Happy Thanksgiving

Our thanksgiving feast for 12 has become a party for 24 in the last six hours. A couple days ago, I was feeling a little sorry that we weren’t a bigger crowd, since I bought a 28 lb turkey, but we found some friends to feed, and now my husband is afraid he won’t have leftovers.

And I’m sitting at the computer… The turkey is brining (an experiment – I hope no one gets e. coli), the rolls are rising, the flavors in the cranberry sauce and relish are marrying happily in the refrigerator. Pie crusts are chilling, and pie fillings are cooling. The house could use a swabbing down, but the kids are working on their rooms, I’ll do the potatoes, bathrooms, and floors in the morning, and that’s about all I’m going to concern myself with.

That’s the joy of living on this island – standards are relaxed. People are just happy to have somewhere to hang out together and eat.

Of course, tomorrow morning I may be pulling my hair out and doing the crazy dance when I realize how much I’ve forgotten to do…

For now, though, I’m taking a moment to recollect, to remind myself to be thankful, and to share one of my favorite poems which we read in class last night, even though a few days ago I was feeling sorry for myself for not being with extended family, for failing students, for having a son who just took a driving class, for calling someone I should know the wrong name, for having to pick new schools for kids who don’t want to move. There’s always something to get you down. 

But now I’m looking forward to a housefull to feed and to sitting on the porch drinking wine while the kids play streetball and to eating pumpkin pie and pumpkin cheesecake and to having plenty.

Love Calls Us to the Things of This World

BY RICHARD WILBUR

The eyes open to a cry of pulleys,

And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul   

Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple   

As false dawn.

                     Outside the open window   

The morning air is all awash with angels.

 .....

Yet, as the sun acknowledges

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

The soul descends once more in bitter love   

To accept the waking body, saying now

In a changed voice as the man yawns and rises,   

    “Bring them down from their ruddy gallows;

Let there be clean linen for the backs of thieves;   

Let lovers go fresh and sweet to be undone,   

And the heaviest nuns walk in a pure floating   

Of dark habits,

                      keeping their difficult balance.”

See The Poetry Foundation site for the whole poem

Always learning

Remember Able Baker Charlie? The little mouse in the Richard Scarry books who bakes up white, fluffy loaves bigger than himself? In one story Charlie accidentally bakes a babydoll who says “mama” inside a loaf so that all the critters think the loaf is talking.

I just learned that his name is a reference to the phonetic alphabet used by the US from 1941-1956.  The current words for “ABC” are “Alpha, Bravo, Charlie,” but before the international code was determined, the US used “Able, Baker, Charlie” when they wanted to transmit messages clearly. Were I older or a WWII history buff, I probably would have known this, but learning it even now gave me a brief burst of mimetic pleasure. Aha, Richard Scarry, I know what you are up to!

  Although the family didn’t go to Tinian this past weekend, we let our 12 year old son go with his friend and his friend’s dad.  The three of them toured the island and saw where the Enola Gay was loaded up with the nuclear warheads to drop on Japan. They also saw the four remaining runways from the second world war, which are named Able, Baker, Charlie and Delta. Although the island is small, during WWII it was the busiest airbase in the world. Thousands of fighter jets took off and landed from these four runways built by the Marines during the War in the Pacific, and 40,000 troops were living there at one time (now the population is about 3000). Our son regaled us for several hours with his new knowledge about Tinian, and I felt worse about not going. (Except that it turned out that the special fare was actually only a one-way fare, so our family would have had to spend about $1000 more than we thought.)

Richard Scarry was not one of the troops on Tinian. He served at the Allied Forces Headquarters in North Africa and Italy as an editor, writer and art director for the Morale Services Section. His career as author and illustrator of children’s books took off after the war.

It is always rewarding to find an allusion where you never saw one before. The world is so full of a number of things. 

The plane to Tinian from Guam. Seats for 8.

My son's view from his seat.

I think this is part of  one of the runways.

A spout creating by a wave crashing into a cave.

A nuclear bomb pit, now filled in.

The view from Suicide Cliff. The story is that Japanese propaganda led some
military and civilians to jump to their death rather than be captured and tortured
by Americans. Several thousand Japanese were killed in the Battle of Tinian. Only 314
were captured. Meanwhile, only 1500 or so Americans were killed. Are the numbers high for the
Japanese because of the suicides?

The boy took several photos of this sign, one of 2 gas stations on the island. I
think he was impressed with the cost.

The crust crumbles

It’s been a short week, full of activities. In addition to the usual sports and classwork, there’s been a fortieth birthday party (one of several this year?) and a baby born. I finally was able to pay forward the favors I’ve received as a parent of multiple children and babysit for kids whose mom was having a baby. 

Since we’ve rarely had family close enough to stay with our kids when a baby was born, we’ve had to call on neighbors and friends to watch our other kids while my husband and I ran off to the hospital.  (A by-product of military life and the general diaspora of modern life - you are always calling on new friends for favors that used to be the job of extended family.) Once my mom and dad were on their way home from vacation and were able to make it to our house before we had to go to the hospital. That one time my dad babysat while my mom, a labor and delivery nurse and the best birthing coach ever, and husband took me to the hospital. Providentially, that was the only time I had a baby in the middle of the night. The rest of them were born during the day while the kids happily played with friends. 

One other time, I was going to watch our next door neighbor’s toddler during the birth of her sister, but when the neighbors tried to call us and even banged on the door in the middle of the night, we never woke up.  I felt so bad about that moment that I went and bought a new phone for our bedside, even though up until then, I didn’t want a phone in our room. Now we continue the phone by the bed because we anticipate the call in the night that someone has died, although we’re down to one great grandmother.

So I was glad to be able to feed and put to bed someone else’s children, who all went down obediently, although they kept asking when their sister would be born.  We met this family because they home school also, and although they are not Catholic, this is baby number 5 for them.  Stepping into someone else's home is always an opportunity to compare.  These kids were all well behaved, and I envied their bookshelves and neat home school workspace, and their maps on the wall. Our efforts looked weak in comparison.  It was hard to turn off that inner voice of self-criticism.

As I tucked the kids in, I told them that their sister would probably be born by the time they woke up, but I anticipated spending the night on their couch. But this baby wasn’t waiting. I don’t think the parents were at the hospital more than an hour before she was born. So I got to sleep in my own bed.  And a new baby was welcomed lovingly into the world.

****

The other event of the week was a nonevent.  When I came home from class late Thursday night, my husband announced that we were taking a trip over the weekend.  Some of his work friends were going to Tinian, the next island over, famous for being the launching site of the Enola Gay, for a mountain bike race. The mayor of the island had arranged a half-price airfare to attract racers.  The biggest (only) hotel on the island, the Chinese-run casino, was offering a good rate, also. My husband wanted to take our whole family on a last minute three day vacation. 

I couldn’t get my mind around it.  On Friday I had to take a kid for a hearing test in the morning, then had to prepare for and host company for lunch, and had to shoo my company out to leave for a cross country meet.  The thought of packing in the evening for a trip to an island where I would be sitting at a casino with the kids while my husband struggled through a six hour or more bike race was not appealing. 

Anxiety set in. I told my husband in the morning that I didn’t want to go.  He tried to convince me. In the afternoon, panic started to set in. While we didn’t have a lot planned for the weekend, we still had soccer, had to serve at Church and to teach CCD, and had papers to grade.  I didn’t want to make time Friday to make calls for subs.  I had entertained visions of addressing a few items on a list of niggling things to do that keeps growing. We are talking about taking trips over Christmas and Spring break – we should be saving up and planning for those vacations.

I have no sense of adventure, no flair for spontaneity, I guess. But this didn’t sound like an adventure. It sounded like work. The younger kids didn’t want to go. I set my heels in. My husband made me call the airline to let them know we wouldn’t be making our last minute reservation, which I did with a sense of relief.

 ****

As so often happens, after a good night of sleep, I woke up feeling differently. Why am I so rarely at peace with my decisions? I saw clearly that I had been driven by selfishness. My resentment about going was all because my time was being threatened.  I didn’t want to deal with the work of packing and unpacking, with the rush to get caught up afterwards on everything that didn’t get done over the weekend.  I like staying home.

But the older boys were disappointed. My husband was disappointed.  And on Saturday morning, I could see what I couldn’t see Friday night: that the initial discomfort would have been forgotten in the rush of adrenalin from taking off on a tiny plane across the ocean.  The wonder of being in someplace new would have offset the irksomeness of extra laundry.  The memories would have been worth the money spent on tickets, hotel, and food.

So in my guilt over not going, I’ve been trying to be entertaining all weekend, although a dark cloud of regret keeps coloring my mood gray. We checked off some of the items on that to-do list: errands and yard work Saturday morning. My husband repaired a couple car problems, which gave him a sense of accomplishment. I made dinner for the family with the new baby, and we had friends over Saturday and Sunday night, one night a family whose dad was gone, and the other, a doctor friend who just returned from a deployment to the hospital in Afghanistan (another story). My husband and I went on a long bike ride and swim early Sunday before church. We fit in a dive Sunday afternoon with the older boys, and my husband and the older boys went diving again early Monday morning before going on their scout hike, which was the other event that would have been cancelled if we travelled.  

Our busy life has continued.  But all weekend, I’ve felt choked by the sense that I let the family down.  Had we gone to Tinian, we would have spent the weekend together as a family. Instead we’ve gone our various ways, one kid here, one kid there.  I’ve already failed at what I announced a couple weeks ago I was going to do: be led by faith.

This regret and guilt is just one more piece of evidence at how weak my faith is. I find it difficult to let go of my failures. Even though on Friday my reasons seemed strong enough for NOT going that I was nearly in tears at the thought of leaving, I can’t be confident in the purity of my intentions.

Lay it down, lay it down. 

My decision means nothing in light of eternity. If nothing else, the emotional turmoil of decision making and regretting has succeeded in chopping away at the crust of complacency, making me little yet again. 

How to Feel 19 Again:

Make an unscheduled stop after Mass downtown in the middle of the day.  See a handsome man in uniform walking out of restaurant straight toward you. Realize, with a flutter in your chest, that that man is your husband leaving a business lunch.  Get swept up in his arms for a big smooch as the cars rush by. 

Day of the Dead

In honor of All Soul's Day: photos of the souls in my prayers, my beloved grandparents. I realize that All Soul’s Day is a day for praying for the souls in purgatory, but I’d like to believe that my grandparents shortened their time there with all the love they gave us. I couldn’t imagine any better grandparents.  They were all involved in their grandchildren's lives. They were generous to us and interested in us, and their homes were like sanctuaries, especially in our turbulent teen years, when we viewed our parents as our adversaries.  

All Soul's Day is a day of celebration here in Guam. A newly arrived neighbor commented with incredulity about the man buying $250 of ugly silk flowers at the Exchange. The cemeteries are all cleaned up and decorated with these silk arrangements, which really aren’t especially lovely, except that they represent the fact that someone took the time to go to a gravesite and say a few prayers. We went to Mass in the chapel, not in the cemetery on base, where the chaplain said Mass in the morning. It is a small town graveyard that got incorporated into military property after WWII, but the base is open to descendents of the people buried there on this day, and our priest mentioned how these descendents bring their folding chairs and sit next to their mom or dad or auntie during the liturgy.  Some of them will go on over to another cemetery for another Mass with another family member.  Not surprisingly, this is a tradition that may die out; few of the people out decorating graves when I drove by one of the larger cemeteries looked younger than 50.  But I hope it survives. There is something comforting in the thought of spending a little time with the bodies of our dearly departed.  I have to credit my grandparents for taking us to cemeteries on Memorial Day to decorate with peonies the graves of my great-grandparents, at least the ones who died in town. 

I scanned some of these photos last spring after my grandmother’s funeral. I love the peek into my grandparents' lives as young people, full of vim and vigor, which is how my grandmother described her own grandmother. I miss knowing them as they were then. I wish my children could have known them as I knew them. And I hope that my children view their grandparents with the same unconditional, overflowing love I felt for these four people.