Somewhere in this house, a tin of buttons hides.

These buttons don’t get sewn on sleeves but pinned to lapels.  They bear pithy sayings, a few slightly off-color.  I acquired them over a period of some years, during my more whimsical young womanhood.  A few date back to high school.

I’ve looked for them casually.   My search resembles more the hunt for a light bill not yet due than the frenzy which accompanies the quest for lost letters from someone who used to love me.  I open drawers and cupboards; but haven’t yet moved the mattress leaning up against the closet in the back bedroom — the mattress I cannot quite bring myself to donate because it’s less than a year old and might be needed for the downstairs room if I decide to stay here.

I began my quest for the button collection a few days ago.  A particular one sprang to mind.  Its message comes from the days just after my mother died and I had decided that drinking would definitely help me to forget the irony of her dying before my father after everything he made her endure.  Or that she chose to endure, as the modern therapists might opine.

It took many Stingers and a few really good single malts on a daily basis to keep me from driving to St. Louis and spitting in his face.  My father’s face, that is; and I think my little brother Stephen did that for me, before he died in a lonely field in St. Charles County.  He lay in that field, against a tree, in his eternal sleep,  twelve years after we buried my mother.  Nineteen years ago this week.  No one knows for certain the day  on which Stephen died; between the 10th and the 17th of June, 1997, if memory serves.  Exact date unknown.

On the day we buried my mother, my brother Stephen and I drank an inordinate number of Stingers at O’Connell’s Pub on Kingshighway in St. Louis where he bartended.  We ended up passing out behind the bar on the cold steel grate that bore the spills of beer and splashes of dishwater.  With the dawn, I jammed sunglasses over my contacts and slipped cautiously behind the wheel of my Nissan Sentra. I drove out to my parents’ home in Jennings to load my suitcase in the car along with my mother’s garnet pin; her turntable; the pillow on which she last laid her head with which my father cushioned the stereo; and for reasons I never quite understood, the soft green socks she had worn on her last night.

I drove back to Kansas City and went to Westport to get a drink.  There I ran into Janice the Button Lady and bought the button that came to mind this weekend — the one which is in the tin full of buttons that I’ve collected over the years.

It says, Since I gave up hope, I feel much better.

I did not really give up any hope this weekend.  That’s not what happened. What I abandoned were expectations.   And I do feel better: Inordinately.  I don’t feel unhappy, or disappointed, or miserable.  Calm courses through me.  I truly have nothing about which to complain, because I no longer expect anything.   But I’ve also opened the skylight above me.  The fullness of the sunshine —  the warmth of the noon day light, the gentleness of dawn, the sweet kiss of sunset — all stream down on my upturned face.

I offer this entry as a special bonus, a note for anyone who thinks their life holds no hope.  Hope never dies.  If your life seems to have taken too many grim turns, let go of your expectations.  I guarantee: you will not miss them.  Your being will float once you release their weight.

(And I’ve a special message for my Dutch friend:  This is a happy post; don’t mistake its sentiment for sorrow, please, my dear though virtual friend.)

It’s evening on the sixth day of the thirtieth month of My Year Without Complaining. Life continues.

 

In a dusty box among other mementos such as my mother’s Civil Defense medal and my son’s Boy Scout pins, I did find the first button I ever collected (“Don’t Die Wondering”); the one I got when Patrick was born and the one he got on his third birthday; and the button voted most popular in a dark bar, a thousand years ago, when I was young, which told everyone how I felt, back then, between the forgotten moment when I first considered hope and the day, so recently, when I surrendered all expectations.