Waves rolled over blackened rock ledges.  Seaweed, salty and bulbous, swayed in tide pools.  A strong breeze stirred my hair.  Sand squished under foot.  Gray clouds traded with sunshine.   My friends and I, warmed by summer and sand, faced the waves.

We waded in the tide pools and, like lizards, basked on the soft sand.  The scene offered enough entertainment without challenging any unseen forces, without risking our lives.  We were, by any reckoning, already winners.  After all, we had convinced our parents we were capable of managing a getaway to the beach, that we would be careful during the one hour drive to and from the coast.  Our parents, although probably wary, hated to discourage our independence and adventurous spirits.  Teenagers, yes , but also a stellar group of excellent students and responsible youth — we could almost taste our freedom in the salt air.

Gritty sand mixed with our lotions and flew onto our blankets.  Our sand castles sprawled along the tide’s edge.  Our footprints trailed toward sand dunes and cliff caves.   A rhythm of undertow and rolling surface, a swirl of reality and imagination stirred us.

Aware of the pull of parental caution — sand gets in your sandwiches, sand fleas bite, sun burns skin, undertow kills — youthful curiosity lured me to wonder if I could climb the cliffs or how it would feel to sleep all night on the sand.

My friends and I were challenging the surf, sometimes body surfing.  A confident swimmer, I began swimming out further and further, waves crashing over me, currents tugging at me.  This is all memory: dark water and foam, the receding shoreline, my suspension of fear when I should have been terrified.  With what fate was I toying?

And then, I decided to return.  Here was the struggle I had not imagined.  I could swim and float but not so easily determine my direction.  The currents delivered me toward shore and then drug me deeper into the sea.  Desperation’s bile rose in my throat.  I swallowed sea water.  Fear chilled my limbs.  I rolled onto my back to rest.  A wave crashed over me, flipped me, and pulled me under.  I fought to the surface, coughing and spitting.

If I use the currents, I can make it, I thought.  I rolled onto my stomach and cut diagonally toward a point to the south.  My limbs ached; my lungs burned.  Finally, my toes touched a sand bar. My lungs sucked in the salty air.  I waded against the surf to a rocky shelf and lifted myself up to safety.

As I walked around the point, the waves hushed, the gulls floated overhead, and my heart beat steadied.   I could see my friends sorting shells and munching on potato chips.

“Hey!  I made it.”

They looked up. “Hey.  Where ya been?”

“Swimming.”

That was it.  I made it.

What was this about me, this odd suspension of self and circumstance, this challenge of dark and deep boundaries of fate?  It’s a question for which I have no answer.  An indelible memory of verve, struggle, and escape — the event could easily have taken me with it.

“for whatever we lose (like a you or a me)
it’s always ourselves we find in the sea.”
― E.E. Cummings, 100 Selected Poems

In the deeps are the violence and terror of which psychology has warned us. But if you ride these monsters deeper down, if you drop with them farther over the world’s rim, you find what our sciences cannot locate or name, the substrate, the ocean or matrix or ether which buoys the rest, which gives goodness its power for good, and evil its power for evil, the unified field: our complex and inexplicable caring for each other, and for our life together here. This is given. It is not learned.”
― Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters

A week before Christmas, Diane helped purchase food for 30 Angel Tree families:  5 cases of precooked hams, 80 pounds of oranges, 60 pounds of sweet potatoes, 8 pounds of butter, 6 cases of canned vegetables and fruit.  In Sam’s parking lot, a man offered, “May we help you?  Those look heavy.”  Indeed, each case of ham weighed 40 pounds.

On Saturday before Christmas, church youth will deliver gifts and meals to the Angel Tree families. The surface of this charitable event looks simple enough.  Pluck a paper angel from a tree.  Read the names.  Shop.  Wrap up the gifts and  deliver them to the church office.

For a family to land on an Angel Tree, it must qualify as “needing help.”  Imagine what needing help might mean:  alcoholism, health disabilities, lay offs, divorce, abandonment.  These very terms imply complexity and confusion or desperation, and more significantly, children at risk.

As a teacher Diane witnessed impoverished adolescents raising themselves.  One young man fell behind in his studies because he was caring for little sisters, dressing them for school, feeding and bathing them, putting them to bed.  He was sixteen; the girls, five and six.  The mother was in and out, mostly out.  Teachers sometimes drove the boy to the grocery store.

A recent article in The New York Times featured a New Jersey family on the edge of losing their home.  A company had pink slipped the father when he reached the eighth year qualification for pension benefits. The mother worked for the IRS, which provided health insurance.  The father worked any jobs he could find: pizza delivery, school janitor, Quick Stop clerk, part-time low wage jobs, two or three at a time.  A car’s transmission went out.  A child became ill.  A local food pantry plugged the creeping gaps of hunger.

The face of need isn’t always easily recognized.  The home may be in a nice neighborhood, the kids playing in the yard, the mom washing the car.  The mom, a divorcee, pays the bills but has trimmed out vacations, air-conditioning, and roast beef.  The ham in an unexpected care box of food will be the family’s holiday meal instead of a hamburger casserole.

Born in 1932, Herb knows how steamed wheat and lard gravy can quiet rumbling bellies.  Today he will eat anything put in front of him.  After Diane’s father graduated from high school in 1932, he worked on farms for shelter and food. At 21 years old, he weighed only 115 pounds.

The refrigerator might be low on food in our family households, but probably because Mom didn’t have time to go to Kroger.  Our grandchildren might have soup for dinner tonight but baked salmon tomorrow.  They thrive on scrambled eggs, hamburgers, grilled chicken, salad, pizza, smoothies, ice cream and cookies.  For this we are grateful, but we also don’t forget how hunger robs the spirit of hope, how difficult it is to weigh more than 115 pounds when crops fail and chickens die, how delicious an orange from a church care box tastes on Christmas Eve after a week of steamed wheat and gravy, how comforting a stranger’s assistance was for Diane and her children one lonely, hungry night in Mono, California.

Love came down at Christmas.  This isn’t a belief; it’s a life.  Here, here is love, in a box of food for your family.  Eat and know you are loved.

Postscript:  Today after writing this holiday essay, Diane met friends at church to bag donated rice, which comes in 50 lb. bags.  The women attempted to drag the heavy bags from a pantry closet, across a lobby floor, to the fellowship hall where they planned to measure and pour the rice into small bags.  A disheveled man clad in soiled winter wear and resting in a lobby chair, looked up.  “Let me do that for you.”  He didn’t look like he had enough energy to stand, much less hoist a 50 lb. bag over his shoulder, but that’s exactly what he did, as if it were no heavier than a feather. His smile revealed missing and rotted teeth, his greasy hair needed washing, but he didn’t hesitate to do what he could do, lift heavy bags.  This holiday essay seems quite appropriate in the light of that simple act.

December 18, 2014.

There is a difference between aging and growing. Aging is what we see in the mirror; growing is the vital ingredient mirrors don’t show:  the saucy verve, the sculpture, the adjustments.

Growing up is what my seven year old grand daughter is doing.  She tells me about reading books and drawing pictures.  She wants me to know she’s bigger, smarter, and faster than her little brother whom she adores but must surpass  as it is her responsibility to him, to lead, and teach and boss around.

Once upon a time I grew taller and taller and finally stopped at five foot five.  I’ve shrunk;  gravity has had its way with me.  All that pounding on my joints from walking around on this ol’ earth has ground down my softer skeletal tissues.  No matter how much I hold  in my tummy or stretch to the skies, I am today five foot four.

Once upon a time I also had a little brother to boss around and teach.  What a bogus exercise is lording it over a sibling.   Today the man, my little brother, is six feet tall, a father, a husband, a business man, and one of those respected individuals none of us would wish to be without.

Sometimes I grow too much.  I am not a dieter.  I eat, usually three times a day.  I also enjoy wine.  So I carry at least ten or fifteen pounds more than my imaginary image of myself.  I can weigh between 135 pounds and 150 pounds any given year depending upon whether I drink wine once a week or twice a day, or eat sandwiches or half a salad for lunch or skip desserts altogether or indulge in a chocolate cherry cheesecake on my birthday, everyone else’s birthday, or for breakfast.

My skin grows — actively, vitally, egregiously– reminding me I’m still very much alive with hundreds of skin tags and a host of subcutaneous keratosis, brown crusts mixed with soft freckles. My bones are growing: bunions and calcifications of tendons.  I also have a growth with a fancy name on my left hand and which I am told will eventually prevent my hand from making a fist.  I think my ears are bigger.  My nose seems longer as well.  There is this loose flap developing under my chin.  I’m a little afraid of what might happen to me around thanksgiving.  I might be misunderstood as fowl.  And sometimes when I go to brush away a hair from my lapel I find it is attached to my chin and must excuse myself from polite company in order to pull it out with pliers.

So you see I am very much alive and well for all to see– and hear.

Behind my friendly smile and kindly ways, I have strong opinions.  Just get me started.  I’m against all manner of things:  intrusive noises like the torso thumping bass from passing cars or my neighbor’s mind numbing, after midnight hard rock; I am against cities without sufficient sidewalks and bike paths, like my own city;  cable TV monopolies; unqualified political candidates; greedy wealth; dirty clothes and messy rooms; stacks of paper; weedy yards; waste; inefficiency; war; gluttony; meanness; and opinionated people, like myself, so I try to be quiet.  It’s not easy.  I am known to some of my friends as “Bossy Pants,” a nickname truly and proudly earned.

I can’t believe I am seventy-two.  Inside me is a silly child who loves ice cream and bright colors, striped socks and bling; who enjoys snuggling and teasing; who feels like running on the wind across a ridge, picking flowers in a meadow, and splashing across rocks over a stream. All the roles I imagined as a child, those unaccomplished ones — flying like a bird, being an orchestra, painting like Mary Cassatt, or winning a Pulitzer Prize — I still aspire to despite the obvious futility.

Yesterday I hacked away at the soil with a spade, pruned rose bushes, divided perennials.  I told myself not to talk to myself as I worked.  That’s what old people do, talk to themselves while they garden.  Don’t be old, I say.  I had two hours, three at best, before my right foot would give out and I’d need to head in for a shower, an ice bag on my ankle, and a snack with Naproxen.

In the evening I dressed for dinner, in slimming black and a dotted pink silky blouse and pink crystal and gold jewelry.  Not too bad, for seventy-two, still upright, still stepping out, still growing.  Just be kind, I reminded myself.  Not too bossy.  Not too caught up in yourself.  Your problems are nothin, Honey.  Not yet, not today, not tonight.