Denise Moser

She loves Andrew, and she makes him tea.  Not just any tea.  She notes his health and his moods and his level of stress, and she chooses a combination of herbs and flowers that will best nourish his body and his spirit.  She thinks about touching him all the time.  Sometimes she brushes against his coat on the hook by the door, casually so no one will suspect that the scent of him feeds her spirit and her body better than any tea.

His last day as her boss is Friday.  She handed in her resignation with a story of a better opportunity in her hometown, and there is a place for her in Bellington, but her real reason for resigning is that she finally found her guts.  She is going to tell him the truth today.  Then, she will either leave, and start over again without the constant distraction of him, or she will stay and love him out loud.

I woke up in time to wash my hair and put on some make-up.  It was a Skype session after all.  If I was going to make a fool of myself by not knowing what the five chord was, or by not being able to reach my left hand across enough frets, at least I wanted to look my best while I was doing it!  I had watched enough David Wilcox videos, and seen him play live enough times, to know that his guitar playing was mysterious and tricky. 

I prepared a wish list ahead of time of what I wanted to cover during the lesson.  It was an ambitious list for forty minutes.  That was the time I was told I would have, although it ended up being longer. The spirit of the list was that I wanted to be introduced to new “songwriting palettes.” I wanted to learn a new tuning or two and a bit about the magic he creates with capos, and there was a song of his that I wanted to learn my way around…

He showed up on time, welcoming and kind.  He graciously permitted me to record the lesson, so that I would not have to take notes.  He understood the spirit of what I was after, and the lesson was deeply satisfying. We laughed and talked about songwriting, and had a good time.  He even gave me his address and welcomed me to send him my new CD when it is ready.  Oh, and without me having to ask, when he got to the big left hand stretch in Deeper Still, he told me the trick of getting it to sound clear.

The biggest lesson of all was once again being reminded that magic exists outside of my comfort zone.  I wanted to win the lesson! When I did, I was thrilled, but then anxiety set in.  I was both excited and scared.  The fear was unfounded.  I need to remember that.  I need to remember to run toward what thrills me, and to not be held back by fear.  Some fears keep me safe, and some fears keep me bound.  I can always tell them apart, even when they feel the same.  My intention this year is to be brave, even when fear makes me want to stay where I am. 

Thanks David!

(This is an introduction to a much bigger piece.)

Come closer.
 
Sit.

Yes, you... 

We have a story to tell.  

Don’t worry; it’s not the kind you used to tell around the campfire with flashlights under you chins.  Nothing will jump out of the darkness.  No one will come back scratching from the dead – no hooks or golden arms…  

You will be able to sleep tonight without the hall light on.  

Yes, we promise! 

We have carried this story alone.  We want her kind to know it too. 

You’ll be glad, you’ll see… 

Are you comfortable? 

We’ll wait if you want to make yourself a cup of tea before we begin.

This is a good story for tea, and for cozy slippers. 

It’s a snowy day kind of a story.

Settle in now. 

We will start here, with the beginnings...

This is her story, but there is no time left for her to tell it.  It isn’t fair for her to move on unwitnessed. Her story rests with us now.  I don’t think she would mind us using her voice.  She has always trusted us, and we have been worthy.  Her voice was so lovely.  We think it is important, Dear Reader, that you get to hear it.  It is important for us to hear it all together, like a song.

We are the ones who know her heart.  We are the ones who loved her best.  We are the ones who always saw her as she was, unmasked.  We are the ones who looked her in the eyes.  There has always been one of us – sometimes two. 

Does it matter who we are?  You wouldn’t believe us if we told you!  You want us to trust you?  Can we Dear Reader?  Will you believe us if we show our faces? 

Most of us have been feline.  Yes you read correctly.  We are her cats.  I am named Rhoda.  That is formal for Roadie.  She always thought that I should wear a tee shirt that says “I’m with the band,” because I have a way of looking like I belong wherever I go, including the tops of doors and kitchen cabinets.  I tried to teach her to take risks and not to always protect herself so much - not that she hasn’t had reason to be protective. 

We all have a piece of her story.  We see what no human ever could.  It all began for us with a beacon from a canine.  Although our instincts and personal tastes sometimes get in the way, we cats and dogs do try to work together.

There was a Border Collie in residence when she was born, a smart and gentle soul named Sadie.  Sadie was the first to recognize her as one who might benefit from our presence.  Sadie sent us a beacon that said something like this:   “There is a little girl here in the family where I live.  She loves me, and I hold her tender heart.  She is not of the mold of her humans, and I am afraid she may get lost.  I will watch over for as long as I am able.  Please keep an eye out.  She may be one of yours.”

And keep an eye out we did.  We partner with the canines, especially during transitions.  Sadie stayed on until she was a grand old lass of fourteen, when our person was in the summer of her tenth year.  As Sadie began to show the signs of her advancing age, we would hear of her through the network. 

Midnight, a sleek black stray was in place to take over.  She showed up at our person’s front door.  Our person loved her right away and brought her tuna and milk.  Midnight was a good match and was feeling honored to be the first of her feline protectors to see the shimmer, but as sometimes happens with children, her mother didn’t understand us, and one day when our person was in school struggling with long division, the SPCA van came and took Midnight away.  Our person cried and cried when she learned, but Midnight was gone from her. 

This is just the beginning, Dear Reader.  There are many of us, through her years, that have seen the shimmer, and we all have our piece of her story to tell.  What is the shimmer?  Sometimes the shimmer is a humming, and sometimes it is a scent that lives behind the eyes.  Sometimes it is a tingling of the whiskers, but mostly it shows up in colors.  It is molecules moving.  It is cells aligning.  It is a shifting into place…  

My mantra this year has been, “If you take consistent steps in the right direction, you will get to where you are going.” Sometimes it has not been clear where to put my next foot down, and sometimes it has felt like my steps were so small that I was standing still.  And yet, the view from where I am standing shows me that I have traveled quite a distance...

The death of my father ushered in a period of intense creativity.  The veils between the ordinary and the deeper mysteries became thin.  At the same time, I committed to songwriting every day, no matter what.  I wanted a new crop of songs that I was proud of and enjoyed singing.  I wanted to put those songs on a new CD, so that I could step back into the songwriter shoes that I had abandoned for far too long.  I wanted to build a website, so that I would have a platform to communicate with the kind people who are attracted to my music.  The songs are written now, the website is active and frequently visited, and the recording of the CD will be finished next week. I am profoundly grateful.

Although a lot of ground has been covered, I am only now standing at the beginning.  As artwork decisions are being made, and liner-notes are being written, I find myself refining my vision and seeking clarity for what comes next.  It is a comfort to know that so many people are taking this journey with me.  Thank you for traveling along!

Where do you want your next steps to lead?

Sarah’s mother wears red and white lipstick. First she puts on the white, and she looks like she should be living in the 1960’s world of beaded door hangings and lava lamps. Then she puts red lipstick on over the white and rubs her lips together until she has achieved the perfect shade of pink. Sometimes you can still see bits of white at the edges. Watching this ritual over the years, Sarah has often wondered why her mother didn’t just buy the shade of pink she was after, but she suspects that her mom likes the ritual more than the color. 

Dorothy thrives on rituals. They lend structure and dependability to her days. It starts in the morning as soon as she gets out of bed. Her white slip-ons wait at just the spot where her feet make their decent, as she slips out of bed. Before even going to the bathroom for her morning pee, she makes her bed, complete with a particular arrangement of the many shaped pillows and bolsters that adorn it. The actual bed making is an easy feat, as she prides herself on “sleeping neat” so that she won’t disturb the covers.

After her bathroom basics, she goes to the kitchen where she melts an American cheese slice onto a toasted half of a bagel-flat she special orders from the Jewish deli on 34^th street. She has a big mug of tea, filled to the top, even though she will not drink the whole thing. She likes the feel, and the sight, of the full cup steaming in her hands. 

As Sarah descends from her tree house sanctuary she knows that her mother will expect her to apologize for not coming home by 4:30 as the rules clearly state. Sarah can recite all of the many house rules, but she doesn’t believe in them. She only respects rules when she can see their value and their purpose. Most of her mother’s rules are arbitrary. What is the big deal about 4:30? It isn’t dark by 4:30. It is too early for dinner. It isn’t even time to feed the cats, a job she is happy to be responsible for. 

Sometimes Sarah is ready for a fight, but not today. Today she wants to be left alone in peace. She rehearses excuses in her head, to see which one comes through the easiest. (I fell asleep in the tree house. I was helping Mrs. Jarvis with the weeds in her back garden and I lost track of time. I have been in my room the whole time, and I was so involved in Anne of Green Gables that I didn’t hear you…)

Sarah loves her mother, but she can’t talk to her – not really talk. And Sarah has so much to say, and so much she needs to know. She needs to talk about why her dad left when she was in fourth grade, and she needs to tell someone that she knows about the other women, the ones whose presence peppered her childhood with fights through bedroom walls and mom’s “black times.”  She needs to talk with someone about boys, and how to be around them. She wants to tell someone about what happened with Billy last summer, but there is no one to tell. Joan would just tell her sister who would tell everyone. Jen would judge. Her mother would ground her for life, and then cry for days in her darkened bedroom. That is why she loves that tree house!  It is her private sanctuary after the other kids go home, or in the winter when everyone else thinks it is too cold.

Sarah loves winter. She loves the warm enveloping hug of sweaters, and the smell of the heat coming on. She loves the sound of water through the pipes as she bleeds the radiators the way her dad taught her. She loves hot chocolate and the smell of snow. She loves to listen to the snow fall from the tree house windows. Most people, she’s learned, don’t know that snow has a smell or a sound. Winter taught her to be a writer.  It taught her to listen to the stillness…

(See the blog post "The Tree House" published June 18th, for another glimpse of Sarah)

 

A Chinese proverb tells us “an invisible red thread connects those who are destined to meet, regardless of time, place or circumstance.  The thread may stretch or tangle, but it will never break.”

Sometimes people show up as precious in my life with intense and instant clarity. It has been true with friends, lovers, animals, and even one profoundly powerful time with an extraordinary and horribly parented teenager who came to refer to me as “Momma D.”  These relationships resonate at a soul level, and they are forever.  They continue, even when the person on the other end of the red thread is far away in distance, thought or time. 

It seems that I am living through a time of shortening threads.  Significant relationships have been showing themselves again, after long absences.  There is always a learning involved, an evolution of sorts.  It is not always graceful, and sometimes I lose my balance for a time, but it is always meaningful, informative, and worthwhile.

A decades-ago friend bubbled up recently from the depths of my past.  He came bearing a long held apology for his part in the pain of our history.  I thought I had long since healed that part of my heart, and it had seemed to me that the thread between us had lived out its destiny.  Now, I am not so sure...  

This reintroduction has been a cleansing, a detox of my heart, and an unexpected opportunity to see, with new clarity, what actually happened long ago.  I don’t know for how long we will nurture this rekindled friendship, but it feels important right now – like it has more to teach me about myself, before the thread once again stretches into the distance...

You could set your watch by the yelling.  It was always 7:30.  It was as much a part of the evening song of the neighborhood as the crickets and the barking of Barney and Fred, the Ackerman mutts. Mrs. Lansky’s voice echoed up and down Oak Lane as she called Sarah for dinner. Michaela, the one Mrs. Lansky always called “that tomboy girl,” finally yelled back that Sarah was in Roberta’s tree house.

Sarah did her best to be out of the house whenever she could sneak away, and she loved that tree house.  She would get to sleep in it during the summer, when Roberta’s parents had camp-out nights.  It could sleep five, so Sarah, Roberta, Jesse, Mike and Roberta’s older sister Joan would all take their sleeping bags and their K-Mart flashlights, and would tell stories and eat chips, pretzels and peanut butter sandwiches until even the crickets went to sleep.

Now, it was just Sarah alone up there, with the red rag curtains, peeling purple beanbag chair and the mismatched TV trays.  She liked to go there to be alone.  She would read, and sometimes she would make up stories about the birds that abandoned their nests in that big old elm, or about where her father might be right at this very minute.  Sometimes she would pack a lunch and would stay long after the other kids had gone home for dinner.  That’s what happened tonight.  She heard Mike tell her mother that she was in the tree house, and as she climbed down, she knew she would have hell to pay.

Sarah’s father does keep in touch, but not in the way she would like him to.  She sees signs of him – the Rav4 with the custom purple paint job shows up in the Cedar Grove Mall parking lot from time to time, or Joan will call to say she saw him at the theater with that Barbara woman.  Sarah always seems to know where he’s been, but it is always second hand.  The last time she actually spoke with him was the night of the big blow up.

It started so slowly that no one noticed.  Beds got made. Meals were shopped for, cooked and eaten.  Bedtimes came and went.  Leaves turned color and fluttered down into wet November piles, and silence descended – the kind of silence that never ends well…

I remember being too little to know how to write, but writing anyway.  I played with pens, pencils, and paper, and I would make loops and lines and swirls.  I remember thinking it magical that thoughts could become lines on paper, and that someone else could understand those lines.

I love the sound of the dance of a sharp number two pencil. I love the way it feels in my hand and in my heart.  I didn’t know when I was little that this would be a life-long intimate relationship – writing and me, but it is.

Writing with loops and lines and swirls connects me with my deepest being.  For much of my adult life my handwriting was a messy shorthand – part printed/part cursive, and illegible to the uninitiated.  Now, I write in cursive again, reacquainting myself with my childhood friend.

Cursive writing slows my hand, and unhurries my mind.  It gives my thoughts space to linger.  Sometimes I lose my way, and then I revert to the meaningless loops and lines of my childhood, while my mind catches up with my hand again. 

I love the feel of words flowing, rhymes forming, and stories unfolding.  Loops and lines are always where I begin.  The computer comes later.  It has other jobs to do.

What called to you when you were little enough to be listening?  What captured your imagination?  Are you listening still?

Annie loves to watch him sleep, her beautiful angel boy. Awake, Adam is constant motion inside and outside his head.  He flits from thought to thought and thing to thing, his mind racing like a hummingbird’s wings.

She is bone-weary by this time of night, worn out from trying to catch his thoughts, and from steering him through the minutiae of another day. As she pulls the covers over his little boy shoulders, and smiles at the angel-face sleeping so peacefully, she finds herself wondering what populates his dreams.

She whispers thanks to Sophie, the adoring dachshund at the foot of his bed.  She leaves the door open to allow a slice of light from the hallway to comfort him if he wakes in the night, and finally, in her sanctuary down the hall, she lies down too.  Annie is asleep before the bed has had a chance to warm beneath her exhaustion.

She dreams…

She sees Adam in the distance, past the pine grove; sitting in the bleachers at the high school football field, empty now except for him and the moonlight.  He hears her approach, and looks up.  Annie hardly recognizes him.  His body is never this still, except for when he is sleeping.  She sits down beside him. 

There is a book in his lap.  She reaches for it, and he opens it for her.  It is filled with pictures that are slowly moving:  Nan; macaroni necklaces; the blue pool at Cindy’s house; Dakota, the golden puppy; jumping jacks.  When she looks closely, she sees him in there too: in the blades of grass; in the oil-streaked puddle; in the cracks in the sidewalk; in the tuna sandwich.  He is waving, smiling.  It is hard for him to turn the pages.  He likes them all equally well. 

Adam says to her, “This is my book.  I am the only one who can read the whole story.  I can show you parts of it, but I can’t take you inside with me.  I love this book.  It is being written as I read it.  You give me the pages.”

He looks up and says, “I am glad you could meet me here.  I have been wanting to tell you this: It is harder to be my mom than it is to be me. Please know that I am ok.”  He looks toward the pines and says, “I have to go now.”

A car alarm goes off down the street, and Annie awakens.  For a moment, she isn’t sure where she is.  She gets up and walks down the hallway to Adam’s room.  She sees that he has kicked off his covers, and as she pulls the sheet up over his feet, she sees that they are covered with pine needles.

I looked forward to it for months.  I practiced and did promotion for weeks.  I edited the set list for days.  I was excited and anxious and nervous and proud. 

When the night finally came, it felt like playing dress-up.  It was like “dress up as your truest self day.” I shared eighteen of my songs, and it was validating and fun. It felt like home! But then it was over…

During the first post-show days, I went into a bit of a funk.  That is part of my nature.  I also had a few personal revelations. I gained clarity.  I learned things about myself, and about this journey I am on.

Being a writer is solitary.  I get feedback from other people at times along the way, but I write alone, edit alone and practice alone.  I record with my producer Marc most of the time, and enjoy our friendship.  We laugh and collaborate, and we even came up with an ad campaign idea for the tea thermos I always carry around with me!  But, for the most part, this songwriter life of mine is solitary.  Until I get on the stage…

I deeply love connecting with the people in the room.  It feels like an intimate relationship.  I feel comfortable and at home on stage, and I enjoy the company.  It also feels like I am introducing my dear song friends to my dear personal friends.  It feeds the social being I am.  It feeds the part of me that I tend to starve.

I listened deeply to myself while I was in my post-show funk, and I heard echoes of my voice during the past many years saying over and over again that I didn’t want to be a touring musician.  (I have been saying that for a long time.)  I also heard an echo of a long ago question I was asked – “What would you do, if you were not afraid?”

Touring pokes at my fears: I am afraid of high-speed driving on roads I am not familiar with (and some that I am…) I am afraid of other people’s road rage, narcissism and impatience while driving.  I am afraid of being lost. I am afraid that my cats won’t be ok.

I like experiencing new things and places, but I am out of practice with traveling. I like my own bed. And, I don’t want to be out on the road alone.

There is a part of me that mostly shows up on stage. It even surprised my sister.  She hadn’t met that side of me.  I think part of the let down after the show was that I didn’t want to put that part away. 

I need to learn how to keep that piece of me active and fed.  I need to learn to not play dress-up, but to be the most authentic me all of the time.   I am learning…

I also remembered that most of the wonders of my life have occurred outside of my comfort zone.  I am up for it and afraid all at the same time.  I am not sure what is ahead.  That is true for all of us…

What would you do if you were not afraid?