Cinnamon Rolls and Bacon

Car(apace)

2012-01-17T21:56:00.000-08:00

Even after two years of sliding gracefully through stop signs and spinning in place while attempting to exit our well-glazed parking space, my husband and I had continued to question the necessity of a new set of snow tires. Was it really worth 1000 whole dollars just to be able to stop when we wanted to stop or go when we wanted to go? Then came the first genuine snowfall in November, which sent us van-skiing down a steep hill toward a busy intersection right in the middle of rush-minute traffic. That thrilling brush with disaster ended the debate. We wanted to live through another winter. So we slimmed down our bank account, handed over a hefty chunk of our savings to the hardworking folks at Les Schwab, and drove away, accompanied by the reassuring crunchity-crunchity-crunch of metal studs against ice.

And then the snow promptly quit falling. We spent nearly all of the last two months wearing down our shiny new studs on perfectly clear roads.

I'm usually the only one around here who's dreaming of a green Christmas, but the complete cessation of snow this winter has had me wondering whether that fat wad of cash would have been better spent on something useful like, say, a lifetime supply of washable markers. But then all it took was one more good snowfall and a slippery drive up a hilly country road to convince me that those new tires were worth every last penny.

Snow tires or no snow tires, however, I was grateful to avoid any extensive traveling this winter. Three years ago, as you may recall, we flew to Phoenix for Christmas, and in the process of missing our first flight on account of impassable roads, driving back home past stranded cars to buy all new tickets, spending the night in Spokane both before and after our flights, and staying at two different houses while we were in Arizona, I both packed and unpacked suitcases for our entire family six times.

Combine that with the experience of loading and unloading the portable crib, transferring and retransferring car seats, rolling and unrolling sleeping bags, slipping and sliding around the highway in winter storm conditions, and hurrying tiny children with tinier bladders through crowded airports, and you'll understand why holiday travel has, for me, lost most of its luster.

My inner pragmatist would be more than happy to swear off all holiday traveling adventures until the entire family is old enough to not only be out of diapers and car seats, but also to pack their own suitcases—and to help push the van out of a snow bank, should the occasion arise.

• • • • •

When I was a kid I used to enjoy winter travel, usually because it meant spending Christmas with my multitudes of cousins. Long road trips were always as much a part of our holiday traditions as Grandma Kvale's roast turkey, Uncle Ken's egg nog lattes, and Aunt Marilynn's "Hyill-hyill-hyill!" laughter emanating from the kitchen. Each year my family would open our gifts early and then pile into our boxy Toyota Tercel wagon for the drive to Tacoma, to my grandparents' house on the hill.

As we neared our destination in the evening, after six hours of sharing the back seat with my little brother, I would watch expectantly through the window for the brightly lit star my grandfather always set atop the roof—high enough to be seen from the freeway.

When we finally arrived at the house, I loved to run up the spiral staircase to the guest bedroom. From there, through the age-rippled window glass, I could glimpse ten thousand red brake lights and ten thousand white headlights forming a peaceful rolling stream along the interstate below.

After experiencing the speed and intensity of city traffic, the transformation seemed surreal. Who, seeing that view, would consider the possibility that tragedy could, at any moment, interrupt that graceful slow dance through the fog? As bright and cheerful as a string of Christmas lights, rows of cars, trucks, and buses glistened under the pink-orange glow of the sodium vapor street lamps. What danger could there be in such a lovely procession?

• • • • •

As a child, of course, I never gave the road conditions so much as a second thought. I had implicit trust in my father's driving abilities and never once suspected that there might be even the slightest hint of danger in all that winter driving—not with my dad behind the wheel. Deep in the recesses of my mind lay an early memory of our brand new car being struck by an elderly lady's land yacht, but that did not shake my firm belief that accidents were distant events that happened in other places to other people.

My first true encounter with the hazards of winter travel didn't come until I was a teenager when, due to an impassable blizzard, we were forced to spend New Year's Eve in an Ellensberg Motel 6. As we set out along an ice-encrusted Interstate 90 the next day, we found ourselves watching in tense amazement as the pickup truck immediately in front of us slid out of control, started into a slow-motion spin, ricocheted off the median, struck another car, and then slipped, missing us by what seemed like inches, into the shallow ditch next to the freeway.

That's when I began to wonder if there was, perhaps, something slightly ridiculous about that annual trek over the ice and through the mountains. I began to understand that even the best of drivers can do nothing to prevent black ice, or drunk college students, or wildlife crossings. (I once watched my brother's Suburban collide with a swooping owl.) Scary things happen on the road—things beyond our control.

Every Christmas of my childhood had sent us weaving our icy way around the Palouse hills, through the Columbia gorge, over the mountain passes (chains or snow tires required), and along roadways blasted out of the rock with countless sticks of dynamite. We zipped through snow and ice and rain at historically unprecedented speeds, passing mere feet from other vehicles that raced along at equally breathtaking speeds. One unexpected bump, one careless flick of the wrist, one brief error in judgement, and goodbye family, goodbye beating hearts.

We—all of us—have been living on the edge, and yet most of us hardly consider whether this whole wintertime travel business is a good idea. In fact, most of us hardly think about driving at all, regardless of the season. Even when conditions are at their worst, we remain largely undeterred.

• • • • •

Last Monday the "check engine" light blinked on in our van, but for an entire week neither I nor my husband had time to take the vehicle in for a checkup. What was wrong with our engine neither of us knew, and on the way to school one of the kids nervously asked me if I thought our car might explode. I laughed and said I sure hoped not. How often does that really happen anyway? In my ignorance, however, I couldn't make any guarantees. But did that stop us from going where we wanted to go? Not at all. The kids must be educated, and the groceries must be hauled from afar. Driving is a luxury that most of us really cannot live without—not even at our own peril.

And it is perilous. Not to sound panicky or anything, but, well, you could die out there, you know.

As a mom with young children, I read and hear a lot of buzz about the terrible risks we take with our kids when we vaccinate them, or don't vaccinate them, or feed them foods tainted with high fructose corn syrup, or expose them to chemical pesticides, or (perish the thought) let them catch a breath of second hand smoke. But honestly, I suspect that all of those potential dangers pale in comparison to the kind of overt danger we face just driving our little ones to the mall—let alone across hundreds of miles of frozen freeway—on a snowy January day.

Stop and think about it. If there were any other behavior-related cause of death that was comparable to traffic collisions, the national outcry would be deafening. More than 6500 American children die—and tens of thousands more are injured—every year as a direct result of motor vehicle accidents. If that grim statistic were associated with a drug or a chemical or a tainted food product, you can imagine the backlash. If we could blame a corporation or the government or some other high profile scapegoat for knowingly gambling with the lives of these innocent victims, we'd all be writing letters to congress to make them stop, demanding fines, prison time, and heads on a platter.

But the thing is, even after hearing all about the risks involved, we're the ones voluntarily buckling our very own children into our minivans everyday. We're too busy stressing out about the the trans-fats that the children in the back seat are absorbing from their drive-through fries to think about the death-defying means we took to arrive at the drive through in the first place. We don't even blink when a fully loaded eighteen wheeler comes hurtling toward us at 60 MPH. We fret and worry about long-term hypothetical risks and completely ignore the immediate—but apparently acceptable—risks that are racing along in the lane next to us. Have we lost our minds?

• • • • •

If I'm reading the numbers right, traffic accidents kill more children in a single year in this country than the total number of US military deaths (combat- and non-combat-related combined) in Iraq during the three years from 2003 to 2006. Just a stone's throw from our home in Dallas, a drunk driver swerved out of his lane on Highway 183 and sent a gasoline tanker plunging off of an overpass, where it burst into an white-hot inferno and transformed the stretch of road next to the IHOP into a charred mass of unstable rebar and concrete. A few too many Budweisers and one careless driver had effectively detonated what amounted to a roadside bomb.

But I, just like everybody else, was back behind the wheel—on that very highway, no less—the same day. There was no question that the fire-blasted overpass would and must be rebuilt. Most of us read the headlines, shake our heads, and then cheerfully strap our little ones back into their car seats without a second thought. It's simply a risk that we've grown so accustomed to that we rarely think of it as a risk at all.

Most of us, after all, would rather not revert to the old covered wagon routine for bringing home the weekly mountain of groceries, let alone for heading across the mountains to visit grandma—especially during the winter months.

• • • • •

Driving at any time of year, of course, is risky—particularly if you live in a college town like mine, where roughly a third of the population consists of impatient, inexperienced, and irresponsible drivers.

Just a few months ago, a speeding car ran a red light and nearly collided with me as I was on my way home from my boys' school. And while I was in college, I had not one but two cars totaled by 17-year-old drivers—one that suddenly turned left directly in front of me on a residential street and hit me almost head-on, and one who ran a red light at an intersection and slammed into my front end with her uninsured orange Ford Bronco. Neither of those accidents happened on icy roads, and they both occurred years before anyone had ever heard of texting while driving. I've been an extremely defensive (translation: tense) driver, and an obnoxiously jumpy passenger, ever since.

• • • • •

What I've come to realize is that every time we go zipping merrily along the highway toward an oncoming car, we are defying sudden and violent death. Who of us doesn't have a few dramatic car-crash (or near-miss) stories to tell about a friend or a loved one—or ourselves?

I've spent a blazing hot afternoon stranded in the middle of a fallow field in Central Washington with my radiator punctured by a rusty, half-buried tiller—and with only a 300-pound Spanish speaking junk man and his great dane to keep me company. I've had friends hospitalized after being struck by incautious and intoxicated drivers. I've attended the funeral of a young man who fell asleep at the wheel on his way home from the university. One of my college friends lost her new husband to a wintertime car crash. The lives of the sister, brother-in-law, and baby nephew of one of my high school classmates were taken all at once by a drunk driver. Limbs and hearts have been broken on nearly every roadway in America.

And aside from the terrible human cost of driving, there are all kinds of animal casualties as well. Ten years ago, on a trip from New Orleans to Monroe, Louisiana, my husband and I drove past countless dead dogs, cats, possums, turtles, and even small alligators—a veritable natural history museum of roadkill. I know multiple people who have struck deer on the highway. The streets where we now live are polka-dotted with crushed squirrel carcasses—but then again, perhaps dead squirrels are an argument in favor of the deadly power of cars? In any case, as long as we persist in our driving habits, all sorts of traumatic events are likely to occur again.

So the question is, what keeps us going back for more?

• • • • •

Driving is, frequently, a mere matter of convenience. Even when walking or biking is a viable option, we choose driving as a quicker and easier way to get from point A to point B. Let's face it. Sometimes we're just lazy.

But often, driving is not a matter of convenience but of necessity. Unless you live in New York or Chicago and have nowhere to go beyond the fixed train routes, alternative forms of transportation are hard to come by. You might try to absolve yourself of fossil fuel guilt by taking the bus, but that does nothing to keep you off the busy roads. Besides, as my shocked children immediately discovered, buses do not have seat belts. Most American cities were not built for foot or bicycle traffic, much less for a horse and carriage. And for those of us with multiple kids and gallons of milk to haul across town, we need some kind of vehicle to help.

We also drive out of a sense of obligation. Because modern transportation has made it possible to visit distant friends and family, we feel that we must. Nobody with a functioning vehicle and some money for gas can legitimately say, "Sorry, Grandma. 100 miles is just too far to travel for Christmas."

And, in spite of the obvious dangers, most of the population isn't hitting the road in search of an adrenaline rush. Quite the opposite, actually. I'm not naming any names, but I know some people who like to take a drive to relieve stress. There is, in fact, a whole genre of driving-for-the-love-of-it songs, typified by Willie Nelson's "On the Road Again." And even I can be carried away by that easy, free-wheelin' feelin' of watching the yellow center stripes flick past to the rhythm of a good-mood soundtrack. You just better hope that a stray moose doesn't wander across your path while you're, in the words of Son Volt, letting the "wind take your troubles away."

That brings me to what is, perhaps, the central reason for our automobile habit: it makes us feel free. "A car in every driveway" is still very much part of the American dream, and individual autonomy is arguably the reigning American value. According to American Public Media, the city of Los Angeles is home to nearly twice as many cars as drivers. It sounds ludicrous. But for us Americans, a car is more than a tool; it is a status symbol. It is more than a status symbol; it is an extension of who we are. To own a car is to hold a sense of power, independence, and importance. We select the time of departure. We set the speed. We choose the music. We decide where to go, and when to stop, and why. We are kings and queens ruling over our own little steel-and-rubber worlds. This might explain why sweet little old ladies can turn into cussing hussies when they get behind the wheel; on the highway we are tiny independent states vying for dominance, and pity the brazen fool who attempts to invade our territory. ¡Vìvà la vehicle!

So, while we may drive for convenience, necessity, pleasure, and the grand illusion of freedom, I have to wonder if even these motivations, powerful as they are, can fully explain our decision to accept the risks involved. Why are we so overwhelmingly willing to play the odds?

• • • • •

The odds themselves are, obviously, part of the answer. Even in the wintertime, you're not statistically likely to die on the way to grandma's house. For every trip that ends in a deadly crash, there are a million more that reach their destination in perfect safety. The bet is a fairly safe one. But that doesn't change the fact that it's our lives that are on the line. Even if there are a million empty chambers in the revolver, Russian roulette is still the game we're choosing to play. (C'mon, kids! Give it a spin!)

Why not stay off the roads whenever possible? Why take the gamble when the stakes are so high? For many, ignoring the risks and trusting blind fate are the best reasons they can offer. But for me the overarching reason is probably best summed up in a quote that I've heard attributed to General Stonewall Jackson: "My religious belief teaches me to feel as safe in battle [or behind the wheel] as in bed. God has fixed the time for my death. I do not concern myself about that, but to be always ready, no matter when it may overtake me."

In other words, the risks we take are never governed by impersonal chance. They are never automatic or meaningless. Which is to say, they are not, in the ultimate sense, risks at all; every outcome was fully planned before we were born.

The well lived life is not the one spent locked indoors, wearing a crash helmet, and popping vitamins. It is spent loving our kids, and visiting our friends, and doing our work with the confidence that comes from faith: Yea, though I drive through the turnpike of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for Thou art with me.

This naturally raises deeper questions about the unfathomable relationship between God's sovereignty and human responsibility, but I will let the theologians and pastors expound that one more fully. I will simply say that I believe God uses indirect means, from Roman crosses to snow tires, to accomplish His ends, and that there is no contradiction between trusting God and buckling our seat belts. We are not called to express our faith by being stupidly suicidal but by living each day as we ought, in spite of the apparent danger. We can drive to school or go to battle assured that in God's hands we are as safe there—or as doomed—as in bed.

So, while purchasing expensive new tires was part of being a good steward of our family's lives, and while I may have been grateful to stay comfortably at home for the holidays, there is, perhaps, no better time than during the Christmas season to recognize that evading death is not the point of living. This life is not meant to be lived for the sole purpose of its own preservation. That momentous birth in Bethlehem was all about taking up a mortal life in order to lay it down. Because of this, we are free to take risks, even deadly ones, in order to fulfill our duties and in order to love others—which is, after all, essentially the same thing.

Sparkling

2011-12-20T13:31:00.000-08:00

Today, our house is sparkling—not the tidy, freshly polished kind of sparkling, but the kind spangled with twinkle lights, glistening with chipped bits of tree ornaments, littered with shreds of metallic wrapping paper, scattered with glitter fallen from children's craft projects, and sprinkled with colored sugar and a fine dusting of flour all around. Very messy. Very merry. May your Christmas be so blessed it sparkles.

We Are the 99 Percent

2011-10-22T16:09:00.000-07:00

We are the 99 percent. We are getting kicked out of our homes. We are forced to choose between groceries and rent. We are denied quality medical care. We are suffering from environmental pollution. We are working long hours for little pay and no rights, if we're working at all. We are getting nothing while the other 1 percent is getting everything. We are the 99 percent.

These are stark and disturbing claims, are they not? The above is the summary statement on the home page of the "We Are The 99 Percent" website, a blog where supporters of the Occupy Wall Street movement can post their stories of worry, deprivation, and suffering at the hands of the wealthiest 1 percent of the American population–the 1 percent who own and manage some of the world's largest corporations.

A tale of two Americas

I confess that I have not been following the protests closely. But the protesters' signs are big, and their complaints are loud, so it would be hard to miss their point: Corporate moguls are selfish moneygrubbers who couldn't care less about the little guy. They would rather line their own pockets at the expense of the other 99 percent of Americans than consider the economic hardships the rest of us are enduring. And while we dig ourselves deeper into private debts, they cruise carelessly above us in their private jets. Somebody (Congress, are you listening?) had better make them give back some of what they've taken from all of us.

By now, of course, we've seen plenty of opposing commentary highlighting the benefits these corporations bestow upon us Americans, and I know that I myself have enjoyed many of the goods and services that they provide. But let's grant, just for the sake of argument, that these corporate billionaires really are nothing but heartless financial dictators who would rather starve a child than lose a dollar. Let's say that they truly do care more about the bottom line than about the bread line. Let's grant, in other words, that the ugly portrait that the protesters have painted of these Wall Street Scrooges is perfectly accurate. It's not a pretty picture, is it? Wall Street has some serious penance to pay.

But now, just for a minute, let's shift our focus away from those bloodsucking CEO's and back on the protesters themselves. They are the 99 percent. Their signs say so. And they have been painting a portrait not only of Wall Street but also of themselves. You can see it on their website. You can read it in the quote up above. The contrast couldn't be starker: The 99 percent are suffering. They have no rights. They are, to put in their words, getting nothing.

Nothing. Let's meditate on that.

How impoverished, exactly, are 99 percent of the American people? How accurate is the self portrait these protesters have been painting? What if, for the sake of perspective, we took away their paintbrush and instead handed these 99 percent a mirror? What, I had to wonder, does it look like to get nothing? What does suffering look like in the US of A? What does it mean to have no rights? Well, I've got eyeballs, and so, I hope do you. So pull up on Google any Associated Press photo of the Wall Street Protesters and tell me what you see.

Living with nothing

What I see over and over again is a gathering of apparently clean, healthy, well dressed, well fed individuals carrying cell phones and digital cameras and being respectfully allowed to take over city streets to voice their opinions—even in spite of their violation of minor laws about the acceptable use of public spaces.

What I do not see are swollen, malnourished bellies. I see no open sores or untreated diseases. I see no dirty rags or disintigrating shoes. I see no one being beaten or shot or arrested merely for voicing their opposition to the status quo. Nor am I seeing that sort of thing on the streets where I live—or on any American street, for that matter. So, while appearances can be deceiving, just on the face of it the claims of the 99 percent seem suspect.

That's not to say that nobody is suffering, that nobody is underfed, that nobody is being crushed by corporate greed. That's not to say that some Wall Street corporations haven't taken merciless advantage of some of us American citizens. I do believe that more and more people in our country have been struggling to make ends meet in recent years. I might even count myself among them.

I myself have known well enough what it's like to be uninsured, to go without certain luxuries, to live "paycheck to paycheck." Our family spent several years in which my own kids were eligible for Medicaid. Just this past year we lost some of our health coverage due to the economic downturn, and even now our family fits squarely within the definition of "low income" according to federal guidelines for a family of seven. I am the 99 percent, I guess. So it's not that I think these people are completely delusional when they say that times are tough. But the question is, tough compared to what?

I have no doubt that among the Wall Street protesters there are individuals with legitimate grievances. But do they represent the 99 percent? To ask it another way, for every 100 people in these United States, are 99 being robbed and cheated and trampled upon by Wall Street? I found that hard to believe, so I decided to do a quick search of the internet to find some reliable statistics that might show what life among the 99 percent is actually like during these dark financial times.

A better summary?

Don't get me wrong. I understand the rhetorical power of hyperbole, but is our plight truly as bad as the "We Are the 99 Percent" crowd describes—that 99 percent of Americans are, in essence, homeless, sick, starving, poisoned, unemployed, or "working long hours for little pay and no rights" and are "getting nothing"?

Exaggerated claims like these are, in part, what prompted the government of North Korea, of all places, to issue official public statements claiming that these dire conditions in the United States now prove that capitalism has failed us. Would you, the 99 percent, prefer to emmigrate to North Korea, that great land of economic equality, in order to enjoy the wealth and freedom that it has to offer? Would you trade your American poverty for their prosperity? Yeah, me neither.

I'm not saying that we couldn't do better. I'm not saying that Wall Street is guiltless or that poverty—even relative poverty—should be ignored. What I am saying is that, before we decide to condemn greed, we might want to take a look in the mirror; before we march through the streets lamenting our poverty, we might first do well to learn what poverty actually looks like in this country. Our "necessities" look surprisingly like luxuries to most of the world's population.

If we compared our poorest citizens to the wealthiest one percent of the rest of the world, I suspect that we might be astonished by the resemblance.

As most of us know, legitimate statistics can be used, and routinely are used, to cloud the truth. So I fully realize that the following percentages are unlikely to paint a completely accurate portrait of American life. What I do hope to prove, however, is that these statistics bear very little resemblance to the portrait painted on the We Are the 99 Percent website.

If nothing else, I hope that after reading the statistics below the response that we come away with is gratitude. We Americans, we 99 percent, have been given far much more than we realize. Thanksgiving is coming up. Allow me to help you get ready:

According the US Department of Energy (2005), of all Americans at poverty level or below,

99.7% have a refrigerator
97.9% have a TV
95.2% have a stove and oven
81.7% have a microwave
74.7% have air conditioning (Really? I am now slightly envious of 74% of poor Americans.)
72.3% have one or more VCRs
66.8% have more than one TV
64.9% have cable or satellite TV (!)
64.8% have at least one DVD player
63.9% have a clothes washer
53.1% have a clothes dryer
54.5% have a cell phone
51.7% have both a VCR and DVD player
38.2% have a personal computer
29.3% have a video game console
29.3% have internet service
28.4% have a computer printer
24.2% have more than one DVD player
22.7% have a separate freezer
17.9% have a big screen TV

(I should add that these percentages are even higher among poor families with children.)

According to the USDA,

85.5 percent (101.5 million) of U.S. households were food secure throughout 2010.
Food secure—These households had access, at all times, to enough food for an active, healthy life for all household members.

According to National Geographic,

Americans on average have the largest homes of the 17 countries surveyed.
97% have hot running water
94% have a reliable source of heat
82% have air conditioning
85% regularly eat chicken
79% regularly eat beef
79% of Americans drive cars alone (So that's why the carpool lane is always empty during rush hour!)
67% have a dishwasher
57% have 3 or more TVs
48% have their own washer and dryer
19% have 3 or more cars per household.
16% of American homes have 10 or more rooms.

According to Pew Research:

96% of 14- to 29-year-olds own a cell phone
85% of all American adults now own a mobile phone
76% of Americans own either a desktop or laptop computer
47% own an dedicated MP3 player such as an iPod or Zune
42% of Americans own a video game console

And lastly, according to the CIA World Fact Book,

the current average life expectancy in this country is 78.3 years, compared to a global average of 67.2 years. (Throughout much of Africa, you would be doing extraordinarily well to reach age 50.)

After looking at what the majority of us really do have, I think we would do well to rewrite the summary found at the beginning of this post. If we are being honest, most of us could sign our names to something more like this:

We are the 99 percent. We drive our own cars. We have free K-12 education. We watch TV. We play games on our cell phones. We take hot showers regularly and turn on the AC in the summertime. We eat meat several times a week. We wear new clothes and have machines to wash them for us. We live long and prosper. We are the 99 percent.

That Is Why It Is Called the "Present"

2011-10-19T16:54:00.000-07:00

The day before my 33rd birthday I nearly died.

Yesterday morning was nothing remarkable. I had made a few loose plans to do laundry and read books with the kids. I had lunches to pack and errands to run and chores to do. I was preoccupied with a collection of quotidian details as I was driving home from my sons' school where I'd been helping with reading groups.

Just as I was starting to cross the highway to turn left at a green light, out of the corner of my eye I noticed a car flying like a bullet toward the intersection and showing no signs of slowing down.

I slammed on my brakes and lurched to a halt. My front wheels had already advanced half-way into the crosswalk the moment the speeding silver sedan shot through the red light. It was gone before I had gathered enough wits about me to honk my horn or read license plate numbers. With the sound of my heart swooshing rapidly somewhere behind my ears, I rolled forward again, trying not to let my knee shake as my foot pressed the gas pedal. I turned left, catching the eye of one of the drivers who had stopped at the red light. Her mouth was hanging open, and she raised her hands and shook her head in utter disbelief.

Death had just looked me in eyeballs, and my eyeballs were now open very, very wide. My vision, for that moment, was as sharp as shattered glass: My time is decidedly not in my hands.

Had I left the school just a split second earlier, had I proceeded from the stop sign up the hill just a moment sooner, had I driven just a hair over the speed limit on my way down that hill, I might have spent this day not enjoying birthday hugs from my children or lunch with my grandmother or a dinner out with my husband and some good friends but in a hospital bed or, worse, in a morgue.

Ironically, it's brush a death that may revive a love of life in all is mundane details. After that near escape, the fall leaves look a little brighter, the sky a little bluer, the laundry a little softer, my breath a little warmer, my family a little dearer. Life is good.

That "every day is a gift" may have been reduced to a greeting card platitude, but it's a truth nonetheless. Today I feel acutely that the mere fact of a beating heart is the gift of a lifetime.

Today I celebrate the day I was born. Today I celebrate that first day that life was given to me. But today I will also celebrate the other 12,044 days when that precious life was given to me again and again. Today is my birthday. Today I am alive. It is a very happy birthday indeed.

Why, Yes. Yes There Is a Doctor in the House.

2011-09-14T08:34:00.000-07:00

The African elephant, I recently learned, has the longest gestation period of all mammals—22 months. That sounds painfully exhausting if you ask me. But I can tell you with certainty that the African elephant has nothing on the American PhD candidate.

Nine years ago, when we had one tiny baby (and we thought our lives were busy), we moved to Dallas, Texas, where my husband would pursue a Master’s Degree in Literature. A year later, he was enrolled in the doctoral program at the University of Dallas and was on his way to earning a PhD.

I, naïve young thing that I was, truly believed that in a mere three, or at most four, years we’d be walking away from that fine institution cradling a sweet little diploma in our arms.

I, of course, ought to have known better; I have had a college student in my household for all but a few short years of my life. I have had a graduate student in my immediate family for half my life, at least. Higher education is and has always been my bread and butter. My own father, if I’m not mistaken, was a college student for fourteen years, and I was old enough to remember when he finished his PhD. (There was great rejoicing.) So why I assumed that my husband would have no trouble accomplishing such a feat in a few short years, I do not know. Looking back now, the expectation seems completely ridiculous.

“I recognize a workhorse when I see one,” said my husband’s professor as he introduced Jayson before his final public lecture two weeks ago, “and when I took one look at Dr. Grieser’s faculty description on the website of the college where he teaches, I could see that that’s exactly what he is.”

It’s true. Only a workhorse (or maybe an elephant) would do what my husband has done. But at that moment, I wanted to stand up and tell everybody present, “You don’t know the half of it.”

For the young, childless bachelor living on nothing but student loans and ramen noodles to complete a doctorate is nothing to sneeze at, I suppose. But for the family man who does the same thing—while simultaneously retaining a full-time job, a social life, and a church life, as well as the love of his wife and five children—some special honor should certainly be added to the degree: PhDE, perhaps (Doctor of Philosophy, Extraordinaire.) Give that man an extra stripe on his academic robe, say I, and an extra tassel on his tam. It wouldn’t be too much, would it, if I followed him around town holding a flashing neon Applause sign over his head, would it? Surely not.

Plenty of people have asked me, “Isn’t it such a relief for him to be done?” And the answer, of course, is yes. But it is more than a relief; it is pride and gratitude and euphoria and fatigue, all rolled into one. If you have ever given birth to a child, you know exactly what I mean.

But just as with the birth of a child, when one kind of labor is finished, a new kind of labor begins. Much as I may wish we could take an extended vacation to celebrate the completion of this degree, I have to remind myself of the saying repeated every year at graduation by my husband's students: Omni cui multum datum est, multum quaeretur ab eo. (To whom much is given, much is required.) Jayson, workhorse that he is, had hardly taken on the title of "doctor" before he moved on to the task of planning new classes to teach and making improvements to the classes he currently teaches. He finished his glass of champagne, and then took up his books again for the work ahead. After all (as Shelley once observed), "nothing wilts faster than laurels that have been rested upon."

Now that the dissertation is complete and successfully defended, you can only imagine how good it feels to be delivered of that 250-page burden. It took my husband nine years of graduate school to bring forth that baby. Nine years. That, if you're counting, is the gestation period of the African elephant five times over. So if you notice a new lightness in his step, you now understand why.

After all these years, I am delighted to finally report that yes, there is indeed a doctor in the house.

The Birds and the Bees and the Flowers and the Trees

2011-07-16T10:23:00.000-07:00

I have done some writing in the last month. Honest. As a matter of fact, I've written more than usual during the past five weeks. But unfortunately, all those words weren't coming together into any proper shape, which is why editing was taking far too long. I felt like I was sculpting jell-o. So rather than publish the formless, strawberry flavored blob I've been chiseling away at, I thought I'd be better off sharing something a bit more concrete to ponder instead.

Here, therefore, are 2,000 "words" from my photos this week:

A Little Local Limelight

2011-06-09T22:14:00.000-07:00

Famous people don’t often rub shoulders with folks living in this small Idaho town surrounded by wheat fields. Red carpet premiers and star-studded galas simply don’t happen up here. So whenever some big name arrives in town, it’s almost always front page news. When Jesse Jackson came to speak at the University of Idaho last year, half the population turned out to hear him. Nevermind that half the population thinks he’s a joke. He’s famous, dadgummit, and that gets us excited.

But if the mere arrival of somebody famous gives us a thrill, you can imagine how much more thrilled we are when somebody from around here—somebody we actually know—becomes a household name.

That is why a bunch of us here in Moscow are all abuzz this weekend over our newest—and probably our biggest—encounter with fame. The J.J. Abrams/Steven Spielberg movie Super 8 is opening nationwide on Friday, and it just happens to star one of our local home-grown kids. We are more than excited; we are practically intoxicated. This sort of thing just doesn't happen here.

I remember listening to NPR while washing the dishes in my kitchen in Dallas one day when an album review came on the air. “Our next artist hails from Moscow, Idaho,” said the announcer. I stopped scrubbing. Nobody had ever mentioned my home town on a Dallas radio station before. Who on earth could they be talking about? “Josh Ritter’s newest album, The Animal Years…”

Wait. What? Josh Ritter is a musician? I know that guy! Well, sort of. He’s in my junior high yearbook! I used to go to the Lutheran church with his family!...Whoa. So, of course, I had to look him up online where I discovered that he’s actually made something of a name for himself on the folk/pop music scene. And that made this Moscow girl feel mighty proud. I like to see my home town on the map from time to time, and I know I'm not alone.

When Sarah Palin's name went global during the last election, our town—well, half of it at any rate—was happy to remember her as having spent her college years here in Moscow.

When track star Dan O'Brien made sports headlines when I was a kid, our local university named its outdoor track after him. We claimed him as ours.

And then there’s N.D. Wilson who graduated from high school with me (lo, these many years ago) in our little class of 17 and now lives just down the street. And he is a bestselling author who has appeared on a National Geographic special and the Today Show. Every time Nate's work makes the news somewhere, we small towners who know him immediately start posting links all over Twitter.

Successful people are impressive. There’s no denying it. We get a charge out of our little brushes with fame. We’ve all heard people tell those long stories in which some chance encounter with a rock star is the punch line of the whole narrative. And most of us actually like to hear those stories told. (Count me among them.) If you shake hands with Alice Cooper at a Target store in Phoenix as my husband did many years ago, you’re going to tell people about it. And if you have a movie star as one of your acquaintances, you and I both know that that tidbit of information will find its way into plenty of casual conversations.

And I think all of that is just fine, to a point. It’s inspiring to watch friends succeed. We love our hometown "heroes," we love to tell their stories, and we especially love to be somewhere within their orbits. There's something just plain fun about being little moons to their sun—satellites that are just near enough to reflect some of the glaring spotlight; the higher their stars rise, the brighter we ourselves seem to shine. But sometimes (maybe more than sometimes) the glow of that limelight turns us a bit more green than it should. To be honest, when astonishing success comes close to home, it can be subtly tempting—all too easy to start thinking that hey, it could have been me. The thought, fleeting though it may have been, has crossed my own mind more than once.

But no. Actually, it couldn't have been me. And to think so would poison the delight of seeing our friends being publicly recognized. Far better to rejoice with them and for them. Far better to enjoy the show than to stupidly regret not being a part of it. It is inspiring to watch a friend succeed. And that, I think, is the reason for all the excitement over tomorrow's release of Super 8.

It’s been entertaining and a bit surreal to see Joel Courtney, who attends our sons’ school and whose family has been part of our church community for years, on the cover of Entertainment Weekly and showing up next to Steven Spielberg on MTV. That cute kid with the bed head who used to sit in front of us in church is a movie star? And we’re not just talking about a bit part in a low-budget, limited-distribution art-house flick. We’re talking about the lead role in what some reviewers are calling the must-see movie of the summer. It’s a bit hard to process.

But most of us who know him and his family are thrilled. We know a movie star! We know somebody who knows Steven Spielberg! I can’t scroll through my facebook news feed without finding link after link to reviews and interviews about Super 8. And I can’t say that I mind. I could take a ride on my high horse and ask what the big deal is. I could wonder aloud why everyone is so worked up about this. After all, it’s not like he found the cure for cancer. It’s not like he’s some kind of genius. It’s just a movie, for pity’s sake.

But that wouldn’t really be the truth. For us, it’s not just a movie. It’s our movie. It’s hard to say how long the thrill will last or whether we’ll get used to seeing our local boy’s face on billboards and movie posters all over the country. But for now, we’re enjoying the ride. Joel’s success feels, in some small way, like our own.

Earth Day

2011-04-22T12:02:00.000-07:00

One Good Friday, when I was a child, we attended the Tenebrae service at our Lutheran church, and while we sat in our pews a storm rose outside. The wind began to blow wildly, and while Christ made his way to the accursed tree, every tree on the hills around us was made to bow and bend. Hail, King of the Jews. The sun went dark. The windows shook. The clouds shed tears. Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for me, but weep for yourselves, and for your children. From the steeple at the center of the circular sanctuary hung a large wooden cross on a chain, and as the rain lashed the roof, the steeple began to vibrate. As those wind vibrations worked their way down the chain, the cross began to hum. To buzz. To moan. The wood itself seemed to cry from out of the depths—a basso profundo wailing. Eli, Eli, lama sabachtani? I remember the chills I felt as the massive Bible was slammed shut and the lights flicked off, the creak and groan of the wooden pews as we filed wordlessly out of the service, the whip of cold air as it snaked its way through the glass doors, biting at our heels, making me shiver.

Truly this was the Son of God.

That Good Friday storm was one of the more dramatic events of my church-going life. In retrospect I have wondered what physics were behind that mourning cross. More than physics, perhaps. That the storm blew in at the perfect moment, that a cold Canadian front met with a mass of wet southern air at that precise geographical location and sent the wind swirling in just such a way as to communicate grief through the glass, down a chain, and into that heavy wood seems almost unbelievable. As unbelievable as the death of God. But I was there. I was a witness. And I do believe.

Today is Earth Day. Today is Good Friday. On this day, two holidays—two holy days—collide. Today, Evangelical pastors and Greenpeace activists share the same hope: the hope that the earth will be saved.

We Christians and we earth-lovers want this world to be redeemed from destruction. None of us want it to go up sulfer-scented flames. I, for one, would rather not turn the wetlands into a trash heap. I'm all for biodegradable grocery sacks, and I don't mind the green glow of my compact fluorescent bulbs too much either. I do have a mandate to care for creation, but by composting my potato peelings, I am not, ultimately, saving the world. We all want to restore paradise, to bring heaven to earth. But at this point the Good Friday and the Earth Day visions diverge. Today we preach our respective gospels to the dying:
Christ was crucified.
Plant a tree for your tomorrow.

And yet, in a twist of irony, the salvation of the earth does, as it turns out, depend upon a tree—a tree that was planted on a hill outside Jerusalem two millennia ago. Creation itself also will be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God.

There was an earthquake that day on Golgatha. Seismology played a roll at the crucifixion, but something more than plate tectonics was at work; the earth itself was taking part in Christ's passion. There was a storm on that Good Friday of my childhood. Perhaps a meteorologist could explain the peculiar atmospheric fluctuations that arose that dark evening when the earth, again, acted out its passion play. Was climate change behind it? Should we try to prevent those conditions from arising in the future? Somebody, after all, paved paradise to put up that church. But that church—that cross—is where the heavens met the earth that day. And where heaven and earth are joined, paradise is restored.

The cross, that deadly collision of heaven and earth, is where the true lover of the world—He through whom the earth itself was created—bled to save it. If He did not come to restore the earth, then all the neighborhood recycling programs in the world be damned.

Good Friday is Earth Day, this year and every year. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.

The Clouds Ye So Much Dread

2011-04-16T16:22:00.000-07:00

Light has come into the world, but men loved darkness

instead of lightbecause their deeds were evil.

—John 3:19

From the pink glow behind my eyelids on Tuesday morning, I could see that the sun was shining before I had even opened my eyes. The window to our bedroom faces east, and the warm light leaking through the yellow curtains spoke of crocuses and daffodils and soft, damp grass. Sitting up in bed, I peered through the glass and let my dilated pupils contract. Below me lay a street washed clean by night-rains and sparkling beneath a blinding sunrise.

After months of snow and weeks of drizzle, these bright mornings blast through the gloom with a jolt of energy that no quad-shot latte can rival. Sunshine spills over the yard, puddles on the carpet and trickles into my soul. By the time I pull the living room curtains as wide as they will go, I am already inspired, ready to tackle projects that have lain untouched for months—ready to sew duvet covers, try new recipes, push strollers, plant seeds, pull weeds, get dirt under my fingernails. Goodbye, clouds. Hello, life.

My name is Hannah, and I am addicted to sunlight.

I don’t remember when I first noticed that a lack of sun was resulting in painful withdrawals, but as I’ve grown older, I’ve found that the weather can hold more than a little sway over my mood. When the sky is gray, my thoughts tend to be gray as well. I struggle to get myself going in the mornings. I drink one too many cups of coffee. I stare blankly at the monochromatic blandness, and I sometimes wonder what on earth possessed us to leave Texas: I could be driving past sun-warmed fields of bluebonnets right now, and instead I’m going numb scraping ice off my windshield.

Short, dark days find me fighting against a short, dark temper, and by the time we give up on saving daylight near the end of the year—when our clocks “fall back” with a dull thud—the loss of sunlit hours starts to rankle.

When the elderly choose to flee the frozen north and spend their winters in Scottsdale or Miami, I do not laugh. I sympathize. Maybe I am merely a snowbird who has not yet learned to fly. Why shouldn’t blue horizons and pink hibiscus brighten the winter of life? With our hair and teeth turning gray, why should we stay to watch the sky and earth do the same?

There’s a reason you’ve never heard the word “bleak” used to describe a mid-summer’s day. Warmth and light need no defense. Light was the very first created thing. And it was good. Does a “cold” shoulder or a “dark” glance ever describe friendliness and joy? Does not the very nature of things tell us what cold and darkness ought to communicate to our poetic sensibilities?

I have friends who claim to love winter. This I do not understand. Not in the least. Nay, not even a little tiny bit. Winter is cold. Winter is dark. Winter is colorless and confining. Winter kills. When people say they look forward to winter, it strikes me with the same discordant note as when churchy people say they look forward to death. Yes, by all means, look forward to what’s on the other side, but do not look forward to death. Death itself is the curse. And I cannot help but think of winter in the same way—as a thing that must be overcome. Winter is a good only insofar as it is a means to arriving at spring.

In order to be enjoyed, winter must be conquered and subdued. We war against it with down parkas, with fiberglass insulation, with UV lamps, with tanning beds, with vitamin D capsules, with tropical beach screensavers, with wood fires, with hot cider. From November to March, my home can feel like a castle under siege; we may not escape its walls without wool hats and snow shovels—the shields and weapons of our hibernal battle.

When I was 13, my family spent the winter in Warsaw, Poland, where the color of virtually everything we saw was a cold gray—clouds, ground, snow, trees, buildings, and even clothing. The sun rose at 10:00 and set at 4:00. There were days when the sun itself seemed to have had the life sucked from it, days when color film seemed a superfluous commodity. Countless pitiable souls had given themselves over to fifths of cheap vodka in their pursuit of a remedy to the chill without and the darkness within. We felt the oppression of that winter ourselves. It was the only time I can remember ever seeing my mother give way to inexplicable tears.

Snow, I grant, is beautiful in its way, but I always feel that it’s at its best when viewed from indoors while it gleams fresh under a clear blue sky and tries for all the world to mimic the white sands of a subtropical beach. I, for one, am dreaming of a green Christmas. I’d trade a thousand soggy snowmen for one sun-drenched sandcastle.

During the season of Epiphany when the days are dim and the nights long, we sing the hymn “As With Gladness Men of Old,” and the final verse always makes my heart swell with longing:

In the heavenly country bright,
Need they no created light;
Thou its light, its joy, its crown,
Thou its sun which goes not down…

Sun which goes not down. Meditate on that. I think I know why my stalwart ancestors settled in Norway; it was surely summer when they arrived, and that midnight sun must have seemed very near to the heavenly country bright. The very thought leaves me pining for the fjords. Little did those pre-Viking hoards know what awaited them come November. Maybe those dark, tiresome winters were behind all the pent up aggression that my distant forebears eventually unleashed on the rest of Europe. And while I may not feel the urge to ransack a village at the end of a long, drab season, I'm certainly tempted to be unreasonably irritable with my family.

When sun finally does break through the gray, as it did this Tuesday morning, the effect is glorious, and I need little other help to embrace the morning. On those days, it's easy to love whatever I meet, and you may even find me humming a tune before I reach the coffee pot. But I cannot spend nine months of the year in fetal position waiting for those sun-days to arrive.

This succession of gray days is trying. But I also know that it has been good for me. When the sun retreats for days on end, it tests my patience and my hope. When that created light grows dim, it drives me to seek a light that endures in spite of thick clouds and short days and winter winds; it drives me back to that sun which goes not down. Light—unchanging, unwavering, unerring Light—shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it: good news that should make for a very good morning indeed.

Betrothal

2011-03-08T21:36:00.000-08:00

“There is nothing I so abominate for young people as a long engagement.”
—Mrs. Croft in Jane Austen’s Persuasion.

Today is Shrove Tuesday, Mardi Gras, and snow flurries have mingled and danced with sunshine since dawn, now gray, now bright, now gray again. Who leads this reel and who follows? I am dizzy in the midst of all this swirling indecision. Blades of green and flakes of white contend for dominance on the ground beneath my feet. For now, the white is winning.

The weather is in that state of limbo we call March, but which the calendar still obstinately calls “Winter.” Nevermind that the snow started falling long before the Calendar informed us, in its authoritarian way, that Winter could officially begin.

From its lofty vantage, my Calendar has a clear view through the kitchen window of what is now going on outside, and it knew that Spring was ready to move in weeks ago. A ridiculously fat robin was out there, hopping around the yew branches in plain sight. Sun was lazily warming the clusters of primroses blooming on my table. Snow was melting, and mud was rising. A pile of children’s black rain boots littered my floor. But the over-anxious Spring must have looked up through the fingerprint-smeared glass, noticed the hard gaze of my Calendar, and, realizing its sad mistake, left without saying goodbye. As if the snow had not lingered long enough, that decorative dictator hanging from my cupboard door insists that Spring is still two weeks away. Cruel, cruel.

• • • • • •

March is always engagement. Betrothal. It is the Already/Not Yet of every year. It is (the Calendar notwithstanding) neither Winter nor Spring; it is neither celibicy nor marriage. Winter is retreating, but Spring, as yet, is nothing but a sharp desire, a promise unfulfilled.

I and the naked branches are wearing this ring that glitters like ice. It weighs us down like wet snow. But these vows will be fulfilled. The dress is purchased, and the date is set. Already I feel the sun—like a bridegroom coming out of his chamber—lend its heat to the table where my cup of coffee grows cold.

March is pregnancy awaiting birth. Those warm days that come with greater frequency as the month wears on bring all the thrill and disappointment of false labor. Hope deferred maketh the heart sick. The new life for which we yearn is buried in damp earth. Locked inside its womb. I feel the pangs, and I watch the frozen ground for signs of dilation, effacement. Nothing. Braxton and Hicks, how I hate you. The whole creation groans.

The high and mighty Kitchen Calendar has also decreed that Lent begins this week. There it is, printed in stark black and white: “Ash Wednesday.” Tomorrow we die.

• • • • • •

Every morning, I peer through the curtains, hoping for fresh signs of green. I check the forecast and see nothing but snow. But I feel a rumbling that the weatherman has missed. It is the rumble of thunder not from the clouds but from the earth—the chest-rattling sound of a heavy stone rolling.

I am ready for the sun to burn through this cosmic permafrost. I long to fling the windows wide to an air perfumed not with embalming spices but with hyacinths and lilacs. I want to hurry through the front door and discover the shroud has melted away. I want to turn and find myself unexpectedly face-to-face with the “gardener” only to realize that He is the Spring—the Resurrection for whom my long-betrothed soul aches.

This is Lent. This is a wilderness. Forty weary days awaiting consummation. Forty dreary days of relentless rain. Forty days of testing. Of hunger and thirst. Verily I say unto you, I will drink no more of the fruit of the vine, until that day that I drink it new in the kingdom of God. This is a long engagement. This is a pregnancy overdue.

This is March. In the empty fields I can see where rocks have surfaced through the snow-speckled mud. But resurrection will come: these hills will live again, and these stones will become bread. These days of fasting will end.

Send out the wedding invitations. This long engagement will soon reach its fulfillment. The Calendar cannot hold it back. The snow cannot lead this dance forever; the sunshine will cut in and begin the nuptial feast in earnest, strewing flowers in its path.

Haircut

2011-02-23T09:21:00.000-08:00

One warm afternoon when I was eight years old, I was skipping down the sidewalk under a row of black walnut trees on my way home from a friend’s house after school. As I passed a couple of boys in backpacks, I heard one whisper to the other, “Was that a boy or a girl?” I turned my head just in time to see the other boy shrug as he looked left and right before crossing the street.

There was no malice intended in that brief inquiry. Clearly, they thought I was out of earshot. But I, with my Dutch Boy haircut and my unisex corduroy pants, could hear those words with the precision of a freshly honed knife. With that simple overheard question, all my third-grade self confidence dropped with a crash into my gender neutral sneakers and shivered into ten thousand sharp-edged pieces.

From that day until the day I graduated from high school, I avoided getting my hair cut short.

• • • • • • •

What makes hair so important to our self perception? To the perception others have of us? According the Apostle Paul, it’s meant to be a glory and a covering. It’s a means of pursuing beauty. But it’s also a way to distract ourselves from pursuing beauty of a more lasting kind. It’s one of the first identifying features we use to describe other people, and it has a remarkable capacity to either attract or repel.

Just this weekend, after dropping off two of my kids at a birthday party, I saw a woman walking through the Safeway parking lot. She wore a cute white coat, a pair of trendy boots, and carried an armload of carefully folded, environmentally friendly, reusable grocery bags. She also had one of the worst cases of bed head I’ve ever seen. On account of her hair alone, she looked, to put it bluntly, like a mess—like she’d had, if not a terrible life, then at least a terrible morning. She looked like someone who deserved my pity.

Odd as it seems, hair has a way of telling a story; we use it to show the rest of the world who we are and who we want to be. According to one recent survey, the average American woman will spend roughly 2 ½ years and $50,000 on her hair before she dies. Apparently we think our hair is a worthwhile way to invest our time and money. And maybe the returns are substantial enough to justify the expense; a person’s “do” is often all the signal we need to tell us whether she is headed for a night on the town or a day at the gym—whether she is one of us, or one of them.

Hair is, in fact, behind many of the snap judgments I find myself making. One look at a woman with a pink Kool-Aid dye job, or a mane of carefully highlighted layers, or a slicked-tight chignon, or straight, down-to-the-rear tresses can leave the impression—accurate or otherwise—that this person is insecure or confident, ambitious or socially inept. It seems a bit strange that I, who spend relatively little time on my own hair, would instantly attach such significance to what other people have done with theirs. Does it prove that I am shallow? Mercilessly judgmental? Astute? Could it be that some poor woman’s bad hair day has kept me from making a new friend? Is it possible that the lady in the Safeway parking lot had her Saturday morning act together more than I did? Or did I accurately assess the truth about her from one quick glance at the back of her matted head?

• • • • • • •

During my last year of high school, I had spent months wanting to change my look. I would stand in front of the mirror, pull up the ends of my long hair and fold it over on itself, letting the bottom of the loop hang down to my jaw, giving me an amateur preview of the style I wanted. I would raise and lower the looped hair, trying to decide how drastic an amputation this should be.

I was partly excited and partly terrified as I finally picked up the phone and scheduled my haircut for the day after graduation.

When the day came, I sat waiting in the salon chair, all nerves beneath my black cape, watching in the glass as a girl with acrylic nails and “Tammie” stamped on her nametag twisted and clipped the top layer of my hair into loose coils around my head, transforming me into a kind of brunette Medusa. Across the salon, a lipsticky woman with squares of foil sprouting haphazardly around her face stared at my reflection, if not exactly turned to stone, then temporarily transfixed as the last snake of my hair was held in place.

“Okay, girl! Ya sure about this?” I turned my eyes toward Tammie and nodded, feeling my heart beat rise. I watched her raise the scissors, felt the cool metal against my skin, heard the first definitive ksssht of blade against blade.

Oh gosh. Oooh my gosh. What had I done?

When that first foot-long snake of hair slithered to the floor, the woman with the foil seemed to revive from her state of petrifaction and dropped her lipstick mouth wide open. “Oh honey,” she said with a loud East-coast accent, “Oh my gaaahd. You are so brave! I could never just go cold-turkey short like that.” My eyes made contact with hers in the mirror, and I saw her shake her metallic head in disbelief. “You are so brave,” she said again.

So brave. Something about those words calmed my jitters and made me feel almost heroic, a sort of side-kick to my acrylic-nailed Achilles. With a repetitive click and hiss, she cut down snake after snake while I looked on with growing approval.

When Tammie was done and the blow dryer was turned off, she passed me a small hand mirror and spun me around to give me the full, 360-degree view. I liked what I saw. So did my foil-framed admirer. “Oh wow, that is so cute!” she said, “You are so, so brave!”

For weeks afterward, I would find myself stopping by the bathroom mirror just to see if I was still satisfied with the new look, half afraid that I’d find nothing but an older version of my crushed Dutch Boy self staring back at me. But each time I looked, I liked this girl—this young woman—better. I felt somehow grown up. Sophisticated. People I had known for years would pass me by on the street without recognizing me, and, when I said hello, would repeat some variation of the foil lady’s shock and admiration. I reveled in their reactions at the time, but in retrospect, I wonder what else they could possibly have said.

The only person who has ever reserved the right to criticize what I’ve done to my hair is my grandmother, who let me know in no uncertain terms that she had liked it better long. But hair, to my grandmother’s relief, turns out to be a renewable resource, and for the past 15 years I have let it grow and cut it off at roughly annual intervals, shocking my children, dismaying my grandmother and pleasing myself every time. I might like to think that these periodic drastic alterations prove that I am so brave. But really, it’s just that I’m no good at fixing my hair; when it gets unwieldy, it has to go.

• • • • • • •

Just a couple of months ago, I went to get my hair cut at the local beauty school. (Risky, maybe, but it’s hard to argue with a five-dollar shampoo, cut, and style.) I’d intended to go sooner, but with other priorities getting in the way, I had left my hair to grow until it reached past my shoulders and was spending its monotonous daily existence as an inartistic—but highly practical—ponytail. So when I sat down in the salon chair and explained what I wanted, my student stylist, was timid about cutting my hair back as far as I’d described. Not once, not twice, but three times I had to ask her to cut it shorter. After an hour under her scissors, it was still an inch longer than I’d hoped, but I decided it was close enough. I paid my five dollars, threw in a tip, and walked home.

When I entered the house, my sons received the new me with varying degrees of enthusiasm. “You look ridiculous,” one of them told me.

“Whoa,” was all another had to offer.

And my youngest child, who always has a flair for flattery, assured me, “You look beautiful, Mommy.” I play to a tough crowd.

I remember, though, how the same alteration startled me the day my own mother cut her hair short when I was little. It took several days to convince myself that, in spite of all appearances, she was still the same person.

• • • • • • •

Even knowing what a powerful effect hair can have, I usually hate taking the time to fiddle with it just to make myself presentable, which is why I like a low maintenance style best—and which is why it’s probably a good thing I don’t have daughters. With five kids (who sport no-nonsense buzz cuts) keeping me busy, there are plenty of occasions when I skip the hair routine and spend the day looking like more of a mess than that lady from the Safeway parking lot. At least she had trendy boots. I, meanwhile, schlep around in my slippers until lunchtime trying to get ahead of the laundry.

But still, even if I am less than gifted with a blow dryer, I do appreciate a good hair day. It’s a lovely feeling to step out of the house with a fresh haircut and a sense of having faced the enemy and prevailed. Nevermind that the enemy was nothing but a bad case of bed head.

Won't You Be My Neighbor?

2011-02-01T12:09:00.000-08:00

Better is a neighbor who is near than a brother who is far away.

—Proverbs 27:10

I live in my childhood home. There is something charming—and almost anachronistic—about raising my own children in the same house my parents bought when I was nine years old. I know every corner of this century-old farmhouse by heart, and every room holds memories in its walls. I am comfortable here. But as familiar as this house is, we are, in many ways, living in the middle of unfamiliar territory. A foreign world lies outside our doors.

Of course, it’s not as though a whirlwind has pulled us from our foundations and given us a yellow brick road where the sidewalk once was. Our street, in fact, looks almost as it did twenty-some years ago. The buildings themselves have hardly been altered; their structures, their yards, and even their paint colors are largely the same as they have been for two decades. The difference, rather, is their occupants. Most of them have been replaced. A couple of familiar faces remain, but after 17 years, they no longer recognize me.

The residences on our block—including ours—are mostly rentals or "starter" homes, which means that the people who are here now won't be for long. We’ve spent three years trying to learn the names of most of our neighbors, and within that short time, several of them have already moved on.

We rarely see many of our neighbors, and with so few of us likely to remain for more than a year or two, putting forth the effort—and it is an effort—to meet them feels almost futile. Some will never even make eye contact before ducking hurriedly into their house-shaped bunkers. They live in hiding, and then they leave.

* * * * * * * *

Twenty years ago, meeting our neighbors seemed easy. With so many kids sharing the same block, spontaneous encounters were practically inevitable. There was a time that children formed a part of the landscape, a time when I could recite the names of the occupants of nearly every house within view of our front yard.

I could tell you that the neighbor in the white house across the street would step onto his front porch at five o'clock each night—you could almost set your watch by his appearance—and call for his son John, stretching his short name into two long, operatic syllables. And John, with the blond rattail flying out behind him, would race his bike home for dinner.

In the fading red house facing ours lived two little girls, younger than I, whose father owned Southside Mini-mart down the alley. I envied them. They could skip over to their father's business after school and have their pick of free candy.

Two houses down, with their mother and the hard rocker step-dad they called Tony, lived Chris and Jennifer, unkempt in their oversized Def Leppard t-shirts. They smelled like dirt.

And at the end of the block was a family with three children who attended our Christian school. They had a friendly brown and white dog named Ginger, and their mother taught me how to sew Barbie skirts by hand.

But for all our quotidian interaction, we never grew close to the people around us. We knew their faces, and we knew their names. We said "hello" when we met on the street, but we never so much as shared a meal. We never really knew them.

Most of these people are gone now. I don't know where. Or why. Or how long ago. Maybe some of them are dead. And, to be honest, I have a hard time caring.

* * * * * * * *

Ours is a small college town, so the student population is in constant flux. As unsettling as that can seem, it's at least to be expected. What distresses me more is how rapidly the rest of the population turns over.

I often wonder what subtle effects our modern nomadic lifestyle has had on our society. What would our neighborhood look like if the people in it had stayed? How much different would our attitudes and expectations be if we knew we couldn't just pack up and leave every few years? And what investments would we be willing to make in our relationships with the folks next door if we expected to find them still living there in twenty years?

* * * * * * * *

Twenty years ago, those casual encounters with our neighbors cost us nothing; it likewise cost us nothing to say our casual goodbyes. Because forging friendships with our immediate neighbors requires more from us than it once did, it’s just possible that those friendships will seem more valuable in the end. But what, exactly, will it take to reach these people in the first place?

Most of us are just not home enough to regularly bump into one another. We spend too little time in our own yards. We're busy. We may have collected enough virtual "friends" to keep us from feeling the need for the kind with flesh and blood. We invert our sense of community by allowing Blogger and facebook to turn our private spaces into public spaces and iPods and cell phones to convert our public spaces into private spaces. Even when we do find ourselves forced into some kind of neighborly small talk, our fragmented culture has made common experiences next to impossible to find.

Bleak as it sounds, the only sure-fire way of making contact and forming relationships with these disparate individuals seems to be disaster of some sort. A massive windstorm this fall knocked out power and downed several trees around us, damaging a number of nearby homes and vehicles. Destructive, yes, but also an easy and natural topic for conversation. It provided an opportunity to finally meet some of the people on our block. I even had a chat with a man on the corner who had the top half of a giant pine tree resting comfortably on the roof of his camper. Before that day, I had never so much as seen his face.

My husband does a much better job of making friends with the neighbors than I do, but even so, it hasn't been easy. Sharing food has been somewhat successful—excess garden produce in summer, hot cross buns at Easter, homemade cookies at Christmas. A couple of neighbors have even accepted our invitations to dinner, but we have a long way to go before we could say we know them. When we tried to share a plate of treats with one man across the street, all he said was, "No thanks," and shut the door in our faces. Maybe he thought we were trying to poison him.

These people could be suffering some horrific trials in their lives, and we would be blissfully unaware. And tragically unable to help them—tragically unable to love them.

We've all heard the story of the Good Samaritan. We've all gotten the message that "Love your neighbor as yourself " doesn't literally mean to love your neighbor; it just means, as the old rock song suggests, to love the one you're with. But what if loving my neighbor actually meant loving my neighbor? As in, the person next door? The one with the Buddhist prayer flags and the political bumper stickers covering his door? The middle-aged single lady who plays the cello? The young couple that leaves for work in the pre-dawn hours and comes home at lunch to walk their tiny dog? The former police officer with the gorgeous flower garden? The registered sex offender whose front door was inexplicably smashed to slivers one night? What about those neighbors? What would it mean to love them?

Unless some of them stick around, we may never find out.

* * * * * * * *

I, too, have been a nomad. I may live in my childhood home, but I've taken a long time to arrive back here. As my facebook "friend" list reflects, I have put down shallow roots in other states, in other countries, only to pull them up again and be transplanted elsewhere. But there are fibers in that soil, traces of me, that I've left behind with every move. Those transitions, however necessary, are never entirely painless.

I'd like to say that we'll stay comfortably rooted forever in this house, but that may not be up to me. And honestly, I have the same wanderlust as those around me, the same hope for something bigger, something better, something we can call our own. Our family is growing, I tell myself, and we'll need more space. I truly do want to hold some kind of principle of rootedness, to maintain a deep sense of belonging to a place, but on this point my principles and my desires work at cross purposes. I don't think we'll ever leave town. At least I hope not. But even if we stay here in this neighborhood until our dying days, I can say with almost prophetic certainty that most of my neighbors won’t.

It’s our modest hope, however, that in the meantime we will build a few friendships here that will cost more—and be worth more—than a shallow hello.

This Little Light of Mine

2011-01-18T20:08:00.000-08:00

Here we are in mid-January, and I haven't posted in over a month. And that last post was practically cheating, since I didn't write anything.

I'd like to think that I'll be writing more soon, but writing takes time, and free time is a commodity that seems to be running low around here of late. Writing—at least the kind that anyone would want to read—also requires a clear mind, but my sleep-deprived thoughts have been about as clear as the oily mud puddles in the alley behind my house.

Several times a day, I walk into a room and immediately forget what I came for. My children are learning to answer to any of five boy names. (At least I'm still sticking to names that belong to actual members of our family. That's pretty good, right?) The Christmas tree, until just a few days ago, was still standing fully decorated in our living room. And the dust. Let's just not talk about that.

My excuse is that I have a newborn who is taking up all my time. And I have four other children who take up all my time. We had Christmas preparations and Christmas celebrations and Christmas cleanup which took up all my time. And now that Christmas is over, I have graphic design projects that are taking up my time. I have groceries to buy and floors to sweep and thank you notes to write and books to read and Candyland to play and guests to feed and laundry to wash (oh boy, do I have laundry to wash), and all of it is taking up all my time. I could be wrong, but I suspect that this is why the old woman who lived in a shoe did not win a Pulitzer prize. She was too busy—changing diapers while talking on the phone to the insurance company and pausing to tell the six-year-old to quit using the piano keys as a Hot Wheels race track—to consider the metaphorical complexities inherent in domestic life and then string them together into graceful narrative arcs.

But then again, some women not only maintain blogs but sign book deals while knee deep in this kind of beautiful chaos. So I suppose my failure to write reveals more about my priorities than about my busy schedule. If you can call it a schedule.

Blogging has been pretty well near the bottom of my list of ways to use up all my time right now. But this may be a good thing. The fuller my life is, the less time I seem to have to talk about it. The best writing I have managed in the last couple of months has been the occasional uncreative Facebook status. Brilliant literature it is not. That kind of writing sheds about as much light as a dollar store glowstick the morning after a party.

Last week, as I was mentally reviewing shopping lists and to-do lists and hurrying home with a van load of groceries to my crying baby, I was inhabiting—both literally and metaphorically—the gray cloud of mist and mud being spat upon me by the tractor trailer I was following. I was thinking how colorless and drab life can be on days like this (poor me), how dull and monotonous, when I started listening to a CD of Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. I bathed my weary brain in her lucid prose, and began imagining how satisfying it would be to write as she does, capturing in precise phrases the glory and excess and teeming life hiding within an unassuming clod of earth.

There I was, a living clod of earth myself, and failing to be amazed by the mere fact of my own of my own existence. But gradually, as I listened, I found the dark cloud growing lighter. I found myself seeing through it. Or not seeing through it, but seeing it, seeing the thing itself:
Look at this grimy cloud!
Look at these living, mud-clumpy hills emerging from their snow shroud and rolling along beside the traffic.
Look at that tired barn leaning on the verge of collapse next to the highway, and see the story hiding within its weather-and-rain-silvered boards.

I am suddenly aware of the strange beauty on every side of me; I wonder how I could have missed seeing what I was seeing. How could I have forgotten that every particle of dust mingling with the rain and melting snow has a history of its own? Each, if it could speak, could tell me how it came from a distant volcano or an ancient glacier, from a maple leaf or from the palm of my hand. My hands—my own hands—are formed from dust, and are returning to dust even as I write this. I, too, am dust with a story. But I did not have to exist here any more than that muddy raindrop. How could I not be overwhelmed with gratitude and awe?

That is what this book does to me—and I haven't even finished it yet. It helps me to see. It shines a blazing light into places I'd never thought to look. I can't take it in all it once; I have to pause it and revel in words for a while. It's probably not safe to listen to while driving. Customers should be sent home from the bookstore with this volume packed inside a brown paper sack stamped with the warning, "Be safe. Don't Dillard and Drive." I need to give my full attention to what she's saying.

That is how I want to write.

Sitting there in my van, I wished I had the power to shape thoughts into the kind of words that could rip away the grey veil from those dreary clouds. I longed to shine my own verbal spotlight, to make everyone see the swirling magic, the millions of untold stories, contained in the spray of muddy water spattering our windshields. I wanted to uncap my highlighter and pull everyone's attention in glowing yellow lines connecting the dust in those hills with the dust gripping the steering wheels in the cars that flashed past—living dust, dust filled with borrowed breath. Dust with birthdays. Dust with dental records. Dust with college degrees and laugh lines and regrets. I wanted to wield my pen and make the pages shout, "Dust you are! Isn't it miraculous?"

But then I sighed and just kept driving, watching the wiper blades flick away the dingy film that clouded my view. I flipped the turn signal and absorbed the gritty rhythm of studded tires on wet blacktop.

Who am I kidding? Annie Dillard must have been born with a gift for writing. And she also has more than just a fleeting desire to commit her ideas to paper. She reads about writing. She writes about writing. She, no doubt, gets up early and stays up late just to write. I am sure that she edits and revises and edits again. Is that really what I want to do with my life right now?

Her life is not mine. I will never write like she does. I will never write about the same things that she does. I will never be a writer. Much as I admire her book, I occasionally get the feeling that something huge is missing from her prose. I realize that all her vivid descriptions, all of her startling metaphors, all her hours spent holding perfectly still until her cigarette burned down to her fingertips simply in order to observe the secretive behavior of muskrats could arise only from study, practice, and an essentially solitary life. Not a lonely life. Not a boring life. But a life full of lengthy meditation apart from the society of peanut-butter-smeared toddlers.

I would not trade my life for hers—Pulitzer and all. I would not trade Candyland with noisy preschoolers for rendezvous with quiet muskrats. At least not on most days. There is no less wonder in my sticky, spit-uppy existence. There is no less magic. There is merely less opportunity to write about it. For now, I will content myself with the few words I can post here on this neglected blog. I will shed what limited light I can.

Annie Dillard can carry her spotlight and I my dollar store glowstick.

Holly Jolly

2010-12-14T11:29:00.000-08:00

I Plead the Fifth

2010-11-28T15:47:00.000-08:00

Introducing our fifth little boy, Liam Quentin:

He arrived on Friday night, November 26, his great-grandfather's birthday, and was a very healthy eight pounds, fifteen ounces and twenty-two inches long.

Meeting his brothers for the first time:

The Glorious Status Quo

2010-11-10T15:43:00.000-08:00

I do not have cancer.

Normally, that wouldn't even be worth mentioning, but in this month of Thanksgiving, it's one bit of news that I'm very grateful for. Every so often something comes up that makes me realize how blessed I am to be enjoying just another uneventful day of "the same old thing."

Lately, "the same old thing" involves feeling about 13 months pregnant and consequently more than a bit sorry for my achy, tired, fat, slow self. And I'm not even having twins. In fact, as far as pregnancies go, mine are uncommonly easy—no morning sickness, no preexisting conditions, no miscarriages, no C-sections, no Strep B, no gestational diabetes. Nothing. "You are," a doctor once told me, "an obstetricians dream."

Nevertheless, when people ask me how I'm doing these days, I sometimes forget all that good news and want to respond with bitter sarcasm. You really want to know how I feel? Then try these ten easy steps to allow you to share in the third-trimester experience:

Place a 25-pound watermelon in a backpack or duffel bag, and strap it to your belly as tightly as you can so that it digs uncomfortably into your waist.
Adjust the straps so that the weight rests primarily on your lower back and hips. Just make sure that the melon sticks out at least a full 10 inches in front.
Put on ankle weights and four pairs of socks before cramming your feet into your now too-tight shoes.
Attempt to do routine household tasks such as getting out of bed, picking small items off the carpet, and hauling an overflowing laundry basket up and down the stairs several times a day.
Shortly before bedtime, consume a family-size jar of salsa, and wash it down with two or three quarts of soda. This will allow you to fully appreciate the heartburn and squashed bladder that pregnant women come to expect as they strive for a little shuteye.
Chew enough antacid tablets to let you sleep for an hour or so.
After no more than an hour of fitful slumber, attempt to roll over onto your other side.
Give up the attempt.
After another hour, have somebody elbow you repeatedly in the ribs to simulate the midnight acrobatics of your baby. You will then be wide awake enough to realize that you have to go to the bathroom. Again.
Repeat daily for three months.

Of course, if all goes well, when this new baby boy is finally placed in my arms, I'll again discover that it really was all worth it. I'll understand afresh what a privilege it was to carry another healthy child—something that countless heartbroken women in history have hopelessly longed to do. But right now, if I'm being honest, I'm usually looking forward less to meeting my son than to simply not being pregnant anymore.

But if I struggle with selfish resentment and impatience on account of a blessing like pregnancy, how would I cope with a true evil like cancer?

"Good timing" is, I suppose, a phrase that does not apply to a deadly disease. Serious illness is never welcome. But with four young kids and a husband dependent on my good health—not to mention a fifth baby who's roughly two weeks away from making his grand entrance—I can't help but think that this would be a truly terrible time of life to be diagnosed with cancer—far worse than, say, 30 or 40 years from now when our kids are grown and our nest is empty. So, as you can imagine, finding a mysterious lump in a place where it did not belong was not a pleasant discovery.

My first thought was, "Oh great." No fear. No anger. Just annoyance. I figured that it was, in all likelihood, simply another obnoxious pregnancy-induced growth. After all, everything else about me has been growing like mad. I feel like I am that scene in The Magician's Nephew during the creation of Narnia, when the whole of that new world is so full of life and growth that a broken bar of iron takes root and matures into a fully formed lamppost. Everything growing. Everything expanding. If I accidentally swallowed a watermelon seed right now, my grandfather's terrifying tale would become a reality; a vine would spring up and start producing juicy watermelons right inside my already crowded belly. So of course one more growth was entirely understandable, even if it was in an unusual place, right?

I figured my doctor would agree. However, at my next appointment, she didn't seem nearly as certain as I was that this was no cause for concern. When she told me to schedule an ultrasound exam, I felt my blood pressure rise just a little. And yet, I remained fairly confident that the ultrasound would confirm beyond doubt that this was totally normal. I prayed about it, but I didn't worry much.

Then, after the ultrasound, the radiologist came in and explained that, given my good health, my relatively young age, and the fact that I'm pregnant, this was most likely nothing serious, but he could not be entirely sure. This particular lump wasn't something he could diagnose merely by looking. The only way to know if it was cancerous was to perform a biopsy.

I don't know how it strikes others, but to me, "biopsy" is a rather scary word. It now brought the idea of cancer into the realm of real possibility. And, because I had been expecting an "all clear" from the ultrasound exam, it struck me as both scary and disappointing. I wanted this to be over. However, with my due date looming ever closer, I scheduled the dreaded biopsy appointment for the earliest available day.

I was nervous about the procedure, but as it turned out, an ultrasound-guided needle biopsy wasn't such a horrible experience—not something I'd like to do on a regular basis, but not a whole lot worse than having a few of cavities filled.

I still didn't really think I had cancer, but waiting to find out was more of a test of my own trust in God's plans than I would have expected. I happen to be reading through the book of Job this month, and as I read chapter 13, I had to pause at verse 15: "Though he slay me, I will hope in him; yet I will argue my ways to his face." Would I, if I were faced with this deadly disease, still be able with Job to hope in God? Could I argue my ways to his face?

Mercifully, the pathology report came back in just a couple of days. Those two days, however, gave me cause to meditate more than ever before on how everything I have, including my health, has been a gift, and that my life is not and never has been merely my own. You can imagine with what gratitude I heard the lovely word "benign" read to me at my next appointment. After facing the prospect—however remote—of a serious trial like cancer, the expectation of maintaining the status quo comes as the best kind of news. It comes like gospel.

So now I face two more weeks (give or take) of third trimester pregnancy. I am still achy. I am still tired. I am still fat and slow and prone to heartburn. I still get kicked in the ribs in the middle of the night. I am even coming down with a cold. But I also still get to enjoy another glorious day of the "same old thing."

October Fruit

2010-10-19T13:56:00.000-07:00

They shall still bear fruit in old age; They shall be fresh and flourishing...

— Psalm 92:14

Another year of my life has drawn to a close, and with it, another growing season. The tomato plants, once pregnant with summer's bounty, now sag dejectedly in the muddy ground, heavy with green fruit that will never mature. The icy night air has faded their once-bright flowers into a pale yellow translucency—an annual picture of the fruitful might-have-been. October has again caught them unawares.

* * * * * * * *

Three weeks ago, when my 91-year-old grandmother fell and ended up in the hospital, none of us anticipated a prolonged recovery. She had hit her head, and she was weakened by the injury, but the bruise would heal, and she would be well again soon. She has always gotten well again. Hers has been a long life.

But a life, to be called "long," must have an end; eternity is not a span that can be measured. And so it seems that this long life of hers will, after all, have an end as well. She is home again and has regained some of her strength, but I can see that her October has come. In spite of this brief Indian summer, the first frost has already taken its toll. She complains of the chill in the air, and her limbs are more frail, her hands less steady.

* * * * * * * *

Last Friday, I spent the lunch hour with my sons at school. We passed the potato chips among the five of us and talked amid the din of a hundred children laughing and joking and shifting fidgety legs; of a hundred children crunching apples and unwrapping sandwiches and rummaging in brown paper bags. My own little boys bounced and squirmed in their seats, talking over one another, giggling at trifles, filled with a surplus of energy that could not be contained within their small, robust frames.

That entire lunch room was a fresh battery, charged with electricity waiting to be released. If I were to spend a full day in the company of so much youth, I imagine I would gather an electrical charge of my own. I felt as though the room might burst—that those walls, like my own bulging body, were pregnant with life about to break from its confines. And at noon, the room did, in fact, give birth to a hundred electrified children rushing outdoors to play. The clock's hands converged at the number twelve with a clap like thunder.

I have seen these children zipping down plastic playground slide, their hair standing on end. At the bottom, I stretch out my cold hands to catch my sons and pull them up, and as we touch, their lightning fingers burn my own; at that startling moment, that point of contact where we two distemporaries collide, something ignites.

On a dark October night, we could have seen the spark.

* * * * * * * *

As my two youngest sons and I entered the nursing home after lunch, my gait was slow and plodding, heavy with my long-awaited child. I felt that I, too, could make good use of the abandoned walker sitting just outside the front door. Passing through the hallways, my children ran their dimpled fingers along the handrail, hanging and swinging and skipping from it, using that would-be crutch as the bar of a jungle gym. They leapt past each open doorway, never noticing the frost-bitten forms lying on inclined beds just inside those rooms; never seeing the hundred color-drained faces bowed over half-eaten meals in the quiet cafeteria.

We turned a corner, and boldly centered at the end of the long hall sat an old man, directly facing us from his wheelchair. His unflinching gaze was fixed upon us as we worked our way toward him. His crooked, unclipped fingers grasped the arms of his wheelchair, while the oxygen tubes in his nostrils made a rhythmic pop and hiss. He breathed with a sound like Darth Vader. I made eye contact and then looked away, pretending to instruct my kids on how they should behave when they saw my grandmother, although I had given them the same reminder only moments earlier. And when I looked up again uneasily, those aged eyes had not wavered from their point of focus.

As we drew nearer to him, my sons, too, became aware of his unnerving presence, and they fell back, hiding behind my legs. He stared us down. Would he let us pass? I tried to slip casually by him with nothing more than a quick hello. But as I turning my eyes again to my sons, his gnarled hand rose from its resting place and, with a suddenness inconsistent with his shriveled state, he jabbed a pointed finger at the center of my protruding belly, his ridged fingernail pressing into my flesh as if testing the ripeness of a large fruit.

Did that moment of contact leave him with a sensation of warmth? Of an electrical charge shocking his chilled limbs into life? Perhaps some sort of strength did flow out of me, but even the vigor of nascent life does not have the power to raise the dead.

Life and death were colliding, and my burning skin was caught in between.

"What's this?" he demanded like a gatekeeper demanding a password. I laughed nervously and stammered something about having another baby in there, but the man had already shifted his attention downward. "Hellooo," he crooned. "You are our favorite kind of visitors." I smiled feebly and told the boys to say hi—something I had hardly wanted to do myself. And I did not rebuke my son when one of them ignored my instructions and merely gaped.

I felt tempted to gape myself.

We moved on down the hall to meet with my grandmother. I could still feel the sting on my belly where that withered hand had touched me.

* * * * * * * *

Another birthday has arrived, and I have much to be thankful for in remembering the year that is gone. Every October brings reasons to celebrate, but it also brings reasons to consider my own mortality. This northern growing season is painfully short, and those sun-loving tomato plants never do reach their full potential before fall arrives. They could have done so much more—born so much more fruit—if the cold had not set in just yet. Not just yet.

But while I survey the frost-stricken garden and look back on the harvest that was, I must remember how much this growing season has given to me. And I can see that even now, among all those withered plants, not a branch is barren. Their fiery red fruit is gathered up, their feeble limbs now limp and unable to rise. They are weighed down. But with what?

At the end of my own growing season, at the end of my own painfully short life, is this the sight I want my time-worn self to see reflected from the mirror? Will I recall with joy the fruitfulness that was mine? In that final October, when I reach out my hands to touch the young, and I again feel the startling heat of that spark, may I see In the light of that momentary fire that, although my weakening limbs are weighed down—they are weighed down with still-forming fruit.

Love Calls Us to the Things of This World

2010-10-14T10:44:00.000-07:00

I have had little time to write these days, due, at least in part, to the daily mountains of laundry rising in impressive peaks and ranges across my bathroom floor. And as I near the end of this pregnancy, mountaineering has become an increasingly daunting task. My four—soon to be five—boys have a unique genius for staining multiple sets of clothing each day.

Although laundry occupies a significant part of every mother's week, it is nevertheless a subject given little dignity by the literary world. There is no shortage of (mostly sappy) poetry praising motherhood in the abstract, but not much is said about what mothers must actually do to keep the household running. Potty training must certainly have the potential to inspire earthy metaphors, and doing the dishes is a topic ripe for poetic analysis. Clearly, more mothers of toddlers should become poets.

G.K. Chesterton once said that "the poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese." True enough. But they have also been mysteriously silent on the subject of laundry. In light of this sad omission, I thought I would share one of my favorite poems, by one of America's best-known poets. It is the only poem I know of on the topic of washing clothes, and it elevates that mundane task to something almost holy. Read it twice.

Love Calls Us to the Things of This World

by Richard Wilbur

The eyes open to a cry of pulleys,

And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul

Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple

As false dawn.

Outside the open window

The morning air is all awash with angels.

Some are in bed-sheets, some are in blouses,

Some are in smocks: but truly there they are.

Now they are rising together in calm swells

Of halcyon feeling, filling whatever they wear

With the deep joy of their impersonal breathing;

Now they are flying in place, conveying

The terrible speed of their omnipresence, moving

And staying like white water; and now of a sudden

They swoon down into so rapt a quiet

That nobody seems to be there.

The soul shrinks

From all that it is about to remember,

From the punctual rape of every blessèd day,

And cries,

“Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry,

Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam

And clear dances done in the sight of heaven.”

Yet, as the sun acknowledges

With a warm look the world’s hunks and colors,

The soul descends once more in bitter love

To accept the waking body, saying now

In a changed voice as the man yawns and rises,

“Bring them down from their ruddy gallows;

Let there be clean linen for the backs of thieves;

Let lovers go fresh and sweet to be undone,

And the heaviest nuns walk in a pure floating

Of dark habits,

keeping their difficult balance.”

From http://www.poetryfoundation.org: Richard Wilbur, “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World” from Collected Poems 1943-2004. Copyright © 2004 by Richard Wilbur. Reprinted with the permission of Harcourt, Inc. This material may not be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Source: Collected Poems, 1943-2004 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2004)

News Flash

2010-09-29T15:09:00.000-07:00

To make up to you for the length of my previous post, today I am only going to publish a brief announcement: Something I wrote is actually going to be in print. (And there was great rejoicing.) One of my blog posts, written about this time last year after a longish blogging hiatus, was just accepted for publication in Relief. And yes, I am pretty excited. I do enjoy writing here, but this news makes me think that the existence of this blog is somehow officially justified. Don't worry, though. I don't plan on quitting my day job.

Have Mercy on the Morons: A Plea on Behalf of the Misinformed

2010-09-07T11:17:00.000-07:00

How do you know what you know?

That may seem like a pretty basic question, but it's a question that few of us are ever pushed to ask, let alone answer. It is a question, however, that has begun to bother me more than a little in recent years.

Of course, there are certain basic and unprovable assumptions that I must hold by faith as a Christian. Or even as a human being. Not every statement is up for debate. Whether we believe that God, or reason, or science, or Bono, or our own gut feeling is our ultimate standard for truth, we all have a place where the buck stops. All of our reasoning becomes circular when we get down to our most foundational beliefs.

I believe in the God of the Bible, and that necessitates that I reject any statements—however compelling—that directly contradict that belief. If someone asserts that theft is actually a good idea when you can get away with it, I can reject that statement without losing a single night's sleep, because it flatly defies the eighth commandment. Easy. But beyond the clear teachings of the Bible is a myriad of assertions that are anything but easy to assess. They require a degree of knowledge and wisdom that most of us will never attain. These are the kinds of questions that make me wonder how we really know what we "know."

A Matter of Trust
It's not that I lie awake at night worrying about this, and I have no plans for taking up the study of epistemology in my spare time. But honestly, every time one of my well intentioned Facebook friends posts another link to some piece of revisionist history, or alternative medicine, or political conspiracy, or any other article claiming to expose "hidden agendas" and "things the corporations don't want you to know," I feel like tearing my hair out.

It's not that I believe all these articles must be wrong. They may be absolutely right. Or mainly right. Or a little bit right about a few things. But therein lies my frustration; with the seemingly infinite number of "untold stories" out there, it's frequently impossible to know which stories to believe.

"Every charge may be established by the evidence of two or three witnesses" (Matthew 18:16). But what about all the times when the witnesses—even the "expert" witnesses—present conflicting evidence? When both the prosecution and the defense can call upon the testimony of two or three persuasive witnesses, how do I decide who makes a more convincing case? Daily life lacks the formality of a courtroom, and there are times when my decision cannot wait. I, of course, pray for wisdom, but often I must render my verdict while knowing full well that I have only part of the story and a few tidbits of sketchy evidence.

If, for example, somebody tells me that my government has lied to me about a particular event in the Middle East, I have to choose whom to believe if I am going to cast a "responsible vote." If there's been a cover-up, it is, well, covered up. There are many things I simply can't know. Do I trust the embittered soldier who was there? The apparently competent general who was also there? The commander in chief who saw the top-secret intelligence reports? The civilians who were effected on the ground? The talk radio host who interpreted the information? The NPR reporter who was embedded with the unit? The news anchor on Al Jazeera? The political blogger who scours the Web for possible leaks and insider stories? How do you know what you know?

I bring this up not because I want to start a discussion on foreign policy. I most certainly don't. And I don't want to sound like a relativist who thinks that all views are equally valid; I believe there's a vast gulf between truth and falsehood. I bring this up because I have found myself increasingly at a loss in sorting through the wildly differing "facts" littering my way as I try to navigate through life—especially through life as a parent.

The Curse of the Over-Informed Parent
In case you hadn't noticed, nearly everything we do for our kids requires careful thought. We need wisdom to sort through the barrage of opinions and studies and information and advice. Studies can be wrong, statistics can be twisted, and people on both sides of an issue can be less than objective in their approach. But the problem is, nobody I know has the time or resources to exhaustively research every possible option presented to us as parents. And because these decisions involve our kids—our future—emotions surrounding these choices tend to run rather high.

A typical mom might be disinterested in politics, apathetic about eschatology, bored by artistic trends. But bring up the topic of, say, childhood vaccines, and boom! Watch the fireworks begin.

It's so very easy to assume that other parents who have made decisions different from our own have simply failed to understand the issues, or are too lazy to do their research, or have motives that aren't altogether pure. Maybe they've been brainwashed by propaganda. Maybe they haven't seen the shocking episode of 20/20 that we saw. Maybe they haven't talked to the right people. Maybe they're just stupid.

Or maybe, just maybe, they know something that we don't.

We can all agree on certain primary issues—that we should feed, clothe, educate and care for the health of our children. But the secondary details involving how we do those things can vary widely among wise and respectable people. We may all be diligently researching our options and still come to opposing conclusions. And that should hardly come as a surprise. We have studies and statistics bombarding us on every side, but rarely do they form any kind of consensus or any sense of certainty. As tidy as the word "data" may sound, the reality is anything but.

Expert Worship
We may have a pantheon of experts just a URL away, but the Cult of the Expert is a demanding and dizzying religion. First, we all slavishly follow the ex cathedra pronouncements of anybody in a white ecclesiastical lab coat and a "Doctor of" diploma framed on the wall. But then some fringe heretic has the gall to stand up and point out that butter actually seems to be better for us than margarine after all and that the AMA and the USDA and the AAP have made some disastrous mistakes. We read the 95 Nutritional Theses nailed to the laboratory door, and our allegiances begin to shift.

Disillusioned by white lab coats, we turn with Reformation zeal to the unshaven nonconformist in Birkenstocks and a broomstick skirt who would expose for us the lies told by the priests of the old order. Down with the establishment! Let's pass out tracts! Let's evangelize the nations with the latest findings, baptizing them in the holistic name of the Protein, the Fat, and the Carbohydrates! Do I hear an "Amen?"

But wait a minute. Now the expert in the broomstick skirt is the establishment, and certain preventable diseases are seeing a global resurgence, to boot. The Holy Writ of the Expert must again be revised. But who will be our prophets and our priests now that nine out of ten nutritionists no longer agree? Which expert's Kool-aid are we going to drink next?

Why do we persist in genuflecting before "experts?"

The fact is, we can't run some kind of in-depth investigation into everything we hear. Not even close. And even if we could, we would still have to make faith-based decisions about what evidence to believe and how to interpret it. "Proof" is only as solid as the assumptions that underlie it. Even if I saw something with my own two eyes, I can still only know it happened if my own two eyes are trustworthy. (And that may be a very big "if.")

So the easiest solution is to turn to the Expert (blessed be he). He will tell us just what to do. No wisdom necessary. And when his demands fail us, we can blame, instead of ourselves, the evil pseudo-expert—the informational antichrist—who led us astray.

But the real solution is, I believe, to remember where our true authority comes from and to realize that no earthly expert has a monopoly on knowledge. The data, however good and helpful, must be taken with a grain or two of salt. The world is a messy place made up of messy people with messy motives, and while true knowledge about the world is attainable, exhaustive knowledge is not. We must all—experts included—recognize that we have a whole lot left to learn.

The older our kids get, the more I am amazed by the number of decisions we are required to make on their behalf. And the more decisions we have to make, the more I realize how much I just don't know. Socrates was on to something. I may not go so far as to say that I know nothing, but what I don't know definitely outweighs what I do. By a lot. Tons, actually.

This is why I have sometimes found myself wishing that an angel from heaven (a different kind of expert) would simply appear and tell me exactly whom to believe about things I'm told to do (or not to do) for the good of my children.

A Toast to Ignorance
Even before they are born, I'm given conflicting information on all kinds of topics. Here's one bit of advice that's been printed everywhere from public bathrooms to health manuals: "Alcohol and pregnancy do not mix." The "experts" have a litany of scary statistics implying that an unintentional sip of grape juice gone bad could leave your unborn baby mentally impaired. So pregnant women nervously chew their nails wondering if they've ruined their child's life by drinking an entire cocktail before knowing they were expecting. But (as always seems to be the case) that's only one side of the story.

There are also scientific studies and statistics (mostly British) that have "proven" just the opposite—that children of women who drank "moderately" during pregnancy actually had brighter, better adapted children than those of women who had completely abstained. And some of these studies allege that it's fear of litigation that has (understandably) led most American obstetricians to advocate the total-abstinence policy, fearing that women will interpret permission to have a drink as permission to go on a month-long vodka binge.

So what to do? Better safe than sorry? Or better lighten up than stress out? Whom to believe? British doctors or American doctors? OBs or midwives? Your mom or that lady from the church potluck? I've tried to read a fair bit about this one, and the more I've read, the more I feel like reciting "eeny-meeny-miney-mo" is probably the best means of deciding the issue.

Sheesh. Please pass the shiraz.

Love and Let Live
I have more to learn than is humanly possible if I am going to make what might be called an "informed decision" about almost anything you can name. And so, I am guessing, do most of us. That is why I am writing this—not as a rant but as a plea for mercy. Share what you've learned for the good of your neighbor, and wisdom can be the result. Beat your neighbor over the head with the cold, hard facts, and somebody is going to get hurt. And it just might be the "facts" themselves that suffer.

In this messy world, charity is the necessary antidote to the idolatrous worship of expertise. Let us hear with gratitude—let us even seek out—what the knowledgeable have to say, but let us not bow down and kiss their feet.

If you see me nibbling on a Chicken McNugget; if you see me, with my pregnant belly, sipping on a mojito; if you see me taking my children for a vaccination; if you see me voting for the wrong candidate (shame on you for peeking); if you see me buying goods from the wrong store; if you see me doing anything else you would never, never do, I beg you to withhold your scorn and instead show a little mercy. I promise to do the same for you.

School Breeze

2010-09-01T08:42:00.000-07:00

July, she will fly
And give no warning to her flight.
August, die she must,
The autumn winds blow chilly and cold;
September I´ll remember...
—Simon & Garfunkel

August nearly managed to live up to its venerable name this year, filled as it was with bold heat waves and solemn convocations. But August has also, in typical fashion, come and gone with undignified speed, bringing with it the abrupt transition from lighthearted leisure to respectable routine. The school year always arrives sooner than I expect.

Every summer, those July days seem to stretch themselves out in lazy rows across the calendar, a succession of blank squares, open to whatever we choose to fit inside them. And then the page flips to August, and I discover with a start that we are left with a brief two weeks into which we must cram every "sometime this summer" activity that has yet to be realized before the khaki-trousered school schedule begins: one last trip to the pool, one last picnic in the park, one last bicycle ride around the neighborhood, one last hurrah. As July gives way to August, I am reluctant to see the empty grid fill up with hastily scribbled registration deadlines and carpool commitments, uniform fittings and snack duties. I look at all those full days ahead and wonder, once again, how summer could be coming to such an untimely demise.

But sometime during that first week of August, a breeze will rise, winding through the dry lawns and harvested fields and overgrown vacant lots, carrying with it a scent that tells me that the time has indeed come for the slow and easy days of summer to end.

The roses may still be in full bloom, the sun may still be blazing, and the brown-shouldered high school girls may continue to parade down my sidewalk in their halter tops and flip-flops, but that distinct scent in the wind announces, even before the school supply list arrives in the mail, that it's time to begin stocking up on crayons and non-marking tennis shoes.

I can smell back-to-school.

Some researchers have noted that smell is one of the most powerful memory triggers known to man. And I believe them. A quick browse of the Web reveals that medical and psychiatric journals are constantly publishing new data on this topic, mapping out "hippocampal brain activity" and the way neurons connect to the olfactory bulb. Neuroscientists can minutely describe the neural pathways where smell and memory collide.

But no PhD is required to experience that sensation that has struck us all at one time or another—when a place long forgotten or a person long dead is momentarily restored to life through an agency no more miraculous than the human nose.

I know next to nothing of the neurological events taking place inside my brain when this happens. What I do know is that I have been casually walking along behind my orange stroller, thinking of meal plans or shopping lists, when an unexpected change of wind will lift me entirely out of the present and blow me to some distinct moment in the past. A rare perfume of wet leaves, cheap cigarettes, and car exhaust will send me sailing back in time to a Warsaw tram platform beside a chilly November marketplace where thick-ankled Russian women sell sauerkraut and pickles from plastic-lined barrels. A momentary whiff of shoe polish and gravied pot roast and Old Spice drifting from an open window will float me into my grandmother's Sunday afternoon kitchen, where I sit at the table shelling freshly picked peas into a white glass bowl. I step through the doors of a nursing home, and as the overpowering, antiseptic odors of Lysol and Pine Sol and menthol (and other substances ending in "ol") reach my nose, I am six years old again and terrified—terrified of meeting, just around the corner, the hollow-eyed, toothless man in the plaid shirt and overalls who once followed me down the fluorescent-lit hallway with loud, low grunting noises and drool pooling on his protruding chin. I do not need to see him. I smell him, and that is enough.

And it is enough, too, for me to catch that unmistakable, peppery-rhubarby smell in the August wind. By that alone, I know that school is coming just when it should. I smell that yellow-flowered weed whose name I do not know, and I am transported back into my navy nubuck Mary Janes and white cableknit tights, back to my first day of school in the basement of the Paradise Hills Church of God, perched on a hill above a freshly harvested wheat field where the wind would blow the spicy fragrance through the open windows and across the playground. It's the unmistakable smell of school.

That smell is in the air at this moment. July may have flown without warning, and August may be about to die what had seemed a premature death, but through some strange working of scent and memory, I know that school ought to be underway. I am about to turn that page to September once again, and all I have to do is inhale to know that this is just as it should be.

Cinnamon Rolls and Bacon: The Title Track

2010-08-20T15:50:00.000-07:00

My soul will be satisfied as with fat and rich food, and my mouth will praise you with joyful lips.
—Psalm 63:5

Now that this blog has been around for a while, I suppose it is high time I explained why I chose Cinnamon Rolls and Bacon as the title. As you may have discovered, if you're looking for breakfast recipes, this is not the site you need (although I will try to make up for that at the end of this post). No, it's more than just the morning meal that I'm concerned with here. Cinnamon rolls and bacon have become our traditional Sunday morning fare, and, by extension, a metaphor for Sabbath living; we commence the week with joyful table fellowship, gratitude for God's kindness, and a very tangible celebration of the resurrection—all of which should spill over into the rest of our daily lives.

Many of the families in our church community have come up with lovely and creative ways to make the Lord's day the high point of the week, and one tradition that our own family has adopted and grown to love is a copious Sunday breakfast. What better way to begin a day of rest, worship, and feasting than by weighing down the table with buttery homemade cinnamon rolls and oven-fried bacon?

But lest you think we are slowly killing ourselves with cholesterol, remember that Sunday comes but once a week. So, while some may argue that such luxuries are bad for the arteries, when taken in weekly moderation they are unquestionably good for the heart.

We want our children to grow up loving the Sabbath, tasting and seeing that the Lord is good from the moment the day begins. Before they can understand the goodness of God in almost any other way, kids can understand the rich combination of butter and sugar upon their tongues, and ours have learned to love it and look forward to it week after week.

There was a time when I was not confident enough in my baking skills to attempt making a pan of cinnamon rolls from scratch on a weekly basis, so we usually opted for the cardboard can variety instead. Those (or a box of doughnuts) will still suffice in a pinch, but now that I've found a reliable recipe, it's awfully hard to settle for anything less than homemade. I bake them the night before and pop them back into the oven on Sunday morning until they're warmed through and ready to be frosted by one of four eager volunteers who will, of course, get spatula-licking privileges when the job is done.

And then there is the bacon. I always check the little "sample slice" windows they provide on the backs of those packages at the grocery store, and if there's not a fat-to-meat ratio of at least three-to-one, I pass it by. The fat is honestly the part we want. Those little pink stripes of meat are simply there for looks—garnish in the form of pork.

But lest you think that bacon is nothing more than a greasy indulgence, let me explain its deeper significance. (No, really!) Bacon is also an edible reminder of one of the things that we, as Christians, believe—that Christ, in His death and resurrection, has fulfilled the Old Testament ceremonial laws, including the prohibition against eating unclean animals (i.e. pigs). Those animals represented the gentiles (i.e. us) who are now granted full membership with the New Covenant people of God. Ergo, bacon is, for us, a very tasty (and greasy) way to celebrate the gift of the gospel to the gentiles.

Granted, when we started our Sunday morning tradition, we simply liked the occasional rasher of bacon and hadn't considered of any of those theological points. It's not as though we set out to plumb the great metaphorical depths of all our breakfast choices. But still, having noticed some of the religious implications of bacon, we did think it seemed that much more fitting for a Sabbath meal.

To complete the morning feast, in addition to the cinnamon rolls and bacon, our kids are also treated to their weekly glass of chocolate milk, and we each have an egg or two fried in (what else?) a bit of bacon grease. We also grace the table with a bowl piled with whatever fruit may be at its seasonal peak. Right now it's peaches and nectarines that leave sweet juice dripping down our chins and forearms with the first bite.

The Sunday table is no place for fasting. Nor is it a place for half-hearted feasting weighed down by guilt. If it helps, leave off the first syllable when you say, "Cinnamon Rolls," for there is no sin in them at all. They are instead a reason for joy and gratitude, and one small way that we set this day apart from the rest—this day that points us toward the great wedding feast at the consummation of all things. Therefore, as Nehemiah exhorted God's people long ago, "go your way. Eat the fat and drink sweet wine and send portions to anyone who has nothing ready, for this day is holy to our Lord. And do not be grieved, for the joy of the Lord is your strength.” (Nehemiah 8:10)

Sabbatarian Cinnamon Rolls

1 packet of yeast (2 1/4 tsp.)
1 1/2 c. warm water (I normally use half milk, half water.)
1/3 c. sugar
1 1/2 tsp. kosher salt (or 3/4 tsp. table salt)
1 egg
1/3 c. unsalted butter, softened (Crisco works in a pinch.)
1/2 tsp. vanilla (real, if you have it)
3 1/2-4 c. white bread flour (All purpose flour works fine)

In a mixing bowl, dissolve yeast, sugar and salt in water. Wait about five minutes until foamy. Stir in remaining ingredients. Knead in flour when stirring becomes too difficult. (I use the flat beater on my KitchenAid for everything and skip the kneading hook altogether.) This dough will be nice and squashy, not stiff. Resist the temptation to add more than 4 cups of flour to the dough.

Let rise until double in a greased bowl covered with oiled plastic wrap. At this point you can punch it down and refrigerate it until Saturday night. (I find the dough easier to work with when cold.) Otherwise, dump the dough out on to a very generously floured board. Roll (or pat with well-floured hands) into a rectangle about 16" x 20".

Filling:
1 stick (1/2 c.) butter (Absolutely no substitutions!)
1 c. brown sugar (or up to half white sugar)
2 T. (yes, tablespoons) cinnamon

Melt the butter and spread evenly over the rectangle of dough. Mix together sugar and cinnamon and spread evenly over the butter. Roll it all up, pulling the dough toward you to stretch it a bit as you roll. (This results in lots of nice, thin layers to unroll as you eat and keeps the butter and sugar from melting out and forming a caramelly ooze on the bottom of your pan. If you like the caramelly ooze, then, by all means, roll these more loosely.) Slice into 20 even slices. (Again, this is easier to do if the dough is chilled.) Arrange rolls in a 4 x 5 pattern in a well buttered 9 x 13 pan. (I have always had best results with glass.) Let rise until almost doubled, and bake at 375° for 25 minutes. (Longer if the dough is cold to start with, a bit less if it's been a hot day in the kitchen. See note below.) Cool.

Icing:
This recipe is up to you. Some people like cream cheese or buttercream frosting, and I can't argue. But my normal recipe is simply:
1-2 c. powdered sugar
1 tsp real vanilla
Enough heavy cream to reach desired consistency—spreadable or drizzlable, depending on what you like.

Mix sugar, cream and vanilla thoroughly. Frost cinnamon rolls. (If you baked them the night before, save this step for after you have rewarmed them in the oven for 5-10 minutes. Otherwise the icing may scorch or melt away into sticky nothingness.)

Additional Notes:

Sometimes these have a tendency to rise skyward into little cinnamon roll mountain peaks. Check them half way through baking, and if they are forming something of a topographic map of the Rockies, then take a flat spatula and gently press them back down into a surface more reminiscent of the Iowa landscape.
You can double the dough recipe and, after letting it rise the first time, freeze half of the dough in an oiled gallon sized Ziploc bag for next week's cinnamon rolls.
If there are too many rolls for your family, share the joy, or else bake the rolls in two 9" round cake pans. Carefully wrap (foil inside a plastic bag) one of the two pans after they are baked and cooled, and freeze until next week. They keep surprisingly well. Then just thaw overnight, and warm in the oven before frosting.
Bonus: If you leave the vanilla out of the dough recipe and omit the cinnamon and sugar from the filling, this recipe makes fabulous crescent rolls suitable for Thanksgiving dinner. Just roll the dough into two dinner plate-sized circles instead of one big rectangle, and butter each circle with half a stick. Slice each circle like a pizza into 12 or 16 equal wedges and roll up starting with the wider end, firmly adhering the pointed end to keep from unrolling. Let rise on two greased or parchment-lined cookie sheets, and bake at 375° for 15-20 minutes, until golden.

Reunion

2010-08-05T11:44:00.000-07:00

Way back in the distant past, when I worked as a full-time designer, our magazine staff would hold a weekly meeting to discuss projects and coordinate our schedules. At one of these meetings, I mentioned that I would be taking some time off for a family reunion, to which my coworker responded by offering me her condolences. "I'm so sorry!" she said, "Family reunions can be such an annoying waste of vacation time."

I remember being taken aback by that comment. It had honestly never occurred to me that family reunions are, for many people, a real drag—an endless week of sidestepping touchy subjects, of reviving ancient grudges, of navigating through a web of gossipy whispers and hurt feelings and bitter misunderstandings. Blood may be thicker than water, but after a week like that, I can understand why water would sound a lot more refreshing—and why condolences would be the proper response.

"No, no! It's not like that," I answered, "I actually like these people!"

We recently returned from our annual Kvale family reunion in western Washington, and I would like to take this opportunity to amend my response; I don't just like these people. I love them. This reunion is not an obligation. It's a privilege.

For twenty-five years now, my mom and her eight brothers and sisters and their families have spent three days vacationing together, a tradition begun by my grandparents when I was young and continued for these many years since they've been gone. And now that I have kids of my own, it makes me happy just to see how my boys can hardly contain their excitement as they anticipate the days spent with aunts and uncles and cousins and second cousins by the lake—and how they can hardly contain their disappointment as we drive back home, leaving all of that fun and camaraderie behind.

Like most families, we're a quirky, varied bunch of people, and the memories I have are quirky and varied, too. I remember the time my uncle fell asleep on the lawn, and the brothers-in-law surrounded him with empty beer bottles pulled from the recycling bin. I remember the time my cousin organized all of us kids into a grand performance of a Belinda Carlisle pop ballad, using ping-pong paddles as "guitars." I remember the time my grandmother woke up early (as usual) and decided that 5:30 a.m. would be a great time to empty the dishwasher—with all the clinking and clanging and banging echoing throughout the lodge. I remember singing cheesy Sunday School songs by the campfire—in full, four-part harmony heavily weighted toward the alto section. I remember knock-down, drag-out games of Scrabble in the wee hours of the morning.

We've done hiking, and swimming, and line dancing, and foosball, and softball, and golf. And I'm sure that for every memory I have, there are hundreds more that stand out in the minds of my relatives. But one activity has remained constant despite the changing venues and the growing numbers; each of the three days of our reunion is brought to a close by a time of singing and prayer. There are 70 of us (give or take) in one room, thanking God together for His faithfulness to our family, and asking Him to meet one another's needs. The older I get, the more I see how remarkable it is to have these opportunities every evening. And if my coworker's comment is any indication, we enjoy a peace between us that, it seems, is extremely rare.

I'm not saying that our family relationships are never painful—even heartbreaking—at times. Like every extended family, we're part of Adam's fallen race. But unlike many extended families, we are also part of the Second Adam's race. A spirit of patience and forgiveness pervades our interactions, and in spite of our differences we share a unity that cannot be explained by family ties alone. Blood may be thicker than water. But what flows between us is thicker still.

Who could ask for a better inheritance? My grandparents didn't leave us all with yachts and Caribbean condos and stacks of cash. Sure, none of us would mind boating around the Bahamas with an unlimited budget. But we'd never take it in exchange for the kind of family we have been given. Each summer, we have a living, breathing reminder of what kind of long-term equity we are working to build. Raising nine children on the kind of money my grandfather made by milking cows, felling trees, and pumping gas might, by many, have been deemed fiscally irresponsible, but who, looking around at one of our reunions, could argue with his rate of return or the generational worth of his assets? We are rich beyond all calculation, regardless of what our mutual funds say.

From my grandparents, I inherited a red cast iron gum ball machine. In terms of material possessions, that's all I got. But the true inheritance that they passed on to me—and to my children—is a crowd of cousins, countless happy memories, a delightful summer tradition, and a confident hope in the reunion that will include not only my grandmother and grandfather, but all the faithful who have gone before them. No condolences necessary.

Staying Afloat

2010-07-07T10:49:00.000-07:00

On Monday morning at 9:00, we began our second session of swimming lessons for the summer. I've been pleased to see how the boys have cheerfully braved the cold mornings (48° and drizzle on the first day) and pushed themselves to do what, just two weeks ago, seemed impossible. Watching them, I can feel butterflies in my own stomach as I remember what it was like to take that first frightening plunge into the deep end, and to make that first nerve-wracking trip down the big slide through blind curves and slippery darkness. We all know what it's like to be pushed in over heads.

As the instructors carry the Pre-Tadpole students, who cling fiercely to their necks, to the "deep" end of the kiddie pool, one child's panicked shrieks suddenly fly across the bright surface of the water: "Don't let go! Don't let go! It's too deep! I! Caaan't! Swiiiiim!" From our deck chairs we parents watch these frequent displays of childish terror with mild amusement. We know they'll be safe, but they, out there where their feet dangle uselessly above the bottom of the pool, are far from convinced.

The swim teacher repeats what has become a mantra during the last ten days: "I've got you. You'll be all right. You're not gonna sink." But the wildly kicking legs, the rapid gasps for air and the expression of wide-eyed dread prove that this kid is momentarily deaf to all attempts at persuasion. Until his feet can touch the bottom, he will trust no one and nothing but his gut instincts—which are clearly telling him that he is going to die out here in this 4-foot-deep chlorinated abyss. And while I may chuckle at his frantic behavior, this terrified child is certainly not the only one overcome at times by panic and a sensation of drowning.

Water is a scary substance. It's no wonder that so many of the great stories of deliverance involve escape through and from water: Noah waiting to rise above the deluge; Jonah plunging to certain death and being saved in the nick of time; Moses holding out his staff to allow the children of Israel to pass through the water to safety; the disciples frantically waking Jesus to rescue them from drowning at sea; and, of course, Peter growing afraid and beginning to sink, calling out, "Lord, save me!" (Who of us, if called, would have stepped out of that boat in the first place?)

Water is a blessing that can kill. Is it any wonder that being "in over your head" and being "overwhelmed" are now clichés for that feeling of bewilderment—of being required to do the impossible?

These last several months, my husband and I have both felt ourselves drifting away from the shallow end, nearing the deep water where it looks like we're certain to drown. Each time I feel the water rising, I catch my breath and wonder if I can do this. Can we really stay afloat with so much to weigh us down? Can we keep our heads above water while balancing four kids, a marriage, friendships, work, heaps of little projects, church responsibilities, community responsibilities, a pregnancy, a sick grandmother, and a dissertation? Can't we just stay in the shallow end for a while and let the water splash around our ankles? Half the time I feel like flailing and hyperventilating like that kid in the swim class. Well intentioned people may be telling me, "You'll be all right. You're not gonna sink," but all I know is that the bottom is a long way down, and I am anything but buoyant.

Keeping our heads above water. That's what we're trying to do this summer. And, as my boys and I can attest, it doesn't always seem possible. When all the evidence appears to point to the contrary, it's hard to believe that we all won't go under. After all, our feet can't touch the bottom.

I've heard that youth group leaders and marriage counselors use "trust games" as a method for strengthening relationships between individuals. One person must fall backwards, arms folded, into the waiting arms of another, trusting that those arms will be there to break the fall—strong enough to save and protect from harm. I admit that I've always found the idea of these games pretty ridiculous. I mean, isn't there a less childish and contrived way to build trust?

Well, maybe there is. But watching my kids floundering helplessly in water over their heads has given me a new appreciation for these "trust games." It's easy to laugh at my boys' nervousness—and even at their terror. We know that they have nothing to fear, but they know nothing of the kind. All that stands between them and death is that pair of waiting arms, ready to catch them when they fall, to pull them up when they're sinking.

I know exactly how they feel. While I may, like them, be tempted to doubt and to start pleading, "Don't let go! Don't let go!" there are others—many others—who have already been out here before me and survived. Through the years, they've successfully maintained their marriages, finished their projects, raised their families, completed their dissertations. They are expert swimmers, and I'm sure that they are watching me amusedly from their deck chairs as I learn to swim. They are perfectly certain that I am not going to drown. I, while I was back in the shallows of the kiddie pool, found it easy to believe that, too. It's only now, when I'm being called to venture out into these unfamiliar depths, that I grow afraid and begin to sink.

I'm not walking on water. I'm not even treading water. I'm with Peter, about to go under and crying, "Lord, save me!"

Last week, even with his life jacket firmly secured around his chest and his teacher's arms waiting just below to catch him, Paul was terrified to jump. "Thirteen feet deep. This water is thirteen feet deep," he was thinking. The measurements may have had only vague meaning to his four-year-old mind, but even a four-year-old can see that the water below is a darker, deeper shade of blue than the kiddie pool will allow. All our cheery assurances could not convince him of safe passage through that cobalt expanse, and simply seeing others survive the leap was not proof enough that survival was possible for him. My little Paul could no more save himself from thirteen feet of water than fly, and yet his teacher was calling to him to jump.

Shivering with both fear and chill, Paul could not bring himself to step off the end of the diving board. So with a nod from his dad, the instructor dropped him in. And, wonder of wonders, Paul survived. But even his own escape from a watery grave will not convince him to take that fateful step a second time. This, for him, was a true trust game—and not one that, at this point in the season, he was willing to play again.

We all know that it's more comfortable back in the shallows. It's easier to believe that we're going to survive when we're sitting on the solid planks of the boat. But if we're called to step away from the edge, to walk out where the blue below us is darker, out where the wind is rising, trust becomes a more difficult matter. We may grow fearful. We may begin to sink. But if we have been called to do the impossible, to jump into the deep end, to step out of the boat in the midst of the sea, go we must.

He said, “Come.” So Peter got out of the boat and walked on the water and came to Jesus. But when he saw the wind, he was afraid, and beginning to sink he cried out, “Lord, save me.” Jesus immediately reached out his hand and took hold of him, saying to him, “O you of little faith, why did you doubt?”

—Matthew 14:29-31

'Til Death Do Us Part

2010-06-10T11:12:00.000-07:00

Ten years ago today, as I slipped into my new white shoes, I already knew that I was about to take the most important walk of my life. It was not the longest walk. It wasn't the most strenuous. It wasn't even the most scenic. It was, to put it bluntly, a walk into certain death. Before I took my first nervous step through those double doors, I knew that this short stroll would be the end of me. When it was all over, I would be somebody new. I would have a new name. I would have a new identity, a new title, a new head, a new walking companion. That brief trip from the church foyer to the end of the aisle is the walk that overthrew my existence without even causing me to break a sweat—twelve deceptively easy steps to a total transformation. With the mere exchange of hands, of words, of rings, my life as I had known it was ending. Before God and hundreds of witnesses we made those solemn vows—'til death do us part.

Death? Must we bring up that subject at such a happy occasion? As it turns out, we must. Weak vows bring weak joy. Ours is a bond that only death may sever.

Nevertheless, we had anything but death on our minds as we drove off into the sunset after the reception, and death seemed a lifetime away as we set up house in the afterglow of our honeymoon. But at some point during the weeks and months that followed, "married life" began. In the midst of our newlywed euphoria, it was a shock to wake up one morning and realize how human the two of us still were. While so much changes—truly changes—in the course of a half-hour wedding, a good deal remains unchanged. We are new people now, right? So why do all our old sins and habits and selfish desires keep resurfacing? Although I knew that we were giving up our former lives to begin our new life together, it had not fully sunk in that I would have to die to myself again and again and again in everyday life once the ceremony had ended. Giving up our lives for one another did not end at the altar.

I had never fully considered how much of me was going to carry over into this new life. And nobody told me what a self-centered little pig I had always been. I didn't like letting go of my comfortable little routines. I was irritated that my plans might have to take a back seat to his plans. I wanted to make the decisions about how we spent my paycheck. This marriage business was not as blissfully painless as I had expected, and we weren't even talking about the big decisions yet—changing jobs, having kids, moving across the country. Living with roommates had been a cakewalk compared to this. I didn't make any 'til-death-do-us-part promises to them.

And that's precisely the point. Death alone may part us. But death, paradoxically, is also required to bind us together. It's death that makes all the difference.

Death. It's a dark little word. But over the past ten years, we've grown to see more clearly how essential to a happy marriage death truly is. Many deaths. Daily death. Death in the little things. As my children have memorized, "Greater love has no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends." Love means a willingness to die. And die, am I thankful to say, we frequently did.

But if I was tempted to think I'd really died quite enough (thank you very much) for the sake of our happy marriage, I had no idea how much more I would be required to die to myself when the kids came along. The first weeks home with a newborn were, to put it mildly, a misery. If somebody had walked into my home and offered to take my firstborn child off my hands for the rest of my life, I would gladly have handed him over (and good riddance.) My busy job with regular hours, regular paychecks, plenty of positive feedback, and a fair dose of almost-instant gratification was hardly the best preparation for the full-time care of a newborn. Everything I'd enjoyed about my previous job was missing from this new one. The hours were wretched, the pay was nil, the feedback came in the form of screaming and disgusting messes, and I felt like I had nothing whatsoever to show for my hours of thankless toil at the end of each lonely day. I cried everyday for two weeks. And almost daily for some time after that. I'd never died like this before, and I couldn't imagine ever willingly doing it again.

But I was forgetting the end of the story: death is never the final sum in God's economy. When I lay down my desires, my needs, my hopes, my habits, my life for someone else, resurrection follows. And the resurrected life is, without fail, more glorious than the life that was laid down.

"Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit." It's so simple that even my children understand the concept after a season of backyard gardening. And yet, how many times have I buried a seed in the ground only to stand there staring at the lifeless dirt and thinking, "Well, that was a waste!" The first show of green always seems to appear at exactly the moment when I've given up checking for signs of new life.

Those women who hurried to the tomb in the early morning were not marching triumphantly with "Welcome Back" banners. They were quietly bearing spices to anoint the dead.

Resurrection is a simple truth I still don't always easily grasp. But in sacrificing so much that is valuable to me—my time, my sleep, my comfort, my career goals, my belongings—to my husband or my children (or anyone else, for that matter) I will and do receive far more than I have given. Every sacrifice is like a seed planted; in laying each one down, in every little death I die, I am declaring my belief in resurrection. In the Resurrection. And after each burial, while I may be staring blankly at what looks uncannily like mud—like dust and ashes—the eyes of faith can see the trees that will spring from that earth, their branches weighed down by the fruit they will bear. Tending a household is very much like tending a garden.

And now, as I wait for the birth of our fifth child, I am, once again, waiting for resurrection. (Is it merely coincidence that the words tomb and womb are so similar?) In times past, bearing children could literally have meant laying down my earthly life. But even today, there is no escaping the lesser sacrifices involved: health, comfort, sleep, looks, strength are given over for the sake of my children. This is my body broken, this is my blood shed for the life of another. The suffering of childbirth is a small reflection of the cross itself. But, as Christ on the cross, we endure it not for its own sake, but for the joy set before us. In laying down our lives, we take them up again, more blessed than ever before. Greater love has no man than this.

In taking that walk down the aisle ten years ago in my new white shoes, I was approaching the altar to lay down my life. But that life was raised up new and glorified. It was a death and resurrection that would begin a lifetime of deaths and resurrections. All that I gave up "before God and these witnesses" has been replaced by greater and richer gifts. Beauty for ashes. And so it has been with every death that my husband and I have died for each other, and then for our children, throughout the past ten years. And so it will be in the years to come—'til death do us part.

Jackson Pollock, Eat Your Heart Out

2010-06-04T17:42:00.000-07:00

Update: We found something to do on a rainy day!

My parents were cleaning out the garage this afternoon, and they sent me home with a big box of cans of tempera paint. But this was not just any tempera paint. This paint belonged to my father when he was a child. I guess that makes it sort of antique. Now, maybe that means I should have doled it out in minute amounts to keep it around for another 50 years. But, as you can see, I didn't.

I have no idea whether powdered Crayola paint from the 1950s is washable, but here's hoping. My boys discovered very quickly that they didn't need to mix the paint with water if they poured it onto pre-moistened sidewalks (courtesy of a week of rain). Ingenious, wouldn't you say? Surely there must be NEA grant money available for projects such as this. All I have to do now if figure out a way to transport these colorful children from the sidewalk to the bathtub without ruining the floors or my own clothes in the process!

School's out for...

2010-05-28T15:25:00.000-07:00

"Summer" has officially begun at our house. We ended the school year well, with a sweet kindergarten graduation ceremony and the celebration of terrific report cards for both my big boys. We had a fantastic 9 months, and now summer lies before us—vast, uncharted, and as inviting as a mile of blank sidewalk to a kid with a bucket of colorful chalk. Or at least it seemed that inviting a couple of days ago. School was dismissed on Wednesday morning, and the boys are now spending their time at home. With me. All. Day. Long.

I really do love having all my kids together again, and their brotherly interaction is something I really miss during the rest of the year. But yesterday, on the first glorious day of our summer vacation, unbroken gray skies drained chilly rain onto our muddy yard. All. Day. Long. That's right. Summer's here! Pull out the sweaters and raincoats! As one of our local store's jingles puts it, "We live in North Idaho...and it shows." School's out for summer. Which, if this weather lasts long, just might make it seem like school's out forever.

So what's a mom to do with four busy-busy, high-energy boys who are stuck indoors with nowhere to go and nothing planned? Well, let me tell you about all my great ideas for how we're going to spend those rainy days during the next three months:

And there you have it. I'm at a loss.

O.K. I may not be quite that helpless, but I confess that I am utterly terrible at coming up with rainy day activities. I've checked out a number of books with imaginative titles like Rainy Day Activities, and they are almost entirely filled with girly crafts. I'm sorry, but my kids do not want to make paper beads to string into colorful necklaces. They're not interested in assembling sweet little clothespin dolls. Tissue paper flowers stuck on green, sparkly pipe cleaner "stems" are not their cup of tea. And speaking of tea, tea parties—and all the lacy whatnots that they entail—are out. What we want around here is warcraft. And loud sound effects. And full contact sports. Sitting quietly around the table with markers and glue sticks does keep everyone occupied for a short while, but it often backfires by simply getting my children to hold in their excess energy for just that much longer. They build up pressure like a pack of agitated soda cans, and then when they are released, they explode.

So, I'm trying to get creative here in order to prevent Cat-In-The-Hat-style disaster. Thankfully, my kids are far more inventive than I am, and in the last three days, they have used up nearly an entire ream of scratch paper in the construction of all sorts of paper airplanes (some more air-worthy than others). They have made super hero masks. They have cut out paper money. They have hosted NBA-inspired bedroom-door-basketball games. I have even, in a moment of weakness, resorted to getting out the play dough for them. They have, of course, colored and colored and colored and colored until our crayons are mere shadows of their former selves. They've built forts. They've played piano. They've read stories. They've sung songs. And yes, they have already watched more than the FDA's, the FBI's, the CIA's, the NSA's, and the Surgeon General's recommended daily allowance of DVD minutes for children ages 2-8. (I seem to remember that I was never going to allow that day to come.) And today's only the second day of vacation. Oh boy. Times four.

I'd be thrilled if Little Orphan Annie showed up on tonight's forecast, singing cheery reassurances that "the sun'll come out tomorrow...". But in case she doesn't, I'd be equally thrilled to collect some rainy-day ideas from all y'all. If you have thoughts on fun and profitable ways for my boys (keeping in mind that they are, in fact, boys) to spend their time indoors—as long as the activities are only mildly destructive to body and belongings—I'd love to hear them!

Oh, and since this is my blog, I reserve the right to end this post with a couple of proud mama photos:

Jonah receiving a medal for getting all A's all year

Jude with his Kindergarten diploma. Yea!

An Inconvenient Truth or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the "Nuke"

2010-05-20T16:55:00.000-07:00

Our microwave died this weekend. And in the few days since its demise, I've already reached for it multiple times, only to realize—with a bit of frustration—that I must instead use the stove to reheat a bowl of soup or a plate of spaghetti. How truly inconvenient. And, as if the loss of the microwave weren't traumatic enough, last night's windstorm knocked out our power for almost an hour. Really now. What's a twenty-first century housewife to do? First leftovers on the stove and then dishes by candlelight? How positively medieval.

Actually, the medieval experience was kind of fun—in a historical theme-park sort of way. Candles and flashlights are exciting precisely because they are out of the ordinary. But every theme park vacation must come to an end, and I, for one, prefer having light and heat instantly available at the press of a button. So I've been shopping around, hoping to find a reasonable price on an appliance that will adequately meet our microwave needs. Yes, our microwave needs.

Somehow, every convenient new gadget or service that begins as a luxury ends up, in a few short years, as a need.

I distinctly remember the day that my parents bought their first microwave. We were living in a rental house on Monroe St. in Spokane, Washington, when we welcomed into our home the boxy appliance that would take over our counter space and light up the kitchen at night with its glowing-blue digital clock. It had an attractive wood grain pattern printed on its sides. And it changed our lives. It changed American life.

With the advent of the microwave came a whole new array of convenience foods: bags of pre-buttered popcorn, single servings of soup and oatmeal, and complete four-course meals, to name a few. The microwave turned leftovers into a time-saving, eat-at-your desk lunch option. And what the microwave did for college cuisine is probably incalculable. There are apartment-dwelling undergrads who manage to complete a four-year degree without ever turning on a stove. True story. Why spend valuable hours slicing and dicing and boiling and sautéeing, when you can heat and ingest a tray of Lean Cuisine in less time than it takes to preheat an oven? And, as an added bonus, there are no dishes to contend with when you're done. It's truly a triumph of American efficiency. But it can, unfortunately, also be triumph of American insipidity and impatience.

The microwave seems to me to be the perfect metaphor for this American life: easy, high-tech instant gratification. We live in a microwave culture. Let's face it: deep down, every American is pro-nuke. We like everything to be cheap, simple, and immediate; we want everything to be microwavable: work, education, religion, politics, health care, entertainment, sex, and, of course, food. So naturally, when my microwave breaks, I'm off in search of a new one before the old one has cooled.

I guess I could be making an argument right now for how much richer life would be if I just went back to the days before microwaves entered my life. I could eschew the nuke-it culture by kissing my microwave goodbye for good, and I might even find my argument convincing. After all, I'm fully in favor of putting the brakes on in lots of areas of life. I don't expect a newly elected politician to press a button and eliminate all the nation's problems the day after he takes office. I don't want my kids to learn piano "in 5 easy lessons." I would rather not get a master's degree with a few clicks of the mouse. I believe that most of what's valuable comes through hard work, patience, and sacrifice, and that includes food.

I like to cook. Honestly, I do. And gardening is another wonderful way to learn delayed gratification when it comes to bringing dinner to the table. I'm a huge fan of homegrown tomatoes. I like a slow-roasted brisket as much as anyone. But at the same time, I miss my microwave. There does seem to be a legitimate place for time-saving devices, and reheating the leftovers, to my mind, is one of them. With a microwave, I've lost nothing but extra dishes to clean, and I've gained precious minutes at the table with my family. Sometimes, instant gratification is, well, gratifying. And, and as fun as cooking by candlelight can be, when it comes to yesterday's chicken soup, I still believe that the best option is to just "nuke" it.

The Gym of Eden

2010-05-14T10:25:00.000-07:00

Whew! My muscles and my back are very sore as I write this. I wish I could say that it was because I performed some great athletic feat, but no. I merely spent a couple of hours digging in the flower beds yesterday. In my defense, I did go beyond the ordinary weeding and instead hauled out the big shovel to excavate an inexcusable amount of invasive grass that had woven itself underground into a dense tangle of roots, some of which were as thick as my thumb and wrapping their evil tentacles around my tulip bulbs. It was hard work. But still, I feel like a sissy being this wiped out by a little spring weeding. (Oh to be able to take ibuprofen again!) Nevertheless, this is the good kind of sore, and my hands are the good kind of dirty.

I suppose that, after my last post, I should mention that the sunshine is definitely back. I'm pleased to report that the thermometer has been peeking its little head above the 70° line for a few days now. It's been lovely. And getting my vitamin D from the sky instead of from a bottle is, quite literally, priceless. I love spring—almost as much as I love summer.

A day this fine should not be spent indoors. This is perfect gardening weather and park weather and strolling-around-the-neighborhood weather. I'd be crazy to sit at a computer typing a blog post right now. Heh.

Having never been a member of a gym, I may not be qualified to say this, but I honestly cannot understand how gyms stay in business during weather like this. Physical therapy, of course, makes sense to me. And winter gym time make a little bit of sense to me. But when it's 73°, the sun is shining, a light breeze is blowing, the yard needs attention, and the birds are singing, getting your exercise inside of a big, boxy room lit with fluorescent tubes while plugging yourself into a pair of earbuds makes absolutely no sense to me.

Yesterday, as I did my squats and lunges with the help of a shovel, my soundtrack was a chickadee and a woodpecker. My workout partner was an enthusiastic two-year-old who could hardly contain his joy as I unearthed two fat beetle larvae, a snail, a beetle, a handful of worms, and an army of ants. I got to chat with my next door neighbor. I said hello to passersby who stopped to admire the tulips. I had the satisfaction of separating the weeds from the flowers and preparing the ground for planting.

I was dive bombed by a hummingbird. No really. I was.

Is there anything so metaphorically rich as gardening? Is there anything so unpoetic as a treadmill? Is there any air so invigorating as this lilac-scented breeze? Is there any air so uninviting as the sweaty aroma of the locker room? Will somebody please explain to me how anyone of sound body and mind could opt for the latter?

Even if you don't have a garden—which we didn't for years—just running around at the nearest park seems far superior to anything I could be doing with a gym membership. And if you've got kids, I guarantee that they are dying to run around outside anyway, so we might as well include them in the fun.

It's spring! So get some sun. Get some dirt under your fingernails. Get some fresh air. And get some exercise where the lilacs smell stronger than the gym socks.

Hey, ho, the wind and the rain

2010-05-04T15:11:00.000-07:00

"It's snowing still," said Eeyore gloomily.
"So it is."
"And freezing."
"Is it?"
"Yes," said Eeyore. "However," he said, brightening up a little, "we haven't had an earthquake lately."

This year, winter and spring seem to have shaken hands and reached some sort of compromise, granting each other the authority to intermittently take charge over one another's appointed months. Winter was unusually mild and green, but this week, spring is doing its best to pose as winter.

Freezing temperatures and a forecast of "possible snow flurries" greeted us this morning as an unwelcome finale to yesterday's trunk-snapping, flower-stripping winds—winds that turned the sky a sickly brown for most of the afternoon. Our yard is littered with the debris of Monday's gales, and the tulips are staring pathetically up at me with a uniform expression of exhaustion and defeat. In the glass of the living room window, I can see that my own expression reflects theirs.

Only in recent years have I discovered how much the weather affects my mood. It's hard to put a spring in my step when there is no spring in the air. If I let them, these blustery days can turn me into a real Eeyore— Eeyore living in a house full of Tiggers.

Dreams of a green, sprouting vegetable garden are not going to be realized anytime this week. Or next, judging by the forecast. The seed packets sitting on my counter all say, in their matter-of-fact way, "Plant in the ground after all danger of frost is past." All danger? That would give us, let's see, the last two weeks in August. Maybe. If it's a good year. I've seen frost on the Fourth of July.

So here I sit near a bright window, warming my hands against a mug of very hot tea, letting the steam rise into my face to clear my stuffy head and ease the disappointment of hope deferred.

The truth is that, living in northern Idaho, gardening is really a matter of playing the odds. It takes a gaming spirit and a sense of humor. What are the chances of snow in May? Are you willing to bet your crop on it? Ante up. And keep a spare ace up your sleeve. Wear your poker face. Don't let the sunshine fool you.

Sunny skies may have replaced yesterday's brown, but the cheery blue, like a squirting trick corsage, is nothing but a cheap practical joke; it lures us with all the illusion of springtime friendliness and then douses the unsuspecting optimist with a blast of chilly reality. Haha. Very funny. Where's my coat?

Truthfully, I do know that spring is already here and that these cold days are nothing extraordinary. I have no doubt that warmer weather will be on its way here again soon. And in the meantime, I have a fire. And a warm mug. And guileless sunny faces all around me. The tulips are even beginning to look like they'll recover.

Oh, and we haven't had an earthquake lately.

Better luck next time

2010-04-20T09:51:00.000-07:00

I promised, ages ago, that I would do something, even at the high risk of failure, with the fabric that I'd been hoarding forever in my search for the "perfect project" to use it on. Well, months ago I made up my mind. I wanted a dress. You see, being either pregnant or nursing for most of the past nine years has made wearing regular dresses rather impractical. But now that I was neither, I finally found myself in a position to actually wear a dress, yet there were very few options in my closet that didn't scream "1999."

So, I chose a pattern, cut out the pieces and then—very, very cautiously—cut out the precious fabric. Eek. I had to do some careful maneuvering and minor adjustments to the pattern in order to include as much of the embroidered design as possible without losing symmetry. I couldn't fit the very top of the design on the skirt front, but I was able to place the rest of it as a little flourish on the back. (I'm rather fond of that bit of detail.)

However, before I could finish the project, I got buried under a gazillion graphic design jobs, so I put the sewing on pause. For three months.

Whew. I got most of the design work almost done, breathed a sigh of relief, and then I found out I was pregnant. ACK! Now I really had to hurry to finish the dress before my body ballooned beyond all hope of fitting into the size I'd cut out.

So, in a mad rush, I pinned and trimmed and sewed and serged and got all the major pieces assembled on the night before Easter Sunday, hoping against hope that the dress would fit. Then I hurried with baited breath to try it on. I could zip it up, but breathing? Forget about it. And at this stage of my life, air, as you may imagine, is rather important.

With a heavy heart, I hung the unfinished garment on a hanger and deposited it in the back of the closet. Not much point in staying up late to complete it. Alas. I decided to put off hand stitching the final details until I actually have a hope of wearing it. The work will be more gratifying then—even if it is two years from now. I'm not sure I'd call this a failure; I think I actually like how it turned out, although we'll see how I feel about it when I finally regain my original shape. Just poor timing. *Sigh.*

Here's to delayed gratification.

Architectural (in)Digest(ion)

2010-04-15T10:57:00.000-07:00

As I entered the house with three of my boys in tow, I had one of those rare moments of shock when I see my home (and, by extension, my life) with the eyes of an outsider—or rather with the eyes I possessed in a former life. With aesthetic disapproval, I surveyed the scene that greeted me when I opened the front door. What kind of woman lives in the midst of this designer faux pas? This, quite honestly, is not the home I thought I would inhabit, back in the days when I fancied myself to be some sort of aesthete. I have an art degree, after all. La-dee-dah.

Ten happy years ago, I recall tripping lightly through the halls of commerce, scanner gun in hand, and registering for sets of crystal stemware and high-thread-count sateen sheets, all the while imagining how they would grace our brightly lit neoclassical house on a hill. The one with the 14-foot ceilings and the gorgeous, dust-free crown molding; the one with the carefully selected paint colors and the matching sets of furniture in every room. I've done what I can to make ours a lovely home, but my time and resources are limited, and my talents do not extend to reupholstering sofas. Just to repaint the dining room seems, right now, to be an unattainable goal. My home beautification efforts are normally limited to what you might call "damage control." I'm hardly the hip, design-savvy housewife I once assumed I'd be. Not even close.

When I was in high school, my mom worked as a secretary in the Department of Architecture at the local university, and every few months, she would bring home a new stack of back issues of Architectural Digest and other home design magazines. I loved to sit on the couch to peruse their pages; they were full of ingenious injection-molded furniture and glitzy, custom-printed wallpaper. As I flipped through, I would take mental notes, soaking up all the decorating possibilities of the "someday" house I would inhabit.

But as I look back from the vantage of motherhood and nearly ten years of marriage, certain characteristics of those picture-perfect residences become clear. Sure, there were lots of homes that still strike me as downright lovely. But the rest were owned by childless couples (usually "partners") who stay there for only a few months of each year—and with good reason. In retrospect, I can see that those designer homes were utterly ridiculous—not just because of their bank-draining price tags, but also because of their life-draining aesthetics. If there's one thing that can be said about the pages of those journals, it is that they represented, by and large, an entirely sterile way of life. They were made to accomodate ideas, not human beings. And, let's face it, human beings are what constitute a family.

It's impossible to imagine raising flesh-and-blood children (though, judging by the photos, some have tried) in a cantilevered concrete box filled with polished stainless steel and right angles and glass tables and suspended, rail-less stairs.* Nor is it possible to imagine bringing up a family in the midst of a palatial Rococo explosion of gilt statuary and mismatched brocade and silk-upholstered ottomans and crystal candelabras. In either case, the environment is hostile to basic family life—in the first instance by setting up hard edges, cold surfaces, and dangerous angles, and in the second by scattering priceless art and irreplaceable fabrics and fragile collectables in every conceivable corner. These designers have shoved aside the business of living in order to make way for the business of showing off their refined tastes. Now that I think about it, my family could hardly be comfortable in many of these magazine estates for a single weekend, let alone for the rest of our lives. Who are these people kidding?

Themselves, if you ask me. And I, too, am kidding myself to think I'd be happier in the pages of a magazine.

Sure, the magazine couples are the ones with the maids and the polished marble floors. I'm the one with the messes and the stained, unraveling carpets. But, although it's far from perfect, my home at least looks like it's meant to be lived in. It has been lived in. Boy, has it ever. There will soon be seven of us in this 3-bedroom house. And I grant that it's a little tight. When bad weather keeps us all indoors, this home can feel very small and chaotic indeed. And it's times like that when it's easy to cast side-long glances—easy to flip through a catalog and long for something bigger, better, more.

Not only do my living room chairs and couches not match; they are also bespeckled with ten thousand sippie cup drips. A shiny streak on a throw pillow is evidence that one child has decided the cushions were more convenient than a Kleenex. The rug is fraying around the edges and is littered with random toys and lonely socks. There's no rhyme or reason to the furniture choices. No matching bedroom sets. No thematically decorated nursery. And (ACK!) would you just LOOK at the kitchen floor! My former self would have thought, "This woman doesn't just need a maid; she needs an HGTV team of home stylists to come to the rescue." And moments do come when I almost agree with myself.

But I don't have a maid. Or a personal stylist. Or an interior decorator. Or anyone else to breeze through my messy life and wrap it up in glamor and sparkle. A broom and a bottle of Windex (and, on a really great day, a vase of daffodils) are the only design team I am able to employ, and they don't do much to produce stunning "Before" and "After" shots.

It's not that I'm longing to set up house in Kubla Khan's stately pleasure-dome. At least, not anymore. But a couple of rooms from a Restoration Hardware catalog would be all right with me. It's a good thing I no longer get that rag in the mail; it would too easily leave me sighing over out-of-reach armoires and tastefully coordinated drapes and upholstery. Better not to know what new wares they're peddling and be spared many a covetous hour. Even in a catalog-worthy house, the envious soul could find new ways to want more, and if I can't be content here, what makes me think I'll be content in a Pottery Barn showroom? A spirit of discontent has a way of staying with a person regardless of location, location, location. "Wherever you go," as they say, "there you are."

In this blessed existence, days will come (and have come) when I descend the stairs—in all my disheveled, pre-caffeine glory—to discover that my boys have emptied all their drawers in search of a certain shirt; dumped the entire contents of our 84 bins of Legos onto the carpet; pulled approximately 397 books off the shelves in an effort to locate a missing school folder; and decided it would be a good idea to pour their own drinks...into water bottles with an opening the diameter of a pencil. And I had, in my foolishness, gone to bed with a clean house expecting to find the same when I awoke. Haha. Those are the days when an army of servants would be quite welcome.

And those are also the days when it can be hard to take the long view. I could be giving my hours to a full-time job, clicking away at a computer for 40 hours a week in order to help finance the house I used to dream about. I could spend the hours God's given me in order to live the DINK dream, in a pristine home with beautiful, unspotted sofas and real wool rugs and windows entirely free of nose prints. I could set giant bouquets in crystal vases on the coffee table, and carry a little clutch purse on my way to dinner at eight. I could give the best years of my life to appearing in the pages of Architectural Digest.

But Architectural Digest is here today and tomorrow is cast into the fire. Instead, my hours—messy and unglamorous as they may be—are being spent on something eternal. Five somethings, to be more precise. Silk upholstery will tear and fade. Walnut armoires will scratch and crack. Colors schemes and design fads will fall from favor. But my children have spirits that will last forever—spirits that are being shaped and nurtured here. Here, on these fraying rugs. Here on these sticky floors. Here on the mismatched chairs. Here are souls that cannot go out of fashion. Here is a "Before" and "After" project worth giving my life for.
__________

*Visit archdaily.com for a look at life in just this sort of modernist architectural Hell.

Then shall the fall further the flight in me.

2010-04-04T08:32:00.000-07:00

Many of you know that my dear husband is writing his dissertation on the poetry of George Herbert (1593–1633). Here's a beautiful little sample of his poetry for this Easter Sunday:

———————————————

Easter Wings

by George Herbert

Lord, Who createdst man in wealth and store,

Though foolishly he lost the same,
Decaying more and more,
Till he became
Most poore:

With Thee

O let me rise,
As larks, harmoniously,

And sing this day Thy victories:
Then shall the fall further the flight in me.

My tender age in sorrow did beginne;
And still with sicknesses and shame
Thou didst so punish sinne,
That I became
Most thinne.

With Thee

Let me combine,
And feel this day Thy victorie;
For, if I imp my wing on Thine,
Affliction shall advance the flight in me.

———————————————

Herbert originally published the poem sideways like this:

(See the wings?)

Of Mice and Men

2010-04-01T16:24:00.000-07:00

Another one bit the dust, but not before he had chewed his way through a package of ramen noodles and littered my pantry shelf with shredded plastic and nasty brown pellets. That was the night before last. But even after annihilating that one furry intruder, I could still hear the sounds of scratching and skittering behind the drywall as I lay in bed last night, keeping me awake into the wee hours. Mice in the attic. This is something new. And not at all welcome.

This old farmhouse has had a record winter for mice. It's not unusual for one or two find their way into our warm and well-stocked pantry during the coldest months. But this year I lost count at nine. For most of my life, I'd never had a terrible aversion to mice. I never wanted one as a pet, but I didn't hate them either. But now that we've disposed of the umpteenth squashed mouse of the year, I am convinced that the only good mouse is a dead one.

Our particular mice have been harder to catch than most. They are sly. At first they led us to believe that peanut butter was the sure-fire bait to lure them in. But no. After days of wreaking havoc in my cupboards with nary a nibble on the peanut buttery traps, we discovered that these unique rodents have international taste: sushi nori, pepperoni, ramen, chow mein.

But we're on to their little games. We now catch mice by offering them seaweed and Slim Jims and Asian pasta. I kid you not.

I liked Ratatouille as much as anyone, but regardless of their gourmet taste, these creatures must die. Apologies to the squeamish, but really they must. Those "humane" mouse traps are for sentimental sissies who watch too many cartoons. Sorry kiddies. Mickey is NOT your friend.

Mice. They live in darkness. They sneak around behind closed doors. They carry disease. They trespass. They steal. They destroy. They breed. Apart from their size, what makes them any better than rats? I'd rather have spiders. At least spiders don't eat my chow mein noodles.

Why, oh, why have all the children's stories—even the great ones—portrayed mice as the dear little friends of humanity? Please tell me if you know. Aesop seemed to be fond of them. Beatrix Potter put them to diligent work saving the poor tailor of Gloucester. C.S. Lewis portrayed Reepicheep as a brave and noble beast. And Walt Disney launched mousehood to new heights of fame and glory. What did these people know that I don't?

As far as I can tell, the only trait that has led us to exonerate these beady-eyed little burglars is that they are cute. Small and furry and cute. That's it. If I'm right, then here's the obvious, though disturbing, lesson to draw from this phenomenon: If you are cute you can get away with just about anything, and people will still adore you. Now I ask you, is this a lesson we want to teach our children?

I submit that we need to protect our young people from harmful messages such as this by censoring and eliminating all stories and movies that portray mice as lovable and dignified. Burn your copy of Stuart Little. Pitch those Mickey ears right into the rubbish. I will be picketing with my "Cuteness Does Not Equal Innocence" sign downtown this evening. Please join me. And make sure you write to your senators, demanding that more federal funding be directed toward the much-needed research and development phase of building a better mousetrap. Mice are a menace and a threat to traditional morality and national security. Do your part to spread the word.

Thank you. (And Happy April Fool's Day.)

The mountains tremble

2010-03-29T16:11:00.000-07:00

The size of a mustard seed. That's how big my fifth baby is right now—one itty-bitty millimeter. Doesn't seem like much, does it? But, come to think of it, Abraham was once that size. And the Queen of Sheba. And Alexander the Great. And Caesar. And Saint Augustine. And Charlemagne. And Joan of Arc. And Martin Luther. And Rembrandt. And Shakespeare. And J.S. Bach. And Jane Austen. And Winston Churchill. And You.

There was a time when every celebrated character in history was invisible to the naked eye.

A tiny mustard seed. Not even enough to add some zing to a sandwich. But great and terrifying things are happening under the microscope. The womb is a fearful and wonderful workshop—secret and dark and mysterious—where, out of the formless void, a "let there be..." calls forth something that once was not and now is.

Only a mustard seed. But a mighty tree is in the making, in whose branches the birds of the air will come to build their nests.

Just a mustard seed. But I can feel the mountains tremble. The mountains, after all, know something we do not; they know what moves them.

Too shy shy

2010-03-15T16:32:00.000-07:00

An unfriendly man pursues selfish ends; he defies all sound judgment.
—Proverbs 18:1

Yesterday at church, two of my boys walked right up to some adult members of the congregation to shake hands and greet them with a friendly hello. It's a seemingly insignificant gesture of kindness, but around here it's a big deal. It's worthy of a sticker on the reward sheet when we get home. Going out of their way to be friendly is not easy for my kids, but we work on it. A lot. That it takes practice is something their mother knows all too well.

When I mentioned in a previous post that I have a tendency toward being a recluse, I wasn't kidding; it's a predilection I've had to fight hard against. I relish moments of "alone time." But these days, alone time tends to be pushed aside by "kid time," and "husband time," and "church time," and "school time," and "sports time," and all the other "times" that come with having a growing family. And that's as it should be. But sometimes the level of noise and activity involved with having four little boys—who spend a significant part of each day thundering through the house making martial sound effects—can be rather overwhelming and exhausting.

Even social events as joyous as weddings have left me feeling so drained afterward that I've been tempted to sit in a quiet corner with a mug of tea and a book for the rest of the day. I recall being sent to my room as a child (after having a spat with my brother) and feeling like I'd just been handed a free pass to solitary bliss. I used to dread my own birthday parties.

Yep. Introvert. That's me. Recognizing my introverted personality type was easy. Recognizing that this personality type came with some serious pitfalls was another thing.

It may seem obvious, but somebody else had to give me a (metaphorical) kick in the head before I discovered that my "shy girl" demeanor had ethical ramifications. I never wanted to be lonely, but putting myself forward in a social setting was, for me, the emotional equivalent of running blindfolded along the edge of cliff—not a risk I was willing to take. Right up through high school, I was under the impression that shy is "just who I am."

But then one day, shortly before starting college, I had a conversation that utterly shook my "shy girl" self-perception.

I was at some sort of informal event at my pastor's home, and I ended up chatting with my pastor's wife during the course of the evening. I don't recall the preceding dialog, but as we talked, I mentioned, only in passing, that I'm "just shy," and that "I don't like introducing myself to strangers," which, to me, seemed like a fairly neutral statement of fact. I guess I expected this good woman to nod sympathetically and let the comment slide past. But she didn't. She stopped me before I could go on.

Now, here's the inspirational, Hallmark card bit of this story: With a calm smile, she told me, "Well, Hannah, maybe you just need to get over yourself."

That was it. And then our talk proceeded to some other topic.

But ouch. What was that supposed to mean? Those may not have been her exact words, but it was something very close. And what she had said cut me—like a surgeon's knife.

She wasn't being rude. Far from it; this was love at its boldest. She clearly knew me better than I knew myself and was simply throwing aside the "personality" lingo and exposing the heart of my "shyness" problem—a problem that I had not particularly wanted to see. Of course my parents had encouraged me for years to be more friendly. But hearing someone else tell me so was a shock. Perhaps this was a real issue that I needed to deal with.

"Well, Hannah, maybe you just need to get over yourself." Maybe... All right, more than maybe.

Why wasn't I willing to go out of my way to introduce myself? Before, I would have said that it was simply "because I'm shy." Nothing wrong with that, right? But as soon as my pastor's wife said what she did, I realized, to my chagrin, that there was, as a matter of fact, something very wrong with that. The truth is, that my unwillingness to shake hands and start a conversation was not just a personality quirk. It was a failure to love my neighbor. The sad fact was that I cared more about my own comfort zone than about making other people comfortable; I was more concerned about protecting myself from seeming foolish than about risking a (very minor) embarrassment in order to show love to those around me. If I didn't feel like being sociable, then I thought I was justified in ignoring my duty to love other people. I guess I was just too important to look out for the interests of others.

I wasn't being "shy." I was being selfish. I needed, in short, to get over myself.

Those words had hurt. A lot. They wounded my pride. But "faithful are the wounds of a friend." She knew exactly what I needed to hear. And, as I was about to begin college with a bunch of total strangers, the timing could not have been better.

I'd like to say that ever since that day I've been a willing handshaker to anyone in need of a friend. But, even after 14 years, I'm still working on it. Getting over myself is probably going to be a lifelong pursuit. But that it is a pursuit at all is something I can be very thankful for. Discovering that my shyness might be a temptation to fight was a huge revelation, like seeing myself in the mirror for the first time. And now that I have four children, friendliness—love in the little things—is a trait we are constantly encouraging in them as well: Smile! Shake hands! Say thank you! Tell the nice lady your name!

I realize, of course, that one's personality is not infinitely malleable and that for an introvert to suddenly attempt to become the life of the party is going to be an uncomfortable scene for pretty much everyone. But insofar as one's personality—introvert or extrovert—comes with a certain set of temptations, those temptations must be resisted; personality type is never a valid excuse for sin.Blabbling thoughtlessly to strangers is not an urge I've ever had to resist. My temptation is, rather, to lose patience with the constant noise and clamor of the children God's blessed me with. My tendency is to pretend not to see the unfamiliar and unattractive face of the lonely-looking lady over in the corner. That, for me, is the struggle—to overcome my own discomfort in order to bestow love.

That unexpected word of advice from my pastor's wife didn't magically turn me into an extrovert, nor will it ever. I'm definitely still an introvert—a home body. I may not feel like saying hello. But, over the years, those tendencies have lessened. By God's grace, I enjoy large social gatherings far more than I used to. I do like my own birthday parties these days—now that I'm too old to have them every year. However, I'm far from turning into a party animal. And to this day, going out of my way to meet new people gives me a case of the butterflies. But thank God that I had a friend and teacher wise enough to show me that doing what I feel and doing what is right can be two very different things. And I'm thankful to be able to pass on that stark bit of wisdom to my kids: Maybe you just need to get over yourself.

The greatest show on earth

2010-03-08T16:11:00.000-08:00

On Sunday afternoon, we celebrated the birthdays of my two youngest sons, Paul and Asaph. Paul is four today, and Asaph turned two on Friday. I know that every mother says this each time her child has a birthday, but I really, truly can't believe how fast the time has gone. My "baby" is two? How did that happen? All I did was put Cheerios and strained carrots into his mouth, and poof! I now have a walking, talking, sword-wielding boy in front of me. My little Paul is now learning to play piano and sound out words. Is that possible? Is there some astonishing sleight of hand at work here?

I can tell you what happened. But I absolutely cannot tell you how. This wasn't my doing. I had nothing up my sleeve. No trick cards. No false doors. This is the real deal. This kind of magic has the makings of a sell-out Vegas attraction—only better.

David Copperfield, you can't impress me. I know someone who can turn water into wine. He can do it with a (magic) word in a moment, or he can do it with rain and vines over months, but he does it all the time. What can you do, Mr. Copperfield?

I know someone who can turn coal into diamonds. Do they do that in Vegas?

I know someone who can transform tomato soup and grilled cheese into flesh and bone. No smoke or mirrors involved. And I don't have to buy tickets to watch it happen. Can you do that, Mr. Copperfield?

Unlike in Vegas, this is the kind of show that attracts biologists with clipboards. They sit, unmoved, in the audience and observe the magic. They describe it in minute detail—right down to the molecular level. They write articles in scientific journals and make Discovery Channel documentaries about it. But they can't tell us anything—not anything—about how all this is happening. Or why. They might use the word "because", but they don't really mean it. All those impressive charts of the digestive process and the breakdown of chemical elements for use by various cells amount to nothing more than journalistic observation.

The biologist might say, "The kidneys convert vitamin D into calcitriol to help the body absorb dietary calcium and phosphorus into the blood and bones." But in spite of his impressive, Latinate words, he is doing nothing more than telling us, in essence, that the kidney has just pulled a rabbit out of its hat. The scientist is simply another spectator (albeit with a good pair of opera glasses) recording his experience at the greatest show on earth. He has no backstage pass.

We think that, because we've seen something a hundred times, we can understand it. Because we can describe what we saw, we believe we can explain why it happened. But that is the only illusion taking place in this venue. What's happening in front of our eyes is no illusion; it's magic in its most genuine sense. The medieval alchemists believed that lead could be turned into gold. But I believe in the far more improbable notion that a single cell can turn into an oak tree, or a sea cucumber, or Barak Obama. Ladies, and gentlemen, children of all ages, it happens in real life! Why isn't anyone selling tickets?

Four years and several gallons of milk can turn my helpless infant into a talkative preschooler. Throw in a few more years and a mountain of sandwiches, and that preschooler will be big enough to drive a car. And his voice will have changed. What a brilliant performance! And I've been invited to watch from the front row. Could there be a greater privilege?

Sometimes, I admit, raising small children seems to be something less than magical. Sometimes a day at home with a group of busy little ones can feel like an eternity—an endless cycle of diapers and drool and discipline. But then, I blink and realize that the baby has (abracadabra!) grown into a toddler. Right here, under my nose, a jaw-dropping transformation is taking place. Suspend your disbelief. (Suspend your unbelief.) Enjoy the show. The Bellaggio has nothing on the nursery.

Copper Plates and Incredible Manitoba Animation!

2010-03-05T10:27:00.000-08:00

As I've been organizing and purging closets this week, a few large boxes of posters and art projects have surfaced. Some of the things—mostly my old drawings and prints—are just so awful, I can't imagine what possessed me to keep them. But a few of them are so fun, I wish I could find enough wall space to hang them.

One thing I'd love to find room for is this huge glow-in-the-dark Van Gogh reproduction I painted in college on nine sheets of poster board. I had this in our kids' room for a while in Dallas, and it took the place of a night light. It does bring back good memories.

I also came across this oil pastel drawing. I'm not sure what I think about it. Maybe if I had a beach house in Hawaii I'd get it framed. It's very, um, bright.

In another box, I found a tall stack of my old intaglio prints, which I'm rather fond of, but they don't translate well into digital photos, because they have a lovely 3-D quality about them; they're printed using a copper plate that leaves an impression in the paper. I still have the plates, too, which have formed a nice patina during their ten years in storage.

Among the things that are definitely better off in hiding? How about this perfectly creepy drawing? My only excuse is that it wasn't my idea; the assignment was to take a photograph and distort or abstract it somehow. Yikes.

And then there's this lovely self portrait. I wrote "Planar Analysis" in the corner, so I guess this was an assignment, too. Thank goodness. I'd hate to think that I came up with the inspiration for this from the depths of my own soul.

But of the things I didn't make, this poster is probably the greatest treasure I unearthed this week:

This was on my wall for a very, very long time while I was growing up. My dad was, at one time, the head of the Canadian Studies program at the University of Idaho, and during that time he ended up with a number of Canadian-made films. Of all those VHS tapes, Incredible Manitoba Animation was the best loved, and we must have watched it at least 100 times. (That probably explains a lot, come to think of it...)

Finding this beautimous poster made me realize that it's high time I introduced my kids to these very strange cartoons. I hadn't thought about them in years, and then, as though it were a sign, the very day that I found this poster, I was looking at a friend's blog, and this video was posted there!

The Cat Came Back:

Coincidence? I think not. Surely it must mean that I was destined share these cartoons with the world! Or at least with the handful of people who will read this blog post.

So, as my very special treat to all of you uninitiated into the weird and wonderful world of Manitoban animation, I am posting a few of the cartoons here for your edification and enjoyment. You'll thank me later. I hope.

Getting Started (for the piano player in your life):

The Big Snit:

A healthy dose of illness

2010-02-26T16:44:00.000-08:00

I had strep throat this week for the first time in many a year. Although that may sound miserable, it turned out to be, in some respects, a sort of mini vacation (or staycation). Being sick is certainly no hobby of mine, but with my sweet husband looking after the kids and bringing me chicken soup and herbal tea, I had a rather pleasant time of it, while it lasted. I also enjoyed, in between naps, the luxury of reading in its entirety George MacDonald's Phantastes—a dreamlike book well suited to a slightly fevered brain.

My oddly comfortable illness brought to mind a C.S. Lewis quote I heard from Alan Jacobs not long ago: "Ideal happiness...is to be always convalescent from some small illness and always seated in a window that overlooked the sea, there to read [the Italian epic] eight hours of each happy day."

Two failed attempts at reading Dante being my only encounter with Italian epic, I can't say much either for or against Lewis's choice of literature. (I must have taken too much to heart the admonition to "abandon hope, all ye who enter here," since I never did get past the Inferno.) Neither would I call this sort of convalescence my "ideal happiness," although a view of the sea might have brought it closer to that. However, I must admit that the extreme introvert in me sympathizes a great deal with Lewis's idea of the good life; I chose to spend much of my childhood and adolescence hidden in my room with my nose in a book. There was a time, I'm sorry to say, when I knew Anne of Green Gables better than most of my own classmates.

Although I have no desire (O.K., not much desire) to return to my life as a junior high recluse, a few days of confinement to my room did provide a not unwelcome excuse for rest and quiet and an opportunity to pray, meditate and, yes, read without interruption. For that I am very thankful. A little down time does help to recharge my batteries, and I confess that I was just the tiniest bit disappointed to have gotten so entirely well so quickly.

Today I'm on my feet once again, coffee in hand, and standing victoriously atop a colorful mountain of freshly washed, dried and folded laundry, while my kids run boisterous laps around the yet-to-be-vacuumed floor. To be restored to health and to my busy daily work is truly a delight—even to an introvert like me. I'm glad to be back. Much as I appreciated the time to myself, I've come to find that here—surrounded by noise and hugs, and amidst the Lego castles and the interrupted thoughts—is a happiness deeper than I think even Lewis could have found in his literary seaside retreat.

With all due respect to that distinguished Oxford don, life is richer—and happier—when passing chianti and spaghetti around a vivacious and crowded table than silently digesting "the Italian epic" in a solitary window seat.

Here's to your good health.

A photographic memory

2010-02-20T17:13:00.000-08:00

Here was a rare moment of quiet calm and perfect lighting. Soft sunlight from a grey, February sky shone through the window onto my youngest son's face as he drove Matchbox cars across the hardwood, making spluttery motoring sounds with his wet lips. Absorbed in his own imagination, he did not seem to notice that I was watching him. How could a mom with a camera resist the urge to freeze time? I couldn't. Pressing the shutter, I thought to myself, "Years from now we'll ooh and ahh over these sweet photographs of childhood, these preserved glimpses of real life."

Real life. Yes, sir. Later, as I reviewed those charming photos on my computer, real life showed itself, glowing in all its full-color ridiculousness, on my screen. There, smeared across my toddler's cherubic face, was a crusty streak of snot. And this snot created a sort of ethical dilemma.

I admit that I am rarely bothered by the work of digitally improving upon reality. Having spent the last 13 years using Photoshop to remove everything from horse manure and acne to birthday cake and entire backgrounds, I knew that a little smear of shiny mucus could be removed in a few quick clicks of the mouse. That would be the easy part. The hard part was deciding if I really ought to take that bit of "reality" out of the picture. This photo was supposed to preserve a true-to-life image of my son's childhood. He had looked so sweet at the time. Or so I thought. How could I have failed to notice the boogers smeared across his otherwise flawless skin? But there they were, blown up to more than full size on my computer monitor, reminding me once again that this is, indeed, a fallen world.

So what to do now? It struck me that I had to decide what story I was trying to tell here, and whether the story was true. I could make his skin look perfectly clean, but my child, had not, in fact, looked like this. Was I willing to make people believe that he had? When "reality" is the very thing I was trying to capture, then shouldn't I leave "reality" alone? Doesn't the booger on the baby represent the truth of the matter? Isn't cloning it out—or whitening teeth or replacing the ugly family photo background with a snowy wonderland—a kind of lie? And isn't lying, under normal circumstances, a sin? I frequently tell my children that it is.

Oh, the hypocrisy! Oh, the deception! Maybe photo editing should keep more people awake at night.

Yes, it's a fallen world all right. Even the everyday realities of head colds and dirty laundry can serve as small reminders of this sad truth. Ugliness and suffering truly do exist. That's the reality. And if you want to win a Pulitzer, that's the reality you've got to depict before the public. We've got to keep our feet on the rocky ground, right? Don't try to hide all the foulness, the cruelty, the sickness, the death; let's keep it real. Stock up on black eyeliner and come to grips with the truth: life is pain. Leave the snot on the baby. The snot is real.

Sure. These sophisticated cynics do have a point: Snot is real. Unfortunately for them, the snot is apparently more real than the baby. But here's the thing: the baby was there before the booger. The beauty was there before ugliness marred it. And the beauty will remain when the ugliness has been wiped away, which seems to say that the beauty is the more enduring reality—the more real reality.

I recently watched a short video that's been floating around the internet—one that shows how an average-looking woman is transformed by an army of stylists and at least one digital wizard into an idealized image of marketable beauty. "See?" the ad implies, "Beautiful women are fake. Cover girls don't really exist." That's probably true to some degree. Perhaps we're right to think that these fashionistas have gone too far in their pursuit of beauty at the expense of truth. And, I suppose, for all of us average-looking women, there's comfort in the thought that at least we're not fake.

But the truth is, whether or not we have personal stylists and professional photo manipulators at our disposal, most of us do what we can to hide our imperfections and draw attention to our strengths. Girls with nice legs and bad teeth will swing their hips in skinny jeans but smile with their lips closed. We prefer not to have our ugly side put on display. We would rather not have our errors and sins repeated by the people we've wronged. None of us wants to be the one stuffing a fork full of mashed potatoes into her mouth when the family photographer captures the moment at Thanksgiving Dinner.

It may be true that we wake up with bed head, that we get the flu, that we sometimes yell at our kids. But that doesn't mean we should want posterity to forever remember us that way. Of course there's a kind of selfish pride that cannot admit to any faults, but that's not what I'm talking about. We—all of us—want to be shown to advantage. And it's not necessarily because we want the world to believe a lie. Often it's because we want the world to see the more attractive side of the truth. It's because we love ourselves. I know I do.

In fact, we love ourselves so much, that the golden rule is built upon that basic assumption: You know how much you love yourself? Well, that's how much you ought to love your neighbor. Whoa. That's not easy. But I think we must conclude that the stories we tell about our neighbors—including our littlest neighbors—should be the kind of stories we would want told about us.

I'm no sentimentalist. Dark moments are found in everyone's story—in the world's story. Earthquakes, ear infections, cancer, crucifixion, snot—they're all real. I don't deny it. But does that mean the essence of the story is ugliness and evil? Is Sleeping Beauty a tale of darkness and despair because it involves the witch and the thorns and a battle to the death? If the essence of life is pain, then (in all seriousness) how do we explain chocolate? How do we account for orange blossoms and the Caribbean Sea and goose down and Tetris and Easter? How do we make sense of the sweet baby-the one who also happens to have snot on his face? What about that reality? To say that life is pain is to ignore the coexistent—and the far more persistent—realities of beauty and love and forgiveness and joy.

Yes, the history of the world is a story with some truly gut-wrenching scenes. But I've read the spoilers, and I know the ending. This story ends with a wedding. The knight in shining armor slays the dragon, claims his bride‚ declaring her flawless (yes, flawless). The wedding feast is incomparably glorious, and every sorrow, every tear—and every runny nose—is wiped away. Heaven is brought to earth, and Love, in perfect fairy tale fashion, conquers all. That's the end. Roll the credit.

So what does that have to do with Photoshopping the snot off the toddler?

Only this: that the child is a more important—a more real—part of this story than the bit of ugliness marring his face. Sure, I want to remember reality. But I also want to remember the beauty that underlies reality. I don't want to forget that sin exists. But I also do not want to forget that love covers a multitude of sins. Sometimes, of course, the dirt and the messes and the runny noses will be part of the fun of remembering. And even the most painful challenges, when they have been overcome, can become the stories we like best to tell. But at the same time, when I do tell stories about (or take pictures of) my children, I hope I will edit out the flaws and remember them in the best possible light. Not because I am lying about them, and not because they are perfect, but because I love them. I would want them to do the same for me. And in this case, I've decided that if love can cover sin, it can surely cover snot. In some small way, Photoshop looks a lot like forgiveness.

Memento mori, memento vivere

2010-02-08T20:09:00.000-08:00

I grow old … I grow old …
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

My ninety-year-old grandmother (who, incidentally, is enjoying a sunny, week-long Palm Springs vacation with her older sister as I write this) has already been living with my parents for nearly a decade. When she moved in with them, she was forced to part with much that she called her own. Furniture had to go. Excess clothes and duplicate housewares were set out for sale in the front yard. She pared down a lifetime of goods to fit into a two-bedroom basement apartment (and a couple of storage closets), keeping only the most necessary and the most precious of her things.

Gradually, over the last few years, she has also begun dispersing even some of the most precious belongings as well. For birthdays, Christmases, and days in between she has given me, among other things, a collection of glass dishes she received as a wedding gift, hand-cut with floral motifs by the father of a high school friend; an assortment of Christmas ornaments she carefully painted during one of her "crafty" phases; a set of black metal trivets from the days when she kept her own table and served family dinners on dishes warmed in the oven—the same dishes that are now stacked in my kitchen cupboard; and her engagement ring, now set with a souvenir opal from a trip my parents took to Australia.

Knowing something of the memories tied to each of these gifts, I cannot help but feel honored—almost speechless—to be the recipient of these keepsakes, these earthly treasures. So valuable. And so valueless. There's a kind of bitter joy attached to each of them, and a collection of stories, of pain and of pleasure, hidden beneath their varied surfaces. Many have stories that I will never hear. But they are stories that my grandmother knows by heart.

Some of what she's given to me has been merely practical. Some of it has been utterly and beautifully impractical. All of it has been a reminder of the swift passage of life.

Both she and I find ourselves wondering, "Where have the years gone?" My babies are in grade school. But her babies are grandparents to the ones in grade school. She talks to me of "the kids" doing this or that, and I know that her mind's eye does not see them as the gray-haired 50- and 60-year-old adults they have become; she sees, instead, the dark-haired youths whose lifetimes once lay ahead of them, stretched out as far as the distant horizon. It's not that she has forgotten that her sons and daughter are grown; it's that she cannot forget the children they once were. Those childhood days, as even I know, were not so very long ago.

The grass withers, the flower fades

when the breath of the Lord blows on it;

surely the people are grass.

One day last week, my three-year-old son, Paul (who is certainly a flower of the grass still in the bud), was staring at my face with a look of deep concentration. He seemed to be examining all the newly formed lines around my mouth and eyes, or searching for flashes of silver among my eyelashes. "Mom," he finally said, "Will you change your face when you get old?" He paused for a moment as I considered what he meant. "Like G.G.?" he resumed, "She changed her face from when she was young.... How did she turn her hair white?"

Paul had seen, framed along her hallway, the glamorous hand-tinted photos of G.G., my grandmother, with smooth skin, and plump red lips, and not a strand of her thick auburn hair out of place. Paul, for whom a five-minute wait is an eternity, could not imagine a change such as this. What strange magic could have worked upon that strong and slender body, on that flawless and radiant face? I laugh at the childish misunderstanding implied by the question: "Will you change your face?" But as I laugh, I find that I, too, must see the wonder and the peculiarity of such an alteration—that my laughter will turn to laugh lines, and that invisible crows are leaving visible footprints in my skin. I will, in fact, change my face when I am old.

My grandmother has changed her face. She has turned her hair white. But she is still very much alive. It is, I suppose, because she has lived so long that she can see all the more clearly how short life is. From her long-lived vantage, she has glimpsed the futility of laying up treasure where moth and rust destroy. And so she has begun to pass the job of earthly hoarding on to me.

For her 30-something granddaughter, this stuff, these memories, these pieces of a life gone by, are certainly treasures. But they are also, simultaneously, "memento mori" and "memento vivere." These mementos set before me the inescapable truth that I must die, and, consequently, that I must live.

At ninety, my grandmother, who has outlived so many of her friends and relatives, has realized that "you can't take it with you." And I, holding her memories in my hands, am forced to realize that neither can I. As quickly as I am able to focus my eyes on the present moment, it has already fallen behind; the years slip by like roadside trees seen from a speeding car.

She is old, and I am almost young. But what is that to us? A breath and a sigh. Grass and flowers. When at last, whether soon or late, my grandmother passes from things temporal to things eternal, I think we all may feel the urge to say, "What—gone so soon? We hoped you might stay and rest your feet...and linger here awhile."

I accept her gifts, and the stories—told and untold—contained within them. And as I do, I think ahead to the day that will come, sooner than I can imagine, when I will be clearing out my own basement, and selling off my own furniture, and putting into my own granddaughter's hands the treasures I have laid up on earth.

I made a posy, while the day ran by:
“Here will I smell my remnant out, and tie
My life within this band.”
But Time did beckon to the flowers, and they
By noon most cunningly did steal away,
And withered in my hand.

Hello, Starling

2010-02-07T10:57:00.000-08:00

March may still be a month away, but last month came in like a lamb and went out like a lamb, with nary a lion to be seen. While news of northeastern snowstorms and midwestern blizzards arrives on my doorstep, my doorstep is a balmy 43 degrees and basking in unseasonable sunshine.

My yard seems to think that spring is here already. The maple trees and the lilac bush are pregnant with leaves; early buds are growing round and plump all along their wintry stems. I saw the timid green tip of a tulip peeking from the wet earth like a periscope, as if to verify whether the war with winter has truly been won after so brief a battle. Cornflower seedlings have pushed their way through a blanket of soggy fall leaves, expecting to find daffodils and starlings in their midst.

Starlings did, in fact, arrive.

Last Sunday, as my family stepped out the front door on our way to the car, a flock (or a murmuration, I'm told) of hundreds, maybe thousands, was rollicking in the maple branches and among the spruce needles and along the power lines and in the blue air. They were chirping and hopping and flying in sudden bursts, pursued by unseen squirrels.

The sound of birdsong and rustling wings fluttered down on every side of us—snowed us under—and made us all freeze in our tracks (the only freezing to be found on that January day). The bare trees were unexpectedly alive—not with green leaves but with brown and black wings. It was like a scene from Hitchcock. Or, maybe, heaven. The baby, in my husband's arms, lifted both hands toward the sky and called out, "Daddy! Bird!"

Just as it seemed that spring was truly here to stay, and that life was overcoming death wherever we turned to look, a gust of wind—or the bark of a dog or a stifled sneeze or a rumor—startled those birds from their perches into scattered flight. They fled like an ill-prepared army abruptly set upon by hostile forces; their panicked company dispersed across the sky—all wings and beaks and furious flapping.

But then, a pattern began to emerge from the squawking chaos. Called to order by the quiet authority of some avian general (who?), they just as suddenly spun their tangled mass into a black sphere, and then unravelled again to be knit into neat rows and regiments—rank upon orderly rank of starling hosts. They looped in perfect formation—now east, now west, now dipping, now rising in synchronized flight. Then, as if satisfied by the success of their impromptu military exercise, their general at last gave a command that sent them speeding across the clouds to the Western horizon.

My sons' wide eyes followed them until they dropped from sight below the housetops, to settle in someone else's leafless trees and to interrupt the Sabbath quiet on someone else's street.

Maybe they stopped here merely to rest, on their way to perform great deeds. Perhaps we seemed to be fearsome giants, deterring them from the conquest of our front yard Canaan, and they are now cursed to roam the blue wilderness for another forty days. Maybe they were surveying the land from their power-line Pizgah. I don't know what Jordans they will have to cross before they can finally settle here. Perhaps they have Jerichos to topple before they can call our street "home." I do know that a week has passed, and the starlings have not returned. Not yet. But the tulip and cornflower, the maple and lilac, the lamb and the sleeping lion all whisper that they will.

They will.

Chesterton on Domesticity

2010-02-03T16:01:00.000-08:00

I've been reading What's Wrong With the World (published in 1910) by G.K. Chesterton this week, and it's been positively delightful. At one point, I was tempted to pull out a highlighter and start marking all the quotable lines, but then, I would have more fluorescent yellow on most pages than white. The question is what not to highlight. Chesterton can always be counted on to point out the absurdities of modern assumptions and to turn the "wisdom" of the age right on its head. This is no exception. I'm enjoying it immensely. At a century old this year, the book is hardly less relevant than it must have been in his own day. It may, in fact, be more relevant now. Not that I'm in perfect agreement with everything he says (his critique of Calvinism, for example,) but I, so far, recommend reading the entire book if you get the chance. However, for those of you stay-at-home moms who are short on time (That's redundant, isn't it?), this chapter was especially fun to read and is worth quoting at length. Please take a minute to read it. I've put my favorite bits in bold:

Selections from Chapter 8: The Wildness of Domesticity

It is the special psychology of leisure and luxury that falsifies life. Some experience of modern movements of the sort called "advanced" has led me to the conviction that they generally repose upon some experience peculiar to the rich. It is so with that fallacy of free love of which I have already spoken; the idea of sexuality as a string of episodes. That implies a long holiday in which to get tired of one woman, and a motor car in which to wander looking for others; it also implies money for maintenances. An omnibus conductor has hardly time to love his own wife, let alone other people's. And the success with which nuptial estrangements are depicted in modern "problem plays" is due to the fact that there is only one thing that a drama cannot depict—that is a hard day's work....

But of all the modern notions generated by mere wealth the worst is this: the notion that domesticity is dull and tame. Inside the home (they say) is dead decorum and routine; outside is adventure and variety. This is indeed a rich man's opinion. The rich man knows that his own house moves on vast and soundless wheels of wealth, is run by regiments of servants, by a swift and silent ritual. On the other hand, every sort of vagabondage of romance is open to him in the streets outside. He has plenty of money and can afford to be a tramp. His wildest adventure will end in a restaurant, while the yokel's tamest adventure may end in a police-court. If he smashes a window he can pay for it; if he smashes a man he can pension him. He can (like the millionaire in the story) buy an hotel to get a glass of gin. And because he, the luxurious man, dictates the tone of nearly all "advanced" and "progressive" thought, we have almost forgotten what a home really means to the overwhelming millions of mankind.

For the truth is, that to the moderately poor the home is the only place of liberty. Nay, it is the only place of anarchy. It is the only spot on the earth where a man can alter arrangements suddenly, make an experiment or indulge in a whim. Everywhere else he goes he must accept the strict rules of the shop, inn, club, or museum that he happens to enter. He can eat his meals on the floor in his own house if he likes. I often do it myself; it gives a curious, childish, poetic, picnic feeling. There would be considerable trouble if I tried to do it in an A.B.C. tea-shop. A man can wear a dressing gown and slippers in his house; while I am sure that this would not be permitted at the Savoy, though I never actually tested the point. If you go to a restaurant you must drink some of the wines on the wine list, all of them if you insist, but certainly some of them. But if you have a house and garden you can try to make hollyhock tea or convolvulus wine if you like. For a plain, hard-working man the home is not the one tame place in the world of adventure. It is the one wild place in the world of rules and set tasks. The home is the one place where he can put the carpet on the ceiling or the slates on the floor if he wants to. When a man spends every night staggering from bar to bar or from music-hall to music-hall, we say that he is living an irregular life. But he is not; he is living a highly regular life, under the dull, and often oppressive, laws of such places. Some times he is not allowed even to sit down in the bars; and frequently he is not allowed to sing in the music-halls. Hotels may be defined as places where you are forced to dress; and theaters may be defined as places where you are forbidden to smoke. A man can only picnic at home.

And this chapter, I thought, was even more encouraging to those of us women who might have given up a career or other big ambitions in order to stay home with the kiddos:

Selections from Chapter 18: The Emancipation of Domesticity

...[T]here must be in every center of humanity one human being upon a larger plan; one who does not "give her best," but gives her all.

Our old analogy of the fire remains the most workable one. The fire need not blaze like electricity nor boil like boiling water; its point is that it blazes more than water and warms more than light. The wife is like the fire, or to put things in their proper proportion, the fire is like the wife. Like the fire, the woman is expected to cook: not to excel in cooking, but to cook; to cook better than her husband who is earning the coke by lecturing on botany or breaking stones. Like the fire, the woman is expected to tell tales to the children, not original and artistic tales, but tales-- better tales than would probably be told by a first-class cook.

Like the fire, the woman is expected to illuminate and ventilate, not by the most startling revelations or the wildest winds of thought, but better than a man can do it after breaking stones or lecturing. But she cannot be expected to endure anything like this universal duty if she is also to endure the direct cruelty of competitive or bureaucratic toil. Woman must be a cook, but not a competitive cook; a school mistress, but not a competitive schoolmistress; a house-decorator but not a competitive house-decorator; a dressmaker, but not a competitive dressmaker. She should have not one trade but twenty hobbies; she...may develop all her second bests. This is what has been really aimed at from the first in what is called the "seclusion," or even the "oppression," of women. Women were not kept at home in order to keep them narrow; on the contrary, they were kept at home in order to keep them broad.

The world outside the home was one mass of narrowness, a maze of cramped paths, a madhouse of monomaniacs. It was only by partly limiting and protecting the woman that she was enabled to play at five or six professions and so come almost as near to God as the child when he plays at a hundred trades. But the woman's professions, unlike the child's, were all truly and almost terribly fruitful; so tragically real that nothing but her universality and balance prevented them being merely morbid. This is the substance of the contention I offer about the historic female position.

I do not deny that women have been wronged and even tortured; but I doubt if they were ever tortured so much as they are tortured now by the absurd modern attempt to make them domestic empresses and competitive clerks at the same time. I do not deny that even under the old tradition women had a harder time than men; that is why we take off our hats. I do not deny that all these various female functions were exasperating; but I say that there was some aim and meaning in keeping them various....

The shortest way of summarizing the position is to say that woman stands for the idea of Sanity....

Two gigantic facts of nature fixed it thus: first, that the woman who frequently fulfilled her functions literally could not be specially prominent in experiment and adventure; and second, that the same natural operation surrounded her with very young children, who require to be taught not so much anything as everything. Babies need not to be taught a trade, but to be introduced to a world. To put the matter shortly, woman is generally shut up in a house with a human being at the time when he asks all the questions that there are, and some that there aren't. It would be odd if she retained any of the narrowness of a specialist.

Now if anyone says that this duty of general enlightenment (even when freed from modern rules and hours, and exercised more spontaneously by a more protected person) is in itself too exacting and oppressive, I can understand the view.... But when people begin to talk about this domestic duty as not merely difficult but trivial and dreary, I simply give up the question. For I cannot with the utmost energy of imagination conceive what they mean. When domesticity, for instance, is called drudgery, all the difficulty arises from a double meaning in the word. If drudgery only means dreadfully hard work, I admit the woman drudges in the home, as a man might drudge at the Cathedral of Amiens or drudge behind a gun at Trafalgar. But if it means that the hard work is more heavy because it is trifling, colorless and of small import to the soul, then as I say, I give it up; I do not know what the words mean. To be Queen Elizabeth within a definite area, deciding sales, banquets, labors and holidays; to be Whiteley within a certain area, providing toys, boots, sheets cakes. and books, to be Aristotle within a certain area, teaching morals, manners, theology, and hygiene; I can understand how this might exhaust the mind, but I cannot imagine how it could narrow it. How can it be a large career to tell other people's children about the Rule of Three, and a small career to tell one's own children about the universe? How can it be broad to be the same thing to everyone, and narrow to be everything to someone? No; a woman's function is laborious, but because it is gigantic, not because it is minute. I will pity Mrs. Jones for the hugeness of her task; I will never pity her for its smallness.

Hot Dogs and Forbidden Fruit

2010-01-30T16:40:00.000-08:00

When the weather is as grey and muddy as it has been this January, my kids tend to get cabin fever, so as an antidote, I took the boys to eat lunch and play at the indoor playground in the mall. We sat at a table right outside the GNC store. The store windows were decorated with larger-than-life black-and-white posters of athletic bodies exposing lots of taut, shiny skin. The posters were surrounded by sober ads for supplements and weight loss drinks and weight gain drinks and “super-food” bars. I had to laugh. Next to those gods and goddesses of bodily health, we were enjoying (yes, enjoying) a delightful lunch of hot dogs and generic Cheetos.

The juxtaposition between those ultra-serious advertisements and our fun-filled little repast was downright comical. While my boys and I licked fake cheese off of our artificially orange fingers, I got quite a kick out of watching the women in tight jeans and the men in tight shirts parading into the nutrition store. In fact, the delight it gave me was almost excessive. Those black-and-white posters of hot bods dressed in Spandex were perfectly joyless when compared with the cheery, little ketchup-smeared faces in front of me. With us were all the smiles, all the color, all the joie de vivre. With them, only sexy pouts glaring into the middle distance and daring me to feel guilty for the greasy meal I’d set before my children.

But "guilty" is exactly what I refuse to feel. I don't plan on making Cheetos and hot dogs a daily staple of our diet, but neither am I living in fear of the "long term side effects" from an occasional dose of nitrates and food coloring. Worrying is bad for my health. Rock-hard abs and buns of steel are fine, if that's your cup o' tea. (Although displaying them in Spandex shorts at twice life size is another thing....) But pursuing the ultimate body or the perfect metabolism is not my only goal in life. It's not even a major goal.

Of course I want to be healthy. Of course it's better not to be out of breath just walking from the car to the couch. Of course I want my kids to live for a long time. Of course I'd rather not have my family suffer from disease. But there's so, so much more to good health—bodily and otherwise—than what I put into my mouth every day. However, from some of the conversations I've heard and articles I've read, you'd almost think that food was both the root cause and the ultimate solution to every kind of evil.

Given all the money and time and effort we put into our food, it's not surprising that we have strong opinions on the subject. And I think it’s good that we give some thought to what and how we eat. But something else seems to be going on here. Food has become a topic that is almost too hot to touch.

From Julie & Julia to Food, Inc., we're fascinated enough by food to pay exorbitant prices to watch movies about it. There's an entire television network devoted to it. A huge, adoring crowd showed up at WSU this month to hear Michael Pollan speak on the subject. We have chefs with celebrity status. We have major cities legislating whether we're allowed to buy a cookie made with shortening. And then there are food books and food magazines and food discussion groups and food manifestos and food blogs. We are, in a word, obsessed.

Don't get me wrong. I love food—from homegrown tomatoes to Hostess Ding Dongs. But it's because I love food that I hate so much the way we've distorted it into something overbearing and monstrous. Instead of consuming food, we're letting it consume us. We're food fanatics. Cuisine cops. Nutrivangelists. The Gourmet Gestapo. Casually mention in mixed company (only as a hypothetical social experiment, of course) that you fed Twinkies to your children for breakfast, and wait for the sharp intake of breath and the stunned silence to follow.

Because we won't allow food to play its proper role as a source of strength, pleasure, and culinary imagination, food has become a real point of contention: You use margarine instead of butter? Your lettuce isn't organically grown? You cook in a non-stick skillet? Your peanut butter has corn syrup in it? You buy milk from the grocery store? Your bread comes in a plastic bag? Don't you know the myriad sins you've committed (you hard-hearted, environmentally insensitive, nutritionally ignorant food-heathen)?

The way people sometimes talk, you'd think that eating the forbidden fruit was only a minor mistake when compared with the unforgivable crime of eating genetically modified apples. White flour and homogenized milk are the new hellfire and brimstone, and the only "sins" that ever come up in conversation seem to be related to chocolate cake. Everyone seems to be laboring under a burden of guilt that has more to do with transfats than with transgressions.

Just take a look at the way women's magazines are emblazoned with with "guilt-free" recipe headlines—right alongside "sinfully decadent" desserts. And the absolution for all of our corn-syrupy trespasses? More food, of course.

I found this description on a cup of yogurt that I bought not long ago: "Spoon. Savor. Stretch. Sigh. Trust calming notes of lavender to satisfy the senses and soothe the soul."

Soothe the soul? Right. So if I'm crushed with Chicken McNugget guilt; if I'm sorrowing over pesticide sins; if I'm living in biotech fear, the solution to my guilt, sin and fear is...yogurt? Pardon me while I search for the nearest complimentary air sickness bag. The yogurt was tasty, but the quasi-religious marketing pitch makes me rather sick.

And yet… This food-based salvation message does appear to be just near enough to the truth to make it particularly persuasive to our spiritually vapid culture. I know that organic brown rice will not save my soul from damnation in the lake of fiery fryer grease, but at the same time, food and drink are very near the true Salvation message: Body broken (bread broken); Blood shed (wine poured). True Gospel is all tied up with a meal.

We are all hungry, I think, for the True Bread. But the problem is that we think we can find it at the Co-Op bakery. And so the Co-Op bakery suddenly takes on an importance far beyond providing a nice bagel to go with our morning coffee.

The True Bread unites us. But we have we allowed Wonder Bread to divide us. We're too busy cat-fighting about the Nutrition Facts printed on the side of the package (Package? What package?) to rejoice in what we have so bountifully received. We let ourselves complain about our spouses, lie on our taxes, ignore our kids, and gossip about our neighbors. But God forbid that we should allow any government subsidized corn product to cross our lips.

In other words, our priorities are all in a big tangle.

We've stepped beyond dietary prudence into the realm of dietary paranoia. My most recent issue of Martha Stewart Living has a whole article devoted to identifying "dangerous" produce and encouraging me to check 5-digit barcodes for the demonic number 8. I talked to one mother who won't serve cake at her kids' birthday parties because of all the empty calories and refined whatnots it contains. We're all so worried about staying alive that we're forgetting how to live.

I may, possibly, be two percent more likely to have thyroid problems if I eat a Twinkie than if I abstain. But I know for a fact that I'm thousands of times more likely to be hit by a bus if I leave the house than if I were to stay in bed all day. But does that keep me from stepping out the door? Hardly. I have a life to live.

Ah, there's the rub. That's the thing about living: It'll kill you. But who of you by worrying can add a single day to your life?

Instead of worrying and feeling guilty over eating hot dogs rather than hummus, I should be thanking God for the joy and unity that comes from sharing food of all sorts around a table. To paraphrase Proverbs, better is a dinner of hot dogs and Cheetos where love is than a bowl of sustainably grown quinoa with hatred. I am not going to hyperventilate over what I eat. My salvation does not depend upon it. So after breathing into a brown paper bag for a few minutes, lets fill that brown paper bag with lunch, shall we?

God's bounty is vast enough to include Cheetos and chèvre, hot dogs and hummus. There's a whole world of flavors and textures—of edible joy—left to be discovered, and I'm never going to sample more than the minutest fraction of it before I die. (This is one of the many reasons to look forward to the resurrection of the body and not just the immortality of the soul; my taste buds will live into eternity. Glory.) Food, in its rightful role, is a blessing and a delight.

Therefore, under the disapproving gaze of the black-and-white GNC gods, I can laugh with ketchuppy lips and lick salty orange fingers with my children. Contrary to popular belief, I am allowed to eat my Cheetos with joy and drink my Diet Coke with a merry heart. A merry heart, after all, doeth good like a medicine.

The Digital Muse

2010-01-25T23:36:00.000-08:00

While we're on the subject... As I was writing the last post about digital communication it crossed my mind that the great stories of history and literature—and of our own lives—might have been drastically altered by 21st century communications technology. For example:

Remember that fateful letter from Friar Lawrence to Romeo, telling him that Juliet was only mostly dead? The one that arrived too late? If Shakespeare had instead given each of those two men a Motorola Razr, timely communication would have been established and tragedy turned into comedy. ...Except that the Capulets and Montagues would have continued biting their thumbs at one another until the world's end.

Or how about Robinson Crusoe? If he'd made a satellite phone call from the sinking ship, he might have been rescued about 28 years sooner. And nobody would ever have cared much about his survival story. Oh, and Friday would never have been rescued from murderous cannibals.

Then there's the whole Midnight-Ride-of-Paul-Revere thing. One if by land, two if by sea? Totally unnecessary. "Through the night went his cry of alarm, to every Middlesex village and farm"? A waste of breath. Just text it, Paul, and all those colonial farmers will be ready with their muskets and their night-vision goggles.

And if Odysseus had bought matching iPhones for Penelope and himself before heading off to battle the Trojans, the trip home would have taken on an entirely different tone:
P: Honey, where are you? I left you like ten voice mails yesterday.
O: Long story, Penny. After a rough day on the wine-dark sea, we took a pit stop on some island. I had already checked Google Maps, and I told the guys that there was a nice, authentic Greek gyro joint on the next island, but did they listen? They were so hungry for a steak, they just couldn't wait. They came across this herd of grass-fed, free-range cattle and just went nuts with their battle axes—had a big ol' Texas barbecue.
P: Typical men.
O: Yeah, well, it gets worse. It turned out that those cows belonged to Helios the Sun god. Seriously bad news. Let's just say I'll be home a bit later than we'd planned. I'll tell you all about it in dactylic hexameter when I get there.

Poetic, no?

It seems pretty clear to me that our modern hyper-connectedness would have drained a lot of the color from many of history's best stories. And even from my own life's stories.

When I was 13, my family lived in Kenya for 6 months. Without a cell phone. Or a home phone connection, for that matter. My dad did have a phone at his office, but the line would mysteriously go dead whenever he mentioned anything negative about events taking place in the country at the time. E-mail was in its infancy, and few people ever thought of communicating via computer. (This is making me feel old.) Our contact with home was minimal and normally involved letters that might take weeks to arrive.

While we lived there, a day came when my brother and I could not get home from school because of a riot taking place in the city through which we needed to travel. Cars and trucks—so loaded with people that the bumpers nearly touched the road—were streaming out of the town, and ours was the only car going toward it. Our driver stopped to ask what was happening, but we could only get hints and rumors. A few people said that they had fled because everybody else was doing it. So we waited. Meanwhile, news of tear gas and gunshots spread through the surrounding area, and my parents had no way of finding out where we were—or whether we were alive. For a few nervous hours they felt the way that many Haitian parents must be feeling now: fearful and wondering where their children might be. With today's technology, a quick text message could have told my parents that we were safe, and spared them those hours of distress. But then we wouldn't have had much of a story to tell afterward. Every good story involves some kind of conflict or tension waiting to be resolved. Who wants to hear about the day that started happy, went along happily, and ended with smiles all around? I want to live that day. But I don't want to hear about it. Without those hours spent in fear, this story wouldn't be worth telling. And a cell phone, I'm quite sure, would have removed the uncertainty that made the afternoon memorable.

Another event that my sons love for me to recount is the day in 1998 when I was driving alone through the barren wasteland of Central Washington and slid off the highway into a field. My car came to a stop directly on top of an ancient, rusty plough that was half-buried in the dirt. After trying everything I could to free myself from the grip of that antique piece of machinery (4-wheel-drive, reverse, digging, pushing), I only managed to spin my tires deeper into the dust. I was stranded and clearly needed help. With a cell phone, I would have let my fingers do the walking. Without one, my feet had to do it.

The nearest sign of civilization was a dilapidated farm house about 40 yards away. I waded shakily through the dry grass, climbed up the steps onto the collapsing porch and knocked insistently on the ripped screen door. A couple of hung-over teenage boys dragged themselves off of their bare living room mattresses to answer my persistent pounding. "The party ended like three hours ago," they informed me. When I explained my situation and asked for a phone, they said that theirs had been disconnected for months. In an act of selfless heroism, they pulled on some shoes and walked back with me to my car. After helping me try unsuccessfully to push it off the plough, they shrugged and walked back to the house to sleep off the last night's beer binge. But before they did, they sent me to search for a man who was wandering the property seeking antique farm machinery to weld into fences. I found him behind an old silo. He turned out to be a fifty-year-old, three-hundred-pound Mexican immigrant with a great dane. And red pickup. After laughing a bit at my predicament, he drove his truck to the scene of the accident and used it to push my car free of the plough.

Unfortunately, once he did, the radiator began to empty its green contents into the dirt. He raised his eyebrows and whistled through his teeth. "There's no way you're gonna make it to town like that," he told me. We climbed into the cab of his pickup, and he drove me to the next farm with a phone, called a tow truck for me, and drove back to my car to wait with me. For the next hour, we sat on his tail gate and learned each other's names. I told him I was an art student. He told me he'd sent his daughter to the Art Institute of Seattle with money he'd made from welding fences out of farm junk—the kind of farm junk my car was stuck on. He offered me a cold Pepsi. I showed him the design projects I had in my car.

Thanks to my lack of a cell phone, I ended up spending a ridiculous and fascinating hour on the back of this man's pickup, exchanging stories and sharing soda under the baking sun, next to a dog the size of a pony.

It's true that the story could have turned out differently—so differently that I'd never want to repeat it. A cell phone offers a sense of safety, and I wouldn't want to find myself in a similar situation again without one. But it's also true that if I'd had my little flip phone at my disposal, I would never have made human contact with the people at that farmhouse, and I would have one less memory to laugh about with my kids. In retrospect, I'm thankful that I (and Romeo and Crusoe and Paul Revere and Odysseus) didn't have a phone that day. But I think I prefer the way things are now. Mostly.

A Byte That's Hard to Swallow

2010-01-19T12:58:00.000-08:00

She doesn't own a cell phone. She has no e-mail account. She knows "tweeting" to simply mean bird song, and she would never think of writing on somebody's wall. This old friend of mine went out for coffee with me on Friday, and it was refreshing to share face-to-face conversation without the usual interruptions that motherhood brings—and without the digital distance that has slipped between me and friends both old and new.

This dear friend of mine, my 90-year-old grandmother, never witnesses the non-stop exchange of digital small talk, never sees the volley of information that shoots across my computer screen, never finds text messages popping up on her LCD. She's missing out on an unprecedented level of human interaction. But then I have to wonder: When it comes to human interaction, which of us is missing out more? She never meets the Niagra Falls of data that pours over the rest of us. What she meets are people.

At times, I wish she did have an e-mail address; I could just "shoot her a quick e-mail" to share the latest news and consider my granddaughterly duty done. I could upload a cute photo of the kids and call it "keeping in touch." Instead, what I'm forced to do is come into real, messy, inefficient human contact with her, and it's not always so easy. I can't limit her conversation to 140 characters so that I can get back to the dishes. I have to cover my mouth when I sneeze. I can't answer her replies in my own good time. I cannot multitask while sharing a mocha. Communication with my grandmother takes genuine effort.

So much the better.

Perhaps the greatest downside to all the tech-driven interaction is how little it cost us. There's not much emotional investment in a status update. Not much time commitment in a tweet. Small sacrifice in a text message. And a friendship that doesn't cost much can eventually seem to not be worth much either. Small investments pay small dividends.
But that's not to say that they pay no dividends whatsoever.

I must say, I'm thankful for the way electronic communication and internet "communities" can help maintain friendships through years and across miles. Saying goodbye to those I love has been too common an occurrence, and facebook does help—or at least gives the illusion of helping—to bring us closer again. Just this week, my brother was offered a job in California, and when he and his family move, the separation will be a bit more bearable knowing that, no matter how far away they are, we can Skype.

Small consolation, I know. But it really does seem better than nothing, and maybe my grandmother will think so too, when moving day actually arrives.

Then again, maybe not. All that virtual interaction may seem like merely slapping a Band-Aid on the bleeding wound of physical separation. I don't think any of us who are being honest could say that digital contact can replace a face-to-face meeting. Still, I'd rather have a Band-Aid than sit here and bleed to death.

It's when our connections with those far from us prevent a connection with those nearest to us, that I think these high-tech blessings become a real evil. If I'm walking through life plugged into a Bluetooth earpiece, I feel exempted from acknowledging the people I pass on the sidewalk. When I'm too busy blogging to an unseen audience to find out what the kids are all arguing about right here in the same house, I've lost the real point of communication. When a stranger cannot ask me for directions because he is afraid to burst the earbud-bubble I inhabit, I've sealed myself off from the flesh-and-blood neighbors I am supposed to love.

Remember that commandment? To love my neighbor? It didn't come with a digital caveat. I cannot plug in and opt out. If he'd been grooving to his own personal soundtrack while texting the friends he'd seen ten minutes ago at the mall, the Good Samaritan might never have noticed the guy bleeding to death in a ditch. What's the good of iPhone contact if it makes me forget how to make eye contact?

Too often my virtual relationships interfere with the living, breathing, sneezing, laughing relationships made through meeting in physical space. ("Oh, sorry to interrupt you, but this is an important call...") I cannot maintain a healthy marriage simply by writing on my husband's "wall" three times a day. Or thirty times a day. You and I can both eat a bowl of Cheerios while we video-conference, but we have not had breakfast together. I can sit on my couch with a cracker and a glass of cabernet while I watch a live broadcast church service. But I can't trick myself into believing that I've just participated in Communion. I haven't. Not even if my TV is a high-definition flat screen. I cannot be there in spirit only. My spirit is stuck inside my body. It's supposed to be.

We're Americans. We're all obsessed with bodies—especially around New Year's Day, when ads for weight-loss products and workout DVDs fill the airwaves, and the word "sexy" flies through the air like the swine flu. But this body obsession seems particularly odd—or, perhaps, particularly obvious—when I notice how disembodied our relationships have become. Ever since AT&T redefined what it means to "reach out and touch someone," we've been losing our ability to do it literally.

Of course, I could have talked to my grandmother on the phone, and I do. But a voice heard from across a small table is far warmer than heard through a telephone receiver. This is why it was so refreshing to go out for coffee with her, my old, old friend—to share face-to-face laughter, to knock knees under the same table, to breathe the same air, to brush doughnut crumbs onto the same paper napkin. To step outside my digitized world into hers—into the unmediated, flesh-and-blood realm of true friendship—was delightful.

Sharing a Verizon connection cannot compare with the connection made through breaking bread (or glazed doughnuts) together—sharing a bite instead of a byte. It's something I should do more often.

Cabbages and kings

2010-01-12T13:33:00.000-08:00

"The time has come," the Walrus said,
"To talk of many things:
Of shoes—and ships—and sealing-wax—
Of cabbages—and kings—
—Lewis Carroll

My kids were playing quietly after their naps yesterday, I'd finished folding another load of laundry, and I'd gotten some small projects done. It had been a reasonably good day, but in the middle of another grimy-gray January afternoon, I was feeling a bit gray myself, and the second latté of the day wasn't infusing much energy into my veins. I always appreciate a good cuppa, especially now that I can smell again, but on this particular Monday, the java wasn't quite potent enough to cure the winter blahs. Caffeine can only do so much. I meandered into the kitchen in search of ideas for dinner and, after rummaging through the refrigerator for a while, resolved to whip up some coleslaw. Not much excitement there, but I had the ingredients on hand.

Then I sliced into this, and found the little splash of color I was looking for:

Ta-da! I bet you didn't know that cabbage is a natural mood enhancer.

Okay. Strictly speaking, it's not. At least not in the way you might think. But slicing into a red cabbage and looking at all that spiraling graphic artistry gave me reason enough to pause, kitchen knife in hand, and marvel—reason enough to call three-year-old Paul into the kitchen to share the marvel with me. "It looks like beautiful paint," he said.

Annie Dillard describes beauty as "a grace wholly gratuitous." "Gratuitous grace" may be redundant, but in that cross-section of cabbage, I could see again what she meant—the surprising discovery of beauty in the most unaccountable places—on my cutting board, next to a Wüsthof knife streaked with purple. Gratuitous grace it certainly was.

Beauty didn't need to be there. Truly, it didn't. I think we would eat cabbage even if it did not look like "beautiful paint." Some scientists hypothesize that we perceive beauty merely out of biological necessity; it's all about preservation of the species, they say. That kind of straight-faced silliness makes me want to laugh and taunt them with a cut cabbage. Clearly these scientists never made cole slaw. Clearly, they know nothing of grace. Grace was right there, lying in wet halves before my eyes on the kitchen counter. And if I can find this gratuitous grace there, I can, it seems, find it almost anywhere, provided I open my eyes widely enough to see it.

One of the delights of having small children is their high-pitched excitement at what, to the rest of us, seems like nothing much. I remember taking our oldest son, Jonah, to the Fort Worth Zoo when he was not yet two years old. We held him on our shoulders to give him a better view and pointed, telling him—with exaggerated zeal—to "look at the colorful birds!" At the "great-big elephants!" At the "tall giraffes!" I was disheartened to see that, even after our enthusiastic drumroll, my little boy took a brief look at the wildlife and then gave his attention wholly to the industrial fans blowing above our heads.

After seeing countless National Geographic specials, it was all too easy for me to miss the fun in watching a herd of awkwardly galloping giraffes. But what excuse did my wide-eyed toddler have for failing to squeal with glee? I think the answer is simply that he could not have recognized that a giraffe was any less common in Texas than a cockroach. And, let's face it, cockroaches can move a lot quicker. For a person so new to the world, everything is fresh, and everything is astonishing, so the common things hold as much fascination as the exceptional, and a fan can be as captivating as the Grand Canyon. But at the time it bothered me that our son was missing the point of the zoo "experience." To be distracted by the bright tropical plants or the contrived animal "habitats" I could maybe understand. But c'mon, kid. A fan? We can see those at home. For free.

But that's exactly what I did not understand. My emphasis was all wrong. Why would I want my children to be bored with what they can see everyday? I can see a fan at home! For free! Why should I not be thrilled at the very idea? All four of my babies have been held transfixed by the sight of a slowly rotating ceiling fan. And why did that always strike me as funny? We sophisticated people know how to have contempt for the unexceptional. To be bored has almost become a mark of refinement, and any American high schooler knows that it's not cool to be easily impressed. But why? That day at the zoo, Jonah was experiencing what we all could use a little more of: wonder in the ordinary.

I know that this idea is nothing new. This has all been said before by folks more eloquent than me. But if the idea is right, and I think it is, we must not despise it simply because we've "heard that before." I could use a reminder almost daily to look—really look—at the jaw-dropping spectacle that surrounds me every waking moment.

Look at the way the sunlight refracts rainbows across the shiny side of a CD. Give your attention to the iridescent shimmer on the multiplied eyes and the microscopic veins tracing through the wings of an ordinary housefly. Watch the way the steam swirls and churns the air as it rises from your morning shower and turns to dew on the bathroom mirror. Make coleslaw, and call the whole family in to watch as you reveal the "beautiful paint" inside a cabbage. Open your eyes wide enough to see the gratuitous grace in everyday life. Because life, as someone once said, is beautiful.

Overwhelmed by Olfactory Hues

2010-01-04T17:41:00.000-08:00

I have a disability. There. Now you know. But, as far as I can tell, this disability doesn't get much press coverage, and it certainly is not mentioned in the Americans With Disabilities Act. My disability is minor, but I confess that it leaves me feeling a bit—a very little bit—helpless.

Imagine your life without color or without music, and you will doubtless imagine your life deprived of some of its greatest joys. Imagine yourself with no sense of touch—that sandpaper and silk are both alike against your fingertips. Imagine that your sense of taste dissolved, making salt and sugar indistinguishable on your tongue. And now imagine yourself unable to smell; the scents of garlic and cinnamon, dumpsters and roses are nothing but empty air. Every breath, whether fair or foul, is the same.

This is the pitifully odorless world I currently inhabit. I can't smell a thing. (Don't laugh. It's rude to laugh at people with disabilities.)

Help, I am glad to know, is available in this country for people with many forms of disability. For those unable to walk, we have designated parking places and motorized wheelchairs. For those who cannot hear we have specialized classes and closed-captioned sitcoms. For those without their sense of sight we have beeping pedestrian signals and braille textbooks. All these forms of assistance are terrific, and I'm encouraged that new efforts are constantly being made to allow every American to live as well as possible. Even I, who can both see and hear, have made use of the closed captioning on more than a few occasions when the dishwasher was running and kids were hollering; and I've been brought back to attention (after staring absently out the airport windows) by that soothing female voice informing me in three languages that I am "approaching the end of the moving sidewalk." Gratitude is due to the folks who make these services available. I do mean that. But what about people like me? What federal funding has been provided for those who suffer from bouts of smell-lessness caused by differently abled noses?

Today, as I drove through the rain (And it is rain rather than snow.), I listened to Annie Dillard's descriptions of people who, following cataract surgery, had been given the gift of sight for the first time. Their reactions are varied: some are disturbed by the relentless barrage of light and color and shade, and keep their eyes shut against it. Many are bewildered by the sudden awareness of things and people beyond arm's reach—of the enormous space and size and depth they experience on every side. Others are struck dumb, enchanted by the spectacle of white and blue and green light dancing, too beautiful to be expressed in words, among the leaves of the trees overhead. But in every case, these newly sighted people were overwhelmed by the mere fact of sight. And it made me wonder what I would experience if, after a lifetime without smell, I were suddenly given that sense as an adult. Would I be repelled like the girl with her eyes shut? Or would I, like the child staring at the trees, be enthralled, inhaling breath after breath of violet-tinted air until I hyperventilated from the sheer glory of the smell?

The first time I lost my sense of smell was while I was living in our Dallas apartment. I realized one morning that I could not smell my shampoo. And then, while making breakfast, the cinnamon rolls might just as well have been water for all the aroma they conveyed to my brain. I started to panic. Thinking nerve damage must have occurred in the night, I raced through the rooms trying to smell the most pungent items I could find. Onion? Nothing. Bleach? Nada. Vinegar? Zilch. The baby's trash can? A breath of fresh air. My ability to smell was more important than I had ever realized or appreciated. And now it was gone.

Smell is surely the unsung sense. We revel in our sense of sight. Hearing is a delight that requires little explanation. A sense of touch is the livelihood of massage therapists everywhere. Taste is the subject of many a cookbook and magazine. But smell? Who really cares?

Well, I, for one, do care. The old adage, "You don't know what you've got until it's gone," is quite true. And what your high school biology teacher told you about taste being largely experienced via smell? That is true as well. When cinnamon coffee cake is merely crumbly and vaguely sweet in your mouth, you know you've been deprived of something marvelous. When salsa is reduced to a chunky, salty-sour concoction, you know that something great is gone. The scented candle burning in the kitchen yields nothing but flame. The pizza sauce simmering on the stove is only so much wet red stuff. The world is a paler place without the olfactory hues it once had. That coffee breath does not offend me, and that bottom-shelf wine now tastes the same as the good stuff is small consolation.

The sense of smell, you see, is more than merely aesthetic; it has practical value as well. When my three-year-old has to inform me that the toddler on my lap needs a diaper change, I know I've lost something useful. If the bacon is burning, I smell no smoke. To discern if the milk's gone bad, I look for chunks. My house could have a natural gas leak right this minute, and I, unable to detect it, might carelessly light a match and blow us sky high. Kaboom. My fellow Americans, is this not a true—and potentially life-threatening—disability?

I don't ask for pity (although I am thinking of starting a fund for the silently suffering smell-less population.) That I have differently abled sinuses is nothing cry about, and I'm thankful to report that my condition has, so far, been temporary. But this lamentable situation does confront me (on average) three times year. Sometimes it lasts a day. Sometimes, as now, it lasts for two or three days. Or more. Always it happens at the end of a head cold; following a week or so of sinus congestion I can breathe freely again, but I can still smell nothing. And nothing, my friends, is a terrible thing to smell.

After a day or two, I expect I'll be stopping to smell the roses once again. But in case I'm not, I suppose I'll be visiting our family doctor for his professional opinion. (And if you're reading this, dear family doctor, when you see my name on your appointment schedule, you'll now know why it's there.)

The bright side of all this is that, as a consequence of these episodes, I've come to genuinely love this underappreciated sense. Smell, like the other four senses, is a wonderful gift, worth giving thanks for daily. I can stand in the kitchen where bread is baking and find joy in simply breathing. The woodsy scent of Christmas tree needles wooshing into my vacuum cleaner gives me chills. Nutmeg makes me giddy. Even the foul odors are a blessing to me now, because the truth is, after days of smelling nothing, nothing stinks.

Recalled to Life

2009-12-31T16:43:00.000-08:00

The last day of December is here, and snow is finally falling in earnest. This year, instead of greeting us by flinging ample handfuls of snow across our rooftops, Winter clenched his fists and blew long, icy breaths over the wheat fields, leaving the landscape grey and parched. He blasted the streets and yards with dry, bitterly cold wind—the kind that freeze dries your lips when you inhale; the kind that quite literally takes your breath away, sending it skyward in toothpaste-scented clouds.

We spent the first weeks of Advent wrapped like mummies in layer upon layer of apparel, our scarves, like unraveling grave clothes, trailing behind us in the lifeless breeze. During those frigid days in early December, when my fingers and toes felt as cold and lifeless as those of the walking dead, my heart miraculously kept up its warm and merry march somewhere underneath all those wrappings.

Here, in the bleak midwinter, we are all dead men walking; we are all Lazarus come from the tomb, with warmth and breath and lifeblood in motion where no motion should rightly be. What a shock to find ourselves alive and on our feet, our shame covered and our limbs warm. What can account for it? None of our wilting fig leaves, however artfully arranged, could have held up against the wind rising from the valley of the shadow. We have been recalled to life, and we step out of our tombs, blinking from the brightness, wrapped up in apparel not of our own making, clothed in skins not our own.

Lazarus's grave clothes may not have been the bright blue parka and striped wool scarf that I wear, but to live and breathe is nearly as startling for me as it was for him. Finding life in winter is like finding a shiny quarter on a muddy street; a red cardinal on leafless branch; a sudden peal of laughter on a sleepy afternoon; a Bethlehem star and a chorus of angels in a black sky. It's an orange stroller, a blue coat and five pairs of pink cheeks splashing color along an icy sidewalk.

I am surprised to discover that the dark and deadly cold outside is no match for the warmth I and my children carry with us. There in the midst of December's biting breath, we could laugh in the face of the cold and dark and step confidently out the door, armed with nothing but coats, gloves, and life itself. Even so, when the temperatures dipped below zero, I wrapped my scarf a little tighter and stepped a little faster as the dry winter wind wound serpentine trails close upon our heels.

And then came the rain. The iced melted, the mud softened, and a mock-Spring arrived. But no birds sang. And nobody was fooled. December can dress himself like April, but he cannot make the flowers bud.

Christmas arrived, and a white one, at that—white in the way a chocolate cake dusted with powdered sugar is "white." And all the warmth and color and brightness of that festal day sent true Spring-like hope through the frozen earth. How fitting that we spangle the streets with white and multi-colored strings of stars; no other time of year is in so much need of color and light. Christmas is nearly the darkest day of the year. And yet, save one other day, it is the brightest. In the midst of wintry death, we find life of the truest kind.

Now, as December draws to a close, snow is falling at last. It covers the yard and the trees and the roof over our heads. Although it is growing dark outside as I write this, I know that tonight will be bright with six-pointed stars. And in the morning, the earth will be clothed in a white shroud, waiting to be recalled to life. On the first morning of the New Year, the earth will be wrapped in a pristine blanket, waiting for color and warmth and laughter to burst upon it, to roll across it, to breathe life into the glittering air.

Eine Kleine KidMusik

2009-12-11T13:36:00.000-08:00

A couple of videos of our budding musicians.

In this performance, Paul (age 3) is perfecting his musical skills on a K'Nex banjo. Note how he incorporates elements of J.S. Bach & Johnny Cash with the postmodern lyrical storytelling style of Bob Dylan. This video includes a post-performance interview in which Paul discusses his artistic inspiration. (This is from August, but it still makes me smile.)

Paul's "Banjo" on Vimeo.

And on a slightly more serious note:
We had another successful recital on Tuesday, thanks to the boys' terrific (and patient!) piano teacher, Lydia F.
Jonah (7) plays "Humming Song" by Schumann.
Jude (5) and Jonah play "Bingo" as a duet—a picture of what I hope will be brotherly harmony throughout the years.

Piano Recital, December 2009 on Vimeo.

On rummage sales and lilies

2009-12-08T20:43:00.000-08:00

This Saturday, our kids' school held a rummage sale fundraiser. I contributed three large boxes of excess shoes and picture frames and sweaters and candle holders that had been stacked for months in storage containers, awaiting a summer yard sale that never happened. It felt good to deposit the contents of those Rubbermaid bins into the school gym. And it felt even better knowing that I was cleaning house for a good cause.

Yes, it felt good. But as nice as it was to open up some closet space, and as useless as those goods now were to me, I still had a voice in the back of my head telling me that each thing I was giving away might yet prove valuable, might come back in fashion, might fit me again. I've always been a pack rat. My blood pressure rises a bit when I relinquish anything that has the remotest possibility of future utility. Shouldn't I keep it just in case?

I (and my mother and most of my aunts, uncles, and cousins) grew up with a "waste not, want not" outlook on housekeeping. My grandparents, who, like the rest of that generation, lived through the lean years of the War and the Depression, went on to raise nine children on a dairy farm that eventually went bankrupt. My grandmother had neither the time nor the resources to spend on domestic bells and whistles; she did what she could with what she had. Meanwhile, my grandfather spent much of his time jerry-rigging a whole assortment of machinery to avoid having to replace it. Frugality was a means of survival. Frugality seems to be in our blood on that side of the family; we don't throw things away easily.

Shortly before I was married, one of my mom's dish sponges tore in half. It wasn't one of those "expensive" ones with the Teflon-safe scrubby stuff on one side. Nope. Just a basic, 50-cent yellow dish sponge. But it had scarcely had the chance to perform its humble duty before being rent in two. The average American would, I think, have sent it to an early grave in the city landfill. But we are not the average American.

My mom had to restore that sponge to the life for which it was intended; she took a needle and some sturdy grey thread, and with nurse-like care stitched the torn halves back together. And when that sponge got dirty, did she throw it out? Oh, no. She sent it through the laundry and brought it back on kitchen patrol next to the sink. When no longer fit for kitchen service, it did time in the bathroom. How long it remained in this degraded position, I don't know. But in the end, worn, tired, and scarred, it took a ride to its final resting place amongst the tuna cans, banana peels and spent coffee grounds of our fair city. However, none can say that it met an untimely demise. Not at our house.

It's not that any of us thinks we're still living through the Depression. The lean years have passed, but the habit of frugal living hasn't. My parents have always been careful with money, while at the same time keeping an open hand and a generous spirit. My mother, who will sew a 50-cent sponge back together one day, will the next day be cheerfully writing substantial checks or preparing lovely meals to give to people she's never met. Her frugality and her generosity do not conflict; if anything, her frugality has made her generosity possible.

I hope that someday the same could be said of me.

I may not have inherited quite the same degree of waste-nottishness as my mother, but enough of it remained in the gene pool that I still tend to hang on to things that most people would throw out in a heartbeat. When loading up those boxes for the rummage sale, I nearly kept an out-of-date, hand-me-down baby blanket none of my kids had ever used. It had no aesthetic value. It had no sentimental value. It had no practical value. Its only value was in the "just in case" of the thing—just in case I have another baby and our 34 other baby blankets get ruined before the child outgrows them. Ridiculous, I know.

I, of all people, should realize that, on the day when "just in case" actually arrives, we will have all we need—and probably much more. I have never asked for bread and been given a stone.

When we lived in Dallas, our annual household income (including our "income" from student loans) was well below the Federal Poverty Line for a family of 5. When I look at our tax returns for those years, I have no logical explanation for how we got by, let alone for how we lived so comfortably. Not even my über-frugality seems to account for it. The figures don't add up. But the figures didn't add up the time when that boy handed over his five loaves and two fish to feed the crowd, either. The math was all wrong. Statisticians would have predicted significant food shortages. And yet, there were leftovers. When we moved, I gathered up box after heavy box of our worldly goods. We filled a huge moving van full. And even then, with nearly all our belongings out of reach, we continued to live in relative comfort and ease. One pan to cook with. Paper plates to eat on. A few changes of clothes to wear. Running water. A roof over our heads. We lacked for nothing. The experience made me see how much of a luxury all those other things were that I thought I needed.

Today, according to the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, our household income is still many thousands of dollars below the "Low Income Limit" for our county. Low income? True, we won't be buying a vacation home in Bermuda anytime soon. But we drink wine. We eat almost too well (cinnamon rolls and bacon!) Our kids are enrolled in a private school. We have many, many, many toys, games, clothes, gadgets, pairs of shoes.... Low income? Really?

As I said, I donated three large boxes of excess belongings to the rummage sale. I'm sure I could have come up with several more without noticing the slightest change in the way we live. Our "low income" American family has more stuff than we can possibly use. We're wealthy enough to just give it away. If I decided to count my blessings, to name them one by one—even if I limited myself to counting material blessings only—I would have no time for doing anything else.

I will probably always be frugal. I might even catch myself sewing dish sponges back together. (It's in the blood, you know.) But I hope I would do it with a sense of gratitude and with the knowledge that I am, quite literally, rich. Rich in every way. So why waste any more time worrying about the "just in case" scenarios? Better to consider the lilies and start clearing out the closets. They'll be filling up again with Christmas gifts anyway before I know it.

Black Friday (With Apologies to the Prince of Denmark)

2009-11-27T16:06:00.000-08:00

It's not called "Black" for nothing, this Friday. Enticed by promises of unbeatable prices, I ventured out before sunrise, through the rain and foggy darkness, to make my mark on the "Consumer Confidence" charts. (Watch for my percentage point on tomorrow's news.)

When I arrived at the massive chain store across town, the parking lot was already an oily sea of minivans and pickups, SUVs and sedans, abandoned shopping carts and discarded seasonal red paper coffee cups. I had a sinking sensation as I stepped uneasily across that sunless sea. My faith in American capitalism was failing faster than the real estate market in LA.

Nevertheless, I rode the swell through the automatic doors and waded with my squeaky cart through wave after crushing wave of bleary-eyed customers. I sloshed my way against the current toward the sale items that had lured me in. But when I saw the checkout lines stretching around the corner, down the aisle, and away toward the garden center, the sinking feeling left me; I had hit bottom. It's dark down there—Black even—despite all the fluorescent lights. With nowhere to go but up, I swam for fresh air, buoyed by my empty cart. No $3 pair of pajamas is worth drowning for.

Gasping, and dripping, I fell back into the driver's seat of my car and pondered a bit. Defeated. That's how I felt. The native hue of resolution was sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought. And doorbuster sales of great pith and moment with this regard their currents turned awry, and lost the name of action.

To shop, or not to shop? That was definitely the question. Whether 'twas nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous consumerism? Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, and by going home for coffee end them?

I considered Christmas. I considered the potential savings on gifts. From the great height of the big-box store parking lot on the hill, I considered the yawning abyss of the mall down below. I considered the coupons stacked in my wallet. I considered the hordes of people crowding the stores in search of a bargain. Last year on this day, somebody somewhere was trampled to death in a shopping stampede. Was it worth the risk? Shouldn't I rather bear those ills I had than fly to others I knew not of?

In the end, I resolved to take my life in my hands and descend to the Macy's parking lot. (Though this be madness, yet there is method in't.) The sun was beginning to rise, and the outlook appeared slightly less bleak as I plunged into the mall. I slid past crimson signs printed with swirly fonts saying "Yes" to Virginia. Perky clerks who'd been up since 4:00 A.M. wondered if I was "finding everything all right." Bing Crosby crooned somewhere over my head, trying to put me in the mood to spend.

It must have worked. Bing, unlike me, knows what he's doing when he's at the mall on Black Friday.

As I set sail for home through the fog, I brought with me bags full of stocking stuffers and craft projects and games and articles of clothing. I also brought back a much lighter purse and a much lighter head. (Ay, there's the rub.) It had taken me four hours to paddle through the mall. I stayed afloat, and yet, somehow, I still feel a bit soggy and defeated. I managed to avoid getting caught in the Black Friday undertow, but it may take me a few days to dry off and get the sand out of my hair.

I'm no thrill seeker. I wasn't altogether ready to test my strength against the storm surge of bargain shoppers. The only surfing I'm comfortable with is the kind I can do from my computer desk, where I can dip my toes in the kiddie pool version of Christmas shopping. Going out on Black Friday was a true test of nerve. Although I snagged some great deals, I really don't think I will attempt it again.

Well, not for another year, at least.

Martha, Martha

2009-11-14T19:06:00.000-08:00

The annual Christmas issue of Martha Stewart Living just arrived in my mailbox, its colorful bulk barely fitting through the slot. As always, the pages are filled with time-consuming creative projects that walk a fine line between kitsch and beauty. I love flipping through the glossy pages, filling my head with ideas for handmade decorations and show stopping desserts and thinking smugly to myself, "Yep. I could make that. Mm-hm. I could definitely do something jazzy with those!" Some of the cookies in this issue are almost pretty enough to dip in shellac and turn into family heirlooms. Martha. She's got tips on how to apply little candy snowflakes with a pair of craft tweezers. Craft tweezers. These recipes are sprinkled all over with nonpareils and faux bois. Their beautiful possibilities give the perfectionist in me a thrill. And who wouldn't love to present friends and neighbors with a plate of candy-coated perfection?

But here's the problem: Achieving the perfect Christmas cookie requires skill and patience. It requires time and quiet concentration. It requires an organized workspace and a steady hand. It requires conditions that are, quite frankly, not to be found in my kitchen. I would be shooing away greedy toddlers, with warnings not to handle, not to taste, not to touch. I shudder at the thought of chubby fingers pressing into my work of art before the royal icing had dried. And if I achieved the perfect cookie, what then? What would be its end? Confinement in a lighted glass case in a hushed gallery? No matter how many careful hours I spent on its aesthetic development, a cookie is still, after all, a cookie; all its yuletide perfection would be ground to mush between the teeth of unwashed plebeians like my children. Like me. How could we eat perfection? How could I think of doing so as anything but a waste?

Martha. Her magazine is crammed with page after page of homemade potential. Issue after issue, I imagine all the great things I could be making—so many great things that I don't know how to begin. Clearly I do not own a sufficient supply of felting needles or snowflake-shaped paper punches or ultra-fine glitter. But I lack more than a room full of specialized craft tools. What I lack is a willingness to fail. Or to see all my work go to waste.

I've been planning on making a dress. Or maybe a skirt. Planning may be too strong a word; I want to make one. For fifty cents, at the Saint Mary's Catholic Church rummage sale last year, I bought some fabric. It is so lovely—has so much promise—that I can't use it for just any old article of clothing. It's from Thailand. It's raw silk. It's the warm orangey-red color of oak leaves in fall. It's embroidered with gorgeous cream-colored vines and flowers. It is beautiful. This is why it has been waiting in a plastic bin under my bed for more than a year. I cannot bring myself to touch this fabric with a pair of scissors until I am certain that I am about to make it realize its full potential. If I were to make something merely acceptable out of this precious fabric, what a waste it would be! Or if I make the perfect skirt and then ruin it with spilled wine, how, again, could I think of it as anything but a waste?

This paralyzing pursuit of perfection has led me to give up on projects of all sorts before I even begin. I don't want to paint a picture; I want to paint the picture. I don't want a decent apple pie recipe; I want an apple pie recipe that will win prizes. I don't want to speak mediocre French; I want to speak it fluently and with no accent whatsoever. If I'm going to take the time to knit a sweater, it must be knitted as though it's the last sweater I will ever finish. (But at the rate I'm going at picking out the perfect yarn and the perfect pattern, it probably will be the last sweater I ever finish.) If I'm going to sew a skirt, the skirt must be lovelier than any I could find at Macy's. If I'm going to decorate a cookie, I want it to be worthy of a magazine photo. Otherwise, why start? If I have the potential to do something with excellence, how could I settle for doing it by halves? Or even worse, how could I settle for flat-out failure? We have potential, people. Potential must be realized. We, too, could become president of the United States. (Yes we can.)

If we don't, how could we think of it as anything but a waste?

If only I had realized my potential, I could have been a graphic designer to the stars. What a waste. I could have been a four-star chef. What a waste. I could have been an ivy league professor. What a waste. I could have been a first-chair violinist (if I had ever taken a lesson). What a waste. I could have been a published writer. What a waste. I could have sewn the perfect skirt or baked the perfect cookie. I could have been Martha Stewart. What a waste and a shame.

It is a waste. Unless I have wasted my life for the sake of others. And if that is the case, then all that wasted potential is not a shame at all; it is a glory. It is costly perfume—perfume worth a year's wages—wages with the potential to do much good—poured out with love and with tears. A lifetime is not enough to pursue half of what I want to do. But a lifetime is not all I've been given. So I am free to waste my potential on my friends, my enemies, my neighbors, my husband, my children. My God. I am free to begin a sweater and never complete it. I am free to let muddy shoes run across the clean floor. I am free to be an amateur, free to burn the pie, free to press delete. I am free to spill glitter, to write wordy blog posts, to let little fingers smear the icing. I am free to let the wine spill over my perfect skirt. Free to eat perfection.

Martha, Martha, you are anxious and troubled about many things, but one thing is necessary. Take, eat. Perfection is meant to be eaten. Take the cup. Wine is meant to be poured out. Christmas is coming. I will sew. I will bake cookies. I will raise a toast to one with all the potential in the universe, who "made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men."

Remembering Saint Crispin

2009-11-05T20:39:00.000-08:00

One of the best things about moving back to my home town is that my sons now attend school at my own alma mater. Because our town is small and my husband's job hours are somewhat flexible, we try to meet our boys every Friday at school to eat lunch as a family. It at first brought on a strong sense of dejà vu to be munching potato chips in the same room where I had spent so many lunch hours as a kid. Some of my own teachers are still there, patrolling the tables, conversing with students, and drinking half-pint cartons of milk. I can only imagine how many thousands of peanut butter sandwiches my old teachers have seen devoured in that room over the years. And after a couple of decades in the classroom, those teachers must have a hard time remembering our names, let alone the blurred succession of individual events that made up our lives during those years—events that stand out clearly in our own memories as momentous, even formative.

So I was pleasantly surprised recently, on Saint Crispin's Day to be exact, when of my teachers from high school strolled up to me at the lunch table to chat about old times. He informed me that one of his current students had just come close to winning the "Hannah" award. I looked blank. He continued, "Yeah, the 'Hannah' award! For the best Saint Crispin's Day speech ever delivered in one of my classes." I raised my eyebrows. He added, "I still have my students recite that speech on this day every year, but your speech set the gold standard. This is the closest anyone's come yet to matching your presentation. All others pale in comparison."

Well, hurrah for Henry V and all that. I, being human, am not one to disbelieve high praise such as this. Deride me for my shortcomings, and I am likely to shrug, to argue, to disbelieve. But laud me for being the "gold standard," in however minute an achievement, and I am happy to believe what you say. I might be startled, at first, by the compliment. I might half-heartedly protest. But I will relish it, and I will quickly decide it must be true. Pride feeds on trifles. I do like to have others think well of my accomplishments...

...unless I did not, in fact, do the thing for which I am being congratulated.

Memory is a mystery. How judges can determine guilt or innocence, based on the testimonies of witnesses that happen to be human, is also a mystery. Where were you on the night of November 5, 2009? A year from now, a month from now, maybe even on the morning of November 6, 2009, the recollection might be hazy. It will certainly be biased. It may even be gone.

As a mother, I am asked at various times each day to be judge (or jury or prosecutor or sometimes defendant.) But discerning what happened, even when I'm the one who did it ("Did I really say you could have another piece of candy?") is not easy. When one child lies howling on the floor, one child stands pointing a finger, and one child talks incoherently at the ceiling, piecing together the truth of what took place can seem impossible. Each child recalls the incident differently; each saw the moment from a unique angle, and each has interpreted the event in the light that shines most favorably upon himself. The memories of all three are suspect. I may not be wearing a black robe, but I preside over these little court cases everyday. Maybe I should ask my kids to address me as Your Honor. "Honor thy father and thy mother" has connotations I never considered before becoming a parent. I want a gavel for Christmas.

If young children, with steel-trap memories, cannot be trusted as reliable witnesses, how can we grownups, with our multiple commitments and distractions and our longer lives, hope to get the details of our stories right? My husband read one of my blog posts from last month, and commented that I had left out some important details. But, I maintain, those details were not so important. Forgettable, really. I am sure I will forget them. And then we will wonder someday, as we recount the circumstances to one another, whether we are speaking about the same incident at all.

Of course I understand that not all memories can be so haphazardly kept; some truths must never, at the peril of body and soul, be forgotten. And some truths must not, at the peril of soul, be remembered. But all those truths and fictions in between are, as far as I can tell, a collection to cherish and bequeath, or a heap to relinquish and neglect, at will. As a parent I often wonder into which category my children will stash the events of their own lives.

My husband has carried on an agreeable disagreement with his brother for many, many years now. The question is: Whose bike was it? What happened to the bike and how is another story. But the laughable argument arises at family holidays, when each man adamantly maintains that it happened to his bike.

My brother and I also grew up in the same house. But at times, you'd never know it. I realize now that my parents had little control over what experiences we would carry with us. We lived in Warsaw for a bit when I was 13, and what stands out in memory is not what adults might expect. We visited some palaces and walked through some Polish museums. But those memories are cloudy. What I recall clearly is playing with Legos on the floor, next to the funky couch that folded out into a bed but wasn't a futon. And unfiltered coffee with grounds clogging the bottom of the cup. And the pastry we thought contained chocolate filling but turned out to be packed with a solid layer of poppyseeds. And I remember the day the Pepsi bottle smashed on the slushy train tracks, when the meat fell in the mud puddle, and Mom came home and cried. Many of my brother's childhood memories are probably the same. But I know that some are more different than I would have expected. We knew the same people. We took the same vacations. We went to the same school. I think. I was there. Or so I remember.

My teacher, I am certain, was there as well. He was an eye witness. And he remembered my Saint Crispin's Day speech to be the best ever delivered on the lunch room stage. But I do not recall it. I am certain I did not do it. I never memorized any portion of Henry V. I wish I had. Against my teacher's repeated protestations that it was me, I maintained that I had no memory of that day. I would like to be remembered well. Of course I would. But only for what I have actually done.

A few days later, my teacher found me again to inform me that he had, indeed, made a mistake. He had replaced another girl's face with mine, because he had been talking, with another of my old teachers, about a thesis paper I had written on "Bad Words." I do remember doing that. But some other girl had made the gold-standard Saint Crispin's Day speech. And she will be remembered for it. And I have a feeling that I will remember this amusing mix-up whenever I hear the Saint Crispin's Day speech in years to come. Some things are worth committing to memory.

This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remembered—
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.

When the party's over

2009-10-29T17:26:00.001-07:00

White flakes were drifting to the ground outside my window yesterday morning, and the soggy leaves heaped in our front yard wore a silvery trim of frost. It looked festive, but nobody was tempted to play in that heavy mass of foliage. When the weather was still dry, the boys had raked a pile of enviable dimensions, and they had waded through the crisp leaves, buried each other in them, jumped into the middle of them, tossed them above their heads in handfuls to flutter downward like excitable birds and alight on the brown lawn. But when rain fell (as it always does in October), the autumnal celebration ended.

Tuesday night marked the end of my boys' soccer season, and I can't pretend that I am sorry. This weather has dampened my team spirit. The trees in the distance were pale with snow as we stood huddled on the sleet-saturated grass to watch red-cheeked second graders chase a very wet black and white ball. Jonah complained of numb toes. Paul and Jude, retaining precious body heat with a blue fleece blanket, slouched in the double stroller to keep out of the wind. Asaph's nose ran. I could not feel my fingers. We cheered and clapped, but not with the usual energy; our applause were stifled to lifeless thuds by winter gloves.

That soccer game ended not a moment too soon. But then we raised our eyes above the muddy grass and saw that, against this dim and chilly fadeout of the season, the sun, as it sank, was shooting a blast of pink light across the sky, setting the gray clouds and the snow-dusted hills on fire. The unexpected gala of color overhead seemed to revive a bit of the celebratory spirit as we vacated the darkening field. The whole scene reminded me, just a little, of that sense of anticlimax, when the last shower of sparks fizzles to black; when the show is over; when the crowds quietly prepare to leave—and then, out of dull silence, the echoing barrage of canon fire pounds against my rib cage, and the night explodes into a pyrotechnic grande finale.

Which just goes to show that you should never hang up your party hat too soon.

Two weeks ago, when an early freeze threatened our garden, I thought the end of this year's ingathering had come. I had finally resigned myself to the untimely demise of my tomatoes, picking the last of the green orbs from most of the withered vines. But one tenacious plant was still in full, flourishing leaf and laden with so many unripe tomatoes, I couldn't bear to strip it of its fruit and leave it to die. (One can only stomach so many fried green tomatoes.) I dug it up with its roots, transplanted it to a roomy red pot, and moved into my living room. There it went into shock; its leaves shriveled and grew brittle, and again, I thought its time had come. But it stayed, weighted down by the unrealized crop on its branches, and I waited. During the days that followed, an unanticipated second harvest ensued. Every one of those lovely tomatoes took on a pale orange hue—and then a promising pink, and then a flaming Roma red. The second ripening seemed more robust and welcome than the first. It took me by surprise.

When I turned the insignificant age of 31 last week, my family gave me some of the presents I'd had on my wish list. My husband took me out to dinner—just him, me, and a couple of plates of enchiladas. We had some good conversation, some decent margaritas, some fried ice cream. Fun, but nothing fancy. When we returned home, my husband held the door for me, and shouts of "Mommeeee!" sounded from the kitchen. With a screeching of chair legs on tile and a stampede of small feet, my sons rounded the corner and bombarded me with strawberry cupcakes and packages of chocolate and licorice and cards scrawled with misspelled birthday greetings. My sons were breathless with delight at having caught me off guard. The whole birthday was perfectly pleasant, and the party ended with a cheery bang.

My mom-in-law was still staying with us last Friday when my parents left town for the weekend. My grandmother, who lives with them, had just returned from a long trip, so my husband suggested that we go out to dinner one more time while we had our free babysitter and should stop to visit Grannie on our way to the restaurant. Sounded like a well planned evening to me. How well planned I little suspected.

When we arrived at my parents' house, instead of meeting my grandmother, I was greeted with shouts of "Surprise!" and with the laughing faces of some of my oldest and best friends. What began—and ended—as a birthday of little importance blazed back into life to become a birthday I will savor and smile about for years to come. Bursts of fiery color filled the vases on the table. Unanticipated gifts rested on the hearth. Ruby wine filled our glasses. And the food! My husband had conspired with one of our multitalented acquaintances* to present the twelve of us with a stunning eight-course Japanese dinner. I will not describe it, except to say that I cannot imagine enjoying a meal more. And is there any table fellowship that compares to the easy company of friends kept since childhood?

The snow may be falling, but lately I am starting to wonder if an unforeseen Indian Summer might burn through the clouds at any moment. This has been a week full of unexpected gifts. Of waking from sleep. Of gaiety revived. Of beauty for ashes. Don't put away your party hat just yet.

______

*Lisa B, for those who want to know

Unsophistication

2009-10-19T15:23:00.000-07:00

Today is my birthday. Not a birthday of any great significance; no special legal privileges are newly mine, and the number doesn't end in a zero. It's just another year gone. Today, as usual, I staggered out of my warm bed early enough to squeeze in a morning walk before the kids woke up to to pull my attention in 4 different directions. I didn't even brush my hair before going out. The sun was hardly up when I came in the front door to find my three-year-old running to greet me with wet pajamas. Again. My 19-month-old stood rattling the sides of his crib, waiting to be dressed. "All the shirts in his drawer are too small," my husband informed me as he deposited the baby, wearing a shirt two sizes too big, in the high chair. As I reached for an apple, my eldest complained of three loose teeth and requested that I pack his lunch with soft foods. Meanwhile, my five-year-old ran laps through the hallway in a panic, wondering where his socks and belt could have gone. Apparently it never occurred to him to check in his dresser. Then, halfway through dishing up seven bowls of yogurt, I realized that I'd forgotten to have him do his math homework for the second time in a week.

If, at age eighteen, I could have seen myself at 31, I might not have recognized the somewhat disorganized mother of four I have become. I would certainly not have been pleased with what I saw. I've grown softer and rounder in all the wrong places, and the dark circles under my eyes seem to be a permanent fixture. I've never been the owner of a single item advertised in Vogue. I have never lived in Paris. I've traded art museums for coloring books; urban Shakespeare productions for grade school plays; dinner at eight for Happy Meals at noon. I never saw this coming. I'm not even a "kid person." As I look back, I ask myself how this could have happened to me. What became of all my ambitions?

The answer is: They died.

Thirteen years ago I was a college freshman with big plans and little foresight. I was going to study French, and then earn a Master's degree—probably a PhD as well—in Art History from some red brick institution on the East Coast. If I had asked my 18-year-old self what I would be doing now, I would have seen myself traveling to sophisticated places and delivering lectures to sophisticated students and reading sophisticated books and wearing sophisticated clothes and painting sophisticated canvases to the delight of my sophisticated patrons and dining in sophisticated restaurants with my sophisticated husband, whoever he might be. I would have a brilliant career. I would name-drop cities. I would know people who knew people, if you know what I mean.

But something—let's call it grace—happened to all those sophisticated plans. Today, on my 31st birthday, tiny, unsophisticated fingerprints stipple the lower halves of the windows and the French door to the living room. Sticky drips from unsophisticated sippie cups pepper the hardwood floors. The upstairs trash can is overflowing with unsophisticated diapers. I read unsophisticated stories to unsophisticated children who can't sit still long enough to hear the ending. I have a family-size bag of highly unsophisticated chicken nuggets in the freezer for those nights when we get home late—and muddy—from unsophisticated soccer games. I sing along with unsophisticated songs while attempting to accompany them using my unsophisticated piano skills. And I live in my unsophisticated home town where I push an unsophisticated double stroller while wearing the unsophisticated tennis shoes I purchased at a church rummage sale. And the strange thing is that I know this life, although I sometimes live it poorly, is a far better life than my 18-year-old self could have understood.

It's difficult to discern how my perception of "the good life" altered during the intervening years. But if there's one thing I've learned during that time, it's that a well-lived life means dying well—over and over again. I have not done it as often or as willingly as I ought. Not nearly. Sometimes I think that leaping in front of the oncoming train to rescue the baby in the stroller would be the best way to go—all at once, in a blaze of selfless glory. But where would be the challenge? Or the reward? Until I see that I must die daily, a little at a time, sometimes imperceptibly, I will never learn to truly live.

My husband's mother is staying with our family right now, and I think she has known this for a long time. She has given her years to teaching English to teenagers on their last stop before jail; helping kids with special needs learn to read; giving hours and days of every week to students and grandchildren and friends in need. She's been a mentor to people with addictions. She walked 60 miles this fall to raise money to find a cure for the cancer that took her little sister's life. She's planning a trip to volunteer in an orphanage overseas next year. She drove alone 1200 miles to see her son's family here in Idaho and will drive alone 1200 miles to get home to her other son's family in Arizona. She gives her life away. That is to say, she has found it.

We went with her down to the river this week when the weather was warm. We ate a picnic on the levy and watched the boys play on the rocks near the water. She and my husband climbed down with the kids and peered between the stones with them in search of lost treasures. They returned with a broken pink fishing pole, two golf balls, and an orange water pistol. They also returned with smiles and dirt on their hands. My hands were clean. Sophisticated people do not get dirty.

As we packed up our picnic, my husband told the boys to throw the remains of their sandwich bread into the river. When they did so, a pair of gulls plummeted to the surface to snatch the floating pieces, leaving a lone duck to seek vainly for the leftover crumbs. The bread was gone. But somehow the news got out that food was being distributed, and the gulls and ducks from across the river came in a mass to find what we had to offer. My oldest son turned to me and asked for more bread to give them. I hesitated. I had just packed it away. There were sandwiches to be made during the week ahead. I paid good money for that loaf and didn't want to waste it on an assembly of dirty, ungrateful birds. But I am slowly learning that my own plans must die and give way to something richer; I passed the loaf between my sons, who broke it, throwing it riverward.

The cries of the hungry fowl filled the air as piece after piece descended toward their waiting beaks. We all laughed at their enthusiastic response to this unexpected bounty. Broken bread may have been wasted on these filthy crowds, these shepherdless flocks. But what we gathered from it was something much more. Something multiplied. Twelve baskets full.

We took a stroll along the levy and then down its steep green slope toward the road. But looking behind us, all the boys knew that a grassy bank like that is not to be experienced by mere walking. Back up they all went—even the baby on hands and knees—to roll down in dizzy giggles. I stood apart to watch, with the stroller between them and me, giving way to a dignified smile. But then my husband broke away up the hill after the children to take part in their game. And after him went his mother, who reached the summit and came twirling toward me, calling to me to join in. I hesitated. Sophisticated people do not roll down hills.

Sophisticated people do not know how to live. I stepped from behind the stroller and jogged to the top of the levy, lay down on the grass, and let myself go. Over and over. A whirl of colors spun around me. Gulls cried overhead. I slowed to a stop at the bottom of that grassy bank and lay, arms outstretched, breathless, with a thousand-thousand friendly blades against my back. And I died. Laughing.