A big "Thank you!" to everyone who's been reading, and especially those who're commenting!! I've opened the blog to allow anonymous comments, because some people don't have any of the required accounts, and I'd LOVE to hear from you whether you do or not...but that means I've been getting a lot of anonymous comments.

So...if you're commenting, and not signing in, please be aware that your comments are coming up without a name, so I don't know who's reading, or what you think. If this is your goal...keep on doing it. I love to hear what you have to say either way!!

But if you're someone I know, and would like to identify yourself...I'd love to know who you are! Just put your name (first is fine) in the body of your comment before posting it, ok?

:-)

Again...thanks!! I'm approaching done with Christmas-making (well...haven't started the Christmas BAKING yet...) and so hopefully will get a chance to finish some of the essays I have sitting in Word unfinished. Look for new posts soon!

Tesi

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

The world is so quiet, on a Sunday night before Thanksgiving. The full moon peeks out behind racing clouds, coy as a scarf dancer allowing only a glimpse of herself to be seen before the filmy fabric of clouds is whisked back in front of her. It’s so warm the trees think it’s spring; buds adorn the tips of branches that still haven’t lost this year’s leaves. They stand out against the back sky like so many little candles, lit by the orange glow of the streetlight. I sit cross-legged on the concrete, dead leaves at my feet, marveling at trees whose leaves are still green—and gold—and red—awed that branches which should be naked are instead bedecked with the hope of spring.

A gentle breeze rustles the remaining leaves, whisking away the sounds that try to intrude on the silence of this November night. It’s a night for magic. Not the showy make-an-elephant-appear-out-of-thin-air kind of magic; a quiet magic of the kind that takes your corner of the world and lifts it into somewhere you’ve been but can’t quite remember. It’s Venice on a dark night, threatening rain. It’s Cincinnati on Christmas Eve, with Belgian waffles and bitter lattes. It’s a cobbled plaza in Rome, a back street in Dublin, a secret corner of an old walled city in Spain. It’s that place where you stand still for a moment, feeling life and time part around you like a stream parting for a boulder as you just…watch. Silent. Listening. Not sure what you might hear.

The shop windows are all decorated for Christmas, each pane of glass revealing a snapshot of a world that only exists in children’s books and fairy tales. It whispers of steadfast tin soldiers and velveteen rabbits, of cats with bells around their necks and little engines that can. Lights sparkle off every shiny surface, carrying the magic of ten-thousand Christmases and the children who have fallen asleep beneath them, dreaming of the moment when they will wake to the most magical day of all. Christmas.

It's too beautiful to be indoors, yet not a single person is out. I could be in a ghost town or on the set of a Ronald Reagan movie after all the actors have gone home. Perhaps it’s too late in the year for anyone to think about walking the streets after dark; or perhaps they’ve all gone home for the holiday. Maybe they’ve all just…disappeared.

Curtains are open, though; lighted rooms on display for anyone who cares to look. I stand on the corner for a long moment, watching the empty windows of the apartment I dream of living in someday. I wonder if it’s empty now, and think of asking before I remember that I’m a grown up, paying mortgage on a house with three roommates and a dozen animals. Never mind; it’s a night for dreaming and so I dream of living there, a floor above everyone below, windows open to the world, watching the comings and goings of lives comingling silently. Watching, not entering. Just watching and dreaming stories, writing them down by candle light as the wind whispers at my windows and a cat circles my ankles. Someday. I think to myself, then wonder if I mean it. Someday.

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

The voice was indecipherable. At first, she thought it belonged to a very ugly child, the type who beat things with sticks just to see them break, and repeat tales only if they will make the hearer cry. But as she listened, she began to wonder if it mightn’t be a woman, her voice rough with living yet lacking the maturity of someone who had really grown up.

(I apologize if this post is poorly written. I’m in the throes of pneumonia, but really wanted to share this thought. Evidently pneumonia steals your brain’s ability to function and put words together cohesively. Ugh. Hope you enjoy anyway.)

I just reached the end of the Supernatural (a CW show you should check out if you haven’t seen it) five year story arc, with great satisfaction.

As I bask in the afterglow of a story well told, I’ve been thinking about what makes the show so engaging; what makes it work so extremely well. I’m sure everyone likes a show like this for different reasons, but the most compelling thing about it, for me, is the characters. All the characters have their strong points, but Sam and Dean (the main characters) are amazing.

Looking at them from a writer’s perspective, recognizing how well they work together and how well that dynamic drives the story (even through the sticky bits), I’ve been wondering what I can learn from their character design and development, that I could put into my own writing. The question, really, is What makes a character really, really good?

The first thing that I think makes Sam and Dean such dynamic characters is that we know what drives them. The writers of Supernatural make sure that we know very early on that Dean is motivated by loyalty to family, while Sam wants to do what’s right. Basic character motivations, perhaps, but a great foundation on which the creators then spend over a hundred episodes building.

The motivations are filled in, like colors within a coloring book outline and, while we always know what drives them, we don’t always know how it will play out. Does Sam’s desire to do what’s right make him decide that the ends justify the means? Will Dean’s loyalty to his family cause him to allow innocent people to die so his brother will survive? How far does loyalty go? How do you find right when all your options seem wrong?

Secondly, Sam and Dean are very, very real. Their weaknesses are evident from the beginning (Dean’s especially), and their brokenness is never hidden. Their personalities and motivations are clearly understood by the writers, and their responses to shared experiences (often vastly different responses) make sense within their personalities and motivations.

The oldest of five children, I’ve had a lot of opportunities to see how a sibling’s age, personality and experiences can cause two people to come through the same experience with completely different baggage, something that recurs frequently through the episodes. And the beauty of these character’s development is just that—the writers put very real characters up against situations completely outside of our experience (I’ve never fought a genie, or come head to head with a really pissed-off pagan god) and yet, in the midst of experiences we could never have, the characters have responses, struggles, weaknesses and strengths that we can understand—because we have experienced them. We celebrate Sam and Dean’s victories because we hope that we, in the same situation, would do as well as they do. We grieve their failures because we understand how easily we would make the same mistake. We have sympathy for their pain, because we recognize their brokenness in ourselves.

Third, the characters are deeply consistent. Clearly defined motives and carefully crafted personalities mean that we, the “reader” if you will, know what Sam is likely to do, in a particular situation. We know how Dean would respond when faced with a certain challenge. We know, because we know what we would do. We see ourselves in them, because they are so real.

And then, the writers keep their characters within the motives and personalities they have created so that we never find ourselves saying “Dean would never do that!!” Not only that, but because the characters are so believable—so real—we never even find ourselves saying “Well, I would never do that!” We know, because of how the characters are built, that if we were in that situation…with those experiences under our belt…we are just as likely to make exactly the same choice.

So, I’ve been thinking about my own characters; their motivations, their personalities, the experiences through which they filter the world. I’m wondering if I’ve made these parts of them clear enough. I wonder if I understand them well enough myself. I wonder how I can make them even more real, more accessible, more…sympathetic. Because, when all’s said and done, I want my readers to close my book with a feeling of satisfaction because they hope that, if they had ended up in that place, facing that situation, they would have been strong enough to make the same choice my character did. I want them to know their own weaknesses and brokenness through my characters, and I want them to conquer them with my characters.

If I can accomplish that…I will feel I have succeeded.

--Tesi

"Swimming in a golden bath of its own making, the sun painted long shadows across the sandy surface of the plateau."

This was the first line of my novel-in-progress, until very recently. Now, the first line is:

"People will die tonight."

I believe this constitutes an improvement. If nothing else, you now want to read the second sentence, instead of curling up for a nap. Right?

(You can just smile and nod, if you like. Or pat me on the shoulder and say, "Of course, dear." I'm probably too sleepy to notice anyway.)

--Tesi