Person on the Page

A childhood friend texted me recently to ask a question. When we were twelve, her father took the two of us to an Osmond Brothers concert in Baltimore. Did I remember the date that we went to that concert? 

I remembered. The date has stayed with me over the intervening decades. I replied to her with the answer. 

My friend’s birthday was approaching, she said, and her husband planned to celebrate by taking her to see Donny Osmond in person again. He got tickets for a special Meet & Greet event that would allow her to meet Donny and have a photo taken with him. For old times’ sake, she said, did I want to go, too?

I confess that I was once a giggling, squealing preteen Donny Osmond fan. I entered Teen Magazine’s “Win a Dream Date with Donny” contests, hoping to be chosen to be his companion for an evening of chaperoned fun. Hoping to be singled out from among the thousands of other girls for this chance to capture his attention. If he met me, wouldn’t he love me? Wouldn’t he want to spend the rest of his life with me? Of course. Please pick me, Donny.  

I’ve come a long way since my teenybopper days, however.  I’ve seen through the Prince Charming fantasies, endured sexism and misogyny, learned the hard way not to rely on a man to save me.  If I met him now, at this point in my life, I couldn’t imagine what I would say to Donny. 

Unless it would be to ask how painful it was to be a child star whose career was all but over by the time he was twenty years old. Or to wonder out loud if he felt that he had been exploited by greedy parents who were willing to sell their children to the public.

Or to ask how he had coped with the ambiguities of being marketed as a sex object to young women while also striving to maintain his reputation for milk-and-cookie wholesomeness.

A Donny Osmond Meet & Greet? I would be the spoiled mayonnaise at that picnic, so I thought I should do my friend and everyone else a favor and stay home.

Our texting conversation ended with my friend’s final question to me. How did I remember so clearly the date of the concert we attended when we were twelve? 

That was easy to answer. 

That was the year my father died. He and I were home alone together on a Saturday morning when he had a heart attack, collapsed in our backyard, and was gone. That happened early in June that year, two months before the Osmond Brothers concert. Over the subsequent decades, the events of that summer have remained vividly clear in my mind.   

My friend’s question reminded me of how my perceptions began changing that year. At that time, I began waiting for something. And I have been waiting ever since.

Not for my father’s miraculous return. Not for him to show up at the front door, home from work, just in time for dinner as he always had when I was a child. Not for his death to turn out to have been some odd misunderstanding, or a bad dream. Not that. Not anymore, anyway.

I have been waiting for something like a sudden change in circumstances, like when persistent clouds drift away and the sun appears. A change arriving unbidden to alter the routine that has become my daily life. An interruption, due to some good news appearing in an email perhaps, or a package on the front porch, a voicemail, or a person at my door.  

Now I go to work in the mornings, and as I walk from the parking lot to my office, the subconscious hope for something—some relief or some happy turn—makes itself known. I have been waiting for something to right what seems wrong, to fill what seems empty, to change what has seemed mildly unbearable about my existence. I have been waiting to be rescued.   

Rescued from what?  I am not pacing on the roof of my house as flood waters rise past the door, over the windows, up toward the eaves, watching for that helicopter that will lift me to safety.  I have not fallen into an old well that someone abandoned long ago. I am not waiting alone in the damp darkness hearing only the echoes of my own thoughts, hoping for someone to arrive with pulleys to fish me out.  

I haven’t run out of money. I’m not out of food. I have clothing. I have a warm coat. And times when I can locate my soul, there where it roams under my ribs, pausing sometimes beneath my heart, or sometimes just below my throat, I think that my soul seems to be well.  

What is this rescue I desire?

I teach at a Lutheran university. My institution would tell me—has told me over and over—that the Rescuer has already arrived. In a timeless dimension, Jesus has solved all the problems and healed all the ills. I should rest in that assurance.In daily chapel services, students are reminded that they are known, they are accepted, they are loved by God. Through whatever they must face in their lives, they are safe. They are all already rescued.

For much of my life, I have dabbled in Eastern mysticism. I am a perpetually novice yogi. I have kept the body supple and strong in the hopes of easing the mind. I have turned to meditation to quell anxiety and depression.

My experience in these disciplines tells me that I am my own rescuer. I am enough. I am. I am part and particle of divine being, as Ralph Waldo Emerson said of himself. No need to wait for someone to arrive. No listening for help to announce itself. Just be. Just breathe.

Even so, I have been waiting for the answer to a question that I haven’t yet been able to put into words. For a voice to break the silence within me. I have been waiting to be rescued from a crisis that lies so far below the surface of my daily thoughts and experiences that I can’t define it.  

~~~~~

When I was five years old, my father saved my life. We had traveled from our home in Western Maryland—my father, my mother, and I—to the beach in Panama City, Florida, for our summer vacation.

There in the Gulf of Mexico, the sands were as white as sugar and the water such a clean blue that the ocean looked like a roiling expanse of sky. Mother and I walked hand-in-hand into the surf where the tides lapped ankle-deep and then deeper, while my father stood at a distance, his back to us, his face turned toward the ocean.

A high wave formed out in the deep water. It rose and curved as it coursed toward where Mother and I were standing.  It was well over my head when it crashed around us and plunged toward the shore.

The force of it knocked me under the water onto my back. I was carried by the undercurrent away from where Mother stood. I lay there with the water tugging at me, frightened and amazed all at once, peering up through the murky green, watching schools of bubbles and strands like long, slimy blades of grass floating past. 

During those moments, I felt as if I would be there under that water forever.

Before I could begin to struggle, to fight the current and push my way up through the rushing water to get my head above its surface, I felt big hands surround my waist. They hauled me upward as the weight of a wave against my face forced my neck backward, water rushing into my mouth and up my nostrils.

My father drew me up in an arc out of the waves and over his head as I coughed and snorted and struggled to get my breath. The saltwater set my throat and the lining of my nostrils on fire so that each breath was painful. 

He held me there for a few seconds suspended between ocean and sky, exposed in the midday sunlight that seemed to train its heat on me. Then I was standing again in water up to my waist, wiping the burning salt from my eyes. I looked up into the glaring light to see my father’s face, steady and expressionless.

Years later on a summer morning, a different kind of wave crashed down onto my father. I discovered him in our backyard lying flat on his back.

Two physicians who lived in the neighborhood came running from their houses, responding to my cries for help. They took all the measures that doctors take to save someone whose heart has stopped beating. They pounded and pounded on his chest. One of them put his mouth over my father’s mouth and exhaled over and over, breathing air into his lungs.

They tried and tried to resuscitate him until an ambulance arrived and it was ruled a lost cause.  

~~~~

A few weeks after my father died, my mother started dating. I’m not a prude. I understand that these things happen. At first, it was flirtatious conversations on the phone with one of her ex-husbands. Soon a stream of men dribbled in and out of our lives, one potential mate after another, as if they were responding to a want ad. A parade of receding hairlines, black-framed glasses, and paunches.

My mother was fifty years old. She had always been a beautiful woman, but perhaps she felt her beauty waning. She began dating with the urgency of someone in a hurry. She may have felt an urgency to set her life right before it was too late.  And for a woman in my mother’s generation, a life set right included a husband. 

~~~~

I was once in a writing group that met regularly to share writing and provide feedback on works in progress. One night I brought a poem I had been working on in which I explored my longing for rescue. It examined my impulse, so deeply ingrained that it is who I am, to expect someone to arrive or some news, some change to manifest itself.   

One of the group members, a philosophy professor, responded to my poem, saying, Everyone feels this. Everyone longs to be rescued. There’s nothing here to write about. You have nothing.

Nothing. The needling desire that prods me, this futile wish, is nothing unique to me? The need to turn and look behind me to find someone who has been there all along, someone with the answer, someone just then clearing his throat to speak. No, there’s nothing there? I’m just the vain princess obsessed with her pea? This desire is not really my desire at all. Everyone feels this.

Is that true?

Perhaps a glitch has short-circuited our common human wiring. In the midst of abundance, we feel want. Those of us who enjoy all the security that this chaotic world can provide anticipate a disaster. Those of us who are loved and cared for by people around us feel isolated and unloved.

Is it inherently human that when we have, we want more?  When we see a boundary, we want to cross it. When we reach a goal, another presents itself. Perhaps we are woven together of restlessness. Our lives always seem lacking—something. The reliable grows suspect. Perhaps we all want something that we cannot name. 

And could it be that, in ways we fail to recognize, we are, in fact, rescued? That in ways we ignore, we quietly rescue each other? We are rescued, but we fail to see. Instead, we believe that we stand alone in our want, holding out our empty hands.

~~~~

The year my father died, our neighbors took turns mowing our lawn for us. Some of them brought food to our door—casseroles, homemade desserts, fresh fruit. The lady two doors down, a widow, gave my mother advice. Be strong, yes, but in the heat of the afternoon go into your bedroom, draw the curtains, get a bath towel to absorb the tears, and cry your eyes out. Cry and cry until you can’t cry anymore. Then be strong again.

The man who lived across the street, my friend’s father, told my mother that he planned to take his daughter to an Osmond Brothers concert in Baltimore. Would she allow me to go with them?

His daughter and I were as obnoxious in our fandom of a teen idol as preteen girls could be, playing “Puppy Love” and “Go Away, Little Girl” on our record players until we must have numbed everyone else’s ears.

Would my mother allow me to accompany our neighbor and his daughter on what would be for my friend and me a dream come true?

Thousands of girls packed the Baltimore Civic Center that day. In one row of the first balcony sat a dozen or so boisterous fans, including my friend and me. And with us, my friend’s father. He sat stiff and respectable in his business suit, a blip of stability in the midst of teenybopper bedlam.

He endured when adolescent mayhem peaked as Donny stepped from behind his keyboard to sing his solos. My friend’s father was quietly there. There, during that brief respite from the otherwise painful events of a young girl’s twelfth summer.

If you have read all the way to the end of this long post, please accept my sincere thanks.

Photo: Taryn Elliott, Pexels.com