Beth Arnold

Letter From Paris: Our Mothers, Our Selves

Crossposted at HuffingtonPost.com. Comments not included here.

My friend Elizabeth and I are lolling in the steaming pool with the branches of a giant Mayten tree sheltering us. The sky is gray and threatening rain, but we don't care. We are zen--just the two of us--and for the first time in a very long time we are alone without husbands or children. Elizabeth (Libbi to me) and I have been friends for every breath we've taken in this life and before--since we swam in the amniotic waters in our mothers' bulging wombs. She is my sister even if we share neither blood nor bone.

Healing Arts Center & Spa at Cavallo Point (Photo by Kodiak Greenwood)


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On another Mother's Day that also landed on May 9th, our mothers--Bobbye Arnold and Polly Evans--were young women friends in Batesville, Arkansas, caring for their baby girls. Elizabeth was a little more than three months old and I less than one month, when our mothers cooed in our ears and warmed our bottles, and probably felt tired as hell on our first Mother's Day with them. Bobbye and Polly went to the same church, organized birthday parties with homemade cakes, washed and curled our hair. Polly once spanked both of us and put us in our separate corners because of our lipstick destruction to Elizabeth's sister's room.

Letter From Paris: An Appalachian Spring

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I am a child of Spring, born when the world was renewing itself. And so each year at this time I find myself again .

Plenty of times in life we don't know who we are. The truest parts of us may hibernate for self-protection, or we disconnect from our psychic lifelines when the noise of life drowns our inner voices. We stare at the mirror and don't recognize the faces there, and our lost-ness allows desolation to settle in.

The question is how do we reconnect? It is taking me a lifetime to learn, and I'm trying to teach my daughters, Blair and Bret, so they may have a step up from me. Why don't we women guide one another the way we could?

Among the steps on my personal route are prayers that I render to the Cosmic Goodness, the Universal laws, the Spirit of Love, or whatever one wants to call God. Reading or listening to inspirational messages every day lifts me up. There is absolutely nothing wrong with happy thoughts! Learning to take care of myself by eating well, exercising, taking time for meditation, and hot cups of tea. I hope for the courage to jettison my psychic trash, so that I may free myself. And, all along the way, I look to my family for the earthly sustenance I need.

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This Spring, as this cloud of volcanic ash flows over the skies of France, I think of the West Virginia miners who died last week and their grieving families. Appalachia is also a personal subject for me. My grandmother Anna was born a mountain woman in Kentucky in the early part of the last century, and she and her little brothers dug coal out of the mountains themselves. Considering her life is a part of me discovering myself.

HOME FOR THANKSGIVING

Image by Trodel via Flickr

Crossposted at HuffPost.com. Comments not included here.

GROWING UP IN Arkansas, we relished our Thanksgiving turkeys. Mother roasted them until the skin was crispy brown, and even the white meat was juicy. She admonished me and my brothers, Blair and Brent, not to pick at her beautiful birds while they were still being carved. But where was the fun in that?

I know Mother wanted us to understand proper etiquette and manners. I know her desire was to civilize us in the decorum of dinners and luncheons. But in her heart she must have loved it that her birds were good enough for us to want to pick, expert pickers that we were.

Brent, in fact, could turn a giant turkey carcass into a little mound of bones. My husband, Jim, and I used to say we should leave a good turkey carcass for Brent on his grave. He would appreciate that a lot more than flowers.

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TWO YEARS AGO in this space I wrote about my brother Brent, whose death at Thanksgiving 1990 in New York has forever colored this holiday for me. And so it is again this year. It's not a happy memory, certainly--but as the years have passed it's not totally unhappy, either. After all, it's a memory of Brent. He was my soulmate, and Thanksgiving was his favorite holiday.

I had been in New York for three weeks, from mid-October to early November of that year, and Brent had become increasingly ill: cancer, a by-product of his AIDS. Steroids were puffing him up, and he was experiencing considerable pain. His beautiful dark wavy hair was gone, and when he was able to leave his loft, he walked with a cane to steady himself.

My Father's Voice

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My father, W.J. "Bill" Arnold, died 40 years ago today. This is in honor and in memory of him.

I hadn't heard my father's voice in almost 30 years--until today, when I played an old tape recording. The pace dragged, and the sound quality was scratchy, dating the mid-60's age of the tapes to the audio we have of President John F. Kennedy. Still, Daddy was giving quite a speech.

My father was a lawyer. Among his peers, he was known as a great trial attorney with exceptional oratory skills, and this was a tape of Daddy's courtroom argument that kept his crazy Uncle Clyde, by marriage, not blood--an important distinction in the South--from getting sent to jail. Clyde had feuded for years with his two neighbors over a property line before he finally shot them dead. With a brilliant legal performance, Daddy set Clyde free. But instead of the courthouse packed full of people who'd come to scrutinize the choice event, this time I was my father's sole audience.

My father's voice was iconic. I'd once known it as well as the beating of my own heart, and I thought I would recognize his deep resonance instantly. But now that I heard it again after more long sad years without him than the happy ones with him, I wasn't sure I remembered the music of his words. So I played the tapes over and over listening to the recorded timbre and inflections of his speech, and a thousand thoughts of my father and our relationship engulfed me.

Thanksgiving Days

This column first appeared at HuffingtonPost.com. Comments omitted here.

By Beth Arnold

"He was the talent of his generation," author David Halberstam said to my older brother Blair on the telephone. Mr. Halberstam was speaking of our younger brother, Brent, about whose death he had called to express sympathy.

Brent died of AIDS two days before Thanksgiving 17 years ago -- November 20, 1990 -- when he was 34 years old. Actually, Burkitts Lymphoma is what killed him, but he'd been infected with HIV for 4½ years, at least as far as we knew. Before this lethal cancer, he had been zapped by energy-draining and stress-inducing illnesses of this and that -- conditions or problems that meant he never felt completely well. The various maladies sent him to doctors who scheduled tests, gave him sacks of medicines, and wore him out -- but provided no answers or solace. There were none to give, though Brent's medical bills were ever soaring. The physicians wanted to help but knew little to nothing about AIDS.

One Death in the World

This column first appeared at Huffington Post.com.  Comments omitted here.

By Beth Arnold

I saw a man die today. I'd gone in the lounge to open a window and saw him sprawled on the sidewalk across the street. He was dressed in a navy suit, and on his splayed feet, he wore black lace-ups. I could see stripes of thin dress socks above them and disappearing under his trousers. His hair was jet-black though I couldn't see his face. Two firemen/paramedics hunched over him, one pumping his chest with a round accordion-like device and the other giving oxygen. To save his life, they'd ripped open his white shirt and slightly pulled his pants down. The men worked slowly and methodically while the man stretched below them didn't move. A crowd had gathered in a crescent moon around them, another watched across the street.

I live in Paris and have been staying at a friend's place while he was out of town. I was a visitor, a foreigner to this block. This was his neighborhood, not mine. I saw this man losing his life because my friend went away. I was glued to my spot.

Sustenance

This column first appeared on HuffintonPost.com.  Comments not included here.

By Beth Arnold

IF THERE'S ONE thing I'm good at, it's picking meat off the bones of any steak, chop, roast, or joint of beef, pork, or lamb--but best of all a bird--that happens to be sitting on a plate or carving board in front of me. I can't take all the credit for my acquired skill. I inherited being a good picker as an Arnold family trait. In my nuclear group, I wasn't even the best one. That honor goes to my younger brother, Brent, who honed his talent to an art, even though my older brother Blair and I were avidly pursuing, and not unremarkably, our own picking gifts.

Our mother, Bobbye, was not necessarily pleased by this particular motor skill though we tried to follow her picking rules. With Mother's waste-not want-not mindset, it wasn't that she minded us going for every scrap we could bite off, but there were limits to where and how we could do it. We could nibble any meat to its frame in the sanctity of our own home, but in polite society, we had to contain ourselves--except for pork ribs and fried chicken, which in any sophisticated life is a mortal sin not to pick up, since there is no other proper way to eat them.