Carole, Joni and Me

When I was my daughter's age -- just turning 18, just graduated from high school -- I spent most of the summer miserably in the general vicinity of home.  Ripped from my second set of boarding school friends  -- the people with whom I had lived with far more intimately than I had my own family since I had turned twelve -- and unable to work on Cape Cod as I had the previous two sumnmers, I was lonely and sad and spent most of my free time listening to Carole King's Tapestry album and Joni Mitchell's Blue album. 

I moved in with my maternal grandmother so that I could take a scintillating job as a chambermaid in a suburban motel chain, and occasionally spent the week-end with her and her incredibly irritating second husband in his Kentucky cabin, where I drove his tiny motorboat up and down the small lake and sang to myself:  

"So far away, doesn't anybody stay in one place anymore?"

 

 

 

 

 

and  

"I wish I had a river so w-i-i-i-i-de, I could sail away on." 

 

In mid-July, I moved home; my stepmother had died in a sudden accident and, although I would never have voluntarily spent more than a few consecutive days in the house when she was there, I was willing to go back and try to be of some support to my father, widowed for the second time in ten years.  I found a ride to Cincinnati, then a 45-minute commute each way, and kept slogging it out as a maid.  (Tip for summer motel maids:  you do the bathrooms and vacuuming  during the commericals so you can watch soap operas while you're changing the beds and dusting.)  

Relief finally came my way toward the end of the summer, when my father handed me a plane ticket west and told me that my birthday present would be two weeks with a boarding school classmate, first at her family's cabin in Colorado and then at their home in Scottsdale.  

I was thinking about my daughter and that week in Colorado as I made a long drive this afternoon.  My friend and I rode horseback further up into the mountains every day, and hung out with a group of kids our age in a cabin every night, listening to Firesign Theatre albums.  I'm sure we spent a lot of time stretched out alongside mountain lakes agonizing over The Future, but I don't remember much of those conversations.  We were used to living far from home and weren't particularly perturbed about going off to college.   

 (Found a picture -- the internet is amazing!) 

What I DO remember is that we met some guys from a road crew who had MOTORCYCLES.  And late, late at night, we would sling our legs across the seat backs, throw our arms around those young men, whoever they were, and ride with our long, long hair streaming behind us as they raced as fast as they could along the narrow mountain roads.

I would not want to hear about my lovely daughter riding helmetless at top speed on the back of a motorcycle with her arms tightly grasping a young man she had met hours before.

But when we looked up into the Colorado skies, there were a zillion stars above us.

Birthday Card Left for Me on the Kitchen Counter This Morning

 

 

 

This Birthday

 

You Have A Lot To Be Thankful For

 

 

 

 

I can’t run again.

Conventional Christianity -- Sort of

This entry was initially inspired by the discussions over at Point & Counterpoint, where Jodi  hosts an opportunity for folks of opposing viewpoints (sometimes, anyway) to express themselves.  Her religion/spirituality topic generated some heat and, combined with comments others have left me about my obvious interest in religion, got me thinking about trying to articulate my own beliefs.  So, a first try at decipering who I am:

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            A wholly conventional Christian. 

            A flexible and progressive Christian.

            A Christian who is not capable of believing that there is only one way.

 

            Conventional?  Oh, yeah.  I believe that we are called by God to a way of life faithful to God’s ways, but we are called to be who we are where we are.  I have spent my life in the midst of mainline American Protestantism, with a spicy sprinkling of Catholicism and thunderous 19th century evangelicalism, and I make no apologies for being who I am.  My Puritan forebears planted their feet on the rocky shores of New England and left behind traces of DNA  which have emerged in my soul as a willingness to align myself with the combined forces of convention and rebellion that have formed the Christian church for 2,000 years.  I follow the church year; I know that right now we are in “Ordinary Time.”  I like a service that moves along “decently and in order,” which makes me a Presbyterian.  I like a literate and challenging sermon, and I’m not much moved by liturgical ceremony, which makes me a Protestant.   I’m happy in huge cathedrals with elaborate sculpture and stained-glass windows, and I’m happy in small white clapboard churches with simple altars and clear glass windows and  I’m quite certain that God moves in and out of both places.  I like to sing (off-key) traditional hymns accompanied by a fine organ, because I am a little bit acquainted with the Bible and a little bit with music and the two have been combined by composers whose skills reach far beyond what is called “Contemporary Praise Music” (which itself is fine, on occasion ~ rare occasion). And I have no illusions that any of the above is necessary to worship or hear God ~ but because of who I am, they all collude to make God’s presence accessible to me.

 

            Flexible and progressive?  I would like to think so, anyway.  The spiritual path along which I trek is often lit by the giants of the Catholic church:  Julian of Norwich, Ignatius, Francis, Benedict.  And even more so by the great scholars of the Bible.  I tend to come to faith through the mind  ~  others come by the heart, or by service, or by contemplation, or by proclamation of the kingdom ~ but again, we are who we are, and we tend to find God as we are.  I’m a Bible nerd ~ fascinated by its complexities; drawn to its history, literature, and ambiguity; always seeing it as enhanced and enlarged by a critical textual approach and always dismayed by attempts to shrink it with claims of inerrancy.  Its message is a simple one, but not an easy or comforting one:  Love God, and love everyone else.  There’s nothing sentimental or simple about following a life path faithful to the Christian message.  But as I give it time to settle in my guts, I see it with increasing clarity.  The call is to approach everything ~ everything ~ in a manner exactly opposite to that which seems intuitive to us.  War is out; provision is in.  To expand: we make war on everyone and everything:  our siblings, our spouses, our friends and colleagues, our environment, our neighbors ~ at home and abroad.  We’re supposed to be providing for them instead.  It’s that simple ~ and that complicated. 

 

            “I am the way, and the truth, and the light.”  From the Gospel of John.  Always a challenging bit for those of us constitutionally incapable of  believing that there is only one way to God.  It doesn’t help to know that Jesus probably didn’t actually say that ~ that those are words attributed to him by a community writing decades after his death, a community increasingly isolated from its Jewish roots and therefore increasingly in need of  making a radical statement of its certitude and righteousness.  The fact remains that those words ARE attributed to him in a canon that we accept as ours, so they mean something significant.  I’ve come to believe that the word “Love” can be substituted for the word “I.”  “Love is the way, the truth and the light.”  For those of us who find great meaning in God’s incarnation as one of us, who are moved and deeply affected by what we perceive as the knowledge that God came here to spend time and space and energy as we do, to perceive dimension as we do, the words are fine as they are reported.  For those who are skeptical or simply incredulous with respect to the whole Christian enterprise, the  words can be read differently without diluting their import.  Again, I believe that we are called to be who we are called to be. 

 

            “I believe in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.” So begins the Apostles’ Creed, repeated every week by Christians in the western world.  It was a stroke of early church genius to clarify God in three persons ~ a God who can speak to each of us, regardless of our idiosyncratic approaches to life.  I tend to say “I believe in God the Father and Mother,” or “I believe in God the Creator” ~ which is what I think the early church fathers meant, despite their inability to think outside the limits of a patriarchal imperial world.  I believe in God as a Creator who liked to play ~ can you imagine what a time God must have had inventing sunsets, and grasshoppers, and eagles, and tulips, and the Grand Tetons, and bananas?  Not to mention people of different  colors and sizes whose experiences of their world and, therefore, of God, would differ?  I believe in  God as a Christ who came here, seeking to build friendships and alleviate suffering. And I believe in God as a Spirit who infuses everything  with the potential that we might provide for each other.

           

            And WHY do I believe all that?  I have no idea.  It’s a gift.

 

           

 

Over There

If you didn't watch the premiere of this FX/Steven Boccho series tonight, then get started next Wednesday.  China Beach updated to Iraq.  Almost unbearable.

My boys were about four when China Beach was on.  I used to sob through entire shows.  This I just watched in a state of quiet terror.

PS: It's being repeated right now.

Palace Construction

They are here! -- the concrete guys. 

The cast:

Guy, our fearless leader, a young Italian guy whose company I hired because he LOVES concrete.  Guy could talk forever about concrete in all of its permutations.  He is clearly a direct descendant of the Italian stoneworkers who are responsible for much of the sculpture in the cemetery where I walk, which is squeezed in between my city and Little Italy.

Joe, an older Italian guy,  who has spent the morning alternating between the Little Bobcat and the Big Drill.  He didn't want to work in the rain but, after two days off due to the heat, he's here.  He might be Guy's father.

Don, a quiet black guy, who smiles and trudges back and forth along the driveway.

Marcus, another black guy, with glistening gold teeth who, after I told him that we had a rat or two out there, stood in the middle of the garage wielding a lengthy piece of wood like a bat, yelling, "Come on out!  I'll get him!"

The garage floor is gone.  Not that there was much of it to begin with.  It was obviously a half-a---d job completed sometime after the demise of the horse-and-buggy days rendered some sort of surfacing beyond dirt necessary.

A big chunk of the drive is gone, too.  Some of it disappeared into oblivion following a loud discussion which must have clarified for all of our neighbors the vagaries of local landfill requirements.

The basketball hoop is gone.  We asked the contractors to remove it but I have to admit that its demise leaves me with a lump in my throat. It wasn't so long ago that we had little boys who got a basketball for their birthdays and helped their dad mix the concrete and put up the hoop.  When they come back again, there will be a patio out back where they can hang out with their college friends ~ but the days of "21" are over.

 

Updates

Just keepin' track of my life. . .

Son Numero Uno is studying architecture this summer.  He came home for the Arlo concert and might come home this week-end, too.  It's nice to have him close by for a change.

(School of Architecture Oculus)

Other Son Numero Uno is in Barcelona for two more weeks.  He went to the Salvadore Dali Museum last Sunday but did not get to Montserrat as he was supposed to on Saturday because -- ahem -- he was out partying till 6:30 a.m. and slept through his train.  Hope he gets there this week-end; it's the one place I wanted him to go.  He and his newfound friends from all over Europe are not too thrilled with the Spanish club scene, but they've found an Irish pub they enjoy.

Delightful Daughter has two weeks to go at her animal shelter summer job.  She has grown and toughened up considerably, and become quite the expert on animal abuse, neglect and welfare.  She heard from her college yesterday and, like another journaler's daughter, was dismayed to discover she has been assigned to a women's dorm.  (It looks beautiful.)  Once her job is over, she and I are off to Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island, which means. . .

I did it; I splurged on a new camera.  I can't even begin to afford what I want, but I decided that I didn't want to spend a whole week on the edge of Canada regretting that I had not upped the ante just a bit.  I'm going to settle down and start to learn it in a little while. 

I've finished my paper on papal elections.  Just in case you were waiting breathlessly on the edge of your seat, I can report as follows:

Stephen IV, the first pope who attempted to regulate papal elections, called a synod in 769  which determined that the pope should be elected from among the cardinals.  Stephen IV’s rule was revoked under Pope Eugene II upon the insistence of Charlemagne’s son, Louis the Pious, who additionally insisted that the Pope take an oath of loyalty to the emperor .  After several decades of chaos, Pope Gregory VII appeared on the scene, at first in the influential person of Cardinal Hildebrand, advisor to several of his predecessors as pope. He was behind Pope Nicholas II’s decree that the popes would be elected by the six cardinal-bishops of Rome, which set off major debates among the clergy and royalty, and was never truly effective. As Gregory VII, Hildebrand was elected pope  because the people of Rome insisted upon it.  By the time Alexander III became pope 75 years later, it was apparent that papal elections had to become standardized according to written decree.   Pursuant to the Third Lateran Council over which he presided, the 1179 rule under which the church still operates today was issued:  the pope, the Bishop of Rome, was to be elected by a two-thirds vote of the cardinals:

 

 

See, I knew you all wanted to know that the tradition via which the new pope has come to us is only 825 years old and obviously could be amended.

Heroes I Keep Running Into

I was within a couple of hours of my hometown yesterday, so I went on down to attend the visitation for my stepmother's sisters's husband, gone at 80 after a two-year saga of various ailments.  His wife had taken such wonderful care of my stepmother, coming over to bathe her and spend time with her every couple of days all winter.  As we stood outside on the funeral home porch in the 100-degree humidity so that she could smoke a cigarette, she told me how all last winter she would get her husband organzied and settled in bed, tell him not to move, and then make the half-hour trip to my father's to care for her sister.  All those times she must have been terrified that her husband would try to get up and that she would return home to find that he had done terrible harm to himself, but she never let on.  She just kept moving back and forth between the two houses, giving baths and making meals.

Both parents of one of my daughter's best friends have recently been diagnosed with cancer.  His is a particularly aggressive form for a young man (yes, there are those of us who consider anyone younger than 60 to be quite young indeed) and hers has required two recent surgeries.  She has always been a woman with a tremendous sense of humor, and now her equally tremendous resevoir of courage is shining through her laughter.

Over at Just One Girl's Head Noise, Pamela is chronicling her newly joined battle with lung cancer.  She too has a deep well of humor, unflinching honesty, and just plain guts on her side.

Several other journalers, some of whom appear in my sidebar over there > track the ups-and-downs of the illnesses that they refuse to let consume their lives. 

And then there's my dad, who has lost two wives and a year-old son to accidents and one wife to cancer.  He's now working out his thoughts and feelings about the doctors whom he recognizes failed to impart some essential quality-of-life information to my stepmother. But he's also planning a September trip, visiting my 99-year old grandmother every few days, and growing these along the road by his mailbox:

Did you know that, over the course of the day, bougainville turn completely to face directly into the sun?  Seems that they know something important.

From the redwood forest. . . to the Gulfstream waters. . . ~

Yep -- outdoor Arlo Guthrie concert tonight. 

Not just Arlo, but members of younger Guthrie, Seeger and Unger generations.

I still think that the best concert I EVER went to was Arlo Guthrie and Pete Seeger (who is 85 or 86 now and was described by the New York Times ten years ago as "a banjo player, folk singer and so far left politically he has probably never been called a liberal) outdoors at Chautauqua -- we've figured out that it was 16 years ago. 

But tonight was pretty damn good.

"If you want to stop a war, you gotta learn to sing REAL LOUD."

                                                                          ~ Arlo Guthrie

. . . this land was made for you and me!

                                                                          ~ Woody Guthrie (1912-1967)

 

 

Men at Work

Referred to in last night's entry:  Church of Christ, Scientists' Tower Morphing into HQ of Creative Architects (down the street -- fun to watch!).

 

My Name is Ocean and I Am a Journaler (Heartsong Essay Contest)

 

Couldn't do it, could you?  Couldn't take a real sabbatical from journaling?  You SO need a 12-step program!  

Okay, no, I couldn't.  I spent more time not-journaling than I do journaling.  I have gotten so used to looking at my world with an eye toward writing about it that I couldn't just grind to a halt.  I did find several new journals to read, though, in my frenzied effort not to write anything of my own for all of five days.  

Let's talk about this -- this problem. I can't believe it!  You've been keeping an online journal for more than a year and you haven't told anyone in your daily life?  How wierd is that?  

Pretty wierd, I guess.  At first I didn't tell anyone because I figured it would be a short-lived enterprise.  I don't know how many paper journals I have lying around in which I've written a page or two, or maybe a week's worth of pages, and then given up.  But this one took on a life of its own.  And then. . . I don't know why I didn't tell anyone.  I don't think I've said anything terrible about anyone I know.  I tend to think that the people I know are extraordinary -- loving and giving and talented and smart.  And I love where I live, and how and why people choose to live here.  And I steer pretty far from my work life. And my husband and children do know, so they could read it if they were so inclined, which apparently they aren't.   So there's really no reason not to say anything, except that now it's been going on so long that it would seem even wierder to suddenly disclose the existence of this journal to people who haven't stumbled across it..  

Yeah, what about that?  You've been saying for two two years that you have ADD.  How have you kept this up?  

It's true that I have the attention span of. . . well, of whatever has no attention span at all.  But journaling is different every day.  New ideas, new photos, new crises, new news.  And it's close to effortless.  I'm on the computer anyway, so I don't have to find a notebook and a pen that actually works.  And I can play around with my pictures, and with stuff I find online.  I don't have to locate, you know, concrete things in the house -- all those things that I didn't put where they are supposed to go.  It's bad enough that I have to keep looking for my keys and the checkbook.  I can't really spend a lot of time searching for notebooks, too.  

You are funnier in real life than you are in your journal.  

That might be true.  There is a lot of sadness in my life.  Some staggering losses.  Some things that, if I peered at them with a magnifying glass, would prevent me from getting out of bed in the morning.  Humor is the only antidote available on a daily basis.  And really: you can't limp around in a state of woe-is-me all the time.  You only get this one life so you need to do whatever it takes to live it.  Journaling helps to make that possible.  

How is that?  

It's a reflective activity.  It doesn't mirror my life, but it enables me to pull out selected facets and polish them up.  I don't know whether they look better or worse by the time I get done, but they do look like something of me.  And even if no one else would recognize what's behind some of what I say, I do. I'm living a more conscious interior life, because I'm thinking, either before or after the fact, or sometimes both, about what I'm doing in terms of what I might write about it.   I think that another journaler has already written about this more effectively than I can, which has something to do with another question further down the page.

What about these other people?  What does that mean, to keep a journal for other people to read? People whom you don't know?  

That's a tough one for me. I get a little obsessed by it.  And I am completely bummed when I write about something of huge significance to me and very few people comment  on what I've said -- which happens to me all the time.  That's one of the reasons I tried to go on hiatus.  I needed to straighten that aspect of journaling out in my head.  Notice: I took away the counter.    And as far as people I don't know -- I've always read stuff written by people I don't know, so why shouldn't I send out my own little missives as well?   

You seem to have adapted quickly to an online existence.  Good or bad?  

I first got online years ago when a medical crisis in my family forced me into an unknown world.  That was my first taste of internet-as-community.  I was dealing with an unusual situation for which there wasn't much help in my real life community -- or in anyone else's, for that matter. It wasn't something I wanted to whine about all the time to my friends.  The internet was a powerful tool for ending that excruciating sense of isolation and bringing people together to share information, painful experiences, and solutions.  Then I met a group of mothers online  -- I think we all know how isolating motherhood can be -- and that was just fun. I have a wonderful group of women friends here where I live, but I also have this absorbing need to extend my reach.  (I attrribute that to those six years in boarding school -- I just got used to being surrounded by women of every possible temperament and I feel adrift without that aspect of my life fully functional.)  It doesn't bother me that I can't see the people I'm becoming friends with.  I'm not sure that people choose to reveal or hide any more or less of themselves online than  they do in real life.  

What does all that have to do with journaling?  

I like to TALK.  I like to listen, too -- or, in this case, read.  I like to know what people are passionate about -- and that's what people tend to write about.  I like  to bounce my ideas and experiences off other people; I like to share my perspectives and see them funneled back to me through someone else's words.  I love it when someone else makes a statement and others pick up and build upon it.  And I love the variety of journals out there.  At my age and stage and locale in life, I don't encounter many at-home moms, or fundamentalist Christians, or people who fly-fish or have swimming pools or live in Paris.  But I can read what they all have to say.  

And the photos?  

I've always loved photography.  I wish I were better at it, but I learn something new almost every day from other photographers online.  Since I like to get out and walk and hike and canoe, photography gives me another way of recording the world as I see it.  Now that I journal online, I am looking around all the time and wondering how something might appear in Midlife Matters. Yesterday I walked past a nearby construction site and thought: Look at that.  I would have been interested whether I had been journaling or not -- for months an architectural firm has been transforming a landmark Christian Science Church into its new headquarters and today work was being done on the tower -- but I wouldn't have gone back home for my camera  in nearly 100-degree humidity if I didn't have a place to record what I saw.  Now I'm always asking myself: Is there a way to convey what I see, or to offer someone else a chance to view something differently?  

Your sabbatical is over, isn't it?  

Looks that way.  

 

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The above is my submission for this month's Artsy Essay Contest.  Go to the link for more terrific essays. 

Mea Culpa from a Supermommy

This entry was inspired by Hope over at Am I There Yet?    She's been inundated by Christmas-letter-type success stories of former classmates who, pre-reunion, are all revealing that they have spent the last two decades scaling high mountains, corporate and otherwise.  She reminded me of the misery induced by the similar comments frequently made by the Super Mommies (and sometimes Super Daddies), a group to which, I regretfully admit, I have sometimes belonged.  I apologize profusely for every single time that I have ever demonstrated this pathetic tendency toward one-upsmanship.

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They spread across our nation last a vast horde of locusts, wearing capri pants and sunglasses, choked up by a condition that seems to last, in some cases, at least a quarter of a century.  I offer herewith some conversational evidence, incorporating questions, responses that might have been appropriate, and the unfortunate actual responses.

College mom to college mom:  Hi!  How's your son and what's he doing this summer?

Appropriate Response:  He's lifeguarding.

Actual Response: He's the Head Lifeguard at the Country Club.

**********

Mom of Senior to Mom of Senior:  We haven't visited College XYZ yet.  I wonder if we can fit a trip in this spring.

Appropriate Response:  I know you'll enjoy it if you can go.

Actual Response:  Luckily, we've already been.  We can't make it to the Prospective Honors Week-End because Son is representing the state in the National YouNameIt Competition that Saturday.

**********

College Mom to College Mom:  Hi!  How was your daughter's year?

Appropriate Response:  She loved it -- how about yours?

Actual Response:  It was great, but I'm so worried about her.  I think she might have gotten her first B ever, in Honors Physics, and I'm so afraid that if she continues on that kind of downward spiral she'll jeopardize her Presidential Scholarship.

**********

Mom of Pre-College Student to Mom of Pre-College Student:  My son's AP scores haven't come yet.

Appropriate Response:  Our daughter's came yesterday.  I bet yours will be in the mail today.

Actual Response: Our daughter's came yesterday.  She's so pleased; she's going to place into the highest college level for every one of her AP subjects.

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

Mom to Mom she hasn't seen since their children were in twelve years, since their children were in Middle School together:  Hi!  How's your guy doing?

Apprehensive Response:  Well, you know, he never did finish high school.  That drug problem -- I'm sure you heard -- it really took its toll.  He just couldn't get it together.  But his year he'll be 25, and I think we've finally turned the corner.

Appropriate Response:  Come on, you can figure this one out.  Or can you? 

Moods: What Do You Mean?

I just thought I'd add an explanation for my Round Robin entry (the immediately previous one).  It was taken a couple of weeks after our boys graduated from high school.  We had gone up to Chautauqua for a few days and, since the kids had never been to Niagra Falls and this one's twin brother's German girlfriend was with us, we decided that it was an opportune time to take a day trip to a Great American Site.  (We couldn't go to the Canadian side, because the young lady had left her passport back at our home.)  We went to the Falls, and did the Maid of the Mist Trip (Yes!  I had ALWAYS wanted to do that!) and hiked around on a small island in the Niagra River, where I managed to sneak in a few shots.  The German girlfriend was, not surprisingly, the most photogenic of the group, and by far the most willing to smile into the camera.  But I still like the photo below and its evocation of a young man in transition from one stage of life to another.

Round Robin Entry: Moods

Pensive at Niagra (2003):

Round-Robin participants:  take a look!

Amy...Substance; or lack of

Monica...Mamrazzi

Celeste...My Day and Thoughts

Cheryl...My World

Aunt Nub...Aunt Nubs Empty Head

Danielle...Everybody Knows

Karen...Musings from Mavarin 

Mary...Alphawoman's Blog

Dawn...Dawn's Drivel

Trish...Journey To Peace

Kimberleigh...Life As I Live It

Alan...F-Stop

Phinney...Paragon 

Steven...sometimes photoblog

Duane...sotto voce

Derek...Picture of the Day 

Robin. . . Midlife Matters

Nancy.  .  .  Nancyluvspix  

Maria.  .  .  The Little Things  

Patrick.  .  .  A Stop at Willoughby  

Kat.  .  .  From Every Angle  

Marie.  .  .  Photographs and Memories  

Kell.  .  .  The Mountain Life of a Yankee Wife  

Drive-By

Ocean just wanted to reveal, on the off chance that it has not been immediately obvious, her true identity.  You can understand why she's astonished that the President overlooked her in his search for a Supreme Court nominee:

Galadriel:

Possessing a rare combination of wisdom and humility, while serenely dominating your environment you selflessly use your powers to care for others.

(Ocean had to ask her daughter, Queen of Fantasy Novels and Films, who exactly Galadriel is.  Of course, she was hardly surprised when the lovely daughter identified her as "the most beautiful woman in the world."  Think what the Supreme Court is missing.)

PS: You can see that Ocean has been using her sabbatical productively.

Chautauqua Afternoon

I'm taking a journaling break for awhile.  I just need to re-think how I'm spending my time, and invest some of it in other writing.  I might post the occasional photograph, and I'll be reading and commenting.  I'm not dropping out of the sky ~ just taking a breather.  Have a great summer, everyone.

 

Vive La France! (Week-End Assignment)

When he was in 10th grade, my son came home from a school presentation one day completely absorbed by the possibility of spending the following year as a student in France.  It sounded exciting to me, but I told him that he would have to take care of the application, essays, and references on his own which, to my astonishment, he did.  His glee when he received his acceptance to the program was enough to carry me through the next several months of doubt -- that, along with my memories of myself at age 17, and my recollection of how intensely formative that period is for the rest of one's life.

It was to be a year of extremes.  As I've written before, his group was to depart Logan Airport on September 12, 2001, so when he boarded an Air France jet at JFK several days later, my anxiety level was sky-high.  We faced major challenges as a family at home that year and then, due to September 11, broke into two pairs to make our own Christmas flight to see him.  He had a loving and active French family, with a wonderful mother and sons just older and younger than he was, but he had his challenges, too.  It wasn't until at least the next year that he acknowledged having experienced the typical student-abroad crisis in October - the "oh-my-God-what-have-I-done-how-will-I-survive-this?" moments of loneliness and fear.  But he also played soccer and made friends and became a French-speaker and grew to adore his family.

He took this photo of himself outside his school when he made a return visit last summer. He was nervous about seeing his French parents after a two-year absence but, as I knew they would, they all spent a joyous couple of days becoming reacquainted.  I think he knows now that he has two homes and two countries.  It's too bad that there are tensions between our nations at the moment; fortunately, high school students are capable of more generosity, optimism, and far-sightedness than certain of their elders.

Ora et Labora

This week I'm taking a graduate class in church history.  It's a terrific interlude -- everyone except me is Catholic, all the students except  me teach in Catholic high schools, and our professors are from a variety of disciplines - history, religious studies, art history, etc.  I love it!  My own students are intensely curious about religions outside their Jewish heritage, so we will all benefit.  I finally learned something about the formation of the College of Cardinals, that body which elects the Pope (did you know it's only been around for 1000 years?) and by the time I finish my little paper sometime this summer, I'll know some more.

Tonight was probably the highlight of the week for me.  One of our participants is a monk in our local Benedictine abbey, the only abbey in our state and the largest urban abbey in the country, and he invited us over for evening Vespers and a tour. I've longed to explore Benedictine life ever since I first read Kathleen Norris's The Cloister Walk -- and here there is a Benedictine house right in my backyard! 

As a world history teacher, I always cover St. Benedict, the founder of western monasticism, and his sixth century formulation of the Rule which is the model for all kinds of orders of convents and monasteries worldwide. This week I've had a chance to learn a great deal more about early monasticism.  It was a privilege tonight to be present for a service monks have been chanting for 1500 years and then watch a Powerpoint presentation made by a thoroughly 21st century monk wearing robes of another era.  Benedictine hospitality is very much alive and well!

Remember Winter?

The Monday Photo Shoot asks us to remember days other than the drenchingly humid ones we are enduring right now. 

And no, that's not a complaint coming out of my mouth.  Or keyboard.  Not one single complaint.  The sun has been so relentless that the grass is brown and the gardens are suffering, but I swore last winter that I would not complain, NOT ONCE, if summer ever actually returned.  So I am merely offering some observations.

Oh, yeah ~ the photo.  One of the lakes where I walk a lot.  Hooded mergansers usually show up before it freezes over, but they leave.  Everyone leaves.  No one else is stupid enough to stick around here in winter.

Queen of Coordinated Kicks - That Wouldn't Be Me

I don't know where I was when they passed out the Dancin' DNA.  In some other incarnation, I guess.  I was probably a Buddha sitting under a lotus tree just prior to being zapped back to ordinary human form due to my inability to stop LONGING for . . . oh, that little cottage on the beach, and the kayak to go with it, and the money to decorate it, and maybe just a few little other things, like the eternal defeat of the Republican Party.

Anyway, wherever I was, they were not handing out the Dancin' stuff there.  Just in case I needed to be reminded of that fact which, after those humiliating years in high school gym, I did not, I decided to try a Jazzercise class tonight.  I won't bore anyone with the litany of reasons for this idiocy on my part, all having to do with excess poundage and aerobic incapacity; let's just say that I promised myself 20 minutes of unadulterated and breathless movement and that I kept my promise:

Hiding in the furthest back corner of the gym, I keep my eye on the woman in front of me  and try desperately to at least copy the leg and arm movements in my own pathetic little alternating sequence.  I can't understand a word the instructor says, but I can imitate about one-fourth of what my secret role model is doing -- not that grapevine stuff, of course, but some of that left and right stuff.  I look at the clock at least 20 times in the 20 minutes I have allotted to this trial and then.  .  .

Oh. My. God.  There are two of my best friends, a husband and wife with their own new fitness goals, walking the second floor track that rings the gym.  "Hi!  Hi!"  They wave cheerfully.  I am looking to see if there is a drop-down trap door in the hardwood floor so that I can sink into oblivion.  I am stuck with ten more minutes of this torture as they round the track again, and yet again.  Okay, none of us are Olympic athletes or Tyra lookalikes, but walking has some semblance of dignity. What I am attempting to do does not.

I make it, though.  I struggle through the 20 minutes to which I have sworn myself and then try to slip out the back, planning to effect my escape through a basketball game featuring vigorous and fit teenage males.  (I should blend in well.  Gender, age, skin color and physique all match perfectly.)  

I don't quite make it -- the Jazzercise sign-in lady is also in the back.  "Are you all right?" she asks, in a voice dripping with empathy for this poor woman who can't march and count to four simultaneously.

I need to scramble back to some other existence ASAP.  Maybe I should try snowboarding.  That at least has the benefit of a season several months away.

Return Trip

We went back to Chautauqua for a day, mostly so our daughter could enjoy an afternoon with the friend she had spent so much time with over past summers before they both head off to college.  This time my husband went along, so we also went to see his family for dinner; they live about half an hour away.

Here's what I think is cool about Chautauqa: for an afternoon program like this:

2:00 - Jean Bethke Elshtain, professor, social and political ethics, University of Chicago,  Religion and Politics.

3:30 - CLSC Roundtable Lecture. Jim Wallis, God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It.

you get about 700 people who want to sit there for two and one-half hours, soak it all up, and ask questions

and then you get to walk around eating ice cream cones and gawking at other people's summer "cottages."

London

My personal experiences with terrorism are tangential.

My husband was en route to Logan Airport in Boston with one of our sons on 9/11/01.  They were halfway across New York State, planning to spend the night with my sister-in-law in Providence, when I began calling them frantically that morning to tell them not to drive through the city.  My son and the 60 other students in the group en route to France for a year returned home, but 10 days later they were on a flight to Paris out of JFK.  It was terrifying for all of us parents, I'm sure, to put our children on that plane, but we could not let their enthusiasm and eagerness to experience life in a new culture, their outrageous willingness to learn and to share, be destroyed by terrorism.

This summer my other son is in Barcelona.  He's had the flu for three days and been sleeping it off in his dorm room, but the night before he got sick I called him and found him out to dinner with four Italian guys and two Turkish girls.  He sounded on top of the world.  This morning every motherly instinct I have tells me to get him on a return flight and tell him to forget about trying to see the world, but I'm resisting with all my might.

I don't even know what to say.  There are young people all over the world, of whom my sons are only two, excited about stepping into the light and participating in the international future that is already upon us.  And there are others who spend their time in darkness, planning and executing mass murder.

Summer -- A Season for Accomplishing Nothing On Time

This morning I've started getting Round Robin Photo alerts, and I decided I'd like to play, too.  Of course, if I'd been paying attention to anything, I would have understood that the alerts were showing up because the challenge has been out for two weeks.  So I posted my intention to join in about a day late and a dollar short, but hey -- that's summer, and Summer is the theme.

North Bar Lake, Michigan (July 2004)

 

PS:  In response to dcmeyer's comment below:  there are TWO bodies of water upon which to gaze, North Bar Lake and Lake Michigan.  If you look at the third and last photograph in this entry, the property on which this peaceful place of repose is located is hidden in the foliage to your left.  That's tiny North Bar on front of you and huge Michigan behind it.  In the second, middle photo, this picture would be behind the birch trees to the right.

The other participants to the Challenge are listed in the sidebar of the challenge link above -- pay them all a visit and take a look at some great stuff!

Happy 5th!

 

A Chautauqua Week Begins

A friend and I took off for the Chautauqua Institution yesterday morning at about 7:30.  Excellent  weather – sunny and breezy 80s, a perfect backdrop for our day after weeks of haze and humidity.

 

The focus of our morning was the main religious service in the outdoor ampitheatre, which seats 5,000 people.  It makes my summer every year to hear those voices raised in the singing of “Holy, Holy, Holy,” always the first hymn.  The service was led by Joan Brown Campbell, the Director of the Department of  Religion; Joy Carroll was our reader and her husband, Jim Wallis, was our preacher.  The Carroll-Wallises will preach at the daily 9:15 services for the rest of the week, and Jim Wallis will participate in the afternoon Department of Religion lectures in another outdoor venue, the smaller and Greek-inspired Hall of Philosophy.  That series will involve a number of speakers from across the spectrum of Christian politics who, as Joan Brown Campbell announced, “will all have to sit down to breakfast with each other every morning!”

 

Jim Wallis’s theme, garnered from a young woman activist he had known who had died much too young, was, “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for!”  Some statistics:

 

More then 1,000,000,000 people on this earth live on less than $1.00 per day, a situation technically described as “extreme poverty.”

 

Three billion people live on less than $2.00 per day.

 

Thirty thousand children die every day.  That’s one every three seconds, most needlessly, from unclean drinking water, starvation, and illnesses for which we have vaccinations.  Periodically throughout his sermon, and in his presentation later in the day, Jim Wallis would snap his fingers every three seconds, reminding us of the death of yet another child, and another, and another.

 

I cannot, of course, replicate a Jim Wallis sermon.  But I can offer a few quotations, as I wrote them down in my program (I can’t lay claim to their exactitude, however):

 

“We can end poverty.  We just need the will to do it, and the task of the faith community is to generate that moral energy.”

 

“The altar call was invented by 19th century evangelist Charles Finney, who wanted to sign new converts up for the anti-slavery campaign.  Poverty is today’s slavery.  It ends hope for generations of people.”

 

“The spiritual choice we must all make is between hope and cynicism.  Cynicism is a buffer against hope.  Hope is not a feeling; hope is a choice.”

 

“History is always changed by social movements, and the best ones have a spiritual foundation.”

 

After the service we had lunch with a couple that we had run into from our own church.  We spent time (and money) in the bookstore, time on the beach – my friend actually got me into the lake for a swim, which is something I just don’t do – and time with old friends of mine, a grandfather and the granddaughter he often brings to Chautauqua.  His granddaughter and my daughter were inseparable companions as little girls for several summers when our families stayed at the same Chautauqua guesthouse.  Some of my favorite Chautauqua memories are of walking down the hill to the lake with his wife, to sit and talk for hours as the girls played on the beach.  She died of breast cancer a few years ago, at Christmastime after one of our summer weeks together.

 

We also made time for a new Chautauqua tradition, the late afternoon presentation by the chaplain(s) of the week of their stories of faith.  Jim Wallis walked about youth his conversion in a Baptist church --  made to please his mother, who was concerned that he had not been “saved” by the age of six, and his later conversion awayfrom the church – he had begun to question why whites and blacks in his native Detroit lived such very different lives, and was told by a pastor that “Race has nothing to do with faith.  Race is a political issue, and our faith is personal.”  We wished that he had talked about his experience in the civil rights movement and his return to faith and seminary, since neither of us knows the story.  He did talk a little about his joyful life with his wife and their young sons and his conviction, after his speaking tour of many cities, that “the monologue of the religious right is over, and a new dialogue is breaking through.”

 

Joy Carroll’s presentation was a powerful one.  She was one of the first women ordained to the Anglican Church (the Church of England, known as the Episcopalian Church on this side of the Atlantic). She described her upbringing by minister parents in the South End of London; her insistence on spending a year in Haiti, the poorest country in the western hemisphere, on a mission project at the age of 18, and its transformative effect on her life; her call to the ministry at a time when women could only become deaconesses, members of a lay order; and her involvement in the movement to ordain women as priests.  She was a delegate at the synod where the controversial vote took place.  A two-thirds majority was required by the bishops, the clergy, and the laity to pass the resolution, and the margin was so close that, as the count was announced, it was impossible to tell without some quick calculation whether it had.  It did, of course, by a slim margin among the bishops and the clergy, and by ONE vote among the laity.  ONE vote.

 

It would have been impossible to hear this gracious and quietly passionate woman speak and not be moved by the realization that, but for ONE vote, her voice and gifts might have been silenced for another decade.

My friend and took a final walk along the lakefront as early evening progressed, and finally decided that we really had to drive home.  It had been exactly the kind of day  Chautauqua was  created over 130 years ago to foster: a day of deep faith, magnificent music, provocative preaching, recreation, lasting friendships, and endless conversation.

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

I have discovered that much of Jim Wallis's sermon to us can be heard in his recent graduation address at John Carroll University, here.

Beautiful Days in the Neighborhood

I walked around the lakes yesterday and in the cemetery this morning. As I got out of my car yesterday morning, a Cooper’s hawk settled down overhead.  I could hear the soft whirr of a red-bellied woodpecker and, later, the harsher call of a flicker.  Adolescent mallards roamed the lakes, accompanied by a kingfisher, song-sparrow, and great blues.  Yesterday I saw a flotilla of fourteen geese, meaning that at least one set of parents had raised a full clutch, or something close to it, in a lake that is also home to raccoons and snapping turtles.  Their good fortune was apparent this morning where geese feathers littered the ground in two spots near the tiny cemetery pond, evidence of last night’s geese tragedies and great-horned owl or fox triumphs.

 

I went off to the coffee shop/bakery later in the morning for my usual rendevous with a group of friends.  Only one of them had come and she had already left.  A blessing in disguise; I grabbed a gift certificate (something anyone in her right mind would choose over one of my paltry attempts at a meal) and headed off to visit another friend.  Her husband has recently been diagnosed with a rare and aggressive form of prostate cancer; she has just had the far less serious but certainly traumatizing diagnosis of thyroid cancer.  We sat on her porch for a long time, alternating deeply serious conversation with hysterical laughter over the curve balls life throws at you after you round the base at 50.  I presume that God will help me to produce some semblance of a meal when she goes into the hospital in a couple of weeks for her surgery.  Our girls have been close friends ever since their early-el Montessori days, and I would like to be able to offer some care and comfort to hers.

 

I spent about three hours this afternoon organizing the reservations for a mother-daughter pre-college trip to Prince Edward Island.  I am really hoping that we will be able to pull this one off.  Photographs of the Maritime Provinces have been calling to me for years.  We had been hoping to go to  Europe, but the air fares are beyond outrageous this year.  An airline reservation lady told me that the problem is the cost of fuel.  So , Canada and Anne-of-Green-Gables-Land, here we come!

 

I went to the grocery – now THAT’s a pleasant way to spend an hour on a holiday week-end.  I forgot the tomatoes, but maybe there will be a roadside stand tomorrow with real ones, which the grocery doesn’t have anyway.

 

Tomorrow a friend and I are off to Chautauqua – a moms’ road trip for a day.  Jim Wallis is preaching at the main morning service, so we are looking for a fill-up of liberal evangelical Christianity. (Yes, there is such a thing.)  My daughter has to work from 6:00 a.m. onward tomorrow – shelter animals need to be cleaned up and fed on holiday week-ends, too.  So she and her dad will hold down the fort here, and I should be home late in the evening, in time for a summer bi-weekly gathering of friends on a neighboring porch

 

Midsummer is a very good time. Time is the key word there.  Time to walk, time to visit with friends on porches, time to take trips, time to drive two hours to hear a sermon.  A time of respite, even in the midst of difficult real life stuff.

Creation

Another of my son's Yellowstone images