Piano player

She couldn’t read a note

of music but learned to play

the old upright by ear,

memorizing what she needed

to know, songs and mostly hymns,

and knew them so well that

she played for the church for years,

and no one ever guessed

she couldn’t read a note,

a single note.

Photograph by Sabine Sauermaul via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Salt and light

I spilled the salt

but forgot to throw

some over my shoulder

so the grains lay quietly

on the tablecloth, the white

blending into starched

and ironed cotton white.

The salt began to sparkle,

vibrating against the cloth

as if the cloth was pulling

away from the table,

which it was. I heard

a woman at the next table

laugh.

I spilled the light

upon the floor, and the rays

flooded across the unmapped

surface, the crumbs and dustballs

casting shadows for the first time.

I didn’t realize how invasive,

or revealing,  light could be.

Photograph by Peter Griffin via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

“Forbidden Room” by Joanne Lewis

How much does the past shape the present and the future? Could there be no difference between past and present, that time cycles instead of going forward?

Those are the questions underpinning the novel Forbidden Room by Joanne Lewis. Past and present are not so much a continuum as they become almost the same thing at the same time.

Sara Goldstein, an attractive fifth-grade teacher from a wealthy family, is charged with the murder of her uncle. Her attorney, Michael Turner, believes her to be innocent, and ends up ignoring the warning from almost everyone not to get emotionally involved with a client.  He does more than get emotionally involved; he falls in love with her. But can he be sure he knows who she really is?

Nowhere to be found is David Goldstein, Sara’s ex-Marine younger brother whom she’s called Soldier Boy since they were children. They are as close as a brother and sister can be, having creating a mutual protection against growing up with an alcoholic mother who fought constantly with their father. When Sara was 14 and David 10, they found their parents murdered at home. Sara believe her uncle was the killer; the police never could determine what actually happened.

The novel moves forward on three simultaneous planes, representing different times but eventually converging – the verdict ready to be announced by the jury; the development of Michael’s and Sarah’s relationship as they prepare for the trial, and the childhood of Sara and David. Much seems to center on what is known as the “forbidden room” in the Goldstein home, where Sara’s father kept his collection of antique trains and carousel horses, including a small working carousel.

The story is told from the alternating perspectives of Sara and Michael, and it to the author’s strength as a writer that she tightly controls the narratives, gradually developing the story so that all threads eventually come together.

Forbidden Room is a suspenseful, engaging read, holding the reader’s attention until the final page.

Photograph by Petr Kratochvil via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

The Refining Fire of Affliction

It was what we still call our horrible year, the year when virtually everything that could go wrong went wrong.

1987.

It’s still hard to talk about it.

On a Saturday in early March, I had gone out on an errand, likely the local hardware store. It was a lengthy errand; I was home in with an hour. When I arrived, I found our next door neighbor  sitting with my crying wife. The call had come from New Orleans – my father had had a stroke. I was able to get a flight that evening, but the plane was late leaving, the connection was missed in Memphis, the airline got me to Baton Rouge and arranged for a taxi to take me to New Orleans (airlines did things like that back then).

Within 24 hours, the family had told the doctors to remove from father from the machines keeping him alive. He left behind him a business that was a mess, and I was the executor of the estate. I stayed there a week, returned home, and then we drove down two weeks later. Mess had to be taken care of for months.

In June, the church we were attending erupted, largely because of an ill-designed building program. I was an elder, and had raised questions about what was planned, making a lot of people angry (things aren’t easy when you’re on the losing end of a 14 to 2 vote). I ended up resigning from the elder board. While it caused an uproar and harmed several relationships, the uproar did eventually result in structural problems coming to light, problems that would have likely bankrupted the church had the building program gone forward.

Then in October, work blew up, politics of the kind that was so naked and obvious that the entire organization I was working in was upended. I had been working almost feverishly for four years, only to see the wrong person get an unexpected promotion a few months into the job. I left the division, even after being offered “anything I wanted,” including a promotion, to stay. But the situation was broken, and it was time to leave.

Father, church, career. My world had turned upside down in six months. And my wife was pregnant with your youngest, who was born that December.

It’s easy to write and talk about the refining fire of affliction. It is another thing altogether to love it. Christians know there is always a point; we also know that it may be years before we understand what the point was.

In The Fire of Delayed Answers, Bob Sorge says this in answer to the question, why does God allow affliction? “In His mercy, He allows other fires to put the heat on our lives: financial stress, physical distress,…family distress. Without the heat, so often our love grows cold.”

That sound likes a one-sided answer, one that would likely not offer much comfort to someone suffering a serious affliction, at least while they were experiencing it.

But, in retrospect, that’s what happened with us in 1987 (and some years before and after that, too). We came out of that year changed, but during that year it often seemed that all we could do was hold on. Just hold on.

I think that was the point, too. Just to hold on, hold on to our faith.

And today I can talk with people who lose loved ones, experience job upheaval, and see their churches blow up, and can empathize in a way someone who hasn’t experienced those things simply can’t.

Led by Jason Stayszsen and Sarah Salter, we’ve started reading The Fire of Delayed Answers. To see others’ comments, please visit Jason at Connecting to Impact and Sarah at Living Between the Lines.

Photograph by Junior Libby via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission. 

Poetry: The Teachers Who Teach Us

Whenever we return to my hometown of New Orleans, we inevitably drive all over to see friends, visit the French Quarter, see my older brother, and hit the local grocery store for food items you can only buy in the region. Just as inevitably and by necessity, we travel streets that pass right by my junior high and high schools. Those were the two places where my ideas and understanding of poetry were formed and took root.

Teachers can have an enormous impact, for good and for ill. It was my good fortune to have invariably good literature and English teachers, from eighth grade through high school graduation. Most of these teachers were of the same generation – they had all been teaching for 10 to 15 years, except for one whose tenure was approaching 40 years.

To continue reading, please see my post today at TweetSpeak Poetry.

Photograph: East Jefferson High School, Metairie, Louisiana.

Life After Art

When I was in third grade, my teacher was the one officially designated as the “art teacher” for the entire grade. My mother loved telling her relatives and neighbors that I had the art teacher. What she didn’t say was that Mrs. Sibley was in her early to mid-60s, rarely could remember our names, and told stories so outrageous that even we eight-year-olds knew she was telling something other than the truth.

But art we did. We had two big simultaneous projects. The class was divided right down the middle. The teacher had the janitor tape a long roll of brown paper, roughly three feet wide and forty feet long, to the classroom walls.

We painted murals.

To continue reading, please see my post today for The High Calling. 

The man in the pew

The man in the pew

in front of me has

a twisted collar, and

he’s unaware of it,

surely, or he would

fix it, surely, or if he

does know, then, surely,

there must be a point

to it, since no one

deliberately twists

a shot collar, surely,

do they? I barely resist

the temptation to straighten

it, and I resist the temptation

to lean forward and tell him

his collar was twisted. Wasn’t

the sermon on the Good Samaritan?

Photograph by Junior Libby via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.