Lila Blue (31 page)

"Home school?" I asked.

"Yes," she continued.
"He got bored in fifth grade and found out you could get around the education
laws by being home schooled."

"He sounds smart," I
said, interested in the idea of a kid figuring all that out and doing something
about it just because he was bored. Most of us daydreamed or drew pictures or
wrote notes to each other on tiny scraps of paper when we were bored in fifth
grade. He actually did something to get out of school forever. Impressive.

"He's smart, but more than that,
he's an artist, and his parents and sisters are artists, too."

"Franny said he was making
pots when he was ten," I said.

"He started selling them at
ten. I think he was born at the potter's wheel. His parents were both potters
before they branched out into fabric arts. Now they have a black sheep, because
dying white wool doesn't work when you need black."

"How do you know so much about
them?"

"Dante's little sister Reba is
my friend. During the school year I hang out with her a lot. She's great
too."

"So you think I'll like Dante?"

She grinned and nodded.
"You'll like each other. You'll see."

Lila's gun essay came out in the
Rainbow News early Friday morning. When I got out of bed, she already had her
copy of the paper on the kitchen table.

"Here it is," she said,
handing it to me. "Next we find out the consequences."

When I read it aloud to her, I was
surprised that it was almost nothing like the draft she'd been working on a few
days earlier.

Growing up with Guns: My Point
of View, by Lila Blue

I usually keep this column light
and fluffy. But this time, I want to talk about something heavy. Guns. Handguns
in particular.

I grew up in northern Idaho
among farmers and hunters, which means I grew up with guns. When I was twelve
years old, I knew where the guns in our house were kept, how to get them, how
to clean and load them, and how to shoot. Guns were normal.

For many of us, guns are an
unquestioned part of life, like church on Sunday morning or bingo on Friday
nights.

In the past three months, two
children were killed by handguns. These deaths were not caused by an intruder
forcing his way into their home. Both were caused by children playing with guns
in the house, without their parents' knowledge, permission, or consent. Because
of these facts, I think it's time we ask ourselves some questions.

How safe are handguns? Is the
potential benefit of having one in your home worth the risk? Should we as a
community discuss this issue?

Is it our business whether or
not our neighbors own guns? When does it become our business? When a child
takes a gun out into the front yard to play with it? Or takes it across the
street to school?

I don't know the answer to these
questions. I don't believe any one person has all the answers. But I do believe
in all of us working together to keep our community safe.

Please come to the community
council meeting Tuesday night to share your experiences and opinions. Together
we can make wise decisions on issues that affect us all.

"You changed it so much,"
I said, slightly confused because the argument from the first draft was still
in my mind.

"I prayed about it some more,
and that helped me take some of the judgment out of it. I was pushing my own
viewpoint too much in the first one."

"But the column is your
viewpoint," I said.

She laughed. "I try not to
have such a strong point of view that I feed its opposite."

"Huh?" I asked.

"Here's how I think things
work," she said. "A very good position to take about any issue is
neutral, right in the middle, maybe yes, maybe no. That way you are allowing
everyone's opinion to be okay. Opinions are only thoughts after all. We've all
changed our opinions. We've all learned more and reversed our previous stance
on some issue. So neutral is a good, balanced position on most things."

"Okay," I said, not
really knowing where she was headed.

"For example," she said.
"If someone had a strong opinion about how I should wear my hair, it might
cause me to have a stronger opinion than I had before. They might say to me,
'Lila, you're too old to wear long hair.' Then I would either agree or disagree
with them, but either way, my opinion would get stronger. Say I disagreed or
was even offended by them having an opinion about my hair, so my new opinion
might be, 'Nobody has the right to talk about how I wear my hair,' or 'Long
hair looks just as beautiful on older women as it does on teenagers, better
even.' See? That person's opinion fed my opinion and made mine stronger."

"Okay, I think I get it,"
I said, getting lost in all the memories of my mom having strong opinions about
how I should wear my hair and how that fed my resistance to doing anything at
all with my hair.

"So, in the first essay draft,
my opinion was so strong it was guaranteed to feed someone else's opposite
opinion, and I didn't want to do that. So I tried to make my point of view be
that we should all get together to discuss how to keep our community safe. I
wanted to stress meeting, not stress my personal bias about handguns."

I read the essay over to myself
again and thought about it as I got some coffee and banana bread. "I think
you succeeded, Grandma," I said.

"Thanks, Cassandra. I value
your point of view."

We went for our morning walk as
usual, and there was a misty fog that felt good to walk through and breathe. I
was so used to the beach that it was no longer cold or uncomfortable. Instead
it was bracing and exhilarating, crisp and invigorating. I had metamorphosed
into an Oregon beach person. My tenderfoot days were long gone.

I was still mulling over what Lila
had said about feeding opposites. "Do you mean if I love something, I'm
feeding hating it?"

"Give me an example," she
said.

"If I really love my mother,
and I want her to be safe, then am I feeding not loving and not safe?"

"That's a good question,"
she said. "What do you think?"

"If I want her to be safe,
then I'm watching her all the time, waiting for her to do something not safe,
so she tries to get away from me to have some freedom, and then she gets
reckless with that freedom? So my pushing so hard for her to be safe makes her
reckless?"

"Wow," she said. Then she
didn't say anything. She kept walking along, looking at the waves, stopping to
pick up pretty stones, yipping at the gulls and sandpipers.

I walked beside her in silence,
only my silence wasn't peaceful. I was questioning everything I'd ever felt
strongly, every time I pushed myself to do something or someone else to do
something or every time someone pushed me to believe something or be a certain
way or choose a certain path. My silence was chaotic.

When we got back to the house, the
phone was ringing. Lila just took her time as usual rinsing off her feet and
drying them, and admiring the rocks she'd collected before adding them to the
basket. By the time we went inside, the phone had stopped ringing. It started again
right away, though, and she answered it on the second ring.

I was sure it would be someone
calling about the column, but it was Janice. I could tell by the way Lila sat
down at her desk and adopted a very patient tone of voice, as if she were
talking with a troubled child who needed to be handled with care. It was
exactly the way I felt when I talked with my mother.

I tried to remember what I'd been
repeating to myself on the porch when I was practicing forgiveness. I accept
Janice as my mother. I accept my mother. I allow her to be my mother. I stop
resisting being her daughter. I let her be who she is. I stop pushing on her to
be stronger, smarter, safer, saner, more grown up. I allow her to be exactly
who she is right now. That helped my breathing so I was able to listen to one
side of their conversation without getting myself all opinionated about it.

I could tell Janice wanted
something and was making excuses when Lila questioned her about the paperwork
she needed to register me for school. Finally Lila said, "All you have to
do is sign the papers and send all her records to me. Then I'll wire you the
money."

She waited much more patiently than
I would have, and finally said, "I'm sorry, dear, but I can't do
that."

Another long wait, and she said,
"Yes, as soon as you get all the right papers to me."

I was suddenly struck with the idea
that Lila was buying me, like buying a car. She was making a deal for me,
bargaining with a crazy person to get the goods on her terms. I knew my mother
didn't want me back. She hadn't called to talk with me the whole time I'd been
with Lila. I felt myself getting worked up into old anger again, so I said over
and over, I accept my mother, I let Janice be my mother, Janice is my mother
and it's okay with me, she's not perfect but she's not a monster, etc. It
helped a little, but not much.

When Lila hung up, she smiled a sad
tired smile and said, "You mother says she'll send the papers we need.
Let's hope she does."

"How can you be so patient
with her?" I asked. "I wanted to slap her, and she wasn't even
talking to me."

"I'd slap her if I thought it
would do any good," she said. "But I'm pretty sure it would set us
back about ten years. I can't risk that, even for the satisfaction of a
slap."

I grinned at her. I was glad to know
Lila wasn't perfect either. She'd actually considered slapping my mother. The
thought thrilled me.

The next time the phone rang, I
answered, and it was Molly. "We all thought Lila was very diplomatic in
her column," she told me. I put Lila on so Molly could tell her. They
talked and laughed a few minutes, and then Lila handed the phone back to me.

"Cassandra," Molly said,
"I need your help. I found the perfect dog for Kitty Lynn, and I need you
to help me take it to her."

"But after last time, don't
you think we should ask her first?"

"Oh, I learned from last
time," she said. "I found out you can check the dogs out for one day
to see if they are a good match for the family, so I'm going to check out a
dog, and we can take it to her shop and let her fall in love with it and then
give it to her."

"Molly," I said,
remembering how much we all cried just a few weeks before in Kitty Lynn's
sunroom. "Are you sure?"

"Yes," she said. "I
know this is the perfect dog, and Curtis will take us, so come. I need
you."

I sighed. "Let me check with
Lila," I said, hoping Lila would say no, but of course she said whatever I
wanted to do would be fine.

"Okay," I told Molly.
"Give me a few minutes to prepare myself." I took a big wad of
tissues and stuffed them in the front pocket of my backpack. I knew I'd need
them no matter how this adventure turned out.

When I arrived at Sunshine Books,
Molly was practically hopping up and down waiting for me. She had found the car
keys for Curtis and rousted him out of his chair. I nodded hello to Marge, who
shrugged and rolled her eyes at me as Molly dragged us out to the car. We all
squeezed in the front seat, Molly in the middle. She'd brought a towel for the
dog to sit on and a pink ribbon for a leash.

The coast highway wound along beaches
and over cliffs above the sea. The sun was shining on the clear blue ocean, and
the ride was glorious. It was warm enough to have the windows down, so the cool
ocean mist from the waves coated our faces.

Molly said, "The dog's name is
Juliet. She's an Australian silky, which is a special kind of dog perfect for
Kitty Lynn. When I called, the lady at the shelter said Juliet must have a
quiet home with lots of affection. When they rescued her, she had a terrible
nervous condition from being left alone in a house with two big dogs, five
kids, and a parrot."

"Living with a parrot would
give anyone a nervous condition," I said, thinking of Buster at the
hardware store. "Does she have an ugly rash or something?"

"No, she's all healed or they
wouldn't let her be adopted. She will love the yarn shop. Everyone who goes in
there is quiet and nice."

"I hope she's not allergic to
wool," I said.

Suddenly Curtis laughed so loud
Molly and I both stared at him. I was afraid he'd lose control of the car and
we'd plunge over the cliff into the ocean.

I was used to Curtis being in the
background. His explosive laughter was as unexpected as a tree screaming and
running across the street. It shocked me.

He laughed long and hard and then
kept chuckling every few minutes while we watched him to see if he was okay.
Tears ran down his face, and he wiped them away with the back of his hand. He
finally calmed down and kept his eyes on the road, so we let him fade into the
background again.

Juliet was better than even Molly
had imagined. She looked scared, sweet, and grateful all at the same time. She
had the prettiest face with big perky ears and syrupy eyes. Her hair was blonde
and it was trimmed short, so she was soft to pet. She licked Molly's hand and
looked up at her with that sweet face.

Curtis said, "Uh oh."

I knew what he meant. I was afraid
Molly would be getting a new dog, not Kitty Lynn. GrumpaLump were Molly's pets,
but they were about as entertaining as an old coat, so I could see where Molly
would be seduced by such adoration.

Curtis stood by Molly as she filled
out all the paperwork and paid the lady at the shelter. It was amazing how
handy Curtis was. Imagine how hard it would have been for Molly and me to get
Juliet out of there without Curtis. We'd have to steal her. From a place where
they try to find good homes for dogs.

In the car, Molly and Juliet and I
rode in the back seat. Molly situated Juliet on the towel between us, and
Juliet went along with whatever Molly wanted. Molly tied a pink ribbon around
her neck and made a fancy bow, like a birthday present package. Juliet had a
collar with an ID tag, and Molly tied another length of pink ribbon onto that to
serve as a leash.