Shoes for orphans, please

At Nazareth House, they're gathering up shoes for the orphans. You can click on the picture to go to their blog and see more details, pictures of the work in Sierra Leone, and links to video. The bottom line is this. There are orphans who need shoes. Walmart is getting rid of inventory for a dollar a pair (ironic, don't you think?). If everyone who reads this blog went to Walmart or some other vendor and purchased some of these rubber clog type shoes or flipflops or any other durable and waterproof children's shoes, and then sent them to Nazareth House by August 1 so they could be shipped overseas, together we could do a lot of good. So ... a $5 latte today? Or five pairs of shoes for small people who have no parents? Hmmm.... you decide.

Deadline for Shoe Collection for children of Sierra Leone
August 1, 2009

Let's see if we can raise at least 5000 pairs of shoes...

Nazareth House/One Love
Attn. Maria Stianchie
402 W White Bear Road
Summit Hill, PA 18250

Mr. Happy, the VBS Clown

Honestly, truly, I think clowns are very creepy. I don't like anything with a mask on - it's lying. Treacherous. Deceitful. Masks hide people. I do not like masks, and I never have.

But even I was once a clown.

It's true. I spent the two-week Vacation Bible School days of one summer's June changing in and out of my costume, to become Mr. Happy. Why does a Vacation Bible School need a clown? It's supposed to be because the children love clowns. I don't really know any children who love anything with a mask on its face, but that was the working theory.

So, that year's curriculum included a clown called Mr. Happy. Who would do it? Who'd be brazen enough and fearless enough and careless enough about any lasting reputation to dress up in a clown's costume every day for Vacation Bible School? Did anyone have a costume already?

No. Nobody had a costume. But one family had a teenage daughter. And it was pretty obvious that this family would do anything, and they always worked the VBS ... well, it's a natural fit. The dad of the family was in charge of transportation (a job he absolutely loved because he could map the city, plot the routes for picking up the kids, send out the buses, and drive one of them himself), and recreation (which was playing games in the enormous parking lot). That was a man who never ran out of ideas. It rained during the recreation times one day - but that didn't stop him. He loaded the kids onto one of the buses, and took them on a parking lot tour - fully narrated and thoroughly enjoyed by everyone on the tour.

And the mom in that family had been doing VBS for so long that she was always in charge of one of the departments. It was going to be the 4th - 6th graders that year, if I remember rightly. Organizing the teachers, cutting out the endless pages of Bible characters and visual aids (and enlisting family members to help out) ... telling the stories up at the flannelgraph board to the whole department before everyone split up into smaller classes to work on their crafts for the day and their memory work Bible verses ... she was a whirlwind of organization and energy.

Ask their daughter to be the clown. She'll do it. Do you think she'd really do it?

I'm not sure about this part, but I think my mother approached me in private, at home, and very quietly. (Why was she so careful about it?) Would I like to do it? I believe my first answer was no. But then I realized that the senior members of the team have their responsibilities. So I said yes. And I put together a clown costume. And it was such a thoroughly good costume that nobody recognized me. I found all the pieces, including a really silly hat. And then I found a "voice" - a distinct voice, a never before heard by human ear, Mr. Happy voice.

Et voila! Mr. Happy, the VBS clown.

That was the summer I suddenly understood why people become professional actors. If you have a whole other person to inhabit, you are magically and completely freed from yourself! All learned inhibitions vanish in a puff of smoke - as instantly as the air exits a popped balloon.

When a lanky teenage girl, generally known for her somewhat serious view of the world, her embarrassingly large vocabulary, and her relentlessly earnest intensity puts on a silly hat and huge shoes, and then uses a different voice, she becomes unrecognizable to the people who have seen her grow up. These people who saw me every week, on Wednesday nights for Pioneer Girls, and twice on Sundays, really did not know who had showed up as Mr. Happy the VBS clown.

For the one behind the camera - or the mask - or the odd voice and mannerisms (where did those come from anyway?) - not only is there the freedom of utter anonymity, there is also a strange disconnection. It's a wall of glass - a one-way mirror like the one at that church's nursery, put into the wall so that the parents could see in without the children seeing the parents. (I've never thought before just this moment about how creeped out that makes me - on behalf of the children, I mean. I felt the creepiness of being watched without being able to see the watchers every time I worked in that nursery.) If you're inside a costume, you see what you otherwise would not see. Like Scrooge visiting his past, present, and future with the visiting spirits, I could see and hear the people I knew, but they did not know I was there. I wasn't there. Mr. Happy was there.

I wonder why I've suddenly recalled Mr. Happy. It's probably the chilly wet spring. There must be something about the weather that reminds me of those years. This would be the time when all the planning meetings were happening. I spent a lot of hours sitting at the dining room table or out in the middle of the living room floor, cutting things out during those teenage spring seasons. I helped host the meetings of the teachers who gathered at our house to talk about the lessons, bringing to the table the things from the kitchen that I'd helped prepare before they got there. And that one year, I also found and tried on various items for a clown costume. It must be the season, somehow, that reminded me about all of this.

And ... there seems to be something about that whole experience nagging at the back of my brain. I want to try to put it into words.

I think it's something about the mask. It's something about the modern ease of resort to "trickery or deceit" (St. John Chrysotom warned against this method of "evangelism" in the Christian church - so it must've always seemed like a good idea.)

Such methods hold a danger for the tricked, of course. There are many instances of the bait-and-switch method of getting members in modern American evangelicalism. There are Easter Extravaganzas, with door-knobs in the neighborhood getting ads hung on them during the weeks preceding the Big Event. The family and friends of the enthusiastic endure all the enticements during these campaigns. The idea is to bring the people in, then sneak up with the conversion message. In the parlance of the early 80's, it was, "find the point of convergence," so that you and your neighbor have feelings of camaraderie - then witness and win him to your side. The mentality makes me feel ill - I wish I could apologize to everyone who ever saw me get anywhere near it.

But there's another danger. It's dangerous for the clown. You gotta ask some questions of yourself if you're looking into a mirror in that outfit.

If I'm a clown, and the message is in my hands, spoken in my funny voice, what, exactly is this message? Is it real? Does it mean anything? Anything real? Anything necessary? Or ... is this message I'm bringing something I don't have to touch for myself - that nobody has to touch for real? Is it a mental trick - or a physical, spiritual, actual reality? Why didn't the presence of Mr. Happy, the VBS clown seem to trivialize things? Spending a couple of weeks as a Vacation Bible School mascot can make a girl wonder a few things.

But kids know the difference, I think. They seem to know what parts matter and what parts don't. They're willing to play their bit parts so that the adults will be placated, of course. So they laugh at the clown and learn the lessons that the clown brings with his daily appearance in their departments. (Of course they learned the lessons during the Mr. Happy summer - there was an instinctively excellent teacher behind that funny hat and bizarre voice!)

But those kids also knew what was important. One of the projects we did that year was to raise money to buy, and also to bring food, to fill a huge cooler to send to the missionaries. The missionary coolers were a smashing success that year. Of course, the idea was to bring foods that could be packed into the cooler and travel from America to places like the Philippines Argentina. Non-perishable food. That was the idea. That was specified on the first day's Take-home Sheet - with the permission slips and the memory verses. Across the days, the kids brought in their money offerings (their own, and whatever they could extort from their family and friends), and they brought food from their own cupboards, and they filled that cooler.

One little boy in particular, a kid in my mother's 4th-6th department, deeply understood and personally adopted the concept ... but he came every day on the VBS bus because his folks didn't have the money or leisure time to bring him somewhere during the weekdays.

And one day he brought his offering for the cooler. It was a partially-eaten half-gallon container of ice cream - apparently purloined from his family's freezer.

He stood there, trying not to cry, holding out the dripping cardboard, and wailed (quietly), "I didn't know it would turn into milk!"

When I first heard that story - at the dinner table that night, when the department head and the bus driver/recreation captain were comparing notes for the day - I heard the embarrassment they felt for the boy. And the sympathy. They could relate to him, I think. But what I did not hear was admiration.

Thinking back on it now, as I find myself looking around my house for things to cut out with the scissors and pile into nice neat piles of ready-to-assemble, I have a different understanding than I did then. Now, I think, perhaps, the kid whose ice cream turned to milk had a better grasp on his faith than Mr. Happy the VBS Clown ever thought of having - even if the child's grasp was a bit sticky and even though it dismayed him. At least he wasn't hiding behind a hat and a funny voice.

Deepest drenching in the surf

Okay. I gotta say this. First of all, my delightfully talented and creative cousin makes this sort of thing, as I've mentioned before.

I've also mentioned, about fifty or sixty times, that the Oregon Coast is a sort of primal home for me - it calls and must be answered - it waters my inner deserts and soothes both skin and soul. Okay? Got that part? Me. At the beach. 's th'way it is for me.

I've also noted that this started early in my life, when I and my brother and my cousin looked like this. And she's still that cute, and, I still have that haircut. I think someone finally persuaded my brother to take his hood off.

But today, I found out that her sister, my OTHER cousin in that trio of cousins who, like their mother, could sing - in parts - with or without any kind of instrument - whenever they wanted to - and they were all beautiful and athletic and - still can, too. And they still are all those things ... huh? Oh. What was I saying?

Today I found out that the wool roving, sculpturally minded cousin's sister, my other cousin ... well, SHE does THIS! (She's also tech savvy and has it all so I can't grab it and show you. Go to it. The woman PAINTS, I tell you!)

But that's not even the thing that makes me a little fizzy right now. See ... the deal is ... both of these people have taken some photos of the beach. We might have grown up to three very different adult lives, if a person were only to look at our schedules or addresses, but me and my cousins? We are all exactly the same in one very particular way. To all of us, the beach is always there, the surf is always pounding and foaming in the background, the air is always a little bit moist, and there is always a little bit of sand in at least one pair of shoes.

I don't paint. I write. This is what I write about the beach, pictured here through the lenses of my cousins. (pictures linked to sites where you can see more)

Foam the edge of sea
clings
the salt of tears and sweat and fear and victory drips
near my bare and sandy feet
emerging from the edge
of the great
pounding
tidal
water.

For a year
and a year of years
I drowned
but admire now the print
of toes
pressing into sand
toes pressing on land's edge
not drowned.

Not in the sea but of it
coming up from water
not choked
reborn
Venus
Aphrodite
ancient me, young again and wet.

Waves have pushed me onto shore
water
love surging after love
to answer
walking coming up and out.
Streams and rivers flow across my skin
where wind says
breathe.

Today I do not die but live.
The fierce raw cry of
ancient goddess
finds sound in deaf and watered ears
I bring with me
the silence of the deep where sure
and dark
I died.

And yet I live.

Crawling back in, scrambling up again

Did you do it too? Do you remember?

I have a very distinct memory of working very, very hard to crawl and scramble up onto things. And I was tall! It was a rare thing that required such a scramble. But some things did. Tree branches ... or rocks at the beach ... or hillsides with a good viewpoint at the top and bushes and trees on the way up for grabbing and pulling.

Or down! I've scrambled down to good vantage points or water's edges too.

This is a picture of the Lower Falls at Lewis River. I love this place. (This picture is from Picasa Web. The person who took it was standing at a very good viewpoint. I love standing there - in any season of the year.)

There is a path that leads down to the edge of the river, over to the left of the falls. From there, the power and force of the flowing, falling water pounds and sprays and makes the railing damp - in all seasons of the year. When I stand there, when I feel it - breathe it in - watching what I cannot see - feeling the life-giving water wear away the impervious rock - when I am there, then there is a tightness inside of me which can let go. I can know myself to be part of the whole of the wide and beautiful world, and not at all in control of it. After the slightly slippery scramble down that path, I can stand and breathe ... and know.

In the summer, when the water temperature becomes something slightly above freezing, groups of immortal young people jump off the corner of the falls and into that pool below. I flinch every time I see this display of crazy optimism. I flinch and then I feel again the upsurge of Life's own energy when the diver breaks through the water and back into the sunlight. From where I watch, the pure joy of boundless youth bounces off the trees and rocks, and hits me in the chest.

Today I have scrambled down the path, and I am starting to catch my breath again, and I can feel it at last. At last! I seem to have re-entered my own self once again. Thoughts, and hunger, and sensations like heat and cold and itching ... creative ideas ... impatience at the dust buildup on my furniture ... planning for the upcoming school year. Everything is returning to its accustomed place again. Today is the first day I have been sure of it in a way that doesn't feel brittle.

It's been awhile since I felt so alien in my own body or so completely evicted from my own life.

I do remember it from before, though. This is the feeling that enveloped me from about six weeks before childbirth until about six months after it. That is when the brain can (just barely) take in the information that yes, I am here, in my life, and these people are all around me. But the mind will not accept this absurdity as reality.

The mind says no, dreamer, you are merely an observer. Those people think you are here with them, but you know otherwise. Yes, that is your voice. But you are not really speaking. In that time, for me, there was only one reality, and it was there - with that moment - with the tiny person in my arms and my husband's arms around the two of us. That was all there was. For me, the "baby-moon" was as engulfing and wonderful as the honeymoon had been.

And then, gradually, each time, the mist cleared and the mind cleared, and the mind once more made contact with the brain, and out into the sunshine I emerged, full of the boundless optimism of Life's eternal youth once more. The water ran from my face and hair and eyes, into the pool all around me, and I found that I was breathing air just like everybody else. And someone beside me was crawling out of the pool, and someone above me was getting ready to jump. Oh, it so good to be young and alive and bringing life into Life ... and to know it.

Now - today - I wonder something.

See, I had thought that this was an experience of youth. I knew - over and over - not just with the babies - I knew the scramble and the rocks slipping under the soles of my shoes and the fraction of a second where I am about to fall off the path and into the ravine - and then I don't ... I knew the awareness of a plunge into nothing and a burial in the deep, cold waters ... and I knew the burst of glory into the light and air ... I knew, when I was young (that is what it means to be young), the wonder of the sun on my face when I realized again that yes, I was breathing the same air as everyone else. When I was young, I knew how to die and rise again.

But I thought that I was done with that. I thought that since that is what it means to be young, I was done with that. I thought that was what it meant to grow up.

But today I wonder. Perhaps this is the fount of youth. Perhaps Life is made entirely of deaths and resurrections. Maybe I will be jumping off the rocks when I am very old.

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.