Immersions Archives - Laurie Klein, Scribe

Switchboard

I wasn’t on duty that night.

It was summer, 1967. Our hospital’s leading surgeon strode into the office, flipped off the paging switch, ripped the unit from the wall, then stalked away.

A broken circuit. A bent plug. A whiff of char.

My friend, running switchboard, stared at the metal-tipped cord meant to connect Dr. E. with his caller. Um, no, the doctor was not available. Could she take a message?

I know the feeling.

Socially, I’m feeling awkward these days. Not fully available. Seems I’ve misplaced my knack for navigating multiple, incoming signals.

My weekly Zoom conversation with five laughing women (often talking over each other’s words) can overload my senses — especially when my internet connection proves unstable and the audio cuts out.

I can’t keep all the lines sorted.

Fifty-some years ago, when I trained on the hospital switchboard, if I moved responded too slowly, calls would bottleneck. The insistent beeps and flashing lights overwhelmed me.

Verbal triage demands concentration. While directing telephone traffic, I’d ask, “Is this an emergency?”

Then I’d pause for a deep breath. Now, who did I put on hold? And what on earth did they want?

This past week I planned a small, pandemically sensitive, airport sendoff for cherished friends moving to Maui. We sang lyrics customized for the occasion — through masks — and yours truly busted a few Hula moves.

Laughter. Cheers. Cellphone captures. Words of remembrance and love. A-lo-HA!

Our friends beamed. After a year, it was heady being together again, even briefly.

And yet. I felt an odd sense of suspension, like a caller not yet plugged into the desired source. Inner switchboard, jammed. It caught me off guard.

From our earliest hours onward, touch fosters thriving. Sure, elbow bumps offer contact, the shared chuckle. Eyes may communicate soul but don’t always reveal nuance. Something vibrant seems lost. Or tabled.

Unused, my social skills have languished; my small talk sounds rusty. Too many days touched by sorrow and sameness can weary the spirit, fray generosity, erode compassion.

Isolation can also tutor us in the ever-deepening riches of creative solitude.

Dreamer assures me I’ll readapt, with practice. Will I reenter public gatherings fully? Gratefully?

Poet Angela Alaimo O’Donnell writes:

. . . You feel less lonely
when you’re part of a posse and still
your named and singular self.

St. Benedict writes: Always, we begin again.

Meanwhile, I’ll savor my ongoing pen pal endeavors, offer what ease I can to others. My lapse in social fluency may or may not dissipate. I’m okay with that. Going forward, from somewhere deep within command central God may switch my assignment, redirect my connections, as needed.

My job? Stay available.

How about you? What short-circuits your availability?

***

Excerpt, “The River,” Angela Alaimo O’Donnell, Andalusian Hours: Poems from the Porch of Flannery O’Connor

Photo by Museums Victoria on Unsplash

Resilience

by Laurie Klein 29 Chiming In

Resilience: After eating together, Dreamer and I update the blank book we use as a gratitude journal. As we verbalize and record the day’s visitations of grace, our threadbare souls experience modest repair.

We are coping with holes in our lives. Sometimes we feel worn as ancient parchment: our moods uneven, our hopes brittle and thoughts torn.

Back in medieval times, a parchment maker’s knife often slipped while smoothing animal hides for the written word, leaving behind small gouges and tears.

Frugal scribes threaded needles, then zigzagged back and forth, bridging the gap. They redeemed a deficiency with color and texture (see image here).

Raw edges were sometimes sutured, like a heart patient after a bypass.

A gash might be darned, like a sock. Or latticed with parchment strips.

Mid-page in a gospel or treatise, repairs might resemble a doily or dreamcatcher (see image).

Rather than discard the parchment or try to disguise the flaw, patient hands beautified the damage.

Defect as Art.

No matter how riven or riddled we feel, the Living Word keeps tossing us lifelines . . . for every gap, every absence, each gaping wound.

Sturdy, vivid, resilient — grace (and gratitude) mend us.

Let’s embrace each strand, no matter how small:
when we sleep, or kneel, when we mourn with a friend,
reset the mousetraps, scour the sinks,
mask up (or not), re-brush the dog,
make lists, make love, make sincere amends,
recycle, pay bills, exercise,
tithe, take the stairs, sanitize hands,
binge, commute, argue, pray,
zoom, google, sing in the shower,
cha-cha, chop onions, shop online,
change diapers, change lanes,
send faxes, do taxes . . .

Thank God, there’s always one more holy, holistic way to practice resilience.

Where are you torn, and how will you treat the hurt place today?

You might also like “Holes and Holiness”

Here, a scribe leveraged three page holes to create a laughing face.

FROM THE ARCHIVES: You might also enjoy Crossing the Gap

Photo of spools by frank mckenna on Unsplash

Hands and thread photo Conor O’nolan on Unsplash.

IF

by Laurie Klein 13 Chiming In

If only . . . it hadn’t happened.

Today, I wake up grieved by Wednesday’s violence in our nation’s capitol—only to be further dismayed by the media’s name-calling in the guise of news.

When epic troubles escalate, how do we resist the downward spiral of resignation? How do we nurture fresh reasons to hope?

Earlier this week I splurged on a pot of hyacinth bulbs. Buds closed tightly as raised fists lined three fleshy stalks.

This morning, bloom after star-like bloom perfumes the house.

When bulbs are responsibly “forced,”
the wild, greening wellsprings
that infuse creation
surge upward and outward: Now,
marvel transfuses my spirit, triggers
awe, releases a whiff of poetry.

My outlook shifts,
from grainy, film noir desolation
to hi-def, hyper-spectrum joy—each stem
redolent with modest glories. It reminds me
we’re all fiercely loved
by One who makes all things beautiful
in their time—even when growing entails
unspeakable suffering.

For God has made everything beautiful for its own time. He has planted eternity in the human heart, but even so, people cannot see the whole scope of God’s work from beginning to end.

So, I am scouting evidence of order. Implicit design. Metaphor and deeper meaning.

I am seeking Love quietly lavished in merciful ways around me so that I might go and do likewise.

It’s a plan, albeit a small one . . .

If I do say so myself.

What’s rekindling your experience of beauty? Truth? Humor?

This “IF” quotation made me laugh:

“If I could go to dinner with one person, dead or alive, I think I would choose alive.” — B. J. Novak

You might also enjoy: Hai*Pho — No, it’s not a new entree . . .

And here’s a famous poem about hyacinths:

Lure

by Laurie Klein 16 Chiming In

Same path, same camera pausing again, this time to capture a curled leaf, each serration salted with rime.

Nearing the pond, I listen for ducks.

But my viewfinder zooms in on mats of algae, flash-frozen. Glazed and rumpled, here is weather’s awkward marriage of wind and degree.

Friends, I love this trail
meandering through
our neighbor’s woods, where,
with their permission,
I gratefully roam.

Only a week ago,
I traversed it on snow shoes—
which is why today,
after the thaw, I falter.

A rusty, misshapen bicycle someone recently abandoned rivets my gaze.

Whose is it?

Beyond, I see the old metal gate—jackknifed open—first time in 29 years.

Then . . . something blue: a child’s scooter, flung down in the grass.

And the ramshackle shed, ever-padlocked, now gapes.

I snap photos. Inch past the scooter. Two rooms with a plywood partition beckon.

In the first room, wheel spokes,
clogged with pine needles—another bike
hunkering amid castoffs: a cracked
Kool-Aid pitcher with its retro grin,
jumble of crockery, blackened tools.

It smells like rust and silt and disappointment.

Can you hear the sinister soundtrack? “Turn back, now!”

A campy movie comes to mind: “I saw something nasty in the woodshed.”

Stifling a shiver, I ease
into the second room.
From ten penny nails,
four human-sized
sacks of black netting sag.
Glint of an eyeball.
A crooked neck.

My breath stutters.
A gulp. A step backward.
A shake of the head, to clear it.

And then, that pesky resolve to know.

I edge forward, peering through gloom.

Duck decoys. Four bags full. Cork versions meant to lure real ducks into settling on the neighbor’s pond.

I too feel lured in. Fooled, and foolish. Relief is a long exhale, a shaky laugh.

O, the lure of the unexplained. Eavesdropping on a forgotten life. Lurking enigmas. Secrets.

We tread the familiar, by rote, sometimes for decades. And one day somebody wrenches open a gate. Someone leaves behind woebegone relics, evidence of a story.

Similarly, there are locked rooms in my heart, littered with ghosts. Misleading notions. I harbor substitute emotions disguising something I don’t want to face.

I am sharply aware, in this moment, of simmering jealousy within, masquerading as applause for a colleague’s recent success. I’ve stuffed it away, feathered my envy with feigned goodwill. This is how I lure myself into believing I’ve mastered festering disappointment.

The Old Testament prophet Hosea heard God say, “I will now allure her. I will lead her into the desert. There I will speak tenderly to her.”

And isn’t this a kindness, after all, being led forward? Braving the musty, looking within, naming what’s still lurking inside the sack?

I head home: same path, same camera, no longer quite the same me.

Tell us, how do you interpret Hosea’s enigmatic words?

You might also enjoy: Constancy: The Tale of a Trail

Woodshed quote from Cold Comfort Farm, by Stella Gibbons.

Lessons from a Moose

by Laurie Klein 30 Chiming In

Heartsick and hunkered under a lap quilt, I light my prayer candle. The votive flickers within its chunky glass holder, a treasured, fire-in-ice gift from my lifelong friend. Yesterday, she was diagnosed with cancer.

Oh, friend. Oh shit. Merciful God, please intervene!

I yearn to help. And I want to bolt, escape to the woods, outrun heartbreak.

Beyond my window Indian Summer burnishes the aspen’s heart-shaped leaves to quavering gold.

Hold on. Those movements exceed a passing breeze. Branches thrash.

Camera in hand, I edge onto our deck: grunts … rustles … CRACK! — massive jaws are tearing off limbs.

I inch nearer. A dark, unblinking eye slues in its socket, meeting mine. Abashed, I shift my gaze. Behold, 800 swayback pounds of fur quixotically arranged atop legs like stilts: a moose.

AND her twins.

I study their commandeered buffet — this time, the crab apple.

Does the cow scent human? Have her calves ever seen one?

Stilling breath / bones / muscles … I try to communicate: No threat here and No greens for me today, thanks. After all, a mature moose weighs as much as a car, can charge at 35 miles per hour, and possesses front hooves designed to lash out in any direction.

So, I stay put, snapping breathless photos.

Then … simply watch, rapt. Only God could imagine into bone / joint / sinew-and-hide these stoic, browsing eccentrics. How effortlessly they radiate wildness.

Moose are focused. Adept. Insouciantly unafraid.

Moose: literally, “Eater of Twigs.” De-nuder of trees. And these three are thorough. The ornamentals will soon be whittled to nubs!

Stamping my feet, I shout. Flail. Make noises, mostly unintelligible.

It’s a lot like praying for someone with cancer.

Are such cries disrespectful? Do they communicate? Are they vacant gestures against a disease all-consuming in its hunger?

I mutter prayers anyway, writes author Brian Doyle.

Did they have any weight as they flew?

I don’t know.

But I believe with all my heart that they mattered because I was moved to make them. … believe that the impulse to pray is the prayer, and that the words we use are only envelopes in which to mail pain and joy …

It’s the urge that matters — the sudden Save us that rises against horror, the silent Thank you for joy.

Even the wrenched-out gutterals — ?!#%?&?! — all that is ornamental pared back to the raw shoot.

So, I pray for my friend with cancer. And for others I know, also gravely afflicted with different versions.

I pray for all of us. That we remain focused. Adept in grace. Insouciantly unafraid.

What’s staring you down, eyeball-to-eyeball? I’d gladly add my prayers to yours.

Brian Doyle, Leaping: Revelations and Epiphanies