Running around

Inspired by her grandfather’s paintings of exotic places, Barbara Cooney’s Miss Rumphius wanted to do three things: travel the world, settle by the sea, and the most difficult, make the world a more beautiful place. She does this by planting lupines all over her village, where they bloom in profusion, multiplying each year. What am I doing to make the world a more beautiful place? Planting children? This is one of those picture books that the kids never ask to hear, but every once in awhile I check it out from the library and get choked up while reading it aloud.



Now here I am, getting to see a bit of the world here and there, settling by the sea. But this is not a place to plant lupines. Too hot in the summer, not cold enough in the winter. But this town is a place that probably once was beautiful in spots, and maybe could be again, if not everyone flees to the new developments north of Highway 10.



Nearly every day I run. I try to get in 2-5 miles. Running has been one of the few constants in my life; it may be an addiction. But it allows me to clear my head, exercise the dog, spend time with whatever kids are in the babyjogger, daydream, get fresh air, feel less guilty about the amount of chocolate I consume, and get to know my neighborhood.



If I leave my house and turn one direction, I end up at the bay. I take this route most often because it has little traffic, plenty of shade, and the distance is just about right. This is not a resort area, but there are piers and a scenic island, some random wild flowers in the sidewalk cracks: some that look like what my grandfather called rock roses, or portaluca. This route circles around a neighborhood on a point that juts into the bay. Here large homes are shaded by stately live oaks dripping Spanish moss and tropical plants add color. A number of vacant plots remain from Katrina, one with the Adirondack chairs decaying on a cement foundation on my masthead. There are also a few new homes being constructed in large beach house fashion: big porches with ceiling fans, long windows, taupe hardyboard with white trim… Big boats park at piers in front of these homes.



If I turn the other direction, I run into the Air Force Base. On this route, I feel safe and secure but there’s not much to look at. Big open spaces. Few pedestrians. Fewer flowers.

If I skip past the Air Force base and go on, I hit the projects next to the railroad tracks, the trailer park, the house with tarp covering missing sections of roof, boarded up, surrounded by jalopies, overgrown shrubbery. A few of the homes here have a southern cottagey feel – deep porches with gingerbreading, long windows, garden ephemera in disarray, evidence of a more gentile past. But for the most part, they are small, deteriorating boxes providing shelter for people who work long hours for little pay. Or for those who don’t work at all. Someone at church saw me running here one day and told me I shouldn’t be on that road alone. Her comment worried me, and I avoided this route for awhile. But then I figured people live here, survive the shudders when the trains pass every day, meet at the pawn shop, sit on their porches and wave at each other or don’t, ignore the pit bulls, the rottweiler, and two enormous mastiffs who pace their chain linked boundaries. And they survive, although perhaps only because they block out thoughts of the many miseries they suffer.

Once I hit the Gulf Coast beach, I feel less like I need to move quickly. On Sunday mornings the only people on the beach are a few fishermen, some aging women walkers, and vagrants with nowhere else to go. The odor emanating from the casino parking garage when I pass by leads me to believe they might sleep in there or hide from the daily rainshower.  I don't see many homeless people hanging out near the cemetary on this route, though, despite the fact that it an outhouse, water pumps, and shelters over some of the gravesites.  I'd like to think that there is an understood reverence for the graveyard, but perhaps there is a greater fear of ghosts.

One of my son’s friends said our neighborhood is scary, as I mentioned before. When we were househunting, we looked at some more suburban neighborhoods, where the school friends live, that were newer subdivisions north of the highway, undamaged by hurricanes, neat, orderly communities with covenants. They were clean and safe, but I couldn’t imagine living in a house with wall to wall white carpet, and I didn’t know where I would run, except in circles around the neighborhood, because these developments emptied onto busy streets where pedestrians are at the mercy of drivers in a hurry to get to Walmart or work or wherever. The house we chose is pocketed between moderate wealth and poverty, government property and city slums, but it is in what was once a pedestrian friendly spot. If you squint your eyes at the bay or walk to the beach and shade your eyes with your hands, you can close out the bridges and traffic and trash and pretend you are on a desolate island for a couple seconds.

So here I am near the sea like Miss Rumphius. Is there something I can do to make this place more beautiful?

photos from the fall

Fun Video

Fun video of the Notre Dame Band with OK Go, the guys who made the treadmill dance video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJKythlXAIY

Little House

Happy Birthday, Laura Ingalls Wilder!

Who didn't want to live in a little log house in the big Wisconsin woods? This is me, dreaming of a being a pioneer girl, in about 4th grade. I had a plan to become president and make the United States go back to the way it was in pioneer days, except I would allow modern medicine. That was the power of Wilder's writing. (I suppose it was the influence of Marlo Thomas and Free to be You and Me that I didn't see any discrepancy in being a girl president.)

Coincidentally, my second grader and I just started reading Little House in the Big Woods together a few days ago.

First Confession

Last Saturday my second grade daughter made her First Confession. She was nervous for weeks until she had her act of contrition memorized – I think she was afraid the confession wouldn’t work unless she memorized it. So she must have been a little disappointed when the priest didn’t ask her to say it.

This is the third church where we’ve been for sacraments. Actually, seventh, if you count baptisms. (After the first three boys were baptized at three different churches, we had the other three kids baptized at my parents’ little country church, so that if we ever lose our baptismal certificates and have to locate them for First Communion and weddings or perpetual vows, we’ll know where to find them. So it is interesting to note how each parish does things a little differently.

Our oldest first went to confession at a parish that had a big reconciliation service with a formal liturgy and about half a dozen priests and cake and punch afterward. At the church where our second and third boys had First Reconciliation, families signed up for specific time slots, then 2 or 3 families would gather on a Saturday afternoon, the DRE would lead a brief reflection, and then everyone went to confession with our pastor. At first I thought this was anti-climactic for a “celebration”, but the more I thought about it, the more I believe it helped ‘normalize’ confession, because it more closely resembled what going to confession is like.

This most recent celebration was a mix. Although all the kids were there with their families, and something like 9 priests, about half of them Irish, since this used to be an Irish mission destination, the ritual lacked the pageantry – music, reflections, candles lit after each child finished confessing. But it would have had some of the contemplative feel of the second, if the people behind us hadn't been carrying on a conversation. Some of the children read scripture or intentions, after which our pastor gave a homily in which he thanked the fathers for coming. He was making the point that fathers need to be spiritual leaders, but I wonder if he made a misstep by mentioning Jewish and Muslim fathers as good examples. I’m not sure some in the congregation would want to emulate these patriarchal communities – you could almost hear the hackles rising. But I applaud him for encouraging fathers to take a more active role in their families’ faith lives.

After his promotion of fatherly spiritual leadership, he led the children in an examination of conscience. “Is it wrong to steal?” he asked.

“Yes!” they all answered.

“Is it wrong to lie?”

“Yes!”

“Is it wrong to fight with your brothers and sisters?”

“Yes!”

“Is it wrong to miss Mass on Sunday?”

“No!”

Clearly, some more catechesis is necessary. 


But on the positive side, a number of parents went to confession after the children. And there was time for all of us to be shriven before my husband’s departure. So he departed with a clean conscience a couple of days later, although I suppose he experienced more than one moment of parental frustration between Saturday and Monday. Fortunately, there is a chaplain assigned to the base where he is stationed. Not every base has one. The chaplain corps is always recruiting. And they seem to attract good men.

A link on education

Can I go to this school? Ideas from Stratford Caldecott on primary school reform, via Christian Integration.

From "Pieta"

A belatedly posted poem for a First Friday . . .

From Jorie Graham's "Pieta"

. . .  -- Like an explosion that will not end
this dismemberment which is her lifting him up, dismemberment
of flesh into minutes. Are they notes, these parts, what is the
song, can you hear it, does it sound beautiful and true to the one

on the other side who hears it all at

once, cadenza of gaps? When she still had him in her,
unseen, unbroken, what did she have?
Before she gets him back there is something he has to cross,
as god, as thief, something he has to marry --
 ...
. . .      Listen.  Do you hear it
last, the spirit of

matter, there, where the words end -- their small heat -- where the details

cease, the scene dissolves, do you feel it at last, the sinking, where the
                                                                                  meaning
rises, where the meaning evaporates, into history, into the day the
mind, and the precipitating syllables are free at last
on the wind, sinking, the proof of god the cry sinking to where it's

just sound, part of one sound, one endless sound -- maybe a cry maybe a

countdown, love --

Three recent reads

Last week I read or skimmed three books. Their juxtaposition made clear their quality. First was The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game, by Michael Lewis, which I read for the Navy spouses’ book club, (which is really a get together, drink coffee, and talk club – but always interesting). This is one of those books that may be a better movie. I picked it up at Barnes and Noble and skimmed over it in about half an hour while the three year old played with the Thomas Trains. I can see why many like it: it’s inspiring and about football and you can read it quickly. But it reads like a Sunday newspaper feature, and a fairly artless one.



Then I read Nick Hornby’s A Long Way Down. I keep seeing recommendations for Hornby’s books, and this is the first I’ve read. It was engaging, clever, and has a resolution you feel satisfied with. And you can read it quickly. The characters are recognizable – and since the point of view gets passed to each of them, you can identify somewhat with them all, although I’m probably most like the dowdy Maureen, unfortunately. It’s the story of 4 down in the mouth strangers who meet on the roof of an apartment building to commit suicide on New Year’s Eve. None of them can do something so private with an audience, so they head downstairs and go to a party. Unintentionally, over a period of three months, they end up helping each other find a purpose to live, or at least to work through their current dark spots. There were some good lines and memorable scenes, but not a book you’d go back and read again, unless you were bored or were having a conversation with someone about it. It actually would make a better book club book.

Then one night I started in on Lolita. This is not a book that should be read quickly, but I didn’t actually mean to reread it. I had picked up the Library of America collection of Nabokov’s novels from the 1955-1962 because I wanted to read Pnin, another regularly recommended book, but Lolita was the first novel included in the collection. I remember reading it originally while sitting between the stacks in college, supposedly reading something for a paper, but sneaking this in. But I couldn’t remember the ending. Embarrassing, but a talent that allows me to reread with greater pleasure. I had meant to reread it after reading Reading Lolita in Tehran some time ago, but never got around to it, and really wasn’t sure I wanted to because the book makes you feel so uncomfortable, like you need to hide it behind the covers of another book or hide yourself while you read. Which I did. I just meant to read the last couple of chapters to refresh my memory. But it is an artfully told tale, and I couldn’t stop flipping forward a few more pages and then a few more. I finally returned to the beginning after getting about halfway backwards. Fascinating, revolting, enchanting – like Nabokov really did incant some spell while writing it. That it was his first book in English is astounding – the lyrical language confounds the horror of the content.


The afterward, in which Nabokov describes the development of the book, raises the issue of whether the book was “lewd” or not. He says the techniques he used in the beginning “misled” some readers into thinking it was going to follow a pattern of successive erotic scenes, and he assumes that many of his initial readers for publication didn’t finish the book and thought the theme one of three untouchable taboos, the other two being interracial marriage and the good atheist. That comment dates the book.


Also interesting: “For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm” . . . “It is childish to study a work of fiction in order to gain information about a country or about a social class or about the author.”



So to read and write for “aesthetic bliss” – an elevated sort of pleasure, a state of enlightenment – is his goal. Sounds zen-like. But that quote dovetails into the idea of reading as sacramental – a vehicle for encountering beauty that makes you aware of the possibility of transcendence – of God. The first two books I read won’t get you there, although to its credit A Long Way Down addresses the idea of God and of connecting with others to make life worth living. But Lolita does leave you in a state of altered consciousness.

He closes with this:

“My private tragedy, which cannot, and indeed should not, be anybody’s concern, is that I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammeled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand of English, devoid of any of those apparatuses – the baffling mirror, the black velvet backdrop, the implied associations and traditions – which the native illusionist, frac-tails flying, can magically use to transcend the heritage in his own way.”

Imagine if he had written in Russian. But maybe the alien language of creation creates a more intriguing, alienated character.

It is obvious that the “best” book of the three is Lolita. At some point as a preteen, I remember thinking what made one book better than another? I loved everything I read. Which is, I suppose, why I ended up majoring in a great books program. But the question is, do you ignore content because of the artistry of the creation? It is another one of those books that have become cultural icons, but are monuments to a sort of nihilism, or a religion in which art is God.