by Jill MacGregor

When I think about fear…or it thinks about me and I respond…my mind goes immediately to this image of a blind many walking through a crowded airport alone with only his cane to guide him. It makes me want to hush everyone and stop them so they’ll look—LOOK! I’ll gesture madly, not wanting to interrupt what’s happening but needing everyone’s gaze to be like a laser on what I’m seeing.

Blind man in an airport.

He’s not hesitating. He somehow knows how to get to his gate. I don’t always know how to get to my gate…but I’ve got airport issues… He’s not bumping into people. In fact, no one seems to be noticing HOW AMAZING this is but me. EVERYONE, I silently communicate by flapping my arms like a crazy person. LOOK, my eyes wide, I make an exaggerated arched pointing motion toward the action that I need all to see. HOW, I gesture in my self-inflicted game of charades, shrugging my shoulders, shaking my head in disbelief.

It stuns me. This blind man in an airport. I feel like I always see him.

They say real bravery begins when you have a choice and still decide to do the right or hard thing. Blind Man in an Airport could have stayed home.

Fear and Bravery…now there’s a pair. Always diametrically opposed yet somehow linked like two girls at either end of the ropes of my personal Double Dutch. “Jump now!” they say as I nod my head in time to the ropes rhythmic invitation. Always working in unison, fear and bravery, they try to work the ropes so that I can jump in and find my cadence. Sometimes it takes a while…sometimes I think the ropes are going to smack me in the face if I pick the wrong moment to enter what looks like chaos. But the partners in crime, Fear and Bravery, have it all under control—as if they hear the metronome and are simply waiting for me to trust…and jump…and feel instead of think.

by Jill MacGregor

Outside my window is a very tall pine tree. It’s full of new growth, thin spindly long branches that grow up and out. Fat little birds will perch on the very end of these branches, relaxed as the skinny branch curves and bows under their weight into an upside down C. How do they understand the pliability of the branch? How do they hang onto the branch (without getting a cramp) and maintain their balance? How do they know how far to go without it snapping? They sit there, playing chicken with the topmost branch and I wonder how it doesn’t spa-roing! back and catapult them through the air. Those little birds know if they lose their footing they can simply flap, flap, flap to another branch and start the whole branch bending experiment (my point of view) over again.

Even a fat, little bird understands there’s a Plan B. But more importantly, those birds understand that branches were made to bend under them, just as they were made to hang on.

I stare at this tree often and watch these birds push the laws of physics on the skinniest ends of the branches. I long to see one of them push it a bit too far only to get whipped back in the other direction, flying against its will.

Never happens.

But stop for a minute. What if all those things we perceive as dangers are the normally pliable parts of life that move around, sometimes feeling unstable, but are always solidly under our feet? What kind of chances would you take then?

Life can sometimes feel like a revolving door of missed opportunities. Perhaps it’s more of a course correction and our way of moving from one branch to another.

Or becoming a strong branch for another—maybe you’re someone’s safe spot to land.

There’s something to be said for believing that you’ll be alright, that if you lose your footing you can always rely on your wings to find a new stable spot in life.

By Jill MacGregor

My mom once told me “Don’t pray for patience because you’ll be shown how to be patient in ways you never wanted to imagine.”

I try to never assume. Sometimes saying a prayer fills me with the same feeling I get before I assemble a wall unit from IKEA. My instructions will be in pictures not words, with symbols I may not understand and 9 times out of 10—I’m going to have to get my drill out and make the hole on the other side of where it currently resides. I usually find out that I’ve done something upside down, post hole drilling, of course.

I have been known to misinterpret.

I unfortunately have come to think of God as a bit of a trickster (perhaps even Scandinavian…see: GØD), possibly a lawyer (sorry, lawyer friends), always looking for the loophole—Sometimes looking for the exquisite pain that could accompany the answer to a prayer because I left out something obvious and critical. From a very early age I felt if I did not specify every particular of my prayer that God might dupe me on a technicality.

It would have been my own fault for not having being specific.

Because of that, I have a tendency to make each prayer sound a bit like a deli order. Since I want my sandwich the way I want it and so there are no misunderstandings I have a tendency to list all the withs and withouts in extreme detail. It may sound something like this:

“Dear God. I would like to meet Mr. Right. And not the Mr. Right who starts out like Mr. Right only to turn into Mr. Wrong by the end of the movie. I would like to meet someone who loves me. I would like to meet a man who loves me.” And because I may be called later on being vague, I add,” And he’s not married. Or gay. Or dead. Or in prison.” And because I may only have myself to blame, I add, “I would like to love him back.”

And because sometimes God only gives me half an ear due to multi-tasking, I add: “And I would like him to be my height or taller because we’ve already tried the shorter thing and no one’s really happy. And no toupee. I can do bald. Bald’s ok, but no comb over. And I’d like him to have a job that makes as much as me or more because we know how weird it gets when he finds out I make more than he does. Not everyone is a carpenter. Ha. (awkward pause) It’s ok if he is a carpenter. As long as his hands are clean.”

I reflect. I wonder, if I were God, how could I screw me?

Countless times, I’ve made God the bad genie who just granted me three wishes only to catch me in my greediness and deliver the pure and unadulterated crap I accidentally wished for in my haste.

I pause and try to find some way that God might misrepresent my wishes, because I realize that if he only followed my instructions to the letter, everything would be perfect.

And I got to tell you…between you and I, God might be coasting on thin ice. Sure, I’ve experienced the joy of unanswered prayers. Somebody got busy and didn’t clear the list of to-do’s that day and it just happened to work out in my favor anyhow.

I’m sure I offered up a begrudging *thank you* in response…since the situation didn’t follow my specifications.

If only God would listen…

Poor God. Reading whatever he wishes into my prayers, right or wrong.

Poor God. Not understanding what needs to happen to make me happy. I’m here telling him, if only he’d pay attention. I am detailed for a reason.

Poor God. I don’t know what else I can do to help him. (tired smile)

Poor God. If only he were as smart as me.

A Valentine’s Day Story

By Jill MacGregor

I know a lot about your insides.

Going to high school in Austin, MN—the Home of Hormel—grants one particular access. Unless you too grew up in a meat packing town, I doubt you know what I’m talking about. Austin High School—home of the Packers: get it… because we were MEAT Packers…now go make cheerleader jokes…

Hormel. Spam. Got it?

When I was in high school I was fascinated by anatomy and physiology, thinking that one day I would be a doctor. Those dreams were dashed after what is known as the *unfortunate live frog incident*.

So what could this possibly have to do with Hormel, you may ask. One simple thing. PARTS. I’m talking about free parts—throw away parts, parts not even fit for the hot dogs. Hormel would generously provide our High School with buckets of free parts for dissection. (don’t think too long on that one…) Living in a meat packing town puts you on the fast track to getting free parts for anatomy classes. So, I’m taking some classes where we receive little formaldehyde soaked animals pumped full of red and blue latex and then other classes where we’d get giant buckets of pig eyeballs, straight from the pig. This was when I learned that our bodies are not as clean on the inside as they are on the outside.

One day, while clenching a live frog,(who knows where we got our frogs from…) my sharp probe pointed in the direction of its brain and spinal column, I suddenly understood this little frog was not going to be full of red and blue latex. The frog was also making a lot of eye contact. I sadly explained to my lab teacher that I just wasn’t able to kill the frog and handed him back. My lab teacher, who was always so sweet and gentle, took the frog and probe from me, told me he completely understood and gave that poor little frog the business inches from my face. “Pith and double pith”, he whispered as the probe scrambled Mr. Frog’s brain and then his spinal column.

He handed me back my limp frog, my mouth a frozen circle of “NO!”

The *unfortunate live frog incident*.

It was really interesting to dissect, though.

That was the moment I realized that I just might not be a doctor. It was very hard to see everything clearly with all of that blood obscuring my view. We are actually full of messy, messy blood. I suddenly longed for red and blue latex.

That didn’t stop me though from doing an independent anatomy project, which involved that same sweet lab instructor handing me a small, preserved shark wrapped in plastic, a set of scalpels and tools and reminding me to keep it refrigerated or it would go bad. My mom gave up her crisper drawer in the fridge and if I curved the shark just right I could get all 1 ½ feet of it in the drawer.

I confess, it’s not as easy to dissect alone. At the kitchen table. Every time I laid the shark on the table and prepared to dissect, I would expect it to twitch as my blade would touch its belly. Or I would replay my own version of Jaws: tiny Florida license plates spilling from its tiny shark stomach as I cut…

And its eyes. You know how they say (in Jaws) that a shark has dead eyes? Well, when it’s dead, it still has those same dead eyes making it look a little bit alive…for a shark. Alone at the kitchen table, these are the stories that would play in my head and although I outweighed my tiny shark by –well, geez, I think it only weighed 5 pounds—I always expected it to rear back on my hand and take a few fingers.

After a few months, my mom requested the crisper drawer be returned to a shark free zone and I hesitantly threw the man eater away. My lab instructor never asked about the shark. I imagine it was a gift with purchase he received by the Dead Things Full of Red and Blue Latex Company that supplied our high school with all of those fetal pigs.

Speaking of fetal pigs. The fetal pigs were the epitome of Comparative Anatomy II. You would spend the entire semester with your own tiny pig, meticulously identifying each internal organ and system. I was fascinated with my pig.

I was also fascinating with a boy whose name I can’t recall but in my mind he’s an amalgam of 3 boys. I had such a tremendous crush. Unrequited, of course. He was part of our group of friends so I always saw him and probably gushed a bit in his direction when I did.

I’m a proclamation kind of girl. I don’t mind taking a chance and making a statement. Valentine’s Day was just around the corner and I had an idea. I was going to tell him that I liked him. To his face. And I think I had come up with the perfect way to do it.

It was going to be very original.

Played and replayed in my head, suddenly Valentine’s Day was here and it was time to act. I saw him in the hall, in High School the location of all meaningful events.

“Hi Amalgam of Three Boys I Liked in High School (AOTBILIHS). I wanted to give you something very special for Valentine’s Day. I bet no one else will give you something like this.”

AOTBILIHS: looking wary yet strangely curious, “What is it?”

“It’s a surprise. Hold out your hand and close your eyes.”

AOTBILIHS: extremely apprehensive, “Close my eyes?”

“Just do it. I promise it’s not bad.”

AOTBILIHS complies, closing his eyes and reaching his open hand toward me, palm up.

I place my palm over his and close his fingers into a fist.

“I wanted to give you my heart. Happy Valentine’s Day.”

AOTBILIHS opens his eyes and his hand to discover he’s holding something he can’t identify. It looks like a piece of eraser. Eyes meet mine, questioning.

“It’s my heart.”

Not getting it.

“It s my fetal pig’s heart, actually.” But in a pinch it would have to do. We only got respiratory systems and eyeballs from Hormel.

And as he began to understand that I had removed a piece of dead pig and put its dead pig heart in his hand, his eyes grew wide and his hand, still gently cradling my heart, jerked up and hurled the pig’s heart somewhere behind him. Into the maddening throng of even more maddened teenagers, most hoping that cupid’s arrow would strike them that Valentine’s Day.

Only to be struck in the head by my fetal pig’s heart.

I am a believer in the power of words, the raw, knock you on your ass, change everything power of words. Some words change minds, some words change history.

“I have a dream…”

If loose and sloppy, words can do damage and destroy. I do believe that sticks and stones will break my bones –but words, words can sometimes cause an injury that is much more severe.

Some words are hard to say. They get stuck in our craw, if they even make it that far. They can be easier to say to some people than others.

You hurt me.

Forgive me.

I’m sorry.

I love you.

Those little words. They can change everything. They can make us feel vulnerable. They so concretely say the things our eyes are trying to express. As difficult to they can be to say…those words can also make all the difference. It’s the words that make us feel the most naked that often are the words that draw us closer to others—and them to us. All those words and actions that bare us have a purpose past making us feel awkward.

Why do we sometimes hesitate? It’s very easy to not want to open the can of worms, Pandora’s Box and create other cataclysmic moments. These little words can irreversibly change a situation, ringing a bell that cannot be unrung.

Maybe we all need to shake hands with feeling uncomfortable more often.

We all have the select group of people who have heard you say anything—and I mean anything. Things they may have wished we’d not said. Things that made you throw your arms around each other. Good, bad or difficult—it’s because these people fall under a different classification– the people who will love us no matter what. We’ve already had to be brave with them –we’ve tested limits.

I guess it’s the other classification of people I’m less sure about. There seem to be a group of people that regardless how long I’ve known them I only get to know them so far. It’s as if we never move from the shallow end of the pool.

I like the free feeling I get when my feet can’t touch—even if it has moments of fear attached.

By Jill MacGregor

When I walk outside, dinosaurs don’t chase me. I don’t see danger at every turn. My fight or flight response rarely if ever has good cause to kick in.

Except when I am saving everyone’s life in my head. I do it a lot.

You’re welcome. Just doing my job.

What could I possibly be talking about? It’s like this. In my head, on a very regular basis, I have smack down every home invader, scare the shit out of every mugger and protected myself and everyone I love from danger.

It’s sort of a volunteer position.

Until recently, I thought it was one of those things we all did—like talking to yourself or replaying the day’s events until they played more favorabley.

Is this wasted energy or preparation? Only time will tell because I do inadvertently store all my scenarios away. Not for review but for just in case. Card catalog of defensive maneuvers and crushing comebacks… complete with bat shit crazy facial expressions and gestures so every fictional attacker understands that I have nothing to lose, I’ve been waiting for trouble…for the myriad of dangerous situations in which I find myself…alright, ,in my head.

I am not a negative person. I am slightly embarrassed to admit that I am an optimist which makes me feel like Pollyanna, bonnet tied under my chin, understanding that my fall from the tree will bring the town together.

But, honestly, we live in a world full of miracles. Children unburied in Haiti. Peace when everything points to potential chaos. Saying yes instead of saying no.

We created this phrase: near miss. It describes all the good things that rationally shouldn’t have happened but did.

Maybe that’s just our version of a miracle.

In fact, we’ve created an entire lexicon all so we don’t have to say miracles. I think it might embarrass us or feel too Old Testament…

Narrow escape. Incredulous. Unexpected. Lucky Duck. To be in awe of. And then, out of nowhere. When I least expected it.

All miracles.

Love. Friendship. Forgiveness. Cured (always past tense). Belief.

All of those positive things that happen in a way we can’t quite explain…miracles. Doesn’t always have to involve Olympic hockey or rising from the dead to be miraculous.

I could leave my crime fighting behind me. The world may not need me to take care of it after all.

`

by Jill MacGregor

There came a time when the risk to remain tight in the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.

Anais Nin

Tested.

Steeled.

Trial by fire.

Sometimes what feels really bad is really good for us. In a there’s no other way to get this information kind of way.

We’ve all had those moments, when we’re living our lives, minding our own business and things are going fine. Then, in what feels like out of the blue, everything changes, situations become difficult and you’re knee deep in something thorny, possibly tragic and definitely something new…not good new.

Suddenly, something is going to stop being easy. Something’s going to stop being comfortable. And sometimes, something that we thought was perfect and dear may be ending.

All these rough spots that life nudges us toward with sharp, pointy elbows, the moments of great change and sometimes great pain, coincidently happen to be pockets of intense personal growth of the *whether you want to or not* variety.

I have a tendency to whisper “thank you” under my breath, understanding that this situation I’m about to be shoved into is going to change me at the core whether I want to be changed or not. And while it changes me, it also prepares me to deal with other challenges. Thank you, I whisper, for change and all of its many guises.

Thank you, for the job that ended…because I am doing so many more interesting things with my time and mind. Things I wouldn’t have discovered and truly embraced otherwise.

Thank you for the relationships that have changed or ended even though at the moment it felt like a loss. They’ve allowed other relationships to rise to the surface and become even more important to me.

Thank you for distance that makes me miss some of the most important people in my life. It makes me never waste a moment with them.

Thank you for all of the times I only had a vague notion of what I wanted my life to be—all the times when I felt like I was just a big aggregate of dissimilar situations, unconnected events, a pile of strings. Those moments taught me patience (still learning) and gave me an eye to spot what’s valuable…not by the shine, but by the strength.

Although my first reaction to change may be pain, fear, sadness or discomfort, that is merely a response to a symptom of what I’m experiencing, not the end product of change. These symptoms are just the deep stretch to warm up my emotional muscles. And sometimes that initial stretch doesn’t feel very good at all. I think I’ve pulled something…

Thank you, I whisper, for all the times I thought I couldn’t. There’s nothing like being half way up the proverbial mountain and feeling like you have no strength to continue only to discover you have just enough in you for one more step–and one more step and one more step after that.

Thank goodness for that.

The most important thing to remember is this: To be ready at any moment to give up what you are for what you might become.

W.E.B. Du Bois

You may want to read Don’t Make Me *Lucky Bastard* You

by Jill MacGregor

I’m finding that I like to designate a new year *The Year of Fill InThe Blank* before I get too far into it. Sort of give it a theme, like a ride at Disneyland. It keeps me focused, as if someone’s posted a sign I can always glance up at in case I’ve forgotten what I need to be doing next.

This has been such an interesting last year and a very different year than I’ve had in a long time. I felt myself ramping during 2009. Making changes and having changes made all around me that put me in a unique position to (voraciously) need to know the inner workings of things around me in a new way. NEED TO KNOW like a starving person. I’m not sure why what brought this on. Therefore, 2009 was appointed The Year of Learning.

I felt this overwhelming need to be smarter in 2009.

Don’t get excited– I still round up on fractions (learned that from baking) and my high school friend, Anne, will make a very sad face while explaining my difficulties with Algebra…blah…

In 2009, I caught a sense of the speed the world was moving at, how it was picking up speed everyday and I didn’t find it scary. I found it thrilling. I understood in my bones that there was more I needed to know so that I could keep up with all this spinning.

Year of Learning.

So, what is this year supposed to be? It seems really important to label it…like the Chinese do. Some ideas:

Lovely choices, and annoying accurate, but possibly not what I’m looking for.

When I think about what the focus of this year should be, I want to see myself at the end of it, on December 31st, breathing a contented sign and feeling like my life is so much better than when the year started. That was how it felt this Dec 31st and I liked it. Maybe this coming year should be:

Honestly, The Year of Learning will continue, because once you start a practice like that it’s difficult to stop. The monster must be fed.

And if the only one holding me back is me—I guess the question is really how big can I make this year. How can I make enormity look small?

Oh my…I have to sit down.

Maybe this could be The Year of Risk.

Let me take a moment and step back. Sometimes when I ask myself big questions like this or when I lay my little head on the pillow, I find myself back in Hong Kong, for some strange reason. It’s not because I lived there for an extended period of time or even had a significant experience there. I did go there last year for business and pleasure and certainly enjoyed my trip…but didn’t feel a big urge to return to Hong Kong.

So why do very palpable memories come flooding back? I smell the streets, I feel the heat, I know what to expect around the corner where my mind’s eye has taken me…

Maybe it’s because I was a stranger there. I was foreign.

And I got lost a lot.

I really love those two things—being foreign and getting lost in a strange land. It turns you on your head and forces you outside your comfort zone. I am very comfortable outside of my comfort zone…well, maybe outside of someone’s comfort zone. It seems like there’s something about not understanding that makes you realize that you are on the verge of understanding something really big.

Perhaps I should call this The Year of Being on the Verge of Understanding Something Really Big.

That could do with some editing.

While I ponder my year, I’d love to hear what you think the focus of your year is going to be. Shout it out!

By Jill MacGregor

Take all choice away. Just grind me down to a nub. Shove and elbow me right to the very edge. Force me into a corner, take away my wet paint brush and turn off the lights. Do you find that this is when and where you make your most significant changes—or is it just me?

I wish change was a glorious Oprah *aha moment* that I had over International Delights coffee each morning but it just never seems to happen that way.

Sometimes change is a bully, pushing and shoving me into a rage until I finally push back harder. People can do the most amazing things right after they’ve taken the hardest punch and suffered the most severe losses. Just when you think you’ve nothing left, you’re completely depleted and broken, you can push yourself up, harness the thing that makes you mad enough to spit and beat change down until it serves you, it obeys you. Is this extreme a necessary ingredient for us to change?

Change is hard and many times we just don’t wanna. We like puppies and bunnies and unicorns—not change. But those things don’t usually motivate us do they? Did you hear that? I just said happiness doesn’t motivate us to change. Happiness is the warm, snuggly bed that we don’t want to get out of…yet the day calls and the bully shoves.

Chaos seems to be the doorway to change. It’s the wind kicking up and the sirens going off that seems to put us in the starting position.

I hate that.

Fresh Starts. So, here we are at a new year. You can’t really make a fresh start without a little wear around your edges. An occasional dent and scratch that reminds you to try a different path this time. A scar that serves as a badge of sorts, a battle wound, maybe still tender, that makes you wiser, gives you the experience to remain calmer this time, creates a new level of certainty as you make a fresh plan, craft a new path for yourself. The recent past is your compass as you chart a course in the New Year.

Resolutions. Resolutions are all about looking forward which is a good thing but, at the end of the year, it seems just as important to take a moment and assess the goods. What did you accomplish in the last year? What slipped through your fingers? What did you not get to as fast as you’d wished? Looking behind you can be just as important as looking forward at moments like these. So, take a look in your basket—all full of scraps of joy and pain and hope. Pick through the pieces of almost and next year that are stuck to the back of every hope and dream that weights your basket—and look, my friend, at all the accomplishments in there. Really acknowledge them, big and small. Maybe your accomplishments met up with your expectations, maybe they didn’t – but they are still accomplishments.

This could be a more apropos time to take a breather, a temporal sorbet, that cleanses you from the past. Do you feel a dull hollow resonating in you from a previous disappointment? Set it down and leave it here. Allow yourself to move forward refreshed. You’ll move faster without itsr extra weight — there are so many important things to get to that will be far more important to you than this old disappointment.

Reminders. I was reminded of a lot of things this year. Some of these reminders looked like they came in neat little packages until I unwrapped them. Deceptive. Sometimes the seemingly simplest things that happen in our lives can carry the greatest weight. Here are some of the reminders I received this year.

My wish for you. I wish you bounty as we enter the New Year. Bounty in every guise—love you feel you may not deserve, success that comes at you like a raging locomotive, fulfillment that wraps its arms around you and makes you purr like a cat, the cup that runneth over repeatedly, the forgiveness that comes unexpectedly, the understanding that allows you to be just who you are, the peace that allows you to move through difficult moments unmarred, the strength that you didn’t think you had at the exact moments you need it and the ability to give all the kindness your heart wishes it would receive.

Here’s to your wonderful 2010.

by Jill MacGregor

I am seven.

I am finally getting to grow my hair out and occasionally, my mother who has fine, stick straight hair, will give my very wavy hair a perm. Vicarious Lilt Permanent Wave…

I don’t know why either.

My dad takes me to the Planetarium on what feels like a regular basis and I like it. I love it when they turn out the lights and its pitch dark and the voice and the stars come on at the same time. It doesn’t make me feel small or insignificant. It makes me feel a part of something big that I don’t understand.

We have fun, my parents and me. In my spare time, I am trying to learn how to swear. I am not very good at it and swear like someone who is just learning English– but I seem to always get caught when swearing (with poor syntax and improper conjugation) at one of the neighborhood boys.

I have mastered riding my bike without training wheels and have stopped careening into the fins of our Oldsmobile (ow) and the mailbox (ow, but a smaller one).

We live in Peoria, Il. We will live here just short of two years. We will live here just long enough to complete a very important task. And if you don’t believe that everything happens for a reason, I hope this will change your mind. And if it doesn’t change your mind…I think you might be visited by three ghosts tonight.

I regularly defend my friend Wee. His name is really Lee but he has a wittle wisp and it takes me a long time to get that his name is Lee, not Wee, and what a lisp really is. He is smaller and gets picked on and I don’t mind pushing a bully. I am not a delicate little girl.

I have been an only child for seven years. And one day in July 1969, just a few weeks before Neil Armstrong is the first man to walk on the moon, my parents tell me I am going to have a little brother…at the end of the week.

Hmmm.

Jack, my brother. I don’t know if I’d say I was excited about the idea of having a brother but I was definitely curious. If my parents had said we were getting a puppy, I would have been excited. We all visited the adoption agency in our Sunday best and were led to a sunny room with a white rocking chair. And we meet Jack. He is days old and has that tiny old man look that newborns often have. We are told that Jack has the same birthday as my mom and we all quietly recognize this as special.

We don’t quite know how to act because our excitement is growing with every minute we spend with our new, old man, Jack. We could laugh hysterically or cry or sit staring in quiet amazement that here we are…HERE WE ARE, a very different family than we were 5 minutes ago. Everything was different yet at the same time it was as if we’d always been this family of four and all previous moments in our non-Jack, threesome world had disappeared and been swiftly replaced by moments that we’d always shared with Jack.

We all settled in.

My brother, Jack. Someone I don’t know gave him that big nose and that even bigger brain. He’s all MacGregor with his weird sense of humor, highly functional made up language, love of blowing up fireworks in near illegal and always dangerous ways. All MacGregor.

But then he’s also very, “I don’t get your art. It doesn’t look like anything. Maybe if you painted a tree.” (I do abstracts.) And very “I don’t understand the movie. I’m going to Wikipedia it.” These things crack me up.

Fast forward to December. My Dad informs me that my Aunt Margaret and her family are going to spend Christmas with us. Aunt Margaret is my Dad’s sister. Her family includes Uncle Don (never met him) and my cousins Greg, Mark, Donna and Lori (never met them, either). These cousins are all older than me. There are 6 people coming to stay with us in our 3 bedroom duplex. We were being invaded and the thought was thrilling.

So, 6 of them and 4 of us.

Family can just happen in a moment, whether you’re genetically linked or not. The main thing is that everyone agrees, “Yes, this is what we are. Our tribe. Our strange little tribe.” I remember this Christmas so fondly because there was a thrill in not being the oldest…I did not have to be as responsible as the others and I liked that. And there was so much funny. The jokes went back and forth at a crazy speed and although my kid brain could only observe and not fully participate in the zingers, I knew this was a skill I wanted to develop. I wanted to play like this!

In this little three bedroom duplex, there were suddenly 10 people. Plus a Christmas tree that was so big (obviously a representation of the excitement everyone was feeling) that it wouldn’t fit in the house. We had to saw off the top two feet and it was still so large for the room that the lower branches were flush with the floor. We had an obese Christmas tree. Your Christmas tree is so fat—how fat is it?!—that when it sits around the house…its really sits around the house. Really—we couldn’t put presents under the tree because there was NO under the tree. There was tree adjacent seating for all presents. I think we had to cut some of the limbs off in the back so that it didn’t take up half the room.

But the tree was a symbol. A symbol of our excitement at being together. Our swelling, uncontainable, irrepressible excitement that we were all under the same roof in a space far too small to contain us and therefore there just may be some bursting at the seams. We felt like an army, our numbers had grown so quickly overnight. We were together—some of us for the first times in our lives. And then there was this little baby—what kind of lottery did we win?

We were lucky and we knew it. It made us loud. It made the Christmas tree take up half the room. It was such a great Christmas, all stuffed in that duplex with the gia-nourmous Christmas tree like a sausage fixing to burst its casing, our excitement and energy vibrating the walls.

It was so different than I was used to and I liked it.

Because of our overstuffed house, people slept were they fell. My cousin Lori was (and still is) three years older than I am. And suddenly she was an older sister and I was a younger sister—I think we both enjoyed the change of roles. When you are 7 and she is 10, those 3 years become as vast and unconnected as if we were different dialects of the same language. As we lay in the dark on our bed of fluffy blankets, we decided Christmas was a perfect time for scary stories. This is when my cousin Lori told me the story of the china doll that came to life at night and sawed the head off of its current owner with its crazy big fingernail. As she whispered the story in the dark, I saw that doll with its unblinking eyes and frozen smile coming at me with a speed that was never fast and never slow yet always gaining on me…I am forever put off by those dolls now. Shiver…blah…

It is Christmas morning and we have all slept in the same house as if we attended a party that never ended. We have opened our presents and now lay amidst the rubble of paper and bows and thank you’s and I felt full. Full in the best way imaginable—as if having everyone to our house was the perfect meal and I had eaten the exact amount to be full but not too full. Having everyone together, in my mind, we became the family that wouldn’t stop growing—first Jack and now all these raucous cousins—and it was, well ,it was perfect.

Jack, in his special Christmas pajamas—I can still see them. The pajamas were red and white with a big Christmas mouse on them and a little Santa hat that Jack could wear on his very bald head. He was no longer the tiny baby we had brought home 6 months ago, in fact, that day wasn’t even in my memory. He had just always been with us, just like these new cousins of mine, only far away, and we just hadn’t met yet.

It only takes a moment to love a child. In the snap of your fingers, everything is different, as if that love has been in you and growing for as long as you’ve been alive.

This was the first Christmas I understood how big family could be, how loud, how crowded, how different—and how inclusive all those things were. We were lucky. We were lucky that we just happened to live in Peoria at the same time when Jack was born and that the state adoption agency, who had said no for so many years to my a little bit older, already had one child parents, finally, one day, just said yes. Really…just said yes– and we don’t know why after so many no’s. Yes, to a family and a mother who happened to have the same birthday as her new, little boy.

The next place we moved to was West Lafayette, IN, home of Purdue University. Neil Armstrong graduated from Purdue. I’m just saying…

No, you shut up.

Don’t mention coincidence to me. Can I make you understand? Walking on the moon or a new little brother…these were things that happened against all odds and changed everything from that day forward.