In the Bleachers

Most of us have participated in an activity – sports, musical performance, public speaking – that includes onlookers or fans. There is an audience of some description. They may be seated in bleachers, on folding chairs, in a venue of some kind, while you yourself are participating in The Main Event.

I was always a quiet, reticent kind of child. I would rather be at home with my nose stuck in a book and my mind engaged in the imaginary life of the written word, than to be part of any kind of a performance in front of people. Nevertheless, at an early age I found myself in front of the congregation at church singing a duet; or in the social hall of a local church at a piano recital.

You probably fall into two classifications: a natural performer and an extrovert; or an introvert who finds herself suddenly and inexplicably exposed to the general public. No matter which category you fall into, you still desire your supporters to be with you in the audience for moral support, to cheer you on, and in the event that you fall flat on your face, to console you afterwards.

Although it was not naturally in my makeup to voluntarily do things in front of people, it was a life lesson for me. By repetition, I became more comfortable with singing special numbers in church, for example. And in my profession, I have become accustomed to speaking to larger groups of people on subjects where I have some expertise.

When I was small, I noticed that in church on Sunday mornings, there were some people who weren’t singing the same notes most of us were. They were singing what my mother explained was “the harmony.” It was beautiful, and I wanted to learn how. I hadn’t had any formal musical training yet, but since I was interested, when we got home Mom told me to sing the melody of a song we had sung together (I can’t remember which one), and she sang the harmony, and asked me to listen. After a couple of repetitions, she sang the melody, and I sang the harmony part she had been singing. Later, when I could read music, I started singing the alto part of songs in the hymnal at church. This led to my being asked to sing an occasional special piece of music in church with my buddy. I looked up between verses to see my mother’s eyes in the congregation, glowing with encouragement.

Over the years I took up an instrument and became part of our school band. In junior high school, we would join the high school band for Christmas and Spring concerts. It was an expectation that the family would attend these concerts, although my father expressed a reluctance to attend, based on his aversion to hearing the unavoidable squeaking clarinet reeds. Nevertheless, the Smith family, plus Grandma Chamness would be sitting in metal folding chairs on the gymnasium floor, listening to my band concerts.

As a girl, there were not too many opportunities to be formally involved in sports, although growing up in a neighborhood consisting mainly of boys, I had to learn to play certain games or spend my summer days alone. Consequently, I became pretty good at baseball and softball, and when I got to high school, I found an opportunity to play with a women’s fast-pitch softball team that formed in my hometown. I was a small, wiry girl, weighing 105 pounds soaking wet, and 5 pounds of that was probably my long hair. But I was good at fielding, running the bases, and had a good swing. My size meant that I would never be a power hitter, but playing fast pitch, if I could connect properly with the ball, nine times out of ten, I could hit it over the heads of the infielders and get on base.

We practiced intently, and then had our summer season with women’s teams from nearby towns. Those women were some tough old birds for the most part, and since our pool of teams was small, we became well acquainted with the abilities of the other teams. Therefore, it was known that I was a good hitter. The Johnson City team had a pitcher named Babe. She was a strong, hefty woman with an arm like a cannon. And she could put all her pitches exactly where she wanted them. She knew she had to pitch to me. But there was another option – which she resorted to; she could also hit me. That would put me on first base but would prevent the runner on third from coming in and scoring. So, as I limped to first base. I looked up in the stands and saw my mother glaring holes at Babe. If looks could kill, Babe would have been dead on the spot. Dad’s reaction, on the other hand, was “Wow, those girls really can play!”

The next occasion for me to have spectators in the audience was my high school graduation. Then college graduation, but this time Mom was with me on the floor of the auditorium at SIU (Southern Illinois University) because she too was graduating from college.

A few years after college, I got married and moved to Maryland. My experiences with audiences didn’t include my parents now, but Mom kept in touch remotely and was still my biggest fan. She followed me as I continued with my musical pursuits, progressed in my career, and raised three children. She always made it clear that she was my biggest fan and managed to come to Maryland after each child was born, and to be in the bleachers when my children graduated from high school and college, and when I got my master’s degree.

With every accomplishment I looked for her face in the bleachers, whether literally or figuratively. She would always be there, if only in spirit. Being a mother meant so much more when I was able to share the experiences of raising a family with my own mother. In my heart of hearts, I can still feel her there, although this is the first Mother’s Day that she is not with us. I know that she is still my biggest fan, and feel a warm spot knowing that it was she who taught me what being a mother is.

 

Gobsmacked - An Episode of Everyday Apologetics

             

   “Are you aware that everything you have on matches?” This from the clerk behind the bookstore counter.

                Little did she know that she was touching a match to the fuse of a theological epiphany.

                “Believe me, if anything I’m wearing matches anything else, it is not intentional on my part,” I responded. “Perhaps I’m channeling my mother.”

                Mom is - and has always been - well put-together. Me, not so much. My attire is usually a study in entropy.

                On Fridays, we are allowed to wear jeans to the office. The inclusion of blue jeans to my ensemble was the only planned element of my attire. The purse I currently carry is bright blue. (I bought it because blue is my favorite color, and carry it all the time, regardless of what else I’m wearing because… well… blue.) My morning routine on Fridays – in my pre-coffee state of semi-consciousness – is  to grab the first shirt I can lay my hands on. The one I was wearing was acquired at the last IT conference I had attended, and happened to be lime green, with (you guessed it) blue lettering. Which of course matched my purse. My sneakers had LIME GREEN SHOE LACES. What were the odds?

                There is an argument in favor of creationism that goes something like this. If you were in the middle of a desert, and found a watch, what would you think? That it had spontaneously appeared there as a natural phenomenon? No – you would recognize it as the design of an intelligent mind. If the universe is a parallel to the watch, one is inclined to believe that there is also a superior intellect behind its design.

                Gobsmacked in the middle of Barnes and Noble, and confronted with the miracle that my attire actually matched, I had to admit that yes, this is incontrovertible proof, no matter what your religious background.

Kathy’s clothes match today. There is a God.

Candle Wax

When I was a kid, I loved the idea of fire, but my parents would never let me have anything to do with it. This is probably like most children. You want to play with what is forbidden to you. The exception was when there was a birthday, and then sometimes I would get to light some candles on someone's birthday cake. And of course, when it was my own birthday, I would get to blow them out. This was my first introduction to being able to handle a form of fire.

Candle wax is wonderful, until you realize that when it melts, it is almost as hot as the fire itself. When I was a child, at Christmas Eve Service they would give us little candles which would be lit at the end of the service, as we passed the light of Christ throughout the congregation. The candles had little paper holders around the bottom, which in theory would catch the wax, but they never would quite do the trick. We would be holding the Light of Christ, but the byproduct of the light of the baby Jesus would be dripping down onto our hands and burning us. It was an exercise in irony.

It was hot as Hell.

I hadn't thought about what candle wax would do to other objects, either, but once, blowing out the candles on my mother's dinner table, I realized (all too late) that I should have used the little bell-shaped candle snuffer, because the liquid, red wax from the candles blew onto her elegant cream-colored best table cloth, and the stains never came out. We never had much money, and we couldn't afford to replace the tablecloth. The look in my mother's eyes when she looked at that stain hurt me worse than hot wax could ever have done.

You can't have light without heat. And you can't have candle light without candle wax.

The sucker's hot.

The Telecommuning Soul

It is a typical midsummer evening in Montgomery County. The sun has gone down on another hot, humid, and hazy day; yet in the dusk the temperature has started to go down, and the grass is a lush green, thanks to the rain we have gotten lately.

My pup Angel and I enter the pathway, a shaded tunnel on the side of our house, and turn right at the corner of our fence, emerging into the common area. A couple of deer lift their white tails and bolt into the woods. Fireflies rise from the grass like a multitude of the glowing, fervid souls of the redeemed, resurrected in the rapture at the sound of the final trumpet.

This is the physical world, and I love it. Its extreme temperatures become difficult for me to live with in midsummer and the bitter winter, but I try not to complain. In all too short a span of time the lush greens will fade, the air will turn crisp, and then freeze. Those who complain now about the heat will soon complain about the cold.

But there is another world laid over the physical part of our existence – another part of the person who is Kathy Long. Theories of our being describe humans as a dichotomy or a trichotomy, depending on what religious or philosophical view you espouse. If you believe in an afterlife, when this physical body ceases to function, the light that is Kathy Long will go dark in this world, and we hope that it will flicker into existence in another, better, world. That light is usually referred to as my soul or my spirit. (Or both.)

 

Humans are developing in yet another way. With the advent of the Internet, and in particular the Social Web, we have integrated another component into our being.

I first became aware of this phenomenon in the mid-80s, when I became involved with a few online communities. Each of these was fairly isolated from the others, not yet linked together by the "Internet". Depending upon my activities in a given community, I became known as an entity that was separate from (but somewhat the same as) the real-life Kathy Long.

In the community where I was the most active, I took the persona of "ByteSize", and quickly realized that I could present myself however I saw fit. ByteSize may or may not have been very much like Kathy Long, depending on how much of myself I wanted to reveal. The important idea was that in this digital incarnation, people didn't first see a thirty-something stay-at-home mother of two who ran her own business from home. Rather, I was known online for my ideas, and my ability to express them. Therein lay a great deal of personal liberation.

A friend of mine in this group referred to himself as "a telecommuning soul", and even now this label appeals to me. I still find that some of my deepest and most enduring relationships are carried on via the Social Web and the Blogosphere.

And this was prior to Facebook. Prior to the Internet unifying these various "online services" and enabling them to talk to each other. Forgive me if this sounds "too cool for school" but I was involved in online communities long before Facebook was a twinkle in Mark Zuckerberg's eye.

A man by the name of Nicolas Carr has recently written a book entitled "The Shallows", whose main premise is that the Internet is re-wiring our brain circuits. The main gist of his argument is that our activity on the Internet is damaging our minds.

There are others who feel that there is only a change in the way our mental circuits process information, as the brain constantly changes and adapts to our every experience. And this change isn't a bad thing. One of these is Tom Stafford, a lecturer in Psychology and Cognitive Science at the University of Sheffield, UK. To the question "Does the Internet change your brain?", he responds that everything we do changes our brains, including making a cup of tea, and it's not anything to worry about.

So put your mind at ease.

Our lives have a new dimension. We exist in the physical world; the world of the soul; and now also the world of bits and bytes. And maybe the Kathy Long you see on the Social Web or the Blogosphere is a better representation of her true self, as thoughts and feelings fly free of the strictures of the physical world.

When I Go Home

Grandma Smith. Grandma Chamness. Aunt Katie and Uncle Lloyd. Uncle Lyle. Daddy.

These are the people whose spirits are always somewhere in the back of my consciousness. They are the ones who loved me unconditionally, and had hopes for me. I, and the children born to the family in my generation were at one time The Hope of the Future. In the days approaching a trip home, their spirits solidify in my mind and memories, and become more real. As I near Home, they are a welcoming committee, watching me cross the threshold into southern Illinois. And when I am Home, I miss them more than ever, because when I arrive, their places are empty.

Now there is Mom, and a couple of cousins. We often remember the others and miss them together. I am who I am, because they helped me start my life. And I hope that I can live it in a way that would have made them proud.

Sometimes I have a sense of them as the "cloud of witnesses" - that they see me from afar. And I hope they are proud of the woman I have become.

I'm always shocked at the way things have changed, as in my mind I remember the Zeigler/Carbondale/whatever of yesterday.

I'm always pleasantly surprised by the persisting love and bonds that still exist between myself and those I love.

I feel sorry for people who have never had a real "home" that they can come back to.