Category: Behind the Stories: Inspirations and Encounters

Santa Claus Checks in at the Fat Buddha Spa

This short story is an annual tradition (when I remember to share it). It’s an interlude that takes place “offstage” during Snake Face, book three in the Mae Martin series, while Mae is in northeastern North Carolina over the holidays.

Santa Claus Checks in at the Fat Buddha Spa

             Mae Martin raced her twin stepdaughters to the pasture fence and almost let them win, making it a three-way tie. The llamas looked up from grazing on the dry winter grass, blinking their long lashes. Taking walks to visit the neighbors’ animals had been a favorite pastime for Mae and girls when she’d lived with them. Now, on her first holiday visit after separating from their father, she was trying to keep everything as normal as possible. As the six-year-old girls clambered onto the fence, Brook shouted. “That’s what I want for Christmas. A llama.”

“Are you sure?” Mae picked up a small purple glove from the weeds and put it in her pocket. The late December day was growing warm and both girls had taken off their gloves and hats. “I thought y’all wanted a tarantula.”

“We do, but Miss Jen is scared of spiders.”

Their father’s new girlfriend didn’t share Mae’s appreciation for crawly critters. “She might think a llama was cuter, but I don’t think anybody can afford one right now. You do know your presents come from family, right? Your daddy said y’all don’t believe in Santa anymore.”

“Yeah. We figured it out.” Stream perched on the top rail, swinging her legs. “We watched this TV show with Grampa Jim and Granma Sally about these people who have reindeer in some place near the North Pole.”

“Lapland?”

“Yeah. And those things are big. There’s no way they can fly.”

“What about magic?”

Brook sat beside her sister. They studied Mae as if they felt sorry for her. Poor mama. She’s not caught up with us yet. “Magic is for little kids who can’t figure things out. We’re gonna be bug scientists when we grow up—”

“Nun-uh.” Stream wriggled and sat straighter. “That’s your job. I’m gonna be a race car driver.”

Mae walked up and placed her hands on their knees. She loved their independence and eccentricity, but they could be tactless about how smart they were—like her ex-mother-law—and she needed to take that attitude down a notch. Gently. “Now what in the world is Santa Claus gonna do if all these kids don’t believe in him?”Santa_Claus

Brook frowned, saying he couldn’t do anything if he wasn’t real, but Stream started to laugh. “He’ll pop like a bubble.”

Mae did her best to act serious. “Did you tell your friends there’s no Santa?”

The girls exchanged glances. Brook said, “We got in trouble for it at school. It made some kids cry.”

“It might be hard on ol’ Santa, too. Popping like a bubble. Before you tell any more kids he’s not real, I think I’d better give him a call and see how he’s feeling.” Mae took her cell phone from her jacket pocket and pretended to make a call. She rolled her eyes and sighed as if waiting a long time for an answer.

The girls poked each other and giggled. Stream whispered to her sister, “She can’t call him. She’s making believe.”

Mae raised her eyebrows, giving them the oh yeah? look, and then a triumphant smile as if she’d finally heard a voice. “Well hey, Santa buddy. What’s up? You know Summer Stream and Autumn Brook Ridley don’t believe in you anymore? … Oh. Of course. I can’t surprise you. You know who’s naughty and nice. “

Brook protested, “We weren’t naughty. We told the truth.”

“But did you tell it nice?” Mae turned away, lowering her voice to resume her conversation with Santa. “I hope they didn’t hurt your feelings. They told half the kids in Bertie County, North Carolina—You’re kidding! … So what are you doing now? … Really? Shut up! I live there. I just left for my vacation.” She put her hand over the phone. “You won’t believe it. He’s checked into a spa back in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. So many kids stopped believing in him, he’s taking this Christmas off.”sign_-_new_mexico_-_truth_or_consequences_-_exit_4892943477

“What’s a spa?”

“It’s sort of like a motel with extra stuff. The ones where I live have hot springs. People go there to relax and get healthy.” She got back to Santa Claus. “Which one? You at the Charles? La Paloma? … I never heard of that one. The Fat Buddha? … Oh. Reckon I wouldn’t see it.”

She explained to the girls, “He’s at a spa for supernatural beings. Regular folks can’t see it.”

Both girls frowned, and Brook asked, “A spa for what?”

The_Laughing_&_Lucky_Buddha!_A_stroke_of_Luck!_(413428647)    “Supernatural beings. Kinda like ghosts or angels, but not exactly. It’s run by a big fat Buddha. You know who he is?”

Stream nodded. “Granma Sally has his statue on her desk. She says he helps her stay calm when she does taxes.”

“He’s helping Santa, too. And they’re hanging out with another fat supernatural, Ganesh. He’s this Hindu god with an elephant head.”

“An elephant head?” Stream whooped.

Brook asked, “How come they’re all fat?”Ganesh_2

Mae repeated the question to Santa and listened while she worked on an answer.

“He says it’s because they’re supernatural. They don’t have to be in shape to be healthy. Ganesh …” She had to stop and think again. Her neighbors in T or C were into yoga and they had a Ganesh poster in their living room. Finding it strange but beautiful, she’d asked Kenny to explain it. “Ganesh is fat but he’s big and strong, too. People call him the remover of obstacles. Like an elephant can pull a fallen tree off a road but a human can’t.”

Stream looked skeptical. “Do people believe in the elephant-head guy? Like they believe in Santa?”

“Some do, but a lot of people just believe in what they all stand for. Like being generous and happy and enjoying life. Santa says they’re hanging out in the hot spring together and these other guys helped him with something he was worried about. So, you did him a favor, giving him a vacation, but he wants to go back to work next year, and he’ll need kids to believe in him again.”

“We can’t make them.”

“No—but you can keep it to yourselves if some new believers come along. You know why he wants to go back to work?”

Brook asked, “Does he get paid a lot?”

“No—he does it to be kind. And this is what those other fat dudes at the spa told him. He’s been too generous. See, they don’t get as carried away with their roles as he does. They help people by changing their lives, not giving stuff. He’s been giving people way too much expensive stuff, and they’re starting to think Christmas is about getting big, fancy gifts. So next year, he’s gonna cut back. Give stuff that means more and costs less.”

Mae took a deep breath and let it out. She hadn’t known she was going to say that. But as a college student with a part-time job and not much cash, she’d had to buy small gifts this year—child-sized team T-shirts for the College of the Rio Grande Tarantulas and a pair of stuffed toy versions of the mascot. She’d wanted to do more, but the trip east had cost all she could spare, and yet she didn’t want the girls to think she loved them less because she didn’t live with them anymore.

“Like when we make you presents,” Brook said.

“Exactly.” Mae smiled in relief.

“Good,” said Stream, “because we—”

Brook dug a fist into her sister’s arm. “Sh. You can’t tell her.”

“That’s right.” Mae put her phone in her jacket pocket. “Being surprised is part of the fun.”

The girls stared at her pocket. “Mama,” Brook said, “That was rude. You hung up on Santa without saying goodbye.”

“Oops. Look like I’ve been naughty, too. Good thing he’s taking the year off.”

“Yes, and …”

How often do we say, “Yes, but …?” Sometimes, it’s how we decline unwanted advice, but it’s also what we say when we’d like to do something but automatically think we can’t. I heard Bob Harris, travel writer, microfinance lending enthusiast and author of The International Bank of Bob, as a convocation speaker at my college. He described how he came to embrace microfinance through some of the adventurous jobs he’s taken, experiences that broadened his world view.

The attitude of “Yes and…” got him there. It’s an approach he learned when doing improv comedy. Suppose a fellow actor suggests, “We’re in Spain.” If you say, “Yes but,” the scene is dead. If you say, “Yes and,” you can build on it. One of his examples was how he responded to a job offer asking if would write for a telenovela in Mexico. “Yes, but I don’t speak Spanish” would have closed the door. Instead, he dared to walk through it, answering: “Yes, and I can learn the language fast.”

A travel writing job reviewing the world’s top fifty luxury hotels brought Harris face to face with painfully glaring income inequality in a way that made him deeply uncomfortable. The contrast between the lifestyles of the guests and owners of these resorts and the lives of the people who built and maintained them led to his interest in micro-lending. Later, he visited microfinance recipients around the world, to see the impacts of the small no-interest loans he and others had made through Kiva, a microlending nonprofit. It took hard work on the part of the people who received the loans to grow their businesses—a chicken farm in Bosnia, a little shop in Rwanda, a barbershop in Beirut, and others—and little risk or effort on the part of people who each loaned them around $25.00. All it took was a “yes, and…”

I’m thinking of the various yes buts and yes ands in my life, such as letting new love or friendship in, or getting involved in a good cause. Turning it down would be a yes but. Yes and is more rewarding and yet it can be mentally difficult. It’s not just negative events that can be disruptive. Positive adjustments are disruptive, too.

In some ways, the world appears to be taking a dark turn right now. A backwards turn away from compassion, away from stewardship of the earth. When I look at the work to be done, it’s huge, overwhelming, urgent and complex. Can my small efforts make any difference? The answer is “yes, and…”

Wobbly

I had to share this wonderful image of Truth or Consequences. There’s a scene in Ghost Sickness that takes place right here, on this sidewalk in front of Passion Pie Café. And I wanted readers who haven’t been to T or C to get a glimpse of my town. I highly recommend the photography blog this came from, Always Backroads.

Donna Catterick's avatarAlways Backroads

wobblyMain Street, Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, USA.

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From the Shadow Side of My Bookshelf

shadow1

That’s the side I never look at. The side scarcely touched by my superficial housework. Where the dust is.

This week, I stuck the duster behind the books, though I didn’t bother to pull them out, and I encountered a slender volume that had shifted into the shadow side. I’ve always believed that if a book literally, physically jumps out at me, I may need to read it. This one had ducked back and hidden from me. I pulled it out. It was Jungian psychologist Robert Bly’s A Little Book on the Human Shadow. I’m Jungian enough to appreciate synchronicity. shadow3

I opened it at random and found a chapter that’s an interview with Bly and his editor William Booth. It starts with Booth asking Bly how some ordinary person, a hypothetical woman in a small town in Minnesota without access to a Jungian therapist, might find her shadow. (The shadow, by the way, isn’t necessarily the bad side of the mind, it’s the unacknowledged side, the aspects of ourselves that we have, in Bly’s imagery, stuffed into a bag we carry around on our backs.) In his answer, Bly suggests that this hypothetical ordinary person look where her attention is drawn. Does she tend to think too much about a member of her community that she sees as sexually loose and immoral? Does she find herself obsessing on a member of her PTA who she thinks is fake and dishonest? If these other two women dominate her attention, her shadow may be calling her to look at her own sexuality and at her own level of sincerity and honesty.

In essence, Bly says, to find your shadow, look at what you hate.

That’s different from what you disagree with. It’s quite possible—more so face to face than in social media conversations—to disagree without hatred. I find it valuable to talk with people with whom I disagree so we can stay in a constructive relationship. But I hate yappy dogs that won’t shut up. I’m an extravert, a talker, and I’m persistent as heck. Maybe I need to acknowledge my inner yappy dog. The other day during my outdoor yoga practice between the tennis courts and the college president’s house, the president’s dog objected to my presence exactly at the time I was ready to practice savasana. Deep relaxation. Quietness. What could I do? I focused on the spaces between the barks. Maybe I can do this with my own yapping thoughts. My tendency to object to things.

Back to the book. Bly chose Abraham Lincoln as an example of a well-known person who seemed to have incorporated rather than rejected his shadow. I agree. One thing I admire about Lincoln is how he handled anger. He would write his “hot” letter to the person he was angry with, then put it in a desk drawer. A few days later or whenever he felt calmer and could think more clearly, he would communicate rationally with the individual, never sending the angry letter. He felt anger and expressed it, but processed its meaning rather than lashing out. That’s my reason he seems integrated. Bly gives the illustration of Lincoln’s sense of humor, his ability to laugh at himself and not take offense.

A woman meeting Lincoln on a train told him that he was the ugliest man she had ever set eyes on. Lincoln asked her, “What do you suggest I do about it?” She said, “You could stay home.” He liked her answer and enjoyed telling the story.

The shadow, once explored, might be a source of lightness, or of strength, peace, or beauty.shadow_of_a_dune_in_death_valley

 

 

Image: Shadow of a dune in Death Valley by Brocken Inaglory

Dialogue and Discomfort

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This isn’t about writing dialogue in fiction, although it’s related in a way. In fiction, an author has to sustain conflict. In real life, we have to resolve it. Keeping the drama up can be engaging for readers, but it can be destructive when people actually need to hear each other. Contrived and exaggerated conflict is the meat of reality TV, but that’s not reality. And we’re not on TV.

My college, like many across the country, has a Dialogue Club. Students are trained to facilitate conversations on difficult topics. These conversations give students a method for expressing their experiences, opinions and feelings without attacking, blaming or accusing. The participants learn to listen without arguing back. The purpose is not to persuade anyone, but simply to understand each other.

I had already planned a Dialogue Club activity in my freshman seminar this week, and the timing was right. We talked about the topics my students had chosen in advance: Black Lives Matter, and athletes who kneel during the national anthem. And then, once we had practiced our skills in civil discourse, I asked if they would be willing to share their thoughts on the election in the same way. They did. It was amazing. My class found this dialogue process valuable enough that they want to do it every week. This is so promising, I’ve volunteered to part of an upcoming campus-wide dialogue about the election results.

The origin of dialogue clubs, to my knowledge, is with a group of women in Massachusetts who had pro-life and pro-choice views and were tired of the anger and even violence that had arisen in disagreements about abortion rights. Their purpose was to hear each other, and they found that there were not just two sides. If there were ten people in the room, there might be ten sides to the issue. Venting to our like-minded friends is a relief, of course, and we all need to do that. But then, we need to move out of our comfort zones, our echo chambers. Reducing our stress often begins with raising it—by doing what makes us uncomfortable. Getting involved in anything controversial (in a role other than audience) can make most people uncomfortable, unless they are the type that thrives on conflict. The rest of us need to be as engaged, or even more so, than the people who enjoy being angry.

Dialogue clubs have been used not only on college campuses. They have been effective working through national conflicts, in places like Rwanda. Talk doesn’t replace action, of course. What it does is do is give people the courage to become part of the public conversation, the first step toward peaceful, constructive action.

Working Together, Washington, Wisdom and Walnuts

This week my college’s entire faculty and the president and the provost got together and discussed a major change in the academic calendar, a change which some support and some oppose, and we worked toward a compromise. Though we didn’t solve the problem yet, we agreed to keep talking. If we didn’t keep cooperating and communicating constructively, the institution would cease to function and it would fail the needs of those we serve, the students.

A few days ago, I finished reading an eight hundred page biography of George Washington, which I reviewed at length on my Booklikes blog. Washington was flawed, as all of us are, leaders and unknowns alike. He was successful because he listened and took time to think.

Here are two of my favorite quotations from his letters (also quoted in my review):

In this one, he was writing to his adopted grandson: “Where there is no occasion for expressing an opinion, it is best to be silent, for there is nothing more certain than it is at all times more easy to make enemies than friends.”
 

The following is an excerpt from a letter Washington wrote to a Jewish congregation in Philadelphia. Note that the word “demean” back then related to one’s demeanor and didn’t have its modern meaning of debasing. It meant comport or behave. “All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunity of citizenship. It is now no more that tolerance is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily, the government of the United States, which gives bigotry no sanction, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens.” He found religious tolerance to be too weak a concept, too condescending toward religious minorities.

Between two classes today, I took an outdoor yoga break. My route out the side of my building passes under a walnut tree and then across a lawn beside the tennis courts. Earlier in the fall, it was hard to tell a walnut in the grass from a tennis ball. A closer look at the bright yellow-green spheres revealed either the smooth texture of a walnut pod or the fuzzy skin of a tennis ball. Now the walnuts are yellow, resembling golden delicious apples, and some have softened open or been punctured by squirrels for the nut inside. The tennis balls, of course, are still firm and green. I place them on the wall of the court or toss them inside, in case they can be used again. Once they’ve been hit past the fence and left there, though, I wonder if they can serve any purpose in the game, or if these wild shots can’t be reclaimed by either the tennis players or the earth.

Curiosity and Openness

park

The boy braked his bicycle on the bridge over the creek and stood straddling the frame. “What are you doing here?”

As I adjusted out of the mildly altered consciousness that comes from a long, peaceful run, I continued stretching my calf muscles, listening to the stream’s soft burbling, the autumn trees rustling, and studied my interrogator. He was about ten years old, with a stocky build, short hair and wire-rimmed glasses. His question wasn’t unfriendly—not as if he owned the park, but more of an inquiry into what other people came here for.

“I just ran four miles,” I said, “and now I’m stretching my legs.”

“Four miles?” His eyebrows shot up. “I can’t even run one.”

“It took me a while to build up to four. I didn’t run that far when I first started running.”

The boy asked what it felt like to run four miles and I said it was beautiful, being outdoors and quiet, moving through nature. It’s hard to describe the spirituality of running and I didn’t do a very good job of it. He said it must be a good workout. I agreed. He rode around a little while I finished stretching, and then pedaled beside me as I walked through the parking lot toward my neighborhood.

“What was it like the first time you ran?” he asked.

I told him a shortened version of the story that follows.

I’d been visiting the Apache reservation in Mescalero, New Mexico. A friend informed me that there would be a five-K and 10-K race the next morning, then looked me in the eyes and said “See you there.”

He and his girlfriend would be running, but I could tell he didn’t mean I would be there to cheer them on. He meant I would be running. I took the challenge and ran the five-K. At the time, I lived at sea level in the Tidewater region of Virginia, and Mescalero is 7,500 feet above that. Being an aerobics teacher, I was in good shape, but until that day I wasn’t a runner. I struggled uphill at that altitude, but the singer for the Navajo Nation Dancers kept cheering me on. His group had come for the powwow, and we had met briefly and chatted while waiting for the race to start. He couldn’t remember my name, only where I was from, so he shouted, “Go, Virginia! You can do it!”

I came in second for my age group, and I was hooked. Not on racing, but on the Apache concept of spiritual running. This race was not just any race, but a community event to promote health and traditional culture, timed to go with the four-day Dances of the Mountain Gods and the girls’ coming of age ceremony. My friend who convinced me to run had told me about spiritual running when we first met, and before the race started I got to know a number of other people who ran for cultural reasons. That was almost twenty years ago. and I never lost my love for running.running

The boy in the park listened to the short version of this story attentively. We chatted a little longer. He concluded that he would still prefer bicycling and then pumped his way up the steep hill, wishing me a good day and saying, “See ya.”

There was a synchronicity to this encounter. Back in 1998, I made friends with the man who got me to run that first race by striking up a conversation with a stranger. I was stuck in an airport due to a delayed flight, and as I walked to pass the time, I noticed him sitting cross-legged on the floor rather than in a chair in one of the gate areas, and was intrigued by the writing on his T-shirt. It read: All Apache Nations Run Against Substance Abuse. I was doing research in graduate school about using traditional culture to combat modern health problems in Native communities. The idea of people running all the way from the various Apache nations, from Oklahoma and Arizona and New Mexico, to gather at one chosen reservation, was inspiring. We talked a while, and he invited me to visit Mescalero later that year and put me in touch with a medicine woman who could help with my research.

On subsequent trips, I ran the five-K several more times. At the time, I was thinking about writing an ghost sickness ebookacademic paper, not fiction, but years later these races, the powwows, and the ceremonies inspired many of the scenes in Ghost Sickness. By the time I wrote the book, I had a lot of experiences to draw from.

My new young acquaintance’s friendly curiosity makes me think he has what it takes to be a writer. He has his own view—prefers biking to running—but he wanted to know what I thought and felt as a runner, and not because he planned to start running. He simply wanted to know. That’s a writers’ mind, or an actor’s or a psychologist’s. He asks: What’s it like to be someone who is not like me?

Fragmentation and Focus

I’m a guest today on Lois Winston’s blog, talking about trying to focus despite fragmented time. If you share that frustration, you’re not alone. Stop by the blog and let me know how you handle it.

At the end of that post, I mention a 99 cent sale. The Calling is discounted on all retailers through October 28th.

Overfill Alarm

overfill

Taking my freshman seminar students for a mindful walking meditation excursion, I noticed things I’d never seen before. Most striking was a college van parked near the softball field, overgrown with vines. How fast did they take it over? Had the van been forgotten?

As always on such walks, I noticed the sounds: wind in leaves, the nearby river rolling softly over rocks, birds and crickets singing, and our footsteps. When we reached the park I was aiming for, one of my students found a friendly black cat and held him up. Part of the mindful condition is that we don’t talk or use phones for forty minutes. Her smile communicated all that was needed, and several of us gathered around her to pet the cat. Mindfully. Feeling the catness of the cat.felix

I watched carp in a lily pond, ducks on the river, and then crossed under a bridge to another part of the park. There, I saw a flock of birds reflected in gray water that was busy with a swarm of water-walking bugs, a moment of earth-sky-water symmetry that put my mind on pause. Pure perception uncluttered by the noise of thought.babyducks

A thin old tuxedo cat with a red collar trailed several students into a gazebo. He seemed to want human company, but unlike the black cat, he found no one to pay attention to him. When I went to pet him, the girls sitting in the gazebo were on their phones. Surrounded by nature’s beauty, free to enjoy silence, with a cat who wanted affection sitting at their feet, they were sucked into tiny screens.

On our return to campus, I stopped in front of another thing I’d never noticed before: a big yellow sign on the maintenance building that says OVERFILL ALARM. The class gathered in silence and looked at it. It was finally time to talk.

Does your brain have an overfill alarm? Do you override it and keep putting more in? What are the signs that it’s about to go off?

*****

Picture of black cat, Felix, courtesy of his owner, mystery author Sally Carpenter.

A Little of Everything

Today I’m a guest on fellow mystery writer Jim Jackson’s blog, answering ten questions about writing and reading. I had fun with this, and hope you will, too. Once you get to his blog, you can also find interviews with many other writers, including some of my favorites like DV Berkom. These Q&A posts could be great way to discover some new writers as well as get to know those whose work you enjoy.

Happy Tuesday.