Ellen Gilchrist - Things like the Truth

Things like the Truth

Things like the Truth

Out of My Later Years

Ellen Gilchrist

UNIVERSITY PRESS OF MISSISSIPPI JACKSON

www.upress.state.ms.us

The University Press of Mississippi is a member of the Association of American University Presses.

Living with Light originally written for Shadow Patterns: Essays on Fay Jones, Architect, edited by Jeff Shannon (University of Arkansas Press, 2016).

Pollen, Part II was originally published as Living with Sudafed in House and Garden, 2008.

My Paris and My Rome, Part II was originally published as Watching the Water Run in Smithsonian, November 2006.

Ode to New Orleans was originally published in Yoga Journal, October 2006.

Proving Once Again I Will Do Anything for My Granddaughters was originally published as Dancing Across the Waves in Washington Post Magazine, March 2003.

Being Wooed was originally published in Harpers Bazaar, October 2002.

Summer, A Memory was originally published as On Her Terms in Washington Post Magazine, July 2001.

In Praise of the Young Man was originally published in Vogue, September 1997.

Christmas Past was originally published as Surviving the Holiday Season in Harpers Bazaar, December, 1994.

Keeping Houses was originally published in O at Home, Summer 2008.

Copyright 2016 by Ellen Gilchrist
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America

First printing 2016
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Gilchrist, Ellen, 1935 author.
Title: Things like the truth : out of my later years / Ellen Gilchrist.
Description: Jackson, Mississippi : University Press of Mississippi, [2016]
Identifiers: LCCN 2015039893 (print) | LCCN 2015051464 (ebook) | ISBN
9781496805751 (hardcover : acid-free paper) | ISBN 9781496805768 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Gilchrist, Ellen, 1935Anecdotes.
Classification: LCC PS3557.I34258 A6 2016 (print) | LCC PS3557.I34258 (ebook) | DDC 814/.54dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015039893

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

FOR MY CHILDREN AND THEIR CHILDREN AND THEIR CHILDREN and for all my wonderful friends and helpers. For my typist, Stephanie Meehan, and my editor, Craig Gill, and everyone who helps them be their extraordinary selves.

FOR THE HEART CANNOT LIVE WITHOUT SOMETHING TO SORROW AND BE CURIOUS OVER.

Eudora Welty

WHAT FAMILY HAS NO MARINER IN ITS TREE? NO FOOL, NO FELON. NO FISHERMAN.

Cormack McCarthy, Suttree

MY CREDO IS TO WRITE AS WELL AS I CAN ABOUT THINGS THAT I KNOW AND FEEL DEEPLY ABOUT.

Ernest Hemingway

Contents

SECTION ONE

Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, Arkansas: My Southern Home

Things like the Truth

A BOOK OF ESSAYS ABOUT MY LIFE AND FAMILY AND WORK, about the aging process and the fun of fighting to stay healthy in an increasingly undisciplined culture.

This book includes a diary I wrote during my winter vacation near my family on the Mississippi coast. I am trying to learn to love the undisciplined members of my family even though they scare me because they remind me of my own undisciplined youth. I learned. I got smarter and more disciplined. So will they. I hope.

The family members I was worrying about are a man and woman, both related to me. The rest of my progeny are healthy and well and productive. But the squeaky wheel still gets the grease, as my daughter-in-law reminds me.

Since the time when I was spending sleepless nights worrying about these two, here is what has happened. The woman has gone to a new doctor and had her blood pressure medicine lowered and changed. Now she is back to her usual, wonderful, brilliant, productive self. She is well. Did it do any good for me to have worried about her? You bet it did. We send strange vibrations to people we love when we worry about them. My messages always say, Im mad at you for harming yourself. Im worried and cant sleep. Stop hurting yourself because it is hurting me.

The man I was worrying about was grieving for his dead father and two close friends who died in accidents they did not cause, one in an automobile, the other on an oil rig.

He went to AA meetings for two hundred days in a row, went back to church in a meaningful way and has completely recovered from the depression that caused his drinking. I know it helped him for me to worry about him. I am a logical positivist, but there are things we know that we cannot prove.

For the heart cannot live without something to sorrow and be curious over, Eudora Welty wrote. I try to let that lead me when I am worrying about my progeny. Waking up all night worrying about your children is a losing battle but we do it whether it is wise or not. The brighter and more creative you are the harder you worry.

The thing that infuriates me is that I cant concentrate on the two dozen young men and women in my family who are beautiful and intelligent and hard working and ambitious. I love to look at them or be in their presence. I look forward to seeing them or writing to them on Facebook or just knowing they are alive.

If one of them calls and tells me her landlord forgot to pay her water bill and she woke that morning to no water, I get very wise and tell her that most of the people in the world have always and still have to walk to the river or the well and carry water home in heavy buckets. She liked that answer and told me later she thought about it and told it to people all day.

What treasures children are. How divine when you can be useful to them.

The Family

I WOKE THIS MORNING TO THE SOUND OF SMALL VOICES MOVING toward the Christmas tree. He ate the cookies, the four-year-old boy said. His name is Garrett.

He was here, his seven-year-old brother, Marshall, answered. Look at this. He squatted by a package with a large card that read, To Garrett from Santa Claus. I knew hed come. Grandmother Ellen talked to him last night when he was over New York City.

I got out of bed and went into the living room and sat on the sofa and watched. Go get Momma and Daddy, Marshall said. I want to open things.

They both left the room and returned with permission to open the overflowing stockings on the table. We cant open presents until they get up, Garrett told me.

It was six-thirty in the morning in New Orleans, Louisiana on the twenty-fifth day of December, two thousand and nine. I put coffee on to brew, ran a comb through my tangled, blond gray hair and sat back on the sofa to watch the children tear through the things in their stockings. Then I called my brothers in Jackson, Mississippi. My brothers wake at dawn as I do, as my father did, as all the high-strung Scots with Daddys genes always do no matter what time they go to bed. We get up with the sun. It is always safe to call my brothers on the telephone.