the chickens are packed

I took this picture last week of the kitchen table on what happened to be a good packing day. I'm not sure why I took the picture, so don't ask, except that maybe I thought the table looked kind of homey. When life is in a period of transition, I'm afraid it will slip by quickly and I'll forget major periods of time because my long term memory is so poor, so maybe that's why I took the picture. Other times, like today, I'm thankful for my bad memory.

The decorative chickens are now packed, and the polka dotted pitcher, fruit bowl, and icon. It was a nice packing day that day, listening to music, and feeling the motivation to organize items into boxes, seal them, label, then stack, then step back and see evidence of progress. Today was a terrible packing day. I somehow got stuck listening to "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me" on NPR, which never makes me laugh, even though the hosts of the show seem to laugh like crazy at themselves. I felt grouchy. Our apartment is not home at all anymore, now that the chickens and their likes are packed, so it's just a matter of putting dissimilar items together in the same box, which grates against my desire for a smooth, organized transition from one place to another. And no matter how many boxes of miscellaneous stuff we fill, there seems to be more miscellaneous stuff to gather, and I can't see evidence of the progress.

Packing/moving also inevitably brings out otherwise hidden differences between Jeff and I in the way we think about things, deal with stress, and approach tasks, so incredibly petty arguments erupt no matter how hard we try to treat each other well and keep them at bay. They aren't serious arguments and we always make up really quickly, but it's just a hassle to know that they're coming, and you have to cycle through them. We've only been married three years, and already it's our third move, so it's all becoming very familiar.

Today we were reminiscing about our difficult move from New York to Indiana, just last July. It was crazy for so many reasons. I had a job interview lined up the day after our move-in day. I needed internet access to be in touch with the woman I was meeting for the interview, so we had to drive to a hotel and steal their wireless access from the parking lot. I checked my e-mail only to find that she wanted the interview candidates to perform a writing assignment under a tight deadline. So while Jeff, with the help of one other guy, unloaded the truck, I had to find a bookstore where I could sit with my laptop and collect my frazzled brain to wing this assignment. I was so stressed before the interview, it's no wonder I ended up not getting the job. Our apartment was hot and dirty; four undergrad guys had been the tenants before us, and it looked like they had never even made use of a paper towel on any given surface. Two weeks later, having barely unpacked, we had to make a trip down to Tennessee for Jeff's brother's wedding, which was great, except that it was while down there that I found out I didn't get the job, and I wasn't looking forward to the trip back through the flat cornfields toward our new and terrible-seeming place of residence. Eventually, things did settle down, though the winter here was difficult. We've made really sweet friends, and even though we still don't like South Bend as a town, we've found things about life here to like. And Jeff loves his program at Notre Dame, which was the whole point of coming here, after all.

We'll have another move in nine months, to a place we don't even know yet, and then we'll (God willing) have a baby as well. We don't have a difficult life (we could, for example, be victims of Hurricane Katrina, or the earthquake that happened last year in Pakistan). I can't complain. But humans are weak, and there are days and weeks in the course of any given year that feel really difficult, despite all the good things that are mixed in.

vermilion, not familiar

Last Sunday during Divine Liturgy my mind played a word trick on me by substituting the word "familiar" with "vermilion." This has happened before, but this time it happened when the choir was singing a version of the cherubic hymn which I did not recognize, and I said to myself in a bored tone, "this hymn is not familiar," but my brain continued dreamily, "not familiar...fermilliar...vermilion."

I love the word vermilion, but everyday conversation offers no segways into its use. It must therefore be lodged like an uncut ruby in a crusted stream bank of my brain, from having read it in a thesaurus, or looked it up in the dictionary after first encountering it in a novel. Was my brain conspiring to dazzle me by spontaneously swapping it with a similar but over-laundered word? I was delighted that it came into my head unbidden, despite that it's dazzle brought me out of my reverie to realize that I should probably be focusing on the liturgy.

"Familiar," would be a good word for the words in an Orthodox service. Old words, repeated words, and over-laundered; words benignly undistracting despite their loveliness. All the sung poetry has a way of lilting past a person on a given week, then swirling all around the room. All this swirling of sung words has an effect on me, for sure, but not always the one intended, given my wandering thoughts. Visually I would compare the effect to a Marc Chagall painting, in which human figures are floating in mid-air, lifted up amidst blobs of bouquets, color fumes, and prancing blue donkeys. Some Sundays I stare at reflective illuminated blobs on the icons and reach a state in which I might be one of those floating Chagall figures. In this version, an old babushka leans from her fourth floor window, laboriously pulling her fresh clothes in on their pulley. She might represent the choir, pulling in the clean laundry line of words strung together in a troparia, old garments but new each time they're wrung out and propped on the canter stand. My fourth story body is high enough to hear the creaking line as it pulls right past my ear. But where are my eyes? Any onlooker would confirm that the woman in the painting has her eyes locked dreamily on something outside of the picture, or on something inward.

I tend to stand in the liturgy waiting for the power of a word to dazzle me, even as each week I become more and more impervious to the familiar strands of words. While I was working and going to church at the seminary chapel-- which carries out as beautiful, acoustical, floatsome, and seamless a liturgy as can be found anywhere in North America-- this tendency of mine to gaze at things outside of the liturgy was at its worst. Not even the greatest rhetorician on the rotating schedule of archpriests (and occasional bishops) could make one of their words sparkle inside my head. Only rarely would a jewel from the stream of liturgical words drop down and trigger the startle reflex on the surface of my thoughts, and I would latch onto it just like with vermilion.

These days, I come down to the ground more often. Ironically the priest at our tiny parish in Chesterton, Indiana, doesn't pull out anything very polished, but his sermons distract me from my own distraction. O great wonder: I remember them during the week and they influence my behavior. They are minimalistic, lasting no more than about ten minutes, and are not bombastic. But they aren't...well...trying not to be bombastic. He isn't one of those sermonizers who presumes to speak as if he's sitting down for coffee with you. He's not finagaling any tactical approach whatsoever, in fact. The sermon just comes across like a footnote to the weekly announcements, which he actually does first, shifting from the announcements into his sermon imperceptibly, without ceremony. It's odd, for sure, but it seems to work for me.

I'm not sure what the point of this blog entry is. I just wanted to express how thankful I am on the rare occasions when words can hold power, as I believe they're meant to, especially in church.

childbirth without fear

Yesterday a friend brought his two year-old child to our house so I grabbed the most toy-like thing we had on hand--my matryoshka dolls--and set them out for his entertainment. When he took them apart and pulled out the smallest doll, he said that he'd found a little baby and seemed pleased. I started gazing at the curvacious dolls in their dissembled state and realized that I strongly identified with none other than the very largest. I've crossed a size line in the last few weeks; even my maternity shirts and elastic waist maternity pants are feeling and looking too snug. Like the largest nesting doll, I encase the smaller versions of me inside, and further down, the real prize, a little baby.

My friend Violet asked me which I feared more, going through labor, or the first few days with a newborn. I said I was more afraid of the first few days with a newborn. Later I decided that the question was faulty. Sometimes I fear and sometimes I don't, but when I do, the fears are not limited to either the duration of labor, or the first few days of motherhood. Fears brought on by the pregnant state seem boundless in time, space, and variety. An occassional bad dream reveals to me my hidden anxieties. I've had dreams that I forgot to start nursing my baby after birth and the hospital nurses took it away and started bottle feeding it formula without my knowledge, thus permanently robbing me of the chance to get it started on breastmilk. I had another dream where I left the hospital too early after the birth, even before the baby had been weighed, and it missed all of the important tests and measurements that confirm its health.

Other fears are less irrational but more odious. What if my child inherits only the worst personality traits from both sides of our family? What about Sudden Infant Death Syndrom? What if, one day, our child gets injured or killed in an accident that Jeff and I, in a fluke of carelessness, fail to prevent? Then there is the petty category. What if my curly hair and Jeff's curly hair combine to give our child the wildest, most unruly head of hair imaginable? What if the child becomes a teenager with embarrassing taste in clothes, hobbies, or social tendencies? Then there is the twice-removed petty category: What if my stomach looks forever like curdled milk after childbirth and I have to give half of my favorite clothes to the Salvation Army because they will never fit again? Fear begets fear, begets fear. The ones I've written here are only the ones I'm willing to admit on a public blog. There are worse ones.

I've stumbled over inane thoughts, one at a time, in the late hours of the night. But at unexpected times I have also demonstrated a hardy resistence, and I'm proud of these instances. One happened when I was discussing the baby's September due date with a co-worker and she pointed out how awful it would be if it were born on September 11. Another happened when I was talking to my well-meaning Mom, who after saying how excited she was about the baby, added that she only regretted the scary future it would be born into (thank you, Fox News). In both cases, I was remarkably impervious to these potent suggestions of fear. I even found myself thinking: Let my child be born on September 11; it will be born for martyrdom. Let the future be scary and my child be a light for frightened people.

I think I'm most proud of these reactions because, quite simply, they were sincere. I didn't think them because the little thinker in me decided they were appropriate. And for that matter, they weren't even really thought out. They were simply visceral, which means that they were already in me and ready to assert themselves in the darkness. Later, of course, I was able to fill in theological details. We depict Christ as being born in a cave, which represents a tomb, for goodness sake; this is comparable to being born on September 11. And moreover, he was born to die on a Cross, which, let's see, qualifies as a scary future.

But all is supremely well in the redeemed cosmos.

Not to carry the matryoshka doll metaphor to a nauseatingly literary extreme, but I'm realizing my faith is like the innermost matryoshka doll, hiding under the outer doll husks, fat with this-worldly fear. I possess the prize of non-fear that will get me through childbirth, into motherhood, and well beyond.

white-paw-love among the ruins

A hot August has rendered me less inclined to read or think or write anything interesting. And not much seems worth photographing either. We're moving on September 1 and the packing days remaining are sliding by. A heat advisory warning keeps repeating itself from the radio, agitating the nation, our apartment, and the internal furnace of my abdomen. Today we took a tour of St Joseph's maternity ward to prepare for the delivery day and going from room to room, listening to the nurse explain how it all worked, shuffling through the halls with a dozen other pregnant women and their spouses, seeing the callico curtains, the birthing balls, the hospital cafeteria menu next to the bed, made me feel content and grateful to be exactly where I am at the present moment, rocking for the time being in the plain bosom of Indiana, married to Jeff, the student, carrying the baby of yet unknowable gender, and owner of Effie, the cat.

The summer weeks have gone by fast and slow at the same time and, as usual, the little judge living inside of me has officially demoted summer to the least of seasons, a season to speed through, despite someone's admittedly wise warning that I should not wish my life away. I am a lifelong waiter-for-fall. I wait for the break in the atmosphere that will bring the blessed cold air down from Canada, and the (in my imaginary geography) legend-like forests of the farthest and purest parts of North America. If it would listen to me, I would call out to the air up there to sweep down upon us here.

This fall will coincide with the added everything of a new baby, and the subtraction of an uncomfortable mid-section, so the temptation to wish my August life away is stronger than normal. For now, while drawing arrows on boxes and writing out the word FRAGILE with a sharpie, and frequenting the freezer for pieces of ice to chew on, it's helpful to find the occassional white paws tucked away among the ruins of the apartment we will soon and gladly be abandoning.