tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10519803544393893322024-03-13T05:16:52.565-07:00Splinter and BoneBeing Broken. Being healed.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger18125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1051980354439389332.post-32554666355424011192016-01-23T19:36:00.000-08:002016-02-01T18:35:26.716-08:00Fire in the Sky, or Trailer Court Lessons on Race<div>
About race: my parents, grandparents, pastor and teachers all had lessons they tried to teach me about it. They taught me lessons called "Inevitable" or "Irreparable" or "Institutional, but...." But not, Race. Not a personal problem, if I don't say N******, if I treat everyone with dignity, if I see beyond appearance. They tried to teach me what they wanted assurance of: "Exculpated."<br />
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Those lessons backfired. They fed my contrarian habit of thought. If they got the lessons about personhood wrong, I was free to doubt all the other moralisms they tried to teach me. It took Ta-Nehisi Coates' to give words to that truth, which he did in <i>Between the World and Me: </i></div>
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<i><br /></i></div>
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"Dreamers reap what they had sown, we would reap it right with them. Plunder has matured into habit and addiction; the people who could author the mechanized death of our ghettos, the mass rape of private prisons, then engineer their own forgetting, must inevitably plunder much more. This is not a belief in prophecy but in the seductiveness of cheap gasoline....Dreamers... plunder not just the bodies of humans but the body of the Earth itself. The Earth is not our creation. It has no respect for us. It has no use for us. And its vengeance is not the fire in the cities but the fire in the sky."</blockquote>
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<div style="text-align: center;">
*****</div>
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Once on a Saturday night, my father pulled me over onto his lap and let me steer past my grandparent's olive green house. My grandfather named the road for himself, Bade Drive, and owned the only home, a standard American model with three bedrooms, no central air, one-car garage, on a basement in our trailer court. It seemed like a mansion compared to the trailer in which we lived. I felt my father's right leg moderate the gas pedal, so that we drove the car like a riding mower. With the power of the wheel in my hands, I felt like the reigning princess of a kingdom. One of the grandkids of the park owner. Special.<br />
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My grandfather took pride in his fiefdom. Enormous concrete pots spilled out flowers he planted himself. He owned two barns, a tractor and a cadre of small machines which my dad and uncles used to keep the roads black and dust-free. He built shelters for everyone's mailboxes on a patio so the mail deliverer could slide all but packages into slots in the back. Although it was illegal, he could slide in the lot-lease reminders as well. He made a shelter for all the kids who rode the bus, which was not me, because my parents homeschooled us. I didn't have to shelter with the freckled red-heads, the blondies, the nut-browns, the bleach-blonds, all those white-skinned kids who kicked me around after school for being different.<br />
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I thought being the princess of the kingdom made me their target. Yet, I knew the truth. I wasn't a princess. We didn't own the land on which our house sat any more than any other family in the park. In fact, we didn't even call our trailer park <i>neighborhood. </i>My grandmother called it a trailer court and my grandfather planted more flowers and called it a park.<br />
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And, I grew up learning bit by bit that my dad worked off the break on lease fees when he plowed the streets for my grandfather in the middle of the night, whether he had a shift at seven am or not. I learned that a body could own her dwelling without rights to land beneath. This lesson contradicted the narratives I read in history and heard elsewhere. As a result I learned to unthink- or maybe just to worry less about- the Dream.<br />
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Because my grandfather protected us, dealt bountifully with us, I decided we must be more like Chief Tecumseh and the Shawnee I read about on our Indiana history mugs. Each told the tale of the Indiana Territory- Mad Anthony Wayne, our city's founding father, and Chief Tecumseh, his rival. I'd read those narratives enough, evaluated them over shirley temple eggs, eggs on toast, scrambled eggs and pancakes that I found Mad Anthony and the white man's clutching at land superfluous. A body could live in a place without possessing it. We were fine. Our neighbors seemed content. We had our bikes and El Dorados under tarps. We had our bullies and hung-over single moms, the lady with emphysema. My best friend ate Cookie Crisp for breakfast, Boo Berry after school, let me sneak into her house for cartoons with her and never ratted me out. My parents told me not to go in there, not to disturb her dad, a Vietnam vet who slept odd hours but kept the house and curb spickety-span while his wife brought home the bacon. I didn't know what PTSD was then. We just weren't supposed to make loud noises.</div>
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When did I realize the truth?</div>
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My father never grumbled about what my grandfather exacted- okay, maybe once, but "Dad gets tired, Maria," my mother explained.<br />
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My mother could not explain why she had to turn away the neighbors when the three tornados touched down near us.<br />
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"Get back under the mattress," mom ordered. But I couldn't My best friend, her little sister, her mother and few other mothers and children in tow stood on our porch. They needed help. They saw a danger we didn't. Mom had us under mattresses in the hallway.<br />
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"What should we do if they turn our way?" The other moms pleaded. "Please, can't we go to your dad's house to the basement? Can't you call him?" I don't remember my mom's replies. I remember her silent despairing inability to help. I remember seeing one twister, a kind of ribbon shadow stirring smoky dust at the touchdown, off in the distance. I remember ordering my younger siblings to "get back under the mattresses in the hall." I remember that at some point after she closed the front door, my mom mumbled about what the radio squawked. Two more tornadoes had grounded President Reagan's Air Force One on the tarmac at the Air Force Reserve Base. It was two miles away as the bomber flies. I think my mother muttered something about staying put, somethings about sheltering in place being good enough for the president and good enough for the owner's daughter.<br />
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"Should we go to Grandpa's? To the basement?" She didn't answer. She shook with fear or anger, I'll never know.<br />
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We couldn't, I gathered. Not because grandpa would turn away his daughters but because the neighborhood would follow us and he'd turn them away. I remember something about it being <i>a Christian thing to do. </i>Whatever that meant.<br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">
*****</div>
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Between our park and the neighborhood stood an tight arborvitae fence, tall and old. My parents said we should never ever sneak through and trespass. Sometimes, I wound a tight running line close on the other side or hid in the greens. It hurt my conscience to flirt with disobedience like that. But what was on the other side?<br />
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"Black people," my friends told me. "That's where the black kids live and they are all in gangs at school." I wouldn't know since I didn't go to school. "They are so mean on the bus, Maria. You wouldn't like them." My aunt transferred her boys to our church school so that they wouldn't have to be around black kids.<br />
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A few months after the tornadoes, a new menace had a couple of the neighborhood dads banging on our door after eleven on a Saturday night. Mom and Dad stood at the door, asking them to keep down their voices.<br />
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"A black spook with a butcher knife is running crazy through the neighborhood. Call your father-in-law, Pete." Mom said, "Pete, don't. Just call the police." Instead he called the brothers-in-law and told the men to go home. He didn't want a posse of white men trawling the trailer court for something was literally a spook or a woman defending herself.<br />
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I made up delicious tales for my friends the next day. We congregated on my red porch, the only trailer with a big porch, a motherly maple and a park-sized swing set on the lot. We had the best lot in the park, so even red-headed bullies had to kiss up to me from time-to-time. When my father figured large in saving the park from dangerous black women because he was the owner's son-in-law, all the kids had to come to me for the scoop. Of course my dad and uncles would take care of it, I assured them. My dad, the hero. But when my dad heard me talking "too big for your britches, Maria" he sent me inside where my mom rebuked me gently for gossip.<br />
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"But, she was real. People saw her. Other people's dads. Why didn't we call Grandpa or the police if she was real?" I asked.<br />
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"We never found her. We did let your Grandpa know, had to," my dad said. "They are just afraid of black people."<br />
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The kids had scattered when my dad sent me inside. Having cleared my way to the only version of the truth my parents would give me, I worked out my thoughts alone on the red porch. I felt full of big thoughts. Were we, our family- my parents and such- afraid of black people? Last night, was my dad of a black woman, crazy with knife? What about my uncle whose boys went to the church school to get away from black kids? What did my cousins and relatives think of the one black family in our church. I played with their daughter. My dad joked around with the dad, who preached much shorter and more interesting sermons when our pastor wanted a week off. So why did my parents order me never to trespass the greens into Crown Colony? Were they afraid of gangs and black people? Did they think old folks would be mean to me? (Probably. I didn't know how curmudgeonly some could be). We had to stay in our park and come to think of it, we had no <i>Orientals </i>on this side. No Spanish. No black people. </div>
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"Are there mostly black people in Crown Colony?" I tried for a bit of fact checking my parents. "I didn't see them when I had delivered newspapers," which my father had allowed while my cousin went to camp. One of the parents followed me sleepily while I threw papers towards front doors in the pre-dawn light. I saw only old people, shuffling down driveways between green lawns, plastic daisies, faded tulips, hedgerows. My mother shrugged. She couldn't say. </div>
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According to my friends, the place was crawling with "blacks." I just had to see for myself. "You've only seen people in the early morning. Only old people are up then. Ride your bike with me. You'll see them." I wanted to see these people. I didn't have a television and only my one friend with her baby sister. I wanted to see the people my friends wanted nothing to do with. I needed truth, so I peddled further out, faster and longer on the clean white paved roads of Crown Colony. The unseen black people must be richer than us, like my church friend. They had things I didn't to keep them inside: televisions, cable, instant cereal to keep them inside.</div>
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Why don't black people live over here on our side, I asked my cousins. My parents never provided a satisfying explanation.</div>
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"Oh, Grandpa screens them out. He screens out all the dangerous people," my cousins educated me.<br />
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When my friends and cousins were at school, I pondered that on the red porch, my legs dangling off the side, kicking the skirting around our trailer.<br />
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That's not right, is it? Grandpa wouldn't do that, would he? That would make him a racist wouldn't it? Racist. A taint.<br />
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Why would Grandpa screen people out, I asked. I think my father gave a cagey reply. "I wouldn't do that, Maria. That's all I can say."<br />
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<br /></div>
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Next time...</div>
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</div>
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2. Don't marry a black man and I'll tell you why...</div>
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and after that, Dr. King wasn't a national hero because he cheated on his wife.</div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1051980354439389332.post-78180080825644013822015-12-01T18:32:00.002-08:002015-12-01T18:32:06.583-08:00Dear Mr. Berry<h3 class="post-title entry-title" itemprop="name" style="background-color: #fff9ee; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, Utopia, 'Palatino Linotype', Palatino, serif; font-size: 24px; font-stretch: normal; font-weight: normal; margin: 0.75em 0px 0px; position: relative;">
Dear Mr. Berry</h3>
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My husband wrote you, and you wrote back. Thank you. He wrote you on behalf of my despair. He wrote you because I graduated from a lovely little school, the one where Rachel Carson studied, out in Pittsburgh. I proved I was a writer by generating copious words, hundreds of pages, and defending those words. The paper next to my desk says I have a Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing. But I feel like a fraud. My thesis needs extensive re-working to be publishable, and a writer is a writer in two ways, as one who answers the call within her heart to put words to paper, and as one who revises her texts because writing requires discipline. What that paper whispers to me is this: "You can put lots of words on a white blank space." I have yet to prove if I can make those words artful, as artful as I admire in your writing.<br /><br />Thank you for writing back.<br /><br />This sounds sentimental but when I ask my high school students who they'd invite to a dinner party, I give them my list to get them thinking. You are on that list. If I could choose from among the living and dead, I'd invite Flannery O'Connor, Marilynne Robinson, Brian Doyle, Barbara Kingsolver, and Scott Russell Sanders. You all come to mind first because of something I talked about with Mr Sanders during my first summer residency for my MFA. I said I loved <i>Hannah Coulter </i>and<i>Jayber Crow</i>, but the first time I read <i>Hannah Coulter</i> I kept expecting something to happen. By that, I meant I expected you to manipulate her circumstances to "sex up" the plot. Please excuse the common parlance. When you confounded me by writing a novel that made me feel I'd sat with my friend's grandmother for several enjoyable hours, I felt resurrected. Your term. God's term. The one you used at the end of one of my favorite poems, <a href="http://ag.arizona.edu/~steidl/Liberation.html" style="color: #888888; text-decoration: none;">"The Mad Farmer Manifesto."</a> I stumbled around trying to articulate this to Mr. Sanders, and he took my ideas and lifted them to the heavens like a priest offering them as Eucharist. "He writes about fidelity," said Mr. Sanders and that's the hard thing to do. When I left that residency, I intended to write about how hard it was to love Mary, the Mother of God, because I converted from Protestantism to Orthodox Christianity and I am supposed to be devoted to her. -- I confess, she scares me. She has her stuff together. I am, again in common parlance, more of a hot mess after that two years earning that MFA than I was beforehand.<br /><br />Which is why I want to say how important it was for you to write back.<br /><br />My husband knew you would. Here's how.<br /><br />You trade sheep with Adam Moody of Moody Meats. His daughter Rachel once wrote you about raising young boys. She treasures the letter you wrote back to her.<br /><br />One of Adam's employees Josh met you. Another, Justin met you. They told me that you have such a generous heart that you sometimes entertain perfect strangers like we are angels. You do this in due season and when it works.<br /><br />And, Mr. Sanders said he's met you several times. He spoke fondly of you.<br /><br />I hope I meet you someday, on terra or in heaven. In <i>The Great Divorce</i>, C.S. Lewis meets George MacDonald, his literary hero. I hope I stroll past them on my way through sharp, bright, dangerous place where God's love burns and I find you there.<br /><br />Thank you for writing back in your handwriting. I should return the favor. I type this because my mind races with every thought I want to share with you. I pray this missive does not read like diarrhea of the pen.<br /><br />I feel ashamed because the first essay I ever read by you,<a href="http://home.btconnect.com/tipiglen/berrynot.html" style="color: #888888; text-decoration: none;"> "Why I Am Not Going To Buy A Computer,"</a> chastised me. I'd been teaching high school language arts for an on-line school for a couple of years. The computer distracted me, divided me, kept me working, sometimes with thirty tabs open. I'd be texting someone, using a cyber-meeting room and have a phone ringing in my ear. When I finished those long days, I couldn't touch a phone. I should have slammed shut my laptop lid but Facebook, this horrible social networking tool, connected me to the people outside my house. It became my drug. I learned to think and write so many words so fast through fingers that tap keys like I imagine someone can read Braille.<br /><br />Here I am tapping out this letter to you. I think I should do what Doris Lessing character does in <i>The Golden Notebook. </i>I should scrawl this out until my wrist aches, and I have a flat spot on my thumb. The computer tabs are distractions. I lack focus most of the time. I open tabs and stumble around reading<i> The Atlantic</i>,<i>The New Yorker</i>, or some Washington Post article, looking up recipes, or ordering supplies. I read your article and thought about those old days when I lived and wrote closer to the rhythm of reality. You wrote in your article that you work with horses. I smelled their dusty musk. Hot dirt, a hint of horse pucky. I smelled the cucumber-crisp air that wisps into my room because I sleep with the window open most of the year. I rubbed my empty hand and remembered the way the horses at a nearby ranch leave a film of body oil on my palm after I run their necks or coil their manes in my fingers.<br /><br />I need to write like that, close to dark and light, dirt and dust, heat and cold. The blandness of temperature and the unsatisfying pursuit of a teaching career remind me that I live in a zoo. My controlled environment with easy meat bores me. I write words without the fidelity of meaning.<br /><br />Thank you for writing back to tell my husband that you don't have much advice for a writer so discouraged she cannot write. "If she wants to write, she will." Admonishment of the kindest sort.<br /><br />I've been writing since I was a teenager. At fourteen, after my parents with help from my grandfather and even us, the kids, built a home with our own hands, I took to sneaking off to write. As the oldest, I had to sneak away from chores and distractions. It didn't happen often, maybe a couple times a week. I'd fill my canteen with our sweet well-water. I stacked several mechanical pencils, a college-ruled spiral notebook and my cassette walkman with headphones. I balanced them with an apple and my 35mm instant camera on my left arm and snuck out the back door, a wood-framed screen door that had to be eased closed, or my mother might hear its sloppy whack and call me back. I'd creep like a settler through the woods to a remote concrete bridge and lay on it, cold in the off-season, hot in the summer, while penning poems or ranting about parents. I finished stories started at my desk that morning.<br /><br />I am writing again about that place. I'm reworking portions of my thesis, about the young years when my little sister Naomi Ruth slept at my feet while we built the house, about her desire to live closer to the earth, or rather to be buried naturally in it. She is thirty and surviving stage four cancer. Writing about her cancer, about the natural cemetery our church has initiated, about living and dying closer to our natures, that is the story to which I'm trying to be true. Writing about it leaves me broken sometimes.<br /><br />I write you all these words because I wish I could redeem myself as a writer. I want to write something worth reading some day. It's a compulsion. I sometimes rebel. I want you to read this, but I know it's because I'm self-conscious that you might think I'm one of those writers who wants her name in lights, or on the cover of a book, at any cost. I don't. I want to write one thing worth reading. One thing about fidelity. One story with substance and style. I want to write one story, even slowly that does what your poems, essays, and stories have done for me. They've reminded me that living simply rewards me best. It expands my heart with gratitude, faithfulness, simplicity. Things of real value.<br /><br />Thank you for writing me back. I've wanted to tell you how much your work has changed me. Now I have a reason.</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1051980354439389332.post-18542661798239744402015-10-20T16:05:00.003-07:002015-10-20T16:05:48.528-07:00If you are not safe in the tub...<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/92/1902_bath_illustration.png/800px-1902_bath_illustration.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/92/1902_bath_illustration.png/800px-1902_bath_illustration.png" width="247" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span class="mw-mmv-author" style="background-color: whitesmoke; color: #555555; font-family: sans-serif; line-height: 24.48px; text-align: start;">H.C. White Co Publishers, North Bennington, Vt., U.S.A.</span><span style="background-color: whitesmoke; color: #555555; font-family: sans-serif; line-height: 24.48px; text-align: start;"> - </span><span class="mw-mmv-source" style="background-color: whitesmoke; color: #555555; font-family: sans-serif; line-height: 24.48px; text-align: start;">Stereocard by H. C. White & Co. Via Library of Congress </span></span></td></tr>
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Then where are you safe?<br />
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One reason I fell in love with my 1874 Victorian was the claw-foot tub in the bathroom. At the bottom of the iron, the white porcelain has been scoured thin, leaving a gray trail. It hints at hardships this tub and this house have survived.<br />
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While we waited interminable days to offer, counter offer, close and take possession, I dreamed of solitary baths, deep in the tub, water and bubbles burying me. The gush of water swirling into my ear canals, shutting out noise. Children could thrash at the door but in water that deep, I would be a mermaid. I wish I could say I've actualized as many baths as I've fantasized. I've probably curled up in that dry tub hiding behind the white curtains that drape from above.<br />
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One curls in a tub because it's in the bathroom. The biological urgency of the bathroom protects a mother from reacting to the forces outside the walls. Children can slap each other. They can slam doors. They can swallow gallons of sugar. Bills can seep out of the bill drawer. Doorbells can ring. Fists strike wood. Timers chime. When sadness consumes a person, we stream silent tears and reply with cheer, <i>I'll be out momentarily.</i><br />
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When my tears turn to heaves, I cover them with the stream of shower water. I stand in the water naked, and steam sucks the fabric to my legs. Seer-sucking mildew stained shower curtains want to hug me when I want least to be touched. Don't even caress me. Sometimes, I don't want a kind look. I want to my disfigured aging body in a mirror and hate it. Only, I don't. I stand in the stream, beating myself up for the waste of water. I get out when I've washed the salt off.<br />
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I timed myself out in the bathroom of last resort. Timeout began after I stomped up the stairs, glass in hand, and holler on the lungs. My mother would have called my hollering <i>a pity party</i> and an angry one, at that. I threw my glass into the tub, hoping its tall walls would capture to the wave of glass, spraying like bullets from the ball turret gunner's bay.<br />
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Glass waved up and pushed past the curtains. I stood in shards, barefoot, and sobered immediately.<br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">
*****</div>
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"What I couldn't figure out last night," my husband paused, "is why there was glass in the tub?"</div>
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"Oh, really. There was. I thought I got it all cleaned up."</div>
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"Well, I cleaned out the rest," he said. We said no more because we were brittle. I went to bed without apologies for the fit, without resolving the conflict. My daughter had knocked on the door. <i>Goodnight</i>, I said to dismiss her. I sound fake cheerful. My husband begged to talk about the issues. I told him I put myself in timeout. We'd talk later.</div>
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"Was there glass in the bottom of the tub last night?" My son asked. </div>
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"Why?" </div>
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"I got glass stuck in my foot when I showered."</div>
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"I'm sorry. I thought I had it all cleaned up."</div>
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*****</div>
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<a href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a1/Air_Ministry_Second_World_War_Official_Collection_CI1028.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="147" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a1/Air_Ministry_Second_World_War_Official_Collection_CI1028.jpg" width="200" /></a>I thought they'd heard the whole tantrum. The flask ricocheted a thousand shards that would later embed in my son's feet. I washed out the tub. Like blood, some stuck in the pocks of porcelain. </div>
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Our thoughts are material, scientists now believe. The material has a kind of consciousness. Genes and compounds react and relate in proximity, not even when mixed. Between what we think and atoms, another substance influences reality. Saint Porphyrious must have had premonitions of this when he wrote in <i>Wounded by Love:</i></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Palatino, Georgia, 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 14.4px;">Man has such powers that he can transmit good or evil to his environment. These matters are very delicate. Great care is needed. We need to see everything in a positive frame of mind. We mustn’t think anything evil about others. Even a simple glance or a sigh influences those around us. And even the slightest anger or indignation does harm....</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Palatino, Georgia, 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 14.4px;">When we speak evil about someone, an evil power proceeds from within us and is transmitted to the other person, just as the voice is transmitted on sound waves, and in point of fact the other person suffers evil.</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Palatino, Georgia, 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 14.4px;"> <a href="http://orthodoxinfo.com/praxis/elderporphyrios_dispositions.aspx">(Excerpt reprinted here)</a></span></blockquote>
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An act of war. I committed such an act of war, in private isolation in the one place I thought I was safe to bury my evil. I thought my warring disposition would eek out its catharsis without true harm. But evil power transmitted. My son suffered glass. I became the ball turret gunner casualty of war, aggressor, dead myself. For causing suffering in another killed me.<br />
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No man is an island, entire unto himself," writes John Donne. Spiritual kill causes suffering and suffering diminishes me, more so when I am the cause.<br />
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Photo Credits:<br />
<span style="font-size: xx-small;">Ball Turret Gunner, Public Domain. <span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="mw-mmv-author" style="background-color: whitesmoke; color: #555555; line-height: 24.48px;">Royal Air Force official photographer</span><span style="background-color: whitesmoke; color: #555555; line-height: 24.48px;"> - </span><span class="mw-mmv-source" style="background-color: whitesmoke; color: #555555; line-height: 24.48px;"><a class="external free" href="http://media.iwm.org.uk/iwm/mediaLib//55/media-55317/large.jpg" rel="nofollow" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: initial; background-image: none; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;">http://media.iwm.org.uk/iwm/mediaLib//55/media-55317/large.jpg</a> <span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: none; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial;"><a class="image" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:IWMLondonThumbnail.jpg" style="background: none; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;"></a></span>This is photograph <a class="external text" href="http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/205212349" rel="nofollow" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: initial; background-image: none; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;">CI 1028</a>from the collections of the <a class="external text" href="http://www.iwm.org.uk/" rel="nofollow" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: initial; background-image: none; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;">Imperial War Museums</a>. </span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: xx-small;"><span class="mw-mmv-source" style="background-color: whitesmoke; color: #555555; line-height: 24.48px;">Woman bathing, 1902. Public domain. Reprinted on Wikicommons. </span></span><span style="color: #555555; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: xx-small;"><span style="line-height: 24.48px;">https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Bathtubs#/media/File:1902_bath_illustration.png</span></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1051980354439389332.post-76156650370791677032015-09-23T19:12:00.001-07:002015-09-23T19:12:06.661-07:00Murder Most Foul, some disconnected thoughts and quotes.<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-small;">Twas my last year at Purdue University and a pro-life group gathered outside the English hall with six foot tall signs printed with photos of severed bodies that in truth are the size of a dime. They meant... something. I want to be able to say, "They meant well." Even I, a seamless garment pro-lifer, against capital punishment, euthanasia, war, suicide, assisted suicide, and abortion, puked in my throat, choked and thought, "this will only wound, not heal."</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-small;">Dr. King wrote the words </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-small;">The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral,<br />begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy.<br />Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it.<br />Through violence you may murder the liar,<br />but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish the truth.<br />Through violence you may murder the hater,<br />but you do not murder hate.<br />In fact, violence merely increases hate.<br />So it goes.<br />Returning violence for violence multiplies violence,<br />adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars.<br />Darkness cannot drive out darkness:<br />only light can do that.<br />Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-small;">Sara Manguso wrote in <i>Guardians: An Elegy for a Friend, </i>that her friend's suicide made that option unavailable to her. I keep asking when that option will be unavailable to me. These times try my soul. Last weekend I found the most elegiac place to die. And today, on my run, I saw myself, like Judas, running headlong off the cliff to dash myself against the stone. What does being against all violence look like?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-small;">Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that, wrote Dr. King. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-small;">The light has shone in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it, wrote St. John of our Lord, the true Word who saves.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-small;">Last night, I broached the topic of the materiality of our thoughts, which Elder-now-Saint Porphyrios talks about in <i>Wounded by Love. </i>Elder Zaccharias wrote a whole book <i>Our Thoughts Determine our Lives. </i>The podcast <i>Invisibilia </i> explored this from a scientific standpoint. I encountered Emerson's quote at the outset of "Self-Reliance" -- and here we are. What does it mean to wish that our brother gets his just-desserts? What does it mean to hate? To hate ourselves or another? </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-small;"><span style="background-color: white;">That quote from Emerson in "Self-Reliance:" Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for the inmost in due time becomes the outmost,—— and our first thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the Last Judgment.</span><span style="background-color: white;"> --</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-small;">From <i>Wounded By Love,</i> select quotes on materiality and danger in judgmental thoughts.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; line-height: 19.32px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-small;">"Above everything is love. The thing that must concern you, my children, is love for the other person, of this soul. Whatever we do, whether it is prayer or offering advice or pointing out some error, let us do it with love. Without love prayer is of no benefit, advice is hurtful and pointing out errors is harmful and destructive to the other person who senses whether we love him or not and reacts accordingly. Love, love, love! Love for our brother prepares us to love Christ more. Isn’t that perfect? Let us scatter our love selflessly to all, without regard to the way they act towards us." [p. 181]</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-small;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; line-height: 19.32px;">Let’s have love, meekness and peace. In that way we help our brother when he is possessed by evil. Our example radiates mystically, and not only when the person is present, but also when he is not. Let us strive to radiate our good will. Even when we say something about a person whose way of life does not meet with our approval, the person is aware of it and we repel him. Whereas, if we are compassionate and forgive him then we influence him — just as evil influences him — even if he does not see us.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; line-height: 19.32px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; line-height: 19.32px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; line-height: 19.32px;">We shouldn’t be enraged by people who blaspheme or who speak and act against God and the Church. Such rage is harmful. We may hate the words and the malice behind them, but we must not hate the person who spoke them nor become enraged against him. Rather we should pray for him. A Christian has love and graciousness and should behave accordingly.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; line-height: 19.32px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-small;">What will make suicide unavailable to me? Self-annihilation. For there brothers and sisters annihilated daily by no will of their own. When I go, Dear Lord, let it be under the wheels of this dark age, in place of another who needed to go on.</span></span></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1051980354439389332.post-2969523265962961052015-09-17T19:30:00.002-07:002015-09-17T19:30:13.923-07:00It's been a week, folks I wrote an essay that started as a poem years ago, called King Tut's Nubian and now I refer you to it because it provides context for this post.<br />
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It's been a week, folks. Usually on weeks like this, I look for full moons, but I've been grading till wee hours of the morning and too depressed to get out of bed for my usual dawnbreak runs. I'm not superstitious but I believe in magnetic forces. Some include:<br />
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<li>I've worked and worked and worked to grade and conference with all my students so they can be successful at 11th grade writing standards.-- I internalize all these messages about teachers who don't try enough. Try this. Try carrying between 220 and 300 students on your gradebook. Do the math on reading papers carefully, holding them against a rubric and knowing that 70% of first drafts don't meet higher than a D standard. Not proficient. Now, I have to help these kids see this without robbing their dignity and help them see how to fix it. That takes conferences. Conferences take time. Right after they turn in their papers, my school -- a virtual school where kids do most work from home without me or a parent there -- assigns the unit test. If they didn't give half a rat's buttcheek on the paper, they gave less to the test. Even they are fried. One of my team members resigned. And we'd just welcomed a teacher to drop our loads from three hundred to two hundred. Now what?</li>
<li>My daughter seems alone at school and had a tough summer. I'm a worried momma. I want her happy. When I have a week like this, I almost hold my breath to hear who will have cancer, more cancer, more double-toil-and-trouble. Maybe it's the disturbance in the force, coming from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, most of the Middle East. </li>
<li>It was the Elevation of the Cross Feast. This is the feast where we read the OT story about the Jewish people looking upon the snake on the staff to be saved and we are reminded to look at the Cross at Christ upon it. Huh. Every year something overwhelms me and I'm caught looking up at the Cross with the same desperation. It's no cheeky easy solution. I look at it with anger and hurt and sneering. So, God. Why again?</li>
<li>And, I just get depressed. Regularly and more so as the years go by. I've always been depressed. Now, I get panic attacks and depression. </li>
<li>My health issues flared up enough that I had to crash my dear friends' home tonight on a run and beg to use her loo. She rescued me cheerfully. I love you, dear friend. I've only done that two other times in the eight years I've been running. It's so humiliating. Not as humiliating as pooing yourself in the middle of a half-marathon though. That's worse. Oh, dear dear GI.</li>
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In that, I spent one whole day rebuffing all the love my husband and son gave me. Backrub, mom? I shrugged it off. Eye-contact, darling? Couldn't make it. I slinked up and down stairs without so much as a hello.</div>
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But why acid-burn others with my despair? So I told my husband I'd try to kick around in the dark for my big girl knickers. He came alongside me. God should give that man a medal when we get to heaven. He's put up with me for over twenty years. I told him it could get bad way back, while we were still dating. Neither of us knew how crappy I'd get, literally and metaphorically. Lots of couples don't make it. If anyone asks how we do, I point at him. And God, and some friends.</div>
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Like my friends Luke and Janna. On the anniversary of their Aiden's death, they wrote me, not I them. Luke sent a playlist which I pulled up when I went for a prescription jog. That's where I pretend I popped an anti-depressant and I turn up music <i>loud </i>and run. Hard.</div>
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<i>I tried that again tonight but there was the poo thing. TMI? Just wait till I write about my colonoscopy next week. This is my third in a decade. The docs hate me because I never go fully under anesthesia. I start a conversation just when they think I'm out. It weirds them.</i></div>
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Luke wrote a great blog tonight, so this response is really a push for you to go to his post <a href="http://www.lukebeecham.com/2015/09/sorrow-shrapnel-a-d/">"Sorrow, Shrapnel, and A-D." </a>Read it. He wrote about Aiden's death, about losing his other (god) kids, about his own struggles with anxiety and despair. As I read his words, I thought of last spring, when one of my fellow parishioners stopped to scrape me off the sidewalk. I'd sat down there so light-headed from my panic attack that I thought I'd lose consciousness and fall into the road. I thought of Luke and Janna's quiet way of being. These people not only save my life, they exemplify what happens when we get up and keep going. In Luke's words,<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="text-align: center;">
<i>"In doing so, I have also discovered that most of the people I have looked to for my own inspiration are deeply flawed and hurt individuals themselves, but more importantly, those who allowed their pain to help shape them by dealing with the sorrow shrapnel as it surfaced, and letting Grace, as U2 says so well, “…make beauty out of ugly things.” </i></blockquote>
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So here's to a brother and a family in Christ who are like brothers and sisters. To a friend whose birthday is today and knows what it's like to fight melancholy and care for people with mental illness. To another friend whose family struggles with mental illness. To the friend who parents an autistic child and lets us into her house every week to see what we can learn from it. To siblings and siblings-in-law who let me fall apart and give sound responses. I'm not calling you out to embarrass you. I owe my life to you. I owe my life to the friend parenting a recovering cutter and alcoholic. I owe another friend, facing divorce with shrapnel and grace. I owe cousins, uncles, and siblings with cancer and mental illness who keep on soldiering for Christ. When I'm rooting around for my big girl knickers, hoping they say it's saturday, I turn up my music and keep the beat. Maybe tomorrow I'll have slept enough to scrape you up when you need it. Maybe. I hope so.<br />
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I owe all to my God who in the words of Saint Symeon the New Theologian, "k<span style="font-family: 'times new roman';">nows the multitude of my evil-doings."</span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">
<i><span style="font-family: 'times new roman';"> You also know my wounds, and You see my bruises.</span>But You also know my faith, and You behold my willingness, and You hear my sighs.<br />Nothing escapes You, my God, my Maker, my Redeemer, not even a tear-drop, nor part of a drop.<br />Your eyes know what I have not achieved, and in Your book things not yet done are written by You.<br /><span style="font-family: 'times new roman';">See my depression, and see how great is my trouble: </span></i></blockquote>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1051980354439389332.post-80141878354264127132015-09-17T18:26:00.000-07:002015-09-17T18:45:28.911-07:00King Tut's NubianWhile we lived in Pennsylvania, I took my middle school daughter to see the King Tut's Exhibit. We paid a pretty penny to wander for an hour among gilt sarcophagi and intricate jewelry. Within a few minutes, Layla raced ahead of me, bored as myself but so childlike she didn't care to get her money's worth.<br />
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Take away the glittering neon and the homage to the Pharoah felt a bit like our visit to Times Square. Oh, look at what rich people stock pile. Look what happens to it after they die. Meh. I lingered to get my money's worth, like a girl trying to savor a six-dollar slice of cheesecake while the scent of NY trash wafts by.<br />
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Not that the Tut exhibit smelled of dust. But there was no head-heart connection. I couldn't conjure the wonder at what the powerful do with their wealth. Only one piece impassioned me. Without the Nubian staff to snag my imagination, I might have felt like any children's museum in the country had as good a replica.<br />
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<a href="http://news.nationalgeographic.com/content/dam/news/2015/04/24/achaeologygallery/4_archeologygallery_nationalgeographic_1347944.ngsversion.1430201205638.adapt.768.1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://news.nationalgeographic.com/content/dam/news/2015/04/24/achaeologygallery/4_archeologygallery_nationalgeographic_1347944.ngsversion.1430201205638.adapt.768.1.jpg" height="320" width="240" /></a>That Nubian girl, fashioned at the curve of the staff head, fluttered in my sensations. I had a kind of synethesia in the back of my head. She looked first like a dancer or mermaid splashing with such perfect grace, such beauty in her back bend. She was in a copper dress. Her shoulders squared. She was anguishingly slender, beautiful to behold and the longer I admired her the greater my confusion of pain and sweetness. The perfect curve from crown of her noble head, her brow, her nose, her lips, that chin, all more lovely than I remembered Barbies and ballerina dancers, I stared until she became the truth and horror. She looked without looking. She hides pain behind beauty and pride. Tut had bent her to breaking. She held hands behind her shoulder blades and copper links hind her upper arms. Her hands were turned back, Her thumbs she folded as if her muscles seized. Powerless.<br />
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The sign said Tut had this staff fashioned to show he'd bent the backs of the noble race of Nubians who marched against him. He destroyed their dignity by making them his slaves and bending them to breaking. Because he wished it. Because he had the power.<br />
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I began to cry as I cry. Not sobs. Not weeping. A mere swollen eye. Burning salt. A wounding. Looking up on her pain felt like seeing myself as I felt doing my job.<br />
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She was my poetry. The metaphor of me. I would have broken the glass in a fantasy, stolen her, taken her to a farrier and begged him to give her enough warm to be made straight again. I could no more straighten her than I can or have straightened me. I am still such a slave.<br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1051980354439389332.post-74646296876972976222015-09-10T18:11:00.004-07:002015-09-15T09:17:46.618-07:00Dust When we passed into Mexico, south of Chula Vista in July, my husband looked around and saw that it was beautiful. All that God created.<br />
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Until we crossed the border the teenagers in our van -- a <i>SKV </i> they called it, which stood for serial killer van -- looked out onto a concrete Euphrates flowing south to Tijuana. They looked upon the fish. Chevies. Mercedes. Audis. Sonatas. CRV's. They looked out of the side-slanted windows, into the eyes of these animals. Carp. Guppies. Druggies. Warlords. Boreds. Gangstas. Smugglers. Mothers. The collective teenage consciousness in our white whale looked out on the paradise my husband saw and declared it rife with weakness and duplicitous motives.<br />
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North of the border boasted the best of human superiority. Grand villas. Manicured. Landscaped. Cultivated. Controlled. Balanced. South of the border broadcast the <i>bildungsroman </i>of humankind. On its way to civilization, greatness mashed against trash. Homes founded on piles of tires. Towers of hotels arrested a floor or two short. Rebar crowns and tin slips, pavement dying away to dust. Below the cat calling billboards -- <i>autoplastía, anaplastía, abogado immigracíon, -- </i>men walk down the dust between our highway and the eyesore of concrete and wire between us and them.<br />
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"Really?" I am flabbergasted. "Why do you think it's beautiful?" But the kids jabber too loud to answer and he's soaking up the vista. And calling it beautiful.<br />
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The square mile looks the same as it did when I saw it first four years ago. I drove a rented guppy with my daughter in the front passenger seat, two boys from our Midwestern church in the backseat. The guppy's transmission choked on dust. I prayed the white whale in front wouldn't race away from us, The white whale behind us would let us be a barnacle on its nose if this transmission failed. I divided my energy between observation, the art of a writer, and driving, the responsibility of a team leader.<br />
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To be fair, the first trip into Tijuana was 2011. Even our town in Indiana looked like hell. 2008 came, stole our bread, stole our factories. Thrifty scared and bored, people in our town built labs in their attics for cash and entertainment. Our century's version of a still, my generation's version of hooch kills as many of us, or more. Houses blow up, or burn. Back home our main street looked like an abandoned Western town. The saloons, the lawyers, insurance agencies, pawnbrokers, tanning shops and motley folks put out their wares. Mostly everything looked beautifully abandoned.<br />
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Imagine Tijuana in that. In Mexico during the crisis, the government made the Tortilla Act. Farmers south sold their corn north of the border. Corn for ethanol sold better than corn for food. The two room, concrete-and-chicken-wire houses we came to build protected a family's claim. They squatted in something more permanent than tin and tarp.<br />
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The tires that triggered quiet "ah's" and "that house is literally built on" from the teens, those were part of well-designed repurposed buildings. The longer we rode, the more I saw rows of white and vibrantly painted homes inside compounds. To me, Tijuana had burst forth. It was reaching towards beautiful. More like the pretty side by side compounds of Guatemala City's neighborhoods, which I'd seen only once.<br />
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I traveled to Guatemala City in August of 2011, a few weeks after we returned from Mexico. For both my husband and me, this was a first. Our first travels out of the US. When we disembarked in Guatemala City, we walked past armed soldiers across the tarmac. Guns and guards seemed to swarm. I thought of New Orleans after Katrina, images I'd seen, not experienced. Now I walked among guards who couldn't care if I spoke only English.<br />
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My husband says he found Guatemala hard to look upon with love. I saw its <i>zoologico </i>and the uniformed students, waiting to see if today the striking teachers would show up to unlock their schools. I saw uniformity, not graffiti and dust. I went to bed at night inside the twenty foot high cinderblock walls surrounding the <i>Hogar Raphael. </i>The shipping trucks rattled until late. They picked up Sears furniture from the factories nearby. Nightclubs on the four corners of the compound took over the noisemaking around midnight. I heard weeping and music, hollering and fighting.<br />
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"Once, we found a knife in the grass," said <i>Madre Ivonne, </i>the nun who supervised the <i>hogar. </i>A man had been murdered on the other side of the wall. I thought about that every night as I fell asleep. I felt safe because we had check in with the armed guard at the steel gate of the compound, even with Jorge driving. Jorge was <i>Madre Ivonne's </i>brother.<br />
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At four am, I woke up because no one sang, hollered, honked or cranked an engine. I heard clicking across my floor. I flicked on the switch. Large black beetles skittered under the crack into the <i>jardín </i>separating my room from my husband's. I shut off the light. They came back like that every night. I shuddered thinking of them ending up in my luggage, but what bothered me more was the wire in my showerhead. It heated my water at the spigot, but if it shorted I would be electrocuted. Our handyman warned me to take a cold shower before trying to fix anything myself. <i>No worries, Joe, </i>I thought. I would moan my way through a cold shower, wash away a little sweat and dust, and huddle in my covers. <i>And flick on the lights if the beetles sounded too close. </i><br />
<br />
Several nights in a row, I did just that. But one night, when I flipped off my switch at ten pm, light seeped through cracks above me. I'd never seen it before. A swishing sound and dust sprinkled down on me. Like a subtle hint, I understood that I had someone above, the older <i>hogar </i>girls or <i>Madre Ivonne. </i>My late night light defense against the beetles probably disturbed the sleeper above.<br />
<br />
I loved Guatemala City, even <i>Zona Una, </i>even though the mothers said they had to get the kids out of there, it was just too ugly, too dangerous.<br />
<br />
Coming home this summer, my husband told everyone he thought Mexico was beautiful.<br />
<br />
"I thought Guatemala was more beautiful myself," I said.<br />
<br />
"I didn't," I take his response as a bit defensive, a kind of retort, as if we a have passive resistance to the mystery of beauty we each see. It's not true but he sees something so expansive he has yet to capture the beauty, though he's been playing with lyrics and chords to get it across. "Whatever is lovely, whatever is true, think on such things," admonishes Paul, a writer, a saint and sinner too. We're all reaching to these mysteries, I think. It's no easy task wrestling with beauty. Sometimes it's easier to entertain with dust than mystery, with violence and ugliness rather that what is lovely and faithful.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1051980354439389332.post-29649124862994331442015-08-12T17:53:00.004-07:002015-08-12T17:53:59.473-07:00Pairings- Happiness: Watch, Listen, ReadA new ditty for me. Consider these. I think they talk to each other about what makes us happy and what doesn't. I'm sure there is a TED talk out there on this too. My goal is to get you thinking about why less makes you happier. Fidelity makes you happier. What are your rules for happy?<br />
<br />
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="360" mozallowfullscreen="" scrolling="no" src="https://embed-ssl.ted.com/talks/dan_gilbert_asks_why_are_we_happy.html" webkitallowfullscreen="" width="640"></iframe>
<br />
<br />
<ol>
<li>Watch: Hector and the Search for Happiness</li>
</ol>
<br />
<a href="http://ia.media-imdb.com/images/M/MV5BNTAzNTIyNDYzNV5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTgwNDg1NjYyMjE@._V1_SX214_AL_.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://ia.media-imdb.com/images/M/MV5BNTAzNTIyNDYzNV5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTgwNDg1NjYyMjE@._V1_SX214_AL_.jpg" height="200" width="135" /></a><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Listen: Walk the Moon's Spend Your $$$<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<iframe allowfullscreen="" class="YOUTUBE-iframe-video" data-thumbnail-src="https://i.ytimg.com/vi/N_b2dFsEVhc/0.jpg" frameborder="0" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/N_b2dFsEVhc?feature=player_embedded" width="320"></iframe></div>
<br />
and Apartment Story by The National<br />
<br />
<div class="" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<iframe allowfullscreen="" class="YOUTUBE-iframe-video" data-thumbnail-src="https://i.ytimg.com/vi/RnI28bdZylM/0.jpg" frameborder="0" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/RnI28bdZylM?feature=player_embedded" width="320"></iframe></div>
<br />
Read: The Happiness Project or A Path Appears. I recommend the latter highly.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51aOQ%2BajK4L._SX352_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51aOQ%2BajK4L._SX352_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg" height="200" width="141" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
<a href="http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51KeJZ6ncnL._SX330_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51KeJZ6ncnL._SX330_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg" height="200" width="132" /></a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1051980354439389332.post-39883249774118879972015-08-11T17:00:00.000-07:002015-08-12T17:37:21.968-07:00Final Blood : How you lose a baby<i>A fiction. An exercise. A memorium. An honorarium to dear friends.</i><br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>How to lose a baby<o:p></o:p></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Want one. Cheer for every ovulation like your husband cheered
for the Colts to slaughter the Saints in the Superbowl. When your body bleeds
again in a few weeks, wonder why he cheered against the Saints. <o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
You know this fails the synchronicity test. What you have is
myth, so you actively dismiss the thought, <i>what
business did he have cheering against saints?</i> What if the Saints symbolized
saints?<br />
<br />
What if it all importuned bad luck?<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
What business do you
have questioning the (insert word here: mercies? faithfulness? ways? goodness?
love?) of God? Talk yourself down. <i>Wait.</i>
<i>Those who
wait upon the Lord. Trust in the Lord with all your heart. Lean not on your own
understanding. </i>Surrender to the
Scriptures and snatches of hymns that give you hope. Wait upon late blood. Hope
it turns to no blood, to two lines, a plus sign on a pee stick. Jiggle your
breasts for an ounce more of weight. Brush the nipple, hoping it aches.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Late in January you begin the
second wait. The one from the cash register at the drug store to the bathroom.
Two minutes in the public restroom? Or ten minutes home and two more minutes?
Open the box without tearing the package directions. Squat, careful not to pee
on too strong, too far up the stick, or on your hand. Perch the damp stick on
the box. Watch the second hand click and jerk on your watch.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Negative. One bar. Stash the
other three tests, the second from the box in the back of the medicine drawer.
Wait to bleed. Wait to cry until you bleed again. <o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Make plans for dinner this Valentine’s
day. Be pressure free, says everyone. Have fun. You have the best date. You wonder
while you stare into his eyes if this will be the release valve, or will
adopting be that? Everyone says once you adopt you conceive. Such pressure to
squeeze your ovaries or his vas deferens. You should have started bleeding
three days ago. Because you don’t see red, you don’t order red, or white. “Mineral
water, please.” Later decaf green tea. He sees. His squeeze on your hand as you
walk out makes you both tear up.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
You walk the cold blocks to
the theater feeling like you returned to your twenties, when you got hot
involuntarily, when your body clotted and cleansed like a clock, before the
clock hit thirty and it broke.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Try not to picture sperm
meeting egg when your husband makes love to you. On following mornings, begin
taking your basel temperature before you swing out of bed. Record changes in
the journal. Check for the quality of your emissions. Imagine a twinge. The egg
burst from the ovaries and flings itself towards your husband’s school of
sperm, like salmon hurtling upstream as frenzied as your most joyful lust.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Great Lent starts later that
week. Still you don’t bleed. Your journal reads with years of morning
temperatures. How long have you longed for this baby. Basel, basil. Bleed. When
March idles in, almost Annuciation, the Feast of the Archangel Gabriel
announcing to Mary her pregnancy, when the sweatshirt you pull over your head
hits your breast wrong, you wince. You sneak into the bathroom that morning
before your husband knows. Lock the door. It does no good to get his hopes up.
Tremble. Tear. Box. Impossible plasticvinylaluminium package. Squat. Pee.
Swear. You forgot a clock. Guessing time by counting and saying the alphabet
you wait. One line never materializes. Negative. Damn the single pink stripe on
your character.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Try not to want the baby too
much. Well-meaning friends opine, “It’s stress. It inhibits conception.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It’s a kind of lust, all
sinful, this hope. With it comes contempt for the fertile careless
seventeen-year-old who decides to keep her baby because “babies-are-so-cute.”
Shudder with contempt too whenever a pious friends suggests spiritual hoodoo,
one of your hippie friends suggests a diet cleanse and some aromatherapies.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Three more days repeat the
sneak, tear, squat, squirt, wait. This time: plus. Two lines. Lay your forehead
down there on the peestick. Jerk it up at the moisture. It’s your urine on your
forehead and you don’t know if this annointing is holy or disgusting. In one
month from today, the Feast of Annuciation. It’s thirty days off but it feels
like serendipity. <o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Now how to tell your husband
with all the joy and poetic justice? Thirty-three you are. <i>See. I’m not too old</i>. I am Sarai. I will be transformed into Sarah,
you think.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Tell him and no one else. Oh,
almost no one else. In a week your mother knows. In two, you tell the one best
friend. In three your husband has told your priest and a few confidants. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
All of March and April. In
May, at your friends’ wedding you pretend to sip the toast, but a few friends
who hope secretly for you notice when you push the glass towards your husband,
like a recovering alcoholic discreetly passes off his drink at these functions.
They inquire discreetly. You demand secrecy.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Memorial Day weekend will
mark three months. Then you can announce.<br />
<br />
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Saturday your husband fires
up the barbie and the buddies come over. You have a headache and feel nauseaus,
a bit crampy during the euchre tourney. A backache kicks in while you stand at
the sink after everyone leaves. You swirl water, warm and comforting and think
how nice it would be take a bath, but those are no-nos. Keep your body
temperature from getting too hot. Realize you are grinding your teeth a bit.
The cramps and the back ache may be worse than you’ll admit. Go to bed by ten.
At midnight wake up in waves of cramps, gripping you. Stumble to the bathroom
and push down your panties. You already feel the damp, and in the dark – you
kept the light off afraid too look but knowing you could reach over and flip
the switch in your small bathroom – you smell the iron. Warm blood. Lay your
head down on the cool sink. Sit on the toilet. There will be a crick in your
spine but you’ll not know the difference. Cry.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Mewl. Heave. He comes to you
and rubs your back and sits on the side of the tub. This is your funeral parlor.
It will take days for the cramping and bleeding to subside. Doctors will kneed
and prod and stroke. They offer options, discuss a dialation and cutelage if it
doesn’t bleed out fully. An ultrasound to confirm. Your mom comes to you. She massages your back.
Strange that it feels like she’s helping this baby spontaneously abort, commit
its own leap from the ledge, but really, your mother wants only to ease your
pain, soothe your nerves and minister.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Every clump could be your
baby, the size of dime, with fingers and toes and a beating heart. You would
like to bury your baby. Do you save pads, clumps of toilet paper, do you dare
evacuate your bladder. There’s no proof there, except blood, blood, blood.
Tears. No tears. Numb. Crushed. Grief. This is how you lose a baby</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1051980354439389332.post-51218413872459453632015-07-14T14:20:00.002-07:002015-07-14T14:20:12.308-07:00On turning forty"Which anniversary did you most dread," one marriage said to another.<br />
<br />
Do you even remember the first one? It's the paper one. The modern gift-givers suggest we skip the paper and give a clock. Because what? Because for the first year we paid no attention to time. We slept late, we worked second and third shift, skipped church, learned to map each other from tip to toe by wasting hours and doing little else. My husband expected me to play alarm clock on Sunday mornings, which is why we missed so much church, and he'd count the good days as the ones I jumped him. We ate terribly at all hours and with not concern for health. Jamocha shakes, curly fries and shaved beef with Au Jous at Arby's. Fazolis when we ran out of money, because they gave us free bread sticks. On Friday nights, we took date night. We split cheap fajitas on Fridays at Don Pablos, rented a dollar classic from Family Video and split a pint of Ben and Jerry's. We made pillows of our flesh, rotund and protruding.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ao7G8d7gJ40/VaV8413dhOI/AAAAAAAAD2k/MgYh2dHDCo4/s1600/IMG_3188.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="214" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ao7G8d7gJ40/VaV8413dhOI/AAAAAAAAD2k/MgYh2dHDCo4/s320/IMG_3188.JPG" width="320" /></a>The first year, did you think it was the sweetest and hardest when you look back?<br />
<br />
It took one year, just one, before we tiffed over the wakey-wakey protocols. After our daughter's birth, I refused to wake him up for church any more, and we had to go to church now, for a soul other than our own.<br />
<br />
What habit had worn you down by the end of the first year? When did you start paying attention again to time? Was it with the bills, thirty days from one big one to the next? Or payday with a little splurge? Was it the miles until the grinding began, like the brakes on our Dodge Shadow, that American piece of crap we polished and cursed together, kicking the tires and hating Kmart's Service Department for the two-hundred fifty smackaroos they gauged from us. Finally Dad helped us grow up a bit by teaching us how to do the brakes ourselves for a tenth of the cost.<br />
<br />
On our first anniversary, I could hardly sit up from the stitches across my bikini line, where one week earlier they'd extracted my organs, stacked them up, lifted out my daughter and put them all back in the right spot. It hurt to swallow the cheap Chinese we ate.<br />
<br />
How did you feel on that paper anniversary? What ephemeral sentiments did you exchange? Do you remember? What did you do with me?<br />
<br />
I was born by your first anniversary, a fact that would not dawn on me until I was nine or so. I would have liminal memories of those early years. Flickering TV's, illegal scents, a Fisher Price horse you gave me on Christmas Eve. I scooted around the dim twinkly room front room. I can't recall if I rolled fast on linoleum or worked hard to motor myself over the shag carpet. Later, when I calculated the timeline of my birth and your anniversary, I learned what it means to do the right thing. I understood some of the fractious shoutin' after hours. I understood you took the harder, righter way, for things bigger than yourselves.<br />
<br />
I never dread anniversaries like people talk about dreading birthdays, but looking back, some were warmer, felt more like the exhilarating accomplishments that a tenth-thirteenth-sixteenth-eighteenth-twenty-first evokes. Mostly, those are on the fives, right? Sometime in our fifth year, another wife in my Bible study asked me to count wood under the covers, burned, spent, (wink, wink) you know. Thousands of fires set, burned, ebbed. How beautiful, but sometimes exhausting. And I had only one child in all that time. You had three. You found the quiet escapes and how much work it must have been.<br />
<br />
I remember our fifth, when my husband gave me the first piece of expensive jewelry since our engagement. The waters on the Chicago canal sparkled beneath us. The gift -- either the sapphire and diamond cross I'm scared to wear, lest I lose it or the white gold braided bracelet that I think I ruined because I rolled it over my tiny fist rather than fight to re-clasp it around my wrist -- sparkled less than lights of the city. We'd parked our car on the first stop of the CTA train, dragged our luggage onto the train, exited at the Randolph Street main stop. We hefted our luggage blocks and blocks past homeless men asleep in corners under the passes. Our arms ached and I stung with worry that the valets saw how poor we were, having saved up for this getaway. When we collapsed in our room, I cried as I stared down from the twentieth floor of the Sheraton. We ate at the seafood restaurant you suggested, even though we were vegetarians who wouldn't eat meat anyway. We'd budgeted fifty bucks for the meal and it wasn't enough. My pride stung, but my husband took me back to the room and we danced again in the diamond lights twinkling.<br />
<br />
On my tenth birthday, you said, "You made it to a decade. A whole decade. That's an accomplishment. Two digits now." No one could take those from me, I realized. The decade that mattered, that helped me make it so far so happily had happened behind the hollow panel door of your bedroom. It hid in waves of that crazy waterbed, the rocky-rolling years already tempering. Later in the year, you'd drain the bladder of the bed and for over a year, you'd share every corner of your life with all of us, like we lived on the prairie in a camper. I was cognizant enough to realize that you had no time alone but your need for such private moments, to that I stayed oblivious.<br />
<br />
Was there an anniversary you dreaded, or anticipated? I remember my friend Mark saying you sneaked off once for a celebration in a hotel and split a bottle of champagne. He said not to repeat that back to you, since you did not imbibe in front of your children. I thrilled to the idea that you'd paid for the pop and that your love spilled over like that still. For in the tiffs of your early years, I wanted nothing more than for you to make it. I needed you to make it.<br />
<br />
We made it to year five in August, two months after you made it to twenty-five. None of us had enough money to splurge for you and yet we knew we owed those five years to you. How does one marriage repay another for its breath and life? We started saving then, all of the kids, squirreling off little bits for another ten years. What's thirty-five but middle-aged, coral, according to the traditional gifting list. Shell. We'd learn between year five and year fifteen just how fragile marriages are. In our fifth year, three marriages of kids our age dissolved. When we married, you said, wait until year seven. Until then, you're just playing house. That's the year it gets real. By real, you meant hard.<br />
<br />
In our fifth year, another of your children's marriage was born. And another the next year. The baby marriages kept coming<br />
<br />
By the fifteenth anniversary, I'd witnessed the violent deaths of adult marriages. Like a case of Benjamin Button, I ask "how can something like this die like that?" Consider how we all feel when babies die. How have my friends survived the grief of still births, children who've died of cerebral palsy or in accidents? We acclimate ourselves to deaths of baby marriages and old people dying. But we question the loss of life in childhood and long marriage. This year, twenty years of marriage achieved, adultery and acrimony ganged up on a fifty-year old marriage. Ax-murdered it. When two, ten, fifteen year marriages died, my husband and I did health checks. How do we health check a fifty-year old one? Isn't there a stage where life is a given? No. The mystery of marriage is truly a mystery, a sacred thing, a secret, a sacrament, the centrality of who we become.<br />
<br />
In <i>A Grief Observed, </i>Lewis writes that marriages that last to death does part often lead to marriages arrested, never ending but changed. Many widows and widowers still feel married. I imagine that even the widows and widowers who remarry have a closet identity, a person within still married to the deceased spouse.<br />
<br />
Which anniversary do I dread most? That one. My mother-in-law faced that tenth this year.<br />
<br />
As time passes, I accumulate clocks. Clocks tick and tock like a madness in my head and in my cells. I read clock faces that all have fragility behind their second-minute-hour times. Fragility like a witching hour, bookends our lives. Our early marriages seem hail and healthy, like lively children, but children thrive with strong parents. Late marriages seem stalwart and strong, but time grinds us down. In our early years, your marriage took care of ours; in your late years, I hope to support it as an adult child honors her parents. It's a kind of herd health. Immunize my marriage, exercise it, support the healthy habits of marriages around me, and in turn, when the years of brittle bones and faltering flesh strain the capacity of joyous pleasures, find ways to celebrate your accomplishments. In twenty years, I want hale and healthy young marriages to look ahead to the anniversaries and find no dread in them.<br />
<br />
Thank you for showing and teaching us to remember our Creator and to honor that which comes before us, before we ourselves grow old and stooped and the danger of finding no pleasure comes. For in doing so, we guard against losing our pleasure and joy.<br />
<br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1051980354439389332.post-27093752224061487112015-07-09T18:39:00.004-07:002015-07-09T18:39:56.018-07:00A Panda Bear, A Priest and Mercy<div class="MsoNormal">
What gave me the right to think, let alone speak aloud, “Maybe
we ought not take that stuffed animal home with us?” It was his gift, from the
girls, after a week of him, playing father, instead of builder. He might have
preferred swinging a hammer. How does a man with two nearly grown children
remember the games that entertain seven-year-old and eight-year-old girls? How
does he navigate those games with bubbles, coloring books, a soccer ball, a
volleyball and a language barrier? He knows phrases in Spanish. Katy and
Kimberly knew no English.<o:p></o:p></div>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-ygy4R1aA7Q4/VZ8hHFVWAOI/AAAAAAAADWo/LMyzWVMpyCs/s1600/IMG_0759.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-ygy4R1aA7Q4/VZ8hHFVWAOI/AAAAAAAADWo/LMyzWVMpyCs/s320/IMG_0759.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Fr. Joel with "Katy" or Katherine outside <br />the house on the last day of building.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="MsoNormal">
He clutched it to his chest as he heaved himself into the
rental van, babying his damaged knee, not thinking about what might be crawling
from the furry panda onto his shoulder and into his hair.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
“They gave this me,” he said. They are Katy and Kimberly,
who hover behind him, having hugged him goodbye. The teenage girl on our team
who also played with them all week invites them into the van to hug us all, me
included. To do so, they must bust through an invisible barrier under the
shadow of the van out of the sunny street in front of their compound. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Did my husband see me grit the back of my jaw make psychic
waves of objection, subtle but as real as if the words I was thinking took form
as sound waves? <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
“Oh, honey. Probably we should not. Probably we should not
take that back to the States. I mean, that’s so sweet of them. Do they really
want to give up their toy?” <i>To a grown
man, a priest. I mean we don’t know what’s in that fur, in that stuffing?</i> <i>Are there bed bugs in Rosarito? Or worse
vermin? I don’t know native insects in Mexico, except the black widows we
crushed with our shoes back at the orphanage and the earwigs that I would
smoosh in my purse as we inched along towards border security. <o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I wondered at once from what house did the toy usher forth
and would it make a difference? Had the girls cuddled it after cuddling the feisty
kitten, the one that their mother scowled at them for handling, even though our
teenagers had picked up with pity? “She says it’s sick,” said the Spanish
teacher on our team. <o:p></o:p></div>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-wFc3ockoBt4/VZ8hFQVc1BI/AAAAAAAADWQ/qTztkSA7dy4/s1600/IMG_0748.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="150" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-wFc3ockoBt4/VZ8hFQVc1BI/AAAAAAAADWQ/qTztkSA7dy4/s200/IMG_0748.JPG" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Katy, Kimberly and Sofia lived with family around them, <br />like this aunt' next door until we finished with the house. <br />By the night after we finished,<br /> Sofia had put in beds, a refrigerator and they'd slept there.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Had the panda been cuddled by the Chihuahua putzing around
our feet with stole of ticks around its neck and a squinty left eye that leaked
pus. Frankenhuahua, the kids had called it. Its face looked fused from parts,
the scars of fights from bigger dogs on the street. Dogs, everywhere dogs: pit
bulls mostly, but other Chihuahuas. The fire that had burned most of the girls’
house, the fire that brought Sofia to the mission organization asking for a
house, had nearly killed this little guy. Sofia, who had lived between her <strong><i><span style="background: rgb(232, 236, 245); font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-weight: normal;">tía</span></i></strong><i>
</i>next door and her<strong><i><span style="background: rgb(232, 236, 245); font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-weight: normal;">
tía </span></i></strong>in front of her once and future home, had shuffled
between the homes since the fire in January. Her<i> <strong><span style="background: rgb(232, 236, 245); font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-weight: normal;">tío</span></strong>,
a bombero, </i>had rescued Sofia and the girls from the house, had ushered the
other <i>bomberos </i>and stopped the fire
from spreading past her house, then had given Frankenhuahua mouth-to-mouth. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
He put the panda on the seat next to him and positioned his
knee using both hands to stabilize it before we started the drive first out of
Rosarito, then onto unpaved dust roads to the orphanage. We rocked and rolled
in the fifteen passenger van. He winced up and down, side-to-side. What had he done to earn this toy? In
exchange, our team provided six packs of <i>pompas,</i>
distributed among the neighborhood kids. Crayons, markers, coloring books of
Disney Princesses, and two other bags of Dollar Tree treats. Cheap plastic
baubles and diversions with half the shelf life of the panda.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Sometimes life humbles us.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
He meant to go to Rosarito as he’d gone to New Orleans three
years in row after Hurricane Katrina, ready to beat the heat, bust thumbs and
even brave the roof, even asked. He hates heights, but the modest constructions
of Mexico, two rooms, one floor, the size of a one-car garage with a concrete
slab floor, stucco walls and barely sloped roofs, would seem a breeze. Compare
these to the single story, two or three bedroom homes north of Lake
Ponchartrain or more brazenly compared to the two story, multi-gabled Victorian
in which we lived in Indiana, this would be an easy construction. It takes a
couple months to finish a house for Habitat in the US, a week to finish what we
put up for Sofia and the girls that week. No wiring. No plumbing. <o:p></o:p></div>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Sp0oE800PyI/VZ8hF--KDeI/AAAAAAAADWY/HVmCHhA1cYw/s1600/IMG_0751.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="150" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Sp0oE800PyI/VZ8hF--KDeI/AAAAAAAADWY/HVmCHhA1cYw/s200/IMG_0751.JPG" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Katy helped sponge wet stucco. Sofia helped build.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Is that worth the panda he clutched? The indulged American
in me thinks not. I’m coming home to wi-fi, hot showers, flushable toilets I keep
clean enough to drink from. Potable water from my garden hose, wine with
dinner, chocolates for dessert.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
On the side of the hill, where Sofia’s <strong><i><span style="background: rgb(232, 236, 245); font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-weight: normal;">tía</span></i></strong><i>
</i>tossed out scraps, two small tomato plants, sporting a dozen cherry-sized
tomatoes survive most of the week. I’d eat these for lunch at home. I have five
times this started in neat five-by-five boxes along my driveway in Indiana. By
the time we stack two lunch coolers, spread a white table cloth over them,
perch three icons, of Christ, the <i>Theotokos
–the Mother of God --</i> and a cross for the final blessing, the tomatoes have
been doused with stucco water from tambos of water to clean the cement tubs. I
feel sad that <i>tia </i>did not pick the
half ripe fruits to mix into the red chile sauce she served with stewed
chicken, rice, carrots and macaroni and hot fried tortillas. <i>Verderas, </i>vegetables,<i> </i>are a condiment here, though we drove
through market day where bins of <i>napolito,
</i>tomatillo, tomatoes, fresh chiles, greens and beans were sold with second-hand
clothes, shoes, household goods and tacos or <i>tostilocos </i>and <i>dolces, </i>that
is sweets,<i> </i>like <i>hellado </i>or ice cream bars<i>. </i>Why
so few vegetables? Why did the vendor at <i>Tacos
Manuel </i>seem confused when I asked for a plate of <i>vegetales </i>but when a local translated <i>verderas </i>he allowed me a
whole plate of roasted jalapenos, radishes, cilantro, peeled cucumbers, chile
salsa and guacamole? He kept offering tortillas <i>maiz or flor (</i>wheat flour). How could I explain that <i>queso, </i>wheat, corn, and meat were foods
my American stomach no longer tolerated?<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i>Gringos, </i>I insulted
myself, as I peered around my husband at the panda. Perhaps we could give it to
Melina for the <i>tiendita </i>on the ranch?
He could pose with it for a picture before we left it behind, with its Mexican
vermin?<i> </i>The violence of the thought,
the belief that we bring something cleaner, when I’ve been ushered out of
Philadelphia resorts due to the resurgence of bed bugs, when my friends and
family suffer from the long-term effects of untreated tick-borne Lyme disease,
when we American <i>gringos </i>sprayed
Mexican day workers who crossed the border with chemicals no less poisonous
than what has reduced my diet to mere fruits, vegetables and completely
unprocessed animal products? What makes me think we have it cleaner? I will go
home to water that tastes like a chlorine pool. The kids in my town will die,
one a week or more, from heroin overdoses. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
He says to me, “We can leave it at the <i>tiendita.”<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i> </i>I reply, “I have an extra plastic bag. We’ll
wash it in hot water when we get home. It’s part of the story.” He replies, “We
use it for the presentation.” <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
We are quiet together until he says, “It’s really beautiful
here.” He says later, “This was just what I needed.” I know he was humbled by
his broken knee and by not being able to show his muscle on this trip. He was
glad to escape all the other poison of our native culture- Facebook, texts,
emails. He says, “We’ll be returning often.” <i>Then we need the panda to tell the story. </i>For we cannot pay for
annual work trips to Mexico without all the people who cannot travel but who
can support this work. <o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-AD5nKBTCyN0/VZ8hFxxxwgI/AAAAAAAADWc/-g9ar5fzVh4/s1600/IMG_0756.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-AD5nKBTCyN0/VZ8hFxxxwgI/AAAAAAAADWc/-g9ar5fzVh4/s320/IMG_0756.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The make-shift altar for the house blessing <br />included Frankenhuahua, sleeping at its base.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="MsoNormal">
While the panda tumbles in the washer and dryer at home,
waiting for its perch on our church shelves, and its turn in the narrative of
our lives, the lives of people who put us in Mexico, he says, “That was my kind
of vacation, you know. We build. Sure, we work, but we get to see the people
too.” And we did. We vacationed in a way that feeds my husband and me. We stood
on the cold Tijuana beach. We bargained for <i>futbol
</i>jerseys and a few gifts at the market. We watched fellow American tourists,
mostly college students with their American buttcheeks hanging out of their
doily-swim bottoms, wearing what they call “drug-rugs,” the hand-woven warm
cover-ups perfect for the mild days and cool nights in Tijuana. While there we and the team prayed morning
and night, at the site, all the time. We prayed “<i>Padre Nuestro, Que estas in los cielos, Sanctificado sea tu Nombre”—Our
Father Who art in Heaven, Hallowed be thy name. </i>And privately, we prayed, “Lord
Have Mercy.” But on whom? Us, with our prejudices or the kids who gave us their
best in exchange for a bit from us, a week, two rooms, dollar tree toys?</div>
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-9PBCIvv69Ws/VZ8hHhXHmtI/AAAAAAAADWs/Eecgax3N5XU/s1600/IMG_3831.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-9PBCIvv69Ws/VZ8hHhXHmtI/AAAAAAAADWs/Eecgax3N5XU/s400/IMG_3831.JPG" width="400" /></a></div>
<o:p></o:p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1051980354439389332.post-56369346956816396752015-06-23T17:23:00.002-07:002015-06-23T17:23:41.201-07:00A Turtle, An Easter Egg, Resurrection and Death Questions<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-xeK4ph7-kpg/VYm3udDbNkI/AAAAAAAADEw/898UH2QU4e4/s1600/11009876_10206956068490891_5958566317823542958_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-xeK4ph7-kpg/VYm3udDbNkI/AAAAAAAADEw/898UH2QU4e4/s400/11009876_10206956068490891_5958566317823542958_n.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<br />
Cracked like an Easter egg, spilling out more eggs. Is this what death looks like? Like a snapping turtle, a venerable mother, head split, guts spilt and all her unborn progeny aborted, nesting arrested.<br />
<br />
Or does death look more like what I used to think, like the Death Star laser imploding a planet entire. Black oblivion and silence perceived by someone most sensitive to the quiver of life.<br />
<br />
I've been writing about death for over two years now. I cannot decide if death is sudden, as if energy is swallowed into a black hole. Matter neither lost nor gained, transformed from parents or children or friends into molecules. If so, are there souls or spirit flapping between? Are they the dark matter?. Is death the disembodying of souls? Is there a final anguish followed by silence? A song ended abruptly after the climax of timbre and cymbals? After the walls of sound, the track cuts. For the living, is there such a thing as silence? Something is always there humming.<br />
<br />
Or, does death best resemble decay? Does it detach the living from the dead?. The corpse swells and rots revealing all symbiotic life it once sustained. It hints at its progeny, its DNA, what it did, where it went, what it might have been.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
~~~~~~</div>
<br />
When my father-in-law was dying of pancreatic cancer, he saw work to be done until the last three or four weeks. Perhaps, he proposed, his church needed a strong man still, for the young fathers who never had one, the boys without, like his grandson. Perhaps, he still had a witness of the faithfulness of God to the nurses, the doctors, the men on the radiation ward. In the last few weeks he gave up such final tasks, it was enough just to breathe. When my uncle took interferon for the melanoma that peppered his white skin, like the moles on him, he too felt a great final purpose. He preached the gospel at all times, sometimes with words. For a few months, he came close to death first from gangrene, then in a car accident. Now he is cancer free. Three months before he died, my grandfather shuffled up to the Ambon of the Church of the Brethren, laid his great, shaky hands on my head and my husband's. <i>Give them a great spiritual purpose, </i>he prayed, <i>until one lays the other into the arms of God. </i><br />
<br />
When his wife died, C.S. Lewis did not believe himself any less married. My grandmother, my mother-in-law, both old widows never believed themselves unmarried. I have no such experience to relate; I'm not hurrying along my spouse's death. The closest experiences are my own losses. When my aunt died at fifty-one, I felt tethered to her. I hadn't visited with her in some years and I missed her terribly. Now I had the haunting memory of missing her for all time. Some songs, some scents, some color blends bring her back to me with force. I feel my Uncle John's presence in who I am. His faith formed my parents and, as a result, mine. When my brother-in-law died, I saw him for months driving around town in his van. Further in the recesses my grandfather's voice booms, he spits watermelon seeds and teaches me how to bounce the lawnmower deck to unstick the wet grass before it gums up and kills the engine.<br />
<br />
"No man is an island," wrote John Donne, "every man's death diminishes me." If there is such a thing as a disturbance in the force, it must be the sensation that part of me died.<br />
<br />
Seeing those eggs, tucked inside that turtle, made me think of all that would not live, like all that stopped with the deaths of family members. Such purposes they might have fulfilled, had they had a few more days.<br />
<br />
The older I get, the more I realize that I live in overlapping concentric circles of interdependence. Human lives sustain each other. But the habitat, all its beings sustain me too. They drink the same water, breathe the same car exhaust, muck around in the waste we all produce. They die under the crush of feet or wheels or by disease. Each one sustains another, purifies, feeds.<br />
<br />
The mother turtle with the crushed head and the top of her broken open along her perfect eggs nesting within accosted me in such a sorrowful, violent way, She will decay. Her eggs will be stolen by raccoons. The promise of life will be unfulfilled. I used think of death as inevitable and natural. I mocked Dylan Thomas' idea that we should rage rage against it. Now, when I see how each death represents in an immeasurable loss of beauty and hope, I feel enraged, a little twinge at least. I know that the relinquishing of my life allows space for another. But death remains a conundrum. I will go on wondering if it is a void, a vacuum of what once was, or if death includes legacy, the progeny, the DNA, the lasting affect of one life passed on to another.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1051980354439389332.post-8417362376689733682015-06-04T06:17:00.001-07:002015-06-04T11:20:54.014-07:00Why I don't have a Joel-ologyBAM! I'm really writing to persuade you to read another blog post! Be warned. "What Matters Most" swipes at "theology" as we conceive it.<br />
<br />
As I read Fr. Stephen Freeman's piece, I realized that none of us would propose to create a systematic"-ology" about another person. I don't have a systematic Joel-ology for my husband, though I think I know him well. I don't have one for my parents, either of my children or my closest friends. We don't have president "so-and-so"-ology, or Kierkegaard-ology because we know that we cannot truly distill the essence of another person (we can't even agree on when personhood begins, for Pete's sake). We can know a person. That is how we know God.<br />
<br />
Last night, while editing short essays for submission, I re-read a piece I'd written about knowing God through the bearing witness to a friend's stillborn son. I'd just listened to one by Cheryl Strayed from the Dear Sugar column collection <i>Tiny Beautiful Things</i> about a woman with a newborn on the brink of death. Both Cheryl and I said we could know Jesus (a mere person to her), who is Christ (a person and divinity to me) through being witnesses to His suffering, often through historical accounts as well as through others' suffering. I worried a bit because I'd penned an almost identical denouement as Strayed. What would it mean that I, a believer, seemed to say something so similar to someone who says she believes Jesus is only a very admirable person?<br />
<br />
I checked myself. Not a problem, I've concluded. It was His humanity that opened the door to our encounter with and "knowing" of Divinity. He is fully human. (Most heresies started by trying to dismiss this.) And, He is fully God.<br />
<br />
So, if you are inclined, this short bit by Fr. Stephen Freeman is a good reminder that theology is not what we "think" about God but about knowing Him, the person of God, who knows us.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://blogs.ancientfaith.com/glory2godforallthings/2015/06/03/a-word-on-what-matters/"><span style="font-size: x-large;">What Matters Most by Fr. Stephen Freeman</span></a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1051980354439389332.post-7517887947333760202015-05-25T14:53:00.000-07:002015-05-26T06:21:35.709-07:00Poison Ivy, Confession and Prayer<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">I'm editing and writing
with a huge splinter under the nail of my
left middle finger. It's bone-jarringly painful, and it won't come out. I tried
the Orajel, needle, and tweezer fix, but the splinter is old moist wood. Little clumps break off with each dig. I jammed it in while gardening this morning. When it embedded when I'd grabbed a clump
of plantain weeds along the raised garden bed, meaning to whack it
with my garden clippers. </span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">I howled when it slipped
so quickly between nail and flesh. Hours later, I have no will to dig about
under the nail with a needle breaking off wood and drawing blood. I need to
research a drawing solution.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">Rather
than stand at the bathroom sink, I took my hurt and anger out first on the
poison ivy that has curled and webbed up the fence line and along the raised
beds, emerging here and there at the A-frame trellises my husband built to
accommodate peas, beans, tomatilloes, cucumbers and anything that will vine up.</span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> I crawled on my hands and knees under the
chicken-wire trellises. I yanked and hacked. I cursed the cursed ground. Poison
ivy. Insidious sneaky beast. When I was eleven, I had a case so severe it last for a year. I think I ingested
it. After a year of desperately cloroxing
the patches of seeping, itchy pustules,
it went away. For good, I thought. Not so. Two years ago, while weeding, I hosted a new reaction on my arms and
legs. I learned to wash in a poison ivy soap, slather in caladryl and cover up. I read that other people
dress for hazmat when they weed it. <i>Never burn it. </i>Never put
its remains in your compost pile. Bag it immediately after pulling it out from all its roots. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">The
trouble is, I cannot get out the roots, some of which are curled cleverly
around the chain link fence. Oh, how I curse that fence, which the neighbor says is ours but the property
deed says is hers.</span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> Under the A-frames,
hacking and yanking in anger, I grow angrier
and justify more hurt. The splinter throbs. My forearms begin to itch. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">Out the front door comes my thirteen-year-old son who refuses to help with the garden and resists
even indoor chores. While I produce salary and salad by the sweat of my brow,
he refuses to work towards our household good.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">"That's all poison
ivy," he shouts, adjusting his headphones and dropping his
skateboard. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">Not, "Thanks, Mom, for doing that so I don't have to."
Not, "Thanks for gardens and full-time work and all you do so I can watch
YouTube, skateboard, borrow your headphones and exist on only my favorite
foods." <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">It occurs to me as the
wind pushes hair in my face, trying to soothe me, that I'm whipping up into frenzy. Like cussing, this yanking and whacking fails to vent my frustration. It feeds it. Between jerking and snipping, I do have moments of clarity. Like, </span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><i>I
should be asking forgiveness for stomping inside and unsettling everyone. </i>Still I retort to my son's back as he skated off: </span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">"I'm
doing this because none of you all will bother with it.</span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> It doesn't just go away if you ignore it."</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">I hate weeding, I mumble. I find myself wondering why I garden. It makes me hate green things.
Growing food means facing the weeds that
would like to take over. Some are persistent
but not nasty. I could cut those back less often, if not for poison ivy. It's
the worst kind of sin. It finds an ignore space and spreads out, laying cabled
vines in bundles, then popping up for a drink of the sun. I garden because,
like work, I must. I weed like I do the unpleasant parts of my job. Sometimes
that includes the insidious tasks of reflecting on what's not working and
hacking out the worst habits. Poison ivy, the habits, the sins -- indulge me --
that hide and take over between the harmless little things. These require
uprooting and it's ugly. There's no way to remove these habits and sins without
exposure to the toxins. There's no willing it away. Ignore it, it gets worse.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">In my spirit, I pray the
Lord's Prayers, which includes the line, "Forgive us our trespasses, as we
forgive those who trespass against us."<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">Trespass. That's what
makes some of the harmless plants, like broadleaf
plantain, get the reputation as a <i>weed. </i>Actually, if I had the
energy after all the angry hacking, I could bring in the broad oval leaves and make something like kale
chips with them. I think about it in a calm moment. Found food. Instead, I swing back, blades of mind and hand. Poison ivy and plantain. Weeds growing up where unwelcome. I severe bald vines and roots and pong between good and bad thoughts.
One minute, I think how this poison is like addiction or the worst habits. It is like sin and confession, like the discipline of hacking out
unwelcome habits. The moment, I return back to besmirching
my kids and spouse and my neighbor for leaving me in the middle of the poison.
Lone fighter, drawing the poison with a splinter under my nail.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">Fr. Thomas Hopko, in his
"55 Maxims," indicates we should pray the Lord's Prayer a couple of
times a day. We should make this gesture like we should say "I love you" to our kids
and spouses when they leave, like hugging them and kissing them. Why repeat a written prayer when all prayer is effectual? Because is how God taught us to speak to Him. It's love language on the
other's terms.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">Which means praying "Forgive us our trespasses" several times a day.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">Forgive us for the day's
curses against computers and cars, the stubbed toes,
the splinters, the spills, the teenager who rages.
Forgive as I'm still thinking with
another section of my brain, <i>Are you kidding me, teenage boy? You're being a jerk.
Who died and made you king? You
ungrateful... If you only knew how I bend over backward
for you... There's only one of me, kid. </i><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">So many curmudgeonly
thoughts.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">Tonight, I will pray it and reflect on my sins. I should make a summation like I do with my calories and
work. Did I need that last hot chocolate? Did my stomach serve me or did I
serve it? Was I being fussy about the
kitchen's cleanliness? Is it a sin to be disappointed that the incontinent and
stubborn old pet woke up this morning too? What about the half a dozen times I
saw my husband half-reach for a kiss, a touch
while I rushed off to some other task? What of the friend I didn't call? These
trespasses, sins if you will, are mostly harmless weeds, growing and growing. I
need to take scissors to them before the poison exploits the places and hides.
Despair, lust, addiction, adultery don't just pop up. Most passions cover the
insidious ones which exploit the shadows. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">I went inside at the end
of the hacking. I made an impossible plan to have us burn the weeds. My son
loves fire so I assigned him to the task. Rightly he hackled. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">"It says everywhere
on the internet not to burn that stuff." <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">"I won't shove it into black bags that never degrade. That's no good for the universe," I hollered back.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">"Now we're
yelling," said my husband. I stomped upstairs to strip, take a cold shower
with expensive Technu-soap and slather
myself in the calahyst.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">And, regret.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">While I wrote and edited, I stopped and I said sorry. I made a
new plan. Biodegradable bags don't cost that much more than regular ones on
Amazon. We won't burn the weeds I
pulled. We'll use the vinegar and salt to kill the leaves, mowing and heat to
work on the roots. We'll ask the neighbor if we could own the care of the fence
row. I said sorry again. My husband expressed his hurt. I said sorry again. How many times could I say it? As many as he needed. It's like that when weeds get out of control. Rooting them out becomes more
work. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">He left for a run. He took the boy with him to the skate park. As I left the garden, we left off, with me feeling a sneaking </span><span style="font-size: 18px;">dissatisfaction</span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"> with my performance. II often walk away worried I didn't extract the poison at the
roots.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1051980354439389332.post-18013495915462561352015-05-18T16:19:00.000-07:002015-05-18T16:19:38.675-07:00Prayer, Prone Pose<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>Maxim II </i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>Pray as you can, not as you think you must. </i></div>
<div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i style="font-size: small;">~Fr. Thomas Hopko, 2015 from 55 Maxims. </i></div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Most of my morning prayers lack all piety and right-ness, or righteousness, for that matter. But, like Sunday Liturgy, if I skip them, the day goes to hell.<br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ofVDT5LpFAs/VVpzQT4xYWI/AAAAAAAAC2Y/4BX3eKx0rb0/s1600/FullSizeRender.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="150" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ofVDT5LpFAs/VVpzQT4xYWI/AAAAAAAAC2Y/4BX3eKx0rb0/s200/FullSizeRender.jpg" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">My mother's alarm clock in its new native habitat.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
I've learned to wake before the alarm. That habit began years ago, long before I made a morning prayer rule. It started with my first alarm clock, a Lloyd's hand-me-down from my mother-- still alive and proof that old stuff was made to last. It still bleats like a lamb <i>being stabbed. </i>In college I got a bit superstitious about the hideous noise. I believed my day would prove unlucky if my ears heard the anguished bleating. Until I got an iPhone clock, I used it. For a couple of years it lay in the bottom of a sock drawer. Now my thirteen-year-old uses it. It proves its mettle, getting him out of bed in its noisome glory. I tell myself, that it contributed to my prayer rule, however, impious. I would try to beat it awake and so, for a long time, I woke ten or fifteen minutes before its cries and that became a perfect for prayer, prone pose.<br />
<br />
The older I become, the earlier my body salutes the new day. In spring, I rise with the sun. As the seasons warm and brighten, I cannot burrow into the firm mattress with its eggshell top, under the quilt of Guatemalan patchwork. I cannot succumb to the drug of my neighbor's wood-burning stove. I pray. I stare out my window into the void that is white vinyl siding of my neighbor's house, a mere eight feet from me. I recite words that call me out of fog.<br />
<br />
<i>In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.</i><br />
<i><br /></i>If I were pious, I would lumber out of bed and kneel. I taped an icon of Christ the Savior on my window trim. I could stand before it in the dawn light. Or, at least I could bother to make the sign of the Cross. But the covers are so heavy. I am the dead, the sleeper being called to action: <i>Awake, awake, O Sleeper. </i>Arise from the grave.<br />
<br />
Alas. I lay in prone pose.<br />
<br />
<br /></div>
</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1051980354439389332.post-22991136820263457572015-05-18T09:01:00.002-07:002015-05-18T09:01:21.586-07:00Four FracturesToe. Right Pelvis. Right Wrist. Right foot in one tarsal. Left femur where the ball joints the pelvis. Dull aches. Spear-pain. Certainty of brokenness. Skeptical doctors. Insistence upon x-rays.<br />
<br />
Three stress fractures. Two accident fractures.<br />
<br />
One of them saved my life.<br />
<br />
The week that my shin splints shuttered my return to running, I remembered what old wives say "you never forget:" how to ride a bicycle. Rather, how to check a road bike for air pressure, settle onto its sleek ax-like seat, how to stream-line your body and settle in for a twenty-five mile ride in the dawn. It took a week. On the eve of day one, I asked my husband to refresh me on unlocking the bike from its perch on our porch. He said I should know how to pressure up the front tire, which had a habit of deflating now and again for reasons he didn't understand. I listened. I practiced the bike lock. I set my alarm for five am, checked the weather, set out running clothes. I don't have one of those padded bike pant sets. I had no idea the seat would jigger its way up my pelvis, which it did not the first morning.<br />
<br />
I never got that far. I rustled my husband out of bed at five-ten because I still couldn't unlock the bike. I set out from our house, down the empty thoroughfare, across the railroad tracks. Thump, thump, thump. At CVS, a half mile from our house, I realized the front tire was too low. I stopped to pump it up and deflated. In the darkest hour, I couldn't see to resolve the issue. I walked the bike home, drove to the community center and paid a couple of bucks to ride a stationary. By the following Monday, I'd switched from the road bike to our ten-speed. At seven am, the first day school was out, I skipped morning Matins and head out towards 32W towards Waynetown. Down the summer-empty thoroughfare, toward the tracks, thud, thud, thud. I listened for the horn of the Amtrak that comes whipping through town around seven am on Mondays. <i>I must have missed it, </i>I thought and peddled fast. It blew. Lights flashed. Crossing bars began their elegant descent. I saw a flashback to eleven years before, when I'd thrown my car into reverse without looking to get the hell off the eight tracks, side-by-side in Illinois. I'd been three months pregnant. I hit the car behind me that day, went to court but saved a life. In the danger red blinking, I squeezed hard on the brakes and my ten speed stopped immediately. I did not. Head over handle bars. My helmet grazed the pavement but I landed on my right wrist. I was kneeling on the sandy sidewalk. Bruised, clear of the tracks with a healthy looking bike and a wrist that look just a bit funny.<br />
<br />
The homeless guy across the street, pulling his junk wagon -- a get-up of dog cage on wheels -- asked me if I was okay. Folks in cars leaped out with cell phones.<br />
<br />
"I'll all 911," they all offered.<br />
<br />
"I'm fine. I'm fine. I might have a broken arm, I'm fine."<br />
<br />
I called my husband, though I knew he was chanting and incensing. I called my daughter, though I knew she was sleeping. I used my forearm to push the bike home. I woke my girl and asked her to drive me to the ER, where the staff doctor told me my arm wasn't broken.<br />
<br />
"X-ray it again," I said. He ordered a funny table shot, a low-angled zoom. Sure enough a funny little fracture, right on the joint. He splinted it. He took views of my clavicle, examined me, and my husband finished his service and replaced my daughter, letting her go back home and back to bed.<br />
<br />
He drove me to the bone density scan I had schedule for 11am. At 1pm, arm splinted, appointment with a orthopedic surgeon in Indianapolis set, I went for a nine-mile run. I would not be stopped. Even after the surgery to plate up the wrist, I rode a stationary bike with my right arm sweating in a cotton club dressing. Sometimes, I unwrapped the bindings to give it air, to keep sweat from fermenting and rotting the stitches, or whatever gross infection I imagined.<br />
<br />
That fracture healed fast. I could use the arm in a few weeks. It felt great, stronger than ever.<br />
<br />
So when another orthopedic specialist told me this February that the stress fracture on my left femur was "not bad" but in a very scary spot, and that I should stay off it unless I wanted him "to put a rod in there," I wondered, would it heal as fast, feel as strong? Pain and the four recent fractures reminded me, I needed to mind my mortal coil. Fasting, praying, resting. Learn again the art of restraint.<br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1051980354439389332.post-44609938666904885252015-05-17T16:35:00.000-07:002015-05-17T19:21:55.270-07:00First fracture.The hip bone connects to the femur, the femur connects to the patella,<br />
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
the patella connects to the tibia, the
tibia connects to the tarsals<o:p></o:p></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
the tarsals go all meta.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
My first bone broke when I was thirty-eight unless that toe bone counts. I've
pondered how my broke my right pelvic bone as much as when I broke it. It was a
stress-fracture. Hairline. At first, I
felt a strain. The ache burned around mile two of my customary morning
ten-miler. The ice on the sidewalks made me feel like an elderly woman in a
shower, like Bambi when he first stood. All legs going all which-ways. I turned back at mile three because
I couldn't call my husband for a rescue. He and my daughter were at winter
camp. My son and a friend were asleep in my house. I walked the miles at my treadmill desk pulling and limping my way
over a spinning belt.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
I heard, "Have a doctor look at that
toe. One break can cause other injuries." My cousin recommended after a
fall in July. I'd splatted, six miles
into a hot sixteen-miler, training for the Chicago Marathon. Blood streamed
from my knee. For days, it oozed yellow
pus because I picked myself off the concrete, ran slow miles to a gas station,
rinse and ran on. I finished ten more miles in the euphoria of the run and the
dulling action of nerves under duress. My scar remains, like Sauron's eye,
staring out from my knee. My second
biggest toe arches like a pianist's fingers playing a concerto. I splinted the
toe with a popsicle stick and medical tape. I wiped ooze from under days of
bandages. I ran on. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
Until I stopped running at mile three. The
next day, I tried the trusses of my 1874 Victorian, jogging at 6.0 on my
treadmill, the bookshelves shivering, the china cabinet threatening to spill my
wine glasses to their ledges. If I ran longer, they'd have leaped to their
death when I pulled open the cabinet. I ran with ibuprofen. Four every four
hours.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
Pretty rusty pills. When my husband came
home the next day, I diagnosed myself with a groin sprain. I will walk it off,
I told myself. 1. 8 miles per hour on the treadmill desk. Dreadfully slower
than my 2.5 miles per hour. I moved the ibuprofen bottles to my bedside and my desk. I walked fifteen miles a day to keep up
my daily goals. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
In week four, when I thought<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i>I'm crippled<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span></i>I called the doctor's
office. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
"You. No
sprain.<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i>Strain,<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span></i>said
Dr. Hwang. No x-ray then.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
I went back three weeks later, demanding
an x-ray.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
By this time, the pain like a steel rod,
stung with heel strikes, ached in rest,
made me waddle rather than walk. I waddled fifteen miles, white knuckling the
sides of the desk. At night, I wore pads rather than let my stiff sore flesh rustle out of bed to relieve
kidneys. Little peeps of urine and a full bladder hurt less than turning over
or trying to find stability while I stood.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
January was over. All the cold gear I
bought for running never saw use. When
the nurse at the doctor's office called with the x-ray results, she said,
"You have a stress fracture."<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i>Yes
I know,<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span></i>I thought, but how long will this pain last. How long until I can
let the cool clear outdoor air fill my
lungs, how long until I can get up out of anything without grinding my teeth.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<i>Is this because I tripped during the
marathon or because I splinted my own toe and kept training? </i><o:p></o:p></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
In February, my sister and I walked six
blocks in the Harrisburg cold to eat curry. She walked next me slow. I told her
I thought I needed anti-depressants. I grunted when I stepped off a curb or up.
I grit my teeth. The rod I imagined in my femur jammed up into my pelvis.<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i>How long, O Lord?</i> My
sister said to call my doctor, the one who said "You no have sprain. Strained." But it was broken. All
that stress. Sometime between December 19 and January 1 a small pinching had
blossomed and one muscle or bone yanked on another until I could hardly stand.
When did the bone just rattle and crack, not like the tiny fissures in muscle
and bone which fill as they heal, making a skeleton stronger, not feeble. When
should I call the doctor? When would I know if my spirit was stress fractured
enough that I needed anti-depressants? I consulted friends who advised me to
get ahead of the pain in my soul. I did not call then. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
It took three months to wean myself off of NSAIDs. I felt the pain still. I
planned my first run for April 1st, Saint Mary of Egypt's feast day. She's my
patron saint, an austere, formidable woman who battled her passions forty years
alone in the desert on the far side of the Jordan. Naked. Alone. When I picked
her, I thought I could learn from her personal discipline. After four months of
walking, grad school, a younger sister being diagnosed with cancer, losing a
job, killing a bear with a new car and other tortures, she scared me. How did
she manage alone? I drank to anesthetize
what the ibuprofen couldn't kill. The grain killed
my writing. I nearly failed the semester. My professor scorned me with each
paper: "I should fail you for one more comma error." I confessed all
that happened to him once. He replied, "That's no excuse. I've had it bad
too." I drank twice as much for a few weeks.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
By the end of the semester, I developed a
syndrome in my fingers and toes. They'd turn white, lose feeling, turn blue,
then red and burn when I touched anything. A woman's nipples in the first weeks
of pregnancy cannot brush silk with out searing. My fingers could not tap the keys
without searing. My soul, when sober,
burned.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
On April 1st, I ran. Ten miles. And woke
the next morning with shin splints. On Pascha, a few weeks later, I
curled in my bed, feeling touched, like Jacob in my hip. Would I ever run
again? I missed my town as it looks on foot. I missed
movement. I missed Paschal morning
running where I whisper "Christ is Risen" to each block, to the
Easter morning church goers and the a-religious mowing their lovely April
lawns.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
I curled in bed cursed. First
fracture. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1051980354439389332.post-7415030950442672242015-05-17T14:27:00.000-07:002015-05-17T14:53:05.889-07:00My Spirit Animal<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>My grandmother bequethed me with my spirit animal, the elephant, and this itch to write. </i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>I dedicate this to her because it marks my first post-MFA blog project.</i></div>
<br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/marfis75/12474470554" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="grey giants (cc) by Martin Fisch, on Flickr"><img alt="grey giants (cc)" height="160" src="https://c2.staticflickr.com/4/3830/12474470554_8c579923f8_m.jpg" width="240" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /><span style="font-size: 12.8000001907349px;">Martin Fisch </span><br />
<span style="font-size: 12.8000001907349px;">grey giants (cc) </span><br />
<span style="font-size: 12.8000001907349px;">creative commons by marfis756</span><br />
<div>
<span style="font-size: 12.8000001907349px;"><br /></span></div>
</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br /><br />
Old male elephants weep over the corpses of their male companions, I read.<br />
<div>
Orphaned bulls go on killing rampages. One incident where a gang of orphaned bulls murdered numerous other elephants resulted after poachers slaughter most adults in a family of elephants, I read.</div>
<div>
Poachers hack the faces off these huge animals, leaving hundreds of pounds of flesh to rot, all so the wealthy may enjoyed ivory trinkets, I read.</div>
<div>
Elephants never forget, I heard.</div>
<div>
<i>Elephnanant, </i>I said. Or I heard that I said when I was still three.</div>
<div>
My grandmother bought me soapstone elephants, trucked out the ebony ones her mother sent from Sierra Leone, just to hear me mispronounce the word.</div>
<div>
I said <i>libary</i> too, but she didn't drag me to the library, or buy me libraries of books. She read to me from her libraries. My parents read to me from our county libraries. Bushels full of books.</div>
<div>
I never forgot the books. </div>
<div>
I doubted I loved the leathery, fat animals. They reminded me of my grandfather's leather hands, his fat flesh. Then I remembered how much I adored him. </div>
<div>
I decided to love elephants. </div>
<div>
Before I knew they suffered. The first time I heard they suffered, my grandmother put the white tusks into the holes of the ebony cow and calf. </div>
<div>
"Are those real tusks, Grandma?" She told me how people prized ivory and traded it. She never explained the gruesome murders of elephants, the waste, how coveting ivory meant creating death.</div>
<div>
Elephants. Power. Elegance. </div>
<div>
Almost human, the dolphin of land. Almost moral, certainly interdependent, communal, reactionary.</div>
<div>
Last year I saw the first picture of an elephant, one of an almost extinct species, face hacked off, carcass rotting. Splintered for that lovely external tusk, that bit of almost bone.</div>
<div>
<br />
<br />
<div>
<br /></div>
</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0