god bless america

This Friday night we are changing out the 1880 Gallery at the Long View Center with a new exhibit, Visions of Freedom.  The group made a collective decision not to use this as our official poster because some felt the 'made in China' was too politically charged, but I'm posting it here because I think it says a lot of what I'm feeling about our country right now.

Don't misunderstand me.  I am grateful beyond measure that I live in the United States.  But I'm pretty darn disgusted with what promises to be a long and acrimonious political campaign.  I am disappointed in my state and my country for some poor decision-making that has taken place lately.  I want to see some politicians who are honest, dependable, and not in the pockets of big money.

I want to believe that we are a nation of people who care about all nations but that we aren't bossy or dogmatic about it, that we aren't selfish and greedy and smug in our comfort, that we take care of our own - our own for god sakes - and then take care of others in the same enveloping way.

I'm tired of everything I pick up in a store being made in China and seeing empty brick buildings in every small town I pass through.  I'm tired of sacrificing good men and women to useless wars.  I'm tired of politicians sticking their noses where they have no business being.  I'm tired of divisiveness and name-calling and finger-pointing.

We're the luckiest people in the world, in some ways, but we've forgotten our manners.  It's time to start using them again.

The First Half of the Week

This week I'm taking a creative non-fiction class with author Nancy Peacock at Meredith College.  I've learned so much, beginning with the fact that I totally misunderstood what creative non-fiction was.  I thought that it meant taking liberties with the truth to write a story.  Being creative with the facts.  Not so.  As one participant in the class said, "It's writing the truth creatively."  (I paraphrase.) I've learned that the essay, or memoir, has to have the same elements as a good story.  

Okay.  Some of you seasoned writers may be saying, "DUH!" but I'm a relative newbie to the art of writing!

I've almost always written fiction.  Many of my stories have lots of truth embedded in the story, but I guess I thought that by fictionalizing the characters, changing a few names, etc., I would be freer to explore my (or others') stories.

But today, I took the idea of a story that I wrote a few years back and used it in response to a prompt to write about something we carried.  Nancy read from one of my favorite books, The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien to get us thinking.  She and I had, coincidentally, both given the book out for World Book Night!

So I wrote this story as honestly as I could.  I believe the essay that emerged has it all over the short story that preceded it, and I intend to move forward with it and put the old story in a file drawer.

For an hour after lunch, we do what Nancy calls "independent study."  Writing on demand and reading it out to people you've only known a short while is demanding and somewhat exhausting.  Add that to the fact that on Friday, my father would have turned ninety, should have turned ninety except for that day when he fell down the stairs (you can read my fictionalized version of that day here.)  So yesterday my brain was very tired and instead of writing during that hour, I took my camera around the beautiful Meredith campus.  I was walking down the sidewalk and looked over and saw the origami crane in a leaf, pictured above.  It seemed to represent the workshop and the cosmic discoveries I've been making there.

PS:  There are still a couple of spaces in the Bookbinding class.  Let me know if you're interested.

Bookbinding Class

Over the years, I have collected many books by this fine artist who also happens to be my daughter.  I have journals, datebooks, photo albums, book art.  They are carefully wrapped in tissue and stored on my bookshelf.

"Use them!" she says each time she sees them.  But I can't bear to.

When my youngest sister turned a certain milestone age, all the women in my family gathered at my house for a spa weekend.  We pampered ourselves, laughed, enjoyed each others' company.  As part of the activities of the weekend, my daughter led us all in a bookbinding class and everyone took home a beautiful little masterpiece!  She was a patient and knowledgeable teacher.

On July 21, she will lead a beginning bookbinding class for six lucky people.  If you're interested, please email me.

If you want to see more of her books and get an idea of what you'll take away from the class, please visit her website Rockpile Bindery.

Grist for the Mill

This past weekend I went to New York to visit family.  We had tickets to go to the 9/11 Memorial site.  There are two pools there where the two towers stood.

When I first started writing a few years ago, I took a class at Meredith College with Angela Davis-Gardner.  My initial attempt at a story was based on a PostSecret postcard.  It read:  "All those who knew me before 9/11 believe I'm dead."  I could not stop thinking about what that person's story was, and began to write my ideas.

The story has some strong sections, but this weekend I realized that it captures none of the real terror of that day.  I had just finished reading Don Delillo's book, Falling Man, which did a beautiful job of getting inside the head of two people who escaped from the towers that day.  The image of the Falling Man, a stunt person who reinacted someone falling from the towers, especially sticks with me.  I looked at the Brooklyn Bridge and thought of all those people running horrified away from the island.  Women must have been in heels; people were covered in dust; hearts must have been racing, loved ones in their thoughts.

I know that 9/11 is the defining event of my lifetime.  I hope we never see anything as horrifying as that on our soil, and that we are more compassionate and sensitive to those who live with terror and fear every day for having witnessed the day.

The atmosphere around the reflecting pools is still electric with what happened.  I saw people crying and I know that the emotions were not just felt by those who found names engraved on the stone around the pools.

As a writer, I will draw on my emotions from my visit this weekend and go back to my story and revise.  My character, Annalyn, hasn't been sent to the depths of disappearing yet, and I'm more prepared now to take her there.

The Word of the Month is...

It all started when I picked up the latest issue of  The Sun Magazine.  The Readers Write section was called "Good Advice."  It was a longer than usual section; everyone wanted to tell their experience with following or rejecting advice.

Then a family member called.  "I need to talk about something.  I don't want any advice.  I just want you to listen."

Day before yesterday I met with some people about how to raise funds for an organization.  "Ask for (and listen to) advice from people who raise and dispense money."

Last night I had dinner with a writer friend.  We both needed advice and took turns asking and giving..

Advice is a tricky thing.  We all want to give it.  A few of us want to get it.  Some of us don't want to get it but do anyway.  And a very few of us, like my family member, know how to let you know they don't want it.

In a very short while I've been told how to listen to advice and use it to my advantage.  I've asked outright for it, been asked to refrain from giving it, refrained from giving it.

Tomorrow I'm going to ask a friend for some more advice, and if anybody asks me for some, I'll be only too happy to give it.  But I'm also going to be more aware that it's not always what someone wants when he or she comes to me with a problem, and I'll try to listen with my heart open, keeping my good advice to myself!

Remember

In so many ways, this past weekend was about remembering.

 On Friday, we went down to Father and Son, a wonderful, dusty and musty second-hand store on Hargett Street. They had a basket of old black and white photographs and I went through and picked out a few. I have an idea about what to do with them; it has to do with the fact that nobody remembers the people in the pictures. Roaming around in the back, I put these two things together and made a photograph that cracks me up.

On Friday night and Saturday, we attended wedding festivities for a family who lived next door to us. The bride was born after we had been neighbors for a few years, and I remember the Christmas that she came. She married a boy from my home town, a really fine family. I remember when we were all in high school together, younger than the bride and groom.

On Monday we went downtown to the Memorial Day services at the Capitol. There were many Korean War and Vietnam War vets, and some who looked young enough to have served in the current conflicts. I didn't see anyone I thought to be in their late eighties or nineties from World War II. I walked up to many of them and asked about their service to our country. Every one of them got teary. We owe these men so much and understand so little about what they endured. A replica section of the Vietnam Memorial was there, the names tiny and way too numerous.  After the downtown service, we rode over to Oakwood Cemetery where there was to be a Vietnam War memorial service. I took this photograph there.

It was a varied and important weekend, shaped by things that happened in the past and made the present richer and more meaningful.

Standing Still

I'm not a regular meditator, but I've done it quite a bit. And I've blogged before about how holding my body still for a short period of time is helpful for me. I find now that I call on that stillness more often.

I'll walk into my work space, a thousand things on my mind--stories, cards, photographs, laundry, phone calls. I have music playing in that room all the time, and I'll stop and listen to a song. I'll feel the emotions that the song evokes--nostalgia, joy, longing, loneliness, contentment.

When I have something to write, a story or an essay, I pause for a few minutes and I find I write much clearer and quickly.

 In the middle of an argument, I stop talking and steady my thoughts.  Things don't escalate as often.

I'm a fidget by nature, a brain-racing multi-tasker,a cooker-upper of ideas and plans. This new ability, to pause my physical actions, rest and listen, to cool down on short notice, is a habit I'm glad to have developed.

Do you meditate? If so, how has it changed you?

What really happened

“Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans.” ~ John Lennon

We have spent the last two months burning up the highway to a place called Vandemere. We have been inside and out of a house there. We've been thinking about buying the house and moving there permanently. The property is beautiful. The house was built by the present owner - "Two nails in the whole house," he said - and is welcoming and perfectly sited on the eleven acres. A photographer's dream, his creek a portal to the inner banks.

My mind churned non-stop with the possibilities: writing workshops, photography classes, music festivals, weekends with the house full of friends and family and fellow learners. Gardening, exploring the waterways, pets and chickens. Self-sufficiency with a little belt-tightening. Family holidays with grandkids running the property and swimming from the pier. A legacy home place for our children.

I began organizing and cleaning out my house. Not packing exactly, but thinking in terms of what we would need if we moved there. Games, books, videos. The furniture that would look good in this room or that. I put all my photographs and the children's papers and family memorabilia in containers for storage (the area is prone to flooding). I dreamed some more.

And then, and then, we decided the time wasn't right for this kind of bold move. We need to stay where we are for a while longer.

I won't say I haven't mourned the decision. But a strange thing happened in the midst of the mourning: I realized that all the things I thought of doing there I can do right where I am. Although I won't wake up and walk out the pier with my coffee, I can sit on my deck, private with lush greenery, and listen to the morning chatter of the birds. I can open my windows at night and hear the toads' chorus. I can have workshops and house concerts, rooms full of friends and family. Our garden is in and coming up beautifully.

I realize that my dreams cannot be contained by a place. I still might want to move to Vandemere some day, or some place like it, but I'm going to keep on living right where I am for now. Stay tuned...you know you'll be a part of my next adventures!

Home

The church service this week brought me back to my first visit. The music, the talk about forgiveness, the way I teared up, the feeling of being surrounded by love. I thought, "I am at home." I started thinking about home, all the homes I've lived in. Now we live in a house that has grown with us. It started out as a three-bedroom house, our first purchase. We've added on a couple of times as needed, and it has morphed into a sprawling house with a modern feel. We raised our three daughters here, and it is full of their notes and pictures, artwork, old clothes. It holds all the memories of their childhood.

When I was a freshman in college, my family left my childhood home and moved to another neighborhood. Although I never actually lived in this house, for years it held the promise of "home" in the sense that it was where we gathered on special occasions and holidays. My father lived there for over forty years. Although it no longer holds any remnants of our time there, I can still picture each room: the wall of books, the kitchen with my mother's needlepoint, my father's room with the stacks of CDs and his reading pile, the bedrooms my children piled into with their cousins, the dining room table filled with relatives always welcome to our large gatherings.

Most of my childhood was spent in this house, this split level that was the epitome of the post-war housing boom. Our basement with its fireplace where we huddled when the power went out and where I got my first kiss. The cramped bedrooms where we waited for our "roommate" to spend the night out so we could have a friend in. The back yard where we staged plays and played canasta and ball. This house was only part of the setting for those years though. The woods, the streets, the creek, the shopping center and schools within walking distance, our church at the end of the street. The place of tragedy: a neighbor's child run over by a truck, a mother with breast cancer, divorces. Home was chaotic with five children, but it represented a place to come to at the end of the day.

I couldn't find a picture of the house I lived in until I was seven, but I remember the porch where we drew with crayons, the black and white television, the pony that came around the neighborhood, first homework, learning to ride my bike and coming home with my face skinned up from falling. I remember Eddie, a boy I had a crush on. This photograph was taken after my next-to-the-last sister was born. Soon my mother was pregnant again and we moved to the split level.

I was born in a house on Shady Lawn Drive, pre-war construction. I found this photograph of me and my father, taken at that house. It speaks of love.

During the time I was day-dreaming of home, the choir sang a song entitled, "Grace," a contemporary version of the song "Amazing Grace." I was amazed to hear the words, "I shall go home" in their four-part harmony. I carried the thought of going home out the door, driving toward my house where I store all the memories of my past.

Greensboro NC to Greensboro GA

This weekend I went to Greensboro GA with four of my friends from Greensboro NC.  To look at the picture of the five of us, taken by a kind boater, you would probably see five sixty-year-old women.  But when I see the picture, I picture us when we were younger, forming ourselves, being formed by our parents and our experiences.

Out of ten parents, only one of us has a parent left.  One girl is divorced.  One girl is divorced and remarried.  We have children and grandchildren.  None of us has settled far from home; all live in the southeast.  Some have been hit by tragedy.  In short, a typical group of women.

We have so many memories of our time together.  I've known one of the girls since the fourth grade, the others since junior high.  When we gather for these brief weekends, there doesn't seem to be enough time to remember it all; we skim the surface of some of our past while digging deeply into other parts.  We feel free to reveal the truths of our home lives now that our parents are gone.  We don't have to keep secrets any more.  It's freeing!  It's healing.  It is safe and enveloping.

It's morbid, I know, but I've lost a couple of friends in the past year or so, and I can't help thinking that one year we'll get together and one of us will be missing.  I stare into each face on the porch in Greensboro GA, seeing the girl I knew in Greensboro NC, and can't bear to think of it.  Before we say good night on our last night together, we talk about next year, where we'll go, who to invite into our circle of friends from the past, making a future with all of us in it so we don't say 'good-bye,' just 'see you next year.'

Poem for a Cloudy Day

Why I Wake Early

Hello, sun in my face.

Hello, you who made the morning
and spread it over the fields
and into the faces of the tulips,
and the nodding morning glories,
















and into the windows of, even, the
miserable and the crotchety



















best preacher that ever was,
dear star, that just happens
to be where you are in the universe
to keep us from ever-darkness,
to ease us with warm touching,
to hold us in the great hands of light
good morning, good morning, good morning.

Watch, now, how I start the day

in happiness, in kindness.

--Mary Oliver

(Thanks to Caroline, for sharing this beautiful poem.)

Old is Made New

I just got back from Greensboro doing some family business and while I was there, my brother and I rode by my dad's old house. They had done so many improvements to the outside of the house: an iron fence, a potting shed, french doors to the den. They had painted the outside. There was a paper tulip on the front door, obviously made by a child. Topiaries framed the porch. The yard was green and the driveway had been power-washed. The house looked lived in again.

The house is being loved by another family, and we're moving on with our lives without my dad. A year and three-quarters later I still think of him every day, still miss him like crazy. But seeing his house alive again with that family cheered me up.

(My brother took the photo. Thanks, Bro. <3)

A Day Off

I usually take Wednesdays off. As soon as I wake up, my mind starts sorting through the opportunities the day holds. The constant battle between the things I want to do and those I need to do begins.

Today, here are some of the choices:


I have boxes of photos, papers, and books that I brought from my dad's house. I need to sort through and organize them.



Most of the drawers in my house look similar to this one. It's weighty on my brain, all the junk that we keep. I could clean out a few of them at a time.



My planters have weeds and a cat flourishing in them. It's time to plant the garden. My husband does most of the heavy work, but I could go buy plants for the garden and flowers for the deck.



Laundry. Always a chore, um, I mean choice. The grocery store too. Sweep up the plant droppings that come in on our shoes in the spring. Wipe the counter, empty/fill the dishwasher. Clean out the old food in the refrigerator.



An email comes in telling me of a writing contest. I could write a new story, edit old ones, research literary magazines, submit to them. I could go through the 10,000 photographs on my computer and delete the ones that aren't that good - be ruthless, my friend Jan Phillips says.



So it's 11:00. I've talked to one of my sisters, one of my friends, and one of my daughters. I've checked mail and run through facebook. I've listened to a few songs by the amazing Joan Osborn on YouTube. I've done two loads of laundry, printed out a photograph for a writing contest, taken the pictures you see here. If I count the laundry as a 'need' and the phone calls and blog post as a 'want' I think the morning has been a balanced success.

Now to eat some lunch and think about the hours of the afternoon. Should I go see my mother-in-law, sit quietly listening to music with her? Should I go to the gym? Tackle something from the list above? The possibilities are endless, and that makes me happy.

High Dive

This is probably the biggest "Can I Do It?" moment of my blogging career. Aaaaaah...whoooooooo (me taking a deep breath).

For several months I have been working on a website where I could share my photographs and cards. Thanks to my dear friend Patrice Cherry the website is complete.

I'm nervous. This is like standing at the top of the high dive and looking down. It seems a l-o-n-g way down to the water. Will it sting when I hit? Will the water be warm or cold? Will people be laughing or clapping when I surface? Can I make it to the ladder at the side, pull myself up, and hit the ladder to the board again??

There's only one way to find out. Please visit my new website, MamiePotter.com. Take a look around. Give me some feedback and if something strikes your fancy, buy it.

Aaaaaaah.....whoooooo. YEEEEEEE HAAAAAAAAAA....

Hurry up...no, slow down...

Since I turned sixty in January, I seem to have this conflict going in me all the time: Hurry up/Slow down.

I need to hurry up and accomplish things like get my work published, sell my cards, de-clutter my house so my kids won't have to do it, travel everywhere, experience new things. I'm mature, but not too old to still be daring. I've still got my brain (although I am forgetting things and have a little more trouble recalling details). I'm in pretty good shape physically and have started working out several days a week.

And yet I need to slow down too. I don't have to lead a discussion group on every great book I come across. I don't have to organize trips for everybody or plan the family gatherings if I don't want to. I don't have to do laundry every time it peeks over the rim or wash the dishes before they hit the sink. What if I only had a year to live (like a couple of my friends); what would I slow down to do?

I'm stuck between feeling urgency to get things done before it's too late and giving myself a well-deserved rest. On my day off, I look around my house and think of the drawers and closets full of stuff that needs to be given or thrown away, and then go to the deck and sit in the sun doing nothing.

My life has never been about being balanced; I've always gone ninety miles an hour. Maybe it's time to find the right balance between hurrying up and slowing down. Taking up and giving up in equal proportion with a little discernment about what really makes me excited. More of that subtracting and adding, I guess. And I've always been good at math.

Rocking Chair

Sometimes lately, since my dad died, I feel lonely. I don't exactly know how this loneliness is related to his death, but it is somehow.

The other night I spent some time thinking about it, and I put my mind to what would make me feel better. This beautiful photograph of my grandfather and me came to mind. I remember sitting in his lap while he sang "Red River Valley" and I felt so comforted.

A few days ago, I was missing my dad like crazy after accidentally (are there accidents like this?) playing a message from him on my voice mail. In my workroom, I have a rocking chair that was my grandfather's, and I went down and sat in it and rocked for a while. Again, I felt comforted.

I have lots of people around me, physically and symbolically, so it doesn't make sense that I would feel alone. I'm pondering it from the vantage point of the rocking chair.

Open Windows

On a morning like today in the 1950's and 60's, our windows would have been wide open. Few of us had air conditioning and it was so refreshing to go through our day and night in the fresh air and occasional breeze that came through our screens. At the beach, in the height of the summer heat, ceiling fans circulated the steamy air, cooling our sweaty faces and sunburned bodies.

I don't feel free to do this anymore.

This week alone, I've gotten notices from our community watch about vans of people selling magazines and steaks, several break-ins, cars stolen from driveways. One neighbor told me that thieves used her ladder to break in an upstairs window.

I don't want to live in fear. And I wonder if there's more crime or more dissemination of information.

When crime is in your neighborhood, every person becomes suspect. The teenager with his cellphone taking pictures. The car full of faces you don't recognize. An untidily dressed walker.

I want to get up in the morning and push my windows up. I want to see the slight wind ruffling my curtains. I want to hear the birds in the bush making a fuss.

I want spring to come into my winter-worn rooms and autumn to take away the heat of the summer. I want to leave my house open when I drive away for a few hours and come back to find it as I left it.

People only steal things like TVs, I tell myself. They aren't interested in the pictures or pages of short stories or family videos. They might take a ring or my camera full of photographs or a jar full of coins. But it's only stuff.

And yet, I leave on an errand or to go to work and reluctantly close the windows and lock the doors. It's one of our greatest losses, I think, the ability to leave our windows open.

Cleaning Up

“Sim­plify your life so that you do not try to fill your time with more than you can do. Start by list­ing your activ­i­ties. Then prune the list, strik­ing out any­thing that is not truly nec­es­sary and any­thing that is not beneficial.”- Eknath Easwaran

A few months ago one of the elderly members of my family went from being able to get around pretty easily to sitting slumped in her chair every day in a fog. After a consult with her doctor, he took her off all her meds and started adding them back one at a time. Now for the most part she is chatty and mobile.

That's sort of what I'm doing with my life right now. I felt burdened with some of my obligations and obligated about some things that were feeling unproductive. Basically I have stopped everything and am adding things back one by one.

What I've added is working out at the gym, setting up a web site (link to come soon), concentrating on my photography rather than my writing for now. What I've deducted is most of the things I do at night. I've found that I'm not as energetic late in the day as I used to be, staying up until all hours of the night. Now I want to do things mid-morning through the afternoon.

I'm also taking a break from all the outside things I did with my writing. I quit both my writing groups and have put more workshops on hold. This is the one thing I'm feeling a little uneasy about. I have quite a few stories that are one revision from being finished and I have a stack of places to submit. Until I get those out of the way (in my brain) I'm going to have a hard time concentrating on the book I have in mind. I know that I can add a group or put together a workshop if I need it though.

I'm increasingly aware of this "last gift of time" that I'm being given. I want to make the most of it, and figuring out what making the most of it looks like is hard. Almost weekly I hear of someone with weeks or months or a year to live and I find myself contemplating what those words would mean to me. Not morbidly, but just thinking about what would be important and what wouldn't matter. And trying to put those conclusions into practice now.

The adding and subtracting I've done so far feels right. I've got challenges but not too many, creative endeavors that don't feel like work, and time. I'm content and that's enough for now.

Bad News

One thing I've noticed since I started blogging is that people in Blogdom love bad news. They love illness and death. They can't get enough of it.

I first noticed this when I started reading a blog called Confessions of a CF Husband. The story was very engaging. The wife was waiting for a lung transplant when she found out she was pregnant. Her cystic fibrosis was at a critical stage. The couple chose to go through with the pregnancy and their beautiful daughter was born prematurely. But the entire pregnancy was fraught with danger for both mother and baby. Thousands of people commented on the blog every day, they were on television, in the newspaper.

The mother had her transplant and then the baby's development became the story. Week after week we saw that sweet child lying beside her stuffed animal so we could understand how tiny she was and then how she was growing. Again, thousands of comments a post.

Things stabilized. Readership dwindled. The author of the blog expressed his disappointment. But that was that. There wasn't anything heart-wrenching going on. He quit posting except for the now occasional update.

Good news doesn't make good press. Stories of triumph, love and happiness appear on page eighteen of the newspaper. We get to them after we slog through the murder trial updates, the contentious political campaign, the fight between local school board members. By the time we get to the good stuff, if we get to it at all without walking away in a funk, we feel jaded. Who cares about that soldier who came home when we might be entering into another war? What difference does it make that our high school won the championship when the schools are in such abysmal financial shape? So what if they raised a million dollars for cancer research when the real problem is that the pharmaceutical companies are making billions on treating us instead of making us healthy?

On my own blog, I noticed a jump in readership when my father died. It's back to normal now that I'm writing about more mundane issues. There is still bad news I could write about, but I think I'll pass for now. You've probably got enough of your own without looking or reading about mine. And if you don't, you can always buy the paper.

Workshops

I spent part of last weekend in the company of nine fellow writers and author Zelda Lockhart. We got to the heart of things - our hearts - and learned ways to apply it to our own work.

"You need to quit going to workshops and write that book," my sister told me the other day.

I am writing my book and my stories, but I also love the stimulation that I get from this time spent with others.

The problem is that often we receive conflicting information. One teacher says learning the craft is the most important; another says, "The hell with craft." One teacher says a flashback can only be presented in real time while the next one says that is ridiculous.

The same goes for fellow writers and their critiques. One person might love that I said, "O my Luve's like a red, red rose," while the person sitting beside her says it's too cliched. One character may seem flat to a person but the same character may touch a chord that rings so true to another.

There are a million books written on writing. Some call for outlines, some call for prompt writing, one book calls for reading similar writing while another says steer clear of it.

So, I guess the reason I continue on with these workshops is complicated. I choose the techniques that work for me. I garner inspiration from hearing other people read their writing. I get valuable feedback both from the leader and the participants.

In the end, what it all boils down to is that I must take all that I learn, put myself in a chair, grab a computer or pencil and paper, and write.

Oddly, my sister is a workshop leader. Hers are about getting to the heart of one's relationship with oneself and others. Looking at what's preventing us from having our most wonderful life. People come back again and again because they need a little tune-up. If you substitute "life" for "writing" that's why I continue to participate in the writing weekends. To get to the heart of my characters and move out of the way everything that is keeping me from my best writing. And that process can always use a tune-up.