reading | and a possum in the dishwasher

I’m a reader. Always have been. I will read almost anything except fluffy romance or cold war stories. Even the hyper-active wild child that I was when I was small would sneak away and hide under the coffee table in the living room and read for hours. I had a notebook like Harriet the Spy and solved mysteries like Trixie Belden.

I like to read in waves. I love to find a subject and explore it thoroughly. Early this summer, I went, again, through Pearl S. Buck. This put me on a China track and I read book after book about pre-war China, the poverty, foot binding, the lifestyle. China crept into my life and I found myself ordering vegetable moo shu almost daily from the restaurant up the street.

After that, though, I got on a kick about NDEs. Honestly, this has been life changing.

When I was 27, one of my best friends died. She had been my cohort throughout high school. She knew where the bodies were buried. After school, our paths went completely different ways and while she traveled with bands, dated celebrities and partied, I got married. When she was 24, in the late 80s, she came home sick. Really sick. We picked up our friendship and I watched as, over the next three years, she wasted away.

One of the sharpest people I’ve ever known, The Goose and I adored her. She ate with us, lived part time in her room at our house, went to work with me. We sat at the same booth at Houston’s in Buckhead so often that the hostess knew it was “our booth”. We laughed continually and she was an everyday part of our household. The Goose and I went to Paris that spring and when I came home, she was gone, having slipped away while we weren’t watching.

My grief was all encompassing. I am a person who, when confronted with something scary or overwhelming, does not rent her clothing or wail. I get very quiet and shut down. Sometimes I escape in a book.

That was the year Embraced by the Light came out. I picked it up out of desperation and I did find it comforting. I have never had a crisis of faith. God makes sense to me, even if some of the churchy details don’t. I’m a prayer. I bother God about lots of things. I honestly yack his ears off all day long. I don’t question why bad things happen. I understand completely about having free will and what mankind has done to ourselves. I do question why animals suffer, being such pure spirits. But even with my faith, I certainly did mourn the loss of my friend.

Embraced by the Light, whether or not one believes her account, was fascinating, although certainly not my favorite. I saw where recently, doctors have come out with new studies about NDEs, or near death experiences, and this sparked my interest in, again, reading the accounts of those who have been down this road .

Instead of shoving personal brands of religion down non-believer’s throats, I wonder why no one thinks to approach belief in God in this way? Yes, God is faith, but some folks just aren’t accepting of anything that smacks of Earnest Angley (say baby) brands of God. Surely it is the hypocrisy of “religion” that makes everyone so crazy. What a shame church has snuffed out so much that’s good and comforting about God. Maybe this would be great reading for someone searching for a little proof.

So, I’ve been swimming through these accounts. I just Googled NDEs and jumped in. I read everything in my local library, received daily deliveries from Amazon and Half, and waded through websites until my reading glasses made dents on my nose. I’ve consumed book after book of documented stories folks tell upon being resuscitated. Giant towering stacks of books about children who have died and come back. Kids just tell it like it is and their stories are great, comforting and funny. There are blurbs from Hindus, Muslims, atheists, and old accounts from history, some centuries old. The really awesome thing is that they all tell basically the same story.

Call it what you will, almost all end up calling it “God”. Many call it “The One”. I like that! This is not gender specific. It’s not contained to a certain faith, although a huge percentage, including those of other faiths, do see Jesus. I will definitely see Jesus. Not the Jaysus of the TV evangelist, but the loving and accepting personification of God. There is always a light. There are always loved ones who have gone before and, to my eternal delight, there are animals in some accounts as well. There will most definitely be animals waiting for me and my mother will be there, shooing them away from her lest their celestial animal fur get on her skirt. There is total acceptance. There are usually life reviews wherein what’s important is not what one has done wrong, but the love one has shown to others. Many accounts say that we have been together in spirit form before we’re born and make the decision to come to Earth, much like a life university, and learn from the hardships in the life we choose. I don’t know why this angers some. God says he knows us even before we’re formed.

Even in the stories, which are few, that are bad, or seem to be of Hell, there is a desire to go to the light, to be with the light, to make-up or get things right with the light. Each and every person, without exception, whose story I read, came back with one desire. To love more. To love God, to love others, to lift each other up and show kindness. Possessions didn’t matter anymore, politics, hatred, the crap of the world all fell away. They came back to help others and wait for the time that they’re called “home” again. The thought that came through again and again is how we are all connected.

The story that blew me away was about a blind woman. Blind from birth, she had never experienced color. She had heard about it, but had no context for it. When she died, she saw colors. She exclaimed over and over that though she couldn’t put a name to each one, she had seen colors. She had seen. She had descriptions of things she had never touched that she could only have learned through sight. When she came back, of course, she was blind again, with the memory of sight, but looked forward to a time when she was, again, “home”.

I am digging all this. It has given me a decidedly hopeful feeling in my heart. Although I never doubt where I will go when I die, and am in no hurry to get there, it’s always good to see the vacation slides of others who have been before. In the midst of the storm and fury that goes on in the news, I feel a strange calm and perspective that probably won’t last, but is certainly enjoyable now because I am looking at things through this long range lens. It has caused me to feel a lot less disturbed about the things I can’t control and a desire to do some lasting good while I’m here.

This is reading thread I highly recommend to anyone who is down about the state of things, feeling alone or just sick of daily crap.

My son’s friend told me he didn’t believe I could become any more of a tree hugging hippie until he heard me spout off about this new interest of mine, and I do get how loony it sounds. I can’t help but share it though, as I’ve been talking, ad nauseam, to my family about it since I started reading. If I’ve picked up anything through all these books and articles, it is how we are all so deeply interconnected and so I hope others will find this fascinating as well.

Never should such a pretty man say such ugly words, but in the words of the beautiful Jim Morrison, Summers Almost Gone. The bugs might still be here, but the fun is certainly over.

During the summer I am AWOL. By this I mean, Always Winesoaked Outside Lineforming. In terms everyone can understand, I move to our house at the lake, in a tiny little town, outside the technology sphere, drink alarming amounts of white wine and lie in the sun until I grow yet one more set of fine lines and wrinkles.

Here, in this tiny house, I fail miserably to achieve any of the sun drenched fantasies I concoct all winter. While I do run for about the first week I am there, I find that my running schedule interferes with either my desire to sleep past sunrise or cocktail hour, which starts approximately after 11:00 am. The green juices and raw foods I consume during the year fall by the wayside as I become intimate with the chips and cookies which the kids that surround me demand. I never ride into town to the farmer’s market, on an antique bike with a handmade basket on the front, to collect fresh vegetables still dewy with organic goodness. The wind has yet to whip through my long gauzy skirt, my hair doesn’t flow in the breeze. I do manage to swing by Bojangles for butter soaked biscuits occasionally, though, and can now distinguish between generic and Nestle’s raw cookie dough with a 70% scientific accuracy while wearing a blindfold.

I wear my swimsuit coverups as high fashion. I think drawstring pants are the bomb-diggity. By the end of the summer, I find I closely resemble Orson Wells, in the later years.

My brain atrophies. I read smut and fluff. While I began, in June, to read back through all books by Pearl S. Buck, by this time, the end of summer, I have just finished up the literary high of the adventures of Sookie Stackhouse. I begin a blog in my head and then wander off in another direction because it is incomprehensible to me to remember how to power up my computer. (Hey, look! A squirrel!) My only accomplishment this entire summer has been to completely fold all the towels and swim suits on top of the dryer – one day. Just one day I managed to complete that and it didn’t give me the mountain top high I expected.

My diminutive little cottage has a sweet master bedroom, with a giant, fluffy bed for The Goose and me, that stays somewhat out of the maelstrom. The rest of the house is chaos. Downstairs, there are enormous “kids” piled three to a bed, in the three beds, other mattresses dragged out from closets, four more kids on the sofa, one in a chair and some, in enos, strung from trees. I say kids, though they range from 16 to 21. They each possess two feet that are constantly muddy, 25 outfits thrown haplessly on the floor, and all manufacture crumbs wherever they sit. They each drink only 1/4 of each soft drink can they open and leave the rest to stick on wooden surfaces. They roam like weasels in the night, sneaking beers and baking whatever they can get their hands on while I’m sleeping. They cook everything on broil.

Friends and family come and go daily. We never know who will be there from night to night. Many mornings I awaken to find a whole new cast. Family comes and we float until we’re prunes, going through Dora band-aids and margaritas like Imelda through shoes. I issue the “be on good behavior” decree to all kids, they disregard it, and all goes on as usual and we find that we like it that way. Sometimes there is dancing that causes my daughter to ask me the next morning to never dance again. Some ladies, who are old enough to know better, participate in headstand contests after dinner and some slink away in shame. Friends bring their pontoon over and we idle away hours sunning like seals. We draw endless sharpie tattoos on each other and everyone writes graffiti on the wooden outdoor shower walls. We document the sayings that were funny at the time, like “I’m not above malt liquor” (courtesy of my new sister, the MILK), “twerk on Kirk”, which has something to do with my not dancing anymore and the lyrics to “Grey Goose”, the filthy worded theme song of the summer. Elementary aged children should never be allowed to enter the outdoor shower.

There we have no internet. No television. To make or receive a call, one has to go out the front door, stand by the street and position one’s self just right. Then, we yell and hope someone hears us. If there were a convenient pole, like on Green Acres, we could possibly try climbing that. For entertainment, we buy DVDs at the flea market, of current movies, complete with people coughing and walking in front of the camera. Sometimes we get lucky and there are Japanese subtitles. In this way, we feel we are expanding our linguistic education. Cricket can write the dialogue from the first half of Hangover 3 in Japanese, from memory.

All in all, despite the mess, the chaos, all my hollering and complaining, it’s a simpler, happier way of life. The big news in our little town this summer is that the fire men have TWICE run the firetruck into the firehouse. No murders, no political theatrics. None of the bad feeling that comes along with being plugged into CNN. I am delighted to have missed most of the Zimmerman business. My heart resounds with joy to be in the dark about Weiner. (Now, see? I just snickered to myself over that because I’ve been with teenagers all summer. I’m going to need some time with educated adults to be able to act my age again.) I’ve enjoyed being out of the loop. I live in constant hope of a worldwide EMP that will let us all live small again. (Except for the hair color problem. This does worry me. Being gray in a post apocalyptic world seems somehow less glamorous.)

In the end, I yell and scream, everyone cleans up. There is vacuuming, dusting, endless loads of washing, we clear off the dock, put covers on things, pull out the carpet cleaner and turn off the lights. The little house gives a big sigh and it looks as if we were never there.

Coming home, everything feels big. I’m amazed that we need this much room in which to live. I can’t remember where things are. My animals have shunned me, having fallen in love with their caretakers. My old cat looks older and skinnier and glares at me from her place atop the microwave as if to say “Really? Almost three months? Just pour me some milk, you naked, upright animal with thumbs.” I’m starting to feel that old pull inside me again to clean out some closets, find a calendar and organize us all. I am going to put gas in my car for only the second time this summer. It seems my hair has taken on a very “sun in” tinge and, jumpin’ jesophat, my dermatologist is going to need DMV tools to restore my face. This morning, I caught myself yelling, for the first time all summer, to HURRY UP! I watched the traffic report. I regarded the giant pile of mail. I got a text from the library that I was late. And just like that, we are all forced back into the real world of school, schedules and shoes.

The real world sucks.

and a possum in the dishwasher

Tag Archives: reading

A Peek at the Other Side

To Quote Jim Morrison, Summers Almost Gone