Chicken Soup for the Woman's Soul (22 page)

“Coat? What coat?” My husband looked up from sorting the mail. I took out the jacket, holding it up in the light for him to see. “Oh, that jacket. Mom bought it years ago, when I was a kid...you know, when they were fashionable. She and Pop even argued about getting it.”

I thought of the woman I’d known for 30 years. She bought her housedresses and polyester pantsuits at Kmart or Sears, kept her gray hair tightly confined in a hair net and chose the smallest piece of meat on the dinner platter when it was passed around the table. I knew she wasn’t the kind of flamboyant type who would own a faux-leopard print jacket.

“I can’t imagine Mom wearing this,” I said to him.

“I don’t think she ever wore it outside the house,” my husband answered.

Removing the jacket from its padded hanger, I carried it to her bed and laid it on the white chenille bedspread. It seemed to sprawl like an exotic animal. My hands brushed the thick, plush fur, and the spots changed luster as my fingers sank into the pile.

My husband stood at the door. “I used to see Mom run her fingers over the fur, just like you are,” he said.

As I slid my arms into the sleeves, the jacket released a perfume of gardenias and dreams. It swung loose from my shoulders, its high collar brushing my cheeks, the faux fur soft as velvet. It belonged to a glamorous, bygone era, the days of Lana Turner and Joan Crawford, but not in the closet of the practical 83-year-old woman I knew.

“Why didn’t you tell me Mom had a leopard jacket?” I whispered, but my husband had left the room to water the plants.

If I’d been asked to make a list of items my mother-inlaw would never want in her life, that jacket would have been near the top. Yet finding it changed our relationship. It made me realize how little I knew about this woman’s hopes and dreams. We took it to the hospital for her to wear home. She blushed when she saw it, and turned even rosier at the gentle teasing of the staff.

In our last three years together, I bought her gifts of perfume, lotion and makeup instead of sensible underwear and slippers. We had a lunch date once a week, where she wore her jacket, and she began to curl her hair so it would be fluffy and glamorous for our date. We spent time looking at her photo album, and I finally began to see the young woman there, with the Cupid’s bow mouth.

Faux fur has come back into fashion. It appears in shop windows and on the street. Every time I catch a glimpse of it, I’m reminded of my mother-in-law’s jacket, and that all of us have a secret self that needs to be encouraged and shared with those we love.

Grazina Smith

7
LIVE YOUR
DREAM

A
lice laughed. “There’s no use trying,” she said. “One can’t believe impossible things.” “I daresay you haven’t had much practice,”
said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes, I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

Lewis Carroll
Through the Looking Glass

The Wind Beneath
Her Wings

F
ar away there in the sunshine are my highest aspirations. I may not reach them but I can look up and see their beauty, believe in them and try to follow them.

Louisa May Alcott

In 1959, when Jean Harper was in the third grade, her teacher gave the class an assignment to write a report on what they wanted to be when they grew up. Jean’s father was a crop duster pilot in the little farming community in Northern California where she was raised, and Jean was totally captivated by airplanes and flying. She poured her heart into her report and included all of her dreams; she wanted to crop dust, make parachute jumps, seed clouds (something she’d seen on a TV episode of “Sky King”) and be an airline pilot. Her paper came back with an “F” on it. The teacher told her it was a “fairy tale” and that none of the occupations she listed were women’s jobs. Jean was crushed and humiliated.

She showed her father the paper, and he told her that of course she could become a pilot. “Look at Amelia Earhart,” he said. “That teacher doesn’t know what she’s talking about.”

But as the years went by, Jean was beaten down by the discouragement and negativity she encountered whenever she talked about her career—”Girls can’t become airline pilots; never have, never will. You’re not smart enough, you’re crazy. That’s impossible.”—until finally Jean gave up.

In her senior year of high school, her English teacher was a Mrs. Dorothy Slaton. Mrs. Slaton was an uncompromising, demanding teacher with high standards and a low tolerance for excuses. She refused to treat her students like children, instead expecting them to behave like the responsible adults they would have to be to succeed in the real world after graduation. Jean was scared of her at first but grew to respect her firmness and fairness.

One day Mrs. Slaton gave the class an assignment. “What do you think you’ll be doing 10 years from now?” Jean thought about the assignment. Pilot? No way. Flight attendant? I’m not pretty enough—they’d never accept me. Wife? What guy would want me? Waitress? I could do
that.
That felt safe, so she wrote it down.

Mrs. Slaton collected the papers and nothing more was said. Two weeks later, the teacher handed back the assignments, face down on each desk, and asked this question: “If you had unlimited finances, unlimited access to the finest schools, unlimited talents and abilities, what would you do?” Jean felt a rush of the old enthusiasm, and with excitement she wrote down all her old dreams. When the students stopped writing, the teacher asked, “How many students wrote the same thing on both sides of the paper?” Not one hand went up.

The next thing that Mrs. Slaton said changed the course of Jean’s life. The teacher leaned forward over her desk and said, “I have a little secret for you all. You
do
have unlimited abilities and talents. You
do
have access to the finest schools, and you
can
arrange unlimited finances if you want something badly enough. This is it! When you leave school, if you don’t go for your dreams,
no one
will do it for you. You can have what you want if you want it enough.”

The hurt and fear of years of discouragement crumbled in the face of the truth of what Mrs. Slaton had said. Jean felt exhilarated and a little scared. She stayed after class and went up to the teacher’s desk. Jean thanked Mrs. Slaton and told her about her dream of becoming a pilot. Mrs. Slaton half rose and slapped the desk top. “Then do it!” she said.

So Jean did. It didn’t happen overnight. It took 10 years of hard work, facing opposition that ranged from quiet skepticism to outright hostility. It wasn’t in Jean’s nature to stand up for herself when someone refused or humiliated her; instead, she would quietly try to find another way.

She became a private pilot and then got the necessary ratings to fly air freight and even commuter planes, but always as a copilot. Her employers were openly hesitant about promoting her—because she was a woman. Even her father advised her to try something else. “It’s impossible,” he said. “Stop banging your head against the wall!”

But Jean answered, “Dad, I disagree. I believe that things are going to change, and I want to be at the head of the pack when they do.”

Jean went on to do everything her third-grade teacher said was a fairy tale—she did some crop dusting, made a few hundred parachute jumps and even seeded clouds for a summer season as a weather modification pilot. In 1978, she became one of the first three female pilot trainees ever accepted by United Airlines and one of only 50 women airline pilots in the nation at the time. Today, Jean Harper is a Boeing 737 captain for United.

It was the power of one well-placed positive word, one spark of encouragement from a woman Jean respected, that gave that uncertain young girl the strength and faith to pursue her dream. Today Jean says, “I chose to believe her.”

Carol Kline with Jean Harper

What Do You Want to Be?

I
magination is the highest kite one can fly.

Lauren Bacall

I had one of those serendipitous moments a few weeks ago. I was in the bedroom changing one of the babies when our five-year-old, Alyssa, came and plopped down beside me on the bed.

“Mommy, what do you want to be when you grow up?” she asked.

I assumed she was playing some little imaginary game, and so to play along I responded with, “H’mmmmm. I think I would like to be a mommy when I grow up.”

“You can’t be that ‘cause you
already
are one. What do you want to
be?”

“Okay, maybe I will be a pastor when I grow up,” I answered a second time.

“Mommy,
no,
you’re
already
one of those!”

“I’m sorry, honey,” I said, “but I don’t understand what I’m supposed to say then.”

“Mommy, just answer what you want to
be
when you grow up. You can
be anything
you want to be!”

At that point I was so moved by the experience that I could not immediately respond, and Alyssa gave up on me and left the room.

That experience—that tiny five-minute experience— touched a place deep within me. I was touched because in my daughter’s young eyes, I could still be
anything
I wanted to be! My age, my present career, my five children, my husband, my bachelor’s degree, my master’s degree:
none of that mattered.
In her young eyes I could still dream dreams and reach for stars. In her young eyes my future was not over. In her young eyes I could still be an astronaut or a piano player or even an opera singer, perhaps. In her young eyes I still had some growing to do and a lot of “being” left in my life.

The real beauty in that encounter with my daughter was when I realized that in all her honesty and innocence, she would have asked the very same question of her grandparents and of her great-grandparent.

It has been written, “The old woman I shall become will be quite different from the woman I am now. Another I is beginning...”

So... what do you want to
be
when you grow up?

Rev. Teri Johnson

Hello, Dolly!

Y
ou gotta have a dream. If you don’t have a dream, how ya gonna make a dream come true?

Bloody Mary, in the movie
South Pacific

Music, I suppose, will be the thing that sustains me in the time of my life when I am too old for sex and not quite ready to meet God. It has always been an essential part of me. Since I have been able to form words, I have been able to rhyme them. I could catch on to anything that had a rhythm and make a song to go with it. I would take the two notes of a bobwhite in the darkness and make that the start of a song. I would latch on to the rhythm my mother made snapping beans, and before I knew it, I’d be tapping on a pot with a spoon and singing. I don’t know what some of this sounded like to my family, but in my head it was beautiful music. I loved to hear the wild geese flying overhead. I would get into the music of their honking, and start to snap my fingers to their cadence and sing with them. I think I was especially drawn to them because I knew they were going somewhere. They had good reason to sing. They were free to go with the wind, to make the world their own. My song connected me to them. They took part of my spirit with them wherever they went.

When I was forced to pursue my musical dreams on my own, I would whang away at my old mandolin with the piano strings. I started getting pretty good with it, within its limitations, and people started to notice. Of course, that was exactly what I wanted. I was never one to shy away from attention. Finally, my Uncle Louis began to see that I was really serious about wanting to learn, so he taught me guitar. He gave me an old Martin guitar, and I learned the basic chords pretty quick. This was like manna from heaven to me. At last I could play along with the songs I heard in my head. Mama’s family were all very musical, and I used to worry the heck out of all of them to “teach me that lick” or “play this with me.” If Daddy had found it hard to get me to work in the fields before, now even he began to realize it was a fruitless undertaking.

I would sit up on top of the woodpile, playing and singing at the top of my lungs. Sometimes I would take a tobacco stake and stick it in the cracks between the boards on the front porch. A tin can on top of the tobacco stake turned it into a microphone, and the porch became my stage. I used to perform for anybody or anything I could get to watch. The younger kids left in my care would become the unwilling audience for my latest show. A two-year-old’s attention span is not very long. So there I would be in the middle of my act, thinking I was really something, and my audience would start crawling away. I was so desperate to perform that on more than one occasion I sang for the chickens and the pigs and ducks. They didn’t applaud much, but with the aid of a little corn, they could be counted on to hang around for a while.

Over the years, my dream for a better audience grew. I wanted to sing at the Grand Ole Opry! But people thought my chances were pretty slim and wanted to spare me a heartache, so they’d come up with answers like “You’re just a kid,” or “You have to be in the union” or just about anything they could think of. But I just wouldn’t be denied.

You had to have a slot on the program to sing on the Opry, and there was no way I was going to get one. But finally, Jimmy C. Newman, who had a spot one Saturday night, agreed to let me go on in his place. Yet even though I got my wish to actually sing on the Opry, the reality of it hadn’t really sunk in. I took my place backstage that night, my usual cocky self, acting as if I sang on the Opry every night.