Meet the Parents

This. Is. Bizarre.

Disconcerting. Exciting. Boggling. Nervous and happy and ... odd. Just ... odd.

It's not our first time (thank goodness!). I think we'll be okay. The addition of more people will probably grease the skids a bit, and having sleeping bodies encamped about the house feels ... um ... like a party, I guess. Older than a sleepover party. There will be wine. But still - a party. A shadow of things to come. A hint about the future when they'll "all" show up, and there will also be small children encamped about the house, on cots, couches, and floors. (Please, God, can we finish the house far enough to put in another bathroom by then? Please?)

Anyway ... ready or not, here it comes. We meet another Significant Other this weekend. I am already predisposed to like her, of course. After all, she likes our son. How bad could she be? We like him. (I need someone here to remind me that I'm The Mom. This phase of my life has sneaked up on me - I keep forgetting that I'm supposed to be Old.)

Summer in so many Ways

Okay, so maybe the weather isn't quite up to speed this year. "Summer" looming on the calendar looks a lot more like spring just barely starting outdoors, but I'm okay with that. Summer is usually a little too long and a little too hot for me anyway, and if we sneak up on it with some of this foggy, chilly, beachy, dampness, maybe it won't seem like a torture at the end of August. Shoot - at this rate, we'll be lucky to turn off the heat in the house by the end of August!

Season changing, and again there's a huge clock overlaying the world, and the second hand is near the top, and the minute hand is about to click. The scenery has already changed. Everything has changed. For me, everything has changed. Again.

At the parish, we are doing a huge project to organize, format, and use a multi-age, multi-purpose curriculum for children's religious education. This past school year was our first experiment, and it was a stunning success! Those kids learned hymns and catechism and songs and lessons ... they can recite in "choir" with each other, and they watch out for each other like a group of loving siblings. I couldn't be happier about the effort they've put in and the things they've been able and willing to do, and the final presentation for the congregation at coffee hour was a smashing success. But the secret's in the sauce.

And the sauce has been simmering for a long time. The sauce was not a one-person endeavor. The sauce needed more than one person to stir it. And THIS year another cook signed on for the fun - not just for awhile, but for years to come. Others have pitched in over the years when they've been needed, but none of them could stand and stir like this one does. You know who you are, my friend and sister, and without your creative input, enthusiastic willingness, and determined patience, I could not possibly have gotten those catechumens through a real year of vigorous, traditional Anglican children's instruction. I want to cut loose with the joy of it - to sing like Maria von Trapp in the opening sequences on mountaintops! This team we've formed - it's just so GOOD.

On the home front, we enter a new summer of our lives. This - here - now - this is two adult people who've passed all the way through child rearing and out the other side, and this is the first summer of the New Order of Things. We've done practice runs before. Evenings, or weeks, or school terms without offspring in the house. But this isn't practice. This is it. And now it's summer.

It's summer for us in a lot of ways. We planted and tilled and planted and weeded and tilled and planted and tilled and planted ... and the kids grew up! All at once, it's summer and there's nothing to do but watch what happens in this field we've worked on all these years. Now is not the time to try pulling out the tares. Too much of the wheat may be harmed, and it's not ours to do. Now is the time to let it alone to do what it will. The harvest is coming. (Please, God, send the latter rains.)

Life is like this. It's seasons inside of seasons - a wheel within a wheel, a'turnin', way in the middle of the air. For this family, it's summer. And I've just planted something I've never planted before ... and ... well, did you ever put a seed into the ground and be unable to stop yourself from checking on it several times a day? I feel like the boy in The Carrot Seed.

They keep telling him, "It won't come up." But he's an Idealist and a Dreamer and he knows. He just knows. If every day he pulls up the weeds around the seed and sprinkles the ground with water ... he just KNOWS it will come up.

And it does! It's HUGE. He carts his carrot around on a wheelbarrow because it's gigantic.

And my seed was a marketing idea, and my weeding was the courses I offered but never got to teach at the community center, and my water was hope ... and now I have a student. One perfect student who understands what she's doing and participates with her whole self and is learning to write for self-discovery and follow directions with the most sweetly lovely trust imaginable, and I am beside myself with the possibilities for the seeds I've planted.

Why ... what if ... what if a whole CROP of carrots as huge as my entire self came up? What if?

The Time Has Come

"The time has come," the Walrus said,
"To talk of many things:

Like, for instance, the realization now firmly in hand, that neither of us - neither The Great Husband or his wife (that would be me, variously known as "missus," "young lady," and "mom") - has any time left in this life to wait for better health habits. Either we return to being skinnier now, or the whole idea slips further and further from our lives as we have lived them. The cumulative effects have begun their adding and the sum is too near ill health and a painfully slow old age. It's time to deal with this because there is no time left.

Of shoes--and ships--and sealing-wax--
Of cabbages--and kings--

And school -- and kids -- and peeling paint -- Of marriages -- and things. See, here's the dealeo. My kids aren't kids, and they're off doing their own lives, and they have decided at last to discount utterly what their parents have learned about interpersonal relationships and commitment and the connection between our souls (so easily shredded, so hard to repair) and our bodies (which seem immortal when we're in our twenties). Okay, fine. That's what the Walrus and the Carpenter have decided. They have to do what they have to do, and if they have decided that their parents are too ridiculously traditional or hide-bound or small-minded or hyper-sensitive to understand how things are in the "real" world, there is nothing left for us to do but pay attention to the many and enormous things we love about these former children of the household. And there is a lot to be happy about.

And why the sea is boiling hot--

And whether pigs have wings."

It isn't. And they don't. But if no one who needs this information is listening, then maybe it's not time to talk yet. Maybe, instead, it's time to gasp at a suddenly clear blue sky and be completely happy about the approaching short spate of warm weather. Maybe it's time to get new creativity nurtured (lessons instead of classes? okay! I can do that!) -- maybe it's time to weed the house and decorate the yard and just. Be. Happy.

"But wait a bit," the Oysters cried,
"Before we have our chat;

Okay. I can wait a bit. I know how. The Oysters aren't ready. Then, there's nothing for it. Here I sit. Here I wait. Here I dig and here I play. This sand slips through the glass, with unrelenting certainty, and it doesn't ever flow the other way, but this sand also makes castles and wonders and beauty. Shall I moan that the tide comes in?

For some of us are out of breath,
And all of us are fat!"

I shall not moan. Many mothers moan.

Many mothers moaning mumbling
make a musing every morning,
that their lives are dull and flat.
The children never call us.
The house is empty now.
What will I do with all my time
if no one needs me? How
shall I be happy
if my whole day is mine?

I know, I know. I've gone over this a thousand times. I keep coming back to check. Am I doing it? Am I being the mom of adults? Am I being the woman in the middle of a century of life, who knows that most people don't get a century, and that if this life of mine is going to be lived, I'd better get to it? Raising my kids took my whole body, my whole soul, every ounce of my being, and it was for them - not for me.

The tide turned. The sand caved in. The castle that contained their childhoods is washed out to sea, and our midlife is here, and we are together. And now we are really really good at tides. Oysters eventually produce pearls. That much we know.

"No hurry!" said the Carpenter.
They thanked him much for that.

Dear Kids

How are you? We are fine.

The weather is starting to get a little brighter, and we expect spring to arrive any day now. We can tell that it will be soon because the buds in the lilac hedge are starting to open.

Our new kitchen stove and new television will be arriving this afternoon. We are sorry that you are not here to enjoy them with us, but you are welcome to visit at any time. Bring a sleeping bag if you come. We have cleared out your rooms.

Love,
Mom

P.S. We go to bed at 10:00, and we get up at about 6:30.

P.P.S. That's 6:30 in the morning.

Without Limping

I had a border collie.

I named her Libby.

My first dog since I was a kid. And she loved me.

Whenever I would go out to the car, to leave the house on days when I felt ill or wrong-footed somehow ... she would limp.

Libby started limping after she suffered a broken leg, the result of trying to herd a moving car out on the road. She was tossed to the side of the road, and the people from the car came up to our house, distraught, apologetic, ready to write me a check for my foolishly optimistic border collie.

Her desire to herd wasn't their fault. I sent them on their way.

We drove to the vet, me in the back of the station wagon with my broken, patient, black and white dog with the big brown eyes. She kept lifting her broken leg for me to hold it. Her occasional whimpers sounded confused. She sounded like she was trying to be brave.

We brought her home in a cast.

She stayed on the back porch for weeks and weeks.

She was supposed to lie still so her leg could heal.

But every time we (I) ventured onto the back porch, she was overcome with happiness, and her tail and her body ... and her cast - wriggling, tap tap tapping on the cement - trying to stand - making it impossible to heal the broken bone. My husband used to say that if I'd let her, that dog would've gotten into my clothes with me just to be closer. She couldn't hold still because she loved me.

I finally went to a naturopathic vet and got some remedies, and Libby's leg - her front left - the same "arm" on her as the arm I broke a few years before when I fell on the ice - her broken leg finally healed.

But ever afterward, my dog limped whenever I didn't feel good.

***

This morning, my son drove away down the driveway, headed off into his life. I do not know if I've ever seen him quite so keyed up - taut - concentrating. He wanted to go. He is ready.

I have a lot in common with the dog named Libby. She couldn't help resonating to the human she loved. Today, the young man who used to be my little curly-headed boy headed into his life with a laser-like focus. I did not weep on his shoulder, or make a large, long good-bye. The part of me that begat him knew that he didn't need such a moment. I could feel his intention today. He was okay. I didn't limp when he went to the car.

But then, after I had shut the door ("Want an orange or something?" "I have some already." "Okay ... call us when you get there so we'll know you made it." "Bye.") I came back upstairs and opened the door to his room. Most of his stuff is still there. He will come back and get it when he has found a place to call his own. I stood in the middle of the room, his, but no longer his, and watched through his window as his car went down the driveway. This feels different from college. This feels permanent. The sign of the cross. On me, on him. ("God bless you. Godspeed. Goodbye.") When his car reached the bottom of the driveway, I burst into tears.

***

Please understand. I did not want him to stay. I raised my kids to find their lives and live them. Last night when I came home from work and my headlights moved across this young man and his dad headed up to the barn in the dark together, I started to think - without this moment, there can never be moments of grandchildren, families coming to visit, babies born, careers and adventures and travel and all of the things that will flood our home in the years ahead. He cannot stay here - none of them can. They - and we - all of us have futures to walk toward. And so far, nobody's limping.

Tomorrow and the Next Day

The weather forecasters are saying that tomorrow and the next day will bring us bluer skies and dryer weather. For the sake of moving on with this thought, we'll just take that as stipulated by the witnesses, shall we? Evidential proof is utterly impossible in this absurdity of a storm. (And I like rain! But this year, even I am ready to remember what color the sky is above the clouds.)

I'm ready to move on. To see spring. To feel the sun on my face again. But today? Today the weather is a perfect exterior to match my interior. Inside of me, the water is moving in sheets and waves, first to one side, then to the other ... little drops, big drops ... and a sudden gust of wind tries to blow open my windows from time to time.

Tomorrow and the next day.

Tomorrow that man person who used to be my little boy - tomorrow he drives away. And the next day he won't be here when I wake up in the morning. I'll be at this desk again, just like today, and if the weather people are right, I'll be looking at the sun coming through the trees.

No driving rain. No background of tossing fir trees and crashing creek noises. No man/boy in the room across the hall for me to disturb by my pounding on the keyboard or my laughing out loud or my swearing at ... well, never mind what I swear at. The point is that I'll do it aloud and then realize - again - that there's no reason not to because the rain and the boy are gone. The skies and the house will be cleared out. I know what that feels like. I've done this before. And I'll have to go to work in the afternoon on that day, but if I want to, I can spend the whole morning stomping and yelling and pacing and crying and singing and dancing around the house. It wouldn't bother anyone at all.

Ever seen a beach storm? Today's one of those days. I expect to be cleaning up broken branches in my yard when it's over, but ... you never know what you'll find on the sand when the wind stops. Tomorrow, the wind is supposed to stop. The next day, I'll be beach combing.

Waving (again)

Well, it's happening. This week, it's happening. Young giant packing up his car to drive away and start a life that isn't here, isn't with us, isn't in my ears or eyes, isn't where I sense his presence as a kind of constant.

No one to whittle sticks on the front steps, or leave seriously muddied logger style boots in the way after a tramp in the woods. No one going up and down the stairs at very odd hours in the middle of the night, or alternating fascinatingly evocative guitar music with ... um ... well, whatever that other stuff is supposed to be. No one cluttering up the TiVo with weird movies or absurdly nutso talk show hosts ("you guys gotta see this!"), and no one eating the food I thought I'd have around for the whole week. No one to leave dishes on the coffee table and no one to do it when I say, "you do the kitchen tonight."

Two people's clothes in the wash now. Two people's dishes in the sink, and two people's reading material scattered across the living room. Two people for meals, two people for evenings, two people for conversation.

I'll be fine. No. Really. I will. I've got lots to do. Library work and school work and writing work and house work and walking and teaching and reading and cooking and dreaming and ...

wondering

when he'll be back.

Bye, son.


Love, Mom and Dad

Uh-oh ... Mommy 'piow?

Yes, Mommy spilled. Again.

When our oldest child was still an only child (a condition of her life she has since suspected was an 18-month stay in her own personal Nirvana), she didn't miss much. Ever. She was born paying attention. She was the child who would stop breastfeeding if her mother so much as looked at an open magazine lying beside us on the couch cushions. She could sense my wandering attention, and the slight shift in her surroundings made her stop and wait to see ... and not continue with her work until my attention was back where it belonged. (notice the facial expression on artist Carl Larsson's wife as she attempts the same thing with one of her own eight children?)

At a year old, our daughter had advanced to a much more verbal processing of these environmental shifts. Still aware of everything, she had now learned to comment.

"Doo lou'!" ("Too loud" - a comment on a passing fire truck when we were out on a walk.)

"Gah!" ("All gone," said with chubby hands turned upward and with a small shrug, to cheerfully and adamantly inform us that her food was "gone," apparently because a magic trick had been performed.)

"Cahfooooh...!" ("Careful!" - her first real word, recited like a mantra while she was learning to walk across the room, nearly never falling down in the process.)

All must be noticed. All must be identified. Aloud. Usually with exclamation points.

And so, there was very little hope that the spilled oatmeal would pass unnoticed. It only happened once, but every morning for weeks afterward, we re-lived the moment.

Mommy reaches into the cupboard and picks up the container of dry oatmeal. Mommy puts the container on the counter and begins to pry up the edge of the lid. And this one time? This one time Mommy spilled. The container fell off the counter, and upended its contents onto Mommy's feet. And the child in the highchair, cheerfully waiting for breakfast in this place of contented confinement, up where she could see the breakfast being made, began her shocked commentary.

"Uh-oh!"
(Mommy glaring at her own bare, morning feet)

"Mommy 'piow?"
"Yes, Mommy spilled." (Mommy begins stepping out of the heap of rolled oats)

"Oapmeoh?"
(teeth gritted, voice calm) "Yes, Mommy spilled the oatmeal."

"Toe?"
"Yep - Mommy spilled oatmeal on her toes." (grrr!)

This was the dialogue that continued for weeks, every morning, and every time someone opened the door to the cupboard with the oatmeal container inside.

I thought about this today, more than twenty-five years after the fact. I thought about it because Mommy 'piow'd again. Not oatmeal, but papers and books. (Uh-oh ... Mommy 'piow? Toe?) Mommy's toe made Mommy's brain begin to process a certain sort of awareness today - the awareness of the spillable piles, and what they contain.

I began to look around. From where I stood, I could see books about cinema, because I'm writing my final paper for History of Film. I could see several notebooks - some empty, a couple of notebooks full of notes, and under other piles are notebooks with only a couple of pages used, either because they could not be found after the first bout of writing or because the project had ended almost as soon as it began.

Here are library books about emotions, brain development, perception, and narrative. There are Newspapers. Magazines. That table holds the latest finds from used book stores. This one has some (more) books and booklets for theological and religious education writing. Interestingly enough, the books about writing and poetry, once I own them, cannot be found in this part of the house. Those books are upstairs, in my office, near my desk, and usually shelved properly, where I can easily lay my hands on them again.

In the main part of the house, between clear-outs, the flat surfaces of living and dining rooms also bear their weight in junk mail, catalogs (both the desired and the where'd-this-come-from? variety), and all the mail waiting to go to places in other parts of the house or in other houses (my mother-in-law's mail, mail for the kids who aren't here, bills, etc.). The piles are ever in danger of 'piowing onto Mommy's toes, and Mommy thinks this morning that the myth of the paperless society is an absurdity too laughable to laugh at.

So, what is Mommy going to do about this problem?

(Uh-oh ... Mommy 'pioh? Oapmeoh? Toe?)
Yeah.
Hush up.
There is too much paper and there are too many printed words in this house.
I don't want to talk about it.

But ... wait.

Is that the problem?

Is it a problem that these piles and papers and books and notebooks are here, in my house, all the time? Should I have less paper here? Fewer notebooks and fewer books and fewer projects to generate all of this in the first place?

Is the oapmeoh the problem?

Or ... is this simply the stuff of life in this house?

This is a picture of Gretchen Rubin, writer, and most recently famous because of her Happiness Project and the book she wrote about her year's experiment. Notice, please, that in her New York apartment, where she lives with her husband and children, and where she writes and cooks and reads, and from which she goes out into the world to exercise, or speak, or shop ... where she lives ... she has lined a wall with books. Gretchen Rubin's gorgeous New York apartment has at least as much danger of acquiring piles of papers as my house has, here in mostly rural Stevenson, Washington.

Here is a similar picture of Mireille Guiliano, former CEO of Veuve Clicquot, and author of French Women Don't Get Fat. Another New York apartment. Another wall of books, some vertically shelved, some horizontal, non-matching bindings, hardback and paperback books kept together, not color-displayed ... real books ... lots of words and ideas and pages and pages and pages.

I used to put only a little bit of food at a time onto the high chair tray for the little girl who was sitting there. It was easy to overwhelm her with too much to do - too much to pay attention to - too much to process. (And it's too hard to comment on everything if there are too many things to comment on.) But the answer wasn't to eliminate the food. The answer was to have on the high chair tray only as much as the tiny talking child could pay attention to - and while she was eating (and commenting) the rest of the food in the house was where it belonged.

I need the things in my piles. Although I suppose I could do without the junk mail, I could also probably do without a new container being purchased every time I buy oatmeal. If I haven't sorted the mail at the post office and used their recycling containers, I can use mine for junk mail. If I haven't bought my oatmeal from the bulk aisle and used my own container, I can properly dispose of the purchased packaging on my own. I can fill my bookshelves with the words and words and more words, putting the bound and unbound pages that belong in this house where they need to go, throwing away the stuff I don't need, and filing my course work where I can find it again.

It sounds a little silly, when I type it all out like that. "I can be an organized paper shuffler." (duh) But when a pile falls onto Mommy's toes, Mommy wonders - at least at the first crash - if the contents of the pile need to be eliminated from her reality in some sort of final and definitive way. Today, Mommy has decided again that the possibility of spilled oatmeal is better than having no oatmeal at all, and that it just might be possible to live happily with all this paper in the house.

Now, if you'll excuse me? I have some piles to unpile and a few more books to find homes for. We went to a couple of library booksale places while we were on vacation a couple of weeks ago.

The Thermodynamics of Family

In Thermodynamics, a closed system can exchange heat and work (for example, energy), but not matter, with its surroundings. In contrast, an isolated system cannot exchange any of heat, work, or matter with the surroundings, while an open system can exchange all of heat, work and matter. For a simple system, with only one type of particle (atom or molecule), a closed system amounts to a constant number of particles.

That's what wikipedia says.

And what I say is this.

I used to be the mom in a closed and simple system. We had a constant number of particles (five). We kept things closed, but not isolated, and simple for the sake of strength. Little particles do better when not disturbed by overwhelming matter from their surroundings, and so all our heat and work had limits. Overwhelm was something I was pretty vigilant about.

We even homeschooled our kids - but we rejected the isolated system. This is the "homier than thou" homeschooler type who grinds her own wheat for making her own bread (and buys the wheat from a Good Christian, who probably also homeschools), has all her babies at home, and has church at home too, with all the anachronistically dressed children sitting straight and tall while they participate with a whole heart and a willing spirit. (feel a little ill yet? ... you should ...) We wanted our kids introduced to the wide world - not kept away from it, in a sterilized place where no immune system can develop.

Get the idea? We parented consciously. There are at least as many ways to be a fully conscious parent as there are parents to be conscious, and we did it in our way, and we chose to be a closed but not isolated system while the three particles were developing.

But they are all developed now.

And they've blown apart my system!

I resent this!

I resent the blast of the brightest supernova ever, and I resent the flying particles and heat and light and matter and exchange with so unexpected a set of surroundings, and I resent the apparently endless Are You Kidding Me? moments!!

I liked the closed system, okay?

I liked it.

There is a theory that at the beginning of the universe, the blast of heat and matter spun the solar system into place. This, so goes the theory, is how the earth spun about, like a drop flung from a hot spoon of boiling sugar accidentally dropped off the stove, and in its perfect distance from the heat source of our sun, and after a few little scrap meteors crashed into it and broke up the surface and put the right minerals into the shell, we had a fertile planet.

I hope I put all the things they'll need into the three particles, but in any case, they're on their own now. The spoon has dropped, and the drops are flung, and what they make of themselves is up to them now. But in the meantime, I seem to be living in a permanent meteor shower, and the novelty is wearing off.

Is there hope of a new, closed, stable solar system for spent Big Bangs, I wonder?

Who says men can't plan a wedding?

(hat tip, Susan! This is great!)

Probably, not fifty more

In this, my fifty-first autumn, I find that I have started to count.

There is no way to know how many autumns I'll see, and there never was any way to know. Young people do die, after all. And people also live to be over a hundred years old. The counting I have started to do feels very like the counting of a child pulling beads or buttons from a drawstring bag. There's just no way to know how many are in there, or what they look like glinting in the sun or laid side by side on the step until they've all been pulled out and counted. This is what I am doing - counting.

48 ...

49 ...

50!

51 ...

And they're so beautiful!

This one here has that beautiful dark teal and black plaid wool in it. My mom made me a pleated skirt jumper out of that fabric one fall when I was seven or eight, I think. And this one has this crack right across it, but you can't see the crack unless you hold it up and look through it from a certain angle. That was the fall when my daughter was in Afghanistan and my son had moved out for college and it seemed difficult to take in enough air when I breathed. Oh! See this one? See how it's darker in the middle and paler pink at the edges? How it's shot through with this odd gold fleck? That's the fall when September 18 saw our first baby born. That button is 26 years old now, and it's a favorite. (click on the pic for a cool project done with buttons)

There are metal-edged buttons that look somehow like guitar music, and there are buttons in here that are the color of tears - because I wanted to finish school, but I wanted to stay home with my future husband and plan our wedding, and every time I got back onto the plane to leave him, I cried and cried.

One more, and one more, and one more, I pull them out in the days when the sun comes out. I hold them up against the turning leaves that stand against the evergreens at the edges of our field. I sit here, on this front step, at the house that saw great-grandma's children born, and raised, and flown, and now all gone. There is no way to know how many there will be. Each fall adds another, after all. And they are so beautiful.

Because the point of the story is the hero

In honor of my daughter's military service, and the service of the other soldiers we know and love;
In honor of every hero who pulled people and bodies from the wreckage on September the 11th nine years ago;
In honor of every mother who trains her child to struggle valiantly, "enduring the cross, despising the pain;"
In honor of everyone who turns away from saying, "They hate us," and turns toward generosity of spirit;

A re-posting of the following, from three years ago:

"Show me a hero,
and I'll write you a tragedy."
F. Scott Fitzgerald

And, of course, Fitzgerald could have written many a heroic story and tragedy. He knew that if you have the thing that gets your attention (the tragedy), then the writer or other artist fills in around it, and that background of tragedy makes the main point visible.

That's how background and foreground work. It is true if you are merely assembling a bulletin board in a classroom - you get the elements together, staple them on the board, and then you can "see" them. Get the elements together, back them with dark paper so that they're framed, and you will see them. It's the edges and the background and the contrast that show us a thing.

And this is true for heroes. Heroes are the ones that stand out in the foreground against the background of tragedy. During the last century, these have had names like Schindler - a Sudenten-German Catholic businessman who saved the lives of over one thousand Polish Jews during the Final Solution; and tenBoom, whose Dutch family helped Jews without forcing conversions, and even provided Kosher food and honored the Sabbath; and Rusesabagina.
Paul Rusesabagina.

This from Roger Ebert: In 1994 in Rwanda, a million members of the Tutsi tribe were killed by members of the Hutu tribe in a massacre that took place while the world looked away. "Hotel Rwanda" is not the story of that massacre. It is the story of a hotel manager who saved the lives of 1,200 people by being, essentially, a very good hotel manager.

It would have been possible to reverse the effects in this movie, and to have filmed it so that the background was the heroism of this good man - but that is not the story they told. They told the story instead of a very good hotel manager. The background of genocide was the chaos against which the clarity of his goodness was startling.

And yet, being able to see the thing in the foreground seems to be a learned skill. We have to figure out what it is we're looking at. We have to train our inner eyes to see.

As youngsters of about the ages of ten and fifteen, my little brother and I went together to the theater and we saw the movie they'd made about Corrie ten Boom's life. A worse day I have rarely had. While I watched in an agony of nauseated fascination, poor Clark had to leave the theater over and over, going out to the concession stand to get more napkins for us to wipe our eyes and blow our noses on. (To his credit, he did keep bringing his stunned and terrified self back to the seat after these short breathers.)

When it was over, the scenes that haunted me for years afterwards were all scenes of helplessness in the face of great evil. I did not remember the foreground. To my youthful inner eye, that was a movie about evil. Good people try to stand up to it. Of course they do. What else would they do? And the evil crushes everything in its reach, killing babies in front of their mothers, and crushing hands with the butt of an angry gun. I tried to be brave. I tried to identify with the obvious heroes of the story. But to my inner self, that was a movie about the helplessness of good people.

Now I think I know why I heard a story of evil. Look at that poster! Does that look like a story of the power of a hero? Thinking back on it, I wonder now if the movie makers drew the background so much for effect that the foreground was lost to it. Now look back at the movie poster for Hotel Rwanda. Look at the way the main character is larger, and rises above the horrors he takes action to stop.

And what does the poster for Schindler's List say about the movie? Look closely. The list of Jews slated for death (or worse) in the prison camps marches across the trusting hand of a child, joined together with the grownup person who will rescue the little one. The threat is there. The menace is there. It's horrible. But it's not the point. The hero is the point.

And shame on the people who made the strength and power of evil the point of the beautiful and courageous story of Corrie ten Boom and her family. I can admit that my sheltered teenage life was little preparation for her story at all. But now that I have seen that poster again, I think I was not the only one with an unfocused inner eye. Shame on them.

Stories of heroes are by necessity stories of wars and disasters and great and grave difficulty. Of course they are. Heroes do strive for goodness in the face of evil. That is what a hero is. But the point of the story is not the background. The point of the story is the hero. There is nothing for Kenneth Branaugh to do (or Sir Laurence Olivier before him), and no story of Henry V to tell if there are no soldiers dying in agony on the fields of Agincourt.

Look at that poster. What is that story supposed to be about? War? That is in the movie, and that is not what it is about. The agony of dying men? That is in the movie, and that is not what it is about. The difficulty of knowing one's own courage in the face of terror? That is in the movie, and that is not what it is about. This is a movie about a heroic leader. A hero.

In the past few decades, I have heard these things about hero stories:

"When we saw The Sound of Music in the theaters, we really thought it would only be a little while before that would happen in America." (!!!) "What would happen?" "Communists would take over, and we would have to flee."

Uh-huh. A story about Nazis marching across Europe, and occupying Austria is to the viewer's inner eye a story about "Communists" on another continent coming across the ocean and ... marching us around? A story about restoration within a family and what it really means to serve God - a story about sacrifice and love of country and what romantic love is for ... that's a story that says to you "the Commies are coming, the Commies are coming"? Really? Wow. What kind of inner distortion sees that?

Here's another one, re: the movie Schindler's List. "Well, it was pretty good, but they didn't need to include all that nudity." Nudity? In a story about the heroism of one man in the face of the Nazi menace, amongst the terror of angry soldiers, and the horrors of the death camps, the viewer remembers gratuitous nudity?

Background and foreground. Getting them mixed up makes for some very bad story telling, and apparently it also makes for some very bad story hearing. Mythical or otherwise, modern or ancient, well-known or unknown, a hero is a person who "feels the fear and does it anyway." And the point of the story is the hero.

For post number 1,111

Yes, that's right. This is post #1,111 for this blog.
And because he's handy and could make my computer do what I want it to do, I've finally gotten access to the photos of that crrrazy graduation of our son's.

Ready?

The man himself, in the middle of this photo, in the beige and brown and hat and beard.
And I told you there were juggling graduates! (Not to mention graduates who walked across the stage with their children in tow.)See the balloons? In the middle? There were lots and lots of balloons that day.And here we are. And that has to be the most horrible and unflattering picture of the daughter ever taken. She'd been back from deployment for less than 48 hours, and it shows, poor sleep-deprived soldier!

Preserves

This morning, the earth has inhaled. The heat of summer is abating. A few more exhaling days of heat will come before the autumn begins in earnest, but still. There is a breeze that keeps making attempts to release and scatter everything paper tacked to the wall behind my desk, and I know what that breeze means. It's time to preserve the taste of the summer.

My daughter's been doing it for weeks and weeks. She found a farm stand local to where she lives, and she's got freezer jams (and ice cream toppings, aka, the jams that didn't gel) made of all kinds of berries. We've had samples - and man, oh man, is that good jam! Summer in a little jar. (And the lady of the house getting quite irritated with bad recipes and is learning her own methods and preferences so quickly it's like she's been doing this for decades, not days. I'll have to have her show me how. No reason for both of us to blaze this trail. Although, when "we" progress all the way to the pressure cooker stage, it'll be a race to retreat. Pressure cookers are scary.)

Meanwhile, I want to preserve a few things here. In writing. My life now feels reminiscent of the night I sat on our couch, third and last baby in my arms, and thought to myself, "Breathe this in. Remember it," trying and trying to tamp down the memory, embedding it in my brain and bones, knowing the effort was futile and that the only thing I would be able to remember would be the desire to remember.

So, knowing that the feeling will be elusive, but dates and years and diaries are still helpful, here's what I want to preserve from this summer.

1. This was the year the boots and BDUs came home. (A picture being worth a thousand words, the feeling attached to this picture still fresh, and tears have started to roll as I type, glancing at the bizarre feeling of relief and tension of that moment - because she was there - somewhere - (as The Great Husband murmured) "in the sea of sameness.")

She came home, all her body intact, her soul bruised and a bit in shock, but already healing quickly, even now, in this same summer. And for my part, the realization that our country and its military has not traveled more than a couple of psychic inches from the days of Vietnam and war crimes and soldiers stressed beyond imagination and leadership that could have acted and did not ... well, my soul has some healing to do too. But she's home. This was the summer our daughter came home.

2. Graduation at Evergreen State is graduation in a Fellini movie, and few celebrations I've ever seen or will see can touch it. Pure exuberance, complete with balloons, jugglers dressed as circus ladies receiving their degrees, and yes, the distinct smell of something sweet in the air, there, under the stair tower where I went to get pictures. My son in a hat of his own - spurning (with many, many of his classmates) the fee being charged for green rayon, and refusing to have a proper cap and gown. The band playing Dixieland music - in particular, a really tipsy sounding version of The Stripper. Me wondering where the (a-hem!) girl of interest might be in the crowd ... wondering if that boy will EVER introduce her to us.

3. The kid turned twenty-two and introduced us to his girl of interest. That's her - right there - in the red skirt and the stunning smile. We think the kid has great taste. That's what we think.

We also think that the ability of our three now adult children to have a party and dance and drink and laugh and have a lot of fun is ... well ... I mean, look at them! It's impossible to feel anything but unadulterated joy when I look at this picture. Bottles and bottles of unadulterated joy to be preserved this summer, and lined up, sparkling on the shelf, winking red and yellow and orange and purple in the shaft of afternoon sun that hits them right before it's time to serve dinner.

In the next couple of weeks, I'll add "insulated south wall of the house," "access to the attic," and "finished master bedroom" to my list of this summer's preserves. That's how it is at the end of summer. The heat starts to take an occasional break, and everything comes ripe at once. I don't want a morsel of it wasted this year. I want to feast on it this season, and I want to bottle every drop.

Almost there

At the bottom of my driveway is the road. At the bottom of the road is the edge of town. Past the edge is the river. The Columbia River, that flows out to the ocean. And here, in the Columbia River Gorge, the mountains rise up on either side of the mighty flow, and our little Pacific Northwestern fjord makes me feel all day - all the time - as if the ocean is close by. All I would have to do, I think to myself, is sit on something that floats, and I would come to the ocean after awhile. This river flows into the ocean, I repeat in my head. Sometimes I say it out loud.

The drive to the ocean, though, goes over another mountain range (one that looks a lot like this one), and the last bits of the road before the ocean first comes into view are winding, and turning, and I always think, at each turn of the road - even now, after I've gone to that ocean on that road for fifty years - is this the one? Are we almost there now?

The air changes subtly along the way. More mistiness. The smell of salt. Sometimes, even this far inland where Lewis and Clark began to record it, there is evidence of the effects of tides. Sometimes, even here at my house, the air makes my land feel like beach land. The air feels like beach air.

See these happy people?

White hat is our oldest child. Bushy beard is her first little brother. Blue shirt over the black T is her second little brother, and on this day he was turning twenty-two years old, and they were having a lot of fun at the party he set up at a pub. And see the stunner in the red skirt?

Are we there yet?

The air has changed and the road is turning another corner, and I know - I just know - the whole wide ocean is just around the bend. I can smell it. Things feel different. About two and a half decades ago, we piled our three kids - our one "gor baby" and our two "boy babies" - into the back seat of our car, and we started to drive. We've been following the river and the winding road and we've climbed the mountains and we've come down the other side of the range. This is "where the mountains meet the sea." We're almost there. Watch for it ... watch for it ...

I love the beach.

Your dreams will tell you

I woke up this morning in tears. I had just dreamed that my beautiful, capable, brave daughter and I were at a grocery store (but not the kind of store I've ever seen, except in the movie The Night We Never Met). She was carrying something to purchase - but she'd just come out of the restroom - and she noticed that people were looking at her arm - and in the dream, her forearm was missing, replaced by metal "bones" and a fake hand that looked and acted real. She casually put her sleeve back down to cover it - consciously casual - just handling the situation. And in the dream, I realized that she could not feel her upper arm - didn't know the sleeve was still up until she saw people looking at the metal.

I am in tears again, writing about this dream. My daughter came home from Afghanistan whole in body - and bruised in mind and soul, but not missing anything essential or integral to who she is. I do not cry over reality. I weep across the waves of fear that I could not watch while she was gone.

And I know that this dream is not just about my daughter. It's about all of my kids. All grown now. All looking at their 20's (or what's left of them), deciding how they want to live. And why. And with whom. And where. And there is nothing to do but see the dangers and possibilities from where I am now, decades older and wiser, but still only one person with one person's vantage point, and wait. If they loose limbs they're the ones who deal with it now. Not me. Being the mom now means, more than ever, seeing without acting. Praying without ceasing.

I had horrible dreams about the kids being in danger after a car accident I was in when they were little. The kids were not hurt in the accident. But in my dreams, terrible things happened. I dreamed then, as now, about what might be. What could be. What I was most afraid of. My dreams told me then what I was most afraid of.

But now there's a difference. Probably it's a good sign that in my dreams, my oldest child and only daughter is handling it. Now, in my dreams, I know my kids are strong. Brave. And ready.

So why am I still crying?

Because wedding pictures are forever

Twenty-eight years ago, when we were planning our wedding (and I do mean "we" - we were both in school, but on opposite corners of the country, and since we couldn't be in the same room, we did a lot of planning for when we could be) I got a good bit of advice from our pastor's wife.

"Pick a good photographer," she said. "When it's all over, what you'll have left is the man and the pictures. You got a good man. Get a good photographer."

Of course, this was the same woman who must've been a bit ... uh ... relentless? fussy? in her youth. She also once told me that on her wedding day, while she was getting dressed for the ceremony, she suddenly realized that she was missing either something old, something new, something borrowed or something blue. I don't recall which thing she was missing, but it was one of those. So someone brought her something, but she was merely confused by it.

She asked the giver, "What am I supposed to do with that?"

To which, the giver replied (through clenched teeth), "Why don't you eat it?"

Wedding days can be a bit frazzling.

Even for the pastor's wives whose reputations later become all about the kind serenity and the calm and all of that. But I digress.

We did get a good photographer for our wedding in the summer of 1983. Two, actually. One for the "pre-bridals" done for a picture in the paper (that's what this picture here is from - and we tamed the daisy head maisie flowers before the wedding day so they didn't look like they were sprouting out of my head), and also a team for the day itself.

On the day itself, this guy and his mother were the two left out of the team of three of their photography business, because his dad had passed away. And a truer team you never saw than those two. She arranged the people, and he took the picture, and he only took one with each arrangement. No kidding. One take was all he needed. And the album is beautiful.

And permanent.

The album is permanent.

Our pastor's wife was right. I have the man and the photos. I still wish I'd had my hair and nails done that day or the day before. Right there, in that permanent album of permanent pictures, pictures of such high quality that they will be here until kingdom come, is a record of everyone's appearance on that day of days - including the mother of the bride.

And this is where my thoughts have traveled of late. My mom looks good in all the wedding albums of all her kids - even the photos taken in the early 70's, with the ubiquitous chignon - the extra hair with a braid around the base of it, that lived on a white Styrofoam head on her bedroom dresser when she (my mom) wasn't all dressed up and wearing it. Back in those days, people thought that my mom, my sisters (8 and 10 years older than I am, and all shorter than I am), and I were all sisters. My mother looked really young for a really long time.

But all her kids were married by the time she was my age. This means, in case you're not following, that I will be older in the wedding albums of my children than she was in her kids' wedding albums. When the wedding days come, I mean. Okay, if the days come. But I'm telling you, I see winking and blinking lights over there on the ocean's horizon and this boat isn't showing any signs of stopping out here at sea, and those lights might not be what I think they are, but they might be, and if I don't lose some weight and get a more flattering hairstyle soon, I'll be caught forever in wedding photos in the very un-pretty appearance I seem to have taken on lately, and when my kids have their spouses and their photo albums, there I will be. In this condition. Because wedding pictures are forever.

Birthday the Next

Two weeks from today is the next birthday. The youngest Young Giant turns twenty-two. Apparently, this is going to be Funny Hat Day ... the guests (all young people, and all extremely goofy, as far as I can tell) are supposed to wear hats. I have been assured by one of these people that pictures will be taken. Look for them here. I've found a spy who'll smuggle them out.

Okay ... I can do that ...

Do you ever make these?


This isn't the recipe I use - mine calls for cocoa, and the quality of the cocoa makes a huge difference. So does the quality of the vanilla, added right at the end of the cookery part.

Well, anyway, on August the twenty-second, our youngest child will be twenty-two years old. Today, when I saw him, he said that what he wants for his birthday is a huge plate of these. A mound. An enormous amount. And he wants them all for himself and intends to share absolutely none of them.

So I'll be making them for him. But what I'm wondering in the meantime is this. The memory of amazing deliciousness, associated with home and mom and all of that ... that's gotta be a good thing. But that "all for me" thing? Yeah. What's up with that?

A will, a way, and a wondrous story (especially for unconventional parents and educators)

Imagine the back seat of a big rig as your high school classroom. For Kerry Anderson, who was home-schooled as her truck-driver mom made deliveries across the country, that was reality. Anderson eventually got through community college and received a full scholarship to Harvard University. Michele Norris talks to Anderson, now 26, about her unconventional education.