On the death of my band teacher

I was in the middle of trumpet practice when I got the news.  After playing a string of high notes I never could have hit in high school, I glanced through my email and saw words I had long expected and dreaded:

Mr. Roina died.

I envy those of you who can call him "Ed."  More than four decades later, this teachers' kid still cannot use that level of familiarity.  Perhaps Paula, another teacher's kid, will understand.  But her dad inspired that mixture of both familiarity and respect.  In the avalanche of comments on Facebook, I've seen everything from "he turned my life around" to people who got to interact with him on a frequent and familiar level.

   

Ted Kennedy famously eulogized, "My brother need not be idealized, or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life."  I have tried not to let my memories run away with the real Ed Roina, yet it is hard not to idealize a man, a teacher, who touched so many lives, and who lived a life we might not believe if it were written as fiction.  To understand what I mean, read the excellent piece "And His Band Played On" by Jannette Jauregui, published in the Santa Paula Times 12/03/03.

Some teachers put up with us.  Some liked us.  Some loathed us.  I think that Ed Roina truly loved us.  I know he was harder on some than on others, and that some of us drove him crazy.  But my experience was that he was fair and respectful to all.  Along with family and church, band was where I learned the things that formed the core of who I am, my best self.  I learned to work as a group, and especially in marching band I saw how individuals working together can create a whole that is efficient and beautiful.

Besides music, I learned discipline, responsibility, and adaptation.  I remember Mr. Roina's story about playing tuba to qualify for a position (perhaps the Navy band?) and seeing a low note approaching that he knew his instrument could not hit.  When the note arrived, he sang it (I can hear his rich basso voice) and moved on.  He got the position.  Years later as a very young marching band student, I was lining up for the parade route when he noticed my red socks.  I had proudly chosen them, thinking they coordinated well with the uniform.  I learned about regulation uniforms when, after an exasperated sigh, he traded his darker socks for mine – explaining that the judges might deduct less points than if they saw them on me.

I look back at band as the great melting pot of grade school, junior high, and high school.  It was the class that saved my life and sanity all through school.  During years when I felt out of place everywhere, I "belonged" in band.  All of us:  "soshes", jocks, brains, nerds, the quiet, the unseen, the unclean, all the castes of our adolescent society – we became one and we all "belonged" in band.

I was never the strongest or most talented player, and I should have practiced way more than I did.  But I know that I looked forward to band every day, and the time passed way too quickly.  I started out at 11 years old on trombone; after an initial mild double-take ("You want to play trombone?") he became my musical mentor for life. 

There are always things we wish someone had done, or not done – I wish he had encouraged me to continue music in college; and I wish he had not praised Sandra King's talent in a twist when I initially thought he was talking about mine (Sandy, do you know how much he admired your playing?)  I waited three years with the hope of being first trombone my senior year, and was disappointed to not be chosen. I learned to overcome disappointment, to always keep playing, and that every player is integral to the group.  He recognized that plodding determination when, much to my surprise, he called my name as the Eva Walden music award recipient.  And I thought he was talking about Sandy in his lead up to the award.

The gifts he gave me will never end. He started a jazz band when I was in high school.  I never heard this music in my home and I never quite "got" it.  But he kept letting me play.  Thirty years later I was playing trumpet in a jazz band that performed in local venues, and I was "getting" it and loving it.  I continue to play in the local community band.

I've just agreed to play in a Veterans' Day parade, and that reminded me of a Veterans' Day at the Santa Paula cemetery, playing "My Buddy" and seeing grown men weep as they listened.  I was learning the power of music, but I had no idea what that song meant to Mr. Roina until reading Jannette's article.  He was the kind of man and teacher whose death inspires tears from former students 51 years after their first lesson.

As I read the obituary and the many comments from former students, I remembered he was also an art teacher, but I was stunned by the depth and breadth of his talent, of his life before Santa Paula.  There was also mention of the church we both attended.  I recalled how I dreaded Lent – first because it was Lent, but especially because Mr. Roina would give up his pipe.  Oh, those were dark days.  I don't know if all the broken batons happened during Lent, but I remember we could all breathe easier after those 40 days of edginess. 

He did change my life.  He taught me to play and to appreciate music, one of the passions of my life.  He provided a safe, challenging, exciting place to be every day.  

He allowed this painfully shy person to interact with classmates I otherwise would never have known.  I'm astounded to think I got up in front of all my peer musicians and earned my SP letter for conducting.  Only through his teaching, guidance, and support were so many things possible for me then, and now.

When my brother Joe died in 2001, I was back in Santa Paula at my mother's home, waiting for the funeral.  I knew I needed something to ease the grief and the waiting, and I went up the hill to the high school.  There, in a band room new to me, Ed and Barbara Roina greeted me warmly and offered condolences.  Then Mr. Roina rummaged around in the back, found an ancient trumpet, and invited me to sit in for practice.  The bewildered trumpet players couldn't know what that meant to me, but Mr. Roina certainly knew the power of music in the face of grief.  

So when I heard of his death, I turned to music, and listened through the Fauré Requiem.  Surely Mr. Roina was familiar with those soaring melodies, particularly the movement "In Paradisum", with its text from the Catholic Order of Burial.  Those are the words of farewell I pray for him now:  

"May the angels lead you into paradise . . .

  may the chorus of angels receive you . . .

  may you have eternal rest." 

Thanks, Ed, and Godspeed.

This article was originally published in the Santa Paula Times, October 25, 2013

Listen

It's been a long time since I have prayed.  

Oh, there's the communal prayer on Sundays, which is important, and the meal prayers through the day with my Sweetie.  There are the brief fits of prayer – the Anne Lamott-type prayers of "Help me Help me Help me!" and "Thank you thank you thank you!".  But I have strayed once again from the regular prayers that I wish could be like breathing – done always and every day.  And when I do include them in my daily routine, they ARE like breathing: refreshing, sustaining, life-giving. When I let them go, I wander, I flounder, I sink. 

So I sat this morning, for the first time in too long a time, to read something, anything, that would pique my spirit; and to be still, and to spiritually breathe.  The closest reading at hand was "Listen" – a publication of Spiritual Directors International.  The front page is always a short meditation.  "Good, this won't take long," my inner impatient self unconsciously assured me.  I was anxious to get on to other things that provide parts of my life, but which my heart knows are not as life giving as the breath of prayer.

I read Pegge Erkeneff's words in "Listen", trying honestly to listen, and came to the full stop of her suggested reflection:  "Pause and be still.  Listen to your heart beat.  What sensations, emotions, feelings, or thoughts are you present to, within your own body and skin, here and now?"  Seems so simple, yet there is a world of possibility here. 

"Pause and be still." 

I felt the discomfort of the chair.  I moved my hands and arms around, trying to assume a posture of peace, and quiet, and stillness.  I was distracted by objects on the table.  My spiritual kindergartner was hard at work, trying to make stillness.  I tried breathing exercises, and moved into trumpet breathing exercises, which brought up all the music I've practiced lately.  But it did finally calm me down enough to move to the next step.  Interesting how stillness can lead to movement, and vice versa... 

"Listen to your heart beat." 

I tried.  I tried to hear or feel it, just sitting in the stillness.  I could imagine I heard it, because I know my body, I know my heart, and I can replicate it's beat after all these years of listening to it.  But today, nothing.  I put my hand on my chest.  Nothing.  I put my left hand on my right one, to help in the search.  Not much – perhaps an imagined thread, a feeble cry from somewhere deep inside.  I tried for a pulse.  Faint, and sleepy.

Granted, I had just gotten out of bed in the wee hours of the morning, but this felt like something beyond sleepy heart.  This was a heart trying to get me to wake up, and it was glad I was finally paying attention.  This was a heart begging me to attend.  To it.  To life.  To sit still and listen and hear the beat.

"What sensations, emotions, feelings, or thoughts are you present to, within your own body and skin, here and now?"

First I felt sad for my own heart, trying to get my attention.  But crashing all around me and unshakable is the global bad news.  I had been to cnn.com too often, and read too many stories of mall shootings, school shootings, army base, navy yard, homes, churches, mosques, synagogues.  I knew this sadness was beyond my own individual heart.  This was the world's heart trying to get my attention.  But there must be feelings beyond sad and scared.  Otherwise we will all curl up in a fetal ball and whimper, of no use to ourselves, others, the earth, or God.

What can one heart do?

Maryknoll Sister Ita Ford wrote to her niece "I hope you come to find that which gives life a deep meaning for you...something worth living for, maybe even worth dying for...something that energizes you, enthuses you, enables you to keep moving ahead."

For most of us, that will not be as dramatic as it was for Ita Ford and the other church women killed in El Salvador many years ago now.  But it can be a guide for all of us – the search for that which gives life, even (especially) in the midst of so much death and sadness and lack of cooperative spirit.  I do find things that energize and enthuse me, and I am doing them.  Now how do I transform them to be life-giving for those around me?  That's my question for myself today.

And I rise from my sitting to see the sun rising quite brilliantly, glancing off the clouds and transforming them to gold.  I will go out into my ordinary day, which, as always, has the potential to be quite extraordinary.  It's all in the heartbeat.

Eat Like a Thresher

"The one who prepares the meals holds the memories." 

This line sprang from my spouse Willa as I read an obituary aloud.  Bobbie Widmer, wife of retired Iowa priest Marlin, was described in many ways, but her essence was captured for me in these lines: 

"Bobbie had a love for rootbeer floats, strawberry shortcake, and cooking for family gatherings. Food was a sacramental, an outward and visible sign of deeper meaning."

"The one who prepares the meals holds the memories." 

My little congregation of St. Luke's is all about hospitality, and food is the integral part of that hospitality.  "Feed my sheep,"  Jesus told Peter, and my congregation takes it seriously and literally.  But we also eat our fill spiritually when we come together.

At a recent "open mike" session at Uptown Bill's in Iowa City, one woman described the groaning table of a harvest meal.  She recalled with delicious specificity each dish from 60 years ago, and the one who prepared it. 

While I have my few specialty dishes, Willa is the one who knows the importance of the ritual of preparation and serving; how to get everything together and served at just the right moment.  It is a talent and a gift, but also a practice - a spiritual practice, even.  It's what makes her such a great preparer of holiday meals.  It's part of what makes her such a great priest. 

You've seen it in the Norman Rockwell painting - the meal that took the woman (the head of the house church) all day, or multiple days, to prepare.  

In my 33 years in Iowa, I have learned about people through the dishes they brought to potlucks, funeral dinners, fish fries, and Sunday dinners.  Each is as famous for her or his dish as they are for their personality.  Some are consistent and balanced.  Some are jiggly and colorful like Jell-o (which I soon learned is a salad in Iowa.)  Some add a touch of spicy adventure, while others are unpredictable.  Savory, sweet, salty, tangy - we all come together at least once a week and share our flavorful selves.

Once I sat across from a farmer friend at a church dinner.  I can see him as if today, head bent over the plate.  He had "tucked into his food," our British bishop would say, the fork rising and falling steadily between plate and mouth.  He did not look up until the plate was empty.  It was a habit honed over a lifetime, and it did not leave him on days of "rest."  He and his peers had probably set up the long heavy tables after completing their chores at home.  He ate quickly and efficiently, to fill the human machine and send it back out to work.  I have rarely seen anyone so completely consumed by the task at hand, so entirely focused.

My father would say that he was "eating like a thresher."  Maybe your family used that expression, or maybe "eating like a harvester",  or maybe "eating like a field hand".  This being Iowa, I think most understand what I mean, if we have not gotten too far away from our history.   If you need a refresher course, go to Mt. Pleasant for the yearly Old Threshers Reunion and eat at one of the church tents, or go to Living History Farms in Des Moines to witness life when it was so much simpler but so much harder.

Actually, that's what church is like - a living history farm.  We may not dress the same as 2,000 years ago, (or as during the past 170-plus years when our Iowa churches were being planted), but we come together for the same reasons.

We gather with our neighbors in community, to praise and thank God, to feed and be fed, to meet the spiritual and physical need of ourselves and our community, to send our prayers and means out into the larger community and the world.

He ate like a thresher, that young farmer.  It is that habit and focus that bring us week after week to the rail, the board where we offer the food that is us, where we are fed.  We come to God's table, fatigued and hungry from our labors, carrying all the meals and memories of the past.  We say grace, and grace covers us as we eat our fill.

I walk to the rail, and raise my hands, open and earnest as the beak of a little bird, hungry as a harvester needing to return to work.  "Feed me!  Feed me!  Please.  Amen."

"Well done, good and faithful..."

It is a Lenten morning, foggy and dank. It is the kind of morning she would love to be out in - when the snow melts and uncovers all those smells and memories from a former season. Our dog is dying. She looks out the window, strangely-tilted head bobbing.

The fog floats over the park, across the ball field, across the places where squirrels tease and possums run. A few geese are returning to the pond, reminding me of Joyce Rupp's poem in Praying our Goodbyes.

We got this strange-looking three-legged dog at the local shelter. "We have to take her - no one else will want her." The plaintive cry of the 11-year-old soon turned into, "We have to take her now - everyone else wants her!"

We pitied her, assuming she would be clumsy and slow and needy.  But taking her to a friend's fenced yard to enjoy some off-leash time, we discovered our error.

She could run like the wind, criss-crossing the grass in a wild dash that inspired her naming..

"She's so graceful!"  "That's amazing!"  Incredulous, we repeated those phrases as we watched, and her formal "Amazing Grace" (awkward to call out in the street while walking her) became, simply, "Mazie."

Her softest-fur-in-the-world caught a thousand tears from scores of griefs. The dying and deaths of parents and sibling and friends. Lost loves. Illness. Change. Bitterness, regrets. All. All. But also unbounding joy. Leaping with pleasure, Snoopy-like in a rapturous dancing twirling of delight. Glee at outrunning us, the last thing we see as she escapes; tongue flapping, eyes maniacally telling us - "you've been had..." All. All.

Mazie was a mystic, able to read us like an open book. She would stand in the middle of the kitchen when there was tension or sadness in our household, and look from one face to the other, communicating understanding, and empathy, and grace, begging us to be our best selves. She measured the spirit of everyone crossing our threshold, and was seldom off the mark.

She was with us for almost our entire marriage, with Jacob through his teen years. In her youth she was strong enough to pull him on his skateboard - until the local police officer put a halt to their neighborhood joyrides..

She would not eat until we sat down and started our meal. Willa remembers a time I was away and Jacob had moved on to college. Willa sat to eat; Mazie stood by her bowl, waiting. Willa finally realized what was holding up the meal... only after she said grace out loud did Mazie begin to eat.

Mazie was the pastoral care minister of our neighborhood. Willa took her to visit flood victims and workers - she always sought out the ones most in need, people we hadn't noticed. Exceedingly patient with tiny children in the park, she allowed them to face their fear and awkwardly pet her. Then, by visible example, she showed them that you don't need all your parts to be whole.

I wrote the opening words of this article a year ago, when we thought Mazie would die within days. She fooled us again, and lived another year, almost to the day of her stroke last March. In that year she taught us much about life, aging, disability, and dying.

Many people assured us that in heaven, Mazie would get her missing leg back. Willa insisted Mazie wouldn't need that leg in heaven any more than she did here, and recalled our late friend Nancy, who " was born with a foreshortened arm. It ended at the elbow with a stump of a hand. She always bristled when some religious person reassured her she would be whole in heaven. She said she already was whole. And she was."

So I quit wishing a new leg for Mazie, and wished instead for her a leg of lamb...

Now she is gone, and we have felt bereft and disconsolate, crying in this huge Lent-like void. We find ourselves bewildered by the sudden change in our 14-year routine. Death and grief do that - strand us in the wilderness for a while. That's where we are - in the "be-wilderness" of loss.

Mazie belonged to so many more people than the three of us. She was not a servant, nor a pet, but a spiritual companion who pointed the way for us..

On an achingly beautiful day in March, we said goodbye for now. Only remnants were left of the snow she loved to bound through, biting at it and burrowing her snoot to search for God knows what.

She was stuck at the end, stepped into a thin place but unable to cross through and out of it - circling, circling, always clockwise, searching for God knows what. She took me back to the deaths of my parents, the times they lay in the thin place and waited, as we kept watch.

We keep watch during Lent, hoping, hoping, every year, that it will turn out all right, that Easter will follow. 
It always does, thank God.

We believe in the resurrection, 
but does that include dogs?.

That, indeed, will be heaven.
______________________________________________

This article was first published in Iowa Connections April 2011
the newspaper of the Episcopal Diocese of Iowa 

Helen Keefe is a research assistant at University of Iowa Hospitals and a member of Spiritual Directors International. Senior warden at St. Luke's Church, Ft. Madison, she and her wife the Rev. Willa Goodfellow live in Coralville, IA with the memory of their mystic wonder dog, Mazie.

Good Morning!

Good morning.

 

I am looking at sunrise over the Cascades and thinking about Aunt Vi.

Streaks of pink and gold and colors impossible to pin down are changing by the second.  The light outlines and gives clarity to the mountains and infuses hope into the coming day.  A new dawn. 

"Good morning". 

It was Violet Hager's standard greeting.  Phone call, letter, in-person conversation - - didn't matter, day or night.  Birthday or Christmas card - they all began with, "Good Morning". 

So we will miss that incongruous greeting now that we have lost Willa's Aunt Vi to the river of life and time.  But I am aware of her presence and the wisdom of her greeting as we step into Advent.

Advent marks the beginning of the new year for churches of the western tradition.

Like the morning, Advent is an expectant and hopeful time.  Some mornings for my prayer time, I light my little oil lamp and watch it rival the glow of dawn.

What better way to approach Christmas during this time of waiting and hope than to greet it with an enthusiastic "Good Morning"?

The new day lies ahead; anything can happen.  We are walking toward the birth of hope.  It is eternally a new day.  Good morning!

Violet Hager was old enough to have met the artist Georgia O'Keffe (she came to her rescue when the young artist was too preoccupied to keep her Jeep's oil level full). And Vi was young enough to welcome this similarly unorthodox Keefe into her family.  As elder stateswoman of her extended family, she could have made my entry into that family a rough ride. 

Instead, I found a vibrant and energetic welcome from the woman who insisted that "Take Me out to the Ballgame" be sung at all family gatherings.  I think she may even have cheated to declare us the winners of the sand sculpture contest at Rockaway Beach (although Willa, Jake, and I did have a fabulous design...)

Advent is like that.  God is like that.  No matter what time of day or night, there is the prospect of a new day wrapped in an enthusiastic welcome. 

Start over, be new, walk forward refreshed. 

Good morning!

9/11 x 9

I serve as chaplain to the

Commission on One world One Church of the Episcopal Diocese of Iowa: http://www.iowaepiscopal.org/ministry_together/one_world_one_church.php

Generally I open our meetings with a short meditation or read from the Book of Common Prayer - nothing too spiritually-taxing for tired church folk gathered on a Saturday morning.

Encouragement. Comfort. Inspiration.

Today was different.

Today the recurring horrific communal memory floated around us, and I had to dig deep to know how to speak to the pain and fear that still surround the events of 9/11.

Here is what I said:

__________________________________________________

It's been rendered almost treacly by being used as the frosting of so many weddings,

but the scripture has so much to say to us today.

You know the one:

"Yada yada yada, clanging cymbal, ho-hum; move mountains, yadayada,

but the greatest of these is love..."

Yeah, yeah, but when can we kiss?

Love. Only this. This and only this

only God

only neighbor

only love them

What a concept. . . let's burn their holy books - that'll show 'em!

That a minister of a faith built on love and sacrifice would even consider this makes my brain and my heart hurt. I feel the same outrage I felt the day we buried my mother, when two people were handing out pamphlets about purgatory. In the door of the church! At my mother's funeral Mass!

I was restrained then, but at the funeral lunch, when they showed up to eat with us - plates full of tamales and rice and beans and salad - the words I threw at them were so angry that I didn't argue when they said they didn't think they were welcome there.

"You're right", I said.

"I was wrong," I tell myself now.

My momma taught me better than that. Given the chance to sit down with people I disagreed with, people who had hurt me, I couldn't do it.

"How dare you?" I continue to think about them.

"How dare you?" I think about the Florida pastor and those who agree with him.

But all it engenders in me is more hatred and bitterness.

How can we wrap our arms around those who hold our food in their hands, even when our mouth is full of ashes and bitterness?

But I am preaching to the choir, to you, my mentors in all this.

[and the OWOC members are my heroes, as are many of you who read this]

Certainly we don't forget the ones who died on this date. But at peril to our lives and souls do we cast aside those who caused the death and destruction, and the ones who continue it, no matter what "side" they are on.

There can be no sides, no us, no them, or this will never end well.

Love. Only this. This and only this.

God

neighbor

self.

love them all -

Amen.

"The Epistle of Helena"

I am the keeper of my mother's words.

Along with the wooden darning ball and the potato salad bowl, her letters, columns, diaries and trip logs are my inheritance.

She wrote every day, more than I knew.  I knew about cards to relatives and friends.  I knew about letters to the editor that made us cringe.  I knew about her love for postcards of jackalopes and giant ears of corn.  I thought I had seen all of what she wrote.

Her letters were cheery and her writing full of flowery romantic prose.  Not lovey-dovey romantic, but that optimistic bright-eyed Pollyanna-type of writing that must have made her California life seem all milk and honey to my Midwestern relatives. 

Their letters, especially those from North Dakota, were full of woe and lament, Job-like tales of illnesses, plagues, crop failures, infidelities, and way-too-early deaths.  My mother and sister and I sat once with Aunt Alice as she related the misery of neighbors.  It was a half hour before we realized she was talking about her soap opera characters.  The lines blurred in the whistling wind that rattled dust through the windows and made me want to steal the car keys and get my self out of there. 

So my mother's life was a contrast right out of the Grapes of Wrath.  South Pasadena, Santa Paula - - warm names full of sunshine and oranges.  She wrote to Alice and others of our days at the beach, picnics, swimming, gardening.  "All of it was true, some of it actually happened", my spiritual director says.  But there were other chapters I read only after her death, and some of it still waits.  Seven years on, I am just starting to dip into the notebooks lined up on my book shelf. 

My first inkling of her other writing were diary entries made as a young teacher in Antelope Valley, a wilderness at the time.  I was surprised to find not an excited young professional at the beginning of a career, but a woman 24 years old and depressed.  What self-imposed exile took a debutante in her red roadster out to the hinterland, away from the active social life to which she was accustomed?  What was she seeking out in that desert? 

One early piece begins, "Imagination is a tragic thing."  She fed us huge dollops of imagination, yet here I find that she viewed it as something sinister and to be controlled.   Her depressive side showed up in her interior but not her exterior life for the next 70 years .  She wrote of lost expectations, bitterness, spiritual questions and longings.  I wish we could have spoken of these, she and I, perhaps to ease them, knowing they were shared by someone we loved.

Our mothers are much more complex than we can know in this life.  That boxed-in role has changed in past decades, but to those of us who came from them, "Mother" is still a particular person and place.  Yet they were persons in their own right long before they ever got involved with us. 

My mother asked the questions we all asked as angst-ridden teens and young adults (or still do):  "Who am I?  Why am I here?  What is my purpose?  What's it all about?"  This from a parent who tutored me in the cut-and-dried answers of the Baltimore Catechism.  It's sad to think of the doubt that still haunted her in her last years.

Yet what lives is her writing that went out to the world:  "My gardening grandmothers said that friendship is the perfume entwined in our memories.  The main part of me always wants to plant many things, as I know the harvest will be beyond my wildest dreams."  She gardened, and wrote, and made friends like that - with lavish abandon.  Every year I plant, hopeful that things will grow.  Some do, but not as wildly or prolifically as for my mother.  But I am always encouraged by her example, her words, her hope.  So it is with writing, also.

And so, she wrote to the churches of California and Iowa and North Dakota, to the house churches in Ventura, Los Angeles, Oakdale, Sacramento, Mt. Pleasant, Dove Canyon, and Santa Paula, to school children and to strangers.  She wrote with news and needs and instructions and hopes for us, our families, and our futures.

Each year she planted, hopeful that something would grow.

Each day she wrote, hopeful that it would mean something to someone.

It did.

It does.

This article was first published in Iowa Connections May 2009:
www.iowaepiscopal.org/news_and_events/iowa_connections.php