Roxanne Henke

Oh, we high school girls had our methods of circumventing the rules. If made to kneel (this sounds SO archaic now), we’d pull in our (mostly nonexistent) tummies and push our skirt down as far as we possibly could to pass the step test. The alternative was to wear a longer skirt to school and roll up the waistband as much as we dared. If questioned, all we had to do was unroll and kneel – test passed.

Getting back to the bell-bottomed pants – we weren’t allowed to wear those to school at all. Even to basketball games after school, it was skirts and dresses only.

Frustrated, but as politely as possible, I approached again and said, “My husband and I are paying for this reception, could you please play some oldies?” He nodded more earnestly this time. I walked to the edge of the dance floor and stood beside my young niece. Not one tune seemed to change. I gave up.

A new song started and my niece screamed, “Finally! Something from this decade!”

It took a few beats, but I finally realized that to the young DJ, songs from the 1980s (not earlier decades) were “the oldies.”

I’m going to be blunt: Easter has always felt a bit cold and hollow to me.

There, I said it. Now, let me explain. My dad passed away the day after Easter in April 1971. I remember our minister coming to the house and making what I’m sure he felt would be a comforting analogy that there was something “fitting” about my dad passing away at Easter, the time of resurrection. Even though I was only 17, intellectually I “got it,” but that thought didn’t fill the hole that felt as if my heart had quit beating in its usual rhythm.

“Go for a walk,” I tell myself. I sigh. I feel lazy. Tired. “Nah,” I answer back.

“A little walk is better than no walk.” That darn conscience of mine is so smart.

I tie my tennis shoes and step outside, telling myself that today I will do my “short walk.” I have three paths plotted out; two of them are 2 to 5 miles. One is maybe 1 mile. That’s the one I’m doing today. Until I get to the short-walk turn. Gosh, I don’t want to stop. It’s a beautiful day. It feels so good to be outside and moving. So, I keep going and do a “long walk” instead. Yay, me!

It must have been a Saturday, because I was home when my mom walked in the kitchen door with a single, small, drugstore-paper-wrapped package in her hand. The strip of sealing tape read: “Wiest Drugstore.” That was all the evidence I needed. I screamed, “My watch! My watch!,” grabbed it out of my mom’s hand, and ran to put it under the Christmas tree.

Last fall, my husband and I were on our way to Minneapolis, Minn., from our northern Minnesota lake cabin. I was driving, since he had hurt his back. Like most people these days, we don’t have an old-fashioned map in the car. Since we’d made the drive many times, who would have thought we needed one?

My husband was resting. I stepped on it. It was impossible to speed. The road was so curvy, it felt like the Grand Prix racecourse. In “good” traffic, the trip to Minneapolis takes three hours. I had planned on four, which included a fast-food lunch.

My pastor concluded his sermon on generosity, reached into his pocket and pulled out a $20 bill. He held it high. “Who would like this?”

His question was met with silence by the congregation. He asked again, “Who would like this? It comes with an assignment. You have to give it away.”

More silence. Once again, he asked, “Anyone?”

I raised my hand. “I’ll see that someone gets it.”

“What’s going on?” I asked. And then I listened. Her problems were not new. She’d been wrestling with these same issues for years. But, I’ve learned that speaking your woes is therapeutic, and sometimes it takes saying them out loud more than once to work through them. I listened and then pulled out much of the same advice I’d given her before. I imagined her nodding on the other end of the line. She murmured, “Yes. I know. I’ll do that.”