And in other news. . .

On the anniversary of 9/11 last week. the campus where I am teaching now had small flags set up in the quad to memorialize those who had lost their lives. Because this is an evangelical Christian school, the campus ministry team emailed some prayers to be read in class. I am thrilled to begin class in prayer - "Come, Holy Spirit," being the one I have used, not sure of the theology of the Holy Spirit for my students, but going with it.  We had a moment of silence, and I read the prayer, and then asked who remembered 9/11.  Only 3 of 16 raised their hands - two were seniors, so they were toddlers when it occurred, and one was a nontraditional student who spent time in the Marines before returning to school. He was 11 in 2001. They shared their stories of what they could recall. One of the seniors remembered his dad packing up his family from southern Mexico to come to America because he still had a visa and was afraid the borders would be closed in response to the attacks.  They never went back to Mexico.  The guy who was 11 watched the news in his middle school classroom - and saw the people jumping from buildings on TV in school.  The third girl with memories of the event remembers it as a movie - something not quite real. To the rest of the students, this event is a part of recent history, much the way I remember Jimmy Carter being president and lining up for gas.

My own memories of 9/11 I  think I have shared: That morning I was, as usual, not paying attention to news until my mother-in-law called me. At the time we kept our TV in a closet because our tiny house in the northern suburbs of Chicago had no space. But I pulled it out and watched TV as much as I could with three toddlers the rest of the day.  Disbelief was my primary emotion.

We have been talked about defining moments of history in class - the fall of Rome, the shift from an earth-centric to a heliocentric understanding of the solar system, the revolutions of the 18th century, including the revolutionary ideas of Lamarck and Darwin. 9/11 surely marks a shift in worldview. Terrorism, domestic and international, has become a defining fear; has increasing secularism been a response?   These students of mine have never known a time when America was not involved in the middle east as a military presence. What a change in the military community 9/11 created.  Day to day life may be relatively little changed for most people, but the inconveniences of security checks, the very real disruptions of IAs, PTSD and deployments have restructured this generation's experience of military service. I wonder if it is just that I am more aware of suicide since 9/11, or if it continues to rise because of the trauma of that event and the corresponding reactions to it.

What will be the next defining event? The church is obviously going through a period of disruption. What should have been ended half a generation ago is still festering. A Catholic friend of mine, also in a military family, suggested that perhaps the Church needs to follow the example of the military. When mistakes are made, the commanding officer has to take responsibility at some point.  Some early retirements, if not public confessions and offers of restitution, should be made. I don't know how far up the canker reaches, but it must be very firmly rooted if it is still erupting so widely.

But it makes me tired to think of that, and many other concerns are more immediate.

For instance, how to teach about symbolism. Apropos of it all we read Blake's "Sick Rose" in class Tuesday - the worm imagery perhaps could represent this scandal in the Church, the sickness in our culture, in our love affairs, etc., etc . . .

O Rose thou art sick. 

The invisible worm, 

That flies in the night 

In the howling storm: 

Has found out thy bed 

Of crimson joy: 

And his dark secret love 

Does thy life destroy.

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For a few days I was spun up because our priest had a question and answer session during Mass about the scandals. I heard about it beforehand and expected the worst. I even went so far to send him an email to see if the rumor was true and to express my hope that the Mass wouldn't be interrupted by angry people venting. In a gesture of attention, he called me to confirm the rumor, to say that the idea had come to him in prayer, and to mention that there is a tradition of questions and answers during Mass (cf school masses). The call just made me sad.  I both was glad and regretted that we were out of town for that Mass.

Happily, my fears of the worst were unrealized, and it sounds like most people appreciated the opportunity to ask questions. They also appreciated our pastor's openness about the issue.  Perhaps the lesson for me is that I shouldn't expect people to behave badly.  I'm afraid I do tend to expect people to behave worse than they usually do in reality. Thus, I am usually happily surprised, instead of disappointed by their behavior. And perhaps that's why I don't feel tempted to leave the church. Priests and bishops, kings and presidents, and all other types of human beings have been acting badly since the beginning of time.  The hypocrisy of the leadership burns worse than anything. It is easy to imagine that Hell exists for this reason.  Who is Lucifer eating in the lowest ring of The Inferno? Judas, Brutus, and Cassius, backstabbers all.

At any rate, our parish also had a holy hour on Friday evening that week. We went, released the kids after 20 minutes of silence to go play on the playground across the street, where the sounds of toddlers and middle schoolers created a sound track for the time of prayer.  I wish more people would have come to share in the /silent/ hour of reflection. This is why our pastor wanted to meet the people at Mass instead of planning another event. Most people just don't come to church other than on Sunday morning.  They want to talk, not sit in silence and pray.

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Speaking of hypocrisy, my freshman son has to read Catcher in the Rye this year.  Anthem of adolescent discontent.  Back to school night was this week. I almost didn't go but decided to catch up with what the freshman needs to keep on top of. I really wanted to go to my junior daughter's teacher's classes, especially her English teacher, because I like him, even though I don't love all the books he assigns (Candide the primary offense). Despite my wish that the kids were at a Catholic school, I have to admit I like their teachers - pretty much every one of them, excepting a PE teacher. I loved the previous principal who left to go be principal at an elementary school, which will free her to spend more time with her three young daughters. She was an English major. I miss seeing her around campus - I felt we connected, even if she made everyone feel that way.  After living in the community less than a month, I felt like she knew our name and our high school kids. After living here for three years, I'm not sure the new principal, formerly the vice principal here, has any recognition of us or our kids.

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Meanwhile, I thought my students would appreciate another anthem of youthful ideals, Walden, but most of them seemed to think Thoreau was preachy and unrealistic, which he is, but still. They also thought the book was boring - accounts of how little can be spent on nails or how deep and wide Walden pond is don't interest them. I can see their point, but I also am a bit disappointed in how few of them seem inspired by his call to freedom from stuff.  Then again, I am inspired but unable to detach.  I understand the liberating effects of his minimalist existence, the joy of traveling lightly through the world, but still I hang on to clothes from 1997 and have trouble letting go of books. Our most recent book club book was about decluttering. It claimed to be about making room for God, but I found the spiritual element to be lacking. Thoreau is more convincing in his linking detachment to freedom, but his is more an Eastern viewpoint; he isn't advocating for spending more time in prayer. The book club book might have been more memorable if it had given more attention to the idea that we briefly discussed after reading Dorothy Day's The Long Loneliness. This is the idea that if we own more than we need we are taking from our less fortunate brothers and sisters in Christ.  The author really didn't really delve into the sins that lead to clutter - greed, covetousness, vanity, selfishness, a lack of trust in God's providence, etc, etc. Combining these two ideas - generosity and overcoming sinfulness in relation to stuff might be more convicting.

Not laboring

These photos are out of date, but I have been sorting through photos and trying to get rid of "digital clutter" because our hard drive is full, so I thought I would share some. 

Labor Day weekend we traveled up to our old stomping grounds in Ventura to meet up with my husband's brother and his family. He has a friend who has a boat, a really nice boat, who was going out to Santa Rosa Island for the day, so we got to ride along. The boat had two bedrooms, two bathrooms, and a kitchen - the kind of boat you could live on.  Many of the boats docked near this one were people's homes, at least temporarily. The weekend gave us a little sneak peek into another subculture that we don't get to see very often: the life of luxury boat people. 

The ride to the island took just over an hour. The ocean was fairly calm, but we didn't see any dolphins or other large marine mammals, aside from sea lions. A pod of large flying fish entertained us on the way home. Once we reached the island, the boat owner anchored in a cove and preceded to get out the boat toys: A giant floating mat (the lilypad), kayaks, paddle boards, snorkel gear, the dinghy. The rest of the afternoon we played in the cove. I don't have many photos of the time in the cove. I was either in the water or reading a book in the sun, so the day wasn't well documented.  We had brought our wetsuits and snorkels and masks. With my wetsuit, I was warm enough in the water to stay in for a while. The four-year-old snorkeled around with a lifejacket on, too. Not a lot of color and variety, like in the coral reefs around Guam, but we did see some bright orange Garibaldis, a number of bat rays, and lots of colorful urchins and kelp. Lots of little fish that I don't recognize also, the nameless gray fish that are everywhere. 

The best part of the day was the slowness of time. We had no schedule, nothing to do but enjoy this moment and explore this spot. We kayaked to the island's rocky shore, but there wasn't really a beach, nor was there easy access up the cliffs surrounding the cove to hike inland. The point was to be on the water anyway.  I tested my fears by kayaking into small sea caves, imagining the fate of that soccer team in Thailand the whole time. Then I paddled out of the cove around the edge of the island into the bigger waves of the ocean. For quite some time I paddled along the coast before beginning to think about paddling back against the current. The current actually wasn't that strong, but the unknown was intimidating enough to make me turn around. I did challenge myself to take the kayak through a small natural bridge, even as I envisioned a wave pushing the little boat into the rock wall and scraping all the skin off my knuckles.  I find myself more fearful as I get older; is this because I have heard more tales of death and disaster or because my physical abilities are fading along with my eyesight and hair color (actually that is artificially bright right now, to my frustration.) ?

At one end of the cove there was a large rock island where a whole troop of sea lions were playing. They slid off the rocks into the water, played in the waves, barked at each other, circling around in their games before ooching back up the rock to rest in the sun. That's mostly what our kids did, too. They jumped in and out of the water, off the lily pad and off the decks and roof of the boat, and explored the sea caves in kayaks. They ate and rested in the sun to warm themselves like the glistening, lazy sea lions before sliding back into the water to play some more.

When it was time to return, we felt glutted with sun and salt, and memories of a day of freedom and energy. We planned to sit around the fire that night back at the cousin's house, but instead we all fell asleep early while the kids watched Moana, dreaming of island life. 

Morning light

The littlest one still creeps into bed with us sometimes in the middle of the night. I wake up and she is there, close to my face, breathing faintly from half-open lips, her nose dotted with freckles, her round cheeks smooth as cream. One morning, she opened her eyes and caught me studying her.  She took my face in her pudgy hands, and said, "Mommy I don't want you to get old."

Perhaps she recognizes that her mom is more worn out than other children's moms. I remember being proud that my mom was young and beautiful, and I pitied the other kids whose moms were shapeless and gray. Now my meanness is coming back to haunt me.  Poor child. She will never have a young and pretty mom.  The young moms at our park wear yoga pants and tank tops, their biceps defined, their curves firm, their skin tan. They have long shiny hair and faces unmarked yet by years and cares. Little girls are attentive to what is pretty and sparkly. I must seem more like the grandmas and nannies at the park in their orthotic sandals than these lithe, athletic young moms.

Maybe I am just a little bit frightening in the early morning sun, with my wrinkles deeply creased, dyed roots and grays showing in my messy hair. When her older siblings were small, I was young. She has this strange privilege of not having to share me very much with other children. My bed in the mornings was like a nest of mouselings rolling about when her oldest sibling was her age.

Perhaps she is just recognizing that these mornings when we nestle under the covers a few extra minutes before getting up, the sweetest time of day, won't last. Her older siblings don't climb into bed with mom and dad. In the past few weeks, many things have changed; her brothers left for college, the other kids went back to school, she started a little preschool program, I have been distracted, busy. I am not young and fun and carefree. She asks me often, "Why are you making that face, Mommy?" I will then realize I am squinting or grimacing or chewing on my cheek.

What lesson this? Only that time passes. I have been revisiting the poetry and literature of my college years, revisiting places, revisiting old photos and old books looking for something. As I prepare for teaching a new class, I realize how long ago it was when I first encountered Keats encountering Chapman's Homer.  The son who is newly away at college has been discovering the pleasure of reading Homer with a group of students who are interested in talking about it. Each time I talk to him he has a different idea for a major, or he has just returned from some study session. He is thinking about trying out the Great Books program that was my major.  Delighted that he is relishing his college experience, while also missing his chatter around here. Trying to remember 18 years ago when it was his tiny face smiling at me during that sweetest time of the day.