Best Intentions

During my first Christmas season as a single mother, in 1994, I frequently visited an antique shop in Chardon, Ohio during my rounds as a reporter for The Plain Dealer.

My young daughter and I had recently moved into the first floor of a modest, well-tended Tudor in Shaker Heights. We had brought little with us, and our small collection of new furniture, dishes and linens painted the scene of a family in flight. I was on the hunt for affordable, vintage pieces to make our place feel like we’d lived there for a while.

On one of those trips to the shop, on a snowy day in December, the proprietor drew my attention to a worn, wooden box that had just arrived. It was painted red, with a slot carved into the hinged lid. These barely legible words were stenciled on the front:

League Sacred Heart

Intention Box

She looked at my puzzled face and smiled. “You’re not Catholic.”
I shook my head, and she explained that these boxes were used to welcome parishioners’ prayer requests—their intentions--for others. Write the names on slips of paper, slide them into the slot, and others would remember them in prayer.

I loved the notion of this, the intention. I bought the box, set it on our fireplace mantel and told Cait we would use it to manifest our own good intentions for our life. It would be a bank, for two vital necessities: Friday night pizza and books. As long as we saved our coins and tossed them into the box, I promised her, we would have enough money for both.

And we did, because of course I was going to make sure of it. That old red box became our habit. Every bit of loose change, and there was so much of it back in those days, went from pockets to box. The credit union kept us stocked in paper rolls, and every so often Cait and I would sit at our kitchen table and stuff them with the right number of dimes, nickels and quarters.

At some point, after I remarried, the intention box ended up in a closet. I hadn’t thought of it in years but unearthed it during our big move this year. I picked it up and nearly dropped it, surprised by the weight. I opened the lid and there they were, roll upon roll of coins. At some point we had stopped needing them.

“Your intentions were manifested,” my friend Kathy said last week, after I told her about the box. “That’s how it works. What a wonderful lesson for your Cait.” This is Kathy’s nature. I don’t know anyone with more faith in the mystical good pulsing around us. In her orbit, I feel its promise.

The intention box is back on our mantel, in another Tudor. This house was built in 1936, and it has felt like home from the minute I laid eyes on it, after our realtor sent the website link. I can’t explain it, except to say I walked through its doors and felt the windstorm of dust from this year’s upheaval finally settle at my feet and slowly blow away. This move took more out of me than I thought I had to give, and I am grateful for all that it asked of me.

This old red box reminds me of the ongoing need for good intentions for others, and the importance of conveying this tradition to our grandchildren. Instead of coins, we will talk about ways to help. We will talk about our intentions. Right now, ICE agents are invading our central Ohio community. Families are under siege; children are terrified. There is no way our children don’t know this is happening. They have classmates. They have friends.

This is my ongoing worry now, for America’s children. What are they learning from this cruelty, this president? What is this telling them about who they should grow up to be?

Perhaps you are seeing why I haven’t written for a while. It is impossible for me to stay on topic, if the goal is to focus elsewhere. I’ve decided to surrender to this and I hope you will bear with me as I write again and again, no matter how imperfectly. The racing mind needs to run.

It’s Christmas Eve, and we are about to watch one of my all-time favorite movies, It’s a Wonderful Life. My heart is in two places. I am so grateful to be home with Sherrod and our dogs, listening to him play his guitar as I plan tomorrow’s Christmas gathering. But a part of me is still at the airport on the day after Thanksgiving, saying good-bye to two of our grandchildren who live hundreds of miles away.

I love how artist Anne Truitt once described such a parting with her daughter, in her 1986 memoir, TURN: The Journal of an Artist: “We hugged good-bye with different smiles.”

We’d had such a wonderful visit with Milo and Ela, and Cait and her husband, Alejandro. We happily hugged and the immediately the kids darted for the entrance, excited for their next adventure. I was feeling the tug of their departure, the ache of all that I cannot control. I look at them and see this always: They are safe, but many children who look like them are not.

Children.

Children.

“We have to be a country that exists for our children,” Michelle Obama said in a recent television interview with Jonathan Capehart. There was such urgency in her voice, in the expression on her face.

She is right. Who are we if our country’s children—everyone’s children—are not our priority? I can’t stop thinking about this.

Recently, I unearthed these four dusty photos of my daughter when she was seven months old. It was her first Christmas, and she was just learning to pull herself up and cruise along table edges. I had set her in front of the Christmas tree, but at the sound of my voice she had other plans.

See those pudgy little fingers?

Bald head, center stage.

Well, hello there. (Much grunting.)

Victory.

All she wanted was to lay eyes on her mama. Intention, manifested.

Merry Christmas. If you are struggling right now, may this season land gently.