Phyllis Cole-Dai's Blog, page 9

What You Get Into Will Change You

This post first appeared in a recent issue of Staying Power, my weekly care package for creative, compassionate spirits. Get a boost in your inbox! Scroll down to sign up.   Sometimes in life you...

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“Dropping into the Net”

Tomorrow I fly to North Carolina to retrieve my eighty-one-year-old mother and bring her here to South Dakota for as long as she wants to stay. I can’t wait to throw my arms around her...

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“Arise, All Women Who Have Hearts!”

May I make a confession? While I love my mother, and I love being a mother myself, I don’t particularly love observing Mother’s Day. To me, the second Sunday of May feels like another “Hallmark...

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“Nuggets of Or”

See if you can figure out the significance of my title before I finish. * * * The last few weeks, I’ve been living in the closet, producing the audiobook version of Staying Power: Writings...

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“How Do You Be?”

If you’re a movie buff, as I am, you might remember Awakenings (1990). The main character, played by the late Robin Williams, is Dr. Malcolm Sayer. Though inexperienced, Sayer cares deeply about the residents in...

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“On This Our World Turns”

Imagine that you are born into poverty. Imagine that, during your grade school years, a teacher recognizes your artistic talent. Imagine that the teacher enrolls you in a government-funded art class, held weekly at a...

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“More Than Just Talk”

On this date, in 1999, I returned home after living by choice for nearly seven weeks on the streets of Columbus, Ohio. As we recounted in The Emptiness of Our Hands, my friend James Murray...

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“Picture a Face”

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“The Turning Hinge”

When your big, slender hand slips into mine, joy spills through me. I soak it up like a new sponge, resisting the urge to squeeze. You’re a young man of eighteen, soon to graduate high school, bright-eyed with college dreams. Few fellows your age are comfortable showing affection to their mothers in public; even fewer are apt to initiate it. But here we are, mother and son, striding hand-in-hand across the park after a human rights rally. Friends and strangers are all around us.

Please, don’t let go.

Together we sidestep the soggiest grass, the ground squishy from late-winter snow melt. We angle across a parking lot. Your legs are so long, I have trouble keeping up.

You’re still holding on.

I want to tell you how glad I am that you took my hand, and how happy I am that you continue to clasp it. But I don’t. Any acknowledgment from me might break the spell, and make you self-conscious. It might cause your hand to fall away from mine.

I listen to your rambling reflections about the rally. You’re trying to assemble a puzzle whose pieces, from your perspective, just don’t fit. Where, you wonder, do ignorance and prejudice and hate belong in the jigsaw of this world?

We tiptoe across another sodden span of grass. We jaywalk across a street.

Earlier, I’d walked to the park alone. After finishing your sign for the rally, you followed by car. Now that the demonstration is over, I’m hitching a ride home. You’re leading me to where you parked.

Still holding on.

I draw a deep breath and sigh. This magical moment is a hinge on which so much meets and turns. On one side is everything between us that has gone before: the dreams I had of you before your birth, the nursings in the old wooden rocker, the silly dances that spun us dizzy, the first days of school, the crowds in which I almost lost you, the time you almost died … a precious history of your hand, tucked into mine.

On the other side of the hinge is everything between us that is yet to be. An image rises up of me in old age. You’re holding my hand to support me—keeping me company, and upright. Whatever the two of us might look like then, I can see the strength and steadfastness, still there in our joined hands. The trust. The bond that doesn’t confine or cling.

The hinge between our shared past and future swings wide within me. I marvel to feel it, unable to contain it, almost out of my body. By what miracle are my legs still moving?

We approach another parking lot. A massive pile of snow looms on the lot’s edge, stubbornly resisting the sun, shoved there by a plow after the last storm.

“Car’s just beyond it,” you say, nodding toward the pile.

Nimble feet have worn a narrow, slick path through the softening middle of the snow. I know that’s the way you will go, right through the heart of it—just as you know that, to be safe, I’ll circle around.

I feel you hesitate. The hinge stops on its pivot.

“Go on,” I say, releasing your hand. “I’ll meet you on the other side.”

* * *

Three hundred and sixty-five days ago, the World Health Organization declared Covid-19 a pandemic. What’s happened since? Here in the United States, with a population of around 330 million, more than 29 million have been infected. More than 529,000 have died. About 10 million have lost their jobs.

Just like my son and I did after the rally, you and I are walking the soaked ground of spring, our hands clasped in friendship. Every step we take, every moment we share, is a living hinge between What Has Been and What Will Be.

So much meets and turns here. We’re relieved to feel hope about the future. We celebrate the widening distribution of effective vaccines; the development of promising medicines; the cautious re-opening of schools and businesses; the economic relief flowing into communities; the jubilant reunions and the return of hugs.

But along with our hope and happiness remains our grief. We’ve lost so much, and so many. That’s the other side of the hinge. If we pretend the grief isn’t there, the hinge will creak and groan, begging for the oil of our attention.

The hinge between past and future swings wide within us. Sometimes it causes us to marvel, but it can also daze. What shall we do then—when we fear that we’ll fall apart, unable to contain our emotions, almost out of our bodies?

We breathe. We sigh. We weep. We feel each other’s hand clasped in our own, and we cherish it for being there. One way or another, we help each other make it to the other side.

“Never Look Anything But Real”

Have you ever sat for a formal photograph? When was the last time? Did you do so by choice or at someone’s request? Did you enjoy it, or did you put up with it, like a root canal at the dentist?

As an author, I’m advised to get new publicity photos every year, or at least before publishing every new book. My last photo shoot was eight years and five book releases ago. That tells you how much I’m fond of getting my picture taken. (The phrase “photo shoot” aptly describes how I’ve always felt in front of a camera: stalked.)

For that last batch of publicity shots, my friend Ruby snapped me sitting in her backyard, out in the countryside. Because we knew each other well and were in a comfortable summer setting, she got enough quality images to serve the purpose.

But now, eight years later, I wear glasses, and I have a few gray hairs. I appear to be closer to sixty than fifty. So I decided, with a collection of essays and poems coming out this spring, I’d better suck it up and freshen my shots. If I did, maybe I wouldn’t have to pose again for another decade. (“Pose.” Another revealing word. In front of a camera, I’ve always felt like an imposter.)

This time, I couldn’t ask Ruby to photograph me in her backyard. We weren’t about to dress up in arctic gear for a shivering session in the snow.

So I hired Tammie, a professional photographer. She proposed a socially distanced shoot in her studio, complete with a stylist for my make-up and hair. “Don’t make me look like somebody I’m not,” I begged, when booking the appointment by phone. “You’ll be fine,” she said, with a laugh. “Plan on about three hours.”

Three hours? Ruby and I had wrapped up in less than thirty minutes.

Oh, how I dreaded that appointment! Last Friday I arrived at the studio, steeling myself to be made up and shot. (“Made up”—another telltale phrase, as in “imagined” or “invented.”)

Then a strange thing happened. Tammie’s stylist introduced herself as Rebecca, a lovely young woman of college age whom I’d known as a schoolgirl. I hadn’t seen her in years. She briefly lowered one side of her mask, showing her face. I still didn’t recognize her. The child had vanished.  

Rebecca told me she was attending the local university, studying leadership and nonprofit organizations. “Cool,” I said. “What prompted your interest in that?”

Tears welled in her eyes. “I’m going to cry, telling you this,” she said, a catch in her voice. “It all started when you talked to my youth group about how you gave up your home to live awhile on the streets.”

Her words stunned me. I remembered that talk, so long ago. How nervous I’d been, huddling with that flock of kids, struggling to help them imagine “homelessness,” for which they had no frame of reference….

“When I finished,” I told Rebecca, “I thought that I’d failed you all. What a gift you’ve given me now! Thank you so much for telling me.”

Tammie, listening nearby, reached for a tissue. “This is making me cry, too,” she said.

That’s when something inside me clicked like a camera shutter. This portrait session, I realized, wasn’t about publicity photos. It wasn’t about marketing my books. It wasn’t about me at all. It was about you, and everyone else I might ever meet, whether face to face like Rebecca or through the ripples of my work.

The photographs that Tammie was about to take could be another way of saying, “I care about you.” Of saying, “I invite you to share this journey with me.” Of saying, “Let’s talk. Let’s listen to each other. Let’s change the world together.” The images could express all this, and more. If I let them.

But I had to get out of the way. I had to wipe the slate clean of all that nonsense about how prying the camera was. I had to erase all that negative self-talk about how I wasn’t worthy enough to sit for a portrait. Could I empty myself of all that bunk and just be present, as I had been with Rebecca and her group, so many years before? Could I trust Tammie to bring forward from me a glimmer of light that someone else might need to see?

We began the shoot. I tuned into Tammie and her camera. I sensed my spirit pouring toward her lens, then through it, toward the unknown. Not on every shot—I wasn’t so capable as that. But whenever I wasn’t quite “there,” Tammie noticed and summoned me further in. Our three hours together became a sustained lesson in mindfulness, the boundary between self and not-self dropping away, rising up, dropping away again.

Two days later, I received an email message from Diane S., a Staying Power subscriber who lives in Texas. “Eye smiles,” she said, answering my question about what she wanted to carry forward from the pandemic. “Never look anything but real.”

Never look anything but real. That’s a pretty good motto for a photo shoot, don’t you think? And it’s a pretty good motto for life.