He generously tops the fizzing Coca-Cola with salty peanuts.
Comfortably seated in his well-worn lounge chair, my grandfather Chuck slightly leans back and his sky-blue eyes meet my tear-streaked face.
I’m in a full-fledged, teenage upset. A swirl of heightened emotions, I find momentary landing in the doorway of my grandparents’ TV room. John Wayne looms large on the screen, but not as quietly commanding as my observant grandfather.
Wordlessly, Chuck motions to the small dish of wheat-thin crackers dolloped with pimento-cheese. I shake my head, my version of a polite “No thanks.” He nods, helps himself, and I burst into a fresh bout of tears. And though I decide to absolutely not! regale my grandfather with the study-hall incident that is wracking me with guilt, it replays as I stand there helplessly and cry.
The study-hall incident had begun innocently enough … they all do.
At the very end of the window-wrapped hallway leading to the English classrooms, a cluster of friends and I perched on navy-blue upholstered chairs and studiously chatted with each other.
In the honorary spirit of study-hall, I did have my laptop open and a series of poems I was submitting for a summer writer’s program were displayed on the screen, waiting patiently for editing.
My private high-school forwardly aligned itself with the rise of technology and each student was required to have a laptop. We even had our own tech department, similar to an on-site Geek Squad team. Notebooks and pencils were only for math class. Passionate discourse on Mac versus PC could be heard over lunch on Chicken Tender Tuesdays. The diligent clicking of keys was the background chorus to our lectures. And while we dutifully recorded the significant dates and details leading to the War of 1812, we also developed the skill of how to discreetly shop online Macy’s for Prom sales.
I don’t remember the exact reason that prompted me to unquestioningly leave my laptop, but I did, faithfully leaving my MacBook, whom I affectionately nicknamed Carrie - an ode to Carrie Bradshaw, the famous writer from “Sex and The City.”
A certain unspoken trust was part of the school culture. Teens left their laptops around the hallways of that school in the same way that mothers in Denmark are remarkably known for leaving their babies in strollers outside of cafes.
So I leisurely ambled away to my locker, and most definitely made a stop at the ladies room … probably to brush my hair. I was always hopping into the bathroom in between classes or during class to comb through my thick mane and reapply Burt’s Bees tinted lip balm. And when I returned, well, when I sauntered toward the front of the hall, my blood turned ice and my feet became winged and I lunged at the two guy friends who had captured my laptop and had the audacity to read my poetry.
I was mortified and irate, and flew at them in wedge-heels like a screeching mama bird sweeping in to rescue her baby bird.
Clinging to Carrie, heart-pounding, wide-eyed and sputtering as they chuckled and teased what I was hiding, the heated retort that foamed and spewed from my mouth shocked them so much they fell into an uneasy quiet … and hid into their chemistry books, and actually focused on homework.
And to this day, my one-word retaliation rather stuns me, because I was a sheltered, kind-natured, highly sensitive teen who got daydreamy about Edward Cullen, a Mr. Darcy-like vampire in the hit Twilight series. I was known for being sweet, would be voted for being the student to make you smile … or something along those lines. But in that searing moment, I blew the teasing grins right off their faces.
What was I hiding? they had bantered and asked.
“PORN.” I torpedoed that loaded-bomb right into their smirking faces.
I had hurled the word as a sarcastic joke, but the aftermath was anything but funny. I most definitely wasn’t harboring illicit sexual material on my computer, just wistful poems written from a teenage girl whose only vague notion of romance came from Jane Austen novels and teen fantasies.
Still, the aftermath of the exchange had left me with large, seething emotions – not geared toward the boys, but toward me.
Standing in the TV room’s doorway, I internally warred with mind-splitting guilt, struggling to spare myself from my own vicious self-condemnation.
Screaming that unspeakable word in study-hall didn’t fit in with my careful cultivated image of being a “nice girl.”
I was caged in regret, vulnerable to being bitten and scratched by my own fanged and vindictive disappointment. I had broken my own unrealistic standards of always being “on,” of always being “kind,” and had completely, utterly lost my cool. I had exposed that I am, of course, not always nice … so far from it, I am human. And for those boys to see this, oh, it was brutally too much.
I don’t say any of this to my grandfather.
These towering breakdowns were typically reserved for my grandmother, Peggy.
My grandmother knew human nature, and she understood emotions. Her background in majoring in and teaching English along with becoming certified in couple counseling with the Enneagram and Myers Briggs, had excellently equipped her to deal with her highly sensitive granddaughter.
But for whatever reason, that afternoon, which I typically spent at my grandparents’ house, Peggy was not available. I was at the side of my grandfather, a man whom my grandmother would theatrically whisper in front of family and company, and with Chuck only a stone throw away on his lounge-chair, “He doesn’t have any feelings.” We would chance a glance at Chuck, whose reserved and stoic face seemed to uneasily suggest that she was right. “Feelings,” she would persist, “are completely foreign to him.”
In the past, whenever I had squeaked a tear in the beige backseat of his Buick, which we endearingly called The Chuck Mobile, I would be coaxed out of my upset by being whisked away to McDonald’s for a chicken fried sandwich or an Oreo McFlurry, and he would covertly slip me a $20 bill.
“I had a rough day,” is all I manage to say.
Explosions erupt on screen. He glances at the pistol-wielding John Wayne, takes a sip of his peanut-topped soda, and then, nonchalantly squares himself toward me.
“I’m gonna tell you something,” he says, and suddenly nervous, I brace myself. “I’m going to give you four-words to live by,” he continues calmly, his WWII bomber-pilot eyes clear with patient understanding. He slowly lifts his hand and counts each word by raising a corresponding finger, emphasizing the striking simplicity of this lived-and-learned guidance.
“This. Too. Shall. Pass.”
He gives me a knowing nod, resettles back into his chair and turns his attention back toward the screen.
This too shall pass.
For the first time since that eventful study-hall period, the consuming intensity of my emotions lightens. There’s a sun-lit break in my mental rumination, and I get a glimpse of a blue sky. Staying rooted in my wedge-heels, I expand into a heightened perspective, like observing a weather pattern that vibrantly and fleetingly decorates a landscape.
I am outside of time and very, heart-beating present.
This too shall pass.
This is the life-advice from a blonde-haired little boy who watched his parents sell everything they owned during the Great Depression and then be moved to live with grandparents on a farm in rural Kentucky, who signed up for the Second World War at the young age of seventeen and flew and survived thirty-three, maybe thirty four missions.
This is the life-advice from a man not afraid of taking risks, who enjoyed playing with money, who bought race-horses, invested in Holiday Inns and Pizza Huts.
This is the life-advice of a man whom my grandmother would admirably call a provider, a protector, that certain type of dignifiedly quiet and moral-compassed gentleman from the Great Generation who looked after his kin, and pierced the world with this cool intellect, quick humor, and steady commitment to integrity, to truth, to living a good Christian life.
This too shall pass – the words he would write onto postcards to my mother when she was stressed about getting an A, about winning a speech tournament, or getting into law school.
It’s these exact words that he repeats to me later, much later on, when I am returning the favor of all those afterschool pickups, and am driving him to Panera’s for French onion soup.
My sister and I co-create a playlist, affectionately called, “Chuck’s Chauffeur” and Johnny Cash serenades about everywhere he’s been. From the backseat, my sister asks Chuck about the life wisdom he would wish to pass on.
“Four words,” he instantly answers from the passenger seat. I look at him. I have an inkling of what he will say.
“This too shall pass.”
This too shall pass … which is why I adorn the yellow dress on a summer-kissed Saturday in June, and trace the familiar route to my grandfather’s hospital room.
Today, the flat screen TV shows photos of national parks, pristine streams, sunsets and sunrises. Classical music whispers through the stilled air, and again, I purposefully disrupt the serene scene with emotional heightening … through Chuck’s favorite songs.
I blare Johnny Cash. I sing-along to Patsy Cline. I blast the opening from “Oklahoma!” and my grandfather Chuck’s sky-blue eyes awaken to the familiar refrain.
“Oh, what a beautiful morning, oh what a beautiful day, I got a wonderful feeling, everything is going my way …”
The iconic lyrics mirror my own inner narrative … to continue to reawaken to what is real.
And what is real is beautiful … this blooming moment besides my grandfather, witnessing the transition from life to death, and noting, once again, the purity of consciousness emanating from my 98-year-old grandfather.
We exit the way we came in – an embodiment of radiant consciousness.
For my year of BLOOM to conclude with a death/ a “passing” is fitting.
This last year, my year of BLOOM, I happily created my own study-halls, and studied what I actually heart-yearned to study … holistic health for women, conscious conception, vibrant pregnancy and intuitive birth. In amazement, I watch mothers give birth in the shallow shores of the Baltic Sea, and noticed that the little ones so new to earth shined with soul-lit aliveness, and it’s this purity of consciousness that I see within my grandfather.
Birth and death book-end life. The narrative of the middle road is up to us.
When I hear my grandfather’s life-advice, This too shall pass, I feel this nudge, not out of fear-raced urgency, but more similar to cowboy Curl’s exuberant voice singing “Oh, What A Beautiful Mornin’” at the beginning of “Oklahoma!”
To live wide awake, to live fully, and to be completely real in my self-expression.
That study-hall moment was significant.
I’m making peace with that untamed streak in me – the part of me that is unrestricted and is very real.
The hyper self-consciousness of that study-hall incident did pass. What was left – what remains is the bare bones of a moment that I am still living into. This shedding of filtered speech, of corseted behavior, of performative niceness, and instead, unraveling into living freely, into the uncertain and tantalizing liveness! of real, into discernment and compassion, and the messiness and the miracle of improvising with the moment.
This is my year of REAL. This is my 33rd spin around the sun, and while my grandfather is not earth-side, I do feel his presence.
Today, with the setting sun streaming gold in between the trees, I catch a scarlet glimpse of a cardinal, and clearly, I hear my grandfather’s voice and see him, humorously dancing and shaking his elbows (in rhythm with Curly singing) and pausing before he sips his peanut-christened Cocoa-Cola.
“Everyone is going to have a glory in heaven.”
The memory of Chuck breathes into the present and my heart expands in peace for -
This is real.