Story Frame 12 – Tulips & Gargolyes: On the Road to Singledom with Dave Brubeck & Desmond Tutu

The kids and I moved into the little house in early April. I painted the living room walls lavender, hung their art on the walls, and put out big pots of bright flowers on the front steps, just as I’d planned in my daydreams.

A few days after we took up residence, I got out of bed one morning and wandered through the house towards the kitchen in search of coffee. Zoë, awake before me, was sitting in the living room.

“Look outside!” she said as soon as she saw me.

“Why?” I asked.

“Just look!” she said in that special child’s tone of voice, the one that must be obeyed without question.

I glanced out the window in the direction of her pointing finger, to the side of the house where the big tree was with the tire swing and gasped in astonishment. The yard, which I had thought was just tall weeds and grass, had erupted overnight in long-stemmed tulips! All over the lawn, slender green shoots and colorful buds were reaching to the sky as if they were giving us – the new cottage dwellers – a botanical standing ovation.

“They’re everywhere!” I gasped.

Zoë nodded with an eight-year old’s smug satisfaction, very pleased to be the one who saw them first.

I made coffee, then walked outside, cup in hand, to wander through the flowers and admire them up close. Gazing at the colorful exuberant abundance, I felt welcomed into my newly single life – welcomed and celebrated.

In addition to the tulips, there were other colorful shoots of new experiences and adventures popping up in my life now that I was working at the documentary workshop full time as an associate producer. We occasionally shot interviews at Washington National Cathedral, which had become, if not exactly a spiritual home for me, then at least a stone sanctuary of ideas and inspiration, guarded – as only the best repositories of dreams and visions are – by a collection of fierce gargoyles.

A towering presence on a high hill in the north Georgetown section of Washington DC, the cathedral was close to the neighborhood where my father had grown up. I loved it for the architecture and scale that reminded me of churches in England where I grew up. I loved it for its maze of back rooms – a dark and secretive labyrinth of stone nooks and crannies, my favorite area of which was filled with flowers for assembling the enormous arrangements used in and around the cathedral. And I loved it for its brilliant stained-glass windows.

I also loved it for the interesting characters who came there, none of whom I would have gotten to meet were it not for this new line of work I’d fallen into, like Alice tumbling down the rabbit hole.

We’d recently done a multi-camera shoot at the Cathedral on the topic of taking away anger, featuring Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor and George Stephanopoulos, among others, and was moderated by television journalist and lawyer Tim Russert, the longest-serving moderator of NBC's Meet the Press.

Stephanopoulos showed up on set as scheduled, despite being sick and feverish. I was impressed he hadn’t blown us off. What a professional. An empty hole on the panel would have been impossible to fill at the last minute. Refreshments were not permitted on the semi-circular set up we had in place for our panelists, but Martin said I could bring Stephanopoulos a cup of hot tea, which I did, placing it on the floor beside his chair and periodically re-filling it from the kitchen in the flower-arranging rooms behind the nave. He could not have been more appreciative of these small gestures.

Note to self: regardless of how you’re feeling, show up and do your best to be pleasant about it.

Another was the opportunity to sit in on an interview Martin did with Archbishop Desmond Tutu, whose newly established Forgiveness Project was a much needed and mind-opening construct for me those days, wrestling as I was with my own anger and frustrations.

“Without forgiveness, there is no future,” the archbishop said. “Forgiveness says you are given another chance to make a new beginning.”

In those post-divorce days when letting go of grievances from the past had been a struggle, his words left me wondering if I could challenge myself to really forgive so that I might move on, less burdened. It was something I would eventually do, but at the time forgiveness was still very much a work in progress.

Even author Madeleine L’Engle had ‘wrinkled’ her way there, sharing her unique meditations on spirituality, science fiction, and, of course, the importance of stars.

Our shoots at the cathedral gave us a pleasant working relationship with its director of communications, Bob Becker, who helped us facilitate most of them.

And when Dave Brubeck came to the Cathedral on his 75th birthday to perform – not jazz – but a mass he wrote called, To Hope! A Celebration, Bob gave me a seat in the section of pews designated as the press gallery for the event. Brubeck’s jazz was the soundtrack of many Sunday mornings at home with my parents. And there he was, performing not twenty feet away from me.

As the music soared to the highest reaches of the cathedral’s interior stone walls, I watched the musicians play, awash in shards of dancing colorful light streaming through the cathedral’s multicolored stained-glass windows. The combination of music, color and light left me almost breathless with appreciation for the impossible beauty of the moment. If this is what hope looked and sounded like, I wanted in.

When the mass was over, I left the cathedral swept along in the midst of a stream of other jubilant concert goers, carrying the lights and music inside me. For the first time since I had begun navigating the fraught landscape of the newly divorced, I finally allowed myself to begin feeling hopeful as I drove back home along the Potomac River to my little house and the cheery tulips in the side yard waving hello.

Coming next: Story Frame 13 – Muse Complex

Painting by Asheville artist, Joyce Thornburg