Author: Margaret Bendet (Page 3 of 6)

Some I chanted for, clockwise from the top: two of my great grandmothers, Mary Baright Dunsmoor (left) and Great Grandma Reeves, are with my father, George Dunsmoor at age four; a dear friend, Terry Shurig Farrier; another great grandmother, Grace Green, with my mother and her brother, Grace and Alan Green; Great Grandpa and Grandma Allen with my grandmother Florence at age one; my paternal grandmother, Margaret, at age sixteen; and finally, my mom again with my brother Geoff at his baptismal.

Pitru Paksha, the Hindus’ “time of the ancestors” was finished last week, but I feel that something has started for me that won’t ever end. That sounds ominous, and I don’t mean it that way. It was quite lovely to chant for people I care about who have passed on—the ancestors.

For the final chant, I wore a tiny silk scarf that Joan Szabo, the mother of a former friend, gave me for Christmas some fifteen years ago. I learned last week that Joan had just died, at ninety-two, and so I added her to the people I was chanting for. The scarf is a floral pattern in shades of blue that would have looked good on Joan’s fair coloring, and it’s a size that was in fashion in the fifties, when she was a young woman. I think she liked the scarf, and that’s why she gave it to me.

It’s no bigger than a whisper, so I’ve kept it through all of my moves because it reminds me of this dear woman, who once invited me to her cottage for Thanksgiving dinner because she knew that I couldn’t be with my own family. She was then about the age I am now. We both ended up leaving upstate New York, Joan to be close to a daughter I don’t know very well and I to come to Whidbey. We lost touch.

Until now. Chanting for someone is actually a very personal action, especially when that person has passed on. I felt the presence of the people I named in my little dedication, which became a bit more formal, a bit more like a sacred rite with each repetition. It also got quite a bit longer, as I kept adding people day by day. Pitru Paksha is sometimes called “the fortnight of the ancestors,” but it’s not fourteen days; it’s fifteen. And the way I did it—starting when the lunar phase began in the U.S. and ending when the lunar phase ended in India—it was actually sixteen days. I just wanted to be sure that this year I didn’t miss it, any of it.

The text I chanted is Shri Guru Gita. It’s roughly an hour of Sanskrit recitation. It begins with a namasankirtana—”singing the Name”—which is easy back-and-forth chanting. Each day after the first couple of lines of the namasankirtana, I would close my eyes and start making my dedication: “This chant is for my mother, Grace Green Dunsmoor; my father, George Baright Dunsmoor; my brother, Geoffrey Baright Dunsmoor; my uncle, Alan Green…”

This all started years ago with Uncle Alan. That’s too long a story to tell in detail, but the first time I sent blessings to Alan some twenty-five years ago, he was inhabiting a bleak astral space, and he jumped from there into my body right through the top of my head. There was a scary week then, during which I protected myself by chanting daily the very text that I this year offered on his behalf. All those years ago, I was finally able to obtain serious blessings for Alan, and since then he’s been in a good place. I used to say that this was the one clearly good thing I’ve done in my life: I was instrumental in rescuing a soul from hell.

During Pitru Paksha, one of the people I named in every chant is Mrs. Kennedy, a teacher who gave me a hard time in the fourth and fifth grade. This was very strong for me. After the second dedication, each day when I said, “Mrs. Kennedy,” I heard her say, “Oh, thank you!” and I felt such love. Also, I had a sense of her presence as I chanted; I saw that I had been difficult for her as well… and I remembered that when I was in Mrs. Kennedy’s class, I was given eyeglasses that did nothing to correct my vision. I realize now that I couldn’t see… and that this might have been a reason I had trouble in her class. She might have had reason to think I was slow. Through the process of chanting, I actually forgave her. I could feel it.

Early on in this holy period, I was fairly selective about who I named. I started bringing in Alan’s daughter, my cousin Joyce, because I knew he and my mother would both like that. Of course, I named my two grandmothers and my, to my mind, three grandfathers. But then I named only three of my great grandmothers. I didn’t know any of these women. I still don’t know the name of my paternal grandmother’s mother—I called her Great Grandma Reeves—but I was happy to chant for her; she looks quite jolly in her photographs. Initially, however, I consciously did not chant for Great Grandma Allen. She’s my maternal grandmother’s mother, and I’d never liked anything I heard about her. When Florence, my grandmother, was still a girl, her mother used to tell her that they didn’t need to worry about anyone trying to kidnap her, not with a face like that. And when she first saw my mother, she said, “What a homely baby!” What kind of darkened sight did this woman have that she would say such a thing to her own daughter and about her own granddaughter!

Then I thought, “But she must have been so unhappy. She may need help now.” So, I started including her; and all four of my great grandfathers, too—even though my mother detested the grandfather she grew up with. But was I only going to chant for nice people? No. I’m not always nice myself. I just do the best I can.

There is a story that my first teacher used to tell about a maid who was truly mean. In her entire life, this maid performed only one virtuous act—she gave a meal to a holy person who needed the food. When this woman died, her soul went to the bleak nether regions of the astral plane that she had earned by the way she lived. There was, however, the merit from her one virtuous act—which appeared before her in the form of a huge carrot, ascending toward heaven. The maid caught hold of the carrot, and it started to carry her up. The other souls in hell were thrilled to see this carrot heading for heaven, and they started grabbing onto the maid’s feet and to other people’s feet. Before long, hundreds of souls were being lifted to heaven on the strength of this one good deed.

But the maid was not a generous soul. “What are you doing?” she cried out. “This is my carrot. It was my good deed.” And she started batting away the other people… even though to do that, she had to let go of the carrot.

The carrot went to heaven without any of them. My teacher used to say, “It wouldn’t have hurt her at all. She could have just let the other people come along.”

So, that’s my way of seeing it. I want as many people as possible to ascend on my carrot. I’m inviting everyone who’s interested to come along.

Today I opened my email and found a message from a Pat Fillinghim—a name that meant nothing to me. She wrote, “Peggy, I have tried to find you forever. Tried Terry and discovered that she’s died…”

Pat! It was Pat Sayles, my friend of longest standing, the person I met in the sixth grade in the first year I moved to Tulsa. She had sent the message one minute earlier. I started replying immediately, and two hours later we were talking on Facetime. That wouldn’t have been possible sixty-five years ago, when we first met.

“Ha,” she said when she saw me. “We both have white hair!”

We talked about a lot of things—how both of our younger brothers had variously eaten, smoked, and, for mine, also drunk themselves into early graves. “Corky ate nothing but hamburgers and French fries,” Pat said, “and he wouldn’t quit smoking. He had asthma as a kid, and our father died of lung cancer without ever having smoked. The doctor told Corky, ‘You have two strikes against you already. You have to quit.’ You know what Corky said? ‘It has to be bad for you to do something as painful as stopping smoking is for me.’ So, he died of lung cancer six years ago.”

In the last nine months of his life, my brother Geoff did quit drinking—as many as three fifths of Scotch a week—but by that time, he was on morphine, so I’m not sure giving up alcohol counted as a health measure. Geoff died ten years ago; he was just sixty-two.

It turned out that our friend Terry Shurig Farrier died only this last August. “I thought she might know how to find you,” Pat said, “but when I went looking for her, I found her obituary. It said she died in her sleep.” We agreed that this was good.

It was a wide-ranging and highly personal conversation, and it was sweet beyond measure. Pat is on her fourth marriage—two were to the same man: her first husband, Mike. “I remember,” I said, “at the wedding reception dinner when Mike told you to stop chewing ice. I thought, ‘That’s not good.’”

Both Pat and I had spent our early married lives trying to live up to what our husbands wanted from us.

“But I liked your Ed,” she said. “I thought he was nice.”

“He could be lovely,” I said. “But then he would close into himself and have nothing to say–for months.” It’s lonelier to live with a person like that than it is to live alone.

Pat met Ed when she came to visit us on R ‘n’ R from her husband. She was pregnant for the second time, and he’d started sleeping with his secretary and had decided that he didn’t want to be a father. Pat should have an abortion, he told her, “And he wanted us to give up the child we had for adoption,” Pat said, “the one-and-a-half-year-old.

“Now, I ask myself: How could I remarry such a man? I can’t fathom it. But I so believed in marriage. I thought I should be able to make it work.”

I told Pat a story about Terry’s first husband, Joe, that I don’t think I’ve ever told anyone. “He was a piece of work,” I said.

“He was very bad,” Pat said. “He was terrible to her.”

Then I explained how I had once seen how bad Joe was. Terry and I were both at O.S.U. We’d gone out on a double date—Terry with Joe and me with a friend of Joe’s they’d fixed me up with. Joe was a little older than the rest of us; he’d been in the military and was now going to school. This was a friend of his from the service. We all went out on a picnic of some kind, and there was something strange that happened with a pill. Joe seemed like he was going into some kind of a fit, and his friend got a pill into him, and it calmed him down. I went into the glove compartment and got one of the pills, taking it with me. I don’t know what I thought I was going to do with it. Have it analyzed? But how?

What I did was to tell Terry my concerns that Joe might be a drug addict of some kind. Of course, now I know that this isn’t the way drug addicts behave, but I didn’t know that then. Anyway, what Terry did was to tell Joe.

Joe called me and said he wanted to talk. He picked me up at the sorority house, and we went on a little drive in the Oklahoma flatlands around the Stillwater campus.

Joe told me, “When I was in the Marines, they taught me fifteen ways to kill a person without that person’s ever making a sound.” He paused. “I can kill a person in a lot more ways than that, ways where they might make just a little sound. But fifteen of them are absolutely silent.”

Then he said, “Am I making myself clear? If you ever do or say anything again that might come between me and Terry, I will kill you. I will definitely kill you.”

I was eighteen at the time, and I wasn’t a particularly courageous person. The one thing I knew for sure is that I couldn’t talk with Terry about this. And what if I went to some counselor at the school? They would call Joe in; he would deny it. It would be his word against mine… And then he would silently kill me. Or so I thought.

I said nothing. To anyone. The next year, I ended up transferring to another school that was better for my major, and the year after that, my friend married the man I knew was crazy… and had several really bad years. In the end, she had to sneak away from him with their baby; she feared for their lives.

“I’ve always felt terrible about that,” I said to Pat. “But I didn’t know what to do.” I thought about it for moment. “If it happened now, I would go to a counselor.”

Pat didn’t comment. What could she say? At seventy-five you have a better chance of seeing your mistakes. At least some of them.

And it’s a great solace to talk them over with someone who knows who and what you were at the time.

At Pat’s first wedding, I was maid of honor.

When we think of events where an author presents a new book, most of us picture a celebrity saying a few words to fans, people who have come to buy said book and have it signed by this great person—a famous and successful author.

Thanks to the recent opening up of publishing to include self-publishing and hybrid publishing, lots of people living on Whidbey Island have published books. Most of us are not famous, and if we’re at all successful, it’s usually not in publishing. Still we give book signings—at a bookstore, a library, a church, the home of a friend… These can be delightful, celebrative events, introducing the book and giving the new author a sense of being, truly, launched.

There are, however, some common-sense ground rules involved in a book signing, and in recent years, I’ve attended several where one and sometimes all of these guidelines were ignored. It makes the book signing, which could have been fun for everyone, a less than salubrious occasion.

And it’s so simple, really. It’s a matter of remembering that, when we’re not famous, those who come to celebrate our life events are not the general public but our friends and cohorts, many of the very same people who helped us put together this book.

Here are my ground rules.

• If a bookstore or library offers to host a book signing for you, the first thing you need to do, as the author, is to invite your friends—all of your friends—and not just by posting something in the newspaper or (for Whidbey) on Drew’s List but by personally contacting them. I remember one woman, an editing client, who had written and self-published a truly lovely book that was featured in an event at a local library—and who told not one single soul about that event. Four people came, including the library branch manager and myself.
• Prepare a few remarks about the process of writing or publishing your book. Often these events are called book readings because it’s expected that the author will read a bit from the text of the book. It is not, however, expected that the author will begin by reading from the book. You’re launching this book; you want to give it a context. People have come to hear you speak about your book. Why you wrote Why you published it. What you’re hoping they’ll get from reading it. Something. I will say just a bit more about this part of it. Even if you’re an accomplished speaker, you must actually prepare these remarks.
• After you write this out, go over it with a friend. Don’t think you can wing this by speaking extemporaneously. There’s something that can happen to the mind when you stand in front of a group, even a group of family and friends—perhaps especially a group of family and friends. You need a plan, and it helps if you allow yourself to have a few notes with you when you get up to speak. You are not going to read those notes to the people gathered, but if you have some notes, you can glance down at them when your mind goes blank. These notes will remind you of what you wanted to say. Then you look back up at the people in front of you and say it.
• Plan how you will thank the people who helped you. Again, think about this, and think about it carefully. This is why most Academy Award winners go to the mic with a piece of paper in their hand: they are in horror of forgetting to thank someone who helped to make their moment of triumph possible. A book signing is a time to be gracious and inclusive: the person who brought the flowers, the groups of people who provided food, people in the audience who may have critiqued your book, the person who was your editor. OK, so, as a professional editor, perhaps I, particularly, notice this—but when it’s done well, it’s wonderful. One author I worked with recognized me by name and function when I tried to slip into the back of his book event a few minutes late. Another author, whose editor was a friend of mine, called her editor up to the front with the book’s designer, thanked them, and presented them each with a bottle of wine.

This is all hard, I know, because once you’ve written the book, you’d like to think that the pressure is off, that you’ve already done the most important part. For a few weeks after I’d completed my memoir manuscript, I balked at the idea of talking about what was in the book. If people wanted to know, they could read it!

But you must do a little to entice them to read it. And why not? There’s so much you couldn’t say in the book itself, so much for people to know about the process of transforming a spark of an idea into a bound volume that readers can take home with them. Think of it as sharing information and acknowledging support.