My Mother’s Magic Rainbow Story: A Lifelong Influence

I spent last weekend with my 84-year-old mother, who made her first trip from Pennsylvania to Virginia in many years, thanks to her escorts–my sister Doris, her husband Dave, and their standard poodle Rodney. We celebrated Mother’s Day live and in person, albeit a week late.

Yesterday I posted two wonderful Mother’s Day tributes found on other websites, including the Six-Word Momoir contest at The New York Times.

In the spirit of the six-word “momoir” here’s a tribute to Barbara Ann Hess Hershey Becker, my mother:

Your rainbow story launched us all.

Let me explain. Mother wrote one story in high school called “The Magic Elevator” that she memorized and told hundreds of times to each of her children, to Sunday School classes, to cousins and family friends–and to anyone who asked. The story evolved over the years with technological and cultural changes. Later versions featured a magic rocket rather than a magic elevator. (My brother and I both like the elevator version better). I posted the latter version of the story online at the DivineCaroline website. Read it here if you want a story that never fails to capture the imagination of children. The one thing that never changes is that two children slide home to safety–and their Grandma–on the back of a rainbow.

Now it just so happened that this past weekend was a rainy one in Virginia. And wouldn’t you know it–we noticed the yellow light as it rained, so we opened the front door to this sight (only brighter in real life).

I didn’t think of it then, but as I was compiling pictures from the weekend and looking at this one of my mother and sister’s face in rainbow light, I felt a little shiver. That’s when I thought of my own six-word momoir: Your rainbow story launched us all.

How did a single story told over and over again influence the five Hershey children? I can only speak for myself, but I hope some of my siblings will offer their own reflections in the comment section.

For me, this story is the very definition of unconditional love combined with adventure. It gave me both roots and wings in childhood.

• It told me that I could play in the woods, disobey some commands, experience fear and danger, and still slide back down the rainbow to Grandma’s loving arms.
• It told me that stories themselves are a powerful tickets to other worlds. When Mother told her story, even to a group of 20 or so rowdy kindergarteners, they looked slack-jawed.
• It told me that nature can be both enticing and dangerous but that nature responds to human longing for home.
• It reinforced my role as buddy to my brother (the main characters were Shirley and Henry when I heard the story) but also my “big sister” leadership.
• As the maker of the story and the compelling story teller, my mother demonstrated–no, she embodied–creativity to me and all her children.

Thank you, Mother, for your steadfast love to all of us and for the permission you gave yourself and others to explore the imagination. You were a true pioneer in the Lancaster Conference Mennonite Church in the 1950′s and beyond.

Furthermore, you play a mean game of cards to this day!

You Can Go Home Again–A Mini-Memoir

Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, likes to call itself the Garden Spot of the World.  If you travel to Lancaster in the springtime, you understand.  The greens penetrate deeper than the human eye can see, and the earth, well, it’s as soft and receptive as any coquette and more fertile than a hutch full of rabbits.

I love going back to the land, walking along the creek where I used to play as a child, and thinking about all the ancestors who are buried on the hill behind my mother’s house.

Last Tuesday Stuart and I went home to celebrate Easter with my mother and three of my siblings, and two of my neices and nephews who live there.  If you have been reading this blog, you know that I planned to read the essay I wrote called “My Mother’s Pulpit” to my mother.  I hoped that she would be honored, but I wasn’t sure how she would react.

Would she be upset, offended that I had not consulted with her before sending in the essay?

Or would she be delighted to find my story about her voice in print?

It wasn’t easy to read about my embarrassment when Mother prayed at my inauguration in 1997 or about how I distanced myself as a teenager and young adult from my mother’s powerful example as a woman leader.  But it was the truth as I lived it, and truth is strong medicine for fear.

Mother interrupted the beginning several times to deny that she had ever said those things in her prayer.  I just smiled and nodded and my sister affirmed my memory, and we plunged on, laughing. I relaxed after that, hoping that Mother would be able to hear the love in the essay even when it was mixed up with my insecurities and judgments.

I have always trusted my mother’s love, and, one more time, she came through with love rather than resentment or pique.

The first hearing of an essay is never enough–especially when it is about you!  So the next day, Mother and I talked about it again.  She wondered what it was about the writing that won the contest.  I loved that question because it shows how eager my mother is to learn, even at age 82.  We talked about phrases and metaphors, and she picked out lines she thought were strong.  I read the essay again into a recorder at the request of my niece Joy, who wants to make a CD.  Mother clapped.

She also wore her Goshen College Mom sweatshirt and Stuart took our pictures.

I’m so glad that Mother forgave me for sharing my impious thoughts.  And I rejoice that she welcomed me home as always–and that she wants me to return.

What makes Lancaster County soil so extraordinarily fertile, my father once told me, is limestone.  My mother’s house is made from stones taken from the barn on our farm, built in the 1720′s, and built to last. The picture above taken of Mother and me on her front porch illustrates how limestone combines beauty and strength in construction.  The front yard contains another great and uncut lime stone salvaged from the ancestral land.

Limestones, flowers, oaks, sycamores, willows, creek–these were forces that forged my imagination as a child.  The wind that blew strongest through me, from the beginning to this very moment, is my mother’s voice.  She would want you to know that the voice that blows through both of us is a Voice without beginning and without end, the voice beyond language that we nevertheless call Holy Spirit.

My Stroke of Insight: A Spiritual Memoir

I will cut to the chase on the last night of the year 2008.  I loved this book.  I read it nearly in one sitting, fascinated by the straightforward telling of an incredible story.  Jill Bolte Taylor, a brain scientist working at the Brain Bank at Harvard University, woke up one morning with a headache and a set of very unusual symptoms–the noise of the shower seemed like thunder, and one arm went limp.  Numbers refused to stay in her head.  When she finally diagnosed herself as having a stroke, it took several hours before she could successfully get help. Had any little portion of her story changed, she would not have lived to tell it.

Barnes and Noble chose this book as the best memoir of the year.  Interestingly, it follows almost none of the story structure guidelines found in Your Life as Story.  It contains very little dialogue, for example, and it moves from a chapter on the author’s pre-stroke life to two chapters about how the brain functions.  Then we get to the story of the stroke itself, lasting until chapter 13, when the focus moves from narrative to reflection.  The last several chapters resemble nothing more than sermon applications, as Taylor explains first what kind of care is helpful and what is not for stroke victims, and then how the stroke has changed her life for good.

I had seen this YouTube video–Jill Bolte Taylor at the TED conference–and the four segments from Oprah Winfrey’s Soul Series, so I had the author’s literal voice and her passionate presentation style  running in the back of my head as I read her book.  The voice on the page resonated with the one I met first on the screen.  As she described what she discovered when only her right brain functioned, I could feel my own fluid, energetic self, the self that is connected to everything and everyone else.

The right brain is a mystic; the left brain tells stories.  Taylor’s epiphany comes after her recovery.  As she says in Chapter Fifteen, “My stroke of insight is that at the core of my right hemisphere consciousness is a character that is directly connect to my feeling of deep inner peace.  It is completely committed to the expression of peace, love, joy, and compassion in this world.”  This is the boon she received from her hero’s journey into her own mind and brain.

What Taylor learned, everyone who writes spiritual memoir must also learn.  We need both sides of the brain.  We need the right side to quiet our racing left-brain guided minds.  Then we need to call upon the language centers of the left side in order to tell the story of what we learn in the stillness.

The jacket cover rear flap contains a picture of Taylor with her arms around her mother, Gladys Gillman Taylor (G.G.) The picture jumps off the paper with the love energy that G.G., Taylor’s mother exhibited when she first arrived from Bloomington, IN, to the hospital in Boston, right after the stroke.  The first thing she did was lift the covers of her daughter’s bed and crawl in beside her. Her calm, her devotion, her teaching (everything from eating to walking to reading), and, most of all, her belief in a full recovery, built strength that made all the difference to her daughter.

I wished for only one thing as I read this story.  I wished for more before and after insights about the family relationships.  Taylor hints that her parents’ divorce and her brother’s schizophrenia had made her angry before the stroke, and that she chose not to dwell on those memories once she recovered them.  Her pure right-brain experience taught her that she had control over whether to allow negative thoughts to repeat themselves endlessly.  Instead of delving into the personal narrative, she shows us how she took control.  This is one of the most constructive sections of the book and the reason she writes the book.  She learned something all of us need to learn.  I hope to apply her suggestions to my own life.

I would also like to know a great deal more about her mother, father, and brother–not out of voyeurism, but because I sense that the human drama of her stroke of insight is not fully complete until more of that story is told.  The decision to make her family members minor characters compared to the stroke itself and to the real hero of the story–the miraculous human brain–had to be a conscious one.  Perhaps some day the time will be right to tell the family tale with the conflicts as well as the joys.  I would gladly read that book, also.

Contests and Memoir

I have always enjoyed biography, autobiography, and the personal essay, but my study of memoir as a subject is only two years old.  It started when I saw a 2007 literary contest announcement in the local newspaper, The Kalamazoo Gazette.  The three categories were poetry, short story and memoir. That choice was easy, since my favorite genre, the personal essay, is a form of memoir.

Entering contests was not at a new phenomenon for me either.  I identified with both the mother and her writer-daughter in the memoir, The Prizewinner of Defiance, Ohio. My own mother loved contests and showed me how to send off for free things in the backs of magazines when I was growing up in the 1950′s.  Going to the mailbox was fun because a fat envelope might be lurking there.  I entered lots of contests and won more than my share of prizes–all with my mother’s encouragement, and sometimes, with her help.  A number of my most vivid memories focus on contests; my young imagination was fired by them.

My mother herself was a housewife “prizewinner”–someone who found scant opportunity to exercise her gifts of speaking, writing, acting, and making music as she laundered on Monday, ironed on Tuesday, cleaned on Wednesday, etc.  She loved reading stories and telling stories to her five children.  She even published a few feature articles and spoke in many churches.  She praised the stories and pictures we brought home from school.  In addition, she encouraged us to enter newspaper and magazine contests.  This eagerness to compete and to create has never left me.  The legacy it left in my life is a mixed one.  I have “won” many contests–4-H, the Bobst Award, admission to graduate school, grants, scholarships, various jobs, a presidential leadership award, etc.  However, it is hard to listen to the still, small voice of the spirit with the roar of the crowd in one’s head.  And it is easy to get attached to winning.  Like Sylvia Plath, I went into depression at one juncture of my life when I failed to win a fellowship I wanted badly.

At age 60, I am able to turn away from some contests, like nominations for prestigious jobs, even if I might win them.  This seems like spiritual progress to me.  To make such decisions well, I have to pause, meditate, seek counsel, and interrogate the greatest sources of wisdom I know.  If I don’t, I can still be addicted to my own adrenaline.

In the last two years I won memoir writing prizes in the Kalamazoo Gazette contest and also two other honorable mentions, the Santa Barbara Writer’s Conference and the Soul-Making Literary Competition in San Francisco.  These contests got me started.

I also entered a handful of other contests and did not win!

External recognition can be one of the signposts we look for when asking how to use our precious time and exercise our gifts in the world.  But it is not enough.  I desire to follow my heart and soul to deeper levels of reflection through reading and writing memoir–even if I never win another contest in my life.