Writing Posts

Rest: An Advent Meditation

2010-12-05T17:49:00.000-08:00

What would it be like to truly be at rest? To have that spinning hamster wheel of worry in our brains go still; to have the inbox empty, the to-do list deleted, the cacophony of all our electronica—the cell phones, the blackberries, the iPads, the netbooks—go quiet, no need to answer any calls or respond to any questions or be sent into any new eddy of crisis; to not be in conflict with those we work with, or those we live with, or those we avoid at any cost and yet are never quite free of.
To not feel tired.

To know our needs are known; to know our needs are met; to be fully alive in the moment we are in right now; to just be.

Such an art, such a power, such a grace, eludes us. Even with all our advancements and all of our knowledge, it is always just beyond reach—that oasis of rest, that dream in the desert, evaporating in the onslaught of our effort.

If only we could remember that true rest, deep rest, the rest of peace, the rest that knits the raveled sleeve of care, comes only as a gift from God. The God who offers us the shelter of his wings. The God who bids us cease striving and know that he is God. The God who is above all, in all, through all for all time. The God who enables us to be because he is.

Let us go to him, we who labor and are heavy laden, and he will give us rest.

Diary of an English Teacher

2010-09-18T09:57:00.000-07:00

So once again I've gone for ages without posting anything here, which is partly because I've been clobbered by the start of another school year, but also because I've been writing about my school year thus far and posting it somewhere else. I've tried this before, only to lose steam after the first few weeks, so I'm a little apprehensive about trying (and failing) again. People have been telling me for years that I need to write about my teaching experiences, which seems like an easy thing for someone who is A) an English teacher and B) claims to be a writer of some sort. But it's actually really hard for me to do and I have to fight a very strong reluctance each time I sit down to write about my job. Maybe that's because it takes so much out of me as it is that I need some space from it--I need some chunk of my life to have absolutely nothing to do with teaching. At the same time, though, I realize that it would be plain stupid for me not to ever write about and record some of the wonderful and awful craziness of my job, so I'm giving it another go. If you'd like to have access to this blog, shoot me an e-mail so I can "invite" you. It's a password protected site for obvious reasons...

A Little Movie Love (with no spoilers)

2010-07-19T10:46:00.000-07:00

As many sources have acknowledged, this has not been a great season for movies. Yes, The A-Team was all kinds of fun with its over-the-top action and winks at the original television series (who knew I would feel such nostalgia for Mr. T and his van?). But I really have to struggle to remember any other movie I’ve seen in the past three months even though I know I’ve seen several—they have all been that forgettable. That’s not even counting the numerous weeks I’d take a look at what was playing and not see a single title I was interested in.

But all of those “meh” feelings evaporated yesterday when I went with some friends to see Inception, which actually deserves the term film and has restored my faith in Hollywood’s ability to produce something with imagination and quality. This is not to say that the film is perfect. The story got a bit muddled at times, and I thought Ellen Page was miscast (I would have preferred someone like Carrie Mulligan—see An Education if you haven’t already, which is another excellent film). However, these are minor quibbles, and whatever flaws I noticed quickly receded as I was drawn completely into this other world. The theater was literally packed—it was a Sunday matinee and every seat was filled—and yet the grip of Inception was so intense and so complete that it was the quietest movie audience I have ever experienced. If it were physiologically possible, I could have sworn we all held our breath for 2 ½ hours.

The visuals were stunning, a reminder that not every movie has to be in that overhyped commodity 3-D to have a dramatic impact. The score powerfully enhanced the atmosphere and tone (holla, Hans Zimmer!). The high concept challenged and provoked my intellect and imagination (see, Hollywood? It’s okay not to spoon-feed a giant bowl of Obvious to your audiences!), and yet it was grounded in real emotion and heart. All the elaborate sets and balletic action scenes were threaded together—much like the dreamers were threaded together—by the pull of family love and the struggle to come to terms with relationships desperately longed for and just out of reach. At the end of the film, the entire audience let out a very audible vocalization, and I saw my own dazed expression reflected in the faces of others as we exited the theater and woke up from the dream we had all just experienced together, courtesy of architect Christopher Nolan.

I’m sure I’ll think of other things to appreciate about Inception in the days to come because it’s that kind of film—the one you revisit and turn over and sift through in your mind for days and even weeks after. One thing’s for certain—I won’t be forgetting it any time soon.

Student Bloopers 2010

2010-07-10T15:15:00.000-07:00

I was recently reminded that I never posted the latest round of student bloopers from this past year. I am remedying this at once since an opportunity to laugh at today's youth should never go by unexploited.

Quiz excerpts--
Q: What might you expect to see if you were to go to France?
A: The Awful Tower

Q: During the Renaissance, what did scholars do in reaction to what they saw as the "dark ages" in medieval Europe?
A: Went to Canada

Q: What does Jem do to Mrs. Dubose?
A: He destroys her bushes with a bottom [student meant baton]

Q: What are two items that Jem and Scout find in the oak tree on the Radley property?
A: lucky penis [student was trying for "pennies"] and a wach

Quotes from student essays:

"He was a know body sailor."

"Fair is fowl, and fowl is fair."

"We have the right to bare arms."

"Maybe, if she knew that he would die in the Battle of Somme, she would've given him her vowels, as in, she'd have married him."

"Beatrice is a very analistic character."

"I think courage can also be that when someone is in the heat of the moment, they won't hesitate to think twice. For example, when someone needs to jump over something like a tall building in order to live to see another day."

"They need to have adaptations so they can evolutionate."

"They enjoyed cruising along the busy streets in that shinny silver Honda, feeling that nice genital breeze hit their faces."

Overheard conversation between two students:
"What does speculate mean?" "Isn't that something they do to your house?"

Two-Wheeled Time Machine

2010-07-05T19:54:00.000-07:00

I have something of a mixed history when it comes to bikes. As a child, I loved them. I learned to ride on a little green bike that was a hand-me-down from my brother, then graduated to a sweet red and chrome number that had a long, cushy banana seat covered in a cherry red patent leather that shone with sparkles. It also had a metal ring in the back that served as a hand hold for any passenger sitting behind me or hitching a ride on roller skates. As my early 80s childhood self would have said, riding around on that thing was totally rad.

Fast forward to junior high, when I inherited a brown wobbly ten-speed, again from my older brother. I could barely touch the ground with my tip-toes on this bike, and only at a tilt (hence the wobbling), and its skinny wheels seemed especially designed to get caught in ruts in the road. It was this bike that sent me flying onto the concrete on my way to seventh grade one morning, causing me to snap both bones in my left forearm. Needless to say, this bike and I were not friends after that. I had to ride it for another couple years but managed to express my displeasure towards it in passive aggressive ways like accepting rides home from friends who had car transport and leaving it overnight in the bike racks. By the tenth grade, I felt myself to be too sophisticated to ride a bike to school and opted for the much cooler method of walking (first with a backpack, then upgrading to carrying my notebook and textbooks in front of me) and bumming rides whenever I could. Somehow, that transition stuck, and I went bike-less for the next two decades.

This past April, when I was visiting my oldest brother and his family in Michigan, my sister-in-law suggested I try a ride with my oldest niece, Gigi. They had bought a yellow tandem Schwinn through Craig’s List the year before so that my niece Emmie, who is blind, could ride with the rest of the family. Turns out that tandem bikes work well for out-of-practice chicken Aunties too. I climbed behind Gigi full of trepidation, but as we pedaled down the road and began to gain some momentum, I felt a bubble of glee rise up in my chest. With Gigi up front controlling the steering and braking, all I had to do was pedal and enjoy the ride. And an enjoyable ride it was. My brother lives in a quiet, semi-rural community, and the flat, gently winding roads afforded vistas of green trees and quaint vacation cottages. As I pedaled in rhythm with my niece, I began to feel the pleasure of our movement and the wind blowing my hair back, and I remembered once again that riding a bike is fun!

Fast forward to Memorial Day weekend, and a friend and I taking advantage of a two-for-one bike sale. I am now the proud owner of a red and black 3-speed cruiser, and it’s had a transformative effect on me. Namely, it’s made me into a kid again. I’ve taken to asking all of my friends whether or not they have bikes and when we can go riding. I talked about it so much at school that some of my students wrote “have fun riding your bike” in my scrapbook at the end of the year. I don’t know what it is, exactly, that makes it so magical for me. Maybe it’s the slower pace and being able to see aspects of my neighborhood and neighbors that I’ve never noticed before driving in my car. Maybe it’s the lack of definite purpose when I ride. Maybe it’s just the rolling joy of motion. But maybe it’s because I can tell that the people who see me cruising by with a big grin on my face are jealous. Because let’s face it—my bike is pretty rad. Just ask the kid who challenged me to a race earlier this evening.

On (not) Being a Writer

2010-06-22T19:18:00.000-07:00

From the look of things, it seems as though I haven’t been doing much writing in the last few months, and there is some partial truth to that. The part that’s not true is that I was taking an online poetry class and writing a poem every week for ten weeks. So why haven’t I posted any of these poems? Well, partway through the class, I learned that posting poems on a blog—even if it’s a personal blog that only your family and closest friends read (and only when they are reminded to…repeatedly)—is considered publication, and a number of literary journals and poetry websites will not accept previously published material. So from now on, any poem I might ever want to submit for publication has to stay private.

The part that is true about my not doing much writing is due to the fact that I’ve been spending some time doing research on the whole publication process, and as I send out query letters for my novel manuscript and research potential places I can submit my poetry, I can’t help wondering about something. In an echo of that age old tree-in-the-forest question, if what I write is never published, am I still a writer? Part of me feels like the answer is no. I might be an aspiring writer but I am not a “real” writer because being a “real” writer means getting put into print by someone other than yourself—preferably by a complete stranger who might not even like you very much but thinks your material is good enough to be seen by other people even in spite of the fact that they might not like you very much.

I don’t think I’m alone in this way of thinking. I seldom mention to people that I’ve written a novel because what tends to happen after their initial exclamations of admiration and excitement is that they will immediately ask, “Is it getting published?” And in the weeks and months after that come follow-up questions like, “Any progress on the novel? Have you found an agent yet?” which I’ve discovered is a question I like just about as much as “Are you dating anyone?” These are not unreasonable questions, and in my more rational and detached moments I can recognize that people typically ask this out of genuine caring. They’re rooting for me. But in my prickly, more defensive moments, answering those questions can make me feel like a big fat loser. No, I am not anywhere close to being published, no I am not dating anyone, and yes, five years from now I’ll be knitting tea cozies while sitting on the couch with my eighty-five cats even though I don’t know how to knit and am allergic to cats, thank you very much.

I’ve read published authors who say that publication really isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, and that the actual writing is what matters, and even though some of these authors are ones I greatly admire, I still think yeah, right. Easy for you to say, being a published writer. Turns out they might actually be right. I’ve noticed in the past couple months that the more time I spend researching and working towards publication and the less I spend actually writing, the more depressed and doubtful I become. Some of the happiest months of my life in the past two years were the ones where I was fully immersed in writing my novel without any concern about it other than the characters and the story. I’ve also noticed that the longer I go without writing, the harder it is to get started again. I’ve thought about writing this post for the past week, but somehow there was always something else to do, and then another, and then whoops! the day was suddenly over and it got pushed to the next day. Just now, before I finally forced myself to sit down and type, I found it necessary to eat not just one, but two popsicles while watching a discussion on ESPN about the World Cup. This might seem like a reasonable thing for other people, but if you know me, the thought of my watching ESPN in any circumstance is a bit of a stretch, if not an outright cause for hilarity.

I came across a quote recently that said something to the effect that we are what we do on a regular basis. For a good chunk of the past few weeks, I’ve been a housecleaner, sleeper, eater, magazine reader, TV watcher, Target shopper, and phone talker. I’ve also been a sad sack of a worrier who’s been depressed and anxious about not being published and the thought of maybe never being published. But, I am happy to report, as of the past 40 minutes, I am once again a writer.

Explanation

2010-03-31T16:53:00.002-07:00

I was asked by my church to write some pieces for our Holy Week services, which are posted below and will be used, respectively, for Maundy Thursday and Good Friday. My friend Jani also wrote a poem inspired by her meditation on the season, which she has been gracious enough to give me permission to post here. The final poem in this “collection” was not one I wrote for use in any service but is more of a personal reflection on Easter and what it is I am celebrating. May you all find your own moments of reflection in the midst of busy lives to remember and be mindful of this weekend and its significance.

The Communion of Saints

2010-03-31T16:53:00.001-07:00

How quick we are
to think ourselves like Peter,
ready to raise a sword
and lop off an ear
in order to defend our Lord;
or to cherish the idea
of ourselves like John,
reclining in favor
against that divine bosom;
or any one of the others
who ever followed
and found favor in His eyes.

We would never think
ourselves like Judas—
the betrayer,
the conniver,
the snake,
the fool who sold
the Son of God
for thirty pieces of silver.

No, no, we are nothing like him,
not one of us.
We would never betray our Lord
in order to get ahead
or make that extra dollar.
We would never fail Him
in the service of our vanity
or sell him for a flash of pride.
Poor, cunning, evil Judas.
Poor, poor villain worse than us all.

And yet, even he was at the table
to share in the cup
and partake of the bread
and to hear Jesus say,
“This is my body, broken for you.”

Christ Forlorn

2010-03-31T16:51:00.000-07:00

It was Your choice
to drink that bitter cup,
to hold it to Your bruised mouth
and receive its heavy darkness
though You had every reason not to—
Your unstained glory,
Your infinite goodness,
Your authority to bid
the host of heaven
come lift You on their mighty wings.

What could possibly prompt
such a sacrifice,
such an abasement born of grace?
Even those dearest to You
traded love and faithfulness
for the satiety of sleep,
fully heedless
of Your deep night’s agony.

And still You chose.

Your arms spread wide
though there was no embrace,
only the slow tearing of flesh
and the awful gasping for breath
and the lonely desolation
of a suffering no one else
could ever know—
not even the One
who had forsaken You.

Joseph of Arimathea by Jani Pearson

2010-03-31T16:49:00.000-07:00

On the day everything changed
and the One who is Good
took on our despicable scales
even the seething pain
of rebellion,
you witnessed Him
on that sorrowful hill
smeared with bronze
as the snake.

And you were devoted
to the awful work
of loosing His body
from the cruel nails
of washing the stain
from His skin
and carrying His stricken
limbs to death's garden.

You, who could not
earn heaven but
through the needle's eye--
you, the rich, the law abiding
the self sufficient,
disregarded your costly
garments
and draped on your back
this bloody corpse,
this burdened and
forsaken rag,
as if it were
a shimmering robe.

Vigil's End

2010-03-31T16:47:00.000-07:00

(for my mother)

It was in the darkest
hours of the night
that they came
to take your body.
And though we huddled
in another room
and closed the door
between us,
I still could hear
the rolling of the
gurney wheels
that carried you away,
and all I longed to do
was rush to you and cry,
Rise up! Rise up!
And be alive again!

They huddled
in the darkness also,
those faithful Marys,
grieving and waiting
to do what small
service to the dead
they could offer,
only to find
the tomb laid open
and a message
they never even
thought to hope for
though it is all
of our hope now—
He is risen!
He is risen!
He is alive again!

Notes from the Conference

2010-02-02T19:12:00.000-08:00

Some of you have asked about my experience at the writer’s conference in San Diego this past weekend (and thanks for that interest and support, by the way), so here it is. Even though it cost me a pretty penny to go and I had a pounding headache for two solid days from information and sensory overload, typical for me whenever I am around large groups of people for long periods of time, it was totally worth it. To summarize, I learned some very valuable information from the workshops, I got to meet some really interesting people, and I have an editor and agent who are interested in reading my work.

To break things down into more detail, the conference felt a little bit like an episode of The Bachelor. I have only ever watched about twenty minutes of that show, but it’s what came to mind during the first night’s reception, where all of us were holding drinks and mingling. The editors and agents, all bearing a special red label on their nametags, were the eligible bachelors, and all of us hopeful writers were the breathless women clustered around them, batting our eyelashes and thrusting out our chests in hopes of being noticed. Beneath the surface smiles and bright laughter was the nervous edge of desperate longing—“please, oh please, make my dream come true!” One of the agents I had an appointment with the next day sat next to me at the table where I was seated and we had a nice chat (along with the rest of the table) overall, the fly-in-the-ointment being that I found out my manuscript is significantly longer than the typical Young Adult manuscript. By about 15,000 words. Uh oh.

The next morning, I went to a workshop about Perfecting Your Pitch, which I thought was appropriate given that I had my first appointment with an editor scheduled almost immediately. The woman running this workshop kicked things off by pointing at random people and demanding, “Give me your pitch.” Um, aren’t we here to learn how to do that? So, of course, about the third person she pointed at, despite my attempts to avoid eye contact and become indistinguishable from my chair, was me. I stammered and hemmed a bit as all of the oxygen sucked out of my body and finally managed to mutter a couple of flat sentences. “Huh,” was her clearly disappointed response, so naturally I felt terrible, especially as the next person she pointed at gave such an engaging and sparkling pitch that the leader threw back her head in joyful laughter and got us all to applaud. Five minutes after that, I had to leave for my first appointment.

The appointments are 10-minute sessions with editors and agents that you request (and pay for) in advance. You can also submit the first ten pages of your manuscript for one appointment in advance, and fortunately for me and my terrible pitching skills, the advance-reading came first for me. I gathered to the side of the entrance with a bunch of other nervous writers until the staff member ushered the prior group out. She then led us into a room set up with numbered tables, and we all scrambled to find our editor/agent. Apparently, we had gone from an episode of The Bachelor to a type of literary speed-dating, complete with ringing bells to warn us when our time was up. As soon as I sat down and we got past introductions, the editor across from me whipped out my pages and began talking at hyper speed. When I could finally get myself to focus, I realized that she was saying really nice things about my manuscript. She “loved” (true quote) the opening pages and my writing, was very interested in the story, and asked me all kinds of questions about where it was going, which I found myself answering surprisingly easily. I guess knowing from the start that she liked it helped me not keel over and die. That, and I was so shocked at how closely what she was saying matched what I had fantasized she would say (but didn’t expect—hence the “fantasy” bit) that I was jolted out of my nervousness. By the time the bell was ringing, she had written her e-mail address across the top page and told me to send her the entire manuscript, reassuring me that even though her company wasn’t currently acquiring YA works, she was excited to read the rest and knew a number of good agents who would be interested in my work that she could pass it along to. The word count didn’t even phase her. I walked out dizzy with jubilation.

More workshops, and then I had my afternoon appointment with the agent who had told me my manuscript was too long. This was the time for some hard-core pitching since she hadn’t read any of it and didn’t know anything about it (other than it was too long) or about my writing ability. As I began to speak, I felt a wave of heat travel up my neck, through my face, and lodge as a pulsating fire in my left ear. So while I was talking, I was also thinking, “Oh my gosh! My ear is killing me! Can she see that it’s super red??” I wish there were a way to turn off the “stupid thoughts” part of my brain, but unfortunately that occupies such a large space that all thought would probably collapse if the stupid parts were removed. At any rate, her enthusiasm was more in check than the editor’s (all she had was my verbal summary and red ear to go on), but she was still very interested and asked me to send her the first three chapters—after I had cut it down as much as possible first.

In an industry where agents get 300 query letters a week and end up requesting chapters and/or full manuscripts from only a tiny fraction of that number, the interest and willingness of the editor and agent to read my manuscript (or at least part of it) is definitely exciting and significant. It’s a foot in the door that I would have had a much harder time getting into had I not attended this conference and met with them face to face. At the same time, to extend this whole dating metaphor, all I’ve gotten at this point is the promise of a first date (full dinner with the editor, and drinks with the agent if I can lose some weight first). There is no guarantee that I’ll get a call after that, no matter how nicely they say goodnight. Out of those approximately 15,600 query letters the agents get per year, they typically only end up representing about 10-11 works. Those are sobering numbers.

But knowing that I have somewhere to send my work has lit a fire in (or under) me, and I am now working like a maniac to put the new editing skills I learned in the workshops to good use in polishing my novel and removing all the “rookie” mistakes (like the overuse of adverbs) that skilled agents and editors can spot in a second. Hopefully, I’ll be able to send something to the editor by the end of the month. Wish me luck…

Practical Magic

2010-01-27T18:31:00.000-08:00

I feel like I’ve been experiencing a bit of a creative drought lately, and I’m not entirely sure why. Sure, there was the busyness of the holidays and the days I was down for the count because of one bug or another. But I think I’m also struggling to find a rhythm again. For most of last year, I spent hours a week creating new pages of material, and many more hours reading relevant research and daydreaming about various scenes and plot developments. And then I finished the first draft, took a self-satisfied break, and dove into my first round of revision. That also kept me busy and moving forward in a structured kind of rhythm. But now it’s time to revise again, and the plain fact of the matter is that I’m pretty sick of it. This part of the writing process, I am discovering, is very nuts and bolts—nitpicking over wording, figuring out chapter breaks, etc. Writing the actual story was definitely work, but it was fun work and it was creative work. This just feels like work work, and I’ve started finding all sorts of things to do instead of this work, from reading magazines, to cleaning my bathroom (although that is kind of necessary), to watching the E! channel (which is like a television vacuum of the soul).

As I get ready to attend my first writer’s conference down in San Diego this weekend, it occurs to me that this phase might be the true separating point between me being a real writer and me being just a wannabe writer. Anyone who’s dreamed of being a writer has indulged in the fantasy of churning out a manuscript that Presto! Magic! instantly transforms into a bestseller on the shelf at Barnes & Noble because it’s just so amazing that the publishing powers and public simply can’t resist it. But something that’s beginning to stand out to me in interviews of authors and articles about getting published is that it’s not so much about talent or having a good manuscript (although those are both good things to have) as it is about having determination and a little down and dirty grit.

Case in point: I recently read a book entitled Your First Novel: A Published Author and a Top Agent Share the Keys to Achieving Your Dream, and it’s a very practical and helpful book. It’s also brutally honest about how hard and unlikely it is that you will ever actually achieve said dream. Basically, the literary agent who wrote it goes to great lengths to explain how much effort you have to go to in order to make contact with anyone in the publishing industry, how rarely anyone will actually respond to your attempted contacts, how even rarer it is for them to ask to read any part of your manuscript, and then the utterly slim to none odds that someone will actually publish it even if you do manage to find an agent who likes it. On top of that, the process between accepted manuscript and book on the shelf can be a long and arduous one.

Essentially, the subtext of this book seems to be JUST GIVE UP NOW UNLESS YOU’RE REALLY SERIOUS ABOUT THIS AND VERY VERY PERSISTENT. I’ve never thought of myself as a particularly persistent person. Conscientious and disciplined, yes. But persistence requires a sense of self and confidence that I’m not sure I have. I hope so and would like to, but only time will tell if I actually do—time and this upcoming conference, where I’ll have the opportunity to talk face to face with actual agents and editors. It’s an exciting opportunity, but also a slightly terrifying one. Just show them how confident and enthusiastic you are about your work, seems to be the consensus of advice. This, of course, sets off a firestorm of anxiety in me. “I’m sorry, but I don’t think I can overcome a lifetime of neurotic insecurity by January 29th!” has been my inward cry. Fortunately, my friend Jani came to my rescue, advising me to just fake the confidence, which immediately made me feel better. Thanks to dozens of piano recitals throughout my formative years, I can fake poise and confidence like nobody’s business. And as negatively as we tend to view faking anything, it’s actually kind of a good thing in some cases. In my case, it helps me get past that initial panic and hyper self-awareness and ease into the actual subject matter. It’s helped me play Beethoven sonatas, it’s helped me deliver lectures on literature, and I have a feeling it will also help me get excited (hopefully!) about my manuscript when I’m talking to publishing industry people about it.

Really, I suppose faking it works even for writing and creativity. If I sit around and wait to feel the “real thing,” I could be sitting around and waiting for a long time. It’s when I force myself to sit down and write even when I’m not feeling like it at all—when I’m faking it—that the real thing comes along and hours have flown by because I’ve slipped into that zone that makes me impervious to my stiff neck, growling stomach, and even my feared lack of creative resources. Like magic. Ta Da!

Timeless Hope

2009-12-06T16:38:00.000-08:00

As in past years, I wrote something for the Advent season at my church, which I read in this morning's service and is posted below. I wrote it while listening to a gorgeous composition by Arvo Pärt, and was fortunate enough to also be able to read it with that same musical accompaniement provided by a very talented pianist and cellist at my church. To experience a taste of that text & music combo (which I think is superior to the text alone), try reading it while listening to this YouTube clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QtFPdBUl7XQ (you'll need to cut and paste the link into a new window).

Before the land and the sea,
there was God.
Before skyscrapers and freeways,
there was God.
Before interviews and exams,
there was God.
Before the stock market and unemployment,
there was God.
Before the tumor and chemotherapy,
there was God.
Before old age and the fear of loneliness,
there was God.

And when the former things have passed away
and the last of the infinite stars have faded,
there also will be God,
the Alpha and the Omega,
the Beginning and the End,
the One who can bring beginning out of end,
making all things new.

For He is not only the beginning and the end,
He is the middle too—
this middle where we wait in longing,
this middle that can feel so interminable,
as it must have felt to Mary,
gasping for breath as she labored to deliver her baby,
and as it must have felt to Christ,
gasping for breath on the cross
as He labored to deliver His creation.

Let us remember this in our own gasping labor,
and let this remembrance of God at the beginning,
and the middle, and the end,
lift up our hearts and make us people of hope
in the time that we have been granted.

Christmas Time Is Here

2009-11-30T18:28:00.000-08:00

Before I step onto the soapbox waiting in front of me, I feel that I ought to make a confession. Over the years, especially the past five or six, I’ve heard a great deal of grumbling from various people in my life about the crass commercialism that has taken over Christmas and sucked nearly all, if not entirely all, the deeper meaning and religious significance out of it, leaving it a gaudy, hollow shell of what it ought to be. And while I could see the point these people were making and even intellectually agree to a certain extent, there was still a large part of me that didn’t care and was quite happy to be caught up in every last cloying aspect of Christmas, from a profusion of decorations in my house to a near constant stream of Christmas music in my car. Part of this was due to the fact that I led a Christmas-deprived childhood (a story for another time), which meant that I had a tendency to over-indulge once I was free of those restrictions, much in the way that I ate a ridiculous amount of Fruit Loops my first year of college (they were in huge dispenser bins! available at any hour!) having been deprived of sugar cereals throughout my formative years. Another part of it was that my mother loved Christmas, and continuing some of the traditions she began in the years before she died helped me feel connected to her. And, finally, I suspect that a small part of my enthusiasm and willingness to overlook any flaws in the way mainstream America approached Christmas stemmed from the fact that I am, deep down, kind of a cheesy sentimentalist.

That said, there is something different about this year. I don’t know if it’s because things have actually changed externally or whether the change is internal, or some kind of mixture of both, but I’m finding the onslaught of this year’s Christmas season somewhere between irritating and distressing. It started in a Target parking lot about a week and a half ago, when a humongous black SUV decked out in Christmas decals and sporting a wreath on the front grill and bells hanging from the back bumper pulled up next to me as I was getting out of my car. Shaking my head over this, I walked into the store and was immediately assaulted by a profusion of Christmas decorations, displays, and music. And this was a full week before Thanksgiving, which caused me all sorts of holiday confusion. I love Christmas and get as excited about it as the next person, but honestly, CALM DOWN, AMERICA! Let’s enjoy Thanksgiving and some fall leaves and plastic cornucopias at least until the actual day is over!

I think what has disturbed me the most, however, is the rampant and strident bombardment of store advertisements. Because of some issues with my satellite receiver/DVR, I was without television for a good week prior to Thanksgiving, and since I have apparently become Mildred in Fahrenheit 451 and can’t go for more than a couple days without my “family,” I ended up watching a few episodes of the shows I follow online. This venue forces one to watch short commercials interspersed throughout the shows, and one such set I had to suffer through was a spate of ads for Target. I am not trying to single out Target—I love Target!—but these ads featured a certifiably insane blond woman frenetically prepping for the Black Friday sale in all sorts of wacky ways, including jogging down her neighborhood street with a fully loaded shopping cart. As she proclaimed wild-eyed to the camera, “I haven’t slept in days!” So not only are the advertisers openly admitting that such rabid consumerism is crazy, but they’re using said craziness to promote and encourage that type of behavior in the rest of us. As in, ha ha! Aren’t people nuts? And don’t you want to be that way too? Because who wouldn’t want to wreck their health and sanity for the best deals ever?

Even while recognizing the wrongness of this, I’ve still had to fight not to get sucked into the undertow. I get as easily overloaded by sensory input as a four-year-old (a trip to Costco drains me), and the idea of shopping in a store during the wee hours of the morning with hundreds of other aggressive shoppers sounds like one of Dante’s circles of hell to me. And yet with all the coupons and advertisements I’ve been getting in the mail and seeing on TV (now that it’s working again), I feel an almost primal urge—I must go shopping! I must take advantage of these deals! I must not miss out! And it’s not limited to Black Friday. Now there’s Cyber Monday, and about fifty e-mails in my Inbox offering me free shipping and 20% off for a limited time only. Hurry! Hurry! Don’t miss out! I ended up wasting an hour online last night (an hour I’ll never get back) looking at all kinds of products I don’t need and would never buy for anyone else just because I felt like I had to buy something. Fortunately, I awoke from this fevered state before I could actually put something in my cyber-cart and check out, wasting money and sucking on the sour taste of regret.

This issue may be old news to some people, but this is the first year it’s bothered me to the point of interfering with my enjoyment of the season. As I said earlier, maybe it’s an internal shift. But I think it also has to do with what’s been happening in the economy—which is very connected to what’s happening in the culture—and the fact that all this aggressive push to consume, consume, consume feels so out of synch with reality. Economic hardship is just that—hardship—and I’m not trying to gloss over the true suffering that people are experiencing as a result of the downturn in the economy. But hardship also offers opportunity to reflect, re-evaluate, and re-prioritize in ways that can bring a kind of health and clarity that times of plenty can blunt or distort. We’ve been given (whether we like it or not) this opportunity along with the option to simplify, pare things down to what really matters, and thus deepen the meaning and significance of what we do, what we give, and what we are given. But instead, it’s business as usual or even business MORE than usual, as the news gleefully crows (because the only thing that matters is economic growth, after all). Instead of reflection and thoughtfulness, we have frenzy. Or so it seems. I am doing my best to say no to that, to shut out the loud shouts of the advertisers, and hopefully others are too. I’m still going to put up my decorations and play my corny CDs. But I’m going to do my best to delete those e-mails, throw away those flyers and coupons, and avoid buying anything I don’t have a very good reason to buy in the coming month. Because contrary to what I’m being told, I have more than enough.

Not Just For Girls

2009-09-27T08:34:00.000-07:00

I recently attended a book discussion group, which, on that particular evening, was focused on Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. After discussing everything from social class to the role of parents in the novel, one of the male attendees confessed that he’d initially been leery about reading it—you know, female author, female protagonist, story about love and marriage—but that he ended up really enjoying it and was really impressed by the quality of Austen’s writing. This sentiment was echoed not only by some of the other male participants, but also by one of the female attendees, who said that she’d initially been reluctant to read it thinking it was “just a chick lit” novel, but was pleasantly surprised to discover that it had real depth to it.

Aside from feeling a bit defensive towards anyone who might harbor any doubts as to the quality of Jane Austen’s novels (I will kung fu fight anyone who doesn’t recognize her skill as a writer, FYI), I was struck by both how (unintentionally) insulting the comments were beneath their praise, as well as by how naturally most of us tend to accept such comments as perfectly legitimate and reasonable. But really, they’re a bit ludicrous, if it’s possible for anything to be a “bit” ludicrous. When was the last time you heard a woman express reluctance to read a novel because it was written by a man and featured a male protagonist? As in, “Yeah, I know that Crime and Punishment is considered a classic, but I don’t know if I really want to read a book written by a guy about a guy’s experience.” Apparently, the sexist notion that male works and male experiences are universal while female works and female experiences are relevant only to women, and only might be a worthwhile read for men (or intellectual women, at that) if they are extremely well written and have withstood the test of time and/or have been critically acclaimed, is still alive and well and so integral to our culture that most people don’t even notice this double-standard. I fall prey to it myself sometimes, hesitating to recommend novels written by and about women to my male friends, internally questioning the novels’ “worthiness” in ways I wouldn’t think twice about with my female friends.

I partly blame the invention of that ubiquitous term “chick lit.” While it’s catchy and fun to say, it’s a bit of an oxymoron. Certainly there is a plethora of fiction aimed primarily (if not solely) at women, who seem to consume it in abundance—novels that feature the development of a romantic relationship of some sort or other and focus only on that relationship and its fulfillment without any particular concern for larger thematic content, social commentary, or psychological insight. But no one in their right minds would call those novels “literature.” The very definition of that term suggests some kind of deeper, universal quality. And if that is the case, why shouldn’t any work of literature be relevant to both men and women regardless of the gender of its author and/or the protagonist? But that term has come to represent, in some people’s minds, any and all novels written by and about women, which in turn allows them to be dismissed as a whole.

Well, Jane Austen always writes about marriage, is one dismissive comment I’ve heard in the past—and more than once, at that. If you want to be that reductive, then you could argue that John Updike also writes a lot about marriage. Usually very dysfunctional marriages, but marriages occupy a great portion of his fiction nonetheless, and no male ever seems to be sheepish about reading John Updike. Granted, we females probably haven’t helped the issue in all of our romanticized co-opting of Jane Austen and our swooning over Mr. Darcy in his various film incarnations. But I’ve seen the same dismissive male reaction to any number of other female authors whose novels feature female protagonists (the same could be said for films as well—“chick lit,” meet “chick flick”).

When I raised this issue within the group, I mostly got a few “hmms,” nods, and the odd look or two. My friend, who was hosting, chimed in that she completely agreed, but there were no other serious takers and the issue dropped quietly to the side. When the discussion moved on to something else, my friend leaned over and whispered, “We women are just more versatile.” She said it in a half-joking manner, but after reflecting on it some, I think she’s absolutely right. And I realized that not only are women more open-minded in our approach to literature, but also that it’s probably, in part, because we are given far more permission to be so than men are. We enjoy a reading latitude that is not as readily available to men in our culture. In my junior high and early high school years, I discovered the novels of Louis L’Amour and devoured them by the dozens. After exhausting myself on those, I then switched to Georgette Heyer’s regency romance novels, and then, after finding myself enthralled by Jack Higgins’ military thriller The Eagle Has Landed, went and checked out every other novel of his I could find in my local library. I never once had to endure a single mocking comment or raised eyebrow over what I was reading no matter what was on the cover. Had a boy my age carried around a copy of a Georgette Heyer novel featuring women in empire-styled dresses and hats with feathers, however, he probably would have had to endure more than a few—that is, if he had ever felt comfortable enough to take it off the shelf to begin with. No one ever teased me for being a girl reading a western or a military thriller, but you can be sure there would be some taunts and snickers directed at a boy reading a female coming-of-age novel, a romance, or anything else with a girl on the cover.

I am not denying that there are gender differences, and I realize that at times there is some true and legitimate gravitation amongst each gender towards certain genres or subject matter over others. I have no problem with that. But I do have a problem with equating worthwhile and universal human experience to only (or mostly) the male experience and perspective, not only for women’s sake but for men’s as well. Surely if women are expected and allowed to legitimately enjoy the full spectrum of novels available, men should be expected and allowed to as well. And that freedom and breadth of experience for men, somewhat ironically, starts by all of us consciously acknowledging and affirming that women’s experiences and interests have just as much value as men’s—something we ought to be able to do easily in our current “advanced” society, and yet, as I recently experienced, something that still goes against the grain.

Nothing New Under the Sun

2009-09-09T18:02:00.000-07:00

This morning, without so much as a by-your-leave, my Yahoo! homepage changed its entire format, disconcerting and confusing me before I’d even taken two sips of my tea. As usual, this change has been done under the guise of New! and Better! and numerous other exclamatory claims that I find myself less than convinced of. These claims are everywhere. Every time I turn on my computer, it seems, some program wants to update to the latest newer and better software (you know—8.1 instead of 8.0). I have been doggedly ignoring the prompts from iTunes for weeks now. The last time I updated their software, all it did was change all of my song listings from a neat, easily (and quickly) scrollable list of names and titles to pictures of all the album covers. Now it takes three times as long to scroll down and I have to go through the extra step of clicking on the album cover to get to the songs. And despite all the boasts about how many great new features I’d be able to enjoy with the updated software, I have experienced absolutely no improvement in my iPod experience. It’s the same old same old, only now with new annoyances.

This is not to say that I am a complete Luddite (or neo-Luddite, which is probably the most appropriate term—honestly, even the terms require newness!), although I must confess that I do have strong Luddite tendencies. I recently bought one of those netbooks that have been heavily advertised lately, although I didn’t even notice the advertisements until after I bought it and my reasons for buying one have absolutely nothing to do with what the cool, hip, or hot trend is right now. For all I know, netbooks are already so five minutes ago. What did convince me to get one was the ease with which it would allow me to write and have access to the internet while traveling. I was also attracted to the built-in camera and microphone that made it possible to have a video Skype call with my nieces and nephews this past weekend.

So now and then new is good—even great. What I get miffed about and am practicing my own small resistance to is the strident onslaught of “new” and “improved” that is so overwhelming and inescapable that the pull to slide into passivity and just accept it can be almost impossible to resist. I have to be careful, though, not to slide into the opposite end of the passive spectrum and just automatically say “no” all the time either. What is required, I am beginning to realize, is an active evaluation of whatever is being offered and an assessment of what it is I value: is this truly going to improve my quality of life? Does what I currently have really need improvement/replacement or am I happy with it the way it is? What, if anything, is being sacrificed or discarded to acquire or make way for the “new"?

The latter two questions are the ones I can most easily forget to ask myself. When I do feel an urge to go “new” with something, there is often an underlying fear driving my decision, as I imagine there is for some other people as well—a fear of what we might be missing out on if we don’t get the latest and supposedly greatest. Everyone else is getting or has [fill in the blank]—what if we get left behind or left out or suffer some kind of lack? And it’s usually pretty difficult to think about something being sacrificed or discarded when you’re caught up in the heady, early-days infatuation with the shiny, pretty, new whatever it is. But something new will always take the place of something else or occupy some space of its own in your life, which means something else has to give way. In some cases that’s a necessary and good thing, and some of those old things need a good purge and the money is well spent. But not always, and even perhaps not often.

So while I might not be able to stop Yahoo! from changing my homepage, and while it might be just plain silly for me to resist updating my Adobe flash player, I am still going to do my best to stem the tide of "new" flowing at me and make decisions on my own timetable and according to my own vision of a quality life. I’ll probably still get swept up in the waters now and then, but hopefully the boulders of common sense and a life that transcends consumerism will pop up now and then on my way downstream so I can grab hold of them and catch my breath.

Warning

2009-08-24T09:43:00.000-07:00

I awoke this morning
to find a cockroach
in my dining room—
obscenely fat and black and creeping.

I could barely contain my revulsion
as I sprayed it with poison
and watched it scurry, flip over,
and flail to its death,
gagging as I disposed of it
and sanitized all the places
it had touched.

I hate them
with every fiber of my being
and resolutely believe
that they should be obliterated
from the face of the earth.
For what good can there be
in a creature that flees from the light
and feasts on decay and filth?

I’m sure some scientist
could tell me they have
their function and their role to play
in this beautiful, ruinous world,
but that does nothing to soften
the hardness of my heart.
My disgust is too great,
my enmity too implacable.

I would kill all of you
if I could.

Birth Announcement

2009-08-02T17:21:00.000-07:00

It's been eleven months in the making, but as of this past Wednesday evening, July 29, I have finished the first draft of my novel. My baby is 164 pages long (single-spaced) and weighs probably about 1.5 to 2 lbs. It's not quite ready for public viewing (baby needs some work & refinement first), but above are some early photos. Since I haven't actually read it yet (I just wrote it), I can't make any claims about its quality, which may very well be lacking, but I must say that there's quite a bit of satisfaction in simply having finished a certain quantity of work, contrary to the popular saying. As I take a break from it, I am experiencing a fair amount of postpartum disorientation, but it won't be long before I begin the arduous task of revision, so I'm doing my best to enjoy this intermission. Thanks so very much to all of you who (quietly & discreetly) encouraged and supported me along the way even though I was so shy about discussing it. Being "public" about it still feels strange and uncomfortable, but at least I now have a tangible product vs. just the idea, and I honestly don't think that would have happened without friends and family cheering me on. So cheers to you!

Consider the Sparrow

2009-07-10T10:23:00.000-07:00

Consider the sparrow
outside my kitchen window
fluffing and preening
with delight in his sparrowness
and the warmth of
the morning sun upon him
and the solid breadth of
the wall beneath him
and the absence of
cats with teeth and claws.

Consider the wildflowers
blazing purple and yellow
even in the midst
of the loneliest
and most abandoned of lots,
as though to proclaim
this too belongs to God
and cannot resist
His touch of glory.

Consider the way
a row of monstrous SUVs,
growling with impatient power,
bow before the tottering,
creeping progress of a man
too old and bent to heed
the light at the intersection,
not one of them moving
'til he has safely reached the curb.

Consider the scrumptious cold
of an orange juice popsicle
on your tongue in the
midst of an August swelter,
when you are browned and spent
from a day in the sun.

Consider if we were
to consider all the myriad
scores of miracles that
surround and bless us daily,
how brimming full of
gratitude we would be,
and how our leaden hearts
would spread forth
their own wings of gladness
in the bounty of God's provision.

Student Bloopers: Part Duh

2009-06-18T19:05:00.000-07:00

As any teacher will tell you, the most wonderful time of the year is not Christmas, but the last day of school. As much as I am truly sad to say goodbye to some of my students (especially graduating seniors), I am never sad to say goodbye to all of the papers I've had to grade all year. Most of the time, it is tedious, mind-numbing, soul-sucking work, but every now and then I stumble across gems like the following, which have all been taken from journals, essays, and quizzes from my sophomores this past year:

1. One bad thing about getting older is things like loose eyesight and hair.
2. When your old your not as fast as before and you can’t get on many rides in the theme parks.
3. When you’re old you can get chicken necks and other things you don’t want like flabby arms.
4. The good thing when you are old is that you already have your life sedaled. You already found your true love, and you don’t have to work really hard because you are already retarded.
5. When you get older you won’t be able to work, but the government will start giving you some money.
6. I think growing old is not a good idea.
7. Something I fear about school is testes.
8. She got kicked out of school for the position of drugs.
9. Maria decided she wanted a family and went man seeking.
10. Unfortunately, her grandmother got sick and pasted away.
11. Pete is 42, he lives in Garden Grove, and he’s still alive.
12. Her most embarrassing moment was when she fell while wherein a dress.
13. She would always go to school with her only friend, who was her best friend.
14. He would always get picked on by his older brothers and he always wanted to probe himself with his brothers to show them that he can do better.
15. He affected others greatly because of his neglectual character.
16. When people start gossiping and tell their friends not to talk to certain people, that starts prejudice. This can happen at school, work, etc. This is a major problem all over the world and has actually started a couple of wars.
17. Regarding Claudio from Much Ado About Nothing: “He is a very gentle man and is easily pleasured.”
18. Q: What town is To Kill a Mockingbird set in? A: Mowtown

Fahrenheit 451 quiz answers:
19. Captain Beatty said the reason they ban books is because they want the equal smart rights for everyone.
20. Montag calls Emergency because Mildred has overdozed.
21. Mankind is like the mythical Phoenix because they are the same.

The Blue Angel

2009-06-13T16:16:00.000-07:00

They’ve cut down more
of the old trees in the park
and the ground is scarred
where they used to stand,
another reminder
of how things change,
like the scrawny boy sophomore
whose papers I used to grade
who showed up yesterday,
a strapping proudly married man,
to fix my leaking faucet.
Just blink, it seems, and
everything becomes something
it wasn’t before.

But as I walked in mourning
over those trees
and this life that passes by,
there he suddenly was,
cruising ‘round the corner
into my line of sight—
suited up in his yellow helmet
and blue jumpsuit,
blue wooden wings
fixed firmly to the sides
of the bicycle he pedals so proudly
every Saturday morning
while the ancient boom box
perched in the back blasts space music
and the blue and yellow flag
flutters triumphantly over him.

They say his father was one of the
Blue Angels I remember seeing
in an air show that made me gasp
in wonder when I was a little girl.
And when I was a little girl
and saw this man pedaling his
airplane bike so solemnly by,
I’d laugh and call him crazy.

And he probably is
in the general sense of the word.
But this morning,
after decades have passed
and he’s still pedaling,
I call him lovely
and wish there were a way
I could tell him
how his constancy gives me hope
and makes my mourning heart glad.

The Amazing Race--Final Episode

2009-05-11T18:36:00.000-07:00

So another issue I would ask producers should we ever, say, sit down and have some lunch together is how they plan the times for the next leg of the journey and whether they know in advance that there is only one flight going out that everyone will end up on no matter what time they leave their starting point. I mean, they build it up so much that Team #1 gets to leave ahead of everyone else, and yet it seems that they all end up at the airport just sitting around, which makes me feel like the first place people get the raw end of the deal since they have to sit around the airport even longer than everyone else. I suppose if someone jetted out four hours ahead of everyone else, that would pretty much kill the excitement and tension regarding who is going to win, but still, it seems kind of lame. That part aside, it did make for an intense and exciting race once that plane landed in Hawaii. I always feel a touch of sympathy for the camera men who have to keep up with the sprinting contestants while lugging camera equipment. Do they ever fall? I would if I were trying to run while holding a camera. But back on track. My feelings about the contestants have evolved enough through the course of the show that I wasn’t rooting strongly for a specific team—mostly, I was just rooting for someone to beat out the cheerleaders. Phil hit the nail on the head regarding Margie, who was indeed the Bionic Woman with that whole pig-carrying thing. She hoisted it onto her shoulders like it was a slightly heavy backpack while Tammy screamed like she was giving birth in some 1860s prairie cabin just to get it five inches off the ground for three steps. And while I know it was petty of me, I did enjoy watching her snap at Victor towards the end. Their incessant cheeriness and positivity has seemed almost unreal (not to mention grating) at times, and it made like her more to see that sisterly irritation finally flare up. As much as I have disliked the cheerleaders’ rudeness towards cab drivers throughout this competition, I did feel a tiny bit sorry for them (even as I laughed) at the continuation of the Curse of the Problematic Cab Drivers, which, in this case, included their cab driver’s inability to find their location and his need to stop for gas. They certainly met their match in the dispatcher who informed the driver on speakerphone that she was not their personal concierge and that she didn’t have time to look things up for them. Oh, snap! Bitches, meet Mega Bitch.

The final surfboard challenge was déjà vu in more ways than one. Not only were they reassembling all the stops on their journey via surfboard symbols, but we also got a repeat performance of Luke running around in his black skivvies and experiencing agonizing frustration. It was Chekhov all over again with those last two surfboards. It was nice to see a little cooperation between the cheerleaders and him at the end, though. Despite their shrill rudeness at times, the cheerleaders do at least have some sense of honor. Favorite line in the episode: “I got them all except for Jesus!” That’s right, Jaime—forget Jesus, and you can forget about the million dollars. But I was touched that at the end, when Jaime was being as hard on herself about the surfboards as she has been on everyone else in this competition, Cara showed her some grace by reassuring her that she had done a great job and that it had been an honor just to complete the race with her. Hopefully, Jaime will learn from that example. And while they haven’t been my favorites in this competition, I feel pretty okay that Tammy and Victor won. I appreciate that they never got ugly about things, at least in the episodes that I saw, and that they seemed to be genuinely having such a good time. Plus, I’m sure the money will come in handy for those two lawyers. I felt bad for Luke’s disappointment, but as his mom pointed out, he’d had a great time every step of the way, and his tearful tribute to his mother at the end made it clear that this was one of those priceless experiences they’re always going on about in the Mastercard commercials. So, see? Everyone’s a winner. Just not of a million dollars. I’m sorry it has come to an end, and I’ll miss the comments from those of you who have been reading (thanks, by the way!), but there’s always next season…

On A Different Note...

2009-05-06T17:19:00.000-07:00

While I wish my life the last few months were as fun as watching The Amazing Race and writing about it have been, the reality is that my siblings and I have been struggling with some very difficult and painful issues related to my father's health, and there are many days when it seems like nothing more bad or complicated could possibly happen on top of what we're already dealing with...and then it does. Monday was one of those days, and so I wrote the following poem for myself, for my family, and for anyone else who is feeling a bit battered by life.

Hope Trees

We’ve all seen them,
those trees in the open spaces
that have weathered, unprotected,
the buffeting blows of strong winds
that swoop and howl against them
over and over and over again
until the trees stand hunched
in the shape of those winds
and bend in the direction of their will
even when the air is still
and the sun shines merrily upon them.

There is tragedy written
in those twisted limbs,
and the gnarled bark
is worn and tired.
And yet we stare at them
and marvel at their beauty
and the story their shapes tell.

They have endured.
Despite the wind’s best efforts,
despite the assault of tireless troubles,
they have endured.

They have endured,
and so, I hope, shall we.

The Amazing Race--May 3 Episode

2009-05-04T16:34:00.000-07:00

While all the episodes have had some unexpected elements and at least some level of suspense, this episode seemed like the twistiest one yet, which I greatly enjoyed. For once, Tammy and Victor’s Chinese-speaking abilities actually did give them an advantage, which was a relief—how many times could their parents endure crying with shame and disappointment in their offspring anyway? But here’s a little tip for Victor—don’t say “I’ll let you say it this time” to your sister and then immediately talk over her like a bad echo. Either own up to your assness and take over completely or actually step aside and let her be the one to accomplish something. None of this wishy-washy in between business. Even though it’s probably best for relations between China and America that they didn’t, I was a little disappointed that the cheerleaders didn’t do the Chinese order challenge. That seemed so rife with comical rage possibilities. I was sure that Kisha and Jen would come in last by a long stretch when they were U-turned, but I underestimated the time-sucking power of getting lost. I wish they’d had a clock or timer on screen to show just how long those cheerleaders were wandering around and accosting the locals for directions. I started to think that maybe Kisha and Jen, who surprised and impressed me with their ability to handle the Chinese orders (after several hilariously translated missteps), were going to easily bypass them. But who knew that when they both ended up at the gross not-food-posing-as-food station, Jaime would uncover a superpower ability to chow down on things that should never, ever, under any circumstances, be put in any human being’s mouth to be chewed on and swallowed? That is the point in the competition where I would have politely thanked the producers and told them that they could keep their million dollars because there was no way in hell I’d crunch on a scorpion or masticate on some plump, deep fried larvae. But I digress. So there they were, sisters and cheerleaders, neck and neck for that final slot when—alack and alas!—water, that evil adversary, got the best of Jen once again and a visit to a Port-a-Potty cost them the race. I guess, as sister Kisha put it, Jen couldn’t pee on herself—or could she? I doubt anyone would have noticed under those long robes she was wearing, but I guess they weren’t willing to push it that far. I’m glad her sister doesn’t blame her (she does), and that they could finish strong (in a Port-a-Potty vs. balled up and crying by the side of a pool), though. The one disappointment in this episode was the greeter at the end. After all that excitement, all we get is some English-speaking woman in a generic white jacket? What’s up with that? Where are the acrobatists? Or someone playing an Er-hu at least? You might be hot, Host Phil, but you let me down with that one.

The Amazing Race--April 26 Episode

2009-04-28T17:40:00.000-07:00

I kind of hate to admit it, but Tammy and Victor are starting to grow on me just a bit. Victor still has the most annoying voice ever, but they are so darn earnest and good-natured about everything—even brown-nosing the airline clerks into giving everyone else crummy seats—that it’s hard to actively dislike them anymore. To do so would feel a little like kicking an eager-to-please puppy. Fortunately, the Boring Sisters have stepped up to the plate in terms of giving me plenty to hate on. I think my favorite let-me-flaunt-my-blatant-ignorance-and-egocentricity moment was when Keisha and Jen were making fun of the blank faces the Chinese people had whenever Keisha and Jen tried to speak English to them. Airing her disgust at the native people’s inability to accommodate their lack of Chinese, Jen joked to the camera, “Yeah, they just get this blank Zombie look, like this.” I waited for her to make the face, and then realized that she was making the face, only it was the same face Jen always has—wide, blank eyes and an expression so frozen that it looks like she had an overdose of Botox. I love it when people on TV are unintentionally ironic—it’s like this awesome bonus. Jen and her sister’s complete lack of affect continues to be a stumbling block for me in terms of being able to relate to them. Even when Jen was having her meltdown about the water and crying her eyes out, Keisha’s voice when she was encouraging her to “finish strong” had about the same level of warmth and expression as the woman who asks me, “What city?” when I dial 411. My level of sympathy for Jen was also somewhat marred by the fact that I couldn’t help wondering why she didn’t just walk across the pool (she certainly seemed tall enough to) and move her arms like she was swimming the way someone I know used to do in swim class?

The foot massage scene, with its orgasmic yowls of pain, was pretty fantastic, and I actually found myself digging my knuckles into the bottom of my own bare foot at one point trying to see if it could really hurt that much. And yes, yes it could. I don’t think Jen and Keisha could have called those masseuses’ faces blank—they positively radiated sadistic glee. And while I don’t technically believe in karma, I did have to wonder if this show is an exception when the cheerleaders, who were so pumped and emotional at arriving to their destination first for the first time in this competition, were blandly informed by host Phil (looking rather hot in his zipped up, black leather jacket) that their journey was not yet over. Their faces fell flatter than a soufflé pulled out of the oven too quickly. Coming on the heels of the Cheater Brothers getting eliminated after falling behind due to their cheating ways, this gives me some small hope that every once in awhile, people do get what they really deserve. So that bit’s good, but I still kind of missed the usual local greeter at the end. Like, what—no scary ballerina girl? No dude playing flutes out of his nose? Hopefully, we’ll be back on track with that next week.

Amazing Race--April 19 Episode

2009-04-20T18:19:00.000-07:00

This episode was one of many revelations, the first of which was that Victor and Tammy are just as annoying in Chinese as they are in English. And despite their reminding us about a million times that they spoke Chinese and flaunting it right and left with as many unnecessary phrases as possible, they still ended up in second place. I guess, as Victor told one of the calligraphy guys in a suck-up attempt to get ahead, that means their parents are out there somewhere crying. Speaking of crying, I was disappointed and saddened to see Luke act like, well, pretty much a big baby. I get that one of the Boring Sisters (Keisha?) bumped him from behind, but he handled himself just fine with his elbow-up arm block. I was firmly in his corner of righteous indignation when Keisha called him a “bitch” and agree that that was uncalled for and definitely lacked sportsmanship. However, when Luke turned around and did the exact same thing to her at the next stop (i.e. rush bump her from behind) and then tried to play the victim a second time, my sympathy wilted. And when he threw his temper tantrum at the end and he and Margie started yelling about all the discrimination he had suffered as a deaf person, my sympathy shriveled up and died. I don’t doubt his disability has made life hard at times, and there have been a number of moments when my heart has ached for him when he was struggling with something in the show (see: Chekhov). But his conflict with Keisha had nothing to do with his disability and, if anything, her getting a little rough with him demonstrated that she saw him as a competitive equal. So, Luke, my boy, it’s time to pull up your skirt and be a man. Stop whining about a shove and an insult and getting your hand pecked by a mean bird. All that drama just makes everyone uncomfortable—especially the ultra-pleaser siblings Tammy and Victor who looked like they’d rather have been last than stuck between the warring parties at the end. Actually, maybe the drama was good since their discomfort kept them silent. Despite my disappointment at that glimpse into the wimpier, self-pitying side of Luke and his slightly over-reactive mother, I still like them far more than the Boring Sisters. I’m trying, but I just can’t find anything to like about them. Can anyone else? If so, please do share. Even the angry cheerleaders, who still find it so outrageous that there are so many people in other countries that don’t speak English (like those Chinese dance instructors that only speak Chinese! That’s, like, me living in the United States and only speaking English! Oh, wait…), have more appeal. They are at least entertaining. And pretty to look at.

The Amazing Race--April 12 Episode

2009-04-14T06:46:00.000-07:00

April 12, 2009

I don’t know if it was just me or what, exactly, but this episode just didn’t seem as great as the past episodes. Maybe because it spent so much time focusing on the Boring Sisters, who showed barely any emotion (monotone voices must run in the family) even having left their travel documents on the dock and having to run around dirty streets in their bare feet. That alone would have made me hysterical. Perhaps it is wrong to judge someone for not being more like me (rather egocentric, no?), but I find it hard to relate to them. The one moment I did feel some stirring of genuine sympathy and liking for them was when they started crying when Phil told them they were still in the game. But darn it if I don’t really miss that father and son! I wish they hadn’t been eliminated last week. Tammy and Victor continue to do a good job defending their title as the Most Annoying Sibling Duo Ever. Actually, all Victor has to do for that is speak aloud, but being the high achievers that they are, they threw in some extras for us, such as Victor’s incompetence in attaching the propeller, which took him about four times as long as every other contestant. And I swear that Tammy must have a chip implant that programs her to say “Good job, Victor,” even when he’s doing a terrible job. Someday, girl’s gonna snap, and all that submissive younger Asian sister support is going to turn into one giant beat-down. Or so I hope. That would surely be an episode worth watching. Luke and his mom continue to dominate thanks to Mom’s surprising ability to fit people with dentures. That had to be one of the grossest challenges ever. Who comes up with these things, anyway? At least Luke & Margie got to wear gloves, a mask, and even protective eyewear, whereas all those toothless people had to endure having things shoved in their mouths that had been sitting around in bowls of water and even (I shudder at the thought) recently shoved into someone else’s mouth. Another question on my list for the producers: was there any disinfectant in those bowls? Please say yes. And why are the Cheater Brothers so dumb? Did they not learn their lesson the last time around when they were cooling their heels under that tree and watching other people get checked in ahead of them? Do they not see those cameras following them everywhere and recording their every move? Obviously not, because they continued their cheating ways. Perhaps their brains are as stunted as their bodies. They didn’t get eliminated, but now they have the super-duper delays and speed bumps and blockades and whatever else the show throws at people like that in the next episode. Looks like good entertainment for next week, although from the previews, it also looks like there’s going to be some sort of smack down between a Boring Sister and Luke. I feel a little uneasy about that, but we’ll just have to wait and see…

A little commentary on The Amazing Race

2009-04-06T19:17:00.000-07:00

For the past six weeks, I have been part of a group that meets regularly to discuss pop culture. The leader gave us all composition books and asked us to keep journals about anything related to pop culture—TV shows we watch, movies, music, etc.—and I ended up writing about a show that’s new to me—The Amazing Race. My friend Diana, who’s also in the group, asked me to post them here so she could share them with others, and since I’m not dumb enough to turn someone down who is actually asking to read my stuff and share it, the four entries I’ve written thus far are posted below.

March 8, 2009

Just finished watching The Amazing Race for the first time since so many people I know like this show and for once I’m caught up (mostly) with my DVR backlog. I enjoyed it and can see the appeal, but this has got to be the most stressful travel show ever. I understand the logic of why they can’t show these kinds of mundane details, but it started to make me anxious that we never got to see the contestants eat, drink, or sleep. It seems like they are just constantly on the go, all hours of the day and night. The bobsled thing looked like tons of fun, but when the deaf boy was struggling to spell “Chekhov,” I almost had to change the channel. Really, CBS? Are you going to make a deaf boy cry? But then he finally got it and everything was okay, and according to the previews, it looks like he may turn out to be a kind of evil U-turning deaf boy. And just as I was thinking, “how is it that none of these people have heard of Chekhov?” the Asian guy who seems more like the sister than the brother of the brother-sister team said, “Who doesn’t know Chekhov?” and I realized that we’re both smug bastards. As enjoyable and entertaining as the show was, though, there are a few aspects that made me uncomfortable. For example, does the cab driver who got stiffed by the stuntman brothers get the rest of his fee from the show’s producers? And I also couldn’t help but wonder what all those Russian guys were thinking watching all these ridiculous Americans in their brand-name sportswear doing the jobs they have to do every day of their lives as a game, and one, at that, where they could totally screw up and knock over a huge pile of wood and just run away to build some tacky Disney shutters instead. Maybe they are all well-paid by the show and enjoy the diversion—the crazy singing woman sure seemed to—but do they secretly resent us and just see it as one more example of how Americans view the world as their playground? Hopefully not, but part of me wouldn’t blame them if they did, even if it is good television.

March 15, 2009

Well, I got my wish—I actually got to see the show’s contestants sleep for a few minutes, even if it was on a train’s midget-sized sleeper bunks. I loved it when one of the blonds exclaimed indignantly to the camera, “This isn’t a vacation, you know!” Yeah, lady, I kind of got that last week when they made you stack a giant pile of wood and run around a lot. I don’t think that would seem like a vacation to anyone except maybe people in prison. I was very relieved to discover that despite the promos, the deaf boy is actually a super nice kid. I think I would have felt uncomfortable with having to hate him, so that’s a good thing. In retrospect, it was actually a good strategy to eliminate one of the strongest teams, and when he tried to help out the cheerleaders in the car behind him by posting a note in the back windshield, all was forgiven. I wish I could say the same for Victor and Tammy. I get that when they peeled away in the car and left everyone else behind it wasn’t much different from the deaf boy’s U-Turn—this is a race after all, and what kind of idiot says to all the other runners, “hey, let’s all jog together at the same pace”? So I get that, but I still kind of hate them. Partly it’s because they thought they were way funnier than they actually were reading all those Russian names aloud, but mostly it’s because Victor has this kind of high-pitched voice that sounds like a whine even when he’s super happy & excited about things like driving a snow plow, and it kind of makes me want to slap him repeatedly. They are so annoying that I found myself rooting for the cheerleaders at one point, which is not something I ever thought I’d do in my lifetime. I’m still trying to figure out the rationale behind one of the challenges. I get the snow plow—they’re in Siberia, for cryin’ out loud—but how brides in flimsy white dresses and capelets are, as the host claimed, “an inevitable aspect of Siberia” is beyond me. And making them run around in their underwear (the contestants, not the brides) just seemed plain mean. Hilarious to watch, but mean. I was somewhat unwillingly impressed by the stuntman brother, who trucked along nobody’s business. He reminded me of a bantam rooster at full tilt. But what was with the scary ballerina girl at the end? Her words said, “Welcome,” but her face and voice said, “This is Siberia, bitch, and we’ll cut you up!”

March 22, 2009

Not only is the deaf boy—Luke—a nice kid, but after watching him weep unashamedly at the poverty in India, I think I now love him. If he didn’t already have such a great mom, I’d probably want to adopt him and bring him home and make him soup. Another set of contestants making its way into my heart is the father-son team. If I thought watching Luke struggling to spell Chekhov was bad, it was nothing compared to the agonized wheezing of the 68-year-old dad hauling buckets of water back and forth for those hussied-up camels. And just when I was convinced that I was going to witness a collapse on camera, he pulled through and the two of them made it in second. And seeing the genuine love and affection between the two of them was, I have to admit, truly heartwarming. The family members that continue to irritate me with their constant stream of self-congratulatory commentary are the siblings Victor and Tammy. I think it’s very telling that while Luke wept during his cab drive through the slums of India, Victor waved cheerily like a has-been pop star riding a float in the Rose parade. And of course they were number one. I think I’ll root for anyone who will beat them at this point, except maybe the cheerleaders, who slipped back into the stereotype this week by getting shrill, rude, and diva with their cab driver. That said, if I’m honest, it’s easy for me to sit on my couch in my pajamas judging them, and I can’t help but wonder what ugly aspect of my nature would come vaulting to the surface if I were in an intense competition in the middle of a foreign city and my cab driver had disappeared with my luggage. I might very well be a screaming banshee as well. Although one with far less caked-on foundation and mascara. Still, this is why I have no desire to ever be on a reality show—ever. I save my flaws for the people who know me. I don’t need them televised far and wide for all of America to shake its finger at me.

March 29, 2009

So this week I actually listened more closely to what the host was saying at the beginning and caught the phrase “mandatory rest,” which makes me picture all of the contestants being locked in their hotel rooms. It’s like, “that’s right, people—no sightseeing for you! We want your memory of this country to be one of stress and confusion.” But at least we know they’re resting. He didn’t say anything about mandatory eating or drinking, though, so I’m still a little worried about that aspect. In this week’s episode, Tammy and Victor have been bumped by the cheerleaders as the most annoying contestants. I still don’t particularly like Mr. “No, no, I can pull this rickshaw with the flat tire the whole way myself” and am disturbed by Tammy’s almost pathological need to encourage her brother despite the fact that he continually dismisses her. But those cheerleaders—especially the one whose name I can’t bother to learn—are really starting to grate on me. I can tolerate someone losing their cool and yelling once—an aberration that they are later remorseful for—but this lady yells constantly, her strident frustration and rage lambasting cab drivers and herb-drawer openers alike. I can almost hear her thinking, “Why can’t you people understand me when I am screaming English at you in your own country? How stupid and unhelpful can you be in my quest to win a million dollars?” Way to represent America, lady. For once in my life, I’m really glad I don’t have red hair and big boobs so that I can never be mistaken for her while traveling abroad. Those cheerleaders could learn a thing or two from the awesome father-son duo, who have said repeatedly that they’re in this to have fun. Sadly, their lack of competitive edge took them to the beach instead of the Phuket Zoo. I was bummed to see them go since they are far more interesting to me as contestants than the sister duo, who don’t seem to have much in the way of discernable personality. Luke and his poor fainting mother continue to dominate as my favorites. I think the best part of this week’s episode was when the cheater brothers got spanked by the host with a 60-minute time out, during which they had to sit under a tree like the naughty boys they were. As the saying goes, cheaters never prosper, and it was nice to see that finally be true. Three words for you, brothers: ha ha ha!

The Last Non-Facebook Person On Earth

2009-03-04T16:46:00.000-08:00

I realize that perhaps my title is a slight exaggeration. In fact, I know that it isn’t true because my friend Jani—stalwart companion in this lonely and perhaps futile resistance—is also not on Facebook. And I imagine there are probably about five or six others out there who remain Facebook-Free as well. But because it feels like everyone else and their mother/sister/brother/
cousin/coworker/childhood sweetheart is on Facebook, it seems like the few of us who are not should form some sort of support group. We could help each other learn coping mechanisms on how to deal with feeling left out of all the wonderful things that seem to be happening on Facebook—all the latest details we don’t know about because we can’t access our friends’ pages, not to mention all the inside jokes and references. We could figure out how to respond when a friend excitedly exclaims to a group, “You have to check out the photos of my trip that I posted on Facebook,” and then turns to you and, face falling, says, “oh, that’s right. You’re not on Facebook. Well, maybe we can look at them on my computer sometime.” And, of course, you know right then and there that you will never see the photos from her trip.

So why, many of my Facebook-loving friends would ask me—have asked me—don’t you just sign up? Be part of the group! And from what I hear, Facebook is fantastic. You can reconnect with people from college, high school, and even elementary school. You can find people in your area who are reading the same book as you or who like the same bands. You can get an instant snapshot update of someone’s life with whom you haven’t spoken in years, viewing pictures of their husband and kids, and learning 25 things about them that you never knew before.

But here are my issues, or at least my issues related to joining Facebook: first, I am constantly finding myself struggling to keep up with the people I already have in my life. I can instantly name at least five people off the top of my head at any given moment that I wish I could spend more time with and get to know better and more deeply. And I am constantly dogged by a low-grade level of guilt for not keeping in better touch via e-mail or phone calls or get-togethers with any number of people. As much as I would like to, I literally do not have enough time to know all the people that I know, and there have been times when I have actually longed to live in an era where people traveled by horse and wagon and had no phones. That would automatically narrow the number of people you could know and interact with, which, in my mind, would mean a simpler life and quite possibly deeper and more meaningful relationships. It would also mean wooden outhouses and no electricity, but that’s beside the point.

To be honest, though, I am torn. There is a part of me that has all kinds of curiosity to know what happened to so and so from way back when and would love to see who they are now and what they’re up to. And therein lies another issue: my tendency towards obsessive and compulsive behavior. I can see myself quite easily losing hours of my life avidly cruising other people’s pages and, because I am also a very conscientious person, feeling obliged to respond to anyone and everyone who posted a message on my wall (I think that’s what it’s called. See that? I’ve actually picked up some of the lingo because it’s so pervasive). So then I’m in touch with dozens of former students and former classmates and former friends and we’re all connected and they’re lovely people with interesting lives and we have so many things in common to talk about and share, and while the thought of that is appealing in some ways, it also completely stresses me out and makes me want to seal myself inside a sensory deprivation chamber.

When I’ve raised this issue to those trying to convince me to join, their response is that I can limit who my “friends” are and only accept those I really want to be connected to. But that means I’d have to reject or not respond to some people, and while I’m not sure about the specifics of how that works, it seems like it could open the door to some awkwardness. And the last thing I need in my life is more awkwardness—I generate enough of that for myself as it is. And furthermore, wouldn’t the friends I’d link up with be the friends I already e-mail and call and get together with? Why would I want to add an additional venue when I already feel so constrained by time and can barely respond to e-mails, watch the YouTube links I’m sent, call someone back, or (gasp) write someone back by hand? (yes, people who write cards and letters to each other and send them in the mail still exist). They would probably answer that it would actually save me time and facilitate keeping in touch, which might very well be true. I could get updates about their lives with a quick scan of their page. I could post a short note and receive one in return on my page without having to write out an entire e-mail or pick up the phone. And there is something very appealing about that as well. But I worry that for a person like me, someone who already struggles with being too much of an introvert as it is, this would provide an easy out from genuine connection and exchange something real for something canned. Something would get lost. Or at least that is my sense of things, irrational as it may seem.

Lastly, I must confess that some of my resistance is pure ornery-ness. I occasionally get stubborn about things that everyone else is raving about and dig in my heels. I felt a strong antipathy towards Harry Potter for years, refusing to read any of the books based solely on the rabid enthusiasm everyone around me seemed to have, until I finally broke one day and read the first book. I pretty much had to since a student gave it to me. After I read it, I had to reluctantly admit that I kind of loved it and proceeded to read the rest of them, even going so far as buying and reading the final book the day after it came out. Perhaps, someday, I will finally weaken and become another Facebook convert and kick myself for not joining sooner and be embarrassed about having ever written this essay.

But today is not that day...

Resurrection

2009-02-09T16:52:00.000-08:00

(for my father)

What do you do
when your body turns traitor
and your cells have lost their way,
when the functions you used to find so easy
now leave you spent of everything
but the weight of your despair?

Some say hope is what comes after death,
the spirit cleaved from body,
flying swiftly upwards to float
in some vague ephemeral bliss.

Nice, I suppose.

But still, it does not answer
all the longing that we have
to shape things with our hands,
to sway to the music,
to feast on fine food,
to hold the ones we love
and feel their warmth
so close against us.

We don’t want our bodies gone,
but back again.
We want to look upon
our whole selves—
blood pumping,
sinews stretching,
bones solid—
in joyful wonder,
echoing, “it is good.”

God of all creation,
arms pinioned helplessly,
body broken in death,
blood flowing out
in the ultimate going awry,
then buried,
a corpse of dust enshrouded,
then rising up forever,
divine spirit in true body,
whole and glorified.

Therein lies the answer,
therein lies the hope.
When we tremble with our frailties,
resurrection is the key—

hope lies in the body
God raises for eternity.

Dear Ikea,

2009-01-19T20:44:00.000-08:00

Though I once loved you with the pure and starry-eyed love of a twenty-something attempting to furnish an entire apartment for under $1500, as someone now older and wiser, I bow to your evil Swedish genius. Your vast store, whose physical layout funnels docile crowds of shoppers through dozens of living rooms, dining rooms, bedrooms, kitchens, and offices all crammed to the gills with rainbows of color and items large and small, has an even greater power than Costco to overwhelm my senses and stun me into simple-minded submission. The sheer number and variety of items available at bargain prices puts Target to shame in their ability to make me purchase numerous cheap and flimsy items that I have no need for, had no intention of shopping for when I entered the store, and will most likely never use. You have the power to make me say, “Excuse me, sir, but do you have any more of the Ekvars?” with a perfectly straight face, and listen to the response of “No, but we do have the Bukts, which are very similar” with solemn attentiveness. And even though I hate those giant plastic yellow bags that seem constantly on the verge of spilling out their entire contents onto the floor, I still pick one up and sling it over my shoulder at the beginning of my journey like every other Ikea shopper going up the escalator.

When I finally reach the home stretch, where I can actually see sunlight coming through the exit doors, what do you do, Ikea? You offer a fresh assault with bins of tea lights, pot holders, picture frames, light bulbs, spatulas, patterned napkins, and stuffed hybrid animals, and I cannot resist. You even make me bag my own purchases and feel that I would be a terrible elitist if I expected someone else—like an employee—to do that for me. Then, when I am tired and hungry since, after all, I’ve now been in the store for over two hours and hefted around my own heavy furniture items, you flaunt your food court, located right between the checkout lines and the exit doors. Sure, I can resist those meatballs, and even the soft serve, which isn’t easy with the little boy in the line next to me screeching, “I want ice-cream! I want ice-cream!” But I cannot resist the overwhelming smell of cinnamon rolls with their warm promise of sweet, melty deliciousness wafting overhead. And as if that weren’t enough, you distract me so thoroughly with the thought of cinnamon rolls that even though I’ve just purchased everything I came for plus fifteen extra items, I still take a 2009 catalog and don’t even notice until I’ve driven home that it’s in Spanish.

And so, Ikea, while I may not love you anymore, I do acknowledge your awesome power and hereby surrender. Go ahead, take my money and those hours of my life and laugh.

For Kiet

2009-01-03T09:59:00.000-08:00

I did not know what to say to you
that Friday before break
when you sat in front of me
trembling with the effort
of holding all the torn up
pieces of your life together
in some semblance of normalcy.

What do you say to a boy
whose father has just died,
who doesn’t want to talk about it,
who doesn’t want to go home,
who just wants to go to class
and answer questions about run-ons,
whose hands are so small,
whose face is so solemn
behind thin wire glasses,
whose life has been
so irrevocably altered?

It occurred to me,
as we sat in silence,
that I had never seen you smile,
not even when I said good morning
or praised your work in class.
If daily life already made you
so serious and intent,
then how much more
will this tragedy
bow you down?
How will you bear
this terrible blow
in all the days that lie ahead?

I wanted to embrace you,
but could only touch your shoulder.
I wanted to have a heart to heart,
but can only write this poem,
which you will never read,
which cannot help you,
which can only hold
my steeping sorrow for you
and the hope that somehow
you will make it through
this awful, lonely journey,
and that some seed of joy
more powerful than any poem
will someday flower in your heart
and make you whole.

That is my prayer for you,
that is the longing
of these lines
that go forth
to be heard,
to be felt,
to be answered.

Stoplight

2008-12-02T18:47:00.000-08:00

She crosses in front of my car,
unhurried and unaware of everything
but her purple backpack
and her new barrettes
and the secret lovely thoughts
that make her hands dance and flutter
before her like small birds,

and my eyes follow
these hands and their joy
until the car behind me honks,
an angry sound
calling me back to the smog
and hurry of my day.

How many times are
we given these moments
of pausing
of waiting
of stillness,

and how many times do
we trample over them
or kick them aside
like so much trash in our way?

We are wed with such devotion
to our hustle and our rush
that at the smallest slowing
we flush with righteous fury
at whatever blocks our path,
and churn with hot impatience
at the stalling of our plans.

But what beauty passes before us
at the stoplight?
What opportunity for grace
nestles in the long line?

Think what it could mean
if waiting weren’t simply
some obstacle to overcome
or endure with gritted teeth,
but was the gifting of divinity
in the midst of our day,

a chance to quiet
and feel the brush of God
against our lives.

A Good Kind of Bad

2008-11-05T19:21:00.000-08:00

It’s been on my mind lately that I have been somewhat neglectful of this blog in the past two months, and in order to rectify that and to make sure the first entry greeting you when you visit this site doesn’t have the word “poo” in the title (that one’s for you, Chuck), I’m going to add this entry even though I don’t know at this moment of typing exactly where I am headed with it. I started this blog to try and make myself write more regularly and have some level of accountability with it, not to mention edge myself out of my comfort zone by having what I write made more public vs. shared only with a few people that I can count on to always be kind and supportive by virtue of blood relation or a long-standing friendship. That said, the lack of posting could be interpreted as a lack of writing—but, I am happy to report, that is not the case.

I’ve actually been doing quite a bit of writing in the past two months, only none of it has been suitable for blog posting. Some of the writing has been for the upcoming Advent season at my church. Once it actually *is* Advent season, I’ll probably post some of that, but it just didn’t fit with October. Another project that was occupying me was a job writing tea descriptions for someone’s website. I’d give you the link here, but she hasn’t posted them yet. And finally, a great deal of my writing energy, so to speak, has been directed towards working on a novel in the past two months.

If it were possible to whisper in a blog, that last sentence would have been the quietest, most mumbled whisper you’ve ever heard, because actually saying that—putting it into words and knowing that other people are going to see those words—is an extremely uncomfortable thing for me. It’s jumping into the deep end of uncomfortable—the part of the pool where the bottom drops away suddenly and you have to paddle like mad to keep your head above water.

I’m not exactly sure why this admission is so uncomfortable for me. Perhaps it’s mainly because I think, not so deep down, that declaring that I’m working on writing a novel is cheesy and pretentious, and that it puts me just one step away from smoking cigarillos, wearing a beret, and affecting disdain for the world around me. Far from puffing me up with supercilious pride, however, starting down this path has been an extremely humbling and even grueling experience. For one thing, I’ve discovered that while the original concept seemed great in my head, the execution of it thus far has been…not so much. Whenever I read a really amazing novel, I’m always in awe of the author and think, “I wouldn’t even know how to begin to write something like this!” and then when I read a really terrible novel (which I did towards the end of the summer, and which I blame, in part, for my even starting my own novel), I think, “I could do this!” And it turns out that I am right. I, too, can write a lame novel. Or a lame first 15-20 pages of one. I won’t know if I can write a lame novel in its entirety until I finish it, if I ever do.

Of course, in my little heart of hearts, what I really want is to write an amazing novel, not a lame one. I would even settle (possibly) for “pretty good.” But while others may have the genius and talent to churn out great pages from the get-go, I do not, and I am having to learn to push forward and just write, whether I think it’s any good or not. This is not an easy task considering that I have spent my entire life actively avoiding having anything to do with anything I’m not 85% or more certain that I will be good at. In case you weren’t aware of this, it’s fairly easy to be an accomplished person when you run like the wind from anything difficult for you, like, say, sports or math or first dates. So, according to my usual M.O. and all those mean voices in my head that say things like, “who do you think you are? You can’t do this! You don’t have the talent! You don’t have the skill! You don’t have your MFA—only an MA!” and so on, I ought to be chucking this attempt in the trash like moldy cheese.

But I’m not. Despite all the exclamatory internal messages to the contrary, there is a tiny little pipsqueak of a voice that urges me to continue on, and even makes the astounding claim that it’s okay to write a lame novel, because even if it never sees the light of day, it is still a worthwhile experience. There may be something to that. If nothing else, this whole venture might help make me less of a hypocrite. I’m always encouraging my students to take risks and to try out ideas even if they’re “wrong,” because that’s the way to learn and grow, and mistakes lead to discovery, and blah blah blah. I practice very little of that in my own life, however. So maybe it’s time for me to learn how to be good at being bad. Maybe it will be a little freeing to learn that I don’t become an instant outcast or get an “F” branded across my forehead if I fail at something or just slog forward in mediocrity.

So, yes, I am working on a novel. And no, I won’t tell you what it’s about. And if you try to talk to me about it in person, I’ll fake a diversion (“look at that fire!”) and run away.

Baby steps…

The Great Poo Dilemma

2008-08-30T10:16:00.000-07:00

There are many things I could write about this morning: my cruise to Alaska, getting ready for the next school year, etc. But I have poo on the brain (and in my yard), so, Dear Readers (all 2 or 3 of you), that is what I’m going to write about.

Because I live alone, a number of people have suggested at various points that I get a pet for companionship and/or protection. While this is a reasonable suggestion and even, at times, an appealing one, I have never acted on this advice. The biggest reason is simply that I have allergies, and no amount of companionship and protection is worth the daily sneezing, watery eyes, and congestion I would have to suffer. My more persistent friends respond to this by pointing out that there are types of dogs that are less allergenic than others and even hairless cats (hideous things that they are). Well, okay, yes. If I’m honest, allergies are not the only issue. As I put it to one friend, dogs are too jumpy, licky, and poopy for me. I like other people’s dogs just fine—I just don’t want one of my own. Cats don’t have the same needs and energy that dogs do, but there are still the issues of the litterbox and my strong inclination never to have to deal with another creature’s feces on a regular basis. Mind you, I have changed many a dirty (and full) diaper over the years without any kind of squeamishness whatsoever, but, for whatever strange and neurotic reason, that’s just in a different category for me.

So, for the past several years, I’ve lived in my house and been able to travel at whim in a clean, orderly, and hassle-free manner, and it’s been great. Recently, however, my ordered peace has been shattered by regularly deposited piles of poo in my front and back yards. It started earlier this month in the back yard, which some cat apparently designated as a great location to do his business. I ignored the problem initially, which was easy enough as I left town for a vacation. But last week I decided enough was enough, and I found myself in the back yard, heavily gloved, with an inside-out plastic Target bag doing what I had sworn I would never do—picking up animal poo. And like magic (evil, animal magic), the poo just keeps coming back—in exactly the same spots. A couple mornings ago, I went out my front door for my morning walk only to discover a new deposit right by the front walkway. Either this cat was eating some serious fiber or I now had two cats pooping on my lawn—one in front, one in the back--perhaps engaged in some kind of contest for poo dominance. I got rid of that as well, only to see a fresh batch when I opened my door this morning.

What can I do about it? Absolutely nothing. There is no way to seal my yard off from cats, and as far as I know there is no such thing as a cat repellent that I can spray on my yard (is there? hmmm…maybe I’ll have to do some internet research). I have to either just leave the poo out there (gross) or pick it up on a regular basis (also gross). And all of this without the benefits of companionship and cuddling. It’s poo without the perks.

So, life lesson learned: no matter how carefully you plan and regulate your life, some cat can still sneak in and crap in your yard.

A Little Bit of Writer's Angst

2008-08-01T18:37:00.000-07:00

Today is the first day of August, which means it is the last month of my summer break, which is something that causes me to have a mini-panic attack (it’s already August???) and scrambling self-assessment. How is my summer going? Am I having a good enough summer? Am I doing all the things I’d wanted to do and planned to do, and am I enjoying them and getting as much out of them as I had hoped to? If I were just a few more notches to the left on the spectrum of crazy, I’d probably give myself surveys to fill out at the end of each week on quality and satisfaction.

For the most part, I am pleased to report that this has been quite a satisfactory summer—even a good one. I’ve already taken two trips (both highly enjoyable), spent time with a number of friends, seen some of the summer’s biggest movies, run countless errands, read several novels, hosted guests, made visible progress on cleaning and sorting the piles around my house, unclogged my bathroom sink, and visited my grandmother.

The one area that registers some dissatisfaction, however, is the area of my writing. I had big plans for this summer—big plans! I was going to write for hours every week, read some books about writing, and maybe even take a class. And now it’s August, and if I’m honest, I’ve been quite sub-par in this area. I’ve written some, but not with any regularity or consistency. And I’ve managed to do mostly “throwaway” writing, which is just that steam-of-consciousness journal writing kind of thing, along with a couple of awkward poems. There’s nothing wrong with that in itself, it’s just that I had hoped to really dig into revising some of my short stories and/or writing new stories this summer, and I’ve done very little of that. Every time I even think about it, I skitter away like the stray cat who bolts in a streak of orange from my yard in the mornings when I open the front door. The moment I think, “maybe I should revise the ending of that story” or “why don’t I work on the new one?” I feel overwhelmed and incapable, and the thought of putting away my laundry or voting for my favorite dancer on So You Think You Can Dance becomes instantly more appealing and important.

So why the struggle? Laziness is definitely a factor. Writing, especially fiction writing, and revising is hard work. It takes commitment, persistence, and discipline, which are three qualities I seem to be rather lacking in during the summer months. This is frustrating considering that the summer is also when I actually have the most time to write. But try doing something difficult when there’s no one and nothing you’re accountable to for doing it (other than your own vague dream) and see if it gets done. It’s like losing five pounds. Sure, it would be great and you would love it if it actually happened, but is it really worth the discipline and deprivation when your clothes still generally fit and no one else but you really even notices or cares about that measly five pounds?

But I can’t blame it all on laziness. I can be (and have been) highly productive during summer months and weekends and vacations in other areas of my life. It’s just a matter of motivation, and when it comes to being motivated about my writing, I have a whole cluster of fears weighing me down and leaking all the air out of my tires. As anyone who’s ever watched Oprah or is familiar with the Harry Potter series knows, you’ve got to face up to your fears in order to conquer them. So I’ve made a list of the boggarts clogging up my creative closet, and here is what they are:

1. I fear that I don’t have any really good ideas. While writers I read about in interviews seem to walk around overflowing with wonderful ideas to write about and they find inspiration in everything from the mailman to the fly buzzing against the screen, I actually find it difficult to come up with an idea for a story. And often when I do think of an idea, I immediately shoot it down as clichéd, boring, or too out of my league to write about with any kind of authority or power.

2. I fear that I’m not qualified enough to be a serious writer (as opposed to one who just farts around with it now and then for kicks). One thing I have been doing this summer with a fair amount of discipline is reading published short stories in literary journals and online, and the blurbs about the authors ALWAYS say some variation of this: “So and So has her M.F.A. from NYU and has published short stories in numerous journals such as The Paris Review, Ploughshares, and The Atlantic Monthly. She has also translated selections of Rilke’s poetry from German and Chekov’s short stories from Russian. Her novel Evening Air, which she wrote while traveling on a Guggenheim Fellowship, was a finalist for the National Book Award. Ms. So and So is currently at work on her fourth novel and teaches writing at Syracuse University.” Like that’s not intimidating.

3. I fear that I don’t have enough talent. I mean, I know I’m an above-average writer, but there are lots of above-average writers—even lots of really good writers (I can tick off at least half a dozen people I know off the top of my head)—and I am constantly reading things that amaze me and make me think, “I could never write something like this.” My experience, insight, knowledge, and ability (I lump that all together under “talent”) seem too limited to me to take me to the level I’d really like to be at (see description of Ms. So and So in #2).

4. I fear the smarty-pants undergraduate or fresh-out-of-college kids working as interns at the literary journals I would be submitting my work to (I don’t kid myself that many actual editors would see my work). I imagine them reading the first sentence or two before rolling their eyes and thinking to themselves, “Another earnest, lame-o wannabe writer,” (only in loftier internal language) before slapping a rejection form into an envelope to send back to me and shaking their heads over having to waste postage even sending me a rejection. More than rejection, which any writer has to contend with, I fear dismissal, which is rejection with indifference and contempt.

So there they are—my four biggest fears about writing and being a writer out there in the open and flapping in the wind. I wish I could say that this act of writing about them has reduced them to silly nothings that I can now kick aside, but they still loom large and are beasts I’ll probably have to wrestle with over and over again. I imagine anyone taking a risk about anything has to do the same thing. But at least now I’ve written something. And it’s only August 1…

A Good Word

2008-07-14T10:17:00.000-07:00

Here is a word that someone spoke aloud to me yesterday: repose. What a beautiful and evocative word—one whose sound immediately conveys a sense of it that can actually be felt. This morning I looked up the definitions for it in The American Heritage College Dictionary, something I always do with words that strike me (I get a little sad at the thought of all the people—especially younger ones—who do not know the pleasure and value of looking up a word and savoring all its meanings and nuances). The definitions listed for both the noun and verb forms of the word are as follows:

1. The act of resting or the state of being at rest.
2. Freedom from worry; peace of mind.
3. Calmness; tranquility
4. to lay oneself down
5. to rest or relax oneself
6. to lie at rest
7. to place trust in (stemming from the Latin root “repos,” meaning “to put away”)

Hearing this word and reading its definitions are like a little clarion bell going off in my mind and heart, because “repose” is what I am so often longing for and what I so often struggle (and fail) to achieve. At the risk of alienating readers who work traditional jobs, I am on my summer break from teaching right now, and, as I find it to be every summer, I am engaged in a kind of battle. It is a wonderful and extraordinary blessing to have eight weeks of not having to work (and it is eight weeks, not twelve as so many people mistakenly believe—I work until late June and start my preparation for the coming year in late August). Not many adults have two full months of free time, so I truly do appreciate what a fantastic luxury that is.

There is a difficult aspect of it, however, at least for me. I like structure and I like routine, and when I’m not working, structure and routine are out the window, and the endless possibilities of what I can do with all this free time become somewhat overwhelming. I have so much time, I think to myself, that I should be able to do EVERYTHING. I should be able to clean and organize my entire house and garage, I should be able to e-mail everyone back immediately, I should be able to get together with every friend I have, I should be able to travel, I should be able to write every day, I should be able to read lots of books, I should be able to play the piano regularly again, I should be able to stay on top of the weeds in the garden, I should be able to have all the minor repairs on the house done that I’ve ignored all year, I should be able to go to museums and concerts, I should be able to exercise every day, I should be able to cook healthy meals for myself, I should be able to watch all the movies in my Netflix queue, and so on and so forth.

Last Friday, I sat in my living room and read a novel for nearly three hours. When I had finished the last page and closed the book, I slowly became aware of the dimming light outside and, after a moment of dazed disorientation, sprang out of the armchair I was sitting in. I looked at the clock, and my heart fluttered with a kind of panic. It was nearly 7:00! And all I had done that day was return a shirt to Old Navy, meet a friend for lunch, buy groceries at Trader Joe’s and read! That’s it! What about cleaning the bathroom? Putting away my laundry? E-mailing my friends back? Prepping for my trip to Boston? The list I had made that morning had less than half its items crossed off. I paced up and down the hallway and around my dining room for a few anxious minutes, trying to decide which task I could squeeze in before eating dinner, and all my enjoyment in reading evaporated. I could relax and enjoy myself only as long as I wasn’t aware of it, as long as I was completely caught up in whatever I was reading or watching on TV. But those experiences really weren’t that enjoyable or relaxing because the moment I became “aware” again, I was filled with guilt and anxiety.

Which is why I’m so attracted to the word and idea of “repose.” Repose implies rest with awareness. Repose implies pleasure in and appreciation of that rest. Repose implies mindfulness and intentionality with a freedom from "shoulds." Repose implies a deliberate putting away of tasks and their accompanying guilt and anxiety, which is very different from mere escape. Escaping is not rest or tranquility—escape is fleeing. I have been escaping instead of reposing whenever I’ve been engaged in “relaxing” activities. The result is that the wolves are still always at my door, circling and snarling and ready to bite me the minute I poke my head outside. Repose, on the other hand, flings the door wide, commands the snapping wolves firmly, “Be still!”, walks out to the grassy hillside, and lays down in the sunshine, basking in the warmth with a heart full of gladness.

Gratitude and the Stomach Flu

2008-07-03T11:57:00.000-07:00

This past Sunday morning, I woke up with the stomach flu. It was actually one of those situations where I knew something was wrong even before I was fully awake, and once I had woken up completely, my body began the many-houred ordeal of ridding itself of every particle of food and ounce of liquid I had ingested over the last 24 hours. I won’t go into too much detail, but let’s just say it’s going to be a long time before I eat cheesy nachos again.

With this onset came a radical change in my perspective and what was important to me. Just the day before, I had made a long list of plans for the coming week, which included all kinds of cleaning and organizing projects, errands to run, things to read, e-mails to send, people to get together with, etc. By 10:00 am Sunday morning, my biggest goal was to make it from my bathroom floor to the sink and then back to my bed. It took several minutes of prepping myself—of visualizing the route, of short panting breaths and, I’m embarrassed to admit, a few pitiful moans—and then I did it. As I was washing my hands and rinsing out my mouth, my vision started fading to black and a roaring filled my ears. Having passed out while sick in the past, I knew the signs and began a quick stagger to my bed, which I flung myself at just as the blackness and roaring overtook me. Seconds later, it began to recede, and I slowly became aware of a number of things. I became aware of the softness of my bed under my sprawled limbs, of the bright sunlight filtering through the curtains of my window, and the cheerful chirps of birds breakfasting in the yard outside. And I was suddenly filled with the most profound gratitude for the comfort and encouragement of those things.

My incapacitated physical state magnified even the very smallest elements into the greatest and most wonderful luxuries to me. For example, how wonderful that cell phones exist and I could actually have a phone in bed with me and reach numerous people at the touch of a button without even sitting up. How wonderful that I had a CD player nearby with a remote control. As my fever kicked in, I closed my eyes in relief from the cooling breeze that wafted down from my ceiling fan. Who invented ceiling fans anyway? Fantastic. Genius. And buckets. Buckets are amazing.

I also spent a fair amount of time marveling at the beauty of friends who will go to the grocery store and buy Gatorade and soda crackers (thanks, Diana) and leave them on your front porch and talk to you on the phone from your own front porch because you’re too weak to get to the front door to let them in. And neighbors who will roll out your brimming garbage cans for trash collection the next day and put them neatly back. And, after a few more hours had passed and I was finally able to retrieve the grocery bag off the front porch, the indescribable sweetness of those first few sips of Fruit Punch Gatorade and lime seltzer over ice that I was able to swallow and keep down (don’t ask my why this combo worked—it just did).

On day two, I graduated to gratitude and joy at being able to take a short shower (oh, what bliss to wash my hair!), eat soda crackers and soup, and swallow an ibuprofen to help the backache my fever was causing. I could sit up! I could enjoy watching TV! It was great.

By day three, the fever and nausea had gone completely, and I was left with only an overwhelming fatigue and a lack of appetite. I found myself restless and anxious as I lay on the couch watching TV. My mind raced with all the things I needed to do, and I began to grow impatient and frustrated with my lack of energy and all the time I was wasting. As I turned off the TV in petulant disgust and railed against my situation, I suddenly realized that not only had the fever and nausea gone away, but so had my gratitude. The more “well” I was becoming, the more I was taking for granted, and the more I was able to do, the more ungrateful and demanding I was becoming.

Last week, while having dinner at a friend’s, I had told her about my experience attending my niece’s recent singing competition. Towards the end of the concert, the host had briefly interviewed last year’s youth winner, a bubbly, vivacious teen who was very obviously eager to witness for Christ. I smiled indulgently along with the rest of the audience at her comments until she got to the part where she gushed about the opportunity she’d had to open for Randy Travis during his local concert, and how that “totally was the work of Jesus Christ.” At this, I couldn’t resist leaning over to my sister-in-law and whispering, “That’s so awesome that Jesus got her Randy Travis! Think he could score me a couple of Coldplay tickets?” After sharing this anecdote with my friend, we began to talk about what exactly the difference was between a Vending Machine God mentality and a genuine gratitude for every good gift, and the conclusion we came to was that the difference lay in the definition of “good gift.” A good gift, my friend pointed out, could be humility or patience. It could be the strength to endure a terrible loss. It might be something we want, but often it is something we don't want, want being irrelevant to need.

A good gift can be the stomach flu.

I definitely have no wish to revisit that experience anytime soon, but I realize that it literally stopped me in a way I needed to be stopped. It forced me to live entirely in the present moment and to be aware of and grateful for the ways in which my most basic needs were met and cared for, the ways these needs are met and cared for on an hourly and daily basis that I never give a second thought to and that I take for granted in the worst of ways—by being completely oblivious to them.

As day three taught me, it is all too easy to lose perspective, to forget what you’ve just experienced, and to slide back into old habits and ways of thinking. The activity and busyness of my days are slowly ramping up again, and I know I’ll lose my way again. Probably by this afternoon. But for the moment, I am grateful once again—that I have a Father who gives good gifts, gifts that shake me up now and then and get me to stop and pay attention in spite of myself.

A Little Love for the Pinto

2008-05-27T18:03:00.000-07:00

I remember when my family first got our hatchback Pinto. It was light blue and had a kind of shimmering glamour to it when my dad pulled into the driveway with it for the first time. This was in the days before Pintos became something of a joke, before the whole scandal of them exploding if rear-ended or whatever story of malfunction it was that later dogged them came out. This was when one of the characters in Charlie’s Angels—the one played by Cheryl Ladd, I think—actually drove a white Pinto in the show, and it looked cool and normal and not dated. Anyway, my dad bought this blue Pinto with its silver trim and navy blue interior, and we all came out in the driveway and circled it like tourists at an exhibition, ooohing and aaahhing before taking turns climbing into it. Seeing as there were six of us in total and this was a hatchback Pinto, we had to take turns. It was our “second car,” mainly for my dad to drive to work, and he parked it on the right side of the driveway so that our “family car,” the burgundy, boat-like Chevy Impala that my mother drove and used to shuttle us to swimming and piano lessons, could back out of the garage. I remember delicately fingering the shiny silver emblem of the horse galloping on the back of the car, thinking that that made the car even more special and beautiful—they decorated it with a horse! Kind of like the way I would put stickers of my favorite animals and cartoon characters on things I owned as a way to spruce them up, only fancier. It wasn’t until a number of years later that I actually made the connection between the silver horse and the fact that the car was a Pinto. Up until then, that was just another interesting and nonsensical word to me, like all car names were. Of course, I felt a little stupid when I learned that a pinto was a type of horse and that an impala was a horned animal that lived in Africa, but how was I supposed to know? I lived in Southern California suburbia and was still learning addition and subtraction when that car came into our lives.

Anyways, that Pinto was great, and we loved it like it was a new member of the family. We’d help my dad wash it on the weekends, all of us dipping our sponges into buckets of soapy water and vigorously scrubbing whatever section we had been assigned to. Because I was the youngest (and smallest), I ended up with the lower parts of the car—everything below the silver trim. As I squatted down, looking up occasionally to cry out against an older sibling for dripping on me, there was such a satisfaction in sudsing away the layer of dirt splatter kicked up by the wheels and seeing the pearly light blue emerge like new again.

But the best thing about the Pinto was the hatchback area—the open space behind the cramped back seats with the scratchy navy carpet material stretched over the bump of the spare tire nestled underneath. If we bent our legs (our kneecaps making faint smudges as they rubbed the glass), two of us—maybe even three if it was me and my equally tiny girlfriends—could lie on our backs in that space while my dad drove us around. We’d stare up through the glass, with its thin orange defroster lines running across it, and watch the clouds and blue sky and the sudden appearance of leafy trees or telephone lines pass over us like it was some kind of magic show put on specifically for our benefit. And whenever we’d happen upon an empty residential street, my dad would weave the car back and forth, back and forth, in sudden swinging turns that would fling us from side to side, and we’d roll and bump against each other, shrieking with laughter.

That same Pinto became something of an embarrassment in my teen years. The shine had begun to dull, Charlie’s Angels was no longer on the air, and it was just this car that my family had had for a million years (my economizing parents tended to keep all of their cars long past the decade mark) and that had been demoted to the car my siblings learned to drive in and were allowed to use for local outings and errands. My last clear memory of riding in it was on a hot summer day when I was in high school. I don’t remember what the occasion was, but for some reason I needed to go up to the Fullerton/Brea area and my brother had to drive me. And I remember that I had to be dressed up, which made the heat of the day even more miserable, as dressed up in those days meant a slip and nylons. Driving on the freeway was no longer an option in the Pinto, so my brother drove us on city streets, the main one to our destination being State College Boulevard. We did all right with all the short stop and go sections, but there is a stretch of State College that is just one giant hill, where everyone revs up and just goes for it. My brother pulled over to the far right lane and switched off the air-conditioning, but that didn’t do much good. The engine strained and huffed like some ancient beast dragging a load of rocks, and the car shook and shuddered, but even with all of that, we were only going about 24 miles an hour. Cars in the other lanes zoomed past us, and the ones in our own lane edged up to our bumper aggressively before losing patience and accelerating around us. “Can’t you go any faster?” I snapped at my brother, mortified. “I’m already pressing the gas pedal as far as it goes,” my brother snapped back. We watched a few more cars zoom past us, taking in their drivers’ dirty looks, and suddenly, out of nowhere, we were laughing like a couple of lunatics. Our slow, sweaty chug up that endless hill on Sate College in our poor, wheezing Pinto had become the funniest thing ever.

The Pinto didn’t last much longer after that ride. Wanting something more reliable (and freeway-viable) for his work commute, my father went out and bought a new type of car called a Toyota Camry. We had the oohing and aahing session in the driveway once again, while the Pinto skulked under the tree on the street in front of our house. My father sold the Pinto to some guy for a few hundred dollars shortly afterwards, most likely for parts. And while it’s probably silly to get sentimental about that old car, I wish I’d given it a pat goodbye. It sure was a good little pony, and it sure gave us some good times.

Poem for Pentecost

2008-05-11T16:33:00.000-07:00

He defeated death—
astonishing and irrevocable act—
and that is that.

But still,
there are all those years for us
of blundering and confusion,
of woundings both willful and unknowing,
of the slow boil of vanity and pride
under the thin veneer of righteousness,
of the easy slide into distraction
and the dulling weight of despair —
all of us forgetful in a careless instant
of what was finished for eternity.

And so,
“I will ask the Father,
and he will give you another Helper,
who will teach you all things
and bring to your remembrance
all that I have said to you.”
Such perfect wisdom,
such depth of kindness,
such magnitude of grace
in that bequeathing.

Help is needed.
Help is provided.

Other Lives

2008-05-04T21:48:00.000-07:00

Not too long ago, I received an e-mail inviting me to join something called “LinkedIn.” For those of you who have never heard of it, it’s kind of like Facebook or Friendster or one of those other types of online networking communities I have done my best to avoid over the years, only LinkedIn is for professional connections—a way to expand business contacts, recommend services, and perhaps even find employment. You can connect with people who work in your same field, who graduated from your college or university, and so on and so forth. I was “invited” by a client for whom I had done some copywriting in the past, and I clicked on the link, filled out a basic profile, and proceeded not to think anything more about it unless someone else from the site invited me to be one of their connections. Many people on the site have 70, 80 or even well over 100 connections. I have four. That gives you an idea of the kind of use I get out of it.

In fact, while others are utilizing this site to expand their professional horizons and market themselves to the masses, my one use—if you can even call it that—was to springboard off of it into an existential crisis. This came about when I received a message (via the site) from a former Wellesley friend. Wellesley has a long tradition of connecting upperclasswomen to incoming first years, and N, as I’ll refer to her, was my “little sister.” Many times these connections don’t last for long, but N and I were faithful in adhering to the traditions of Flower Sunday, hoop-rolling, and the periodic lunch together. We also saw each other frequently in the music department, which was her major and my almost minor and place of employment during my four college years. I lost touch with her in the years after my graduation, and perusing her page in the present, I was pleased and excited to see that she had not only gotten her Ph.D in music after all (something her parents were strongly opposed to when we were still in college), but that she is now a professor of music at a university.

While on her page, I noticed that—unlike me—N had a large number of connections, so I clicked on that link to see what other old Wellesley acquaintances I might come across. There turned out to be quite a few, and after my initial gladness at seeing all the familiar names and the interest of finding out what they were all up to these days, I began to notice something—namely, that one after the other had a Ph.D and were also professors, or maybe they had an M.F.A. and were writers in residence at some university or other, or were professional musicians, or had research fellowships or held some such other position that reeked of prestige. It was like reading an extended version of our alumnae magazine, only I personally knew (or had known) all of the people detailed on the page. I had been in class with these women at one point. I had taken exams with them, agonized over papers, critiqued their manuscripts, and received their critiques of my own. I had eaten meals with them and played Pictionary with them during slow shifts in the music library. They had all seemed just like me, and yet now, laid out in an online profile, they all seemed so much better than me, so much more accomplished. They had gone on to attain the highest levels of education at top universities, won prestigious awards, and were now professors and writers and musicians. They weren’t wannabes but the real things—the things we had all dreamed about and talked about and stewed in the potential of when we were in college.

And, so, the existential crisis. That mean and insidious voice that murmurs, “and what have you done with your life?” Reason kicks in, of course, and another voice pipes up to say that I have done just fine with my life, thank you very much. That I may not have gone to an Ivy League for graduate school, but I was able to pay the tuition to the state university where I got my M.A. in full and learned a great deal while I was at it. That I have a secure job with a good salary and benefits. That I am doing something meaningful on a daily basis, influencing and helping to shape the lives and educations of hundreds of students. That in moving back to California I was able to be close to my mother and help take care of her when she was sick and dying. And on and on. But I think underlying all those statements of affirmation about the choices I’ve made and the things I’ve done is the shadow of all the things I chose against and all the things I haven’t done, and moments like this can make that shadow loom large.

What if I hadn’t moved back home after college? What if I had gone to a big-name university for graduate school? What if I had been more ambitious and less fearful and pushed myself harder? And on the other end of things, being single and childless in my mid-30s, there are always those other questions that are all some form of “what if I’d done things differently?” and worse—“should I have done things differently?” I think we all have those questions from time to time in some form or other. Some of my “successful” classmates probably do. The same probably goes for some of my happily married with beautiful children friends. The particular types of questions and the degree of doubt may vary, and for some the positives of their current lives outweigh the uncertainty of those shadowy other lives. But they are still there—all those other lives we could have lived.

Part of me feels guilty for indulging in such pointless wonderings. So many people in this world have no choice in their lives. They are born, they live, and they die constrained by poverty or violence or some other form of oppression and enslavement. So I recognize that such existential angst is quite a luxury. Having all these choices and options is an almost embarrassing bounty of blessings. But recognizing that doesn’t make the struggle and doubt go away any more than knowing about children starving in Africa made my reluctance to eat vegetables go away when I was a little girl.

When you’re young it’s a wonderful thing to dream about all the possible lives you could have—all the things you can do and be and experience. It all seems possible and even plausible. At this time of year, when I look at my seniors who are on the verge of graduating, who are on the cusp of their adult lives, shining with promise and potential, I always feel a piercing sense of nostalgia. I remember being in that position myself so clearly. I remember feeling such a strong sense of something coming, something wonderful that was just around the corner (what could it be?). And, fortunately, while that anticipation and excitement hasn’t resulted in my being shot by someone named Chino (all of that being a reference to Tony’s beginning song and ultimate fate in West Side Story, in case you’re wondering), it has resulted in these periods of uneasiness and doubt, and even the occasional sense of letdown. Is this as good as it gets? Is there another life I could have chosen that would have been better? Is there something else I should be choosing now?

I am not ungrateful for the life I have. I understand and accept why I made many of the choices I’ve made and the direction they’ve taken me, and on a lot of days—maybe even most—I really like my life. It’s a good life. But I think there will always be some sense of those other lives rising up to haunt me from time to time, and as long as I have choices and dream of possibilities (though those seem to get narrower with each passing year), I don’t know how to make them go away. The one, it seems, comes with the other.

Stuff

2008-03-30T17:15:00.000-07:00

I’ve been dealing with a lot of stuff lately. When I say “stuff,” I am not speaking metaphorically but literally—as in physical stuff: clothes, shoes, dishes, dish towels, jewelry, letters, books, photos, and so on. Having decided not to travel anywhere this spring break, I focused instead on going through some of the accumulation in my house—the bulging closets and dresser drawers, the cabinets and cupboards. Most of the accumulation is made up of my own things, but some of it is still left from my mother and from our family having lived here for nearly 25 years. The other stuff I was dealing with was my grandparents’ belongings. Now that my grandfather has died and my grandmother is no longer living in their condo, my aunt is preparing to sell it. She invited me to go take a look around and see if there was anything I’d like to keep.

A friend of mine is going through a similar process. Her husband died of brain cancer two and a half years ago, and now she is selling the home she and her husband raised their sons in. Both of us have a strong desire to reduce clutter, simplify, and move forward in our lives, and yet this process of excavating, sorting, and bringing to a close past lives is painful and complicated. Over the years, I’ve heard a number of people dismiss physical goods as “just stuff” and tout the superior value of simplicity and the present moment. These people have no trouble throwing things away. In many respects, I admire this attitude and ability to quickly and efficiently dispose of clutter. There is a cleanness in this lack of sentimentality. But for many of us, stuff isn’t just stuff in and of itself—it is a representation or connection to something or someone, and that is what we have difficulty throwing away or carting off to the thrift store.

This becomes even more difficult and complicated when the person the stuff is connected to is no longer with us, and if the life the stuff had a context in no longer exists. When I talked to my friend, she shared her struggle about what to do with a drawer full of peignoir sets. They had all been gifts from her husband and she had only worn them for him and enjoyed them in the context of her relationship with him. What should she do with them now? She recognized that there was no point in keeping them (nor was it possible, given the limited space she would have after moving), but how could she just throw away his gifts of love to her? I suggested she keep a representative one and get rid of the rest. She agreed that this was a good compromise, and we resolved that issue on a practical level. But in having to decide the fate of those peignoirs, she was having to face the reality that the life those peignoirs existed in is over, and that she will never wear them for the man who bought them for her again. And that is a reality she has to confront over and over again with each drawer and closet and cupboard.

Earlier this week, I opened a drawer in my own house and found it full of catalogs, brochures, and pages torn out of decorating magazines. I also found dozens of white notepad sheets covered in my mother’s scrawling handwriting with ideas about window treatments, flower arrangements, bathroom configurations, and so on. In the year before she got sick, my mother had begun planning major renovations and decorating changes to the house. The physical layout and décor were still left over from the 70s and our years of family life, and now that my siblings and I were all grown and moved out, my mother was excited to change things into a more updated house that she and my father could enjoy during his retirement years. Obsessive planner and resource-gatherer that my mother was, she filled that very large and deep drawer to the point that I had trouble opening it. On the practical front, of course I was going to empty the drawer and throw the stuff away. It was pointless to keep all of that when there was no longer any context or use for it. My mother is gone, I now own the house, and I have already renovated and decorated it to my own taste. But before I could throw it away, I had to look at it all. I had to read all her notes and scribbles and consider the fabric swatches she had collected. I had to sit with all my mother’s dreams for her house and her life with my father and the visiting grandchildren and mourn that they would never come to pass. And then, after saving a few sample notes, I threw it away and cleared the space for the things of my current life.

At my grandparents’ condo, I got stuck on a drawer full of tacky plastic placemats. There is no way I’d ever use those placemats in my own house, and I knew it would be ridiculous to bring them home and fill up cupboard space with them. But I had to spend some time just looking at those placemats and remembering all the times I ate KFC dinners off of them as a child visiting with my family for the day. Attached to those placemats was the memory of swimming in the pool at their clubhouse (they lived in a retirement community), of watching my dad and grandpa in friendly but intense ping pong matches, and of sitting on their scratchy olive green sofa reading while the adults talked. Those placemats brought those memories flooding back, vivid and strong. What happens when the placemats are gone? When the whole condo is gone?

Getting rid of stuff is painful and scary because it feels like getting rid of connections to the past, to memories, and, most of all, to people. And yet, to be completely honest, there’s a way in which all that stuff is kind of a drag. It can weigh you down, and it can be a time and energy-consuming pain in the ass to have to deal with. So there is a bright side to this. While the mining and excavating is painful, and it’s exhausting hauling up all those stores of memories and grief and disposing of all the garbage bags and bulky items and papers to be shredded, there is space and lightness afterwards. There is a making way for other things, for the hope and freedom and joy in life that we may not quite believe in yet but are making ourselves ready to receive.

Maybe A Few Should Be Left Behind

2008-02-24T16:06:00.000-08:00

Most of the time, I enjoy being a teacher for all of the meaningful and noble reasons that one would normally associate with teaching: inspiring and shaping young minds, guiding students in developing skills that will help them become better citizens of tomorrow, the creativity and diversity that each day brings, and my own passion for the subject matter. But there are also those days when I enjoy teaching simply for the opportunity to laugh at the unintentionally hilarious ignorance of my students. This might make me sound petty and cruel, but try grading hundreds of high school essays week after week and you’ll soon discover that it’s either laugh yourself silly or cry with despair as you realize that these people will someday be in charge of taking care of you when you are old and weak and in your most helpless phase of life.

All of the following excerpts are from essays my sophomore students wrote during first semester. The ones having to do with historical figures came from a standardized essay prompt they had to answer for a quarterly benchmark. It asked them to write about someone important they had studied in school. The rest are from a random hodgepodge of essays and timed writings I’ve had my students write throughout the semester. I couldn’t resist adding my own parenthetical comments for some of them.

Enjoy your own petty and cruel laughter:

1. One person I studied this year was Napoleon Buenoparte. (This would be Napoleon Bonaparte’s nicer Spanish cousin)

2. Some people believe Che Guevara was a diptator. (Apparently, these people thought he was ruthless but also a little on the dumb side)

3. The persons in history did many things from inventions to dance moves. (This student went on to write about Eli Whitney. If the Cotton Gin were a dance move, I imagine it would be something along the lines of The Sprinkler or The Lawn Mower.)

4. Martin Luther King Jr. did not agree with how black people were being treated back then in his time. He decided to free the black slaves and give them the same rights just like everyone else. (This student probably also thinks that Harriet Tubman wouldn't give up her seat on the bus)

5. Magellan is my favorite because he was the first dude to sail around the world successfully. (He also found some sweet surfing spots)

6. It was really hard for him because the town made him their escape goat. (He wasn't very fast with someone on his back, but he did well enough.)

7. Those were the days when you had to use a Bowen arrow. (Because the Bowen Company makes the BEST arrows)

8. We had to get up at the crack of don. (Because no matter how early we set our alarms, our plumber roommate Don always got up first)

9. He got in trouble for using fowl language. (Apparently, some people find pigeon coos and starling warbles offensive)

10. Charles Lindbergh was a very brave man. He was married and had kids. (Actually, this kid may be pretty smart)

The rest defy snarky comments:

11. I once read in junior high a biography about Albert Einstein. I read it in math class. It was either put it down and do math homework or read about Einstein, so I read about him.

12. Thomas Jefferson is one of the most interesting figures of the American Revolution. Without him and a couple more people the country would not be the same.

13. When he was a little boy he had a new red bike, which was his pride possession.

14. Well, I wrote a report on a man named Cesar Chavez, who was a boxer in a small town.

15. My father is special enough to study. The reason why is because he does certain things that is not normal for a personal to do. For example, he can do a handstand on his forearms and walk for a long time without feeling pain.

16. This is why I remember John Locke so well. Well, that and all his great ideas that really made today happen.

17. A person I have studied about in school is Bill Gates. He invented Microsoft Word. It is helpful for students now that he made it because we use it for school. I don’t remember much about him, but it was a good idea to do this.

18. A famous person who I learned about this year is a king of England named Henry III. He was a ruler who wanted a son to take his throne. So he got married. When his wife failed to give him a son, he divorced her. So he got married again. But this time she failed, but instead of divorcing her, he had her head cut off. He did this now. After about six wifes, he realized that he loved these women for all the wrong reasons. So then he ended up dying.

19. Thomas Edison is an important person to study because before him there was no light.

20. Thanks to Johnny Appleseed, we have apple flavored & inspired food & desserts. We have: apple sauce, apple sider, apple pie, apple cake, & apple juice. So every time I eat an apple pie or climb a tree for an apple, I say thank you Johnny.

21. Beatrice ear-dropped on their conversation in the garden.

22. Good and evil are totally different from one another.

Poetry

2008-02-06T20:25:00.000-08:00

I teach a rather substantive poetry unit to my AP/IB seniors every year. Poetry is a major part of both the AP and IB curriculums, and the students have to be able analyze and write about poetry and answer extremely difficult questions to pass their exams in the spring in order to receive college credit from the Powers That Be. I haven’t really questioned this before given the fact that I myself have both a natural and professional affinity for poetry and studying it seems entirely natural and reasonable. But more recently, I’ve taken a step back and realized just how irrelevant and marginalized poetry has become in our society, how odd it is that we teachers devote so much time and energy teaching our students how to analyze poetry when no one really seems to care about it anymore. Apart from English classes and exams, most people have nothing to do with poetry in their lives. They don’t read it, they don’t write it, and they don’t have even the faintest glimmering of desire to do so.

Why does poetry matter? This is the question I have been mulling over since last Saturday night, which is when I spent an evening with about 1800 other people at UCLA’s Royce Hall listening to poet Mary Oliver read and speak about her work. It was unlike anything I have ever experienced before. The event was sold out—every seat was filled. The excitement and anticipation in the air was palpable. The young woman sitting to my left, in her green plaid mini-skirt and black punk boots, leaned forward in her chair during the introduction as though to bring herself closer to the woman who would emerge onstage. We were high up in the balcony, by the way.

Mary walked somewhat stiffly and slowly onto the stage, arranged her books on the podium, and began to speak to us with a casual intimacy that made it seem like we were all sitting together in her living room instead of an enormous, public hall. After a few remarks, she began to read her poems, and all 1800 of us sat in absolute stillness and silence. I have been to many symphonic concerts, plays, and other hoity-toity events with extremely sophisticated and devoted audiences, but none of them have ever been that quiet and that raptly attentive. We were mesmerized by the cadence of her voice, by the beauty of the words she spoke, and, most of all, by the weight of truth those words contained. At times her spoken truths evoked laughter—boisterous, noisy laughter—and at others a spontaneous and appreciative “mmmm” rolled in waves across the seats.

It seemed as though we all knew that in listening to her, in seeing her before us live, we were participating in something profound. Even sacred. It had the feel of a church service (although again, more attentive and quiet than most church services I have been to), and each line she spoke was a benediction, a sacrament. And we worshippers of truth and beauty stretched out the hands of our souls and received the blessing.

This probably sounds overwrought and melodramatic, like something only an “English” person would think and feel. But my friend, who is not an “English” person and who had never heard of Mary Oliver or been to a poetry reading before this night, also experienced this feeling of awe and transcendence.

So this is what has made me think about poetry and its place in our culture and society. It’s made me realize how much we’ve moved away from the beauty of language and how quickly we’ve given up the effort required to attain something worthwhile. Efficiency and ease have become the new gods. What will appeal to and entertain the masses has become the most desirable. And yet, beauty and depth still matter. As evidenced by Saturday night’s turnout, there is still some segment of the population who craves a beautiful and truthful and carefully crafted word. I think many others would as well if they could remember it was there in the first place and could pause long enough to taste it.

I once explained to my classes that poetry is like a reduction sauce. All the excess and extraneous language is boiled and evaporated away until you are left with only the richest and most flavorful essence of words and ideas. Poems point the way to things, but allow us (or force us, if you’re a reluctant reader) to navigate the layers. They offer lenses and landscapes, and that jolt out of ourselves that we need every now and then to see things more clearly. Seamus Heaney, a rather wonderful poet himself, captures what I’m trying to say in these lines:

You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.

We are all so often living as “hurries,” desperately needing some wind to blow through us and make us gasp. Other things can do that too—a strain of music, a beautiful landscape, even tragedy. But poetry does this especially well, I believe. You cannot hurry with a poem. You have to savor each word, letting its flavor blossom in the heart and mind. Try it. Find a good one and read it aloud to yourself, and let the words sink in you like stones in slow depths.

Pushing Boulders

2008-01-24T21:23:00.000-08:00

I’ve been away from my little blogging world for a while now, and I’ve been missing it. November was kind of pitiful (one entry that really counted as an October entry) and December was a kind of a cheat because I pretty much just posted things I wrote last year. And now January is coming to a close, and it’s time. I haven’t been avoiding writing because I haven’t had anything to write about or because I haven’t felt like writing. Quite the opposite is true. But I have felt that I was not allowed to write about what has been dominating my life since the end of the summer and was waiting for something else to come up that I could write about instead. But the longer I wait to feel like I’m at a point where I can squeeze past this giant boulder in front of me and move on to new territory, the more I realize that I’m never going to feel that way. I can’t squeeze past it. I have to deal with it and try to push it out of my way or else I’ll stay stuck in this dark cave for another three months or more. The long and short of it is that my father has been struggling with, for lack of a better way to put it, an increasingly severe mental illness in the past five months. The roots of it began long before that, and there is a complicated history, as there probably always is, but it’s been the past five months that have been the hardest for my family.

A large part of my hesitation in writing about this has been concern for preserving my father’s privacy and dignity, and I still have doubts about writing about this in a public way. But, as I said, this has dominated my life for months now, and I feel like a liar and a fake if I don’t write about it. It feels like a kind of suffocation not to say anything. So there’s simply the selfish need for outlet and self-preservation driving me to write this. But there’s something else I’ve been thinking about in recent weeks and days that I think has a legitimate place in this decision as well. It occurred to me a few weeks ago that if it had been a matter of my father’s colon cancer recurring or if I were just writing about his Parkinson’s, I wouldn’t be suffering all these conflicted feelings and making such an effort to keep silent. I wouldn’t have to worry for a second about his dignity or the possibility of people making judgments or the possibility of him feeling shame. People are okay with physical diseases and injuries. There is no question of any kind of personal weakness or potential fault on the part of the sufferer, and people often have a tremendous amount of sympathy and even admiration for people who struggle with severe physical ailments.

But what I’ve realized in struggling with this issue myself over the past months is that as far as we’ve come in our society, there is still a tremendous amount of stigma and shame attached to mental illness—to depression and anxiety that have accelerated into psychosis, which is the demon that currently has my father in its grip. I doubt anyone has ever suggested to a cancer patient that if he took up a hobby or went out with friends a little more that he could make himself better, but this has been suggested to my father. I myself have suggested all kinds of variations of that to him, as have my siblings, especially in the earlier stages of his illness, when he was still fairly rational. Obviously, we know that there is a major chemical and physiological component to his struggle and have tried every medical and psychiatric treatment available to address this; but what makes everything so messy and difficult is that there is this murky grey area where a person with a mental illness such as depression and anxiety can potentially make choices that affect his or her recovery. It’s not just chemical—it’s emotional and psychological as well. Is that where the stigma comes from? Is that where the blame resides? Can they really make choices and will themselves to work on these areas, and our unease and accusation stems from their failure to do so, or are we simply ignorant and heartless accusers of victims no more able to control their own minds and emotions than someone with leukemia can control his or her own blood?

This has made my own emotions towards him all kinds of awful. One moment I feel deep sadness and compassion for him, the next I feel full of frustration and anger that he keeps choosing (or so it seems) to persist in his illness and be non-cooperative in doing the things that we think could help him. And, of course, the next moment I feel a flood of burning guilt for that frustration and anger. So in some ways this is about my own shame. As horrible as my mother’s illness was, at least it was more clear-cut. She had cancer. She had done nothing to bring it on or exacerbate it. It was just this terrible disease that we all did our best to fight against. But in my father's case, it’s so easy to get mixed up between fighting his disease and fighting him.

There is much much more to this, but I’ll save that for another entry. I’m tired now and need to go eat something. Pushing boulders is hard work.

Christmas Letters cont.

2007-12-15T11:36:00.000-08:00

Shepherd’s Letter:

Dear Father,

It’s me, Benjamin, your son. I guess you know that much. When I left, you were probably as glad to see the back of me as I was glad to leave, and surely neither of us thought I’d be writing you a letter. But such things have happened lately that an old grudge over sheep doesn’t seem worth the trouble of being angry about anymore.
Nathan and I moved the flock into the fields outside Bethlehem about two weeks ago. The grazing wasn’t bad, but we decided to move on, away from Bethlehem and more to the south. You’re probably shaking your head right now and calling me stupid under your breath, but we had our reasons. That night, everything was as usual. We ate our dinner, and since Nathan said he’d take the first watch, I spread out my blanket to go to sleep. It took me awhile, because I kept feeling a stone digging into my back, but every time I lifted my blanket, I couldn’t find it. I must’ve gone to sleep eventually, though, because the next thing I knew, Nathan was crouched over me and kicking me in the side. If it hadn’t been for that kicking, I might’ve thought I was still dreaming, because a light brighter than anything I’ve ever seen before was shining over the field. And though it seemed like it couldn’t possibly be any brighter than it already was, it just kept getting brighter and brighter. The sheep were bleating and shifting restlessly, but none of them bolted, which, now that I think of it, was incredible. But that was the least of my thoughts at the time. As I said, the light just kept getting brighter and brighter, and Nathan and I didn’t know where to look because it was everywhere. It almost seemed inside of us.
At the point when the light became almost unbearable, a great cracking sound boomed across the field, like the earth itself was breaking in half. I felt like I’d been struck a blow, and Nathan and I both fell to the ground. I thought at first we’d been hit by lightning, but remembered that there was no storm that night. As we began to raise ourselves up again, a being such as I have never seen before burst out before us. Nathan and I clutched at each other like children, shaking with shock and terror, and the words that came out of my mouth were ones that would’ve made you take the strap to me when I was a boy. Not the way I’d have wanted to greet an angel if I’d ever thought before that I’d meet one, but I couldn’t help myself. What words are you supposed to say when you see something like that? I don’t think such words exist, and if they do, they’re not taught to shepherds.
Then the angel began to speak to us and said, “Do not be afraid, for behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy which will be to all people.” I tell you, Father, if it had just been a matter of the angel telling us not to be afraid, I don’t think it would have made much difference. The sight and sound of it was so beautiful and so terrible that at first it made me want to clap my hands over my ears and squeeze my eyes shut. But somewhere in the course of his speaking, I became filled with peace and joy—it felt like recognition. Nathan also seemed calmer, because he straightened up and stopped gripping my arm so hard. The angel continued to speak, and announced to us that right there in the city of Bethlehem was born a Savior, who was Christ the Lord, and that we should find him there wrapped in swaddling cloths and lying in a manger. The moment he finished speaking this, the entire sky was filled with a whole host of angels, singing and praising, “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth, peace, goodwill toward men!” You can’t even begin to imagine the sight and sound of that. They poured out a flood of ecstasy, and I was swept away. My hand trembles and my eyes fill with tears even as I write this. Just the memory of it still stuns me.
I’m not sure how long they were there and how long we stood in awe, our mouths hanging open—we seemed outside of time—but eventually, the light faded away and we were left once again with a dark night sky pinpricked with stars. I looked at Nathan, and one of us or both of us said, “Let’s go,” and we immediately began to run towards Bethlehem. And yes, Father, we abandoned the sheep. I know that must seem insane to you, that I, a shepherd—even as useless a shepherd as you think me to be—would abandon my flock in the middle of a field in the middle of the night, but I knew then as I know now that it was exactly what we were supposed to do. As we came to the outskirts of town, we paused to catch our breath, and it was then that we first heard the cry. A large and impressive dwelling rose up several yards ahead of us, but the cry did not come from that direction. Instead, the wails of a new baby came from a small structure to the side of the house.
We followed them and found ourselves inside a dimly lit stable. A young woman—just a girl, really—was trying to shush the baby while her husband crouched beside her and clucked his tongue. Nathan and I looked at each other in amazement. Surely this red-faced, screaming baby could not be the Christ the angels sang about! I looked around me at the animals in their stalls, the crude patching on the walls, and smelled the warm aroma of dung. Why on earth would God allow our Messiah to be born here? And then my gaze fell on Nathan and my own rough hands and clothes. I couldn’t remember the last time we had bathed. Our hair was matted with dirt and oil, and our clothes reeked of sheep. You can be sure that the wealthy owner of the house we had seen would have never let us step through his door, but here in this stable, we fit right in. What if—and I’m almost afraid to write this, but I can’t shake it from my heart—what if He was born there so that we might visit? So that two stinking, worthless shepherds might feel the freedom to enter in and see him? And so we did.
You’re probably thinking now that we had too much to drink that night, but I tell you that drunk men’s visions have nothing to do with what we saw. I don’t know why we, of all people on earth, were chosen, why this has happened to me and what it will mean to me in the years to come. I only know that I went to sleep with a pebble in my back and woke to a chorus of heavenly angels. I am speaking this now to all who will listen, and I feel that I must write to you as well, Father, for we are all men in a heavy slumber in the dark marrow of the night. And the time will come when we shall all be wakened by angels blazing glory, who will usher us—blind and stumbling—into the presence of the King.

Simeon’s Letter:

Dear Brother,

This is my last letter to you. The time that all young men think will never come to them has come to me. I am an old man, and the days of my life are small in number. Lately, I have been able to rise from my bed for only short periods of time. The activities of the living slowly fade away, and I spend long hours thinking over my life and contemplating the God I shall soon see.

What I have been remembering lately was how when you were just a boy and I was a young man, I would tell you the stories of the prophets and we would imagine the day of the Messiah, the One who would deliver us from the hands of our oppressors. We would take up sticks in our hands and imagine they were swords, and we would act out our battles against the Romans. You were so fierce, that even though I was so much bigger, I had to guard carefully against your lunges and jabs. I remember how we boasted that we would be at the front of our Lord’s army, following just behind Him in the charge to restore Israel.

But then we grew older and wiser, and the image of an Israel restored to glory faded into the images of our failure. We are a people under the feet of other nations, and I have seen how that has made you bitter. But I have tried not to lose hope. Every day for the past forty years, I have gone to the temple to pray. On your last visit, you asked me what I prayed for and smiled when I told you. It was a small moment—you probably don’t even remember it—but the mockery and doubt you showed me in that smile began to creep into my own heart in the days after. What if I was just an old fool chasing after an old dream? What if all these days and years of my life had been wasted? It began to weigh on my heart, and I feared that even in these last days of my life, I would be lost. But I was not. Seven days ago, I awoke not in a haze as is usually the case, but in an awareness that felt clear and bright, and the Spirit of our God spoke to me and told me that the Consolation of Israel had finally come, and that I would not die until I had seen Him. My limbs were filled with strength, and I rose up from my bed immediately and prepared to go to the temple.

When I entered the temple, I saw only familiar figures, but as I turned to look again, I saw a young couple standing at the entrance. I went to them and saw that the woman was holding a baby in her arms. “What is your son’s name?” I asked them. The father answered, “Yeshua,” and I knew then that he was the One who had been promised—His very name was Salvation. This was not a king of armies before me, but a sleeping child, and instead of the shining sword the hand of my youth imagined, the gnarled hand of my old age took up the baby and lifted him high. A voice that was mine and more than mine came pouring from my mouth, saying “Lord, now You are letting Your servant depart in peace, according to Your word; for my eyes have seen Your salvation which You have prepared before the face of all peoples, a light to bring revelation to the Gentiles, and the glory of Your people Israel.”

The parents looked a little frightened, and the mother moved as if to take him back from me, but I placed my hand on her head and spoke a blessing upon her and her husband. Her eyes were filled with confusion and wonder, and it was revealed to me that her child was destined for the fall and rising of many in Israel, and that He would be spoken against so that the thoughts of many would be revealed. I felt filled with compassion for her, for she will be pierced through to her own soul by what shall come to pass. This baby she moves to protect will only belong to her for a short time, as he was in my own keeping for only a moment. He does not belong to her but to the whole world. The days of the law are passing through Him into a new era for both Jews and Gentiles.

These words astonish me as much as they must astonish you, but who are we to question what God has planned? There is a young Roman sentry who stands watch in the marketplace whom I would pass every day on my way to and from the temple. I would see him look upon the people and the dust and knew his thoughts must wander as would anyone’s who looked upon the same scene every day. And it struck me that even these Romans, even our oppressors, have need of consolation. For we are all a people of longing, brother. Even you in your bitterness are longing. My prayers every day of these last forty years were not only for Israel, but also for you and for myself; and God has answered for Israel, and for you and for me and for all people. He has answered beyond what any of us even knew to ask.

I am dying, brother, but I am all joy, because not only has God kept His promise, but He has revealed it to a doubting, dying old man who can now share it with the younger brother he has carried in his heart for so many years. It wasn’t just a childhood tale after all. Christ has come, for you and for us all. May that now be your consolation and hope as it has been mine.

Copyright 2006 by Katherine Lo. Not for public use, reproduction, or distribution without express permission of the author.

Christmas Correspondence

2007-12-09T09:24:00.000-08:00

I received my first two Christmas cards in the mail yesterday. My first response was, “Oh, how nice!” This was immediately followed by a sinking feeling of guilt. I may cave in the next two weeks, but as of this moment, I have decided not to do the whole mass mailing of Christmas cards this year. I have been somewhat apathetic and ambivalent about the whole Christmas season in general this year, which is rather unlike me, but which is perhaps understandable given some of the things going on in my life in recent months. I was still waffling about the Christmas card issue this past week, but when I woke up feeling wretchedly ill on Friday, it was decided—definitely no Christmas cards. As I’ve spent the weekend blowing my nose, drinking hot tea, and trying to sleep despite that fact that it is practically impossible for me to breathe, I’ve been reflecting on the emotions my decision has stirred up in me.

Guilt is the biggest one. How dare I just be a receiver and not a giver? All those other people are taking their time to go buy, write, address, and mail Christmas cards—what makes me think I am exempt? And I truly do appreciate the time and effort that goes into those cards, and I enjoy receiving them and seeing the pictures and reading the little updates that accompany many of them. But really, if you were to put things in a different context (which is what I’ve been doing in my hours on my sickbed), a lot of our expectations are a bit insane. For example, if I were to tell you that in the month of, say, March you needed to change the décor in your house, shop and buy gifts for every member of your family and all of your close friends (and then wrap and package them all), attend at least two or three social events every weekend, bake lots of goodies, and correspond with every person you know (including the ones you haven’t spoken with directly for years), wouldn’t you think that was ridiculous? The kind of Herculean accomplishment that only a squirrel on speed could accomplish? And yet, amazingly, people do it. I have done it. But I’m not going to this year. Not even with all the pseudophed decongestant in the world coursing through my system (which is the equivalent of speed).

So I apologize to all of you who will suffer a grave and bitter disappointment upon not receiving a Christmas card from me this year. I know it will be a struggle for most of you, but try not to let it ruin your holiday or your life in general.

Instead of sending you my own Christmas card/letter, I will leave you instead with a different (and un-ironic) set of letters. Last year, I was asked by the staff at my church to write something for the Christmas Eve service, and what I came up with was an imagined series of letters written by a trio of figures who were direct witnesses to the original Christmas event—God’s physical entrance into our own time, space, and history in the form of an infant. I will start with Mary’s letter, and follow up with the other two in subsequent postings. Merry Christmas…

Mary’s Letter:

Dear Elizabeth,

It is many months now since I last saw you, and so much has happened that I hardly know where to begin. As you may have heard, Joseph and I had to travel to Bethlehem for Caesar’s census. The journey was so long and difficult. By the end of it, I felt as if I’d spent half of my life on the back of a donkey. Joseph was very kind and patient with me, but I could tell that our slowness was difficult for him as well. Bethlehem itself was chaos. You can’t imagine the people, how they crushed together in the streets. By the time we arrived, every lodging in the city was packed full to the brim. We spent the first two nights out on the street. On the third day, my contractions began. Joseph was beside himself, running from house to house, begging for a room. He finally found a landowner at the edge of town who was willing to have us in his stable.
I can picture your horror as you read this. As Joseph led me into the stable and settled me onto the straw, I thought of how my mother would have wept and raged to see her daughter in such conditions. I missed her terribly that night, and you also, Elizabeth. How I longed for you both to be with me! Instead, I had dear Joseph, and the landowner’s servant girl, and the animals all around me. It seems quite comical now that I write about it. The oxen and cows would bellow out in response to my cries of labor. It probably sounded as if the whole stable were giving birth. At the time, it just seemed like waves of pain to me. Until he was born—my baby son. I do not have to tell you the joy of that, as I know you must have had your own son by now. When Joseph put him in my arms, we began to weep and laugh at the same time. We were delirious with joy.
I think back often to our time together and what has occurred in both our lives. At times, those events seem like a dream to me, a beautiful, awesome fantasy. He is so tiny, Elizabeth. He has these little shudders every once in awhile while he is sleeping, and he likes to hold my finger while he nurses. When I blow on the fine hair at the back of his neck, he blinks and smiles. I know all mothers marvel at their babies. All think them miracles, all precious. But mine is the Son of God! I marvel even as I write this. I repeat it to myself throughout the day, and still I cannot grasp hold of it. I could not grasp it even when an angel of God stood before me and told me. Would you believe that I even forget, sometimes? But at other times, it is so real that I feel like it will split me wide open. I sing him lullabies and I wonder—is it my voice he hears, or is God whispering in his ear?
Sometimes I will wake in the middle of the night and see Joseph holding him in his arms and pacing back and forth, his mouth moving in silent prayers over him. We are shy in talking about it, but I wonder. Does he ask himself the same things I do? How is it that this has happened to me? Who am I to be a parent to God’s own son? Everything is so uncertain. Word of danger has reached us, and we are on the move again. Back on the donkey.
I long for home and to see the faces of my family once again. I hope it will be safe for us to return someday soon. I would like our sons to know each other and be friends. Do you think it will be so? So many hopes for my baby rise up in my heart, and with each comes a question. What do I hope for him? What is it God wills for him? Right now, it seems his life is a life of troubles. But I think about what the angel told me that day—that my son will have the throne of David. He will be called Son of the Highest. So surely this time of trial is only temporary. Surely Jesus will return to the land of his fathers with a crown of glory. It has been promised, and so I must believe, though the circumstances around me and my very eyes tell me otherwise. When he is a grown man, my baby son will be a king. How proud of him I will be on that day!

Copyright 2006 by Katherine Lo. Not for public use, reproduction, or distribution without express permission of the author.

Wrappers In My Driveway and Other Halloween Delights

2007-11-01T20:11:00.000-07:00

As I slide into that cycle of self-indulgence and self-hatred that the leftover Halloween candy in my house always provokes, I can’t help but reflect (with peanut M&Ms at hand) on Halloweens past. In the church I grew up in, all holidays—with their pagan origins and crass commercialism—were verboten, but Halloween was particularly bad. Anything directly associated with witches and ghosts and all that devilish business was something to flee with a vengeance. My childhood memories of Halloween are of my family closing the curtains, turning off as many lights as we could, and huddling together in the back room of our house. If someone actually braved the darkness to ring our doorbell, we would all go silent and hold our breath until we heard them go away.

Listening to the chattering and laughter and shrieks that floated in despite all the barriers we erected, I always felt a strange convolution of desperate longing to be one of those costumed children and smug pride that I wasn’t. I think sixth grade was the zenith, which is when my elementary school decided to have all the students in costume do a big parade weaving in and out of every classroom. The two or three of us not in costume had to just sit at our desks and watch. Looking back on it, I have to wonder why they didn’t at least try to pretend we were judging the costumes or something inclusive like that, but I guess they didn’t care as much about making everyone feel special and included in the 80s. Teachers just let you be the big weirdos and losers that you were.

Time passed, my family left that church, and gradually the great divide between us and holiday celebration began to recede. Halloween was the last to make it over, and even then my mother struggled with tremendous guilt. The first year we handed out candy, she insisted on including little slips of paper with Bible verses printed on them in the vain hope that some eight year old scarfing down a fun-size Snickers bar would have his heart touched by John 3:16.

Now that I am an adult, the barriers have been completely removed, and I am like every other American going to Costco and buying the jumbo-sized bags of candy for $11.99. For a number of years, I enjoyed seeing my students dressed up in costumes, and I took a real delight in handing out candy to the flurry of children that would come to my door practically vibrating with excitement and sugar. But lately, the shine has begun to tarnish. Let’s start with the fact that a large percentage of the girls who attend the school where I teach use the holiday to dress as inappropriately as they can—it’s not a dress code violation, it’s a costume! But the fairy tale characters I remember from storybooks and Disney cartoons never had bustiers, clinging skirts that ended at mid-thigh, and stiletto heels. I could be wrong, but I don't recall there ever being a Little Bo Peep and Snow White: The Whore Years.

And it doesn’t stop there. My costume last night was apparently “candy robot,” because that’s exactly what I felt like as the kids came one after the other in a steady stream and I mechanically reached into my brimming bowl and dumped a handful into each open bag. Most of the kids were fairly polite, but when one particular boy came to my door, my costume changed into “grouchy old woman.” As I leaned forward to drop some candy into his sister’s bag, this boy (probably about eight or nine) nudged her over and began reaching into the bowl for himself, shouting “I want that one!” I instantly snatched the bowl out of his reach. “Hold on a minute,” I said blocking his greedy hand. “How about you just wait and let me give you some candy?” “I want that one!” he shouted again, and moved as if to grab at the bowl again. I (gently) smacked his hand down and informed him, “You’ll get what I give you.” I picked out the smallest piece of candy I could find and dropped it in his bag. No John 3:16 from me—just the harsh Halloween lesson that you don’t always get what you want, sonny, so suck it up.

At that point, I was ready to be done. Stupid kids with their inappropriate costumes and grabby, ungrateful hands. Stupid Halloween that justified them. And just then, a girl in a clown costume that looked both clumsily and painstakingly made came walking up the sidewalk to my porch. She smiled shyly behind her plastic red nose and touched her rainbow-colored afro wig self-consciously. “Happy Halloween!” she said as she stepped onto my porch. When I gave her the standard handful, she watched it drop into her pillowcase in genuine amazement and exclaimed, “Wow! Thank you so much!” I wanted to hug her and tell her that she had just restored my faith in children, but instead I threw another handful of candy into her case and said, “Your costume looks great.” She thanked me again and practically skipped down the sidewalk.

After she disappeared around the corner, I decided to quit while I was ahead. I turned out my lights and hid out in the back room for the rest of the evening, just like old times.

Honk If You Hate Parades

2007-10-14T16:20:00.000-07:00

If I were to ask you to name a few important American holidays, what would probably spring to mind is Fourth of July or Thanksgiving or Memorial Day. I doubt anyone would actually think “Columbus Day,” even at the end of his/her mental list. I wasn’t even aware of Columbus Day as a holiday until I attended college in Massachusetts, which, I believe, is the only state in America that really recognizes it as an actual holiday and gives you a day off. I could be wrong about this. I will admit that I’ve not done any research on the matter.

At any rate, Wellesley College and all the other colleges and universities in the area gave their students a day off on that particular Monday in October. But no one actually celebrated anything. In fact, Wellesley didn’t even call it Columbus Day on their calendar—they went so far as to give us Tuesday off as well and lump it all together as “Fall Break,” skipping any direct reference to Columbus. After all, isn’t Columbus kind of passé now? I mean, didn’t historians find out a while ago that he wasn’t the first one to discover America, and that he was mean to Native Americans and brought smoking back to Europe? Or something like that. There was that weird year in the 90s where two movies about Columbus came out in theaters, starring Gerard Depardieu or Armande Assante or some other similar actor(s), but other than that, I didn’t think there were many people left who cared about Columbus other than elementary school teachers, whose students still perhaps chorus back “Nina! Pinta! Santa Maria!” the way I did in grade school.

So all of this to say that in my mind, Columbus Day simply means "three-day weekend in Massachusetts.” My sister, who is a resident of Massachusetts, regularly goes up to Maine during this holiday weekend. My father, who is retired, has joined her for the last several years, and this year my brother and I decided to join them as well—both of us using personal days at work since neither Virginia nor California recognizes Columbus Day. Despite the fact that global warming, evil culprit of all bad weather in the world, has made the idea of a crisp New England fall something of a joke (it was 81 degrees the day I arrived), Maine was still lovely and we had a nice family weekend together.

On the last day—Monday—my brother and I drove our rental car back towards Boston. There was no traffic on any of the major highways and we even had time to stop for a leisurely lunch in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. The 95 South, the 1 South, and the 60 East were all beautiful. It was when we were only three miles away from our destination—Logan Airport—that everything came to a screeching halt. Literally. One minute we were sailing along at 65 miles an hour on the 1A south, and the next I was hitting the brakes. We sat there idling for five minutes, then ten. After another few minutes, we heard some sirens in the distance. Must be an accident, we concluded, and checked our watches in that compassionate/selfish mix of, I hope no one’s hurt and I hope they get this cleared up soon. When another five minutes passed, I saw a few people behind me getting out of their cars, and I sent my brother out to ask the state trooper parked a little ways behind us if he knew what was going on. Meanwhile, I rolled my window down and stuck my head out. And that’s when I heard it—the first daaa da daaa da, BOOM cha BOOM cha.

Yes, that’s right, it was the sound (in case you couldn’t tell from my descriptors) of a marching band. This was no accident backing up all of the traffic trying to get to Logan Airport and other important places—this was a PARADE. A parade to celebrate Columbus. Who cares about Columbus Day, I ask? Apparently, the good Italian people of Revere, MA do. Enough so to shut down one of the major highways leading into Boston without any warning or rerouting for an entire HOUR. To the people of Boston and the far-sighted neighborhood of Revere, dozens and dozens of people panicked about missing their flights is nothing compared to the importance of properly paying tribute to Columbus. They even had bagpipes at one point. What bagpipes have to do with Columbus, I haven’t the faintest idea, but their inclusion could have something to do with the unwritten rule that all parades occurring in and around Boston must always have bagpipes.

Meanwhile, all those of us trapped in our cars could do was boil and stew. One poor British man did several frantic laps back and forth from the parade front to his car, but this didn’t gain him any more information than we had simply sitting our cars. At least maybe it helped him work off some of his stress and anxiety, which was making my own stomach churn. At one point early on in the parade, I suggested to my brother that all of us in our cars should blare our horns and drown out the parade. I was bitter enough to make the suggestion but, at that point, not bitter enough to take the action. When we passed the half hour mark, however, someone else had the same idea and began to honk.

It was like a match to tinder. Immediately, every driver in the vicinity (including me) began to blast his/her horn. The overwhelming blare of sound made my brother and me wince, but it also made us cackle somewhat maniacally with glee, and I leaned on my horn with relish, not caring a bit that I might be ruining some high school trombonist’s big moment or making toddlers cry. I felt a wave of joy wash over me in this act of making myself heard (literally) and a warm solidarity with the people around me who were just as enraged by this situation as I was. Stop traffic, suffer the consequences! You will pay! Ha ha ha! Take that, stupid Columbus Day Parade!

And then another sound emerged. The same state trooper my brother had spoken with earlier was now loudly reprimanding us all over his loudspeaker, ordering us to stop our honking and informing us that “it doesn’t help anything.” He even got out of his car to yell at a few drivers in person. I didn't have the courage to say this to him directly, but here's what I wanted to say: Actually, Mr. Trooper, you are wrong about that. Very very wrong. It may not have helped the parade end any more quickly or gotten us to the airport any sooner, but that wave of honking was a wonderful release of all that toxic anger and anxiety and stress that was building up in all of us, not to mention the strongest bond I've felt with an entire group of strangers in a very long time. Sometimes, it just feels really good to honk at a parade—especially a Columbus Day parade. So there.

Guest Post by Jani Pearson

2007-09-09T17:18:00.001-07:00

Portrait day. I thought getting my kids' portraits would be one of those special memories - right along with feeding my baby her first bite of banana. I imagined an effortless experience of crisp clothes, angelic smiles, and masterful poses. My walls would be covered with pottery-barn-like artwork of my daughters' faces. I quickly found that my idealist notion was wrong, so wrong. Portrait day is more like a bad day at the dentist. Except you're the dentist, there are ten angry patients complaining in the waiting room, and you just numbed your first patient's top lip. The endeavor involves three complex and fragile stages: Getting ready, posing, and choosing photos. The phases stack on top of each other like a Jenga tower of Piza.

Getting Ready
On portrait day I wake to the glare of my clock, 6:24. The clock is ticking. We have an 11:00am appointment. If we have breakfast by 7:30, we should finish baths, get dressed, and complete pigtails by 9:30, pile into the car by 10:00 and arrive at 10:20. It will take 15 minutes to get unloaded and walk from the parking lot to the elevator to the studio. If all goes well, I should be able to maneuver Audrey's nap schedule so we arrive during her happy window. Sounds simple enough.

Breakfast goes smoothly with my two-year old, aside from her smearing oatmeal in her hair and eyebrows. We finish at 7:54. Not bad. I have six minutes to get Amelia in her bath and Audrey down for a nap. I am an efficiency expert. With my right arm, I wrangle Amelia from the high chair; with my left I grab Audrey by the waist. She frantically begins sucking her bottom lip like she's famished. Her paci! I lean over and grab it with my teeth and then kick the hall door open with my left foot. I plop Audrey in her crib and Amelia in the bath. Audrey's crying. Amelia's yelling, "I need hotter! I need hotter, mama PALEEEEESE!" Like a metronome on high speed I go back and forth between the two, plugging Audrey with the paci and washing, splashing, and playing bake-a-water cake with Amelia in the tub.

It's 8:37. Darn. I've lost 7 minutes. I bribe Amelia with a cookie to avoid her daily screaming frenzy that usually ensues when I tell her it's time to get out of the bath. I can't lose those 15 minutes this morning. I refer to Amelia's dress as a "princess dress" and that springs her into action. Amelia is dry and dressed with shoes on. When I draw the comb from the drawer, she runs from me like I'm holding a head of broccoli. After bribing her with 10 Pez and a Dora show, I manage to chisel through the oatmeal (even after Johnson's and Johnson's) and tie her hair back into two uneven pig tails. Why do I always fail to achieve that perfect part other moms do so effortlessly? Mine looks more like a z zzz z.

Argh, it's 9:15. I need to pack our gear and wake, bathe, and dress Audrey. When I wake Audrey from her sweet sleep, she lets out a high A-sharp scream. She is not pleased. Even less so when I plunk her into the bath. I wash and dress my screaming baby and suppress the urge to scream myself. Out of the corner of my eye I notice Amelia has pulled the rubber bands from her hair and wrapped them around her bear's ears. And more good news. It's 9:45. Now I really need to move fast. I feel like a Ms. Pacman on level banana. I strap Audrey into her portable car seat, throw on some wrinkled shorts and a t-shirt for myself, redo Amelia's hair despite her screaming, pack a snack for Amelia, and prepare Audrey's diaper bag. I load all people and items on my limbs and back, and we make for the door. Somehow, between our front door and my car, Amelia manages to smear black dirt from my car's tire onto her white dress. Should I change her quickly? Check the watch. Nope, out of time. What kind of idiot would choose white for a two-year old, I wonder. I load the gear and people into the car. We have enough baggage that we could head out to Yosemite after the Portrait studio.

Finally. My wailing children are strapped in and we’re ready to go. All of the moving parts of the morning are sequestered in my vehicle. What a w-o-n-d-e-r-f-u-l moment.

It's 10:07. Stay focused.

The Portrait Studio
We arrive at 11:01. It's a mad-house. People, kids, babies, strollers, paperwork, ringing phones, and one attendant at the front desk. I glance at the sets of children. All perfectly manicured in matching outfits and eager to get their pictures taken. I look at my war-worn little ones. Amelia's drooping eyelids, her white (and black) dress, her sagging pigtails. Audrey has spit up on her blue and yellow jumper and she's fussing loudly. I feel depressed. I'm jolted out of my funk by a shrill "Who's next?" I look around at the ladies next to me, and say "I think I am." I see several eyes give me the you-poor-thing, mommy-sympathy look. The portrait lady drills me. "Are you a member of the Portrait Club?" "Do you have Portrait ID?" "Have you decided which Portrait package you want?" "Do you have a coupon?" "Are we doing two outfits or one?" I want to put my index finger to my lips and babble, blblblblblblbl. Instead, I locate my portrait card amidst all manner of department stores and buy-ten Golden Spoon coupon cards, answer her questions, and talk her down from the $259 Deluxe package to the $29.99 Basic. "Okay, have a seat. I'll call you when we're ready for you." "Thanks," I say. It's 11:32. I drag my now hungry, tired, and whining two-year old to the couch and park my sleeping Audrey next to us. So much for taking pictures during my kids' happy window.

"Pearson!" The shrill voice calls at 12:00. Finally! It's our turn. Amelia's first. Mrs. Shrill, whose real name is Joanie, suddenly turns into a puppeteering, raspberry-blowing, face-contorting, comedian. "Okay, princess," she sings, "sit on this chair and look over here at Mr. Chicken!" (Mr.? I think). Amelia looks at the soft pink chair like it's electric. "No, mommy, No! I don't want to!" I used to frown on moms who bribed their children with food. I've given up on such ideals. "Amelia, if you will cooperate for mommy, we'll get ice cream later." "No, momma! I don't like pictures!" "What kind do you think you want?" I tease, "chocolate…vanilla…strawberries with sprinkles?" The sprinkles get her. "Strawberry with sprinkles," she says with a tiny smirk.

She finally sits on the chair and Joanie takes over again. "Smile, princess! Mr. Chicken loves it when little girls smile, don't you Mr. Chicken?" Mr. Chicken is starting to sound like a dirty old man. Amelia smiles for a brief second. The smile's there. It's gone. Snap! We missed the smile and end up with a grotesque-looking expression. She begins again. "Oh, what a beautiful smile! Princess! Princess! Look here. Pbbbbbbbbbbbb!" Joanie blows a loud raspberry. I feel the urge to laugh hysterically. A half smile emerges on Amelia's face. The smile's there. It's gone. Snap! A variation on this routine goes on for the next ten minutes. We finally end up with a half a dozen shots ranging from distorted to dazed to just teeth. "I think we got some good ones! Now it's the little one's turn," she orders.

The circus begins afresh. "Audrey, lookey here!" Snap! "Boo! Boo! Pbbbbbbbb!" Snap! "Where's the chicken? There he is!" Snap! "Audrey, Audrey. Lookey here!" Snap! "A boo! A boo!" (Doesn't she mean "achoo?) "I got your feetsy, I got your feetsy." Snap! Snap!" When she's finished snapping, Joanie's hair looks frizzier than it did, and it is wet with sweat around her forehead and ears. We manage a few empty gazes from Audrey and one curly half-smile.

By the time Amelia and Audrey pose together, even Joanie's extraordinary show of potty humor doesn't help. Audrey is ticked. The resulting photo is of Amelia staring off into La La Land and Audrey bawling her eyes out.

Selecting the Photos
By now it's half past 1, and my kids are beyond tired. I'm beyond tired. And yet, we still need to order our pictures. While I enjoy looking at the final pictures, choosing the right ones is stressful. There is so much to consider. I have two kids, which means I end up with 9 to 12 shots of each, plus three shots of them together. Each shot is labeled P1, P2, P3, unless they are enhanced (black-and-white, sepia), then they are E1, E2, E3. I can choose between wallets, 3x5, 5x7, 8x10, and 10x13. You get one pose or one shot per sheet. There are four 3x5s and two 5x7s to a sheet. I have to make sure I order enough pictures for my mom, my mother-in-law, my three sisters, my two grandmothers, my husband's cousins and me. Each is going to want at least two pictures, one of Audrey and one of Amelia. My head hurts. With all of that in mind, I need to make sure I stay within the confines of the package I picked (that $259 package is looking better all the time). And I need to choose my pictures quickly. Amelia has just gotten a burst of punchy energy causing her to dart like a hummingbird singing "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious." I could make this simple and choose one of the best pictures of Amelia and one of the best of Audrey, ordering several different sizes for each of the people on my list. But I'm reminded of my role as household historian and guilt myself into ordering most of the poses.

After 15 minutes Joanie asks, "Are you all set?" "I need to be," I resign. "I've decided on two 5x7s of P1 and one 3x5 of P2, P3, and E13. I'll also take three 3x3s…I mean 3x5s of E13 and P 5x7s of P10. Did I say, "P"? I mean three 5x7s of P10." I feel an irresistible urge to laugh uncontrollably. Just like how I would when my sister and I would get the giggles during the silent moments of a piano recital. "Will you throw in a few C3P0s while you’re at it?" I bust up. Joanie's not amused. She confirms, "Okay, so you want one sheet of 5x7s of P1…" "No." I interrupt. I'm serious again. "I want two 5x7s of P1." "You are aware that you get two 5x7s per sheet, aren't you?" She questions. I nod yes. "Okay then, two P1 5x7s, one P2, P3, and E13 3x5s, three E13 3x5s and three P10 5x7s, right?" I pause, not wanting to look her in the eye. "I'm so sorry. I thought my daughter had an accident, will you repeat that one more time?"

At last, at quarter to two we have ordered our pictures and are ready to go home.

A week later, I receive the pictures by e-mail and send them to my husband. "Hey honey, let me know which ones are your favorites, okay?" I write. I planned to frame two pictures for Father's Day. Since he didn't respond to the e-mail, I asked him later that night. "Hey, so which pictures do you like the best?" "Oh, right." He says. "Uhhh….The kids look really tired in those pictures, don't you think? Maybe next time you should think about getting an earlier appointment. You know, catch them in their happy window." I bite my tongue and nod, "Hmm. I hadn't thought of that."

Comments

2007-08-30T21:29:00.003-07:00

Over the course of the past couple months, a number of friends have told me that they read this blog regularly but don’t feel comfortable leaving comments. I’m glad they’ve shared this because it reminds me that I have been very lax about setting guidelines and communicating my standards for people leaving comments.

Rule #1:

Comments should either be profound enough to make me weep or witty enough to make me chuckle knowingly.

Rule #2:

Comments should be written in a style that is one or all of the following: eloquent, urbane, poetic, elegiac, subtly subversive, or avant-garde.

Rule #3:

Comments should be the perfect length, and you should know intuitively what that length is.

Rule #4:

This should go without saying, but comments should always be written with strict and unfailing adherence to the rules of grammar and punctuation.

Please be aware that I spend a great deal of time closely scrutinizing all of your comments and judging how well they follow said rules. So does everyone else reading this blog. If you fail to meet any of these standards successfully, we will laugh at you scornfully and feel ourselves to be far superior to you, you lame comment writer.**

**NOTE: So, yes, this was all an exercise in irony for me, but in case my skills aren’t up to the task or you somehow lead an irony-free life and enjoy heavy-handed literalism, here is the serious point I am making: I certainly don’t expect or need everyone to write comments (some of you just genuinely don’t have any and some of you prefer to comment in direct e-mails or conversation, which is totally fine), but if you ever feel the urge to write a comment and suppress it out of fear of it not being “good enough,” then please remember how ridiculous everything I wrote above really is and take that leap. I appreciate any and all comments whether you are responding in general to how a post made you feel, responding to a particular phrase/detail, sharing an experience or memory of your own, questioning or expanding an idea in a post, or whatever else you might feel to write. Any comment is a response, and any response is extremely gratifying because that means someone read the post and was affected enough to want to say something back. And this goes for the guest posts as well—don’t be scared to comment on them just because you don’t know the writer personally. Okay, I’ll stop the earnest lecturing now. It’s not nearly as fun as the ironic part.

Thoughts on the Incarnation

2007-08-27T11:33:00.000-07:00

I am part of a team at my church that helps plan liturgical elements for the Sunday morning services. As such, I’ve been spending some time in this improbable and hot month of August going through a book of poems by Luci Shaw about the incarnation to see if there is any material we might be able use in the Advent season. In the poem “Salutation,” which references Luke 1:39-45, Shaw writes:

Framed in light,
Mary sings through the doorway.
Elizabeth’s six-month joy
jumps , a palpable greeting,
a hidden first encounter
between son and Son.

And my heart turns over
when I meet Jesus
in you.

Yesterday afternoon I got a message that my grandpa is dying. I went to the hospital and sat for some time with him last night. I rested my hand on his head and leaned in close to his ear to tell him I loved him, to speak the names of all the family members who could not be there, to tell him the things about his life and presence in my life that I was thankful for. I don’t know how much he heard or understood. His hearing is quite poor even at the best of times and he had just been given doses of morphine and Atavan to help him rest comfortably. So I sat back in the chair and held his left hand in both of mine and slowly stroked the back of it, careful of the inserted tubes, noting the fragile crepe of his skin and the deep reddish blossoms of bruising climbing up his arm. As I watched his eyes droop closed despite his labored breathing and the fluttering pulse beating in his neck, I wished there were something more I could do. But there wasn’t. All I could do was be with him, holding his hand and praying for him, being a witness to this final struggle. And the longer I sat there, the more certain I became that this was enough.

When it comes to the incarnation, I think there is a tendency in modern evangelical Christianity to focus primarily on the issue of personal salvation, where the incarnation of Jesus becomes all about asking Jesus into one’s heart and then being transformed by that indwelling so that one can become “better” and live a more fulfilling life. That act of indwelling becomes a ticket to heaven with the added bonus of one’s own personal Life Coach God. But reading Shaw’s poem after the experience of sitting with my grandfather last night, the incarnation struck me in an entirely different way. Jesus’s incarnation doesn’t end with his own body dying and resurrecting but continues in the bodies of those who know and follow him, and he doesn’t indwell us to serve us but to serve those who surround us.

To so many people, Jesus is a fairy tale, a curse word, a joke to make action figures out of or to call a homeboy on a trendy t-shirt. Christians might shake their heads disapprovingly at this, but we often distance and use him for our own purposes as well. Perhaps the packaging is more pleasing and seemingly respectful, but the act of usage is the same. In claiming to serve him, we use him to better our lives, to justify our judgment of others, to name brand him in a separate subculture that divides us from the rest of society with bumper stickers, logos, and radio stations. We seem proud to declare that we are separate from the rest of the world. But in doing so, I think we separate ourselves from the true meaning of incarnation.

If Jesus really is indwelling me, then I do not need to have signs and proclamations declaring this. It should not mark me out in a divisive or condemning way or cause me to withdraw from the world. It should humble me and cause a joyful fear and trembling as it did in Mary, the first vessel of Jesus and his indwelling. Mary did not strive to do anything or announce anything to Elizabeth. She simply walked through a door with Jesus in her belly, and another baby leapt and Elizabeth rejoiced. I wanted to be able to do something yesterday for my grandpa but I couldn’t—at least not actively or tangibly in the sense of helping him breathe more easily or rest more comfortably. But I could be there. I could bring the presence of Christ through the doorway and to his bedside and touch his head and hand with it. Jesus isn’t just in my heart for my own comfort and guidance and to iron out all the petty wrinkles of my personal sins. He’s there for my Grandpa and for every other person I speak to, listen to, touch, or simply sit next to. His incarnation exists in me to bless others just as it exists in others to bless me, and it is in this way—not through bumper stickers, slogans, or my own personal clean and shiny life—that God is glorified.

Guest Post by Greg Stump

2007-08-23T08:16:00.000-07:00

Here are my prayers.
I open my hands and send them up to you
but there are silences circling above
that swallow the words wholly
before it seems they can reach you.

So I delay any further release,
swatting away flies and covering them from the sun
while they sleep.
I wait to hear an opening above,
to send them in a quick ascent to you.

But the clouds come and go without noise,
I cannot even discern their movement.

Suddenly, twitching then thrashing
on the ground behind curtained tree branches
takes my attention away from prayer
and quickens my unwild heart.

Softly I see the bird, small and anxious,
hopping, as if to fly but unable.
A broken wing? Wounded by predator?
It moves in circles among the needles and dirt
without escaping and frantic.

Shame seeps out of my heart
since I know I will not help it—
afraid of being mistaken for an enemy,
of being bitten and disease,
of even holding some small alive thing
in my grasp that I don’t understand.

So instead I watch as it flails at pine and leaves,
leaping in an endless spiral of inability.
I look up toward the sky, doubly cursed,
and the clouds seem to be falling at me.

I turn back to watch the bird longer
and then I begin to see
what had been somehow hidden from me:

It is not trying to escape, but rather,
is building a nest.

Then the breeze moves over my hands
and my fingers turn loose
and my prayers fly over to rest
in the bed of leaves and earth,
cool beneath the shade of your wings.

Dream lives & broken sprinklers

2007-08-16T13:04:00.000-07:00

A friend of mine recently made the observation that perhaps the reason time moves so slowly for children is that they live completely in the moment, while it speeds past for us adults because we are always thinking ahead and worrying about so many things at once. This reminded me of Jesus’s command not to worry about tomorrow and his suggestion that we should emulate children in our faith. I never made a connection between those two elements before but it seems an obvious and powerful one to me now. I have just come back from three weeks of living in the moment, so to speak—of living what in some ways is my dream life.

As I’ve been unpacking my suitcase and transferring loads of clothes from the washing machine to the dryer, I’ve been reflecting on what exactly made the past three weeks my dream life and why it is so hard for me to be back home. Usually, even after the best trips, I feel a kind of gladness and contentment in returning home. So far, I do not feel this. Part of it may be jet lag, part of it the fact that it is ridiculously hot here (90s), and part of it is that before I’d even drunk my first cup of tea this morning, I got a nasty note on my front door from the city that pretty much said, “Hey, loser, fix your damn sprinklers so they don’t flood so much water into the street and mess up the Thursday morning street cleaning.” Okay, so maybe it didn’t exactly say that, but it was close.

So back to the dream life I was in just a short while ago and what made it so wonderful. First of all, I loved being in such a beautiful physical environment—the lush greenery of the English countryside, the openness and space, the beauty of the architecture in the cities, and the rich history—depth and character present everywhere I looked. I also loved having such complete escape and freedom from all of my responsibilities at home—dealing with bills, cleaning, repairs, doctor’s appointments, phone calls, etc. I didn’t have to worry about gushing sprinklers and how to fix them. I didn’t have to think about work. I didn’t have to worry about returning the shoes I ordered that don’t fit. All I had to think about every morning was what wonderful things I wanted to visit and explore that day. Even though I usually had a rough plan in mind, I was able to make decisions moment by moment and focus completely on what was around me and just enjoying and absorbing it. I got to be Katherine outside of my usual context—Katherine the traveler and explorer and nothing else.

Finally, I was writing about it all and loving it. All writing, I believe, is a process of moving deeper into oneself while simultaneously reaching out to connect with others. I think writers yearn for publication not just for recognition and validation (although those are powerful and often dominant motivators) but also for connection, to have someone out there read their words and be moved by them in some way or other. I connect with authors and their hearts and thoughts all the time as a reader and get to know them on some level even though they might be long dead and/or we’ll never meet face to face. All writers write for themselves, but they are also writing for a reader even if that reader is one merely hoped for and the texts end up in a drawer or hard drive somewhere never to see the light of day. Or at least that’s what I think. I am still so hesitant to call myself a writer and claim the right to speak as one.

Case in point: when I was experiencing technical difficulties at my B&B in Keswick and was trying to communicate to the owner how important it was for me to be able to connect to the internet and continue my blog, I blurted out, “I’m a writer!” The minute her expression changed to one of respect and she said, “Really?” I felt like the biggest fraud. “Well, I do some freelance writing, mainly for non-profits,” I amended, and then added, “My profession is actually teaching—I’m a high school English teacher. Writing is kind of a hobby. I'm just doing a little blog while I travel.” I was completely babbling at this point and finally stopped myself before I could downgrade all the way to, “I type.”

I met two “real” writers during the course of my travels. The first had just won a very prestigious award from the British government for her work and the second had been in England for a month doing research for her next novel, which is to be set in England in the 1860s. I look at them and the gulf between where I am and where they are seems too wide and deep for me to ever get across. They have lives I both covet and believe are impossible for me to ever achieve. It isn’t just that I believe they must have considerably more talent than I have, but also that they must somehow know secrets that I don’t—the password into the world of being published. But that is both an exaggeration and oversimplification. I think, perhaps, what both of these women have besides talent is the drive and commitment to pursue it. They have made writing their lives and I’m sure there was a great deal of hard work and frustration that went into doing that that I am not aware of and that I am afraid to fully commit myself to.

I look at friends of mine who are yearning writers, painters, musicians, dancers, and actors. We dabble and we dream, but we hesitate to name ourselves in those ways and to give ourselves those identities. But I am beginning to suspect that until we do, we really won’t ever be able to cross that gulf into the “real.”

I seem to have ventured away from the ideas I began with, but I think the two are somehow related—living in the moment and writing, freedom from anxiety and burdens and a clearer sense of self. I want to bring some of those elements of what I experienced and how I felt during those three weeks traveling in England back into my life here in tacky and too hot Anaheim. But first I need to go figure out how to fix my sprinkler heads.

I'm going to England...

2007-07-23T17:00:00.000-07:00

Join me at: http://katherinegoestoengland.blogspot.com/

Guest Post by Dale Wayne

2007-07-08T14:46:00.000-07:00

"Charlie's Starry Night"

I am looking at Charlie Classe’s version of Van Gogh’s Starry Night. The swirl of stars tumbles in purple and green onto a curved horizon. Yellow crayon resists green watercolor, making the hills look like they are reaching for the stars. The moon and planets, encircled by bright yellow rays, blink across the night. The heavens are set in motion by curves of pink crayon peeking through a turquoise sky. When I look at stars, I am reminded of our creator God who “made the stars also.” I picture God the Father with a handful of glitter, casting stars through the heavens for signs and seasons, and for beauty.

We worship a God who, in his love for us, made us in his image. We are created creative. When I walk through the halls of The Geneva School, I can feel the creative energy glowing out of classroom doorways, bubbling in hallway conversations, and floating in a noontime blessing sung before lunch.

Charlie’s cloud-like cascade of stars tumbles like a waterfall onto the horizon. I wonder if she remembers that van Gogh liked to make water look like land and land look like water. A large brown cypress tree, a symbol of death, pierces her green and purple scribbles. Charlie has filled the triangular negative space formed by the tree and cloud, with a rainbow. I love rainbows. When teaching art, there are times when it seems God reaches in and reveals something that had never occurred to me. Once, we were studying Noah’s ark in the second grade. I was explaining with excitement something I did not understand until I was an adult: “Did you know that the ark is a symbol of salvation through Christ? The ark cradled Noah and his family saving them from destruction in the same way Jesus rescues us from sin and death.” “Jesus is the ‘what’ of the world?” I solicit, and get a variety of answers and land on the one I am after: “Yes, He is the Light of the world.” Even though it is probably a bit over their heads, but we talk about white light. “When you put a prism up to a light, or if sunlight shines through a crystal in a chandelier, what do you see?” “A rainbow!” someone will invariably exclaim and somehow God’s symbol for His promise not to destroy the earth again by flood, becomes potent with meaning. Jesus is all the colors. They are a picture of Him. We see it again in the story of Joseph. His coat, like the cloak of righteousness we are wrapped in, is multicolored. Our coat is so full of color it is white.

The first-grade children learn that Van Gogh repeats the shape of the looming cypress with the steeple and church in the little town beneath the stars. The actual scene he was painting did not have a church. He added it by his own invention. When Charlie was finishing up her painting, she left an unpainted section underneath the village. The stark white is interrupted by black crayon dashes that look like quotation marks . Will Coleclasure, the art assistant, suggested “Don’t you want to color the ground underneath the church?” “No” Charlie responded, “it’s in the clouds.” As I look at it I think of the New Jerusalem, descending from the clouds, where the streets are of gold the color of clear glass, its foundation made of every color of stone imaginable, and whose light is the Light of the World.

A Walk to Remember

2007-07-01T19:24:00.000-07:00

I have just recently come back from visiting family in the Midwest and am reminded afresh how other parts of the country are very different from Southern California. Technically, being a rational person, I should already be clear on this, but there is something about experiencing a reality live that is quite different from knowing it in your head.

My experience of reality in the Midwest began my first morning at my brother’s house in Michigan. Determined to keep up my exercise regimen despite being away from home, I put on my tennis shoes, anchored my iPod in my pocket, and stepped out the front door. I was immediately bathed in a heavy, moist heat that almost sent me back indoors, but as I said, I was determined. And really, I thought, what could be nicer than a walk in the countryside? Heading down the circle driveway, I decided to go right. There are no sidewalks in my brother’s neighborhood, which runs mostly to trees, large fields of crops, and the occasional house. There is only a narrow stretch of a two-lane road, bordered by an even narrower margin of gravel that slides straight down a steep slant into a ditch, all of which is overgrown by a variety of wild greenery.

I felt uncomfortable walking directly on the road (I had seen enough flattened possums around to feel a fair amount of caution with regards to cars), so I started out walking on the small border of gravel. Normally, I like to walk very briskly, but now I found myself navigating the unstable slip and slide of the gravel like an old lady, keeping a wary eye on the path ahead of me as well as on the steep drop to my immediate left and all those plants reaching out to brush my leg. Did poison ivy grow along country roads? What about poison oak? And then there was the startling eruption of insects that also threatened my stability—brown, clicking, leaping, flying things that would burst out of the plants and rush straight at me. Also, for some reason, flies in the Midwest are enormous, mutant-sized flies and they bite. I can only imagine what I looked like to the cars passing by me—a strange, half-Asian woman picking her way gingerly along the side of the road, flailing her arms and slapping at her own head, arms, and legs. They probably gave me such wide margin (pulling over to the opposite lane when passing) not only out of concern for my safety but also their own. I’m sure I looked either mad or possessed.

Eventually, I decided to give up on the gravel section and take my chances on the paved road. It seemed safe enough now that I had reached a point where I could see it stretched flat in front of me for at least a mile ahead. As I was walking against traffic, cars would become visible in plenty of time for me to move. I picked up my pace and despite the sweltering heat began to enjoy the rhythm of my walking. This lasted a good five minutes. At the end of that five minutes, the forest of trees that had previously been to my left thinned out and a house with a large front yard came into view. Right about this point is when I saw a large and vicious looking dog running at full speed towards me, barking ferociously. In retrospect, I am always amazed at how much one’s brain can process is such a small amount of time in situations like this. As soon as I registered the dog pelting towards me with its ears flattened back, I looked away. I thought I remembered somewhere someone saying that you shouldn’t make direct eye contact with an aggressive dog. My brain raced as frantically as my heart rate as I tried to remember what one does in a dog attack. Show submission, I thought. But how did I do that again? Was I supposed to drop down into fetal position? Play dead? Or did one only do that in bear attacks? Or maybe that was shark attacks—you know, dead man’s float? For a flash second, my brain warned me to protect my head and the back of my neck, but in the next nanosecond I remembered that that was what we used to do in school earthquake drills. All the emergency responses I had ever learned in my life seemed to flood my consciousness at once, scrolling through like some kind of mental rolodex of horrors. And then there was the part of my brain that simply shrieked, Oh God! Oh God! Oh God! as I forced my body to continue walking forward.

Fortunately, the attack—the impact of fur and teeth and claws—never happened. The barking continued, but either the dog was trained not to leave the property and attack innocent road walkers or else it had one of those invisible “fences” that gives the dog a shock through a collar when it reaches a perimeter. I was hoping for the latter. I have more faith in electrocution than obedience. Whatever it was, I managed to continue my walk without getting mauled and made it back to my brother’s house exhausted but in one piece.

The park I walk in here at home may have graffiti, renegade skateboarders, and blatant drug activity, but really...it’s not so bad.

(un)cool

2007-06-03T20:21:00.000-07:00

I realized two things today. One, I am not a naturally cool person. And two, I am okay with that. Now it’s not that I’m self-deluded enough to have gotten all the way to age 33 thinking that I’m cool when I’m really not, but more that I always hoped I at least had the potential to be cool and was just missing it by a few degrees that could eventually be overcome. “Cool” is one of those terms that gets thrown around a lot but is difficult to pin down when it comes to a specific definition, but I’ll do my best. From my perspective, cool people are those who have that kind of effortless quality to them—effortless confidence, effortless hipness, effortless social interactions with others, and so on. During the Italian Renaissance, this seeming effortlessness and grace with regards to dress, conduct, and art (when in fact there was a tremendous amount of intention, effort, and work involved) was called sprezzatura. And cool people have this. They wear clothes that have come out of a thrift store and sport unwashed hair with panache. Cool men can wear hats and glasses that would make any other man look ridiculous. Cool women can wear ugly sweaters and/or dresses with haughty expressions that somehow transform them into high fashion. In cool women’s hair, plastic barrettes are chic. Cool people don’t approach other people—other people flock to them, fluttering about like so many moths anxious to set their wings on fire. Cool people do what they like and say what they like and even their aloofness or lack of consideration has a kind of charisma and charm. They are known and they are in the know, but all in a kind of careless, casual way. Like I said, sprezzatura.

Then there’s me. Every once in awhile, I will wear a cool outfit. I have cool taste in music and films. I read cool books. I’ve even been friends with a few of those naturally cool people over the years. But I am not a naturally cool person and I never will be. I often wear clothes that have more to do with comfort and practicality than style. Accessories tend to baffle me. I make to-do lists every day and systematically cross off each item once I’ve accomplished it (somehow I don’t think naturally cool people do this). I wear old lady slippers around the house. I get the same haircut every time I go to the salon. I get excited when a new Newsweek issue arrives in my mailbox. I’ll have earnest conversations with people about fruits and antioxidants. And most of all, I have none of that sprezzatura. Social situations (especially involving people I don’t know very well) usually require a fair amount of effort from me, and there is an awkwardness and reserve that I feel are often readily apparent to others. When I have a conversation with someone, it’s not just the two of us talking—there are also the voices in my head. These are not the schizophrenic voices of the insane (at least I hope not), but the overly-analytical voice of my self-conscious inner critic, who is processing and judging everything I say and do, and the voice of my fledgling self-confidence, which is attempting to restrain or at least balance the judgmental voice and allow me to just be myself, whatever that is. I lack that sprezzatura because I want everyone to like me but the critic keeps telling me they’re probably put off by my oh-so-obvious shortcomings. And then the critic berates me for wanting everyone to like me (I can’t win). A cool person says, “who the hell cares?” and is liked by everyone anyway. I can see this, but I care too much (and think too much) to ever be this.

Which brings me to number two. While I think I’ll always have a certain level of self-consciousness and shyness around cool people—it’s just who I am—realizing that I will never be a cool person myself is a tremendous relief. It means I can stop trying. It means I can let myself off the hook about the shoes I recently bought that one of my students described as “grandma chic.” It means I can embrace my uncoolness. I can like my gauche habits and dork traits. Most significantly, I can fully appreciate my relationships with fellow uncool people. While cool people have this strange power of attraction for me, I often find it difficult to connect with them and feel at home with them, and I seldom feel like they care anything about me. I wonder if that’s connected—the carelessness that allows them to be so cool is also what keeps them aloof. Or maybe it’s that cool people can only truly relate to and have deep relationships with other cool people. Or maybe that I am artificially creating these barriers on my end, which is quite possible. The few cool friends I’ve had over the years have been my most difficult relationships. There has always been a level of fakeness and self-consciousness there that I haven’t been able to get past, and I know that has as much to do with my own expectations for myself as with any they might have for me. But my fellow uncool friends, well, they are gems. Their quirks and uncool qualities make me feel free and unselfconscious about my own, and that’s when we can actually love each other truly. I know that cool people have flaws as well—they’re just better packaged. Maybe the rest of us are deceived by this packaging. Maybe in their cool hats and cool but ugly sweaters they’re lonely and insecure too. Maybe the Kingdom of God will be all the coolness and the desire for it stripped away so that a world full of dorks and uncool people can love each other awkwardly and honestly, no sprezzatura involved. Or at least that's my (un)cool thought.

My Mother's Toes

2007-05-13T16:32:00.000-07:00

My mother had a number of physical habits that I suppose could be called tics, but they were more subtle and more endearing than that term implies. She was always in motion in some small way even when she was completely at rest. Her nose would twitch, not unlike a rabbit’s, whenever she sat at the dining room table drinking her coffee and reading. Her eyes would blink in rapid patterns while she was listening to someone on the telephone, and her toes would bob and sway while she sat back in the recliner watching TV. Those toes had a life of their own to the degree that my mother regularly had to replace her tennis shoes because her big toes would gradually burrow holes through the tops of them. Same thing with her slippers. I still have a pair of them—fuzzy navy blue ones with a hole poked through right above the big toe.

When we last took my mother to her oncologist in January 2002, he assured us that the agonizing regimen of radiation treatment she had just completed would start to take effect soon, and the tumors pushing their way through her bones, where there was no space for them, would finally start to shrink. It was no cure, of course, but it offered some hope that the grip of pain not even morphine could free her from would finally let up. And then we could talk about the finality we hadn’t had a chance to address yet and do our best to enjoy the remaining three to four months of life the oncologist predicted my mother had left.

What the oncologist did not know, what none of us knew, was that the cancer had metastasized to her brain, and in the middle hours of the very next night my mother suffered a massive stroke. She managed to tell my father and brother (who was visiting with his family) that she did not want to go to the hospital. By the time I arrived from my apartment, she could not voluntarily move or speak or even control her eyes, which rolled back in her head as I greeted her and kissed her cheek. Hospice care arrived a few hours later and had a hospital bed, oxygen tank, and morphine pump set up by midday. At this point, my other two siblings were already on planes, making their way across the country from their homes on the east coast.

I don’t remember quite when or how we first noticed it, but very early on we discovered that my mother could move her feet a little. Her left toes, in particular, seemed especially mobile. We began asking her simple yes and no questions, instructing her to move her toes for yes answers. I don’t think I can begin to describe the joy and excitement that filled our hearts when we saw her move her foot very deliberately in response to one question, hold it quite still at another, and then move it again to another. Behind her slack mouth and rolled back eyes, my mother was still with us. She was still aware. She was still able to communicate with us.

In the next few days, we frequently gathered around her bed and sang hymns. My mother loved music. Growing up, I often found her in the kitchen warbling along to a favorite song and even doing a kind of soft-shuffle dance, her eyes half closed. When she’d see that I’d caught her at it, she’d wink and smile at me and then get back to it. And now, as we circled her bed and sang, her foot danced along. We knew it was deliberate because the motion would still when we paused and start up once we began singing again. When I told her how much we loved her and that we knew she would tell us she loved us if she could, the motion of her foot nearly kicked the sheet off the bed. On the fourth day, her motions became a bit more irregular. By the end of the fifth day, her foot no longer moved, and at the very end of the sixth, she died.

When you gather at the side of someone who is dying, someone whom you deeply love, time has a way of stretching out and small things have a way of being magnified. There are so many elements of those last six days—both excruciating and exhilarating, humorously mundane and divinely sacred—that I hold in my heart and my memory and have yet to fully process. But on this Mother’s Day, I think about her dancing toes and thank God for the sweetness of that blessing, for that tiny miracle of motion that connected us beyond the power of speech.

Guest Post by Eric Balmer

2007-04-29T17:44:00.000-07:00

"Love Roger"

It is pretty natural for people to look to particular moments in their lives that define them. That whole “existence precedes essence” thing has gotten pretty out of hand. But there are moments that leave indelible marks upon the wet wear upstairs. I guess it must have been the millennium. Just imagine the probability of actually living when the calendars change not just from one year to the next, or even from one century to the next, but actually from one millennium to next (I’m aware that is it merely a convention, but nonetheless an exciting one especially considering that world civilization was about to be undermined by a computer bug - “Quick, get the guns and the gold”). The force of history actually moved my dad to put a card in an envelope and send it across the Atlantic. It arrived on the steps of the fourplex that I live in and made it to my desk. Not only did I receive a card, but a box of Swiss chocolates. They had designs on them of local villages in the surrounding areas where my dad resides. I’ve been to these villages. Sure they are pretty, but they’re in Switzerland so they’re neutral. I haven’t met very many exciting neutral people in my life. “Mom, I am so excited for you to meet my new girlfriend. She has all of the characteristics that I look for in a girl. She is so neutral. I think that we’ll get married some day!”

I am actually a believer in the written word (some things are obvious) and two words in the card left me deflated. I was actually so filled with excitement upon receiving the card that I actually missed the severity of the two words the first time that I read them - “Love Roger.” In the first fourteen years of my life, when I lived with my dad, I never once came home and said, “Hi Roger.” Did I have to be taught that? I don’t recall, but it seems safe to say that this goes against the way of the earth. Dads aren’t Rogers, but Rogers are Dads. The relationship is not symmetrical, but I’m not the one who violated it. He did. If only the card had ended with the words – “Love Dad.”

As I write, I am less than two months away from my twenty-eighth birthday. Add fourteen and fourteen together and you get the sum total of years that I’ve been given so far. The first half is the “Love Dad” half and the second half is the “Love Roger” half. The saddest day of my life was the day that found the Archimedian point that divided these two halves when his plane was called and the earth moved. Airports. What is sadder than an airport? On that day, I was fourteen. My Mom, Dad, two sisters and I drove to LAX to see him off. Little did I know that it would be such a fateful day; my life was now divided and my Dad would become a man called “Roger.”

The thing that makes the divide both confusing and painful is…. the willfulness. There was a choice involved and it was not made in my favor. Had my Dad died of natural causes back in December 1989, I would have been devastated. However, the death that he died was a willful one, a neglect of his only son. I was not the one who let go. He did. The fact is, I love my Dad and remember him with the kind of love that only a son can have for his father. I had strange hobbies as a kid. He embraced them. I was a magic geek. In fact, I was President of the Fountain Valley High School Magic Club. We had two members. When I longed for hair to grow under my arms, my Dad did as well. Its uncanny how caught up a prepubescent fourteen year old can get over any area of the body aptly labeled “Buckwheat in a headlock.” 1989. The fixed point and the leverage needed to move the earth was found and someone pulled the lever. The world was rejoicing over the fall of the “evil empire” and I was wondering why my Mom was hanging out with another man. I think that it should be illegal (or a least a highly frowned upon social convention) for adults to ever use the words ‘boyfriend’ or ‘girlfriend’ after the age of … let’s keep it fairly uncontroversial and just say …forty, the BIG 4 0. Not only does it not make any sense, it just sounds so weird when spoken by adults with kids, no hair, and a love for the breadsticks served at the Olive Garden. After the age forty I suggest that adults up the ante on the clever function. When around that confused little bastard just spell out the words, rather than say them. “C-A-N I S-T-A-Y T-H-E N-I-G-H-T?” “Y-E-S A-F-T-E-R (add the appropriate name) G-O-E-S T-O S-L-E-E-P.” I forgot, that trick has been used. Learn a different language and try it in that dialect. Please, just spare the sons and daughters the world over from having to hear their parents use the word ‘boyfriend’ or ‘girlfriend’ about a new and improved significant other. I really don’t think that this is too much to ask and it will alleviate a lot of unnecessary awkwardness from an already awkward situation.

I’m not complaining. This is not my treatise against the stacked deck that is my life. Everyone’s deck is stacked. I’m 6’5”. I can comfortably see over the heads of ninety-nine percent of the world’s population. I might have some pretty stiff competition from residents of Africa, but China, Mexico, Yemen, Italy, Indonesia, Qatar and the globe over offer me a bird’s eye view of their brown, black, bald, and blonde heads. It all depends on the way in which we read the cards. I have a great view at concerts, but a sore back when I go home at the end of the night. The fact is no one wants to admit that the playing field is inherently and brutally unequal. If they did then the grounds for complaint might actually be justified and hugging lawyers with an office the size of my apartment furnished with matted posters that say such things as “Leadership” or “Endurance” would be ok. If that kind of situation is not a paradigm shift, then I don’t know what is.

But time is short. I’m approaching twenty-eight and my dad is now sixty years old. Four years away from the question raised by Sir Paul, “Will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I’m sixty-four?” I never really liked that song. Strangely, I’m more drawn to songs like “Don’t Let Me Down.” However, if the sentiment expressed in “When I’m Sixty-Four” were uttered by “Roger” within the next four years, I might change my mind, embrace the quirkiness of Sir Paul and fly to Switzerland with a Super sized Big Mac in hand. That’s right, four years away from that arbitrary milestone sung about by the baby-faced Beatle. According to recent statistics, life expectancy for American males is seventy-four years old. That gives me another fourteen year block to see how things will fare between my Dad and I. Will he remain “Roger” or will the prodigal father return from his Swiss holiday and embrace his children? We’ve been waiting, holding on to ribbons and bows. We’ve been waiting, dressed up in your favorite clothes.

Decisions

2007-04-18T19:01:00.000-07:00

The wind is howling outside, buffeting the trees and the window panes as it blows. My wooden chimes are being flung maniacally to and fro, battered but still hanging on by their thread. It all feels a bit like a metaphor for what I am feeling internally. I too am feeling blown this way and that, buffeted and battered and just wanting a little peace and quiet and the chance to get the dirt out of my eyes. And the cause of this internal disorder? I have to make a decision about something, one of my least favorite things to do in life. I would rather clean my bathroom, wash dishes, or even go to a doctor’s appointment than have to make a decision. It sits on me like a heavy stone gargoyle, hunched and grinning.

As I’ve often said to friends, it’s easy to decide between good things and bad things, or even good things and just okay things. But deciding between two options with a seemingly equal amount of good and bad elements is pure agony for me, because then it becomes a situation of having to figure out which good and bad things should carry more weight and which should be squelched or ignored. Which are going to cause more pain and regret in the future, and which are going to offer more benefits. Though I have always regarded them with a certain amount of skepticism, I have also always been a bit envious of people who say things like, “God told me to…” or “The Lord put it on my heart to…” I have never gotten those types of communications. Apparently, they have a phone line that I never got connected to. It’s like when I first wanted to sign up for DSL and was informed by my phone company that the cable didn’t reach my area of the city. I am outside the loop.

I look for signs and search my heart for leanings, but there is only vagary and confusion. One moment I will be certain I feel an inclination in one direction only to feel an inclination in the opposite direction minutes or hours later. I am often deeply suspicious of my feelings anyway. What’s really driving them? They come upon me disguised so much of the time, and I can get caught in an endless progression of unmaskings. I pull off one façade and recognize that a feeling of desire for something is really a feeling of duty, or I discover that something I think that I want for myself is really a fear of disappointing someone else. But just when I think I’ve caught a glimpse of the true face of something, it morphs into something else and another layer must be peeled away. Pretty soon I just get tired and want to pack a duffel bag and run away like I did when I was six.

Part of my problem, as evidenced by the previous paragraphs, is that I just think too damn much. All those analytical skills I developed in college and graduate school are great when it comes to deconstructing a work of literature, but when they turn inwards, they can process and chew things over until all that’s left is a pile of mush. Paralysis by analysis, as the saying goes. But I think another part of the problem is the way I view decisions. I have a tendency to see them as tests, God’s benchmarks for my spiritual and life progress, so to speak. In my mind, there really is always a right choice and a wrong choice even though they’re both cleverly designed to look like equally reasonable and morally ambiguous options. Even when others that I consult support or see a justification for one or both options, I feel like I’ve fooled them somehow—suppressed some aspect or presented the options in a manipulative way that is simply steering them to say what I want them to say. But God isn’t fooled, I think to myself. He knows my true motivations and intentions (even when I don’t) and is going to either be nodding approvingly or shaking his head. And most often my assumption is that he’ll be shaking his head. I am doomed to failure. I am too selfish, too foolish, too blinded by XYZ to choose the correct option.

But this makes God a big meanie—one of those horrible, bitter, desiccated teachers of old who delight in tormenting their students. And this is where part of my exhaustion, my internal battering, comes from—having to beat down that image of the mean old man and remember that God is a good teacher. He has already taken all the tests for me, and he has already passed them all. My only task is to learn. Easier said than done. I keep creating new tests for myself, imagining trick questions where there are none, weighing myself down with anxiety and the anticipation of failure and regret. The stereotypical sins that first jump to people’s minds when they hear the word “sin” are things like drinking or sex or violence. But it’s the more insidious ones like perfectionism, fear, and the delusion that I have the power to move myself up or down in God’s favor, that I can cause him to speak to me or to sit in silence based on the things I do or don’t do, that get me every time. I disconnect the phone line myself in a kind of reversed arrogance.

I am nearing the end of this essay and I still have to make a decision. It’s still going to be hard. There will still be consequences I will have to live with no matter what I choose. But what I must remember, what I must cling to in the rush of winds upon me, is that my decision—good or bad, right or wrong—will not change God’s love for me. It will not make him think any better or worse of me. It will not stop him from completing the good work he has begun in me and in my life. He will not be shaking his head or throwing up his hands at me. Maybe when I can finally know that and truly believe it in my heart is when I’ll be able to hear that still, small voice—the one that comes after the buffeting winds.

Confessions of a Jiffy Rube

2007-04-12T15:59:00.000-07:00

At the risk of sounding inordinately pompous and vain, I generally tend to think of myself as a fairly intelligent person. Not a genius, mind you, but with enough higher education, training in critical thinking, and exposure to NPR and The New Yorker to walk around with the inner confidence that I’m No Dummy! So while it might not be a surprise to anyone around me when I run smack into the limits of my brain, it usually comes as a bit of a shock to me and makes me feel stupid on two accounts—1) that I’m stupid in whatever area I’m being stupid in, and 2) that I’m stupid not to have known this about myself.

Today’s beat down occurred at my local Jiffy Lube (whose commercial tag line is, “Jiffy Lube—every 3,000 miles!”). The stupid begins with my not remembering that the same rip-off occurs every single time I go there. I don’t know where this blind spot comes from, but somehow it manages to block out any memory of my getting ripped off at said location until it happens again. As in, my credit card has already been swiped and I am walking to my car looking over a bewildering list of services and wondering to myself how the $30 oil change I went there for turned into $125 worth of work.

This is what happened today, which is just a variation of what happens every time:

I pull into the lane marked by the yellow lines and get out of my car. “Hi,” I say to the man in navy blue overalls walking towards me with a clipboard. “I’m here for an oil change.”
He ignores this declaration and says, “Car keys?” I pry them off my key chain and hand them over obligingly. After scribbling down a few pieces of information from my car, he motions me to follow him over to a small stand with a computer on it. He inputs some information and a screen pops up. “This you?” Obviously this man means to take my money with as few words as possible. I can barely see the screen because the sun is shining almost directly in my eyes, but I make out a fragment of my address and nod. “Yeah, that’s me.”

“Okay.” The mechanic begins clicking and scrolling through a rapid succession of screen images that appear to be long lists of services with accompanying picture diagrams. They flash by at a speed comparable to the images in one of those films meant to brainwash you (á la Clockwork Orange), and they are narrated by an equally blurred mumble from the mechanic that goes something like this: “Okay, last check 3,100 miles ago, you have 50,000 miles, time for radiator flush, transmission flush, air filter, ignition valve replacement, brake pad replacement, windshield wipers, and combustion crank adjustment.” Of course, he didn’t actually say most of that. I’ve made the terms up because the sad fact of the matter is that I had no idea what he was talking about (and how do you remember words you don’t know?), which is the whole problem. I have no idea what goes on inside my car’s engine or what the parts are called, and it is precisely this great ignorant void within me that shines forth like a beacon, beckoning mechanics everywhere to take advantage of me.

When the long list of services my car is supposedly in dire need of finally subsides, this is my response: “Huh.” I stand for several seconds scrambling around internally for contact with at least a modicum of common sense and/or a backbone. “Well, I just had my brakes replaced this summer, so I know I don’t need that,” I finally venture, “and my windshield wipers work fine.” The mechanic sniffs and swipes his nose with the back of his hand, his contempt for my assessment obvious. “And do I really need a transmission flush?” I ask meekly, futilely. His eyebrows lift and he taps the computer screen with his pen. “50,000 miles!” he exclaims.
An indisputable fact. I have 50,000 miles. I cave. “And how much is all of this?” The flashing screen thing starts up again and numbers fly by.

“Seventeenninetyninetwentysevenfiftyeighteenninetyninethirtyfiveninetynine,” the mechanic rattles off, auctioneer style.

“Huh.” Now I am the inarticulate one. We stand staring at the screen for several more seconds. This is mainly the result of my being preoccupied with the myriad of thoughts racing through my head. He’s ripping me off! I hate getting ripped off! But maybe I really do need these services. My car has been shaking some when I start it lately. And it has been 50,000 miles. But didn’t I have something done in September at the dealer? I know I had a coupon for something. Or was that September of last year? Why didn’t I check my records? I need to keep records. Actually, what I really need is to take an automotive class or something. Do they offer those through the city? I wonder how much they cost? But when would I have time to take a class? Maybe they have one of those one-day deals where you just go for a Saturday and learn the basics. But do I really want to give up a Saturday for that?

The mechanic seems to interpret my silence as a bargaining technique, and he scratches his head and says, “Okay, ten percent off.” As I have been so absorbed by my thoughts, this offer comes as a complete surprise and I am ridiculously happy about and humbled by it. He’s giving me ten percent off!

“That would be great, thanks,” I say cheerfully, “but I don’t need the new windshield wipers.” There, that’ll show him. I am taking charge and not just being a stupid female getting ripped off by the mechanic. I am getting a ten percent discount and drawing the line at replacing the windshield wipers—hooray for me!

“Okay,” says the mechanic. “You go wait over there, okay?” and I am ushered off to a tiny waiting room strewn with the entrails of old newspapers and a coffee pot that looks welded to its base. I sit gingerly on the only chair that doesn’t have a mystery stain on it and take out a stack of essays that I need to grade. Given all the repairs he just listed, I figure I’ll be able to grade quite a bit.

I am only on the third essay when he shows up in the doorway. “Okay,” he says, jerking his head towards the payment window. Apparently, “okay” is his go-to word. “You’re already finished?” I ask, but he’s disappeared around the corner. His head pops out from the window.
“Yeah, it’s done. How you wanna pay?”

It takes me a few seconds to put the essays and my grading pen back into my bag. He taps his pen against the counter in a staccato of impatience. I open my wallet and hand him my credit card. He takes it and slides it through the machine. And then, all of a sudden, he’ relaxed and chatty. As we wait for the credit card confirmation, he asks me, “You like boxing?” I am thrown off by this question and stutter a bit. “Um, well, no not really.”

“No?” he sounds incredulous. What’s not to like? He reaches under the counter and pulls out a flyer. “Here,” he says, sliding it towards me, “you should enter this.” The flyer is advertising a contest to win tickets to a fight. I don’t notice the names of the fighters (not that it would matter to me anyway) because my eyes are caught by the grainy photo of some man’s face distorted by the blow he’s just been delivered to the side of his head by his opponent. Sweat and agony spray out in a shower. I look up doubtfully and the mechanic smiles. “It’s good. You should enter,” he repeats, shoving the flyer towards me again. I nod weakly and he rips off the receipt for me to sign. After deftly separating my copy and stapling it to the printout of what’s just been done to my car, he is positively beaming. I end up taking both papers and say “thanks” automatically. He taps the counter and waves. “Sure. Have a good day.”

What’s up with him turning into Mr. Friendly like that? I ask myself walking out to my car. I look down at the papers in my hand and at my watch. Total cost: $87. Total time spent: 21 minutes. And the icing on the cake is that he got me—prim-looking, prissy me in my crisp white shirt and pearls—to thank him for it and go home with a boxing flyer in my hand. No wonder he’s smiling. I get in my car and it’s all I can do to keep myself from banging my head against the steering wheel. I am the college educated, NPR listening, New Yorker reading Jiffy Rube—not just once but every 3,000 miles.

Meditation on Jesus and Death

2007-04-01T15:33:00.000-07:00

Recently, I read the passage in the book of Matthew where John is beheaded and Jesus hears of it. I have never before paid much attention to the verses about Jesus receiving the news, probably because the story of feeding five thousand comes almost immediately afterwards. Book-ended as they are by two such dramatic events—John’s execution and a miracle—I suppose it’s not surprising that I should have overlooked them. But my own experience of loss and sorrow, my recent reading of Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, and the approach of Easter have somewhat sensitized me to verses about Jesus dealing with death.

In Matthew, it states that after the disciples came and took away John’s body and buried it, they went and told Jesus. When Jesus heard the news, “He departed from there by boat to a deserted place by Himself. But when the multitudes heard it, they followed Him on foot from the cities. And when Jesus went out He saw a great multitude, and He was moved with compassion for them, and healed their sick.” I love how simultaneously spare and rich biblical text is. Jesus went out to a deserted place by himself. Of course he would. He had just learned that his cousin and friend—the man who had recognized him in utero, the man who had baptized him—had been killed by the whimsy of cruel vanity and carelessness. Cruel vanity on the part of Herod’s sister-in-law, and carelessness on the part of Herod. And so Jesus went off to be alone. I imagine him weeping, I imagine him bowed before God in sorrow, not just at the loss of someone whom he deeply loved, but also at the terrible senselessness of it all—a drunken party that ended with a great man’s head on a platter. The depravity and darkness of men’s hearts. And yet he could barely even have a moment to grieve. The people, driven by their own need, followed him, heedless of the distance and the lack of resources. They did not think about food and water. They just walked and walked and walked to follow and be near him. And when they found him, he did not resent or rebuke them for intruding on his sorrow. Instead, in the midst of his own deep grief, he was moved with compassion and met their need. He healed their sick and fed their hunger. In the shadow of his own friend and kinsman’s death, he staved off death for others.

Jesus was always battling death and restoring life during his ministry, telling the bereaved, “do not weep” just before raising the dead one to life. But for all of those he helped and healed (and there were many), there were probably a great many he did not—those at the back of the crowd, those at the next town over who heard about him but could not get to him. Jesus is described as a man of sorrows, and I wonder if part of that sorrow was from carrying all those he did not heal in his heart. Even those he did bring to life would die again, and the same grief of those suffering the loss would be unleashed once more, just at a later date. And he knew that. I think about the story of Mary and Martha weeping for their brother and chiding Jesus for not being there in time to heal him. And the book of John goes on to describe how Jesus “groaned in the spirit and was troubled,” and how when he stood before Lazarus’s tomb, he wept.

After my mother died, I was so comforted by the thought that Jesus truly understood human grief and loss—that even knowing he was about to raise his friend back to life, he was still so troubled and grieved by his friend’s death. But now that I look at it again and really think about the fact that he told Martha that he could and would raise Lazarus from the dead before he wept, I see another possible implication. What if Jesus was weeping not only for the death of Lazarus in that present moment, but also for the death of Lazarus in the future? For all the deaths he had merely postponed? We all want more time with the ones we love. When they die, we think, if only I’d had another week, month, year. We long for them back and think of how much more prepared we would be for their death in the future as long as it were far off. But really, no amount of time would be enough. The end comes, and then we want another extension. Even when someone is old and incapacitated and it is really something of a relief when they die, there is still a sense of longing for them as they were in their prime, a longing for them to be restored to us, and a sorrow that they are no longer a part of this world.

Which brings me to the words Jesus utters before he dies—“It is finished”—also in the book of John. There are many interpretations for what Jesus meant by “it”—his task, his suffering, his work on earth. But maybe “it” refers to death. Even though Jesus healed and raised people from the dead, death was never finished. It was always still lurking in the background, waiting to emerge and reclaim its victims. But with Jesus’ death, death was finished. It is still playing out its course on this earth and in this reality, and its effects are still terrible, still devastating—it is still the enemy. But there is now an endpoint. Death has become finite. For Jesus, the power of death lasted three days. For the rest of us, it is much longer. A thousand years are as a day in the sight of the Lord. But death will not last forever. Its days are numbered. And when Jesus comes again to raise the dead, it’s not going to be temporary—it’s going to be for all eternity.

Shopping Moms

2007-03-24T16:48:00.000-07:00

There’s a common ritual that takes place in department stores and shopping malls across America. It involves millions of women and girls and (collectively) millions of dollars. It is the practice of mother-daughter shopping expeditions. For years, I was part of this tradition, dutifully accompanying my mother to stores as a child because I had no other option, and then, in my teenage years, begging my mother to take me to stores, convinced that they held the key to my being prettier or more popular at school. And my mother was always there to shop with me, to hang discarded clothes back on the hanger, to go back out to the floor to get me a different size, to be honest about how the color looked on me, and to notice the outfit that suited me but that I never would have noticed myself. Her services were just a given to me growing up, and as I got older, I began to reciprocate, giving her my input and trying, here and there, to update her just a little on the current trends.

In college and after, when I was no longer as dependent on my mother for transportation and funding, our shopping expeditions together lessened. We both had busy schedules, and the newly adult me flaunted my independence like a shiny new badge. But the reality is that whenever there was a special occasion I was shopping for, I still took my mother along, and even all those other times that I didn’t, I often found myself waiting to show her certain items before snipping off any tags or throwing away any receipts. We didn’t always agree, but she provided a point of reference for me, a solid opinion in which I could find assurance or from which I could depart.

When my mother died of cancer, it was several months before I could even set foot in a department store, and I only did so because I desperately needed some new clothes for work. Mothers shopping with their daughters seemed to be everywhere, all coupled up and of all different ages. I could see a version of myself shopping with my mother as a child, as a teenager, and as an adult. I drifted from rack to rack, dazed by what seemed to me to be an assault of mother and daughter pairs until I finally ran into a dressing room to take refuge and cry. Mothers and daughters together had never bothered me before when I was shopping by myself, but that was because my own mother had always been just a phone call away. Shopping alone had been a choice on my part, and I imagine in those days that there had probably been some daughters with critical mothers who envied my solo state. But now I had no choice, and without my mother, I felt like I had been kicked out of a club. I no longer had membership in the universal sisterhood of shopping mothers and daughters.

As the years have passed, it’s gotten easier to shop on my own. I no longer cry in dressing rooms or surreptitiously watch mothers and daughters shopping together with all the longing of a child pressing her face against the window of a candy store. The anguish has quieted down and the pain has mellowed. But I still find myself wanting my mother there to tell me whether a skirt looks as good from the back as it does from the front or if I should think twice about the turquoise blouse. I miss someone really looking closely at me and caring as much as I do whether or not I’m buying the right dress.

Which is why I’ve begun resorting to soliciting stand-in mothers while in stores. The first time it happened was in a GAP store. There were two pairs of black pants I was trying to decide between. One pair was on clearance and was significantly cheaper than the other full-price pair. But of course the cheaper pair did not seem to fit as nicely, creasing in an unflattering manner across my hips. Still, I reasoned to myself, the pants were black, so maybe it wasn’t that noticeable and was worth overlooking given the price difference. I twisted and turned in the dressing room, craning my head to look over my shoulder at the back view in the mirror. Meanwhile, I heard a mother standing out in the hall giving her daughter feedback on the various sundresses her daughter was trying on. She sounded very decisive and had very specific reasons for why she liked or disliked what her daughter came out with each time. Sucking in a breath, I flung open my own dressing room door.
“Excuse me,” I said to her. “Do you mind giving me your opinion on these pants? I’m trying to make up my mind between these and another pair that’s more expensive.” The mother immediately rose to the challenge and took charge.
“Sure! Why don’t you come out here so I can see you walk in them,” she instructed. I dutifully sashayed down the hallway, and when I turned around to walk back towards her, she had a slight frown on her face. “I don’t know,” she said in a tone that said she did know and was about to tell me. “Those don’t seem to fit you very well around the hips.”
“That’s what I thought,” I said, relieved at this confirmation. “I think I’ll go ahead and get the other ones. It’s probably worth the extra money.”
“Well, why don’t you try those on for me too?” Her daughter had emerged from her dressing room, and the mother focused on her again. I changed pants and came back out. Now both mother and daughter watched me while I walked down the hallway.
“Oh those are much better,” the mother said with approval. “They might cost more, but I think it’s always better to buy the clothes that fit the best. Otherwise you end up not wearing them very much and it’s a waste of money.” This utterly practical and motherly piece of advice washed away any doubt and anxiety I had about the pants, and I felt a rush of gratitude well up in me.
“Thank you,” I said, and I went back into the dressing room wishing I could say more. Wishing I could tell her how long it had been since an older woman, a mother, had guided and directed me. Wishing I could tell her how even though I was a fully capable and independent adult, I still longed for that motherly reference point, that sure voice that stilled my own doubts and anxieties. But I just nodded and smiled at her and her daughter on my way out to the cashier, where I bought the more expensive but better fitting pants.
Nothing and no one can ever take the place of having my own mother, but I’ve come to realize that my situation is not quite as forlorn as I had thought it to be. I am still a part of the sisterhood. I still can and regularly do get feedback from older women about which sandals they think would be better for trekking across Europe or which sweater is a more flattering color for me. There are always women around who are willing to be a mother for a few minutes. One just has to look around and ask.

Single Living & the Great Bug Dilemma

2007-03-24T11:43:00.000-07:00

There are many advantages to living by myself in a large home. Obviously, I have a lot of space, which is nice because there are plenty of closets and drawers and cupboards to put things into. So even though I’m actually a bit of a messy person, I look fairly neat because there are so many places to stash things. My piles don’t look so bad when they are spread out in three or four different rooms. The problem comes when I can’t remember where I put something—there are just so many places to look. I can spend an entire afternoon searching for a lost item and still not find it. It usually surfaces months later when I’m searching for something else. All those extra rooms also mean a lot of extra cleaning, though I’ve learned to cut down on some of that. For example, even though there are three bathrooms in my house, I always run back to the bathroom in the master bedroom—only one toilet and sink to clean regularly instead of three. Plus, I get a little extra exercise jogging down the hallway, which I can always use. Of course, there is the issue of when I have to go to the bathroom and I’m waiting for the plumber or the cable guy to show up. What if they arrive right when I’m on the toilet? There’s no one to answer the door but me, and leaving the door open and hollering “Just a minute!” right before you flush makes for an awkward greeting.

But most of the inconveniences that come with living alone are easily overcome and are far outweighed by the advantages. Living alone is great because I can play whatever music I want whenever I want. I can dance around like a fool and feel perfectly fine about it. I can watch shows on TV I’d be embarrassed to ever admit liking. I can burp and fart with impunity. I don’t have to worry about anyone else’s things or anyone else using my things. If I’m in a horrible mood, I don’t have to worry about being civil to someone. I can be as grouchy as I like and there’s no one to suffer through it but me. It’s quite lovely, overall. People ask me all the time if I wouldn’t like a roommate (or a husband, although that’s usually just implied) and I look at them in amazement. No, I would not. I think some people who don’t know me very well worry that I might be lonely. Rest assured, I am not. As a teacher, I talk to and interact with nearly two hundred people a day. It’s bliss not to have to talk to anyone once I am home. In fact, I am often quite reluctant to even answer the phone.

The only times I ever really wish that someone lived in the house with me is when I have to deal with large insects. Generally speaking, when it comes to bugs in my house, I have developed far more ability to deal with them than I would have ever thought possible. Ants, while highly irritating and vaguely disgusting in their large, swarming numbers, I can handle. And while I still feel a faint desire to shudder and gag, with the right amount of Kleenex, I can dispose of most spiders. For a few of the big black ones, I’ve had to employ the vacuum cleaner with the upholstery attachment, but with most others it’s just a matter of having enough Kleenex that there is no possibility of any direct contact with the spider, which includes being able to feel it squish. I probably use at least two or three Kleenexes (somewhat bunched) every time I kill a spider. I’ve developed a technique. You kind of fold the spider into the middle of the mass and wad it up, squeezing it in your fist. And all of this must be done very quickly and decisively. I learned the hard way that if you have too much Kleenex or hesitate in your attack, you can’t get a proper grasp of the spider, and it can drop suddenly and run at you with alarming and frightening speed, growing fangs and supernatural powers in its mad dash to leap on you. I really don’t care that in reality the spider is more scared than I am. That kind of rationality has no place when it comes to bugs. Someone who tells you that and actually thinks it’s going to make any difference in how you feel about bugs is quite stupid.

At any rate, I was doing pretty well with the general ilk of insect—ants, spiders, and silverfish (slithery and disgusting, but manageable)—and feeling quite proud of myself in the first few months of living by myself in my house. But then summer came with a long hot dry spell, and the cricket invasion began. The first cricket showed up in the middle of my kitchen floor, both obvious and repellant on the surface of the white linoleum. After my first squeak/gasp of shock and horror, I stood stock still for several seconds just staring at it. I think I was caught somewhere between trying to register that it was in fact real, and trying to make it disappear using the power of my mind. And then it moved—a kind of short dart—and I sprang into action. Squashing it was out of the question. There was not enough Kleenex in the world for that. Instead, I sprinted for the can of bug spray in the hallway closet. I rushed back to the kitchen, anxious to deal with the cricket before it ventured onto the carpet of my dining room, and it was still in the same spot. Perhaps it thought it was invisible if it didn’t move. If crickets even think, which I doubt. Whatever. I just knew I wanted it gone. Positioning myself as far away as possible while still keeping the cricket within range of the spray, I released a jet of liquid directly onto the cricket.

This began a horror show of sorts. The cricket immediately began to leap about, and then collapsed into twitching and writhing. I’m sure if it could have, it would have been screaming—a high, keening pitch of agony. This lasted for several minutes, and at least one of its little legs came off in the process. My eyes were glued to the entire horrifying process until, finally, the cricket lay completely still. I waited a few more minutes just to be certain it was really dead, and then ventured closer. Gathering a few paper towels, I applied my wrap and fold (without the squeeze) spider technique to the dead cricket and threw it in the outdoor trashcan. As I scrubbed the scene of the carnage, I realized that I could not bear to spray another cricket. Granted, I still thought they were ugly and repulsive (nothing at all like cute Jiminy Cricket), but even so, they didn’t deserve such a tortuous demise.

So what to do? The crickets kept coming. I managed to get a couple to hop out the door of their own accord, using a magazine to direct them. But both of those crickets were in the family room and already somewhat near the back door. The real dilemma came when I discovered one in my bedroom one night. What was I supposed to do? The nearest door was several turns and hallways away. There was no way I could ignore it. I knew I would lie awake all night, freaking out every time a hair touched my face and thinking that it was the cricket come to get me. But I couldn’t use the spray again. I just couldn’t. So I just stared at it. I think I even whimpered at some point. “I wish I could just catch it and get it out of here,” I thought. Bingo. I went out to my kitchen and began to look around, hoping for inspiration. I had recently had a party at my house, and on the counter was a stack of large, disposable plastic cups. Perfect. I took one of the cups and ran back to my bedroom. The cricket had moved somewhat, but was still out in the open and quite visible. It was time.

If you’ve ever watched the high dive event at the summer Olympics, you’ll have an idea of what I experienced in approaching that cricket with my blue plastic cup. High divers walk to the edge of the platform shaking themselves out and twitching their arms and shoulders like thoroughbred horses. Once they’re at the edge, they position themselves carefully and stand utterly still for several seconds, concentrating, gathering themselves in, visualizing that perfect dive. And then they suddenly spring into motion, flinging themselves into impossible positions in the air before cutting the water like blades. That was a bit like me, only with a lot more sweating and cursing and a lot less grace. I twitched and shuddered as I inched my way closer to the cricket, fixing my gaze upon it and willing myself to be calm and focused. I tried to visualize myself moving with lightening speed and capturing the cricket under the cup in one swift, clean move, but that visualization somehow morphed into the cricket jumping up against me and getting tangled in my hair or dropping down the front of my shirt or some other horrible and writhe-inducing scenario.

The cricket darted forward suddenly and then froze. I yelped and leapt back, and it took another five minutes just for me to regain the position I’d had. I inched the cup forward, slowly extending my arm until the cup was about a foot over the cricket. Could the cricket see the looming shadow? It seemed to. I swear I could sense a new tension in its body, a waiting for just the right moment to leap away. I crouched there, poised with the cup in the air until my shoulder began to ache. It’s not easy keeping your arm extended to its full length while crouching. I lowered my arm and rested for a moment. I glanced at the clock and discovered that fully fifteen minutes had elapsed since I’d first spotted the cricket. This is ridiculous, I told myself. How much of my life am I going to give to this stupid cricket? I extended my arm again, and before I could think about it too much, I brought my arm down in what I thought was a rapid descent. Apparently to the cricket, however, the cup was moving in slow-motion, and it leapt to the side just as my cup sank into the carpet.

Insert loud “F***!” here, as well as a renewed burst of sweating. I would have to move faster and more decisively—especially now that the cricket was on to me. “I’m trying to save your life, you stupid bug!” I wailed to the cricket, but it took no notice. This is so ridiculous, I thought again to myself. On some level, I could see the humor in this standoff and I wanted to laugh—cue up the western music and roll some tumbleweed across the dusty street. But on another level, I also wanted to cry. Why was I having to deal with this alone? I wanted someone to be there with me, rooting me on and laughing with me at the ridiculousness of this all, breaking up the tension and making this whole traumatic experience into a bit of fun. Or better yet, stepping in and taking care of things without any need for me to be involved. But it was just me and the cricket and the ticking of the clock, and somehow this made me very angry. This little (big) cricket was burning up my evening and making me want to cry. Unacceptable. I stretched out my arm again, positioning the cup even more closely over the cricket. I hovered for a moment, the cricket completely in the shadow of the cup, and then smashed it down with the commitment of a kamikaze pilot.

Success! The cricket was no longer visible, and I could hear the flink flink of it leaping against the side of the cup. Now what? I realized I would have to somehow upend the cup while keeping the cricket inside of it. I needed to get something to slide under the cup, but was scared to leave the cup unattended. How strong were crickets, anyway? I pictured it heaving the cup over with its little cricket arms and leaping to freedom. I let go of the cup and listened and watched. Nothing. I ran to the dining room and grabbed a thin cardboard mailer and ran back to the bedroom. The cup was still in place. Hoping that the cricket had not somehow managed to burrow into the carpet and crawl out from under the cup, I carefully slid the mailer under the cup. Pressing the cup firmly against its mailer base, I flipped it over, and heard the satisfying flink of the cricket falling to the bottom. It resumed its jumping, and I sped down the hallway to the back door, the mailer clamped firmly over the top of the cup. I opened the door, removed the cover, and launched the cricket out of the cup. It flew in an arc and landed halfway across the patio. It was completely still for a moment, and my heart sank. Had I just gone through all of this only to end up having killed the cricket after all? But apparently the cricket was just a little dizzy and dazed. Upon regaining its senses, it began a sprightly hop towards the bushes, no worse for the wear. I, on the other hand, felt an immediate need to lie down on the floor. “I need a husband,” I said aloud to the ceiling. And then I saw the dark blob of a spider making its way across the ceiling’s white expanse. Obviously, the ceiling agreed.

Getting started...

2007-03-24T11:29:00.000-07:00

I have always loved reading and, as a kind of extension of that--a love of story and a love of words--I have also always loved writing. Unfortunately, I have also always had all kinds of hangups associated with actually calling myself a writer or publicly sharing what I write. But now I am attempting to shove all those to the side and just write, whether it's "good enough" (whatever that means) or not. This blog is a place for me to post and share some of that writing as well as to post and share writings from others that inspire, move, or amuse me. I hope whoever is reading what is on this site experiences some of that as well.