July 2015 – Kimberly Bryant, MA

Pass On The Salt, Please

July 28, 2015November 17, 2020Kimberly Bryant, Communications

I loved Sunday School when I was a child. Felt boards with figures of Bible characters were how I remember learning the stories of the good book, watching the sweet grandmotherly women manipulate these flat figures as they narrated the tales of Old Testament and New. And the puppets! Big mouth puppets made of felt with fuzzy acrylic or yarn hair that led us in church songs like “Blue Skies and Rainbows” or “Roll the Gospel Chariot.” I loved Sunday School, I really did. There was a story that always puzzled me, though, and that was the story of Lot’s wife.

You may not know this one: God has decided to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah because of its evil, and one Godly man remains. Lot and his family have been warned to flee the impending disaster and NOT TO LOOK BACK AS THEY LEAVE.

But Lot’s wife does. And God turns her into a pillar of salt. A freaking pillar of salt! As a child, I just didn’t understand why God would choose such a harsh punishment for simply wanting one last glance back at one’s home. The twin cities were corrupt and toxic, yes, but they were also familiar. They were home. I don’t know that I understood this until recently.

Let me explain:

I recently left my twenty year teaching career. I hadn’t really planned to. I finished my Master’s degree in my field (Theatre), I thought I had turned the corner on what had been an extremely difficult transition with a new principal, I had started the preparations for the coming school year’s production schedule. We had even started making the costumes for the planned fall production: a steampunk version of “The Wizard of Oz.”

Boom! On a Friday afternoon, upon arriving home from a week teaching drama camp, I learned that a position that I had been coveting for three years had magically become available: to be the School Days Coordinator for the Texas Renaissance Festival, the largest renaissance faire in the country, a faire I had worked at for fifteen years as an entertainer.

I struggled with the decision for about ten days, then took a deep breath and resigned my teaching position. And ever since, I find myself looking back over my shoulder, wondering if I made the right choice, fretting that my replacement would not take good care of my program, at moments desperately missing those great core theatre kids, and sometimes wishing for the chance to direct something.

It’s crippling, really.

In moments of clarity, I remember that I felt like I was slowly suffocating from the workload.

I remember that for every wonderful kid who smiled and tried, there were four who spoke rudely or whose apathy was a line drawn in the ground of the battlefield that is the classroom.

I remember that my administration treated me like a child.

I remember that my voice was ragged, and my own creative endeavors outside of school nonexistent.

It was toxic. Maybe not always, and maybe not for everyone, but for me, my school and career had become a poisoned place.

I think the Divine One knows that to look back can hinder you until you carry that misery forward into the new life He has laid out in front of you. She knows it to the tune of salt. It is as though He refuses to allow you to carry that forward. It will keep those with you from travelling forward as they should. I don’t know why God chose such a drastic means of chastening Lot’s wife, but I am trying to remember that I do not want to become my own living salt statue, inert and crumbling, unable to connect with my husband, kids, or friends.

I need to let go, and look forward to the blessings that await me on this new path:

Golf cart rides with my husband out on the verdant grounds of the renaissance festival, a renewed singing voice, time to write, respect from my boss, and work that is challenging on a large scale.

Walking away does not make me a loser. Setting down a burden that is smothering is not a failure. Life is not only struggle, it is release.

Note: I was searching through my drafts and found this one. This very week marks one year since I started my new job. My replacement took good, if disorganized, care of my students. I still miss teaching, but I am getting better at looking ahead and dreaming of what possibilities might lie ahead.

No, I Would Not Like To Sit On the Couch, Thank You.

July 24, 2015June 15, 2026Kimberly Bryant, Communications

My first memory of her is a body curled up, sleeping with her back to the living room, South Carolina sunlight streaming in the windows. I was three years old, and my mother was napping. Almost every memory of her after, no matter what age I was, includes a couch.

That first couch was a deep red with a Spanish styled print. I don’t remember that from being three, but from having sat on the edge of that couch right through seventh grade. That couch moved from Tennessee to South Carolina to Texas.

It’s always puzzled me, that couch. Red? My mom loved yellow and orange. Spanish? She hated all things Latin. A shield with crossed swords hung on the wall along with what I think was a painting of a bull fighter or something. The coffee table was a heavy wood with Spanish style turned spindles and doors trimmed in burnished brass. Where in the world did all of that come from?

She liked to call me to come sit on the couch to talk to her sometimes. She might ask about my day at school, what boys I had crushes on. Interestingly, she rarely asked about my female friends. She asked about teachers. She told me that I must go to college.

She lay there and smoked cigarettes, drank Coke or Pepsi with lemon, and watched television for my entire childhood. Soap operas, game shows, and classic horror and sci-fi were her tv of choice. She didn’t mind if I joined her for game shows or “Lost in Space,” but when it was time for “Guiding Light” or “Days of Our Lives” I had to make myself scarce.

She never got up and went to the bed in the bedroom that she shared with my dad in name only. Sure, her clothes hung in a closet in that bedroom, and there was a dresser where she had drawers of underwear and socks and chiffon nightgowns left from her bridal days. But she rarely went in that room. She was on the couch 24/7. One time, when I was about twelve, I got out of bed to get a drink of water and found my father laying on top of my mother on that couch. Sex happened on the couch. Meals happened on the couch. Sleep happened on the couch. Her life was lived on the couch.

Right around my eighth grade year, we bought a new couch: sort of a nubby weave of lime green and golden yellow. I didn’t sit on the edge of that one quite as often, as the divide between my mother and I began to widen. Confiding in her was dangerous- if I shared something I was worried about she would use it against me in an angry moment. Her own depression began to sink her into an apathy of lethargy and sleep.

Perhaps my most vivid couch memory was the day it tipped over. Let me set the scene:

It’s summer, 1979. I am out of school, my dad is at work, and my little brothers are outside playing. My mom seems…off. Her speech is slurred, she’s holding on to the walls as she makes her way to the toilet. I call my dad at work, he asks if I can just stay nearby and keep an eye on things. So I grab a book (most likely a Ramona Quimby story) and catalogs and settle down on the shag carpet for a quiet day of reading and looking at clothes in the Sears Big Book; and I watch.

My mom comes back from a bathroom trip, sits down on the couch, then pitches forward headfirst over the coffee table. Her feet were tucked up under the edge of the couch, so it flipped backward.

Turns out she was completely strung out on pain killers. This was the day we learned about my mom’s addiction.

My mom was…difficult. When she was young, people tell me she was engaging. A tremendously talented athlete. In many ways she was brave- she could face down a speeding softball, catching it and pivoting to throw it to first base in the blink of an eye- this was a gift that I saw a glimpse of when she convinced me to join the church softball league with her during one of the infrequent “good spells.” She was fast as a whippet, graceful on the field despite the numerous broken noses and arms (fearless on the softball field, nothing would stand in the way of getting on base or stopping that ball- not even her face).

She was also beautiful. there are photos that show this to be true, even after she married my dad and had me. Big blue eyes, golden olive skin, blonde hair coiffed to perfection, and impeccable style in clothing, she was a knock out.

But something changed for my mom. Depression and probably bipolar disorder intervened. I say “probably bipolar disorder” because that really wasn’t a thing that was being diagnosed in the early 1980’s. Instead, she was diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic, which isn’t quite right, but maybe as close as a 1982 psychologist could get.

Women didn’t typically have careers in the late 1960’s and 70’s. They were housewives. I don’t know that my mom found much joy in this. I think she was lonely and bored. It’s not that she didn’t love us. But she was just too sad. So she slept a lot, watched a lot of TV, got depressed, then got addicted, then got crazy. All on the couch.

The last time I visited my mom in her section 8 apartment, where she was living alone, my husband and I slept on the double bed that my grandfather had given her. She said she had tried to sleep on it, but she just couldn’t. She was still sleeping on a couch. This time, an old couch that I think might have come from the Goodwill store. She died when she was living in that apartment.

When we packed it up, my husband and I took the bedroom furniture, but not the couch.

And when I enter a home, friend’s home, or even my own home, I don’t sit on the couch unless there just are not any other options.

A few months ago, I decided I would try to join my husband on the couch- that’s where he likes to hang out. I spent about a week propped up against the arm rest, tucked under a blanket, and having flashbacks to seeing my mom living on her various couches. Not just chilling for a bit, but living. I moved back to my chair.

It’s funny how we are shaped in the strangest ways. An innocuous piece of furniture that exists in nearly every American home can become a subtle, subconscious reminder to me of that child, preteen, adolescent, then young married woman that I was, who observed the long, slow decline of my mom from happy and vibrant young mother to lonely and sad woman. And then, because I can, because somehow I figured out how to step out of her shadow, I rise each day. I sit in an office chair at work, I read in a wicker patio chair in the evening, I watch TV from my comfy chair and then sleep in a bed with my guy every night.

I just never sit on the couch.

Let’s Go Fly A Kite!

July 1, 2015November 17, 2020Kimberly Bryant, Communications

I believe kites are dreams. I mean, really, when you’re flying one, don’t you feel as though you’re floating alongside it, aloft like a dandelion seed, rising and falling on unseen wafts of air? I have not flown a kite in years, but I used to love to send a kite up into the air, running with the string, giving it slack or yanking it taut to keep it soaring.

My daddy loved to fly kites. When I was a kid, he would sometimes bring an armful of newspaper to the kitchen table and call me and my brothers into the room. We gathered scissors and tape; I would usually decorate the kite, and Daddy always stressed the importance of the tail. On other occasions, Daddy would see a kite at the store and on impulse, he would snap it up and take it excitedly to the cash register. This was a real splurge for us, money was always scarce. I think maybe Daddy bought kites when he was feeling discouraged and needed a lift.

Perhaps kites are prayers, too. Though always a man of faith, church was not something my daddy attended regularly. I am not sure what his personal faith journey was, I know there were some devastating hurts inflicted by well-meaning but misinformed church leaders. I know that in my own arrogant twenty-something faith years, I probably landed a few good blows, too.

Perhaps my daddy sent kites up when he wanted to connect with the Almighty; by shifting his focus away from the heavy gravity-soaked earth under his feet and onto the vast expanse of blue sky, he could send a little whisper to God on the breeze. I like to believe that God whispered back.

The year my daddy turned fifty, I learned something new about him. While visiting us for Christmas, he and I stayed up late to chat in the living room speckled with tree-light glow, whispering so we didn’t wake my sleeping toddler. He told me, for the first time, that he had always wanted to be an Air Force pilot, it had been his aspiration throughout childhood. When he applied for the Air Force, his eyesight prevented him from being accepted into flight school, so he went to the Navy instead.

Maybe for him, kites were also Air Force jets.

Anyway, once our kite was ready, Daddy would load us three kids in the car and we’d head to a field, usually at the nearby elementary school, and we would fly our kite until it broke or darkness fell. Those are some of my favorite memories with my dad and my two brothers.

Recently, my eldest daughter, Hilary, posted a photo on Facebook of she and a friend flying kites on the beach in California. She’s another dreamer, off in L.A. pursuing a career in film, putting away doubts and only listening to voices that encourage. I love that image- sun, sand, kites aloft, and my daughter’s smile.

My daddy was not the only one who loved kites. The Chinese are credited with inventing them thousands of years ago. The Afghan people fly kites competitively. Khaled Hosseini’s novel The Kite Runner is an exquisite chronicle of a father and son who run after fallen kites.

When I taught junior high theatre, there was always a day after standardized testing when the kids took the kites they had been building in math class out to fly. The halls were filled with such laughter and excitement– flying a kite is way better than sitting at a desk doing endless formulae, and I know that flying their very own colorful creations is probably one of their favorite school memories.

Poor Charlie Brown never could get his kite up past the kite-eating tree. Dreams denied, indeed. The classic loser can’t fly a kite.

And then there’s the classic Disney film Mary Poppins.

I always cry at the end of the movie. Somehow, the Sherman Brothers, who wrote the song for Walt Disney’s film, perfectly captured the joy that comes when you fly a kite. With its lilting melody and hopeful lyrics, a kite lover can close her eyes and remember exactly how it feels to send a kite soaring, all at once “lighter than air.” In that film, the kite is a symbol of a healing family: “Up, through the atmosphere, up where the air is clear, come, let’s go…fly a kite!” A family needs a moment when the air is clear. So does a dreamer, or a God seeker, or a middle-aged former teacher who wonders at every turn what in the world she’s supposed to be doing.

Life is kind of like kite-flying, I guess. Wind dictates direction, sometimes we go in ways we never envisioned. The glass-covered strings of our enemies can cut our own fragile strings and send us plummeting to earth, shattered and broken. Hopefully, a kite runner, maybe a loving family member or an attentive friend, occasionally even a random stranger, picks up our damaged kite and, with glue and tape and love, puts us back together so we can give it another go.

All this talk of wind and adventure and dreams has made me want to go kite-flying. I’d better go find tuppence for paper and string. Time to build my own set of wings.