Benedictions for November

The fall has brought new ways to grieve my mother – certain views of the sky, slants of light, driving by her favorite shops.  My mourning comes with tears which I have helped along by listening to the soundtrack of To Kill a Mockingbird.  Have you listened to Elmer Bernstein’s evocative score?  If you need a good cry, it’s the one that will jumpstart it.

When Bernstein first got the gig to score the film, he was at a loss as to where to begin.  After a few false starts, he was told by To Kill a Mockingbird‘s author, Harper Lee, to remember that her book was about childhood before anything else.  To that end, Bernstein incorporated the tinkling of a child’s toy piano.  I know that sound because I had a piano like that when I was small.  Bernstein’s composition is rapturous and haunting.

The image above is called Grace and was painted in 1918 by Rhoda Nyberg from a photo her father took of a peddler who sold foot scrapers.  It was created to depict gratitude for small things after the terrible hardships of World War I.  My mother had a copy of this painting over our living-room fireplace.  She told us it was my father after the phone bill came.

Our phone bills were a source of consternation in our household, especially when we were teenagers and started to have out-of-town friends.  Making long distance calls in those days was very expensive and each monthly bill was itemized and labeled with the town that was called so there was no mistaking who did the most damage, usually me…

Sometimes my mother would warn us the bill had arrived and would give us 48 hours to come up with our shares before it was placed on the top of my father’s bureau, where all household bills landed.  We’d then run around the neighborhood – my brother looking for lawns to rake, and my sister and I searching for babysitting jobs.  We never came up with our full debts but the bill was paid just the same, with questions asked and plenty of warnings about the following month.

The other day, I logged into my blog to write a post and found my admin pages had disappeared.  The blog was still available but I couldn’t get in to write anything.  And what’s more, the error message was frightening:  “There has been a critical error on this website”.  “Critical” read “Fatal” to me, and so I couldn’t sleep.  The next morning, the lovely woman who monitors A Lovely Inconsequence for me, fixed it pronto.  I am forever grateful for her knowledge and skill.  Rena McDaniel @technology-expert.com.

I pretty much take this space for granted but when I saw the critical notification, I panicked and realized how much writing here still means to me.  My November benediction is for my favorite blog techie, all the wonderful memories I have of my beautiful mother, Elmer Bernstein’s masterpiece, my cellphone which has unlimited free calling, and fathers who pay bills.

Above, my November gratitude prayers…