Another bit of non-fiction for those of you who've been liking my memoir work. This one is a bit more spiritually focused than the last one--would love to know what you think. --Tesi

I believe the first truly independent, adult thing I ever did was offer hitch hikers a ride. I was maybe 23 and still living with my parents. It was a Sunday in the summer—church picnic day. In true Pentecostal style, we converged on the city park, crock pots in hand, all set for Wiffle Ball, sticky desserts and indistinguishable casseroles.

An hour later, our appetites satiated, arguing politics and childrearing, I glanced up at the road in time to spot two travelers walking past. I knew they weren’t locals; Tiff and I had spotted them after church. It was impossible we wouldn’t have noticed them; the bright tie-dye shirt, the long dirty-blonde hair, the backpacks. They were walking through town, carefully not hitching but being hassled by the cops anyway. In our rural mid-west town, they were foreign.

“They’ve been walking all day,” someone remarked, gesturing.

“Saw them before church. Drove them across town. The one in tie dye has blisters on his feet.”

“Wonder where they’re going?”

“Cops told them not to hang around. They’re supposed to go right through town.”

“Yeah.”

Glancing across the picnic table, I caught Tiffany’s eye. Hands flashing a few quick signs, she nodded in response to my silent message. Wish we could invite them to eat.

I wondered if anyone else had thought of it. Here were two strangers, hungry, ragged, tired. They were walking past our picnic; tables of food left and all of us replete with our meal, cold drinks on a hot day, and a mass of Christians laughing and playing together. What better opportunity to follow Christ?

Should we ask them? Signing again. Taking advantage of being surrounded by hearing people, unable to sign.

I don’t know—

Would the pastor mind?

It’s not really our picnic… Tiffany grimaced.

But they’re probably hungry…we have plenty…

I know…

I wish…

Me too…

We sat and watched them walk by, wishing someone else would speak. Someone in charge. Someone less on the outskirts than us. Someone older, who was supposed to be modeling Christ-following to us.

No one did.

They talked about them.

They pointed at them.

They wondered about them.

But no one asked them to eat.

They didn’t belong. Who knew where they were from? And there were kids here, at the picnic…what kind of example would it be…?

And so they walked by.

Half an hour later, Tiff and I gathered up our contribution to the feast and headed for home, our minds buzzing with the scolding of opportunity missed. We should have been bold. We could have set an example. The parents might have been angry. They might have felt their safety violated. It’s a picnic—we’re on vacation. This is our time.

Right?

We should have at least asked someone.

We hadn’t made it two miles before we saw the bright tie dye ahead, trudging wearily along the shoulder.

Now, let me digress for just a moment, and tell you something about my parents.

My mom and dad were very, very careful parents. They heard stories, when we were young, about children being kidnapped. Terrible stories, about terrible things being done to innocent people. Rape. Murder. Injury. Theft. And they set about making sure that none of those things ever happened to us.

Growing up, we lived on the end of eight miles of black top road. Our nearest neighbor was a quarter of a mile away. We knew everyone who lived within five miles of us, and they knew us. We all watched out for each other. As children, we were allowed to walk to the end of the driveway to check the mail. We were allowed to play in the woods. But never, ever, under any circumstances were we allowed to go onto the black top without a parent.

When I was seventeen, I asked permission to go on a camping trip alone with my best friend, another seventeen year old girl. We knew my parents would be hard to convince, so we made as reasonable of a plan as we could. We’d go in the evening, to the campground on the river. Three-quarters of a mile from my house, it was owned by good friends of my parents. They’d watch out for us. We were even willing to offer to stay in one of the camp sites nearest the campground office, where our friends lived, if my parents required it. I felt sure we had a fail-proof plan for Naomi’s birthday.

My dad said no.

“You’re only seventeen! And there won’t be any adults!!”

I had never, ever, ever considered picking up a hitchhiker before.

Never.

Hitchhikers kill people. I read it in Reader’s Digest.

But there was that tie dye t-shirt. The one that was on the body of that man with blisters on his feet. The one I hadn’t offered a ride to, after Church. The one I hadn’t offered food or a cold drink to, at the picnic. The one I was being given a third chance to help.

My heart started hammering. I could feel the blood rushing to my face. Beside me, I could feel Tiffany tense, and knew she’d seen them. I had only a moment to decide.

I waited too long.

We flew past them.

“Um…” It wasn’t a word from Tiff; just a sound. But I knew what it meant. Because I knew she was right.

“Should we offer them a ride?”

“Um…” only a momentary pause. “Yes?”

“I thought so.”

A mile past them by now, I pulled off and executed an illegal U-turn in on the highway. My first ever.

As I U-turned again and pulled up behind them, I looked at Tiff and she looked at me, the fear in our faces diluted by the certainty that we were doing the right thing. Beyond that, we were doing the thing God had told us to do. And HE was going to take care of us.

“Um…” I paused. The words came hard. I was unused to saying them. “Don’t tell mom, okay?”

An enthusiastic nod from Tiffany. “I won’t!”

As it turned out, they did want a ride. We offered them fruit salad. It was all we had left of the picnic. They liked it.

And they didn’t kill us.

* * *

I never told my mom we picked up hitchhikers on a hot summer afternoon and drove them for ten miles before dropping them on the side of the road. If she’s reading this now, it might be the first time she’s heard of it. I never told her of making our way home, hearts hammering with the fear of what we’d done and the dizzy ecstasy of having risked our own safety, even our lives, to follow what we both knew Christ had told us to do. I didn’t think she’d understand how important that moment was for us. I’m not completely sure we understood it, at the time. We just knew it was big.

Choosing to offer an air-conditioned ride to two tired travelers may not seem like a life-changing event. For us, it was.

That day was the first time, ever, I chose to do something those around me considered dangerous—unsafe—foolish—because I believed God had told me to do so. Because someone needed me to risk myself to show love to them.

We didn’t tell those men about God. We didn’t explain the salvation message to them before we’d let them out of the car. But we did love them, more than we loved ourselves. And that was the beginning.

Be fore-warned. When you let God know you’re willing to risk your own comfort, your own safety, your own stuff to follow him, He takes advantage. When Tiffany and I moved into our own place the summer after the hitchhikers, God started really working on us. We set up housekeeping in a little three bedroom house on the end of a street, happily arranging the third room as a sewing room/office, and looking forward to enjoying our new space.

Then we asked God to use our home in whatever way He chose.

Never do that if you aren’t ready for the answer.

There was the seventeen year old girl running away from drug dealers and trying to get clean. She’d done things in her short life that I’d only heard of, and could never imagine doing. After all, I’d gotten in trouble for bicycling two miles from my parents house, when I was seventeen. I certainly never imagined being an exotic dancer.

And then there was the friend with Borderline Personality Disorder who had lost her apartment after the police had to break a window to get in during her last suicide attempt.

And the friend who didn’t have anywhere to go but the bed in our basement, and couldn’t really ever manage to tell us she wasn’t okay until her bleeding arms made the fact very clear.

The teenage boy who had an issue with stealing.

The teenage girl who asked me to sit with her until she wouldn’t need to cut herself any more, after she got the call that her cousin had killed herself.

The “wild child” whose overworked mother had trouble keeping track of him, and who needed somewhere to land. Who knew that he would become our brother and we would, eventually, be blessed to offer his mother somewhere to stay when she needed it?

One by one they came. They’re still coming.

Have we been hurt? Not really. Our house was broken into once. They stole Tiff’s Swiss Army knife, my purity ring, and some tithe money. (We figure that, between the purity ring and the tithe money, it’sreally God’s to avenge, not ours.)

We’ve lost $20 here or there. We’ve paid car insurance for roommates that have never paid it back. We’ve had our cars wrecked. We’ve lost sleep. We had to move the sewing machine into a corner of the living room. We’ve cried. We’ve had to learn how to love softly and how to love tough. We’ve had hard confrontations. We’ve learned a lot. And God has been with us.

That seventeen year old? She’s clean, sober and in a stable relationship with a good man, while showing the world just what a great mom she can be.

The teenage boy with the stealing problem? He popped in yesterday, all glowing and enthusiastic, to tell us how much he’s changing and how the “new me” is starting to emerge. He’s crediting the amount of time he’s been spending in prayer.

The wild child? He’s taking the first step toward realizing his dream of becoming a counselor.

And us? We’re just waiting for God to tell us where He wants us…and who He wants us with…next.

Oh—and the last time I was at a church picnic in the park, and there was food leftover? We invited the skater kids over to share in it.

And we didn’t even ask anyone for permission first.

--Copyright 2010, Tesi

And now a little bit of non-fiction for your reading pleasure. :-)

Being Poor

It’s funny how long it takes you to realize that things about your childhood were not normal. Or, really, just how abnormal they were.

I’m thirty years old and volunteering at a camp for Deaf kids in my home state. It’s my thirteenth year at this particular camp and I’m really here, at this point, just for the kids. Here to pray for them, to love on them, to hopefully show them a little glimpse of what a life built around God’s love can be like. It’s late, and I’m talking with one of the girls about her family. She’s an only child, product of a teen pregnancy that turned out well, and I ask her whether her parents have thought about having any more kids.

“I don’t know,” she says, shrugging through her signs, her purple sleeping bag lying wrinkled around her. “I keep telling them I want a brother or sister, and they say they’re thinking about it. But I want one NOW!”

The emphatic nature of her signs pulls her up off the bed, until she’s almost sitting. I nod my understanding. I remember being eleven, and desperate to have a baby around. I remember my parents being so broke that they couldn’t afford a pregnancy test. A friend picked one up from the Crisis Pregnancy Center (never mind that my mom had three kids already, and this wouldn’t be a crisis even if it WAS a pregnancy), brought it to us in a brown paper bag. My mom couldn’t wait until we got home to find out, and wanted me to be the first to know, so when we stopped at the library (where the kids could entertain themselves in the children’s section for a few minutes), she called me with her to the bathroom. We walked down the long, dark hall, past the oil painting of ocean waves that shimmered as if the sun was lodged right in the midst of the ocean, past the book-repairing section, where abused books went to be given a second chance, and through the heavy metal door that housed the one-room bathroom. Toilet on the right, sink on the left. Big, clunky radiator to my back.

Perhaps it’s telling that I didn’t really find it odd that mom wanted me to go into the bathroom with her, but I think I suspected what the bag might contain. I was a pretty smart kid, all things considered. Mom ripped open the bag, and there it was. A pregnancy test. And then I was sure.

I turned my back while mom peed on the stick and then leaned over her shoulder as she washed her hands, watching the odd white cylinder resting on brown paper towels on the back of the toilet, bouncing in anticipation of what color it would turn.

A pink cross! We’re having a BABY!! And we leapt into each other’s arms, jumping up and down and hugging there, in that tiny bathroom, celebrating the new life that was coming.

I think a big part of the reason I never got pregnant, as a teen, was that my mom kept having babies, giving me an outlet for all those overwhelming teen mothering needs. I think about this, as I listen to this girl, who only yesterday told me she really wants to get pregnant, even though she knows she’s too young.

“The problem is,” she goes on with another shrug, “that if we have another baby, we have to move.”

My face must be showing my confusion, because she goes on quickly.

“Well, our house is small; we only have two bedrooms, one for me and one for my parents. So there’s nowhere to put a brother or sister.”

“Really? “ I ask without thinking. “I never thought of that…I mean, babies are small, and you’ll be graduated by the time it’s two…I mean…kids can sleep anywhere…”

I’m half way through telling her where I spent my childhood sleeping before the shock on her face registers, and I realize that here’s another thing about my childhood that is distinctly not normal. I’m almost embarrassed, telling her my story, about how poor it makes my family sound. I want to stop and say “No, it wasn’t like that...” but then I realize that it was like that.

I shared a bed with my parents until I was almost five. They had a twin bed wedged between their bed and the wall, where I would fall asleep at night with my mom curled around me, her cheek pressed against mine (“Cheek to cheek, mommy!” I would beg. “Cheek to cheek!”), or her hand in mine. Some time after I went to sleep, she must have rolled away, because I always woke up by myself in the bed, but my parents were never more than the length of my arm away. As an adult, now, I wonder how they ever managed to make my siblings and I have this wisp of paranoia, if I think too long about it, that I might have been sleeping soundly while, two feet away, my parents were having sex. I suspect this is not the case, because I distinctly remember being put in a high chair in the living room with a tray full of carob chips and being told to sit there while mom and dad had “grown up time”, but I’ve never had the courage to ask either of my parents. I think I’m afraid of what I’ll find out.

I really don’t remember where I slept after Tiffany was born, until I was seven, but I know that when my second sister came along, Tiffany and I got booted to the living room.

Someone had given my family a really nice couch, with a hide-a-bed that I remember as being wonderfully comfortable, which we made out every night and slept on, giggling and whispering stories to each other, or playing the silent game if I was too tired and ready to go to sleep, waking in the morning all tangled in the sheets and happy. Eventually Julianna came along, the fourth girl, and Hannah was moved to our bed.

The three of us shared the hide-a-bed for a while, but I was getting big enough to be uncomfortable and crowded, so I would take the couch cushions into the trailer and sleep on them, or the one-person futon my dad found somewhere. For a while I had an army cot, but it was uncomfortable and too much work to set up every night, so that didn’t last long. I had a light-weight aluminum camping cot that I really liked, but it wasn’t meant to be used every day, and it didn’t last as long as I would have liked it to.

I was thirteen before I got my own bed. It was a roll-away, but we made room for it in the back of the trailer and set it up permanently, allowing me to finally have my own space—a couple of milk-crate and wood bookshelves, and a school desk, back by my bed. My clothes were still in a dresser in my parents’ room, though I had closet space near my bed.

When my brother (the last) was born, Julianna was still nursing. Mom would bring her, at night, into my bed where she would nurse her to sleep while I held my brother, then she’d take him to her room, nurse him to sleep and then roll over to my dad if she wasn’t so tired she fell asleep beside my brother.

I loved sleeping with Julianna—we shared a bed until she was seven and I was twenty. At that time, we moved into a three bedroom trailer, and I had my own room for the first time in my life. It was nice, having my own space, but I always missed being curled up with my sister. I missed the late-night conversations, the giggling, the child-like questions about God, life, the devil and love. For years, even after I moved out, we shared a bed when I visited, or she came up to see me. Being together, so close for so many years, created a bond in us that I wouldn’t trade for anything.

It’s funny, how whatever you experience as a child becomes your normal, and you don’t realize, until you’re thirty and telling a sixteen year old about how you made out a hide-a-bed every night before you could sleep, and didn’t get your own bed until you were thirteen, how truly abnormal that is. How getting rid of your couch so you can put bunk beds in your living room is not the average person’s solution to crowding. How spending your entire life with rough-wood shelves in the kitchen, plastic on the walls, unfinished sheet-rock in the bedrooms and floors made of varnished plywood would make your average social worker shudder and start making notes.

And it makes me understand, just a little, why people were confused about where to sit, when they came to visit. How the gift of an “extra” air conditioner when the summer heat was really too much for my nine-month pregnant mother would be an act of Christian charity, or why some people just didn’t come back to visit.

But it also makes me realize just how committed my parents were, to their beliefs. To the things they chose to build their lives upon.

My parents didn’t want to owe anyone anything. They built their house as they could afford to (the room-addition which would have doubled the size of the house was nearing finished, when the house burned just before my fifteenth birthday), gardened to keep us in good food, heated with wood because it saved money and was better for the world, and put their children before absolutely everything else in their lives. Whether we had enough space for another person was never a deciding factor in adding to the size of our family. Having enough money to support a child wasn’t argued about, or discussed. Children were a blessing, our family was the most important thing in life, and each of us felt like we were the reason our parents were together; loving and teaching and raising us was the reason they existed. It was what God had given them to do. And if a new baby meant even less meat in our diet, or fewer treats, well, I don’t think any of us would have traded. The richness of life and love that each of my siblings brought made the crowding easy, the laughter of the youngest was easily worth the loss of a frozen yogurt on a trip to town.

We never felt poor. I remember Hannah, once when she was very small, saying she felt sorry for some friends of ours, because they were so poor. Confused (they made considerably more money than my dad did), we asked her why she thought that.

“Because they can’t afford to paint their house!” she said, as if the answer was obvious. And that was what she saw, feeling sympathy for them, though they had a bed for each of their children, and a finished house, with raw wood siding. Poor or rich, to us, was never about where we lived, what we ate, or how new our clothes were. It was about love, about family, about people. I hope that I carry that attitude into my adult life. I know I mean to.

Copyright 2010 --Tesi, The Barefoot Author

So, I’ve been studying Irish History recently.

Sensible, I thought, since I’m going there in less than two months and I want to understand, this time, what I’m seeing.

I’m studying in typical homeschool style (well, our homeschool, anyway).Went to the bookstore, browsed the Ireland section until I found something that sparked my interest (written by an Irish storyteller, telling the history of his country through tales of its people), bought it, brought it home and started reading it. Then, each time I hit upon something interesting, I buy another book about that part of history (or get one from the library) until I have a huge stack to wade through. The Pocket History of Irish Saints. Michael Collins. Irish Writers’ Essays on Writing, An Illustrated Guide to the Irish Civil War, A Pocket Guide to Irish Rebels…the stack just keeps getting higher until I’m overwhelmed and end up going off to do something else, like watch Liam Neeson portray Michael Collins on film. Or peruse the Eyewitness Guide to Ireland I’ve been carrying around for six years, eager to go back.

It was while distracting myself with THIS book that I stumbled upon a map with a little section around Dublin in purple, the rest of the country green, the purple labeled “The Pale” (see page 134). Following a rabbit trail, I found myself flipping through the pages of bright photographs until I found the little box describing “The Pale”:

The term “Pale” refers to an area around Dublin that marked the limits of English influence from Norman to Tudor times. The frontier fluctuated…Gaelic chieftains outside the area could keep their lands provided they agreed to bring up their heirs within the pale.

The Palesmen supported their rulers’ interests and considered themselves the upholders of English values…Long after its fortifications were dismantled, the idea of the Pale lived on as a state of mind. The expression “beyond the pale” survives as a definition of those outside the bonds of civilized society.

I closed the book in satisfaction. I had learned something. Day well spent.

So I’ve been thinking about this phrase, “Beyond the Pale”. It’s been bouncing around in my head all week like the ball in a pinball machine; harmlessly wandering around until it gets hit just the right direction, then bells and whistles start going off, and the points start racking up, usually in the form of questions.

How far beyond the bonds of accepted society you have to be, to be considered beyond the pale. How primitive? How different?

I like thinking that I’ve spent most of my life beyond the pale. I might be wrong; I might be over reaching the bounds of the term, might be over-analyzing the whole thing, of course. I’ve never really been accused of under-analyzing anything.

I know that I grew up beyond the pale. I wish I lived there still. I think the root of my dissatisfaction with life, now, is that I feel somewhere along the way I stepped over that invisible boundary and into the land of expectations, the land of propriety and competition, of professionalism and “success”; the place where I’m expected to uphold the ruler’s interest. I’m not sure what to do in this strange land, not sure what to say, how to act, how to handle the feeling that everyone is staring and pointing and wondering where I came from and whether I really belong.

Some days I feel I belong and I go to work, I wear a dress shirt and put on makeup. I keep my calendar. I go to the mall. I talk fashion and music with an adult, and manage to avoid expressing any unconventional opinions. I don’t accidently say something about using an outhouse, or surviving without electricity. I don’t mention how much I want to run away from the city. I remember that a town of twelve thousand is not, in fact, a city. I don’t mention butchering turkeys the day before Thanksgiving. I don’t talk about being in my parent’s bedroom, watching my siblings be born on the bed where they were conceived. Maybe I don’t even mention being a homeschooler. And I go home at the end of the day, proud of myself for fooling them all. For making them think I belong.

I can do this for a few days. Maybe a month. Then I notice that I’m nervous. On edge. Tired. Lost. I feel I’m floundering. Not sure who I am. I’m afraid I’m losing some of the pieces of myself. Afraid that if they disappear entirely, I won’t be able to get them back.

And so I sneak away to the property of the midwife who missed my brother’s birth by twenty minutes. I breathe the forest air, let the music of the creek heal my soul. I take my shirt off and lie in the summer sun, soaking up the velvet softness of moss against the bare skin of my back. I sleep in her teepee beside an open fire. I write with an ink pen on loose-leaf paper. I lock my calendar and my cell phone in the car. I paint something no one but me will understand. I eat mangoes naked.

I go home, and pick brightly colored peppers from the little garden I’ve planted in my back yard. I pull green beans off the thin stalks, and gently pluck tomatoes from their vines. I take dry beans out of five gallon buckets, and cook them in a pressure cooker. I make tofu by hand and stir it into the wok, douse it with soy sauce and garlic, throw in the bright peppers and the green onions. I take off my shoes and cook barefoot in my kitchen, Sherman the rabbit hopping around at my feet before running off to harass the cat.

And I know that whoever drives past my curtained windows will see only a white house with vinyl siding and drive on past, never knowing that the walls of my house are the borders and the secret refuge of my kitchen, my bedroom, my basement full of home-canned goods, are the last fortifications of the Pale. Behind them, beneath my makeup and professional clothes, I will always live beyond the Pale.

By Tesi, January 2010