A few of my favorite things

My 69 cent French press and my Shakespeare curses mug:

Pelicans - somewhere I heard they were a symbol for Christ because they appear to pluck their hearts from their chests when they feed their young. I saw 37 in flight over the bay yesterday.

My garden this year:

In time for All Soul's Day: Spanish moss in a graveyard looks appropriate.

Dear husband: please don't put a photograph on my gravestone.

Not sure what the "etc." would be in that blue sign.

Another good sign, at the church right across the cemetary drive. It reads, "Holding forth the word of life."

Reminds me of that joke about how many people are dead in the cemetary.

Being Productive

Lately, I've been thinking again about getting a job. In the back of my head I berate myself for not being productive and for wasting time (i.e. reading too many blogs), and think that if I were working, I would not be such a slouch. My few forays into the working world, however, have taught me that it takes an incredible amount of energy to coordinate schedules and  to stay on top of responsibilities. For instance, yesterday one of the kids we carpool with mentioned that the cross country coach might not return next year.  A thrill ran up my spine when my son said "You should coach, Mom." Yes! I would love to coach! (I know, not everyone's dream job.) But then reality set in: the other kids would have to stay for after-school care and the toddler would have to go to a sitter, and then there would be meets on weekends and travelling. I don't have the passion for cross country to push everyone else to the side.

Maybe if I had a real gift to share I would be more willing to inconvenience the family.  I finally finished The Story of the Trapp Family Singers last night, after setting it aside for awhile, and was struck again by Maria's determination in getting the family to America, orchestrating their concert series, building their farm, and realizing the dream of the music camp. I admire their family unity and the gift of perseverence Maria must have had. I envy their gift of beautiful voices and wish our family could go to music camp and learn to sing motets and madrigals and hymns. Perhaps their passion for sharing their gifts made their sacrifices less painful.  

On the other hand, I realize that I've been sidetracked from the importance of my duties as a mother.  I've let things slide out of laziness. This quote jumped out at me, speaking to my restlessness: "Our age has become so mechanical that this has also affected our recreation. People have gotten used to sitting down and watching amovie, a ballgame, a television set. It may be good once in a while, but it certainly is not good all the time. Our own faculties, our imagination, our memory, the ability to do things with our mind and our hands -- they need to be exercised. If we become too passive, we get dissatisfied." (This was written 50 years ago.)

So, with renewed dedication to using my faculties, my 3 yr old and I made cookies. Then we made soup and biscuits. And although our activities left a mess in the kitchen, they brought a little peace to my heart.

Although this book was not high literature, it was enlightening. The motto on the Trapp coat of arms was "Nec aspera Terrent" - Let nothing difficult frighten thee. The family took as the motto for their farm the words from the Acts of the Apostles: "Cor unum et anima una" - They were one heart and one soul.  At the end of the book, Maria writes: "As the weeks, the months, the years go by, we see more and more that only one thing is necessary to be happy and to make others happy, and that one thing is not money, nor connections, nor health -- it is love. That love about which Saint Paul breaks out in his famous canticle of praise ..."

So obvious and so easy to lose sight of when confronted with the standards of the world. The Trapps brought beauty and hope to the world during the dark years of WWII and remained simple in their lifestyle and true to their motto. And while my calling is not to share beauty through music, I need to be reminded that making soup and cookies as an act of love is a job productive of happiness.

Movies and Music

Briefly, since I have a sick kid:
Watched 2 man movies this weekend: Quantum of Solace and Mystic River. Both good. Mystic River had lots to chew on. Loved the closing scenes: Jimmie’s (Sean Penn) wife telling him his heart is so big that whatever he has to do is right, and Sean’s (Kevin Bacon) final phone call from his wife when he finally says he’s sorry. Troubling but thought provoking, while Quantum of Solace is pure entertainment.

Also went to 2 concerts: a Sacred Music concert fundraiser for the beautiful Cathedral’s stained glass windows, repaired after Katrina. The performers were mostly amateurs, talented members of the choir, but the event was invigorating because of an involved audience and a couple of uplifting surprises, including a young tenor, studying to be a dental tech at the AFB but with voice training in the Harlem Boys Choir, who sang “Comfort ye” from the Messiah and left everyone breathless. Followed by a reception with lots to eat, wine punch, and a “sacred art” exhibition (lots of pelicans and water scenes). The crowd was mostly about 30 years older than us, but friendly and generous to the artists.

Second concert: “Tops in Blue,” the Air Force’s free morale boosting song and dance group. Only morale seemed a little lacking, since this was apparently mandatory fun for most of the airmen. The show was very professional, lots of lights, big speakers, fancy dance moves to popular songs with the word “dream” in them since “Dare to Dream” was the theme. Like a rock and roll Lawrence Welk show. The performers were dancing their shoes through, but the crowd didn’t seem to notice. We suspected that a lot was prerecorded, except when the soloists went out in the crowd and sang to an audience member. The kids enjoyed the spectacle, but I was so distracted by thinking about how much $$ was spent to put on this show that so few seemed to be enjoying that I was as unengaged as the students. At least the trombonist, a girl, seemed to be having a good time. Never seen such dancing with a trombone before.

Also finished a cute but not remarkable children's book, Mable Riley, A Reliable Record of Humdrum Peril and Romance by Marthe Jocelyn. The author seemed to try a little too hard to make her heroine be Anne of Green Gables, but Mable's a likable type. Another quibble: the climactic confrontation has Mable pushing a lady down in a skirmish during a suffragist/factory worker demonstration. And all of the events seemed to happen too quickly: a period of 4 months didn't seem long enough for Mable and her sister to get so entrenched in the society of their new town.

Curatives

Exhausted by a daylong carnival fundraiser at the kids’ school, my husband slept (relatively) late Sunday morning. I drug myself from the nest of our warm bed downstairs to monitor the volume of the kids comparing their candy stashes. They were rapidly moving toward an “it’s no fair” argument. But I threw out the grand prize from the silent auction: a Playmobil airplane. Now all six of them are working together to put it together and to people it with figures from their collection. A rare moment.
Their cooperative play gave me enough time to read this in Magnificat this morning:

To the eye that sees, littleness reveals infinitely more than vastness. God is known more truly by a little finite creature through the contemplation of a snowdrop than through the contemplation of the universe. Very soon the intellect staggers before immensity, it is used up, exhausted, only the rare heart responds to it at all. But the inward eye fills with light when it contemplates a little thing, the heart can fold upon it, and so the heart expands and the mind does not wither, but puts out petal upon lovely petal of thought. . . . If you ever had a little green tree frog and watched him puffing out with a pomposity worthy of a dragon before croaking, you must have guessed that there is a tender smile on our heavenly Father’s face, that he likes us to laugh and he laughs with us; the frog will teach your heart more than all the books of theology in the world.

 From Caryll Houselander, whose little Reed of God is a revelation of beauty in itself.

Perhaps this meditation stuck out because I’ve been reading Last Child in the Woods: Saving our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder by Richard Louv. I’d seen it on a number of lists, and when the ranger at the Sandhill Crane preserve highly recommended it, I checked it out from the library (I think she meant for me to buy it in the gift shop – instead I bought Scary Stories from the South, which more than one of us will enjoy). Houselander articulates briefly in a paragraph the highest purpose and necessity of nature, which Louv attempts to communicate in a less poetic book with lots of studies and anecdotes, but without ever really spelling out the connection between nature and the eternal.

Not that Louv doesn’t make a lot of good points. Even after reading only a few pages, I felt an urgent need to send the kids outdoors to play. I don’t want them suffering from nature deficit disorder. And they could all use a hit of nature to make them more cheerful and peaceful. We’re a family without a lot of tech gadgets or good TV reception. But sometimes my kids want to stay instead and play Legos or read books more than they want to go outside. Louv pointed out the fact that a/c and central heating deters kids from leaving their controlled climate, an issue here, but since I keep our thermostat at frugal temps, I suspect my kids stay indoors more for other reasons. Perhaps number one is that I can’t let them just bike aimlessly around the neighborhood like I did as a kid. I’m too afraid, both of molesters and of fearful, well meaning, spoilsport neighbors.


Then again, Louv points out that a lot of these fears are unfounded and based on misperceptions of the frequency of random acts of violence.


I suppose I shouldn’t automatically assume a defensive position when I read this book. My oldest are just now hitting the age when they can be a little more independent, and I do let them go fish on the pier and bike to the Air Force Base without me. I make the littles go outside when they’re too noisy. We go to the beach and camping and on hikes. In our old neighborhood, the kids used to play in the swamp and on rocks at Plum Point Park, as I ran around in circles on the road. I don’t really fear that my kids will lack a connection with nature, but I do fear that their opportunities to have free access to green space to play freely will continue to shrink.


When I was little, my parents moved counties to a more rural area, next to a vacant lot. We made a small trail and a stick house in the brambles. We watched may apples die to make room for violets and then for goldenrod. We ice skated on the pond next door (to the neighbor’s consternation). We rode bikes on county roads. And then one day someone bought the lot next door and built a house. And eventually, after I was grown, my parents’ bought 40 acres – a good part of it a big vacant lot.


So we go there when we can to get a dose of nature. I hope my kids have memories of time spent outdoors there and the other places we haul them to. While I may not finish reading Louv’s book because I don’t need to be convinced of the importance of unstructured time spent connecting with God’s creation, I’m thankful for the reminder to encourage to look for little things to contemplate.

Poetry Friday

In light of the conversations my sister and husband and I have been having about marriage, here's a favorite poem on that subject.

(at children's author Laura Salas' site)

"The Country of Marriage"
by Wendell Berry


1.
I dream of you walking at night along the streams
of the country of my birth, warm blooms and the nightsongs,
of birds opening around you as you walk.
You are holding in your body the dark seed of my sleep.


2.
This comes after silence. Was it something I said
that bound me to you, some mere promise
or, worse, the fear of loneliness and death?
A man lost in the woods in the dark, I stood
still and said nothing. And then there rose in me,
like the earth’s empowering brew rising
in root and branch, the words of a dream of you
I did not know I had dreamed. I was a wanderer
who feels the solace of his native land
under his feet again and moving in his blood.
I went on, blind and faithful. Where I stepped
my track was there to steady me. It was no abyss
that lay before me, but only the level ground.

3.
Sometimes our life reminds me
of a forest in which there is a graceful clearing
and in that opening a house,
an orchard and garden,
comfortable shades, and flowers
red and yellow in the sun, a pattern
made in the light for the light to return to.
The forest is mostly dark, its ways
to be made anew day after day, the dark
richer than the light and more blessed,
provided we stay brave
enough to keep on going in.

4. 

How many times have I come to you out of my head
with joy, if ever a man was,
for to approach you I have given up the light
and all directions. I come to you
lost, wholly trusting as a man who goes
into the forest unarmed. It is as though I descend
slowly earthward out of the air. I rest in peace
in you, when I arrive at last.



5.

Our bond is no little economy based on the exchange
of my love and work for yours, so much for so much
of an expendable fund. We don’t know what its limits are—
that puts it in the dark. We are more together
than we know, how else could we keep on discovering
we are more together than we thought?
You are the known way leading always to the unknown,
and you are the known place to which the unknown is always
leading me back. More blessed in you than I know,
I possess nothing worthy to give you, nothing
not belittled by my saying that I possess it.
Even an hour of love is a moral predicament, a blessing
a man may be hard up to be worthy of. He can only
accept it, as a plant accepts from all the bounty of the light
enough to live, and then accepts the dark,
passing unencumbered back to the earth, as I
have fallen time and again from the great strength
of my desire, helpless, into your arms.


6.

What I am learning to give you is my death
to set you free of me, and me from myself
into the dark and the new light. Like the water
of a deep stream, love is always too much. We
did not make it. Though we drink till we burst
we cannot have it all, or want it all.
In its abundance it survives our thirst.
In the evening we come down to the shore
to drink our fill, and sleep, while it
flows through the regions of the dark.
It does not hold us, except we keep returning
to its rich waters thirsty. We enter,
willing to die, into the commonwealth of its joy.


7.
I give you what is unbounded, passing from dark to dark,
containing darkness: a night of rain, an early morning.
I give you the life I have let live for love of you:
a clump of orange-blooming weeds beside the road,
the young orchard waiting in the snow, our own life
that we have planted in this ground, as I
have planted mine in you. I give you my love for all
beautiful and honest women that you gather to yourself
again and again, and satisfy—and this poem,
no more mine than any man’s who has loved a woman.


Wendell Berry, “The Country of Marriage” from The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry. Copyright © 1998. Published and reprinted by arrangement with Counterpoint Press, a member of the Perseus Books Group (www.perseusbooks.com). All rights reserved.

Thanks, http://www.poetryfoundation.com/

On fidelity

My sister has this post up today on trust. We all have a number of friends who have succumbed to temptation of infidelity, including members on both sides of our families.


Most recently an old friend left the man who had been her husband for over 12 years, her four children, whom she was homeschooling, and the church and co-op to which she belonged to get back together with an old boyfriend. She told me she felt God was calling her to do this because of the way everything was falling into place. She was perhaps the last person I thought would have a broken marriage. I remember crying and crying 25 years ago when she said her parents were getting divorced; maybe I thought that would make it harder for her to leave, but she said it made her realize that kids can survive a broken home.

Then my husband comes home frequently with stories of military wives who have run off with all the money and the household goods while their husbands are off deployed for months. Not that while on deployment all these men are living chaste lives.

It’s easy to cast judgment on those who fail, especially when everything at home is going so well that I’m buying pregnancy tests. But then there are the days when a coldness creeps in – perhaps not because of some attraction to someone else, but because of some perceived injustice or selfishness that is nursed along. When provoked by some slight, I’m guilty of inflicting the silent treatment that can fester for days. I woke up stiff with fear in the middle of the night not long ago after a nightmare about my husband sleeping with 125 women. Then I remembered a diary entry that I wrote back in high school after I started reading novels on a college prep list from my English teacher. It seemed like 95% of these books (some Shakespeare, Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina, etc.) were about the fall-out of infidelity, so, feeling very big-hearted, I wrote about how I would forgive my husband if he ever cheated on me. Infidelity didn’t seem like such a big deal for me at the time, probably because I had never really loved anyone whose leaving would kill half my soul.

The majority response to adultery is end it all. Dump him! Who can trust again when trust has once been violated? Who can love again when love is rejected? My sister’s response is that we can’t really trust another human being because we are all guilty of tiny infidelities: moments of resentment and acts of selfishness. We can only really trust God, so we should be prepared for people to let us down.

Granted. If classic novels teach anything, it’s that human beings are always betraying each other. But if infidelity is part of the human condition, so is our ability to forget pain. We don’t stop trying to trust. We keep forgiving and saying we’re sorry, if not necessarily with words, with some little gesture that says as much. We fall in love again.

Conversations with others and self

My oldest asked today about what is a classic when I told him he “owed” me a book of my choice after reading a bunch of fun books. I could think of the Mark Twain quote about a classic being a book everyone wants to have read, but no one wants to read, or a classic being a book you’ll read again (a quote from?). A classic has noble and eternal truths, added Dan. A classic has beautiful, or at least original diction, I threw in. A classic is a book that stands the test of time. Not statements that make you want to run out and read classics. I thought I’d be more eloquent about this topic after my expensive education, but I didn’t have any great one liners to offer.

J complained that classics don’t have enough action, but what he really meant to complain about (after we gave the examples of Romeo and Juliet, Tom Sawyer, Swiss Family Robinson) is the difficulty of the language. So perhaps it is the words that make a classic, more than anything else: good plot and meaning and character development can be found in books that won’t be read again, but if they don’t have any lines that stick with you, you’ll forget them. So a classic has great one liners.


Then he asked if he could sit down and write a classic, apparently because Irene Hunt, whom he’s reading in English, said “There aren’t enough classics” and sat down and wrote Across Five Aprils.


Well, if you have a gift, you could. But you wouldn’t know it for years, we decided, and probably not until you’re dead. That led to the naming of some living classics: Eric Carle. Jan Brett’s version of The Mitten (not all of her books). Strega Nona. Wendell Berry’s essays. Beloved. Others?
**So to add to my love list: these spontaneous conversations between parent and child that hit big topics.

********************************************************************************

Also on my love list: this prayer we say at bedtime:

         “Come Holy Spirit, enlighten my heart,

                 That I may see all there is of God.

          Come, Holy Spirit, into my mind,

                  That I may know all there is of God.

          Come, Holy Spirit, into my soul,

                  That I may belong only to God.

           Sanctify all that I think, say and do,

                    That all may be for the glory of God. Amen.”


Dan learned this prayer at Notre Dame. I don’t know the source, but we have prayed it as a part of our nightly family rosary since we started doing one when the oldest boys were little (after we realized we couldn’t stay awake to say prayers together as a couple after we put them to bed.) I love this little prayer; it encompasses a lot in a few simple phrases.

But I realized tonight that I really need to work on that third petition. I’ve spent time admiring God in Creation and in His Creatures and looking for evidence of God's hand in the events of our lives. I’ve spent perhaps more time in study, trying to get to know God through the wisdom of the Gospels, the Church Fathers, the medieval enchiridions, the Scholastics, the mystics, the Popes and theologians. But although I’ve done a fair share of spiritual reading, it’s not prayer, and it’s not opening my soul to the Holy Spirit. I haven’t given up my will or my desires. (Perhaps making a life list is a reflection of valuing my will more than God’s?) Nor have I really bent my heart to the love of serving others. And this I’m sure is a source of my dissatisfaction with the way things are, because there are always more desires and needs after some are fulfilled. I haven’t learned to offer all I do to God’s glory. I haven’t learned to just be.

Perhaps this is why the last several years have been a blur. They have lacked intentionality in my actions, but also in my meditations.  After saying the words of that third petition all these years, I need to remember to surrender to it every now and then.

Subcultures

A friend emailed this interesting story today about a man in the Netherlands rebuilding a lifesize ark according the directions in Genesis. It is now on display with lifesize animals. The man evidently has time and money on his side and has found a passion. He also has some fellow Biblical literalists in Kentucky who opened the Creation Museum to cheer him on.  And we met plenty of people during our days as members of the home schooling community who will patronize these exhibits (if they could get to them).

As home schoolers we were a part of a subculture that had subcultures within it: evangelicals, Catholics, unschoolers, classicists, Charlotte Mason types, eclectic artsy types, etc.  We kind of moved between groups, because I was so indecisive about methodology, but I felt like a part of a community. I've always been fascinated by subcultures, maybe because we didn't really grow up in one: we identified as a family, one that was a little unique among our peers in rural Indiana, in that we were Catholic, on the large size (even with only 4 kids - I didn't know any families with more than that), and did things like go with our grandparents in town to the ballet and the art museum.  But we didn't really identify as Catholic because our parents were converts. Nor were we members of the cultured elite, since we lived a middle class life in a small town. Our parents and grandparents appreciated the arts, but weren't especially knowledgeable about them.

So as a child, I, and I assume my siblings, felt a little set apart from our peers (add being a reader to that mix. The only thing that saved me from complete nerddom was having enough endurance to do well enough as a runner to be an athlete) but not so much set apart that we felt a part of a different culture.

Fast forward to adulthood, and suddenly I realize there are all these interesting groups out there that get together to enjoy their time- and money-consuming hobbies and identify with these groups as much as or more than their families. First I was introduced to the military and all the accompanying support groups. Then I got some insight into the boating communities in Rhode Island and southern Virginia. Although we camped as kids, we never encountered the RV crowd as we have in our luck of the draw explorations (like last weekend in Georgia: some people put up little "Welcome to the Smith's" signs on their sites, in addition to their party lights and carpets). In Illinois we first found ourselves members a subculture of sorts with our rosary group, but it was not a crowd of big spenders, unlike some of the antique car collectors who descended on the Coast last week for the "Cruisin' on the Coast" event.  Not all of them spend a lot of money, I'm sure, but all the businesses around had out their "Welcome Cruisers!" signs, so the congestion must be worth the revenue the event brings to the city.  

While living in Virginia, we enjoyed observing subcultures at work like we did today: attending war reenactments and living history displays. Today it was a civil war muster, not a battle reenactment, at the summer home of Jefferson Davis, Beauvoir.  Every time we go to one of these things, I'm fascinated by the devotion of those who attend them and their attention to period detail. Dressed in hoop skirts or woolen jackets and pants (thank goodness it was finally cool today!), the participants stroll around the encampments admiring/critiquing the other groups' set-ups, perhaps judging their cooking fires or their canvas tents and hay beds. I love looking at the mercantile tents selection of hand-sewn clothing displayed side by side with made-in-china junk souvenirs. My kids beg for pop-guns and wooden swords, of which we have plenty, and are made to be satisfied with the $,25 handfull of lemon drops. (We also hung out in the morning with the birding subculture at the Sandhill Crane Fest, a more sedate crowd.)

I wonder how people justify the expense of suiting up for these things, but they evidently have a passion and thoroughly enjoy the company of their fellow afficionados. The "doctor" regalled us for nearly 20 minutes with accounts of how he collected all his surgical accoutrements at antique stores and estate sales, mostly from people who didn't know what they had.

And last week watching the Cruisin' folks assemble - here the Mustang lovers, there the tin lizzies, then the corvettes - I realized this must have been much harder to plan before the advent of the internet. How do these people know where to go if they are not linked into message boards or reading blogs by those with similar interests? But since this has been going on for over 20 years they must have disseminated the information pretty well before the world wide web was in wide use.  And these reenactors have been meeting up for years, too.

So I wonder if blogging has made it easier to identify with a community because there are more ways to find kindred spirits. Does blogging encourage a subculture mentality of hanging out with likeminded people? One minute I'm thinking this ark guy and some of these reenactors are a little off-balance; another minute I want a hoop skirt and a canvas tent and all my little soldiers off playing slingshots with the other pseudo-military kids while I talk with these interesting people. Similarly, I waffle between one moment thinking it's great to have the friendship and support of likeminded friends, but another minute feeling called to spend time mixing with people who are very different. 

Perhaps what I really need to focus on is balance in all things for myself and forego worrying about others' mentality and use of their resources. (I should start by not spending so much time reading blogs!).

Fairy Tales

from vannessagx on flickr

Finished Welty's The Robber Bridegroom a couple nights ago and was reminded of how much I enjoy fairy tales. The old English Fairy Tales collection illustrated by Arthur Rackham that I used to pour over at my grandparents' house stands a little dusty now in the kids' room (not that any sisters can take it...). The boys, while loving fantasy, haven't had a taste for Jack the Giant Killer or the Grimms' dark tales, and I feel a little at fault. Every once in a while we pick up a more richly illustrated copy of something like Anderson's sorrowful "The Steadfast Tin Soldier" at the library, but they tend to prefer fast, funny, plot driven series books to the short, frightening stories I used to love to read (and my oldest just checked out a Tom Clancy - perhaps inspired by our viewing of The Hunt for Red October). 

Welty's story captures the sing song tone of fairy tales and the gruesome colorful characters without sounding like some of the contemporary recycled versions of a wornout tale with heavy emphasis on morality, which most of these old fairy tales lack. The beautiful maiden elopes with the bandit and lives happily in sin and in ignorance of her lover's identity (a Cupid and Psyche twist) until the foolish boy Goat foils an Indian massacre, saves their lives, but reveals the identity of the bandit to all. So the bandit and the maiden, after a brief separation, run away to make a fabulous fortune after stopping briefly to be wed. No morals anywhere, but a great tale.

I'm having a hard time thinking of any American fairy tale writers other than Washington Irving right now - Mark Twain maybe? Add fairy tales - and their illustrations - to the list of things to love. And I also love the little local toy store where I stumbled on a collection of fairy tale illustrations today. Resisted the temptation to buy.

Last night while working Bingo for our parish tuition subsidy, I heard another sort of fairy tale, along with a lot of fascinating gossip and restaurant reviews.  One of my fellow "volunteers" is the granddaughter of a woman whose parents immigrated from Yugoslavia. When her mother died, the grandmother dropped out of 3rd grade to help take care of her 4 brothers and little sister. Meanwhile, the father went about his business making a fortune from shrimping and fishing. First he bought a boat. Then he bought a pier. Then he bought a warehouse and a packaging plant. Eventually he had quite a conglomerate of fishing industry businesses.  He sold most of this to the Starkist company for $72 million. A rags to riches story. Eventually, his heirs leased some additional waterfront property to the Grand Casino for 5% of their monthly income.  The twist is that in Yugoslavian culture, only the sons could inherit money, so the poor sisters were left penniless, not even given a freezer of fish after the Starkist deal. This wealth is still floating around Biloxi, and the woman, the granddaughter, telling this story has kids who now go to school with their extremely wealthy cousins, while their dad manages the Domino's district here. Could make for some jealousy.

I'm still fighting jealousy over neighborhood envy.  Another outcome of working Bingo (aside from learning how to make fries in the little basket dipped in hot oil, in case I ever am desperate for a job), is that I have had my running routes curtailed, after hearing that I must be crazy for running on a couple of these streets. We don't have many children on our street anyway - a baby across from us, and some teenagers on the corner. And we don't have any easy carpool mates.  And then today, J's friend commented that he wouldn't want to trick or treat in our neighborhood because it looked all foggy and rundown and some one might put drugs in the candy. To which B replies, "Yeah, our neighborhood is pretty seedy." 

All the doors are locked, and the outside lights lit.

I knew the neighborhood was sketchy when we were looking at renting in it. Too close to the casinos and the water. We drove around the part of Bayview to the left with the pretty waterside houses, not the neighborhood to the right with boarded up, overgrown ones.  Suddenly I feel nervous driving on the streets after dark.

But then I have to remind myself that the people who live in these old rundown houses are people, too. They want to come home after a long day at work.  I could be robbed or accidentally shot in a good neighborhood, too.  The St. Vincent de Paul society feeds hundreds of people a month (I tried to volunteer but couldn't do much unless I had childcare for my 3 yr old because schizophrenics and molesters come in the office). Just as there is great wealth in this area, there's great poverty. 

It's easier to feel nervous than to feel compassion. Having to readjust to what it means to be a good neighbor.

Listmaking

Went to the first Navy Spouses Club book club last week. The book was The Next Thing On My List by Jill Smolinski. I didn’t read it because the library didn’t have a copy, but a friend had told me about it and I flipped through one of the other wives' books at the coffee shop where we met. The novel is a short, female version of The Bucket List and geared to book clubs. Perfect for talking about what you want to do with your life. So we talked a little about characters and more about what is on our lists of things we want to do with our lives and what philosophies guide how we make our lists (this was from a list of questions in the back of the book.) Easy to make a list of things you’d like to do. Harder to make a list of things you’re likely to do. Takes more thought to make a list of things you ought to do to live the life you want to live.

So first on our boat ride and then again on our camping trip this past weekend, I gave more thought to making lists. For the past few years, I’ve been caught up in the details of life, and suddenly, now that I don’t have so many details to attend to with kids in school and volunteer activities curtailed somewhat, I find that I’m something of a stranger to myself. Maybe it’s that the middle aged me doesn’t look like what I expected as the teen me, and I forgot to change that image during the young adult me years. This is the kind of navel gazing that drives my husband (and myself eventually) batty. Maybe this is an attempt at a mini-retreat inspired by getting a little fall weather finally over the Columbus Day weekend in Georgia.

A few things on my list:
          Run another marathon
          Paint a framable picture
          Write something someone loves
          Own a HOME – farm? – near people I love
          Declutter – but keep and arrange attractively things that make me happy
          Visit a lot of places (without tour guides): A UK authors trip, a footsteps of Paul trip to the Holy Land, a cruise around the Mediterranean and Greece following Homer as a guide, the Pacific Northwest, Prince Edward Island, someday get to Africa, Asia, and Australia - might as well make an around the world trip to every continent.

While I love travel and thinking about places I'd like to go, I would probably be just as happy to stay at home if I lived somewhere I really loved, with lots of trees and trails.  Then there's the fact that tourist travel and checking off achievements don't really fit with a philosophy of life centered on love of God and neighbor.  So perhaps the better list is one that focuses on how to love better - kind of like the "love list" talked about on this blog or the "gratitude list" on this blog.

Things I would put on the love/thanks list:
          Camping with the family. Camping with friends and extended family. Being outside in crisp cool weather with no phones or schedules or computers in a place where the kids can get dirty and run and be loud without restraint (at least until quiet hours).

              Dan mentioned he loved being patted by pudgy toddler hands as they lean on your shoulder. A little comfort from the comforted.

              Books, especially books like the one I finished on the drive from GA for the next book club: Delta Wedding by Eudora Welty. I had been wanting to read her while in Mississippi, and was completely satisfied and more. Tough beginning, but once in, I never wanted to leave the home of the Fairchilds on the Delta, with all the cousins and in-laws and secrets and suspicions and jealousies and loves. A fullbodied envisioning of extended family life, although sometimes what was left unsaid was infuriating – like whether George was teasing about having the pretty girl on the way to Memphis or whether Ellen’s dream came true or whether Dabney actually loved Troy or just the idea of shocking her family – but true to way families let each other see only so much of what’s held close to the heart. 
 
      Sleeping in my own bed after laboring to merit a comfortable rest – like hiking ridges with a toddler on a shoulder and sleeping on the ground for a couple of nights.

           Churches like the one we worshiped in on Sunday: Suited to its surroundings, simple, recalling an old white clapboard church but with modern clean lines.

Lily

I love Lilly of the Purple Plastic Purse. She’s so expressive. Who doesn’t want to go to the Lightbulb Lab? Who does want to sit in the uncooperative chair? What little girl hasn’t been disappointed by not being chosen to be a flower girl – or bridesmaid – in a close friend’s wedding? (My little sister wasn’t old enough to be jealous of my one and only performance as a flower girl, but she envied my First Communion flower wreath so much that my parents (or grandparents?) bought her little roses to wear by her ears. Several years later, she got her own flower wreath for her wedding reception.) My daughter is going to be a flower girl for her aunt soon, so we checked out Lilly’s Big Day to learn about this important job and to reconnect with Lilly and Mr. Slinger, that most laidback and understanding of teachers. Lilly seems much more excited about the potential of being a flower girl, than A. does about the reality. However, the fancy dress arrived today, and the silver shoes still fit, and she is beginning to ask questions about hair styles. And here is indomitable Lilly in her red boots to inspire us to practice marching slowly.

Fundraising

One of the things I don’t like about school: fundraising. The kids’ school has a silent auction and Halloween carnival coming up. I feel guilty because we receive a parish subsidy (for which we also work Bingo – stealing from the poor), so I offered to call a few businesses to ask for donations. Then I get handed a list of about 50 businesses. (I was expecting about 5.) Once I get started calling, making the pitch is pretty easy. These places are all used to being asked for donations and probably a third say yes. The most generous are the small business owners who are looking for customers. The big corporations say no, or tell you where to submit paperwork. Something to miss about a local economy. Happily, there do seem to be more small shops here than other places we’ve lived.

On the other hand, when I go to these little stores to pick up the gifts, I feel guilty if I don’t buy anything – or even plan to come back to the store: a formalwear place (don’t need sparkly cocktail gowns for Mardi Gras or pageants), a men’s store (can’t see my husby in patterned silk shirts), an upscale baby store (would like to shop here, but can’t find the 75% off rack). There probably are families at the school who go to these places, so I hope they will visit and say thank you for the donation and strengthen the community connection that doesn’t exist with the new Target that opened yesterday to great fanfare.

So now I’m getting tired of begging. And I’ve had to say no to buying the t-shirts that come around every few weeks – don’t want to spend money on something that is going to add clutter to already full drawers. (Trying to be a little Franciscan here.) I’d rather just send in money, which I’ve done. And I’ve sent in candy for the carnival, and money to help make wreaths for the carnival, and will bake goodies for the Halloween carnival bake sale and will work set up and the booths and clean up...

I know it costs a lot of money to run a school. And I know a lot of people work hard to make it a success, although most don’t have to send in stuff for four classes. But last night I was reading The Story of the Van Trapp Family Singers (who actually did go to school although they seem like home schoolers) and feeling envious of their nights at home around the fire reading aloud and singing, and their celebrations of birthdays and feast days with home made gifts. I want to say no to all this external stuff and just make a pretty, happy home. (‘course we can’t carry a tune and nobody can sit close to each other for long with poking, prodding, and pinching.)

Then I see the Room Coordinator for my 6th grader’s class at school during pick-up. She has no legs. She drives a car, makes the class wreath, works for the VA, sends out lots of email reminders, and organizes the class parties. And here I am complaining.

Weekend Watching

Next weekend we are going camping at Tallulah Gorge in Georgia with some friends from Virginia.  To prepare for the occasion, I checked out Deliverance, a classic I'd never seen, which is filmed on the Tallulah river. My husband warned me that I didn't want to watch it, but I was determined to get a little insight into the place.  Because of my husband's caveat, I expected to see the four men who decided to brave the Cahulawassee river (the fictional name of the river) meet rapids and bears and get injured. I did not expect that the most frightening encounter of their trip would be with other human beings.

Here's the plot: The movie begins with the four men heading into the Georgia backwoods to take a canoe trip down this river before it is dammed by the power company (double meaning intended).  One of the 4, Lewis, (Burt Reynolds) is a daredevil risktaker, the other three are family men seeking a little adventure. Before they reach the river, they stop for gas, where the most compassionate of the 4, Drew, plays the famous banjo/guitar duet with a homely mountain boy. They connect briefly through music, but the boy refuses to shake hands with Drew -- because his friends are condescending, because Drew says G**D*** or simply because he fears the men? The rift between the city men and the country folk leads to suspicion on both sides, but Lewis and the others trust their trucks to some men to deliver down river.

The first day of their trip is exhausting but invigorating.  The four men irritate each other, and seem more focused on getting to their stopping point than on enjoying the journey, like most of us.  The second day is when they meet with trouble.  The two least prepared men are trapped by a couple mountain men who sexually assualt the softest of the two, Bobby. When they turn to assault Ed, Lewis shows up and shoots with an arrow the stronger of the two, and the other runs off. Then the psychological struggle heats up: Drew wants to report the crime, the rest vote to bury the body and cover up the deed.  After the burial, Drew jumps/falls overboard in some rapids, Lewis breaks his leg and convinces Bobby and Ed that Drew was shot. Under the delusion that they are being pursued, Ed ends up shooting an uninvolved hunter, so they cover up another death by sinking the body.  When they finally reach their destination, they barely escape being caught in their lies by the small town sheriff. He seems willing to look the other way because the town is soon to be drowned by the dammed river. As Ed leaves town, he watches a group of men exhuming graves to move the bodies of the dead. The final scene is Ed waking from a nightmare of a hand drifting up from the river, the implication perhaps being that he will be haunted by disrespecting the bodies left in the river.

When we first finished the movie, I was angry at myself for watching it: Now I'll have nightmares about toothless men in coveralls hiding out behind the campsite waiting for fresh meat - my plump children. But I keep puzzling over the title of the movie. Deliverance from what? From the river? From the people whose humanity has been disrespected by the city slickers? I thought it was to be a man vs. nature film, but really it's man vs. himself, and there is no deliverance from the punishment of guilt, except by accepting forgiveness.

I turned off the movie gripped with fear of strangers in the woods, but I also was gnawed on by a sense of loss: there aren't many wild places left where you can hide a dead body. Our experience of Tallulah Gorge will be tempered by the boundaries of the campground. Our friends will  have a trailer with a flush toilet and a shower in the campsite next to ours. I'm sure we'll hear other campers' rock music, as we have on other camping trips.  DishTV can reach even some of the most remote mountain dwellers. But we still keep trying to get away from the city, back to nature, to places that aren't as crowded and polluted by noise, seeking an authentic encounter with God's creation, unmediated by man's interference. We'll be treated to an aesthetic release of water from the dam, since it's a holiday weekend, so we'll get an idea of what those rapids used to be like (even if we won't be riding them).  But it's unlikely we'll meet any locals, any of the people that lost their homes when the power company took over. Lewis would probably taunt us for thinking this is a trip to the wilds.

So our trip will be a little tame. But it will be a respite for our family, nonetheless, from the noise and distractions of daily life.

Quick Takes Friday - The Dichotomous Key

My sixth grader is studying classification in science right now and learning about the dichotomous key as a method for classifying plants and animals. One of his experiments was to classify Jelly Bellies. I thought it might be a useful decision making tool for myself, since I suffer from temperamental indecisiveness. So quickly, here are some choices:

***

To homeschool or not to homeschool: See below. If I don’t home school, will my kids turn out the wrong or right kind of normal? If I do home school, will I lead them to believe that moms are crabby, cruel unhappy people (kind of like that nun with the ruler stereotype?).

***

To have more children or not to: We’ve finally practiced NFP enough to have had a little break in the baby wave. (It took awhile to figure out that you can’t cheat the rules.) Right now we’re in a holding pattern. I feel peer pressure both to have more and not to have more, depending on which peers I’m with. And depending on the time of month, I feel like saying, “What’s one more!” or “What, one more!”

***

To encourage my husband to stay Navy and see the world or get out and plant roots: If he stays Navy, we get a guaranteed paycheck, health care, retirement benefits, and he works a job he likes. And we have interesting adventures. If he gets out, we don’t have to move around and stress about getting new curtains and trash cans and making new friends, we could find a home and a community to love (although we do end up loving each home and community we’ve left), live a Wendell Berry life, and I wouldn’t have to worry about getting rid of books because we’re over the household goods weight limit, but we might have to rely on our kids to house, feed, and change our Depends when we get old.

***

To visit family at Christmas or to stay at our own home: If we go: lots of quality time with cousins and aunts and uncles and grandparents – all those people we love. If not, we don't have to suffer hours and hours of cartime. And will our kids ever want to come home to our house for the holidays (someday when we have our own house), if they don’t have any memories of Christmas at home?

***

To get highlights or not: If yes, I look more stylish, but have upkeep. If not, I continue to be dowdy, but don’t have to spend time or money on hair.

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To eat the entire loaf of chocolate chip sour cream banana bread myself or save some for the kids. If yes, I gain 10 lbs, but get a momentary serotonin high; if I save some, the kids might not eat it anyway and it won’t taste as good not fresh.

***

To read more blogs or not: If yes, I don’t fold any laundry, but have interesting things to think about. If not, I might be a more productive, well rested person.

More interesting observations at Conversion Diary.

Quick read

Cheated myself out of a good night's sleep last night to stay up and read The Help by Kathryn Stockett. A friend lent it to me over a month ago, so I felt determined to read it. I meant to only read a couple chapters before bed, but ending up sitting in the bathroom for over 3 hours, reading the whole thing. Characters were a little caricaturish, but there was enough plot suspense to keep me turning the pages. Set in 1963-64, it's the story of a young white woman in Jackson, MS, trying to get the black domestic helpers to tell their stories to her to make into a book. In the process, she loses her bigoted boyfriend and gets kicked out of the Junior League, but makes friends with the women who have been serving her and her friends all their lives.

Perhaps what struck me most about the book was the note from the author in the back about how she grew up in a similar situation, taking for granted the boundaries between her and the help, until she moved away from the south. She commented that when people found out she was from Mississippi, they all apologized to her or congratulated her for getting away, and she felt compelled to rise to the defense of her home state. There's a lot of disdain for this state, much of it earned during the time this book takes place, and for which it still suffers. Just the other day, another Navy wife commented to me how she disliked it here because the education level around here was so low. I can't think of one Navy wife who envied us for the assignment here. Most said "well at least the cost of living is low," and passed on the shocking news that Target was over an hour away.

And I'm guilty of a similar prejudice. Mostly I just complain about the heat and the humidity, but I've harbored a few redneck jokes in the back of my mind.  Being from Indiana, I am either being a hypocrite or laughing WITH those rednecks, not at them, right?

But even if it has a checkered past and a dim future, Mississippi has been the home to brilliance: William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, BB King, Elvis Presley, Jim Henson, oh and Oprah Winfrey. Sometimes I wonder if it's the accent that makes people from more affluent areas assume Southerners are not as educated. At Mass, some of the readers have a melodious, deep southern drawl.  Instead of thinking backwoods, I’m reminded of Alan Tate or John Crowe Ransome (not Mississippians) when I hear these voices, because of that paragon of southern lit professors, Louise Cowan at UD. Is there mindfulness in the slow speech, in the gentle lingering on last syllables?

Flannery O'Connor, who has to take some credit for giving people the impression that Southerners are odd, says something in Mystery and Manners about letting characters speak the dialect of their region. Southern dialect is so distinctive that's easy for her to say. I used to think reading dialect was distracting, like trying to read a foreign language, but since I've heard it more, even now when it is probably much less distinctive than it was 50 years ago when Flannery was writing, I realize it does have its own vowels. And those sounds create an image and an identity that places overrun by suburbia can't claim. And that lack of identity is their loss.

Some neighbors with charm:

The Loan Arranger with his trusty Jaguar

Pink houses

These two are right next to each other: Plantation style home and Plantation style trailer

Boarded up and overgrown, both have their own beauty

A gulf coast treat