NOW Is Already Gone

In third grade, we watched our teacher, Miss Fox, write the word NOW on the chalkboard in large letters.

Miss Fox was a large woman, not taller than 5 foot six, but probably 200 pounds. her body weighed heavily on her legs, and it seemed so contrasting to the fine, thinning divergence that was her dark auburn hair. At 8-years-old, I thought it was just weird old lady hair. Now I think back and realize she suffered severe hair loss.

Our Miss Fox had a large lap, like a grandma. The kind you’d want to sit in to listen to a story read aloud, but I don’t think anyone ever did. Miss Fox was very serious about making sure that we were learning. She wasn’t a hugger. She took to teaching as a calling. Everything she did, every word she said was an opportunity.

We didn’t know we were her last class ever. I think she might have known.

Even as an 8-year-old, I could sense her pain. Pain seemed to permeate her lower back, her walk, most anyway she sat. She didn’t stand much. She wore black, old lady nun shoes. Her legs were wrapped in elastic bands for support.

I suppose the pain is what made it all that so very important.

She told us that NOW is already gone − gone as soon as we say the word. That's what she said. She said we have to use every NOW as best we could, because NOW is so fast and so fleeting. She said that too. Miss Fox made clear that if we missed using NOW we couldn’t get it back. But, she said, if we always make the most of NOW, when we look back we would see WON.

Miss Fox died the summer after third grade. Our class was the honor guard at her funeral.

Her words about NOW, were her legacy. I often think about them.

−me strauss Letting me be

Imagine God

If, in that first moment when everything started, I was the one who made the universe, I would hope that I would only make things so lovely, so worth exploring.

I would hope that my wishful wondering would be generous and giving to the creatures and beings that I would bring to life.

I know deeply that whoever made the stars and nebulae, flowers, and trees, the hawks and cockatoos, tigers and sharks couldn’t help but have a care for us.

If it were me, I would.

I would know exactly what I made.

I would know that the people I made could make mistakes. I would wish them all of the love to grow. I’d hope they’d find the way of love, hope their feet from the hardest roads.

I’d never choose for them, but I’d wish I could. What would be the point, if I did?

I’d watch like a parent, bearing their pain, reveling in their laughter. Never able to let them know it touched me; it moved me; it made me feel.

My first words on that first day would have been, “Let there be joy.” That would be my blessing for them for eternity.

I can’t believe a creator who made the trees would want us to hurt ourselves ever.

If a person can feel and understand . . . imagine God.

−me strauss Letting me be

Looking Up, Looking Out

Being tall and often lost in thought, I have a habit of looking down when I walk − I like the view. When I want to focus − to think about writing −I get fewer distractions. If I want scenery, its nice to watch the world go by at that scale. The lighting behind me, falling on the path is lovely. I notice details that other folks quite literally overlook.

I see every stone, every crack in the pavement. I see the handprints that kids made when workers were laying the concrete. I wonder at how the tree roots broke through the sidewalk. I wish for roller skates, the old fashioned ones, when I’m on the smooth parts. I hear music in my mind and I walk to its cadence. Sometimes I watch my feet progress along the pavement.

On paths that I walk frequently, I find myself wondering whether there’s one square inch that I’ve stepped on every time I walked that direction. On all paths I think about folks who have walked before me. I picture them. They appear − the young aunt with her niece and three nephews going to town for ice cream. They are like imaginary memories.

Looking down makes the world move at the same pace as I do, and I’ve always been one who best likes the 30,000 foot view. But it also means I miss so much. I miss the flowers in the gardens and the beautiful, unique, and individual houses that stand by them. I’ve walked by some so many times and hardly recall a detail about any one of them.

One house has birds of paradise in a vase in the window. I drove by it not too long ago. How long had they been there? What else have I been missing?

Exotic flowers are art and symbols − colorful, rare, and seemingly alien − especially the flowers called birds of paradise. I love the way they seem to be always looking out, looking up. It makes me wonder what they’re thinking.

One shouldn’t walk past exotic flowers without seeing them. I need to start looking up, looking out, looking all around when I’m walking.

Life wasn’t meant to have only one perspective.

−me strauss Letting me be

Small Town Girl

You don’t really understand the place you grow until you’re gone long enough. Long enough is when you can see with the eyes of one who's never been there. It's a new place when you walk down the street and your name rings no bells, when places are memories, some no longer there. Then you begin to know where you’re from and something about who you are.

Growing up in a small town isn’t something I thought about. It was just how things were.

A small town is a small universe. It has no galaxies. It barely has solar systems. Small town stars just aren’t strong enough to get planets to orbit them not for long.

It’s the way of small towns to attract individuals not crowds, or maybe crowds don’t form because there aren't enough people. Every small town crowd is really made of tiny clusters of ones or twos or threes that happen to be together.

What that means is that the bikers, the theater folks, the dancers, the nerds, the geek, the jocks, the gays, the uptight, the laidback, and the “in-between, self-conscious-I-don’t-knowers,” all know each other/ We all talked and interacted in ways that we never would have if there were more of each of our own kind to hang out with. Instead we all learned how to talk to each other. We couldn’t help but learn.

I had no idea what that small town was teaching me about people.

−me strauss Letting me strauss

Where the Blood Flows

Who knows what it’s like to be on the inside, deep, deep inside where the blood flows. where thoughts and feelings mix with the music and color, where the universe lives both inside and out. Are their few or many? Are there any who know how to live inside that far?

Things where the stars and cells are one work differently.

Do they know that pain doesn’t hurt there? Do they know that moonlight blue is safe as being in a mother’s womb?

No one seems to know that all things come from that deep, deep place where the cells grow. No one comprehends that the love starts with those simple cell dividing, those cells we saw in Science class, those cells that live inside our being.

If everyone understood that . . . would they see that’s what makes love so strong, so pliable, so reliably unconditional?

Is it true? No one knows me. No one sees me. Is it so that they can’t see so far inside me? Maybe some see more than I do.

I know that I don’t know me.

Yet I know the place I speak of. I live, dream, I dance, I love there.

−me strauss Letting me be

That Important Question

In the way that almost 18-year-olds can, we sat in the Grand Tetons, talking earnestly until the night was gone. The night was filled with earnest dreams and honest conversation. A bond forges itself easily in two who link up as stranger openly, when fingers know their hearts were born on the same uncharted planet. Hours earlier, we’d been introduced while still dressed in glory at my brother’s wedding. We’d left tradition for blue jeans, mountain air, and a chance at unraveling our perceptions.

Until that night, no person had ever asked my philosophy of life, nor had I ever thought upon it. Yet the words came out as easily as if they had been written for that moment. They became one of the few truths that never changes.

“I want to be the kind of person that someone is better because he knew me.”

I wish I had the chance to thank the boy who asked me that important question.

—me strauss Letting me be