Sally Huggins Toner

The lilacs outside of our townhouse gate have exploded with their dizzying purple smell.  In another month, it’ll be the pale pink roses that live right next to them.  Okay, so as much as I argue that I’m always too friggin’ cold and will need to retire in perpetual warmth, it’s hard to argue against the seasons in late April/early May Virginia.

I tell my students that dates are important only for context.  January 4, the middle of winter, was the date when I was diagnosed with triple negative breast cancer.  May 4, the height of neon green, was the date of my last chemo treatment.

It was a long fucking winter.

Two years ago, I rang that bell. I actually had to supply it.  The infusion center is small.  So I brought my grandmother Huggins’ old schoolhouse bell and shook the hell out of it in the parking lot adorned with my Captain America shirt from one dear friend and a Tibetan prayer wheel from another.  Last year, I spent this weekend in San Diego with my sisters and mother on a delayed sisters’ weekend/70^th birthday celebration.  This year, I took a walk around the lake with my husband.

I also saw a movie with him on Thursday night—Amazing Grace—the film of Aretha Franklin’s live gospel recording at the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in Watts California in January of 1972.

Dates..context.  That was another winter.  And I can imagine it was a long fucking one for my mother.  I was two, almost three.  My birth father had been gone for a year-and-a-half, killed in an F4 at Homestead Airforce Base.  Twenty-four-year old Pam Vance was back in Virginia Beach, finishing grad school, handling a complex situation with her family in Virginia, and raising a toddler.

At the same time, twenty-nine-year-old Grammy award winning Aretha Franklin was recording, against the advice of Atlantic Records, what would become the greatest selling gospel album of all time.

The theater was empty on Thursday night as Mark and I watched the movie. And I said to my colleagues at lunch the next day that I can count on one hand the true manifestations of faith I have experienced in 49 years on this planet. Thursday night was one of them.  The first half of the film was pure testament, the second half pure celebration.  I was in tears for its entirety.

My faith isn’t something I talk about much publicly.  But it’s there.  Like the lilacs, permeating, reminding me with every season that I have so very much to be grateful for—that I am so loved, so I must so love.  That’s pretty much it.

It’s interesting to me that Aretha Franklin herself sued twice before her death to keep the film from being released.  No one knows exactly why that is.  But I have an idea.  I don’t believe this is the same situation as Harper Lee’s Watchman (writers never throw away their drafts, and that one was never meant to see the light of day…but that’s another post.)  Aretha signed a contract to let the film be made.  Sydney Pollack just messed up the technology.  Franklin was a consummate professional, and you can see that in the parts of the documentary that show the rehearsal, her little bit of sass there and the insistence of starting over once during the performance itself.

At some point in that church, though, something else took over.  Aretha was brought up in the church.  That’s where she started singing. So she might have predicted this might happen.  Or maybe she didn’t.  She was young.  And there was a reason she chose to record that album at that time. A reason she chose that location as the place to record.  I’m extrapolating, but I’m not sure even she knew exactly what those reasons were.  I know one thing, though.  No one in that building was the same when she finished.

I don’t think she was either.

I wasn’t the same after Thursday night, and I only saw it on film with Dolby surround sound less than a year after we lost her.

We don’t always want to relive, let alone make so public, these transformative experiences.

These experiences happen, though, like the lilacs every May. They bombard us with a fragrance so powerful we have to pay attention.

Thank Heaven for their perennial grace.