preaching to myself

Generosity doesn’t come dressed like convenience. So stop calling after it like it will strut down the Catwalk of Ease.

The art of Going Out of Your Way is far less glamorous. It takes boots on the ground and all hands on deck. It's the in-between of the sliver of a nanosecond. The breath between rolling your eyes at her persistence and her, completely oblivious to the eye-roll, thanking you for all your help.

You see, it's denying the selfishness of a to-do list a mile long for the sake of another. It's winding the long hallways of the basement and standing outside of the shipping and receiving dock hoping someone will answer the door and point you in the right direction of a large box containing a new mom's glider and ottoman set, when all you really want to do is figure out how to create more time in a day. Daylight Savings, though, can go to hell.

How generous it is to be used as the unintentional vessel to bring "good news," as she called the nursery furniture's perfect timing, to someone. So why do you try to treat it as a chore when it causes the slightest of inconveniences?

You know there is far greater Good News than the chairs babies are rocked in. And because you know that, it's your duty to treat generosity like a "get to" and not a "have to."

Because at the end of the day it’s the beautiful time-gaining (not losing), winding nature of the road paved of largess. Frankly, it’s as simple as this: Get out of your own way so you can go out of your way.

I doubt she ever dreamed it

I doubt she ever thought about it. I doubt she ever wondered what would become of this boomerang shaped coffee table.

I doubt she ever dreamed it would sit in her granddaughter's living room, sharing a weekly cup of coffee and a reading of the New York Times. Yet it does, along with the ghost of her secrets. Secrets clothed in pride.

That's the funny thing about pride and furniture. They live on after we've become worm food. Or a box full of ash. They keep our secrets just below the tangible surface of understanding. In plain sight and just out of reach.

I've changed the table's legs from their stumpy originals in an attempt to refine and polish the thing. The new thinly tapered set isn't quite right, though. It wobbles on its weak foundation. My attempt to update the table seems futile as, in reality, I am only trying to drown out the thought of our similarities ending at our shared middle name and this triangular, unsteady object.

Did I end up with her self-sabotaging prideful ways? Do I have her fear of being truly known? This woman whom I've never met but seem to encounter every time I step foot into my living room haunts me with the possibility of sameness.

Grace and mercy covers the generation that came before me, a valley of peace sandwiched between the pragmatism of the one before her and the one after her. Born to one and the giver of birth to the other, shouldn't my mother's life have been the catalyst of change? Wasn't her humility the bridge to better? Here I sit, questioning the genetics of the soul. Do we get the strands of DNA that have been spliced and pinched from those who've come before us to craft the foundations of our souls? Is this the growth place for the marrow in our bones?

Perhaps it would be easier to come to a conclusion if the liquor hadn't soured her liver, turned her eyes yellow and brought death in her fifties. Maybe if I could sit across from that woman shrouded in her secrets, instead of her 1960's knock-off antique, I just might be able to define our similarities from presumptions.

What if my questions are exactly that which makes us different? While she spent her life in the trap of what she couldn't bring herself to say out loud, maybe I am the one who is supposed to do the dirty work of ending the silence. What if she lived through the dark so that I could glean from the light? A busted and holy combination of my ancestry 一 grandmother, mother, daughter.

Is it possible a namesake does bring with it a cloak of responsibility?