Sunshine

 

A Sunday:

My darling daughter came home from her last cast-and-crew party at 2:00 this morning.  I think I might have fallen asleep another hour after that.  The show was great and the parties were great and another high school milestone -- the last performance of the last musical -- is behind us.

I had to get up early because I was co-teaching an adult ed class at church on the prologue to John's Gospel.  Interesting stuff but not so much after only five hours of sleep.

I've spent much of the rest of the day finishing a paper on a painting of Raphael's.  These art history papers are a genre unto themselves and require a certain attentiveness to the details of conventions unfamiliar to me that tries my ADD soul.  So I called a friend to go birding at a spot where lots of ducks were rumored to have made themselves at home last week.

They were gone.  There is this problem about birds.  They fly.  Away.  I guess they, too, are plagued by ADD.

I've also been fooling around with my journal a bit.  I've added a couple of new links to my "Other Journals" column -- in a new space, allocated to journals that focus on place.  I know that we all write out of the terrain we inhabit, but geography as a focal point is interesting to me, so I'm starting a collection.  I'd love to get some new links.

 

Almost Spring

 

The Other World

There is a whole other domain out there that most parents never encounter.  When you first stumble into it, you discover a province of such loneliness and fear that you are sure that one more step through it will cause you to crumple into a thousand shattered pieces.  That option is unavailable; transformation is all that's left.  (The choices have a way of narrowing with abrupt speed.)  This is for the parents staggering through that other world.  They look like all the others -- same jeans, same t-shirts -- but the others all look different to them. 

 

In the regular world ~

 

            You get up in the morning, set breakfast out on the table, chat with your children about the upcoming day, and hustle them out the door to school or activities.

 

In the other world ~

 

            You wake up and stare at the ceiling with a dark sense of foreboding, as the memories of previous days and the knowledge of your certain helplessness return.

 

In the regular world ~

 

            You call other moms to arrange carpools and friends to arrange a moms’ dinner out.

 

In the other world ~

 

            You pick up the phone and try to make your way a little further down the list of psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, and schools.

 

In the regular world ~

 

            You lug Gatorade for the whole team to the game and stand on the sidelines cheering your child and teammates on.

 

In the other world ~

 

            You stop by a friend’s child’s game and watch quietly, wondering if your child will ever run up and down a field again with that kind of fearlessness and abandon.

 

In the regular world ~

 

            A friend on the telephone bubbles over with excitement about her child’s college acceptance, or all-state athletic recognition, or Presidential scholarship.

 

In the other world ~

 

            You are praying, practically moment by moment, that the child who showed such promise two years ago will just make it to graduation next week.

 

In the regular world ~

 

            You join in with friends who knowingly nod their heads and cluck disapprovingly over what must be the dreadful parenting skills and family chaos behind someone else’s child’s crisis.

 

In the other world ~

 

            You keep your lips sealed when you encounter such conversations, because you know that tragedy and sorrow blow where they will.

 

I have found only one set of answers.

 

Love recklessly.  Love extravagantly.  Love with abandon.

Signs of Spring

Marigolds2 and I are keeping tabs on the eagle nest at Blackwater Wildlife Refuge.  So far today it doesn't look much like spring there, but that mama eagle is sitting determinedly on three eggs.  (You can see them on a better day in the 2005 archive photos.)  She was covered in a blanket of snow early this morning; she's shaken herself off now but she looks a bit perturbed. 

Down in southern Ohio, spring seemed a bit more of a possibility this past week-end, as a pair of industrious birds worked on the nest they are building in one of my dad's canoes.  Last summer they built in the bow of another canoe and, after they raised their family, my dad cleaned out the nest and made plans to put in. Before he got around to the next step, the birds had started a late summer second nest in the stern.  He says that this year they've gone upscale, having moved from the aluminum canoe to the Kevlar.

If you know who the canoe construction crew is, leave me a note.  The winner(s) of the nesting identification contest will walk away with the grand prize of. . . recognizing a sign of spring when they see it!

Who Was She?

Mary Grannin, in religion Sister Mary Thomas, was born in 1860, before the Civil War.  Somehow, in 1880, she made her way to the convent of the Ursulines of Brown County in southern Ohio and became a nun.  I don't know where she came from, or why she decided to join the convent, or what took her life in the eleventh year of her religious profession.  I only know where she ended up, in the small cemetery down the path from where the main convent buildings had been erected in the mid-1800s.

Since I was visiting family the past few days, I also stopped by to visit my nun friends and, with all of them pretty busy, I ended up taking a walk around the grounds where I had gone to junior high.  Many of my former teachers now rest in the cemetery there, which is striking in its modesty.  At home I frequently walk in the nearby historic cemetery, 400 acres of arboretum quality grounds where many of the past movers and shakers of my city are buried.  The contrast is telling.  A well-known businessman died here a couple of years ago, and it seemed that overnight his masoleum was erected and landscaped, with more expense lavished on the place where his bones lie than many people spend on their back yards over the course of several years.

The nuns, all of them heroes to former students and members of the small community where they play significant roles, take a different approach.  Simple stones on the edge of a field mark the graves of women who accomplished more in their lives than most of us would in ten.  They chose a place that seems to lie on the edge of the world, still so rural today that its isolation 150 years ago is unimaginable, and there created an oasis for the education of young women.  And when they are finished with their work (and they never finish until they die), they move out to the edge of the field, with nothing but simple stones identical to those of their sisters to alert the rest of us to their existence.

It's very beautiful there, and I imagine that they feel at home.  But I do wonder about Mary Grannin.

Going Home

No matter how you cut it, going home is an unsettling experience. 

I've been going home since I was twelve and first went off to boarding school.  Once I hit my twenties, I seldom returned more than twice a year.  My father and wife # 3 were involved with their own lives and young children, and didn't take much of an interest in mine (life or children).  As they divorced several years ago, my father developed an interest in his grandchildren and began to come around, and started to include them (us) on his annual canoe trips in Canada.  My current stepmother was delighted to enlarge her family circle, and stepped in quickly to help us out during a period of terrible family stress.  The burgeoning relationships were good and happy ones for all concerned.

Now my stepmother is ill, and I've been home several times in the last few months.  I don't have much to offer in the way of help, in part because my dad isn't much for accepting any, but at least my presence lets them know they are cared for and provides a few new topics of conversation.

Some of what I do have to offer doesn't interest them.  In this particular situation, I would have called in the hospice troops months ago.  I'm more likely to look a situation in the eye and conclude, "We are totally screwed here."   They are more inclined to sidestep reality.  It's a dynamic I'm acustomed to; my husband has often accused me of pessimism where I have simply wanted to acknowledge the presence of pain.   You can move through it, but only if you do.

I found this barn across a field on a hill as I was driving around the countryside.  Battered but still standing.  A presence; a witness to the buffeting winds of change.  Sometimes that's all we can be.

Tax Return Avoidance

The Saturday Six ~ more entertaining than the 2004 stacks of paper on the dining room table with numbers on them:

1. Other than Earth, what planet intrigues you the most and why?

The tiny one in The Little Prince that has so many sunsets.
 
2. What is the last business issue you wrote a letter or called to complain about?  What's the last thing you complemented a business on?

Telephone call yesterday: round three of the attempt to "help" the dental insurance company "find" the records I sent (twice) demonstrating that my boys are, indeed, fulltime college students and, therefore, insured dependents whose winter break charges should be paid sooner rather than later and whose wisdom teeth extractions should be approved forthwith.

In the compliment line:  my employer somehow deleted two years of employment credited toward my retirement plan.  I sent a complimentary email to the woman who cleared it up and copied her bosses.

3. When was the last time you had your picture taken?  Did you like the way the picture turned out?

I took one of myself a couple of weeks ago and no, I did not like it.  So what else is new?
 
4. What was the last program you watched a rerun of on television?

Ummmm. . . I have no idea.
 
5. READER'S CHOICE QUESTION #47 from Carly:  The land has been referred to, by more than one person, as a community or a neighborhood. What would you call the metaphorical name of the street you reside on here in the land and who are your closest neighbors?

Wide-Angle Drive, because I am becoming acquainted with such a variety of people.  My closest neighbors would be the ladies I've known the longest and best, the inhabitants of Random Thoughts and Matters of the Mind, because, as we all know, I handle change VERY slowly and with great delicacy.  Also because Pamela is going to have a pool and Marian is a great cook, so they need to live on either side of me.

6. READER'S CHOICE QUESTION #48 from Braxton:  If you had to write an essay that pertained to 'human life', what opinion or topic about mankind would you choose to write about? (exp. relationships, struggles, accomplishments, etc) And briefly explain why you chose said topic...

I guess that one would have to be human spirituality -- and I'd go interview Huston Smith to do it.

Barns

I've always loved barns.  They show up on calendars, so I suppose other people do, too.  Because I grew up in the country, they were an integral part of my childhood.  When I'm driving across the state, I'm always promising myself that someday I'll take a leisurly trip along the backroads some year just to photograph the mostly abandoned and crumbling barns that litter the countryside.  So many of them evidence the extraordinary care and expense that went into their construction, even as they gradually sink into the gullies and creekbeds and melt into the fields.

My favorite barns are still the three near Sleeping Bear Dunes in Michigan.  They are so meticulously maintained, exquisite to see up close, and looking like houses of the three bears of Goldilocks fame from a distance. 

But the ones in the midwest remind me of childhood days spent playing hide-and-seek among the stalls and scrambling into haylofts.

 

Photographs

Another image of yesterday's barn -- well, same image, different applications.

I suppose that each of these views says something a little different about my anticipated trip, which is mostly for the purpose of spending a a little time with my extremely ill stepmother and exhausted father.  Yesterday -- stark and a little foreboding, maybe.  Today, dreamlike, into another world.  Tomorrow, maybe a bit of optimism.  You decide.

This afternoon I decided to treat myself to an hour at the Art Museum. Since I'm taking an art history course on Michelangelo and his contemporaries, I was in the mood for some Italian Renaissance paintings, and I spent most of my time with them.  But on the way out, I stumbled over  a small exhibit of work by French photographer Luc Delahaye -- huge panoramas of war and other newsworthy scenes.  The note to the exhibit mentioned that the vastness of his photos enables him to capture some of the sense of the significance of events in a broad way, something often missing from the more intimate, close-up news photos we are used to.  The photograph below, which is one of the seven in the exhibit, is 43 x 95 inches.  It's entitled "Taliban."

Midwinter

I'm going down to visit my father and stepmother for a few days, starting Sunday.  I took this photograph of the barn behind their house the last time I was down there, in the gentle hills of southwestern Ohio, and I thought I'd play around with it a bit tonight.  I have some other versions to add later. 

I haven't been writing or taking pictures for several days, but I've been thinking a lot about both.  I've got some fiction started that I'm going to spend some of my limited time on, which is going to mean more sporadic journaling.  And I'm increasingly dissatisifed with my photographs and longing for a more sophisticated camera.  That little set of car repairs last week put a damper on my Big Spender ideas, so I guess I'll fool around and learn to manipulate what I have while I wait to see if there is any recovery in sight.  April 15 has been a Very Bad Day around here for the last several years so, until it's come and gone, I don't want to start counting chickens that might turn out to belong to Uncle Sam.

I have all of next week off work, and a list of plans that would take a year to accomplish.  It's amazing what optimism an empty calendar can incite.  At minimum: the taxes.  Then we can make our plans to move into a barn just like the one above.

The Sunday Six

Always a day late and a dollar short, that girl.  Nevertheless, herewith, the Saturday Become Sunday Six:

1. What one song or melody can make you smile even when you're having a rotten day?

"Eight Days a Week" by the Beatles ---  four of us lip-synched our way through this in a sixth grade talent show (I was John, of course).  It takes me back to what seemed like a carefree and innocent time just before the Sixties really happened.
 
2. What are your plans for the day?  How much of it do you think you'll actually accomplish?

Well, I was going to finish grading 35 8th grade essay exams on Colonial America and I did that.  I was going to go to the library to do my reserve reading on Michelangelo and I did that.  I have a prayer group at church tonight and I'll do that because I'm committed to drive someone else.  I have to read 16 9th grade paragraphs about Tang-Song China  and I'll probably do that.  I also have to grade 16 9th grade essay exams about China and I'm betting that that isn't going to happen.  Isn't Desperate Housewives on tonight?  Oh, and there's that econ chapter on the free enterprise system that I have to teach tomorrow. . .
 
3. What television show do you most enjoy watching when you're all alone and can devote your complete attention to it?

I cannot imagine devoting my complete attention to a television show.  I always read or work at the same time.  It drives my daughter crazy because I'm always asking her what just happened.

4. What was the last thing you remember arguing with someone about?

The topic: remembering to buy cat litter and laundry detergent at the grocery.  It seems that someone is not aware that these are weekly purchases because I am the one who always, and, until yesterday, without complaint, makes the extra trip to buy them.
 
5. READER'S CHOICE QUESTION #45 from Bud:  Inspired by this article on cell phone technology, he asks, "What is your most aggravating public experience with a cell-phone user?"

Yesterday morning I walked to the small nearby lake.  No one was there.  I was leaning over the bridge, totally immersed in my own completely silent contemplation of the extremely beautiful morning when I heard a raspy voice say, "Well?  Is Joan coming?  I'm here -- I thought she was going to show up!"  I had been oblivious to the car pulling up and the woman getting out, but I couldn't block out the conversation that she had decided she needed to have Right Then and There.

6. READER'S CHOICE QUESTION #46 from Stacy:  Did you watch the Super Bowl and if you did, do you like the commercials, the half-time show OR the ceremony following the game the best?

Nope.  I would have watched Paul McCartney if I'd known about it.  I've been assured that I didn't miss much.  I sure would have loved to hear him sing "Hey, Jude," though.

It's still winter.  Early this morning there was something odd in the sky -- oh!  the sun.  I hardly remember it.

Queen of Technology

Last night some of us were online discussing the vicissitudes of car ownership (that trip to the shop I'd been postponing?  $900. . . ) and that got me started on how well many of us function in today's high-tech world without a clue as to what's going on:

Me, to car guy:  Well, it makes this noise.  And there was this other round kind of thing that I got replaced recently.....In the front. . . you know, round. . .    .  

Me, to appliance guy:   It's broken.  It made a noise and now it doesn't work.  

Me, to husband:  There's something wrong with AOL.  

Me, to computer guy at school (that one would be a rabbi):  My grades are somewhere out there in space.  But they aren't on the computer.  

Me, to plumber:  There's water on the basement floor.  There's a toilet two stories above the puddle.  I'm guessing there's a connection.  

Me, to chimney guy:  It seems that it's illegal not to have the liner that we haven't had for 90 years.  There's a metal pipe through the middle of the chimney that helps to stabilize it. You have to figure out how to get a liner in there.  I don't want to know how.  

Me, to daughter:   Could you install a new print cartridge?  

Me, to son:  I couldn't understand a word of those directions you emailed me on how to un-install your AIM on my screenname, so I thought I'd wait for you to get home on vacation. In the meantime, I'm enjoying my conversations with your girlfirend, even though she doesn't speak English and I  don't speak French.  

Me, to daughter:   I want to watch a dvd, and I can't find that full page of instructions you wrote out.  

Me:  To my readers:  Thank you for the compliments on the collage a couple of entries back.  Unfortunately, as it turns out, I have no recollection whatever as to how I did that!

Celebrity Mania

We live in such a pathetically wierd culture.

I just turned on the computer to read "Famous American Writer Dies -- He Was Married to Marilyn Monroe."

What does that mean?????????

I guess it means that Arthur Miller's marriage to a celebrity who didn't live long enough to accomplish much of anything herself is of more significance to most Americans than his plays Death of a Salesman or The Crucible.

Dustin Hoffman put in a wonderful perfomance as Willy Loman on a televised Death of a Salesman a few years ago.  And I'd guess that many Americans have learned more about the Salem Witch Trials from The Crucible than from musty history books.

So I'm going  to place the blame for the dumbing down of America right at the feet of the media.  If it wants to identify one of the supertalents of our era by the superstar he once married, then it can hardly criticize its readers for their interest in the drivel that passes for much of entertainment today.  I guess we deserve all of the Brad and Jen that we can stomach. 

***********************

OK, I will now get off my soapbox long enough to acknowledge that I, too, enjoy drivel, especially in the form of Desperate Housewives.  But I have to share my paraphrase of and elaboration on what I thought was a hysterically funny "overheard conversation" relayed in the New York Times awhile back:

"I am SO grateful that George Bush has been re-elected President.  We need a God-fearing man to lead our country out of its moral quagmire."

"I couldn't agree more.  There is SO much immorality in our country -- Janet Jackson, gay marriage, extramarital sex --"

"Yes!  I am so glad that we will continue to have real moral leadership at the top!  Hey -- did you catch Desperate Housewives last night?!"

***********************

PS (Later):  Did anyone catch ER last night?  ER doc Kerri Weaver finally finds her birth mother, only to be rejected because she is gay.  I thought the performance by the woman who plays Kerri was beautifully done -- just the right blend of curiosity, anger, sadness, vulnerability, and strength.

Playtime

When my son was home a couple of weeks ago, he showed me how to make a collage on Paint, so I made a couple of tries.  I'm not sure I can remember how to do it, but maybe I'll try to improve this week-end.  (These are all portions of gravestones in the cemetery where I often walk.)

Mother Vent

My daughter went off to the high school basketball game tonight, the final game of the season against her school's arch rival.  (They lost by 2 points in the final minute -- ouch!)  I am really happy for her, that she has friends to spend time with and games to go to and teachers who have become far more relaxed with the seniors than they ever were with them as juniors.  But here's the thing: her school is a half hour drive away, and she got home about 10:00, after driving those 15 miles by herself in the dark and snow.  And here's the other thing: she's five feet tall and weighs about 100 pounds.  If she hits a deer out there in the country, or slides off the road, or has some other kind of incident, she's going to be out there trudging around in the dark and snow all by herself.

Tomorrow afternoon she's driving across the city to the other side of town for the first time, to talk to a vet about a possible senior project.  She rolls her eyes when I go through the directions, practically block by block, and groans when I mention that the neighborhood she's headed to isn't one of the greatest.

Next week -- tech week for the school musical -- she probably won't ever be home before midnight.  Back out on the road, late every night.  How could I have ever imagined that someday I would be hoping that the tech crew would decided to camp out together in someone's house on a  weeknight?  Or that I wouldn't care in the least about the gender mix because I would be so thrilled by the idea of all of them curled up in someone's family room instead of on the road at midnight?

I love that she is an independent, competent, responsible young woman.  I love how well she handles herself.  I love that the colleges she has applied to outline the perimeter of the United States -- that she is eager for adventure and change.  I love that she expects to be able to manage her own life. 

Right?  I do love all that . . . don't I?

Comment Junkie

Little frustrations:  

Last night I attempted to leave a comment on vxv789's LiveJournal.  She's got a terrific thing going there and I wanted to tell her -- you, if you're reading! -- that the stone art photo is by Andy Goldsworthy.  He makes wonderful creations out of patterns he puts together from nature and photographs them -- and then, I think, lets them go. 

Anyway, LiveJournal allows you to comment if you're not a member and can prove you're also not spam.  There's a little box where you type in some letters from the LJ screen to prove that you are a human who can read -- but no letters showed up last night.  Just an irritating little red "x."  Alternatively, you can listen to a recording of numbers and then type those in instead -- but the recording was so distorted that my attempt to type in the numbers got me labeled as nonhuman.  I am waiting in some trepidation to see if my account is suddenly closed down for sending spam, as it was last week when someone apparently hacked into my name and password.  Needless to say, I won't be attempting to leave comments in LJ again.

Another place I haven't been able to comment is Wrenassiance's wonderful nature site.  If folks from other journal sites would leave real email addresses, at least I could email them.  I want you all to know that I do visit everyone who comments here and I often enjoy what I see, but sometimes I have no way of conveying that.  (I managed to leave Wrenaissance a comment in someone else's journal!)

Some of my friends have emailed comments to me that they haven't been able to leave because they aren't members of aol.  I don't know why all these servers can't get together and figure out a joint and FUNCTIONING program so that we could all converse across company lines. 

And as long as I'm complaining --why can't we just cut and past photos into our journals???????????????  I am SO sick of the "My FTP" routine.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch -- something like 25 people checked in here last night after I went to bed.  Same for my other journal.  Come on, guys, give a girl a break.  At least say "Hi"!!!!

I do wonder sometimes about my audience.  (That's because I wonder about myself.) (Not really.  Thank God I don't have much time for that.) I notice that people who get zillions of comments seem to have journals with a running theme -- and often a certain persona or attitude.  Maybe readers like knowing what to expect?  I'm as all over the place as I am in real life (although I do try to leave out the personal sarcasm  in this particular locale).  I would like to think that that makes me delightfully unpredictable, but perhaps I'm just indistinctly unintelligible.

Anyway.......helllllllooooo out there!

Just in Time for Lent

I finally caught up with my other journal this morning.  Yet one more way of avoiding the car shop.

 

 

The Two-Headed Calf

I sent this poem in a comment to Theresa today, but I love it SO much that I've decided to print it here as well.  I remember the very first time I heard it read, some years ago.  My favorite preacher ever in the world, Episcopalian priest Barbara Brown Taylor, used it in a sermon, and there was a catch in her usually exquisitely calm voice as she came to the end.  I don't remember a thing about the sermon (sorry, Barbara), but I've never forgotten the poem's evocation of the unexpected beauty and mystery that we can choose to experience in lieu of revulsion and horror.

                                           

The Two-Headed Calf
by Laura Gilpin

Tomorrow when the farm boys find this
freak of nature they will wrap his body
in newspaper and carry him to the museum.
But tonight he is alive and in the north
field with his mother. It is a perfect
summer evening: the moon rising over
the orchard, the wind in the grass. And
as he stares into the sky, there are
twice as many stars as usual.

This Century and That

I'm trying to remember what I did on Saturday.  Hey!  -- I keep a journal; shouldn't I know?  I have no idea. . . .  .  

Yesterday was a pretty productive day.  I co-taught an adult class at church with one of our pastors and Paul and women; I got to provide the cultural context for his sometimes confusing, sometimes contradictory, sometimes radical and sometimes outrageous statements.   

Then I pretty much finished up a paper I'm writing on Michelangelo's Pieta:

 

and an earlier German Pieta:     

And then I took a long walk in the cemetery -- I wasn't planning to go down the hill (which requires coming back up), but there is a gravesite at the bottom with a replica of Michelangelo's sculpture and, in the end, I couldn't resist trekking down there.  I was fine with that, despite the tortuous walk back up, because I actually got a couple of more ideas for my paper.  

I was horrified to discover this morning that I had completely missed what sounds like a terrific Paul McCartney halftime show last night.  Truthfully, I am just SO OUT OF IT.  I wouldn't even have known the Superbowl was yesterday if my daughter hadn't been going off to watch it with friends, and I had no idea until after it had started what teams were playing.  I can't believe that my husband didn't even call me downstairs to watch Paul McCartney perform!  

Ordinary Extraordinary

My daughter is off working on theater tech today, and will be back for a voice lesson late this afternoon.  Last night she went to dinner and a movie with a girlfriend, and tomorrow she plans to watch the Superbowl with the three girls who have been her best friends since maybe third grade.  All pretty ordinary events in the life of a high school senior, but there have been times in her life when the hope of enjoying any of those things seemed tenuous at best.

My father and his wife are reveling in the long-awaited sunshine streaming through their windows in the woods in southern Ohio.  An ordinary day made starkly precious by the ominous presence of cancer cells, and the knowledge that the number of such days are limited.

The marsh is quiet this morning, despite the re-emergence of the sun and the depth of blue in the sky.  But by the end of the month, even though snow will probably be falling, red-winged blackbirds will be calling across the reeds, establishing their territories for the coming months.  Such optimism they will convey in the face of a blizzard!

I've just been talking on the phone with one of my sons.  He's taking a break from writing a term paper and lounging around his room.  Ordinary.  But there was a time when his upside down and backward letters caused us to wonder whether college would even be in his future.

Last night we helped friends celebrate their 25th wedding anniversary.  Their  24-year-old son made a beautiful toast, in which he noted that they hadn't wanted anything fancy, just a quiet evening at home with the friends who have meant so much to them.  The same old group of people, wearing jeans and drinking champagne.

I mentioned in my other journal a prayer that I had read elsewhere,  "for the grace of a normal day."  My normal day on Thursday included an envelope, covered with hearts (how did she find that?) from Judi Heartsong, containing my contest prize.  Such vibrant colors -- they lit up an ordinary hallway on an ordinary gray afternoon.  Or was it her generosity that did that?

Ordinary days.  Extraordinary.

************************************

This entry was inspired by another one, in which the writer's student is quoted as saying, "the poet's fish was no ordinary fish--otherwise there would be no need to write a poem about it."

Uh huh.  How old do you have to be to know the opposite?

The Landfill...er, Car (Or, Adult ADD)

So. . . . my van is making a strange little squeaky whistly kind of noise that is going to a mandate a trip to the shop before I can make that long drive down to see my father and stepmother again.  I've been avoiding the shop because of the condition of the interior of my car, otherwise known as your local landfill:  dishes, food, magazines, books, student projects, CDs, clothing, mail. . . you get the idea.  Today, however, due to a happy confluence of balmy weather and some free time, I decided to excavate.  I still needed boots, since the back porch steps are encased in ice, but I didn't need  a jacket or gloves for my many trips in and out of the house.

I found some clementines, but they were pretty old.  I found an earring that I've been looking for, but I just realized as I wrote that down that I have no idea where I set it for safekeeping.  I brought in stacks of paper and decided to leave last year's extra yearbooks in storage in the back of the car, where they have been since. . . well, since last spring.

I was feeling so chipper, what with all my progress, that I decided that it was also a good time to sort through the week's mail.  Now, the main mail that has arrived over the last ten days or so has been tax-related, and it makes quite a stack.  Or two or three stacks.  But I cheerfully plowed forward.  I do have to get the tax returns done, since the federal financial aid people are eargerly awaiting the disclosure of all the humiliating details of our lives.  .  And that's when I  discovered . . .

I had lost my W-2.

I went through all the papers.  The ones in the kitchen and the ones in the hall and the ones in the dining room.  Several times.  The ones in the trash, too.  I went through the car, although by now it is so pristine that any stray piece of paper would leap out and yell.  I went through my shiny new health insurance binder.  I went through the trash again.  Finally, well after the day's close of business hours, I resigned myself to the knowledge that I would have to request a duplicate on Monday morning, at no small expense to myself, I'm sure.

And then I found it.  Sigh.

If someone PAID me for all the time that I spend looking for essential little envelopes and forms, I would be so rich that I wouldn't NEED a W-2.

Smokin' Seventeen

Maybe it's Alphawoman's 70s retrospective.

Maybe it's the conversation I've been having with a group of online friends about love and what it means in life.

Maybe it's that I spent so much of work today dealing with various aspects of the emotional fallout from adolesence.

Maybe it's just that my daughter and I drove in at the same time tonight.

I like to believe that she's nothing like I was at seventeen.  One the surface, she's not.  She's a terrific student, and these days she's busy constructing sets for her school's musical.  She's not a party girl, or much of a social butterfly at all, but she has a few good friends whom she loves to spend time with.  And she may be happiest of all curled up in her bed with her dog, her cat, and a good fantasy novel.

But for whatever reason, I felt a real lurch back into time tonight.  I am seventeen and it's early evening, very dark and cold in western Massachusetts.    I'm in boarding school, where seniors are left to their own devices at night.  We pull on our boots and our coats and head out into the crunchy knee-high snow toward the student center -- a gloomy, dimly lit basement where we can sit around and smoke cigarettes and talk.

What did we talk about, all those evenings that winter?  I can't remember at all.  It was a different time, in which test scores and GPAs were matters of no interest.  It was a different world, in which people experimented with but talked little about drugs and sex.  I suppose we talked about The Future, but not much.  And we talked about boys some -- but we were reluctant to reveal our vulnerabilities.  As girls who lived far from parents and siblings, we shared almost everything, but we didn't like to acknowledge  weakness.  After a couple of hours, we'd go back to our dorm and take our books and folders down to the basement smoker, where we'd write our English papers and smoke more cigarettes and talk until the wee hours of the morning. 

I don't think my daughter lives at all the way that I did.  She spends much more time with her family than I did -- I almost never saw my family.  She is much happier and healthier -- and she doesn't smoke! 

But I know that she protects herself, too.

Upstairs Stacks

Marigolds2 and I have got each other going on our book piles.  Herewith, a small selection from my upstairs:

Spectacular Happiness by Peter D. Kramer  

The Secret Book of Grazia dei Rossi by Jacqueline Park  

Blue Iris: Poems and Essays by Mary Oliver  

The Birth of Venus by Sarah Dunant  

If Grace is True: Why God Will Save Every Person by Philip Gulley and James Mulholland  

50 Hikes in North Carolina  

Spirit and Flesh: Life in a Fundamentalist Baptist Church by James M. Ault, Jr.  

The Digital Photographer's Handbook by Tom Ang  

Lords of the Horizon: A History of the Ottoman Empire by Jason Goodwin  

Praying with Meister Eckhart by Wayne Simsic  

Newsweek  

Ohio Magazine  

Weight Watchers  

People  

American Bungalow  

Yoga  

Time  

The Christian Century  

Balanced Living  

Christianity Today  

Christian History and Biography  

The Holy Bible (an extremely battered Oxford Annotated NRSV)  

The Sibley Guide to Birds  

 Catalogs from L.L. Bean, J. Jill, Monterey Bay and Orvis  

Michelangelo by Anthony Hughes  

And now that I've revealed what I read for fun, what I study for fun, what I look like, and what I wear, I am back to learning about production possibilities curves because, God help us all, I am teaching economics this semester.