Friday, June 25, 2010

Friendly

People fascinate me and I love meeting new folks of all types.  I’m quick to strike up a conversation with anyone, even to throw a “Good Morning!” to a fellow meanderer across the street or a “Nice job!” to a neighbor in the midst of lawn care.  My husband calls me the five year old, as in “Hi I’m Heather what’s your name do you have any pets where do you live?”.  I guess it is a fair description of my daily life and we often chuckle about my desire to connect with people around me.

When I was young I was decidedly NOT popular.  I’d moved around a lot and had just moved back to South Bend to a new school AGAIN.  It was my eighth grade summer and I was in the chorus for the school city musical “Once Upon a Mattress”.  I remember standing outside the circle of excited chatter, not feeling like I had anything cool to say.  Then something just snapped.  I was tired of being shut out so I literally jumped in the middle of the group running my mouth and trying to be funny.  It worked; they laughed and I was in.

Ever since then the lively theater crowd has been my niche.  As I look back on my high school days and then my 20’s, I realize that with all the showing off and one-upmanship we didn’t really build lasting friendships...more like dedicated audience members.  As I moved on into the business world, finished college and expanded my social network I realized that although I had many many friends and people who thought well of me I did not have many real friendships.  At the ripe age of thirty four I had lived my life in such a way that I had so many friends I hadn’t been able to build real friendships.  I began to work harder on a few core relationships with people who brought me up higher and made me a better person.  I planned quality time with them, called more often and didn’t rely simply on Facebook to stay in touch.

When I got married and then had a baby things changed again.  I wasn’t as accessible to my friends and their place in my life shifted a bit to make room for my new family.  I struggled as some people drifted away when I couldn’t maintain more casual relationships.  I got hurt when friends I introduced to each other seemed to like each other better than they’d ever liked me.  I would feel let down when people I thought were close didn’t come through for me.  Here I was, a grown and supposedly mature woman feeling like the lone middle schooler again.

The past three years have been odd for me to comprehend friendship...If I enjoy someone I want to be best pals with them and when I like so many different folks for so many different reasons it gets tricky to go deeper and really invest in all these people.  My precious and wise husband released me from my angst just recently by saying “Heather, you don’t have to be best friends with everyone.” I know he is right and have begun to just enjoy the people in my life in whatever form they come in.  I have been surprised too at how much some friends give to me, how much they care for me.  Maybe some people I felt should have been closer to me weren’t, but others filled their place.  I also think more about what I can do for my friends rather than what they are doing for me.  Some friends have fallen out of my regular rotation, and I have become better at accepting that.  My dear friend Tracy reminds me that “Friends come into your life for a reason, a season or a lifetime!” As I near a wiser age of forty I do see all these wonderful people, ebbing and flowing throughout my life, and I say, “Hi I’m Heather glad to know you wanna be friends!?!?”

Broadcast by Heather Curlee Novak on June 25, 2010 • WVPE's Audio Archive
Family & Friends • Permalink • Printer Friendly

Friday, June 18, 2010

Husbandless Wives

I recently traveled out of state to the university where I earned my master’s degree 22 years ago to begin a program for an advanced certificate of study.  I learned a staggering amount about rare books and paper in the two courses I took over a two-week intensive session.

But the biggest lesson I learned began on my first day back in that beloved University town where I met and fell in love with my husband 24 years ago.  I had dinner with his mentor, a woman who from that time onward took great pride in his professional accomplishments and who loved him like a son.  This was also my first opportunity since his death to talk with another widow.

As we were comparing stories, I noticed that after more than thirty years of widowhood, she still wore her wedding band.  This surprised me, though I understood.  I myself have not been able to remove mine nor to change my status on Facebook. I have told myself that I can wear my wedding band as long as I still feel so married.

When I returned to my hotel that night and went to the bar to cash-in my coupon for a complimentary drink, I struck up a conversation with the bartender and two sisters in their sixties who had very recently attended a family reunion in Mishawaka.

After talking quite a bit about how much the Michiana area has changed in the decades since the sisters had grown-up here, they started asking me questions about myself.  When I disclosed that I was recently widowed, the bartender, who also wore a wedding band, told us that she, too, was a widow of 12 years.  She reached down into her purse, took out a black-and-white snapshot of her husband taken sometime in the mid seventies, held it to the v-neck of her blouse which she pulled down a bit and to the side, and revealed an elaborate tattoo which replicated the picture in the photo.  She confided to us that she had had the artist add some of her husband’s ashes to the ink.

I was flabbergasted.  Unlike a wedding band that is easily removed, she had marked her heart as his for the rest of her life.  This woman was not much older than me, yet by indelibly marking herself with his image, she had closed herself off from falling in love again.  For what man would make love with a woman with a 2 by 3 image of her dead husband staring him in the face?

I learned that night that I will not be wearing my wedding band for years to come because I want to be open to the possibility of love, and maybe even marriage, again some day.  But doing so means letting go of my beloved.

Grieving is a process of many big and small goodbyes.  Every day during my two weeks in that University town where we fell in love, I walked through the quad, back and forth from the parking lot to my class room, avoiding a certain path.  It wasn’t until I left my last class that I was able to walk on the sidewalk where Scott first told me he loved me, the moment, in my heart, that cemented us together.  Just ten months ago we had stood again in that same spot, celebrating that first declaration of love, kissing, crying, holding each other very close.  Eight weeks later he was dead.

I breathed in deeply as I walked through that precious space on the sidewalk, as if I could breath Scott in through time and into my soul.  I said a goodbye.

Alone.

He was everywhere and nowhere.

Broadcast by Elizabeth Van Jacob on June 18, 2010 • WVPE's Audio Archive
Customs & Rituals • Family & Friends • Travel • Permalink • Printer Friendly

Friday, June 11, 2010

Glimpses (Courtesy of the French Secret Service)

Every once in a while we get glimpses, or that’s what I call them, anyway. Glimpses of human nature or of the hidden workings of society, glimpses of how the world actually operates. One of these glimpses came my way courtesy of the French Secret Service. In the summer of 1981 I was a college kid bumming around Europe. I ended up in Chartres on the day the president of France was coming there to enjoy a concert. It was to be the Berlioz Requiem Mass performed in the fabulous medieval cathedral. That afternoon I walked through town with an American from the youth hostel. On one long avenue a few people gathered here and there to wave to the presidential motorcade. My buddy and I paused to check it out.

Soon, in the distance, we spotted the motorcade moving at highway speeds into the center of Chartres. François Mitterand travelled in style, with six motorcycles in front, then three or four sharp black limousines, and another peppy squad of motorcycles right behind. On the cycles little flags flapped and lights flashed and the darkened windows of the cars masked the president’s location. My buddy opened his backpack and pulled out an immaculate white gym sock that sagged with the weight of something mysterious within. The motorcade was nearly upon us, and if you had asked me, I would have said we were alone on our stretch of sidewalk.

But before my acquaintance could slip his hand down into the white sock for the thing that was hiding there, from out of nowhere two sturdy men in street clothes appeared and muscled him by the arms while a third man grabbed the sock. I could see the lump more clearly now—something the size and shape of an apple, perhaps, or a hand grenade. The third secret service man reached into the sock and extracted a silvery-gray object. It was the fellow’s fancy little camera.

In those few seconds, the motorcade zipped by and disappeared down the road. The camera was back in the hands of my youth hostel buddy, too late to use, and by the time he turned to me and said “What was that?” the secret service men had vanished. In 1981, a year marred by terrorism, this was my glimpse into the workings of the world. But that night in the cathedral, I considered the little bomb that could have been lurking in the sock.  I thought, also, of two US Marines I had seen guarding the American embassy in Paris, each man as serious as the machine gun he held in his hands. There was a magical passage in the Berlioz music that night where four brass bands join the orchestra and the symphonic choir, each playing from different parts of the cathedral, different points of the compass, and all the layers of music weaving together in the air. The composer’s meditation on human frailty, the fine stonework soaring above us, the patient apprenticeship of all those musicians, the attentive hearts of the audience members, the heavy weapons and the will to use them, the secret service, the dead who bore witness beneath the cathedral floor, the kaleidoscopic glass that filtered sunlight each morning into the shapes that speak of God: No single one of these was enough to explain the thing I glimpsed that day or heard that evening. We were, all of us under the stone arches, all of us under the arc of moon and sun, we were all of us meaner and richer than any name I could have given.

Broadcast by Ken Smith on June 11, 2010 • WVPE's Audio Archive
Arts & Entertainment • Peace & War • Travel • Permalink • Printer Friendly
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A random pick from more than 460 Michiana Chronicles -- refresh the browser to see another set:

April Lidinsky -- What Do You Do? / More essays by April

Joe Chaney -- More essays by Joe

Ken Smith -- Glimpses (Courtesy of the French Secret Service) / More essays by Ken

Jeanette Saddler Taylor -- More essays by Jeanette

Heather Curlee Novak -- Friendly / More essays by Heather

David James -- More essays by David

Elizabeth Van Jacob -- Husbandless Wives / More essays by Elizabeth

Jeff Nixa -- More essays by Jeff

Louise Collins -- More essays by Louise

Jonathan Nashel -- More essays by Jonathan