Quick Takes without Complaints

1. After all my moaning yesterday, my sixth grader place 2nd in the physics category of the science fair! A minor miracle! I’m sure it is not because he earned extra points on creativity and neatness, but because he gave a good presentation to the judges, since he knew what he had done.



2. Daffodils are blooming! The end of drear February is near. Welcome spring! I don’t see a lot of bulbs coming up around here; they must not do as well with the short winters as they do up in the north, where the first daffodils arrive around the end of March or so. But these few blooming around the entrance of the library are a welcome harbinger.

3. Completed and filed taxes and now am planning what to do with the money the government pays me to have children in the form of the child tax credit, if Mr. IRS doesn’t announce an audit…



4. When I passed a house under construction on my run with the lab today, a construction worker called out “Beautiful Day!” Another said, “Beautiful dog!” Beautiful indeed. And beautiful work they were doing! Spring sunshine makes everything seem a little prettier.



5. Books in the mail! My father in law sent some thrillers to pass the time with, and my new old copy of Caryll Houselander’s Way of the Cross arrived from some Benedictines’ library, providentially. It begins with reflections like this:
                 "The Stations of the Cross are not given to us only to remind us of the historical Passion of Christ but to show us what is happening now, and happening to each one of us."

                      and "Each one meets himself on the Via Crucis, which is the road through death to life. In Christ he finds the meaning of his own suffering, the power of his own capacity for love. . . . The stations show us how each one can lighten the heavy cross that is laid upon the bent back of the whole human race now, how each one in the power of Christ's love can sweeten his own suffering and that of those around him."

Thanks for the recommendation, Anne.



6. A letter, a letter, I love a love letter! I love seeing my name written by my husband’s hand. Emails are for business and spies, phone calls are for catching up and feeling distant, but letters are a physical presence, transcenders of time when they take 20 days to arrive, tangible joys to be revisited.



7. I got a hair cut I like, and it was free! My mom trimmed it up while she was here.

Welcome, weekend!

Thanks, Jen, for hosting.

Science Fair

The beginning of Lent happened to fall around the time that science fair projects are due, so instead of being prayerful and reposed, a meek and mild Mary, I have been a screaming meanie of late. Envision me with flames jumping out of my scalp, eyes blazing laser beams, a whip snapping at my side – and throw in spandexed legs ending in stilettos to complete the image of how projects of this nature affect me.


The problem is that I know ¾ of the parents will do the poster board for their children. However, I do not like to cut and paste. My boys don’t enjoy it much either. I refuse to spend large amounts of cash for decorative borders and fancy stickers that will end up in the trash. It pains me enough to have to purchase these trifold boards, which, try as we may to remove the last bits of glue and paper after the projects are returned, can never really be reused. And it’s supposedly the kids’ projects anyway, not a competition to see whose parents are most creative.


Ask me why I stress about these things, but I can’t answer. Perhaps because I was scarred by that C I received on my first science fair project way back when science fairs first came into style. Perhaps because my kids come home grouchy and disappointed because they never win even honorable mention in these kinds of things. They want so badly to do well. And yet I can’t get them to channel that desire for perfection into actual practice for perfection. If you want to do well, you have to do the work, I say, because I refuse to do the work for you. I will groan and moan when you say you are finished and your project looks sloppy enough even for my lax standards. I will share that sinking feeling when you see your classmates’ nicely manicured boards come into class free from the bendy marks left from where your little brother danced on your board or you sister threw her backpack on it. I don’t care if you don’t win.

I just hope you don’t get a C.


But this was not supposed to be a post about science fairs; it was supposed to be about my lack of growth in Maryism during this Lent. Maybe I’ll get around to that tomorrow. My husband also tactfully suggested on the phone the other night that I should give up worrying. Now that would be a sacrifice.

In need of a fairy godmother to tell me what to do

On Sunday afternoon one of the other wives from the regiment invited all the spouses and kids over for dinner. This mom has 3 little girls and a newborn son, so the girls skipped gladly to the car, while the boys dragged their feet armed with books, a deck of cards, and a (fulfilled) wish for a TV on which they could watch Olympics since no one their age/gender would be there. I had a good time chatting it up with the wives and was happy to meet the friend of a mutual friend. Amongst military wives there is nearly immediate friendship. Few of them work high powered jobs, most are church-goers, they all are hungry for socialization. Although I’m enjoying my stay in Mississippi, many of the wives did not receive the orders to come here with joy, and a number are counting down the days until the next orders come through. On top of that our husbands are deployed for about a third of our stay here, before any other variables are thrown in.  In our small miseries, we enjoy each other's company.



Now I’m debating whether or not to join a group of these wives at the Seabee ball. I’m not sure why I feel so torn about this decision – so trivial! I want to go and be friendly and eat and drink and dance, but to be honest, although I enjoy the company of these other women, I don’t really know them well, and I don’t know anyone outside the regiment who will be there. I gave away all but one basic black velvet formal when we moved. I can see myself sitting at the table with a forced smile, trying to make small talk over the dance music, eating bland food, and wondering why I spent nearly $100 for this night. I have the perfect excuse: my older boys are camping with the scouts on the USS Alabama for the weekend, so I don’t have a sitter (although I haven’t tried calling anyone).

So why am I still considering it? I suppose I am subject to peer pressure. I don’t want to say no to an invitation. I don’t want to miss out on the possibility of friendship. And yet, this is supposed to be my retreat year: I wore myself out making new friends at our last duty station. Friends I am very happy to have, no doubt, but friends that I didn’t have time to cultivate, to get to know well. And so some of my older friendships withered, or lay dormant, without my attention to them: I’m not good with phone calls, and the time I had for writing letters evaporated.



But although I intend to connect more with the friends I have, distance and distractions are deterrents, and I find myself craving face time with real people (as much as I enjoy internet connections!). Still undecided.

On a different note: In my haste to throw together a fruit salad and move the kids out the door for the dinner Sunday, I forgot to grab the small clutch of pink tulips I had bought for my hostess. Came home to find them drooping on the counter. By Monday morning, they had perked up after a dose of clean water and trimmed stems. Fresh flowers are a luxury I can easily do without, but I wonder if the impetus that made me pick them up at the store subconsciously encouraged me to forget them, so that I could enjoy them for myself. They were pretty enough to inspire me to scour the kitchen, a duty which hadn’t been attempted since before my mom came for a visit.

The cleanly condition didn’t last long in the after school flurry, but tulips themselves are still in their glory, just beginning to open more fully.

Reading Gaiman

Last week was Neil Gaiman week here. I found 3 Gaiman books in juvenile fiction which we hadn’t read: Odd and the Frost Giant, M for Magic and Stardust. Odd and the Frost Giant was published most recently; it is a fun little fairy tale type story about a boy who has to help 3 Norse gods, bewitched into the appearance of a bear, a fox, and an eagle, return to Asgaard to defeat the Frost Giant and reclaim their form and their kingdom. Odd is crippled and unloved by his stepfather, but he succeeds in his quest with his bravado and lack of self concern. But his encounter with the Frost Giant is a bit anticlimactic. I can’t decide if it is a flaw in the story that the Frost Giant is lovable. He has seized Asgaard and Lady Freya because he wants to possess beauty. While it’s somewhat charming to have a villain intoxicated by the beauty of otherness who then discovers all isn’t perfect, it seems a bit forced. 

Next up: M for Magic, a collection of short stories, some of which are reworked fairy tales, like the story of the ogre under a bridge and one a detective noir riff about a mystery surrounding the death of Humpty Dumpty. Another story tells of an epicurean club who sets off to eat the phoenix. The least likable to me is the story of two boys who go to a party to try to meet girls and discover that the girls are from Someplace Else (outer space? Another dimension?). The last chapter is excerpted from The Graveyard Book, which is still my favorite Gaiman book. Most of the stories were entertaining, only slightly spooky, like when, in the story about the ogre, who wants to eat a boy’s life, the ogre’s awkward twist on words is made literal. The story about the epicures was darkly amusing. Some of these stories delight, but some seem like fiction written by an adolescent, not just for that age group.


I could see my oldest eyeing me when I was reading the book, I think because he didn’t want me to read the story about the teenaged boys, a play on coming of age stories. He had already read it. One boy knows how to romance the girls, the other one is awkward and shy. They walk into a party that turns out to be only girls – but these girls are different. It turns out they are otherworldly beings who have taken the form of human beings to learn about our world. The suave boy ends up running out the door, crying and puking, shortly after he goes upstairs with the most beautiful girl.


So these two books don’t rank with Coraline and The Graveyard Book, but they were fun reads.


Stardust, on the other hand, surprised me. I started reading it at the library until I got to the scene where the young Dunstan makes love to the faerie slave girl. With way too many details. Really, this is juvenile fiction? Is it supposed to be in the adult section? I wondered. Why, Neil? Why write so explicitly, why not just imply artfully what happened between Dunstan and the slave girl instead of giving details from a Harlequin? I didn’t check it out, or read much further. Now I have to vet Gaiman books before I hand them to my kids thinking, “Here’s a bit of good writing.” Maybe I should’ve asked the librarian to move the book to the adult section, but what I did was drop the book back between the two shelves.


A few days later we returned to the library, and it was still hiding there. I wonder how long it will remain.

Off to the show

As you can see from the time on this post, I haven’t quite succeeded with my Lenten resolution to be offline by 10. I also checked Facebook today, but I decided that if I was going to limit myself to one day a week it should be Saturday instead of Sunday. I also ate between meals on Friday. But, if this is a weekend balance, although I’ve indulged in a lot more nuts and raisins than usual, I haven’t eaten sweets. Repeated abstinence from sweets during Lent has made eating a little chocolate seem only slightly less sinful than stealing. Other sacrifices are more difficult. Another discipline I should work on is offering up sacrifices. I always forget at the moment of temptation.
Anyway, my excuse for being online late last night is that my day got delayed about 8 hours because I got called to sub yesterday at the junior high school, and I'm still catching up. Then I delayed my activities even more by doing something spontaneous and taking the kids to a concert. I had seen an ad for Barrage a couple weeks ago and thought “Oh I’d like to see that” but dismissed it because I thought we had something else scheduled. And tickets were relatively expensive, considering we usually attend events in the price range of free. After I realized that we didn’t have a conflict, I reconsidered attending, but then decided we had enough to keep us busy through the weekend: I had signed up to take a dinner to a teacher whose mother passed away, my turn to cook the weekend meal for the priests at our church had come up, two kids have science fair projects due Monday, another has a dance, and we had 2 soccer games on Saturday.


But while I was on my short run Friday afternoon, I couldn’t stop debating with myself about going. I had left all the kids at home playing wii, and was feeling guilty about how much media time I had allowed them the past few weeks since my husband left – and before that. I give in to letting the kids play on the computer or wii while I run or make quick errands so that they don’t fight or fall out of trees while I’m gone. But the more screen time they get, the more they want. So I felt the need to have an alternative to the usual Friday night film (followed by the Saturday night movie).


But another train of thought pulling at my guilt strings was related to a conversation my mom and I had had during her visit last week. We had been talking about memories – she had just finished The Madonnas of Leningrad and had started The English Patient, both books involving the strength and nature of memory. We also had sat one night with the kids looking at old photo albums, and I realized how much of the day to day of raising the kids I have already forgotten or buried deeply in my subconscious. I even needed photos to call forth some of our lives' significant moments.  Of some years I have more vivid memories than others: the few months we lived in California, the short stint in Newport, the year in West Lafayette. I can conjure next to nothing about our 2nd year in Libertyville. How did I spend those days? Was our routine so regular that no days stand apart?

I finished my run determined to do something little to mark the time here. Something to break the monotony of videos. Something that might spark a some excitement for violins. I’m still grateful to my grandparents for carting my childhood self to the symphony when they had extra tickets, even though they sometimes had to shake me awake when the performance was finished. And they took my siblings and I one or two at a time on outings to the ballet, the theater, the art museum, the book store. Those little glimpses into the world of art and culture not only exposed us to beauty but also set us apart, a type of privilege.


So I hustled everyone with minimal complaining out the door to the concert. And the kids all enjoyed it. They got their programs autographed after the show. My second grader talked about the girl performers’ hair and shirts, rather than the music, but at least she is exploring an element of taste. The kindergartner thought the announcer said the drummer was a magician (not musician) so he commented on all the tricks the drummer did. The Southern gentleman who sat down next to us and seemed uncomfortably surprised that I had brought 6 kids with me to this performance by the intermission had made friends with my second grader. During the break he offered to stand with my kindergartner while we went to the restroom, because, despite the drummer’s magic tricks and the energetic leaping and twirling of the five violinists, he had fallen asleep.

He woke up to clap enthusiastically during the grand finale. And I clapped heartily, too. I thoroughly enjoyed the enthusiasm of the musicians on my little date with the kids.

A Good Quote for Lent

From Magnificat for February 19th: Elizabeth Leseur writes:

I have jotted down in my notebook my Lenten resolutions, but I want to confirm them here. I must truly renew my life, and it is God whom I ask in all simplicity to transform me. I want to live interiorly more spiritually, exteriorly more gently and lovingly so as to make God better loved, who is the beginning and end of my spiritual life. . . .

A resolution worth adopting: to be more spiritual, more gentle, more loving, all with the goal of making God loved more.  Too often I attempt self-improvement plans with the idea of making myself more lovable to God, who knows all my failings anyway, instead of trying to show others how God loves, how God can work through people, how anything that is good comes, not from my efforts, but from Him.

Scenes from Mardi Gras

We have now experienced our first Mardi Gras on the Gulf Coast.  While we were in Virginia, we hosted a few Mardi Gras parties for our friends. Our friend from Louisiana tried to tell us what a southern Mardi Gras was like, but now we have a better idea. Our little parties didn't measure up.

 You can tell we are in the South.
 

The kids start to figure out the routine.

The Black Beaded Knight

The crowd was about as interesting as the parades.

This is what 63 lbs of beads look like.

We finished off 3 bags of half-price Valentine's M&M's and a king cake in a day (with a little help from our friends with five kids.) 

Then we fasted.

Sweets

for my Sweet!

Happy Valentine's Day! I'll be renewing my marriage vows at Mass this morning without my Valentine, but we had a nice phone chat this morning.  The connection is surprisingly good, despite the fact that it is 10.5 hours later in the day where he is.

We don't do much to mark Valentine's Day around here. A favorite quote from The Little Prince: "The thing that is important is the thing that is not seen . . ." A nice card does my heart as much good as any supermarket roses or box of chocolates.  But I have been reminiscing about past Valentine's dinners.  We didn't go out often early in our marriage, but on our first Valentine's Day as a married couple, in Newport, Rhode Island, we went to a little seafood restaurant on the Point, down the street from where we lived on the first floor of an old house. Our upstairs neighbors were always making curries that fragranced the whole house, while I cooked rice with canned vegetables mixed in. Not a high point in my culinary history.  I was six months pregnant and always hungry, so it was a real treat to dine out on fresh lobster.

But my favorite Valentine: in 1998, my second son was born on the 13th, so on the 14th, our little family welcomed him home. By our second anniversary we had two babies, and have had birthday cake on Valentine's days since.

So until March, I have two twelve year olds. We are in our Irish twin month.

Quick Takes

Thanks, Jen, for hosting!

**1**

50 cent

= crude rapper

or the price of a fun book off the book sale rack at the library.

**2**

I have a new deskmate: my son’s pet Parakeet Percy (named because my son saw a Walker Percy book sitting on the shelf; the bird is not named after Percy Jackson the Lightening Thief, or Percy Weasley, Ron’s snivelly big brother.) Although I regret the space of my desk that the bird’s cage consumes, I don’t mind having the company. In fact, it was me probably more than anyone who wanted the bird, even though now we’ll have to find someone to watch him when we travel. We went to the pet shop to look at fish, and what do you know – parakeets on sale! Percy was the last blue one left.

Percy is the second budgie we have had. Lady lived only a few short months a year or so ago. Lady was yellow, which was not my oldest’s first choice, but she seemed the tamest bird in the cage at Animal Jungle, our favorite pet shop in Virginia Beach: where else can you get alligators, feed the stingrays, admire tortoises, monkeys, and ocelots (not for sale), as well as all the usual suspects, plus an extremely large fish section. Pets were big business in Va Bch. There were two doggie daycares near our house, a handful of groomers, and a dog stuff boutique.

We did get fish, too.

**3**

I promised new pets after we moved. But here it has been 7 months, and I hadn’t delivered. Easy to make a promise, harder to keep. But I enjoy the animals as much or more than the kids. I'll buy into the argument for pets as an aid to contemplation. They make you stop and stare.  I can see why owning a pet can lower your blood pressure, although when your dog wants to be fed at 5:30 on a snow day, your blood pressure may rise.

**4**

We did get a few flakes of snow today, justifying the day off of school. I think our administrators didn't want to be left out of the blizzard the rest of the country is experiencing.

**5**

 

Made granola the other day after a trip to the health food store to get things like flax seed, pepitoes, and wheat bran (and Dr. Bronner's soap, which I was introduced to by Dr. Bronner's grandson, who lived across the street from us years ago with his cheerful and pretty blond wife. I wonder what Dr. Bronner, with his aphorisms like "Smile, help teach the whole Human race, the Moral ABC of All-One-God-Faith, Lightning-like strong & we're All-One! All-One!" and reworkings of Chaucer, Longfellow, and Kipling all over the bottles of his soap, thought about his grandon being a fighter pilot in the Navy). I like to fancy myself a little bit crunchy. But just around the edges. For example, after Miss C and I made granola, we rolled out homemade sugar cookies for the kids’ Valentine’s parties.  But I frosted them with the stuff from a can because I can’t stand to waste all that butter on some cookies that will be crumbled on a classroom floor. (The parties were cancelled along with school today, so I have 4 dozen cookies to get rid of before Wednesday. I will be really, really disappointed if our parochial school pushes back the Valentines'/Mardi Gras party they were supposed to have today to Ash Wednesday. Surely they won't, but my son said his teacher said they might).

**6**

There is a thin line between crunchy and cheap. How many “green” things have I done – cloth diapers for the first 3, hanging laundry on the line, keeping the thermostat low – because I want to conserve energy and matter, and how much have I done because I want to conserve money? Has my frugality cheated my kids out of some pleasures (for instance, new bikes instead of thrift store junkers)? Does it matter if thriftiness and guilt motivate me to reuse plastic bags and send reusable water bottles instead of juice boxes in the lunch boxes, more than a sense of stewardship?

**7**

A list for Lent:

Giving up:

Sugar

I'd say alcoholic drinks, but since my husband is gone, I don't drink them anyway.

Looking at blogs after 10 pm (when I'm more liable to get lulled into excessive clicking and commenting...)

 

Adding in:

Mass at least 3x a week

Going to bed by 11

Reading Peter Kreeft's Prayer for Beginners, Kathleen Norris' Amazing Grace, and I want to order something by Caryll Houselander.

Happy Memories

In honor of the Feast of Our Lady of Lourdes, some grottoes I have loved:

The grotto at the church where my husband and I were married, a pretty little English gothic church down the street from the Christian church where my grandfather was the preacher and our family attended before we became Catholic:

from the Church's webpage

The grotto at our alma mater, where my future husband and I said more than a few prayers.  He did not propose there, like a lot of other young men, for which I'm thankful.  I wanted him to propose one night when we were walking along the Seine in Paris near another Notre Dame, but at the time we were only 20. Which in retrospect maybe would've been just fine, and a much more picturesque engagement.

from flickr

Another Ondaatje book

I’m becoming a Michael Ondaatje fan. Anil’s Ghost is not as heartwrenching as The English Patient, but the prose is lyrical. It’s about a Sri Lankan forensic anthropologist who returns to her homeland after years in America in order to help identify victims of a civil war. She is assigned to work with an archaeologist, Sarath, who is distant and evasive, even as she grows more curious about him. The two of them are excavating an ancient burial site and discover a more recent skeleton among the old ones and begin to unravel the mystery of who this dead man might have been. In the process they become involved with Sarath’s brother, a doctor who works on sewing back together victims of the violence, and Ananda, a drunk who once was an artificer, the ritual painter of eyes on statues of Buddha, but now is broken by his wife’s disappearance. They recruit him to help reconstruct the face of the skeleton.


The characters are bound loosely together, each suffering some personal loss or alienation. But they begin to take interest in each other as they delve more deeply into the case of the skeleton, although he is one among thousands.  Unfamiliar with the politics of Sri Lanka, I puzzled over why they risked their own lives researching this death. But perhaps in hunting for his identity and cause of death, they hope to right in some way the losses they’ve suffered. They never do breach each other’s inner thoughts, each remains reserved, although Anil seems to fall slightly in love with all three men, or at least to care for them. Maybe their isolation is insurmountable because the political conflicts are still going on around them, or perhaps they still are nursing wounds that have incapacitated their ability to love. The resolution suggests the characters have made some connections despite their reservedness.


Although the search for the identity of the skeleton very slowly drives the plot, it is the gradual fleshing out of the characters, the revealing of scars left by war and by their relationships, that keeps the reader fascinated. Especially interesting were the juxtapositions: of the two brothers; of the exotic beauty of Sri Lanka with the brutality of the warfare – mass executions, beheadings, torture; of Anil’s experiences in America with those in Sri Lanka; of what is buried in the ancient historical sites and with what is buried in the contemporary hearts of these characters.


Some excerpts:

“And she realizes there is an emotional seriousness in this distant man. She needs to step backwards out of the maze they have innocently entered. He is content to be near her, the beauty of this ear and earring, then a comparison with the other side of her head, the way the moon is over them and also in water, the way the water holds the night lilies and their reflection. The false and true alternatives surround them.”

***

“Patterns of death always surrounded him [Sarath]. In his work he felt he was somehow the link between the mortality of flesh and bone and the immortality of an image on rock, or even, more strangely, its immortality as a result of faith or an idea. So the removal of a wise sixth-century head, the dropping off of arms and hands of rock as a result of the fatigue of centuries, existed alongside human fate. He would hold statues two thousand years old in his arms. Or place his hand against old, warm rock that had been cut into a human shape. He found comfort in seeing his dark flesh against it. This was his pleasure. Not conversation or the education of others or power, but simply to place his hadn against a gal vihara, a living stone whose temperature was dependent on the hour, whose look of porousness would change depending on rain or a quick twilight.”

***

“But this was a pieta between brothers. And all Gamini knew in his slowed, scrambled state was that this would be the end or it could be the beginning of a permanent conversation with Sarath. If he did not talk to him in this moment, admit himself, his brother would disappear from his life, So he was too, at this moment, within the contract of a pieta.”

***

I wanted to copy out the beautiful last paragraph, but I suppose that might cheat someone of the pleasure of discovering it.

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.

Would You Buy This Book?

Several times over the past decade, we have checked this book out of the library. It is recommended on a number of home school book lists, and I can see why: it has all in one book what the editors consider the best picture books of the 20th century. Most of their selections I agree with: We love the Tale of Little Babaji, Owen, Swimmy, Miss Nelson is Missing, Whose Mouse Are You, Caps for Sale, Petunia, the silly goose who thinks “He who owns books and loves them is wise” until she learns “it was not enough to carry wisdom under my wing. I must put it in my mind anad in my heart.”




But I’d leave out The Sneetches by Dr. Seuss. I just can’t get myself to like Dr. Seuss, except for the Grinch. We usually skip over a couple of the longer stories we don’t love: Stellaluna,The Cat Club, the D. W. story. And there’s no, say Professor Wormbog and the Search for the Zipperump-a-zoo by Mercer Mayer, which was a favorite of my family and my husband’s family, and now of my kids, since my mother-in-law kept their taped up and scribbled upon copy. (Which is a good thing because it is inexplicably out of print and expensive used - a whopping $227.95 in hardback at Amazon. Is it too expensive to print – oversized high quality paper in full color?)

Even so, the Treasury is a great buy for about $20.

Only I’ve never bought it. One, because it has been stocked by nearly every library we’ve patronized; two, because we already own maybe a third to a half of the stories in it; and three, because really, if you want to read a picture book, you want to look at the pictures. And this anthology has edited out or has shrunk these books’ illustrations. If you were a grandma with extremely limited shelf space for children’s books, or if you didn’t have a good library where you could check these books out in their entirety, or if you were a student of children’s literature and were using this as a text, I could justify buying it. And it’s handy to take along on a car trip.



But it just doesn’t measure up to the real thing.

Latest movies

Well, it is a good thing Lent is around the corner because I already have started bad habits since my husband left Monday afternoon: staying up until midnight reading blogs and then having a slice of sympathy chocolate cake before going to bed. And not just plain chocolate cake: chocolate cake with chocolate chips, chocolate pudding, and chocolate cream cheese frosting.




A movie not to watch when your husband is getting ready to leave for 7 months:

The Exorcism of Emily Rose.

But I can see why it received so many rave reviews.

A movie that is not so well put together but made good family watching:

Gifted Hands: The Ben Carson Story.

My seventh grader had to read the book this movie on which this movie was based for school. It’s the autobiography of an African-American pediatric neurologist who works his way from failing school to going to Yale and then to Johns Hopkins med school and then to doing hemispherectomies and separating conjoined twins. It has a very pro-life, pro-reading, pro- diligence, pro-faith message.

You'll just have to believe me

Today after school, the younger set and I walked the dog down to the public pier. Since the tide was out, they immediately jumped off the pier into the sand and walked among the cypress knees and swamp grass, or whatever it is, and found a bunch of trash, shells, and what I thought were raccoon tracks. Followed those awhile before it was time to head back home, without discovering where they ended.

Later, on the way home from soccer practice in the dark, I spied a furry animal rambling along the bayside of the road. Our friend the raccoon, I thought. But as we neared each other, I realized the little guy was a fox with a bit of mouse or crawdad between his jaws. Bear in mind that the lot where MDOT parks its boats is across the street, all lit up to scare away thieves, so I had a clear view, and it was not a cat nor a dog nor a coyote. He trotted right up to the grass next to our big car, buried his catch, and then stood and stared at us as curiously as we stared at him. Then he hopped over the pier, just like my five yr old had done earlier, and disappeared in the sea grass.  We'll look for his tracks - and his catch - tomorrow if we have time.

And of course, I didn't have the camera.