Momma

One of the things that makes me feel safer and happier and more excited than almost anything else in the world (even more than baked goods) is feeling known and understood. I love it when I feel like somebody really "gets" me. My mom, Deb, "gets" me in the best possible way: not only does she know who I am, flaws and all, but she likes who I am. I like her back so much that it scares me a little. She's pretty much my favorite person in the world. I could go on and on, but I wouldn't be able to stop for trying to find the right words....

Last year I was asked to read a Christmas story/anecdote at my church's Christmas program, and the story I told was about Deb. Since her birthday is tomorrow, and since the holiday season is upon us, I'm going to post this story for Deb. It's not a very polished piece, and it was written more to be heard than to be read (i.e. please forgive its tendencies toward cuteness and alliteration), but it shows a little bit about how amazing my mom is (plus, she's never heard or read my telling of it before).

I guess I should start with my family. We may not be much like your family. And if that’s the case, my mother probably isn’t like your mother, either. You know what I mean… I mean she is, and she isn’t. She is because she probably loves me the way your mother loves you, and she fed and clothed me the way your mother probably fed and clothed you (okay, so maybe she did buy a lot of my clothes at the Salvation Army during my dad’s grad school years, but she made sure that I never left the house unless I was wearing at least a pair of underwear and a t-shirt). But my mother spends her days now, not with children who look like refugees, but taking care of heroin addicts, prostitutes, and homeless people at a methodone clinic in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Maybe your family is the kind who decides to forgo their own Christmas to help some needy family, or serve up meals at a soup kitchen, or buy cold people blankets. But mine doesn’t do stuff like that. We’ve tried, don’t get me wrong… I think there was a year when my mother convinced us all to give up our gifts for the benefit of some less-fortunates, but we only agreed after being promised that Santa would still come and leave us a little something. And, if I remember correctly, which I hardly ever do, Santa was really, REALLY proud of us for giving up our presents for the good of others. So he gave us about twelve times as much junk as we normally got.

Perhaps I exaggerate…

Anyhow, we are a selfish bunch. Except for my little sister, Bekah, who, as a child, had a habit of giving away her most treasured possessions because she loved them so much and she wanted other people to be able to love them, too. She IS like my mother, and probably yours, too. The rest of us kids aren’t really interested in giving of ourselves unless it's convenient and easy, or there’s something in it for us… We want to know: Is Santa going to be watching when I do this? Will Jesus know about this? Thus, this is not a story about how my family learns to be unselfish and is so delighted by how it feels that we decide to live a quasi-monastic existence, except at Christmas when we indulge in endless toy store shopping binges and goose-buying expeditions in the name of charity.

Is that how things go in your family?

On Christmas Day, after opening a few hundred too many presents and managing to feel somewhat disappointed nonetheless, does your family go down to the Broadway Center movie theater to watch a free showing of It’s a Wonderful Life? Does your family have the whole movie memorized? Does your family buy their Christmas dinner, or maybe their second Christmas dinner—depending on Mom’s energy and your willingness to help cook—from the concession counter at the Broadway Center Theater? (The pizzas aren’t half bad.. and those jumbo hot dogs, when they’re fresh....) Anyway, while some family is ladling up soup to people who really need it, or singing Christmas carols to the loneliest people with eardrums they can find, my family is sitting in a cold, dark movie theater watching It’s a Wonderful Life.

Since I was a little girl I’ve loved the parts of the movie where these black and white shots of the cosmos (which sort of look like the graphic from the beginning of The Twilight Zone) appear on-screen. I’m always thrilled by the moment when, as I’m staring in wonder at this mess of celestial bodies, they begin flickering in time to a voiceover conversation. The coordinated flashes and voices are meant to tell you that those blinking spiral galaxies are God and Jesus—or at least some pretty important angels—and that they are talking to each other. Every year I sit in this movie theater, awed all over again, as I watch these God-galaxies discuss the fate of an angel named Clarence and tell the story of a man named George Bailey.

George Bailey is the kind of man, who, if he were alive today, would probably be hanging out at hospitals and homeless shelters with some family, maybe your family. But since he’s just a man in a movie showing for free on Christmas night, he’s stuck hanging out with mine. And on the night he’s with my family, on the night we’re watching him, he’s decided to take his own life. He has decided that he doesn’t want the life he’s got anymore. That’s what we learn from the twinkling galaxies and disembodied voices. And then they tell us the story of George Bailey’s life: how he lost his hearing in one ear when he saved his brother after a sledding accident; how he couldn’t go to college because his father died and someone had to take care of his family and the family’s business. We watch George Bailey send his younger brother off to college when he’s been dying to go himself, we watch him put his dreams and desires aside for others, and we watch as he is crushed by a job that he knows he must do, though he dreams and dreams of leaving it. We watch George Bailey grow into the kind of man my sisters and I simultaneously want to meet and fear marrying.

Every time I watch George Bailey live the life he knows he must, but feels he can’t, I cry. My mother does, too. I cry in the middle of the near-empty Broadway Center Movie Theater, and I think of Jesus, who did the same thing in a sense: lived for so many other people, died for so many other people. On this night, the night the movie takes place, the night these God-galaxies are talking to each other, George wants his cup to pass from him. He wishes he had never been born, never implicitly taken on all of this love and obligation and responsibility. And every year, I watch, enraptured, as the angel shows George Bailey how the world would look without him in it, how much would have gone wrong, how awful things would really be for all of the people he loves, who he thinks would be better off without him. I weep when George Bailey realizes that he does matter, as he finally understands who he is and what he has meant to so many people. And as I do, I want nothing more than to matter the way he does.

A few years back, as I left the theater, my ridiculous, predictable tears frozen to my face, a melody floated through the frigid air, and I looked around to find its source. And that’s when I saw him: a man in tattered clothes and frayed fingerless gloves playing the cello in the plaza outside the theater. I noticed, too, an anomalous pair of unblemished white sneakers on his feet, awkwardly bright against his well-worn suit. My mother approached him, which didn’t surprise me. I was shocked, though, when she called him by name.

“Elie,” she said.

The man stopped playing the cello, looked up at my mother, and a smile of recognition passed over his face.

“It’s me… Debbie. From the clinic,” she said. She called us (we’d kept walking as if we hadn’t seen the man) over to her.

We hemmed and hawed and made our way back to her, uncomfortable with the thought of talking to a homeless man, despite our mother’s ease and friendliness. We were accustomed to ignoring these kinds of people.

My mother introduced each of us individually to Elie and then told us about how Elie had once been a concert cellist, how he had traveled the world and played to huge audiences. Elie smiled, awkwardly, then proudly.

And then my mother invited him to our home for a dinner she hadn’t planned on making as far as I knew.

But Elie declined. “This is my Christmas tradition,” he said. “I play until the theater closes.”

My mother, like your mother probably would, got a little teary, “Oh Elie, that is so sweet of you.” While we smiled awkwardly, not knowing what to do, my mother pressed some bills into Elie’s hand.

We walked back to the car beneath a mass of winking, gleaming galaxies, enveloped by the strains of Elie’s music. As we drove away my mother told us more about Elie, his family, his history, his life before she'd known him.

At one point my younger brother Michael piped up, “Mom, was Elie wearing your shoes? I mean… aren’t those the shoes you bought for work a couple of weeks ago?”

My mother ignored Michael and continued to talk about Elie, “He’s such a good man,” she said, her voice cracking.

I found out later that my mom had, indeed, given Elie that pair of shoes. During one of his visits to the clinic, she discovered that most of his belongings had been stolen because he’d had to vacate his apartment and return to living on the street. And what could she have done, seeing his cotton-stockinged feet shoved into a pair of sandals, but give Elie the shoes she’d just bought?

So, maybe our families aren’t that different. Maybe we’re all trying to figure out what to do with the lessons we learn from Jesus and George Bailey, from homeless musicians and our mothers. They show us that sometimes the song of a cello can sound like a choir of angels, that some nights a fuzzy, gleaming galaxy can look an awful lot like a new star. On those nights, a pair of tennis shoes, a man who knows his job, however difficult, must be done, may teach us all we need to know about good will toward men.

Hee-haw, Happy Birthday, Lovey!


(Zuzu's petals! Zuzu's petals!!!)