“A lotta water under the bridge.” (Sam to Ilsa in Casablanca)

We’ll always have Paris, or at least we’ll always have this blog. Nazi tanks may roll in and life may intrude on my ability to post, but my blog has continued to exist since the first entry on December 28, 2007.  There’s indeed been a lot of water under this bridge.

In late August 2009, I started a new job that I love. I now use my PR and media skills on the side of good to educate my community about public health and services for the poor and uninsured. The days when I stroked the fragile ego of an ignorant, self-important elected official are long gone and seem to have been part of another incarnation. (I think that I must have been a slug back then.)

I drive more than three times the distance of the job I had prior to this one, but I’m happy when I arrive at my desk and when I leave. Today I’m buzzing because I was able to publicize a county program that cares for the poorest of the poor in Pinellas County. Now that smells like victory! (In previous jobs, there were days when a PR success just smelled like napalm.)

I usually walk to my office past very poor people of all races who come to our health department ill and desperate. Some are homeless, ragged and foul-smelling; others are the working poor who are here before they have to be at a job where they are uninsured. Many have little children fed by the federal funds of the WIC program that supplements daily diets. The parents beam when I notice how beautiful their child is. A very young man with a patchwork of tattoos on his neck and head shows me his curly-haired infant with pride, his tough exterior melting at the sight of his child. And so another good day at the office begins.

My hours are long and don’t bring extra pay and the commute takes almost two hours out of my day, which means that personal writing and blogging have to be strained through a cheesecloth of the hours in my day. It’s easier to fit in Facebook updates than it is to write an entry or an essay. The quick and dirty is easier than the well thought-out and pure.  Still, I am the Terminator stomping to my goal until the red glow in my eye is dimmed.

My writing was reinvigorated in December 2009 when something of an epiphany led me to return home–metaphorically speaking. On a day when I had a bit of free time, I suddenly began thinking of attending a writer’s conference. Since money is tight and travel time even more strapped, I thought of the premier writing conference near my home in the Tampa Bay area.  A quick Google search led me to Eckerd College’s Writers in Paradise conference, which was coming up in mid-January.

The cost was way out of my budget and the January 16-24 timeline could only mean that I had missed the deadline to apply. Just when I was ready to quit in disappointment, I noticed that the deadline for an application packet was the following day, December 1, and that the conference offered the chance to apply for scholarships to fund attendance. The genius of the last minute has always been one of my most reliable tools, which I’ve honed working on deadline in newspapers and finishing term papers the night before they were due. I become more brilliant as the clock ticks toward the end of the period. I excel at the writing equivalent of buzzer-beaters and Hail Mary passes. Take that, Doug Flutie!

In a few hours, I pulled together an application for a scholarship, 25 pages of my writing and a statement making my case to be accepted. If the conference poobahs turned me down, I would only be out a $25 application fee and maybe a few days of feeling like Y.A. Tittle at the end zone–bloodied, stunned and on my knees.

Something ineffable told me that I was being guided during the application process. I printed 25 pages of my personal writings and applied for the narrative nonfiction segment of the conference. My request for a scholarship outlined many of the financial and life difficulties I’ve tried to make sense of in this blog. Losing my job, months of unemployment that left us penniless, my husband’s traumatic brain injury (TBI)  less than two months before our daughter’s even worse TBI and her 10-week hospital stays seemed so Dickensian as I told it on paper, like an Oprah version of Little Dorrit’s story, but I continued.

On December 1, the deadline date, I drove to Eckerd College to drop off a packet that must have still had wet ink on its pages. A guard at the gate guessed where I was to leave my envelope and I parked my car and walked in my work heels in the dark to find the writing center. A peek at the writing center revealed kids at workstations, which told me it wasn’t what I was looking for.  Out of ideas, I turned and saw an office with the lights still on. I knocked on the glass and a pleasant middle-aged woman who couldn’t have been anything other than a college professor gave me directions to another building. With the help of yet another security guard, I walked into an empty building where everything seemed to be open: an auditorium, elevator and second-floor suite were all unlocked.  Cosmic, if you like find symbolism in the most mundane details. (The good Lord made sure that I was the one entering and not someone with a Jones for pawning laptops and electronics.)

As I walked through an empty office suite, I was ready to give up when I saw a door with the name of the very person accepting applications for the conference. The office was dark, but the space between the floor and the door were just big enough for my envelope of writings, applications and letters. I slipped it in, left the matter in God’s hands and got in my car for the hour’s commute back home.  If I was meant to attend, then there was nothing else for me to do except trust God.

Nine days later, an email bursting with attachments told me I was one of only about 80 writers accepted and everything except $75 of my conference fee would be covered. Meals and lodging would be on me, but my home is less than 30 miles from Eckerd College and I am the queen of cobbling lunches  out of tuna cans and Progresso soups.  I can live on saltines and Slim Jims if a project is interesting enough.

On January 16-24, I’ll have the opportunity to work with a group of nine women who have narrative nonfiction projects that will tell their own stories. We have shared our 25 pages via email and I’ve read the other women’s essays. Some discuss their family histories, others their journeys through cancer or life stages. It will be a privilege to study with the women whose work I’ve read. Our instructor is Ann Hood, a renowned writer of fiction and nonfiction who detailed the loss of her little daughter and her own healing in Comfort: A Journey Through Grief.  As someone who almost lost a daughter in 2008, I know that I will cry through every page of the book when it arrives in my hands this week from an online seller.  Mothers who lose a child or almost lose a child belong to a club no one wants to join because the emotional dues are so high.

During each session, we will look at one or two essays and offer our thoughts. I’m up on January 19 with another participant. Two weekends and a week of focusing on my writing will be a luxury beyond my imagination. They were certainly beyond my comprehension before last December 1 when something led me to consider the possibility of receiving this gift.

I’ll be working on a project that I’ve mulled over for many years, but never had the clarity of thought to outline. It will take in my childhood in communist Cuba and my early years surviving Irish-German nuns in Queens, NY. Fidel Castro and Dominican sisters are formidable life-changers, let me tell you. It would be interesting to see one pitted against the other in a sort of Godzilla vs. Mothra Tokyo cheapie.

Preparing more of my writing for publication has been my focus this past month, even as our unheated Florida house continues to give us fits during an Arctic cold spell that is setting new weather lows in our region.

A slab leak meant we lived for a few weeks with only certain periods of water in the pipes until we could afford a plumber who jackhammered two holes in our living room and finally found a piece of pipe with a pinhole in it. If you like fine dust on your books and two holes patched with cement near your couch, then our living room looks lovely.

The water heater and indoor heating system picked the same auspicious time to go on the fritz, which means we’ve been freezing indoors since before Christmas. We wear knit caps and gloves indoors and huddle under layers of blankets to sleep. For warmth, I have a new comforter and my husband, whom I now call my “old comforter.” Only he would find that funny!

As I look forward to the first day of my writing conference at the end of the week, I am also looking back at all the water that’s gone under the bridge in the past year. Some of that water has been stormy and some of it has been a placid stream after the storm. It’s been a many things, but uninteresting has not been of them.

May everyone’s wishes, dreams and aspirations come with the new year and, to quote Tiny Tim, may God bless us every one. (Either that or, to quote the other Tiny Tim, find your own tulips to tiptoe through in 2010!)

Richard Wurmbrand

Armando Valladares

I glorified you on earth by accomplishing the work that you gave me to do. Now glorify me, Father, with you…

 

A paperback book titled Tortured for Christ arrived in the mail a few days ago. Its author was Richard Wurmbrand, a Christian preacher who spent 14 years in solitary confinement for preaching the faith in Romania. On my bookshelf are two copies of Armando Valladares’ prison memoirs, Against All Hope. In both memoirs, an ordinary man withstands unimaginable torture for the sake of his principles and emerges vested with God’s grace.

Valladares was imprisoned for his opposition to Cuba’s Communist regime, but his Christian faith bouyed him during his lowest moments. In prison, he meets evangelicals whose crime was preaching the Gospel in an atheistic nation. Valladares’ 22 years in prison included time in solitary in the worst of Castro’s gulag institutions.

Wurmbrand and Valladares were physically tortured, but they emerged from prison with a stronger faith they shared with the rest of us. As we read of their trials, we can think of the excuses we hear from those around us who call themselves Christians and yet don’t do the least of their brothers. When giving God an hour in His house one day a week is too much, how little are we giving? When we consider that some of us give all and others give nothing, who is accomplishing the work that God gave us to do?

These two men glorified God on Earth. Wurmbrand passed away in 2001, but Valladares is still actively speaking out for human rights. We glorify God when we speak out for peace, human rights and justice, just as these two men did. In prisons all over the world, there are Wurmbrands and Valladareses who are being refined through suffering to emerge as examples for us to follow.

Pray for all who are suffering for the sake of the Gospel today. May we all learn how to glorify God no matter where we are.

Last night, red beans, potatoes, onions, turkey sausage, tomatoes and carrots went into our crockpot. This morning, we woke to the aroma of bean soup so fragrant it filled the house with the promise of dinner many hours later.

When times are lean, cooks improvise. I remember watching my grandmother stretch rations for seven into a meals for 11 when I was a child in Cuba. My parents, sister and I had been disenfranchised by the Marxist state for requesting visas to leave. If you wanted out, the government took away your ration book and your job to starve you into seeing things their way. My grandmother’s frugal cooking had been perfected during the Depression; tasty meals that didn’t cost much were her specialty and she kept all of us fed well. She was not only a masterful cook, but the love she added to every meal made them nourishing for the body and soul.

Times are tough for many families in America, including ours. Our one-income family is doing with nine percent less in salary these days, thanks to a decision made at the not-for-profit organization where I work–not five, not ten percent, but an arbitrary nine. My children aren’t in the habit of eating nine percent less at their meals, so the cook in our house–yours truly–had to improvise.

Our red-bean meal was hearty, filling and healthy. The crockpot slow-cooks food without much work, so it was a breeze to prepare. A friend of the family is growing food in her yard now to prepare for difficult times ahead. Her decision reminded of stories about Victory Gardens in decades past.

Tonight, we ate well without much fuss. Knowing that we could survive an unexpected loss of income was rooted in our belief in God’s providence. As my husband says, God has us.

I’ve been reading about Catherine Doherty, the founder of the Madonna House poustinia way of life that sets aside time for prayer and fasting in a quiet room or building. Doherty, whose cause for sainthood is being considered by the Church, lived by what she called “duty of the moment,”

“The duty of the moment is what you should be doing at any given time, in whatever place God has put you. You may not have Christ in a homeless person at your door, but you may have a little child. If you have a child, your duty of the moment may be to change a dirty diaper. So you do it. But you don’t just change that diaper, you change it to the best of your ability, with great love for both God and that child…. There are all kinds of good Catholic things you can do, but whatever they are, you have to realize that there is always the duty of the moment to be done. And it must be done, because the duty of the moment is the duty of God.”

A humble way of living may include lovingly changing a child’s diaper or thanking God for red-bean soup when we could have gone hungry. In feeding the body, we can feed the soul. Either way, God has us.