A Little Bit Scary; A Little Bit Beautiful


She sits on the vanity admiring her reflection in the mirror while I wonder how in the world she manages to transform herself so completely. By all accounts, Anna Lauren is a beautiful little girl; big blue eyes, light brown hair, and a warm smile. But right now—whew! A four-year-old playing with her grandmother’s makeup can quickly become unsightly.

“Anna Lauren, what have you done to yourself?” I ask.

Her blue eyes are hidden behind black circles topped with dollops of chocolate brown shadow. Farther up her forehead are two thick black arcs that I assume must be eyebrows. Bright pink cheeks are no match for the red puffer-fish lips. She smiles.

“Grammy, I’m a little bit scary and a little bit beautiful.”

So is life, Anna Lauren. So is life.

Joe Battle once told me that we know goodness only because we know evil. Scary and beautiful hold that same relationship. Although I don’t like scary—movies, rides, masks, weather, dogs, to name only a few—philosophically at least, those challenging moments that scare the willies out of me make me appreciate the beautiful, the transcendent. Still…

Mostly, I’ve meandered into scary. Like when we lost our 18-month-old son, Evan, at Galveston Beach on the Fourth of July; or when I did a 180° during morning rush hour on ice-covered I-65; or the night our dog, Charlie, was attacked by coyotes; or our wild ride around a volcano in Maui. With every on-coming car or truck on that narrow road with no guardrails, we realized plunging to our death would be bad enough; but taking our three young children with us would appear somewhat negligent on our part. My scariest moment was a couple of years ago when Tim fell off a 14’ ladder and broke nearly all of his parts.

The catacombs in Paris about did me in though. My daughter, Rachel, told me before we went to London and Paris that she didn’t want to go to museums or do anything with history, so I should have seen this one coming.

We descended the narrow, spiral staircase and were immediately hit with a damp, musty odor wafting on what little air was available. The walkway was wide and relatively well-lit considering that we were in an elaborate underground city whose only inhabitants were the six million dearly departed. Road signs indicated from which normal cemetery they had originally been interred. For a mile we walked along the artfully displayed bones—rows of long bones, their knobby ends facing out, topped with a row of skulls—in repeating patterns. Small bones and fragments were tossed to the boneyard in the back. I looked around for an exit about halfway through. No such luck.

When we finally—and I do mean finally—reached the exit, I was hyperventilating between shudders. Unfortunately, the spiral staircase at this end was much narrower than the one at the entrance. At last I gasped clean air and slumped in a chair, eyeing the defibrillator hanging on the wall. In a few moments, the attendant asked us to open our bags to prove that we hadn’t snagged a few souvenirs of our sojourn to the underworld. That scene was seared onto my eyeballs—I didn’t need a souvenir. Alas, I had not learned my lesson.

Recently, Tim and I were in Matera in the Puglia region of southeastern Italy and slept in a 9000 year old sassi (cave dwelling). Families had been sharing the shallow caverns with horses, donkeys, chickens, cats, dogs, pigs, and a variety of other critters for centuries. However, in the 1950’s city officials decided the sassi were unclean and began relocating the 15,000 residents. Eventually, an entrepreneur recognized the tourism possibilities of the caves and lobbied for UNESCO World Heritage Site designation. Today the caves are being repurposed as hotels, restaurants, and shops.

I don’t know what possessed me, but I thought it would be fun to sleep in a sassi. Our sassi, large and furnished in early IKEA, had all the expected amenities like a bed and a bathroom, but an elevator was conspicuously absent. We dragged our luggage and ourselves up 160 steps in the broiling sun.

As the sun set on the limestone hillside, the hundreds of empty sassi conjured up images of thieves, murderers, and wild dogs hiding in the comfort and safety of the caves. I was afraid to close my eyes, convinced that we would both be dead by morning.

I certainly prefer beautiful to scary; however, beautiful isn’t a matter of survival. True, beautiful sometimes takes my breath away, but scary takes my breath, pummels my heart, dilates my pupils, flares my nostrils, churns my stomach, and sets my brain on fire. A good dose of scary reminds me that I am still very much alive. Then, when things calm down, instead of dwelling on the past, I put on my big girl panties and get on with life.
July 7, 2012