Finding Grace: A True Story About Losing Your Way In Life...And Finding It Again

PREFACE

IT’S COLD IN TENNESSEE TODAY. From my window I can see the cows grazing in the pasture next door and our dog’s breath as she runs around our home. Although she has plenty of space to roam she continues to run the same pattern, creating a twelve-inch barren circular path around the perimeter of the house that is peppered with holes where she digs after moles. We try to explain that she doesn’t have to dig that far to get to the moles but she ignores us. My husband cringes every time he sees the path and the holes. I tell him not to look. He’s throwing scraps of insulation and wood out of our attic window; he and my father-in-law have been banging and pounding for weeks as they finish converting our attic space into an office. So you can write, my husband says. It’s difficult to write with garbage flying past my window but, save the banging, it’s quiet in the house so maybe I’ll get a couple of hours to pluck a few letters from the alphabet and to arrange them into some sort of shape before company arrives. Our old college friend Bob will be visiting for a few days and I need to change the sheets and clean the bathroom. The dog’s barking now—at the cows in the pasture next to us. The barking also drives my husband crazy. This day, the writing, the banging, the sailing debris, the cows, the moles, everything is so different from what I wanted as a child. It seems life rarely turns out the way we picture it, though.

I had a plan when I was little. As far as dreams went it was tidy and organized and well constructed. I used to watch the Little Rascals series after school and on the weekends I’d see reruns of The Andy Griffith Show, I Love Lucy, and countless old movies on Channel 43 out of Cleveland. I watched those shows and knew I wanted to be an actress and marry a guy who looked like those men in the movies with dark hair and blue eyes (I assumed; it was black-and-white TV), and I wanted to have three or four children. I envisioned a home like the ones I’d see in movies with a charming picket fence and blooming flowerbeds that wrapped around the house. Like all childlike plans I saw my husband loving his job, I was happy and fulfilled in my own, and my children were well behaved, healthy, and well adjusted. That was my dream. Not a lot of bells and whistles. In the grand scheme of things it was really very simple but no one told me then that in one moment life could blindside me and I’d never see it coming.

Someone early in our lives should tell us that we’ll never make it to the end unscathed or pain free but I guess for centuries people have all thought the same thing about the next generation: They’ll figure it out. Many never figure it out, though. We just suck up the pain of the divorce, the rape, the abuse, the death, or the financial collapse and carry on the best we know how, hobbling along toward the finish line. It seems that God, or at the very least an angel, should appear at life-altering moments to offer guidance for the life that’s now ours but that doesn’t happen. We’re left to figure out things on our own.

We hope for a life that exceeds our dreams, and when those dreams collapse we simply wish for a soft wing of hope, but instead we get life in a culture of ungrace. I know that’s not a word but it works here. (Disgrace doesn’t apply since it’s a different word altogether and nongrace just doesn’t sound as good.) If you don’t know what ungrace is, just hop on the interstate at rush hour, or watch how quickly Hollywood turns on a star who doesn’t shine like he once did at the box office, or sit in a room full of lawyers at divorce proceedings. Ungrace pulsates in our workplaces, our communities, and in the media, and tells us that regardless of what has happened we must do better, look better, and make ourselves better. But to love and accept someone regardless of their flaws and failures is a breath of hope in a harsh, finger-wagging world. That is an undeserved gift, which is life itself. That’s grace.

The following pages are part of my story. If I share these experiences in a way that breathes shape and color into them perhaps you’ll recognize part of your own life as well. Samuel Johnson said that people need more to be reminded than to be instructed. Sometimes we need to be reminded of why we’re here, that we are valued and loved, and at the end of the pain there are still deeper and higher dreams to discover. This is the story of how I finally figured that out.

ONE

Lord, I suffer much. I cannot tell You what goes on inside of me, I cannot hide from You these dark battles, the deep despair. When God breathes on man, He opens his inner being and sees deeply within it.

—VICTOR HUGO, FRENCH POET AND NOVELIST

WE MOVED TO OUR HOME in Medina, Ohio, in the spring of 1970, when I was three. My brother, Brian, was seven and got his own room, the green one with the short, shaggy dark green carpet. I shared a room with my sister Mary Jo (we call her Josie . . . like Jocie, not Jozey), who is nearly ten years older than me. We got the baby-aspirin-orange room with the orange shag carpet, and my parents got the all-purple room. The family room was pink, the living room blue, and the kitchen had bluish-green-patterned indoor/outdoor carpeting and avocado appliances. The house screamed 1960s.

There were a few homes on our road but it was mostly farmland. Our split-level house had a long, blacktop driveway, huge front lawn, brick front, a white barn in the back that would hold my dad’s tractors and gardening equipment, and over an acre of land behind the barn for a garden that could feed most of Medina County (my parents never believed in small gardens). Our neighbor Mr. Lake also had a garden behind his barn. Bud Lake had a round chest that was slick as a watermelon. It actually glistened on hot summer days when he worked outside. When we met Mr. Lake for the first time I whispered to my mother, That man doesn’t have any hair on his chest. She tried to shush me but I was three and lacked whispering skills. Mr. Lake believed in using manure for fertilizer. He’d haul in a huge load from somewhere and let it percolate inside his barn before he used it. His garden always smelled crappy, but it was lovely.

A dairy was just up the street and Mr. Lake walked to work there every morning with his lunch pail in hand. Sometimes (but not nearly enough) he’d bring home a package of ice-cream bars and hand them to me. Life couldn’t get any better than on those free ice-cream-bar days. One morning as I played in the driveway I was talking to myself, weaving together an outlandish tale full of colorful characters, intrigue, and drama. I froze when I saw Mr. Lake peering from behind one of his trees, listening to me. Go on, he said. I can’t wait to hear what happens. Stage fright hit me and I couldn’t utter another word. I ran toward our garage door and heard Mr. Lake laughing from his yard.

Across the road was a pasture full of cows for the dairy and right next to us was an old farmhouse where our other neighbors lived. For the sake of this story I’ll just call them the Taylors. Theirs was not a charming farmhouse in any way. The exterior hadn’t been painted in years and what was left of the old paint fell like curly, white pencil shavings around the house. A distinct odor of aged, rotting wood, cigarettes, and filth met you before stepping onto the porch. My mother was and is a no-nonsense woman. She and my father both grew up in east Tennessee working on farms that fed fifteen children in my father’s family and five in my mother’s. My dad’s oldest sibling, my Aunt Stella, was born the same year as my maternal grandmother, Mary Hurley. As Grandma Hurley grew, got married, and began having children of her own, my paternal grandmother was still giving birth to her fifteen children. When she died in 1972, her death certificate claimed she was just worn out.

My mother was always very practical (as I write this sitting at a plastic folding table I know the apple hasn’t fallen too far from the tree) and called things as she saw them. On more than one occasion I remember her looking at our neighbor’s home and saying, Move next to a dump and you live next to trash. I didn’t know what she meant.

When we moved to Medina my mom worked at the latex factory, the flower container factory and then later, the box factory. (My sister eventually worked at the pickle factory.) My mother settled on cleaning homes as a business because she could set her own hours and be home when we got off the school bus in the afternoon. My dad worked second shift in one of the steel mills in Cleveland, the same one he’d worked in since he moved to Ohio in 1955 and ultimately retired from forty years later. At night I’d fall asleep in my mother’s bed and when my dad got home in the early morning hours he would carry me to my orange room. I never remembered a thing.

After I learned to read I would crawl into bed with my mom and read her stories. Mother would come home from the factory and make dinner for my siblings and me, maybe do a load of laundry, or scrub a spot on the indoor/outdoor kitchen carpet before turning in each night. I’d riffle through my books or the ones we’d picked up at the library and read one after the other out loud to my mother as she fell asleep. I’d look over at her and think, Why are you so tired? I’d read till I got sleepy and then turn out the light, thinking about new books to bring home.

The Franklin Sylvester Library was just off the square in Medina. I would crawl on the floor between the stacks of books in the children’s section in search of two or three new ones to take home. Long before I could read I loved to flip through the pages of a book and look at the pictures. The individual volumes in the Childcraft books that still stand on my parents’ shelves reveal my scribbling then as I learned my ABCs and my failed attempts to write my name (the Ns are still backward). One winter’s night my mother bundled me up to take books back to the library. I set three books on top of the car while I put on my boots but forgot them as I climbed into my seat. When we got to the library I searched the car for the books, thinking I’d left them at home. Mother discovered one of the books still sitting on top of the car; the other two had no doubt come to an ugly ending somewhere along the route. I was petrified as we walked into the library, so frightened that the lady behind the desk would take away our library card or worse yet, that she’d ban me from stepping foot inside the library again. I don’t remember if my mother paid for the books or if the woman behind the desk was just gracious to an absent-minded child but we left that evening after checking out two new books. We went home and had a piece of chocolate cake. There was always dessert in my mother’s