A Famous Poet, KFC, and Peace with My Past

January 13, 2025February 4, 2025 Rebekah Matt2 Comments

Nikki Giovanni—famous poet and winner of dozens of awards—died last month at age 81. We never met in person, so she’ll never know that one particularly interesting thing she did while eating lunch at a Kentucky Fried Chicken more than 25 years ago greatly touched my life.

By the time she was in her late fifties and eating that lunch at KFC, Nikki Giovanni was hugely famous, as poets go. In addition to her numerous literary awards, she was also a longtime professor of English literature at Virginia Tech, and by the time she reached old age, she had received 31 honorary doctorates. Despite having grown up in poverty in the 1940s and ’50s, she had risen to a high station in life due to her own tenacity and literary talents.

I have it on good authority that she was also a really nice, down-to-earth person. When she came to our city in the late 1990s as part of the library’s literary speakers series, my husband, who worked in the library’s marketing department, had the privilege of accompanying her where she needed or wanted to go. And where she wanted to go, after she was done speaking and on her way back to the airport, was Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Faith

When Resilience and Grit Aren’t Enough

September 2, 2024January 14, 2025 Rebekah Matt9 Comments

Statistically, my life ought to be a serious mess right about now.

It’s true that much of my ’70s and ’80s childhood was a fairly typical American suburban experience. But there was a lot going on behind the scenes, and before I was ten years old, I had learned two survival skills used by many children living in a highly unstable environment: how to lie about my family situation and how to hide things from others.

Faith

The Blessing of Forgiving Our Parents

March 6, 2023January 14, 2025 Rebekah Matt8 Comments

One conversation changed my relationship with my mom forever.

“…forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.”

These are hard words that Jesus gives us in the Lord’s Prayer. As Christians, we know we ought to forgive—in fact, we’re commanded to do it. But often it’s easier said than done.

Home

December 26, 2022January 14, 2025 Rebekah Matt2 Comments

This house.

I didn’t have one for so long.

Reading

This Reading Life

September 19, 2022January 14, 2025 Rebekah Matt8 Comments

My life with books goes so far back that I actually can’t remember a time when I didn’t know how to read.

My entire childhood was spent with my “nose in a book,” as my grandfather often said. Books were my comfort, my friends, my treasures, my security, my escape, and my joy. Children who have insecure and disrupted family lives often find solace in something they can control, and my solace was found in books.

Faith

My Three Baptisms

August 8, 2022January 14, 2025 Rebekah Matt6 Comments

“Tell me again why we baptize babies?”

That was the message my husband and I received from our oldest son several years ago, when he was stationed in Japan.

It was an honest question. Simply put, he had witnessed several other Marines getting baptized in the Pacific Ocean and was thinking about whether he should, as well. He had previously been baptized at age four, soon after our family had joined a church that practiced what’s commonly known as infant baptism.

Faith

Loved by God the [Not Absent, Not Abusive] Father

November 15, 2021January 14, 2025 Rebekah Matt4 Comments

By the time I was ten, I had had three earthly fathers.

The first father was the absent one, my biological father. My parents divorced in a storm of anger and legal drama when I was just a few months old, and my mom and I lived with her parents for the next several years. Father Number One left the country he despised for a new life on a new continent, where he stayed.

The second father was the abusive one, my stepfather. My mother had impulsively married one of her more promising boyfriends, and while it seemed like a good idea at the time, his physical abuse started within weeks and escalated rapidly until one final beating which put her in the hospital just before Christmas. She and I fled in secret to another state a thousand miles away and Father Number Two never found us.

Growing Up Poor and Bernie’s Mittens

January 25, 2021January 15, 2025 Rebekah MattLeave a comment

Childhood memories remind me where I came from and who I really am.

Unexpectedly, the #1 viral image from the 2021 presidential inauguration hit me right in the gut. Oh, it was definitely funny to see all the Bernie memes: the old man in a mud-colored parka, disposable drugstore mask, and bulky hand-knit mittens in front of landmarks and embedded in pop culture. But before the memes, I had an unexpected encounter with that image that stretches back to my childhood.