You starvelling, you eel-skin, you dried neat's-tongue, you bull's-pizzle, you stock-fish--O for breath to utter what is like thee!-you tailor's-yard, you sheath, you bow-case, you vile standing tuck!
There's nothing on today's pages anyway, and I can't wait any longer. July's calendar has work days (at the library, which is, in fact, the best place in the whole world to "work" out there in the big wide world), and school days, and birthdays, and vacation days on it. And at the top, a gorgeously bright picture of the Stone Mad Gallery in County Cork, Ireland. July, July, July ... I do love July.
It's like some kind of compulsion for them. They get quite fierce sometimes - they simply must warn me of impending failures, or show me the dangers I'm evidently too silly to see, or testify earnestly to me of the pain and difficulty that awaits me.
And the kid in this blog entry's title? That would be our youngest. We had a very interesting conversation yesterday, this kid and I. This is the only kid of our three kids who got old enough before learning to read to know that he didn't know how. The other two weren't ever really aware that they didn't know how to read - to them, it seemed like everything else in their worlds. New stuff happened all the time. Reading was just one more new thing.
I would be fully qualified to do so by the time this kid learned to read because he wasn't skipping or hurrying through any of the steps. Every excruciatingly minuscule element of human written, spoken, and readable language was obvious in this process thirteen (fourteen? fifteen?) years ago.
You Are Chopsticks |
 People see you as exotic, unusual, and even a bit intimidating. You are a difficult person to figure out. In truth, you try to live a very simple life. But most people are too frenzied to recognize the beauty of your simplicity. |
For a short season in the late summer and early fall, most of the smaller streams and drips dry up, but for most of the year, the edges of the Gorge and the edges of the highway, and the edges of everything form little waterfalls and huge crashing, falling courses, and streams and falling water are everywhere.
But this is probably a good thing in my case. This tiny nibble is sending me into ecstasies of happy rapture. The real thing would probably cause me to lose consciousness!
Twenty-five years ago, I got married nine days after my birthday - so now the whole first half of the month is Celebration Season. We've never done anything flamboyant. We're more about the quiet dinners and homemade cakes and personal, private gifts. We vacation for a little while if we can. But still. Even for all the quietude of it, it's ours. And the anticipation I feel shimmering in the air, the knowledge that there will be something sweet and just for me around the next corner ... it's in my bones.
Even if a person weren't using it for school, it would be a useful thing to do.
Or, maybe you learned that you really deeply abhor sleeping in a sleeping bag, slapping mosquitoes, and eating in a cafeteria -- so ... um ... what would that be, I wonder? Values Clarification maybe?LRN150
Pre-assignment
June 25, 2008
High school graduation seemed to me like the gift of a toolbox, and the project was to chisel and sculpt a life of my own. So, the first thing I did was chip off my place in my peer group by taking my dad’s advice to work for a year and figure out what I really wanted to do. I stayed home while “everyone” else went away to college.
My first job was as a temporary worker for the phone company, filling out grid sheets for the data entry people. There was an application, an interview, a typing test, and then a job, complete with a commute on the city bus and clocking in at the start of the work day. I was fascinated by things like office dynamics, the way promotions were supposed to work and the way they actually worked, and the amused irritation in a co-worker’s voice when she told me I “had to” take my breaks because of the union’s rules.
Next, I worked as a checker at a grocery store during a strike. This was not a job I wanted to keep – it wasn’t interesting, and worse than that, I hadn’t chosen it for myself. I got that second job because my dad knew the store manager.
So, after the strike ended, I got my own job. I took the bus to
That job was enjoyable, but it ended when my dad decided I needed to make more money than I could as a retail clerk. I, who had never even balanced my own checkbook, got my license as a real estate agent. I was not a success.
By the next fall, I began attending a small college in
I nearly flunked a couple of courses in my freshman year, and so learned first-hand that learning is inextricably linked to emotional stability. I also began to see myself through the eyes of people who knew nothing of my girlhood, and so figured out that I was smarter than I’d thought, mentally tougher than I’d thought, and braver than I’d thought. I auditioned for and got into the advanced choir, and accompanied voice lessons as a pianist. I took part in student leadership, performed recitations at all-school programs, and started to feel my natural abilities to inspire groups of people. During my second year, my home church splintered, and I learned then that such episodes are never really about things as esoteric as “doctrine.” It was then that I began to see the similarities instead of only the differences in religious expressions, and I began to study these things for myself.
After graduation, in July of 1983, I got married. During that first summer together as a married couple, we were the camp counselors for the first through sixth graders of the church’s Family Camp. We lived with, played with, ate with, and taught those kids all week, and went home exhausted. But we hadn’t run out of ideas or enthusiasm for a minute of the camp.
For the next two years, we worked in my dad’s neighborhood coffee store, and I worked as a substitute teacher while my husband took Greek at a local seminary. Our first child was born in September of 1984, at the
In the fall of 1985, we moved to southern
After seminary, I gave birth to our third child, and we moved to
In the summer of 1995, we moved permanently to my husband’s family home in
My personal studies have taken a bent toward an understanding and working knowledge of ancient medical and health traditions, and I have continued to be fascinated by human and societal development, especially in the arenas of family, education, and religion. In my more public life, I am now a past master at organizing programs and gatherings for adults, as well as classes and programs of all kinds for all ages of children.
Because I have had a husband in grad school, have educated my own kids, and have been a personal resource for several adult friends who have been students, I have done a fair amount of research for other people, as well as tutoring, coaching, proofreading and word processing. Along the way, my husband and I also acquired a publishing company, in which we write, print, bind, and sell religious education materials. For this and for other things, I do design and copy work in various kinds of publications.
Little by little, chip by chip, my life has taken shape. Compliance for the sake of compliance or for the sake of rewards has been chipped away. This sculpture of mine is far from finished. Apparently, the materials I work with are: a conscious practice of a traditional religion; service to other people where occasional need arises, as well as in private and classroom teaching; and a personal interest in writing, reading, research, natural medicine and health, human development, group dynamics, graphic design, music, and arts and crafts. It is, I think, enough to be going on with.
Sean Sears of Chicopee, Mass. threw the winning rock to defeat Julie Crossley of Anderson, Ind., in the final match of the 2008 Bud Light/U.S.A. Rock Paper Scissors League Championship in Las Vegas on Sunday, June 22, 2008.
Sears will get $50,000 and will represent the USA in the first ever international competition at the Summer Olympics in Beijing, China.
(click on the picture for the full article)
It took me a second to figure out what it is -- can you tell? It's a library. Those are stacks above, and stacks below, and the wide space down the middle, under the vault. Ahhh....
Judging by the bass vibrations now permeating the walls and floors, the elder bearded young giant is conscious for the day. Must've thought of something while he was sleeping. I've never heard that particular "riff" before. (Is that series of notes technically called a riff?)Once upon a time a house mouse met a country mouse on the outskirts of a wood. The country mouse was sitting under a hazel thicket plucking nuts.
"Busy harvesting, I see," said the house mouse. "Who would think of our meeting in this out-of-the-way part of the world?"
"Just so," said the country mouse.
"You are gathering nuts for your winter store?" asked the house mouse.
"I am obliged to do so if we intend having anything to live upon during the winter," said the country mouse.
"The husk is big and the nut full this year, enough to satisfy any hungry body," said the house mouse.
"Yes, you are right there," said the country mouse. And then she related how well she lived and how comfortable she was at home.
The house mouse maintained that she was the better off, but the country mouse said that nowhere could one be so well off as in the woods and hills. The house mouse, however, declared she was best off. And as they could not agree on this point they promised to visit one another at Christmas, then they could see for themselves which was really the most comfortable.
The first visit was to be paid by the house mouse.
Now, although the country mouse had moved down form the mountains for the winter, the road was long and tiring, and one had to travel up hill and down dale. The snow lay thick and deep, so the house mouse found it hard work to get on, and she became both tired and hungry before she reached the end of her journey.
"How nice it will be to get some food," she thought.
The country mouse had scraped together the best she had. There were nut kernels, polypoly and other sorts of roots, and many other good things which grow in woods and fields. She kept it all in a hole far under the ground, so the frost could not reach it, and close by was a running spring, open all the winter, so she could drink as much water as she liked. There was an abundance of all she had, and they ate both well and heartily. But the house mouse thought it was very poor fare indeed.
"One can, of course, keep body and soul together on this," said she, "but I don't think much of it. Now you must be good enough to visit me and taste what we have."
Yes, that she would, and before long she set out. 
The house mouse had gathered together all the scraps from the Christmas fare which the woman of the house had dropped on the floor during the holidays -- bits of cheese, butter and tallow ends, cake crumbs, pastry, and many other good things. In the dish under the ale tap she had drink enough. In fact, the place was full of all kinds of dainties.
They ate and fared well. The country mouse seemed never to have had enough. She had never tasted such delicacies. But then she became thirsty, for she found the food both strong and rich, and now she wanted something to drink.
"We haven't far to go for the beer we shall drink," said the house mouse, and jumped upon the edge of the dish and drank until she was no longer thirsty. She did not drink too much, for she knew the Christmas beer was strong. The country mouse, however, thought the beer a splendid drink. She had never tasted anything but water, so she took one sip after another, but as she could not stand strong drink she became tipsy before she left the dish.
The drink got into her head and down into her toes, and she began running and jumping about from one beer barrel to the other, and to dance and tumble about on the shelves among the cups and mugs. She squeaked and screeched as if she were both drunk and mad. About her being drunk there was very little doubt.
"You must not carry on as if you had just come from the backwoods and make such a row and noise," said the house mouse. "The master of the house is a bailiff, and he is very strict indeed," she added.
The country mouse said she didn't care either for bailiffs or beggars. But the cat sat at the top of the cellar steps, lying in wait, and heard all the chatter and noise. When the woman of the house went down to draw some beer and lifted the trapdoor, the cat slipped by into the cellar and struck its claws into the country mouse. Then there was quite another sort of dance.
The house mouse slid back into her hole and sat in safety looking on, while the country mouse suddenly became sober, when she felt the claws of the cat in her back.
"Oh, my dear bailiff, oh dearest bailiff, be merciful and spare my life, and I will tell you a fairy tale," she said.
"Well, go on," said the cat.
"Once upon a time there were two little mice," said the country mouse, squeaking slowly and pitifully, for she wanted to make the story last as long as she could.
"Then they were not lonely," said the cat dryly and curtly.
"And they had a steak which they were going to fry."
"Then they could not starve," said the cat.
"And they put it out on the roof to cool," said the country mouse.
"Then they did not burn themselves," said the cat.
"But there came a fox and a crow and ate it all up," said the country mouse.
"Then I'll eat you," said the cat.
But just at that moment the woman shut the trapdoor with a slam, which so startled the cat that she let go her hold of the mouse. One bound and the country mouse found herself in the hole with the house mouse. From there a passage led out into the snow, and you may be sure the country mouse did not wait long before she set out homeward.
"And this is what you call living well and being best off," she said to the house mouse. "Heaven preserve me from having such a fine place and such a master! Why I only just got away with my life!"
(Clever Norwegians live in the country, apparently.)
Two Slices of Pizza
Twenty years ago 500 calories
Today 850 calories
Those extra 350 calories, if eaten a two times a month, would put on two extra pounds a year, or forty pounds in the next two decades.
Cup of Coffee
Twenty years ago
8 ounces Coffee with milk and sugar 45 calories
Today
16 ounces Grande café mocha with whip, 2% milk 330 calories
Break a vase,
and the love that reassembles the fragments
is stronger than that love
which took its symmetry for granted
when it was whole.
There's a whiff of the lynch mob or the lemming migration about any overlarge concentration of like-thinking individuals, no matter how virtuous their cause.
I've started a new book. It's a novel. I rarely start new novels these days. It feels like meeting new people, and like Bertie Wooster and education, I usually feel that "I was full up years ago." I am attached already. I am spoken for. New authors with new characters are asking me to take new people into my heart. It's a big decision.I shivered on the stairs, yawned and stretched. Returning to myself, I found that my thoughts had been rearranged in my absence.
And the woman herself? The author? She says that for many years she felt unable to write fiction at all. "I thought authors had to be orphans, or have a drug problem, or be out having lots of sex – and none of those things were me! Once I realized that the only difference between everyone else and writers is that they write, I felt I had cracked it."
And I remember the fishing. More accurately, I remember them fishing. Their fishing. The other people. Family and friends and a boat I didn't get into. We didn't get into. In order to keep an eye out for other people, we stayed where we could see them, but we headed into the woods, up the slope, and well-camouflaged in the underbrush. And we didn't invite any other people to come with us.It is unclear why this usage provokes such a strong response, but it cannot be because of novelty. Impact has been used as a verb since 1601, when it meant "to fix or pack in," and its modern, figurative use dates from 1935. It may be that its frequent appearance in the jargon-riddled remarks of politicians, military officials, and financial analysts continues to make people suspicious. Nevertheless, the verbal use of impact has become so common in the working language of corporations and institutions that many speakers have begun to regard it as standard. It seems likely, then, that the verb will eventually become as unobjectionable as contact is now, since it will no longer betray any particular pretentiousness on the part of those who use it.But ... impactful? Cut that out! That is NOT a word!
Somewhere out in the darkness, a phoenix was singing in a way Harry had never heard before: a stricken lament of terrible beauty. And Harry felt, as he had felt about phoenix song before, that the music was inside him, not without: It was his own grief turned magically to song that echoed across the grounds and through the castle windows.(J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince)
On Saturday, I didn't do much. I tried to breathe properly, and remembered hearing that people who are in pain or in fear don't do that. They don't breathe deeply enough because they are trying to avoid feeling the pain or the fear. But shallow breathing will weaken a person. So I tried to remember to breathe deeply - and tried not to become completely unglued. I researched. I imagined scenarios. I looked over the things I've recently found about bio-identical hormones. I tried to breathe. "Thy will be done," and "into Thy hands," over and over and over. Experience has taught me to be quiet and to trust. It's not usually quite so nerve-wracking, but I'm not a beginner at it either. Saturday felt like a tightrope walk. By the end of that day, I was tired, but I was okay.
I don't have cancer. I do have some very good friends who waited with me to find that out. They didn't need to say anything - they just waited with me. And I have a husband to whom everything happens that happens to me. And today I realized, I also have a vessel for that kind of love. We have a vessel - we humans do, I mean. Music is Love's vessel. Don't you think so?
Don't do it! Danger, Will Robinson! Danger! Don't go over there! You'll be sorry. Listen to me.
And good luck with the whole "reasoning" and "logic" and "current situation" lines of conversation.)
So, although you might be "qualified" for the educational loans anyone can get, you do not have access to any of the grants. The "degree" you've got disqualifies you as a person going for your first degree - because you have one already - the schools don't think you do, but you do - according to the FAFSA form. You didn't use any of the federal student money the first time around (because the places without transferable credits don't "accept" such tainted money, and it isn't offered to them), and you won't get any the next time either. Take an unaccredited degree, and that's the one you get.
Anyone else remember the ads? In the somewhat self-satisfied, still also somewhat defensive, waning-Women's-Lib days of the late 70's, back before we were all convinced that the fact of second-hand smoke existing somewhere in the universe would be the death of us all, there were these Virginia Slims ads. (What I remember most about this ad campaign was the billboard on the way home from school - and how amazed I was that it could still be there, day after day, with my mother aiming such ... uh ... hostile "vibes" at it every time we drove by.)
Get married and have babies. It lived in the same place in my brain as the romantic kiss, which always faded safely to black before "the next thing" could seriously threaten its romantic haze. (I know - hard to believe anyone ever grew up that clueless. But I did.)
He has never wavered from his position that women, even wives and mothers - perhaps especially wives and mothers - are people in their own rights, and ought to have interests and pursuits of their own, and ought to use their talents and skills in as many ways as it pleases them to do so. He EVEN thought they could be "employed outside the home" without giving up their stake in the family! What can I say? The dude's crazy, all right? He has introduced me to Monty Python, and to foreign films of all languages and genres, and ... well ... I gotta say it. He even introduced me to wine drinking. He's a madman, I tell you.
("for a break"), or England Under the Norman and Angevin Kings, by Bartlett, or The Siege of Mecca:The forgotten uprising in Islam's holiest shrine and the birth of Al Qaeda, by Yaroslav Trofimov. Stuff like that. The man always has his hands on a little light, bedtime reading right before he falls asleep - while I'm all curled up with weightier matters. Harry Potter - or the Ya-Ya Sisterhood. The really intellectually challenging things.
He has been reading the books I have used for pressing flowers. Stuff comes on the news, and he (joined now by our son) launches into the historical precedent or the logical fallacies, and I listen while I do the day's Sudoku out of the newspaper.
when I was a teenager, I got a journal for my birthday. When I was a girl, I did a lot of reading, and I did a lot of writing.
but I've ended up with M. Night Shyamalan.
It's not terrible. Once you realize that the dead people are just trying to tell you something important, the village is an attempt to stay in an enclosure and comes with risks of its own, and the lady in the water could use a little help, it can even be a deeply satisfying and ultimately beautiful life ... but it takes some getting used to.
Then, after you adjust to the light and the wind and the altitude, you can start to see a few details. You can turn around, and you can see where you once were. For me, it's a path strewn with all kinds of beautiful, orderly, sweet, dear Rockwell painting type things. I didn't have a childhood of neglect, so I was not thirsty when I crossed that landscape. I didn't have a young adulthood of anger or pain, so I had the wonderful freedom to choose a climbing partner who would both challenge and comfort me. The stuff back there is mostly very good. And I have the good sense now to be grateful.
Behind me now are a thousand moments, pressed forever into the universe because they happened to me. Three babies in just under four years, for instance. That happened. With that, came the lesson that being happy and healthy is not the same thing as not being tired. 
Tired and happy can happen at the same time. Healthy and exhausted coexist nicely when you're pregnant and have toddlers. (Note the baggy eyes a couple of days before that kid was born. And note that the shawl-covered cedar chest is at a ninety degree angle from the couch - kid able to be only on one side, blocked from the open front door, if I remember right.)
Really surprising Christmases happened. Really scary nights with really ill children happened. Deeply shattering anger between the couple who never fights - that happened too. Life is like that. There's no such thing as perpetual spring.
The "gor baby" (that's toddler for "girl baby") doesn't wear pink ruffles anymore - she wears "BDU's" and boots most of the time. But she scoffs at calling the other options "civilian clothes" - instead, she says, "civilian clothes - or, as I call them, clothes." Somehow I don't think we've got a career military person here.
But you could knock us over with a feather - or ... make that a fuzz! The younger, less curly bearded young giant used to be genuinely terrified of them - of fuzzes. His siblings could chase him around with just their fingers pinched together, claiming to have a fuzz they didn't even have, and the poor child was tortured with anxiety! We never did figure out what made wuzzes so terrifying, but he hated them. And he hated any physical pain of any kind, and never, never, never had to learn twice that something might hurt. So ... what's he done with his life? Or ... more specifically, his arm? I present, The Artist Formerly Frightened of Fuzzes.
He didn't just endure the pain of learning to play - and then the discipline of learning to play well - he's also got these other indicators that pain isn't really his worst thing anymore. Sloppy work or disrespect for the honor in any creative effort ... yeah, that'll set him off. But pain? Meh. Not so's you'd notice.
We've changed from being the kids ourselves, to being the grownups with the babies and the grandparents held simultaneously in our lives - for a little while, anyway. We've changed churches, changed addresses, changed income levels, and changed china patterns. All that change seems to have brought a few unexpected (unexpected by me, anyway) adults into the world, and for better or worse, it's a done deal.
