Les Bon Temps

So I just finished eating about half a bag of chocolate chips while browsing Facebook and sipping good coffee. Tonight the Husband and I will split a bottle of wine and eat some red meat (after the PTO meeting...). Maybe I should bite my nails some more and gossip to someone while I have the chance! Happy Mardi Gras, everyone!

Tomorrow, I'll try to make it through the 3-5 pm hours that seem the hardest to fast and look forward to going to bed early. I have a book of Lenten reflections on literature that I bought some time ago and put away.  I need to find it and put it on the back of the toilet so that I'll be sure to read it daily.  Maybe tomorrow I'll also start cleaning out some of the overstuffed closets around here to get rid of a few more things.

I'm really looking forward to Lent. Something different! A physical and spiritual cleanse! The hope for real change! Conversion! A Resurrection of faith ...

Every year I look forward to the liturgical moments of denial and penance, Lent and Advent. I really hope that my heart will become warmer, my faith stronger. I like having a practical list of things to do for spiritual fitness: Fast. Give. Pray.  

But the weakness of my faith is evident in my superficial sacrifices of sweets and drinks and social media.  I really intend to add in a weekly holy hour, or a holy fifteen minutes in the morning or at night.  Lenten fasts and acts of charity are the easy parts, the doable bullet point items. Action items.  As a doer, I appreciate the challenge of physical abstention and asceticism.  Denying myself to give to others? It happens every day around here. 

What is harder is the third practice, prayer. I need to clear out the overstuffed closet of my mind and spend some time being quiet. We've got the nightly rosary down, although often it is the nightly decade or nightly Our Father, Three Hail Mary's and a Glory Be on busy evenings.  We have our grace before meals and a quick blessing as the kids head out to school.  But I'm so easily tempted to forget to spend any time in prayers of listening or even of noticing.  Last summer at a family retreat, we were supposed to talk about times when we had heard God's voice. It was harder than I thought to put any experiences of God's presence into words. Sometimes I want to excuse myself from being comfortable with the suggestion to "Put yourself in the presence of God" because of my temperament, but I also realize my failure is a weakness rooted in selfishness, in an inability to stop thinking of myself.  Selfishness has to be set aside to experience the real moments of awareness of God: when we stop thinking about ourselves for a moment, and see and love another purely.  Moments of epiphany, recognition, outpourings of love, or admiration, of transcendence, like discovering a good poem or listening to good music or contemplating art aimed at this desire for transcendence, for seeing the essence of something here, the divine incarnated in front of us. Ideally, this blog would be an attempt to capture those moments for remembering. Isn't there some Latin or French word for paying attention that shares a root with a word for prayer? 

Still, I am grateful for the wisdom of the Church in giving us the communal prayers and liturgical rituals, routines and practices for the long seasons of ordinary time when our minds are full to the brim, and finding time for quiet listening or contemplation is difficult.

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The two or three weeks that have passed between the last time I sat down to write have been those kind of weeks. A couple weekends ago, my sister was supposed to visit but instead spent the weekend sick with pneumonia, and I spent the weekend working on school work and entertaining the kids.  My husband take over for an afternoon, so that I could spend some quiet hours at Starbucks grading papers.  The man next to me spent about an hour watching people, and then opened a conversation about the "bank holiday" on the following day (Presidents' Day). Turns out he was a British writer, John Karter if you are curious, on vacation. He writes sports biographies and relationship improvement books, and was interested to learn that I was at that moment working on my writing classes, but I tried to correct his impression that I teach "Writing." I try to teach students to document their sources, construct good thesis statements, and correct run-ons and fragments. But it was an interesting exchange nonetheless. 

I ended up spending the actual Presidents' Day trying to fix my hair. I tried to dye my grays to match the rest of my hair, but instead turned the rest of my hair red. Then I tried to remove that color with an over the counter chemical remover and re-dye it, but instead turned it orange. Big mistake! You would think that by now, in my 40s, I would know the perils of playing with hair dye.  Not so. I had to wear a scarf for a couple days until I could get to a hairdresser. Even making that appointment is an action fraught with anxiety. I spent several hours reading Yelp reviews before I made an appointment for the place that charged slightly less than $200 for a cut and color. Then I cancelled it the next morning and ran to the beauty school and had it done for $35.

Those are lost hours of life.  I know there are a lot of people who regularly spend upwards of $150 every six or eight weeks on their hair.  My husband has encouraged me to go ahead and spend money on my hair. But I just can't do it.  There are so many other ways I'd rather spend that money. And all the money in the world is not  going to make my hair long and beautiful, or give me the face to go with long beautiful hair. I'll just stick with my pony tail and let it turn gray.

Part of the hair emergency was heightened because we had a ball to attend on Friday. It was sponsored by our church, not a fundraiser, but for fellowship - and Mardi Gras, I suppose.  We went in on a table with some friends and danced and danced danced. The dinner was unremarkable, but the band was phenomenal. They played everything from swing to 70's disco, to 80's synth pop, to those 90's dance songs we used to jump up and down to in college, from Garth Brooks to Whitney Houston to Beyonce and whoever else is popular now.  My feet were throbbing at the end of the night. As an added perk we walked out with 2 centerpieces that became another Mardi Gras party decoration.  Added to the flowers from my son's art show that were left over, we had a festive looking house just in time for our big Mardi Gras party on Saturday night.

We spent a long full day getting ready for a Mardi Gras party on Saturday. Cleaning, cleaning, cleaning, throwing up streamers and balloons, making gumbo, spinach brownies, chocolate brownies, hip cakes (AKA butter bars), beans and rice, plain rice, dips for chips and dips for vegetables, and also frosting king cake that didn't quite turn out, sweetening tea, assembling muffaletta,  cutting vegetables, fruit, and cheese, setting up platters and tables. At one point, the Evite said 54 people were coming (kids included) - plus I had invited another 10 or so people by text or word of mouth, and ourselves. I started to worry about running out of forks on Friday, but didn't have time to get more because Friday was filled with a strategic planning meeting at the high school in the morning and then the fancy dinner dance for our church in the evening.

Only about 40 people ended up coming - and they all brought food and wine. I had run out to buy more wine at the last minute, but now we'll have to have an Easter party to drink up what is left. I'm planning to hide it down in the garage so we aren't tempted during Lent.

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I have done lots of reading lately - mainly as a form of mental escape.  Working my way through and loving a collection of Neil Gaiman essays. One of the early essays describes his indebtedness to Tolkien, Lewis, and Chesterton - the formative authors of his youth.  I also have a collection of Mary Oliver's observations checked out that I've been dipping into for nostalgic flashbacks to a childhood spent playing in the woods and around the ponds near our midwestern home. I also finally read the Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz.  I kept reading it, but didn't love it. As a portrait of a, well, loser, it reminded me of a Dominican Confederacy of Dunces, which was a book I couldn't stand. This one has more heart, and I can understand why it is beloved, but it won't make my list of favorites.

Meanwhile, I loved almost all of Sherman Alexie's The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian.  Heartwarming, insightful, funny. I wanted to shove it into the hands of my kids and say, "Here, read this and get an idea of how other people deal with the hardships of life. Read and see how much you have in common with a poor Native American teenager, even though you are a middle class white teenager - and see how lucky you are and think this kid the next time you see someone who seems a little lonely walking around the halls of high school."  BUT, there's a chapter about how he sneaks porn magazines and masturbates in the bathroom. WHY? I know, I know, this little confession is supposed to humanize the kid and help others empathize and maybe make some kids think they aren't alone. But why, really? The book is good enough without that little confession. I don't want sneaking in the bathroom to look at porn to be normalized, even if that's what adolescent boys have been doing for generations. This book is on a number of reading lists and if the kids came across it and read it, I would hope that they would focus on the good parts, but it's too weird for your mom to give you a book with that scene in it.

Which reminds me, my ninth grader is going through the health curriculum on reproduction right now. We've had some moderately good conversations, but now is when I miss being a part of a community where other families are around who have more than two or three kids. That's what I want normalized: big, happy families who are too busy enjoying each others' company to worry about interior decorating and fancy cars or hairdresser and aesthetician appointments. We haven't quite found that crowd here. And that's why when my husband mentions that we might be able to stay here longer, I weigh the difficulties of moving with the pleasures of perhaps finding a community of like-minded families... but I also recognize that the ease of imagining that community is not as easy as actually finding it.

Time to postpone that decision - perhaps in Lent I will pray that God's voice will speak clearly about what to do - and eat some chocolate chip cookies. My daughter has been busy baking while I type!

Gymnast

Fancy hair - on a sunny hike. 

Cold hike

This was another dinner out to a fundraiser before dying my hair. Why did I bother? 

Ball dress - wearing my great-great aunt's lace dress. Had to remake the underslip and reinforce the seams before heading out to cut a rug... can you tell my hair is darker? 

Mardi Gras party girl