always choose the tightrope, is what i say

Whenever I read the humorous writings of my fellow bloggers (i.e. Ser, the Miles), I feel embarrassed of the serious nature of this blog. I seem to write strictly about struggles, punctuated by the occasional funeral. The truth is, I do dwell, mentally and emotionally, in sensitivity to human suffering. I've always leaned toward the melancholic, but my theological education then sealed the deal by immersing me for two years in the pastoral and theological and cosmic problem of suffering. Plus, it is just a tendency of Orthodox spirituality to keep the old dial of mirth turned to the lowest possible volume. Save the annual burst of unbridled joy at Pascha, rolling on the floor with laughter, drinking yourself silly, and otherwise ducking out of constant mindfulness of one's own sin and the horrible effects of sin in the world is not, as it were, recommended.

However, I am genetically inclined toward laughing-- hard. I come from a family of people who tend to laugh until they cry, and it took me a good many years and hard lessons in reality before I realized that there are people walking the surface of this earth who simply do not go in for that kind of laughter.

A once-heard scrap of hopefully scientific information which I have no reference for tells me that laughter and crying are physiologically similar. It makes me wonder if the melancholia and hilarity I can experience are, in fact, not that wide of an emotional range. One time, in church, while singing in choir, in fact, a friend and I started laughing so hard that she had to stand in a corner and I had to go sit down somewhere else until we gained control. A friend, a man who had once spent a lot of time living in St. Catherine's monastery on Mt. Sinai told us later that this often happens to monks in church. Perhaps it is a release of the nervous tension and seriousness born out of trying to live life correctly, trying to have a spiritual life, failing most of the time, of course, but relentlessly trying.

I'm not saying anything about my paltry spiritual life here. But the truth is, I do feel a sense of spiritual obligation to be attuned to all the ills of the world. Therefore when I listen to NPR and absorb the news about how polar bears are soon to be added to the endangered species list, the Netherlands are going to be underwater due to rising sea level, and the Midwest is running out of water and looking for ways to pump it in from the sea, I ponder, ponder, ponder. When I hear about the mother of a two-week old who was arrested because police determined that she caused the death of her baby, I take it pretty hard.

It's no wonder that I sometimes want to plunge into the world of little youtube boxes containing the comedic archives of Mystery Science Theater, the farting preacher, or A Bit of Fry and Laurie. I want to laugh, even if it may be not spiritaully recommended. Maybe what I really want is to cry. I can't be sure.

Oh NPR, how I both love and hate you. You spare my winter day from feeling as cooped as it could be, but you take my mind in a thousand directions that it is not smart enough to synthasize in a twenty-four hour period, REM sleep included. My toddler likes to dance to the snazzy scraps of music you play in between your programs. I keep listening dutifully to all the updates about the campaign trail(s)-- trails that swerve and crisscross, like the three-prong footed tracks of hyperactive sandpipers on the Florida beaches of my childhood. This is what I compare the pool of candidates too-- spastic sandpipers negotiating the frothy tide. And the more I follow their antics, imagining that the information will bring me closer to conclusion, the more the whole thing feels like an opaque concoction of rhetorical soup with too many cooks in the kitchen, NPR journalists included, however lovable their voices. Who can claim to see through all of that broth and decide who to vote for? And even if we vote "rightly," who's to say that another bullet fired in Dallas won't send the whole mess spiraling into a "political situation" none could forsee.

Well, this is why I like literature and hate politics. I think that politicians are crazy for thinking that they can weild one iota of control in the cosmos. They should be ashamed of themselves for the way they talk. And this is why my emotional duty is to sympathize anonymously and privately with the suffering things in the world, and also, probably, why I need to laugh really hard once in a while, even though I have no talent for writing comedy myself. Garrison Keeler, on the Writer's Almanac, quoted something from Edith Wharton the other day. She said that life is either a feather bed or a tightrope, and she preferred the tightrope. I think I do too, and yet, I am really looking forward to the spending spree that the government plans to dish out this spring to stimulate the economy. I guess we are all full of inconsistencies.

The picture above is one I took after being trapped indoors all day due to freezing temperatures. It doesn't relate to this post in any way, but I had already uploaded it and decided to leave it.

a small lake to swim across

My sister called today to relay news about my grandmother. The hospice workers have said that she will probably not live past Tuesday. I did not feel emotional at this news for the usual reason-- because she is ninety-two and has not been doing well since her second stroke four years ago. She has languished a long time, giving me ample opportunity to adjust to the idea of her most real self already belonging to the past. Perhaps because she has not really been herself for so long I have already done some of the work necessary for securing her in the place of memory.

I held the phone while sitting on the arm rest of our futon, facing the open door of the bathroom. As my sister talked to me about flights and funeral arrangements and who would sleep in which room at my parents' house, my gaze fell trance-like onto the toothbrush holder, with its two adult and one baby toothbrush. It looked so very static, but oddly, like a symbol of my own binding entanglement with energy and all earthly cares. I learned that my grandmother has stopped drinking water and tried to imagine what state one would have to be in to no longer desperately desire water.

Even though this end has been long in coming, I still cannot process the dissolution of a ninety-two year old life, and all of its indescribable essence. Being too-much engaged in the thick of my own life, I am not sure I can properly ponder the ending of hers. I can only think about my own acquaintance with her essence--the sound of her voice, her gestures, or the tasteful way she decorated her home, which to me seemed like a grand extension of herself. Part of this was lost when she and my grandfather moved into a retirement village, and divided up a lot of their belongings among the family. Part was lost through strokes. I think about the loss of this and also of the stories she told over and over again, and how I'll never remember the details exactly right, and how, even though they reside as partial things in my brain, one day I will die and they will reside no where. That, most of all, is hard to think about.

Her father was a minister and founded Park Lake Presbyterian Church in Orlando, when Orlando was a small town, with pristine lakes. After church services, she and her sister would sometimes swim across the small lake between the church and their home instead of walking. She had a favorite story about involvement in a community play in which the entire cast started giggling uncontrollably and couldn't go on with their lines. I always pictured this in my head as a black and white movie. She had one sister and four brothers, and according to her account they all had big personalities and loads of talent. One of her brothers was nick-named "Curly," and apparently never tired of playing the piano and entertaining people for hours with his songs. Another brother was named Harry and became a surgeon in Nashville. Her sister was Elizabeth but went by "Ibby," and was my mom's favorite aunt, because she was an entertaining story teller and practical joker. I knew Aunt Ibby too and saw her right before she died, still crackling with personality. She collected early American antiques, ate out every single meal, and really was "a riot," as all the older members of my family dubbed it. But my grandmother, named Lucy, outlived all her siblings.

My grandmother went by Gogo to us. She was constantly quoting scripture, holding forth on table manners, and beckoning us to bring her a pair of scissors and stand close so she could remove a stray string hanging from the hem of our clothes. She rode a camel in Egypt and traveled all over the world with my grandfather as a tourist, even to India and Ecuador, at a time when the world was much bigger than it is now, but never carried her own luggage or voluntarily perspired. She always had certs, kleenex, and moist towelettes in her purse, and always wore very large, stylish, tortoise shell sunglasses. I actually remember the kind of face cream she used and that she had several unopened jars of it in a closet. She never cut and permed her hair like other women her age, but wore it up in a big gray bun, held in place with combs. When she would take her long hair down in the evening and brush it with a soft bristle brush in front of the grandchildren, we could not believe how much it made her look like a wicked witch, and actually told her that, but she did not take offense.

Her legacy is potent, with extreme weaknesses and also extremely lovable qualities flowing through it. She led a privileged life, with a maid, countless country club luncheons, vacations, a nice home, nice clothes, and a doting husband. Even now my grandfather has hired the very best hospice care he could for her at the end, and I picture him with one of those over-size checkbooks, freely writing out checks for her care throughout the course of their long marriage. But anyone close to her would perceive that she also suffered inside from unrealistically high standards and a binding, life-long perfectionism that would make anyone miserable. She also struggled with chronic headaches, nervousness, and depression. She was always taking different kinds of medicine.

Maybe it is not proper to write all of this down. It may only the perspective of a child, since that is the only perspective anyone can have of a grandparent. And if I wanted to go much further into detail, about anyone and everyone in my family, and the complex legacy they have handed me, I, like most people, would have to write a novel in which all of the characters "are entirely fictional have no relation to actual people whatsoever." In a literature class I took in graduate school we talked about how everyone has a village of people living inside of them. My grandmother is without a doubt a primary inhabitant in my own internal village. I hear her voice, her advice, her politics, her religion, her criticisms, and her goodness, her heart, and her suffering and best virtues and charms, all jangling around inside of me quite often. They also formed my mother, binding and repelling her by turns, and pass down to me in yet another, modified yet potent version.

For a long time I have lived far away from where Gogo lives and felt distant from her, despite the fact that I know she loves me and I love her. As of this moment, I feel peculiarly detatched from the reality of her death. But I hope to fly down to Orlando for her funeral, which will be at the church where her father was a minister, with stucco walls, a beautiful Spanish tile roof, and oak trees hung with Spanish moss--now a historic building on a busy street near downtown. The lake is still there too, though no one would want to swim in it. It will be difficult to go down with Esme, lugging her portable crib and all the rest, especially because she is in the process of weaning now, and I'm afraid she will regress when taken out of her familiar environment. This is not a time in my life when I want to travel. But it will be warm and green and I will see my sisters, all of my cousins, aunts, and uncles, who mostly all still live in Florida or the South, and who I rarely see anymore. I'm not sure how this trip will go, but I know that I am still young, and, despite all my talk of feeling tired and depleted most days, I still very much crave hydration, and life, my daily tooth-brushing, and in a pinch can always scrap together the necessary energy to make a trip. I hope I can be closer to my grandmother in death than I have been in life, especially in my adult life. I hope her funeral, where I will gather together with everyone who cares about her and holds her in their village too, will carve out that space I need to meditate upon and genuinely honor her ninety-two years.

(This is a photo of my grandparents at my wedding in August 2003.)

my letter to the world that never wrote to me

My expectations of returning to a frozen tundra have been soundly overturned by several days of atmospheric strangeness. An evening thunderstorm is utterly surreal behavior for Northern Indiana in January, but the lightening last night was not imaginary: one particular bolt fell with a red flash and an instantaneous boom that almost intruded through our front window.

People talk of global warming, and when they do, it incites unrest in me, and yet I know that a warm day here and there is not a cause for alarm, as weather data must be viewed over long stretches of time-- years and years--in patterns. I need to make friends with a weather cryptologist who can crack the code which a warm day in January presents with reasonable balance. All of my friends and neighbors are just as limited to speculation as I am, and we feed each others disquiet.

But through the sensors in my skin, this very day, coming in at me through an open window, evokes a disorienting personal reference to the Floridian Januaries of my youth, or perhaps the northern Aprils of my adulthood. No weather specialist, I am left to my harrassed imagination. What? A world bending and swirling away from me and my child, possibly morphing into unfamiliar patterns, disregarding and disrespecting the ones my skin and brain have already laid down in deep furrows over the course of thirty years--the ingrained catalytic prompters that set off a chain of predictable expectations inherent in each calendar month.

But in the midst of this warm January spell I must call a halt to those expectations and dare not let them be set into motion. I cannot allow myself to feel my spring way, my late-Lenten way, my almost-Easter way today. I cannot look out and expect to see bedewed pink blossoms. I need to dig deep and find my winter diligence--steel myself against the truth of January, February, and March, which are sure to return with a vengence.

We received the slick winter issue of Notre Dame Magazine today. One flip-through shows me profiles of successful alumni: a fashion designer modeling her hand-painted silk top, and so on. I close the magazine; I don't want to know. For the first time in my life I am sensing a displacement from the category of "young person." Others, born in startlingly recent-sounding decades, hold that title now.

In many small ways I often feel that the world already belongs to other people besides me, some of them because they're younger, but others because they're smarter, or have more energy, or a better education, or a more sensible upbringing, or a more priveleged upbringing, or no allergies, no fractured identities to sort out, no serious hang-ups or confidence problems. Others--whether men or women--may own more of the world because they have not had to slow their trajectory for childbirth or childcare at any time. But then there are others who have had oodles of children and a rainbow of worldly achievements, and then I just have to stop the madness and admit: I am among the weak of the world who can only handle one or two big projects in the course of a lifetime--or maybe none-- but according to the Beatitudes Jesus loves these kinds of people, and therein lies comfort and transcendent reality.

My grandmother never in her life touched a computer and had no interest in doing so. Sometimes she would dismiss computers and all computer jargon with a wave of her extremely delicate hand, even while their prevelance among her husband, children, and grandchildren made her feel, I think, somewhat alienated. I never knew how to respond to this, so I just sat and listened in a neutral, respectful, nodding silence, while underneath was an undercurrent of impatience at her lack of understanding, her unnecessary complication of something so simple. What was cryptic to her was easy for me, and yet I could not explain that to her or myself, except to feel that her age and alienation from technology was my badge of youth and belonging to the group who understood effortlessly.

Only now I realize that the badge of youth is only handed out once, and fades and starts to look dated. Now I can identify with the tenor in my grandmother's voice that expressed a sad sense of separation from the carosel of progress. I feel the beginnings of that separation already and imagine it growing only more and more pronounced. I worry that I may live to see a world of confused real estate in which the Great Lakes become the new Florida Keys. It will be so disorienting that I'll just have to wave it away with one boney old hand. I have to accept that my daughter will move with fluency in circles--yet unimaginable circles of the future-- that I won't necessarily share with her.

the short list of crosses

It is the morning of our last day in Tennessee, as we leave tomorrow to go back to the icier climate of northern Indiana. I spoke to a friend in South Bend yesterday and he said it was three degrees, with lots of snow.

Here at Jeff's parents' house, our whole family has had a break from that state of endurance that had swallowed us up north. Esme has had non-stop adult attention and fun all week long. Jeff and I have gotten to do a host of things that we never get to do together: we played tennis; we spent an entire morning biking around town and then having lunch before biking back; we went to a movie and dinner last night; we've slept in most mornings while our little early riser was downstairs having breakfast with her grandparents. She has also allowed her grandparents to put her to bed a few nights, leaving me to visit friends in Chattanooga in the evening, and not feel locked in to my mothering routine as I do at home. I have driven many places by myself, with loud music in the car. I have taken a few long baths. I have been able to do some shopping and, in rare possession of selfish spending money thanks to Santa, have been able to buy things like clothes and make-up that might assist me in the restoration of some semblence of lady-hood, despite the mid-western stay-at-home mom situation I'll soon return to.

We hear from lots of others who have been in similar situations that the first year of a PhD is the hardest. This last semester took a lot out of our family somehow. There was so much non-stop work for Jeff and yet so little money--something that seems so incongruent in this land of supposed opportunity and reward for hard work. Such a small apartment, and such bad weather howling around outside of it. There was so little time to relax with friends because so many weekends were snatched from us. For Jeff there was so much time at the library, which for me translated into so much time at home by myself with Esme. My hands were occupied constantly with boiling water, scrubbing dishes, wiping sticky bananas and pasta off the floor beneath Esme's high chair, dunking and wringing dirty cloth diapers, washclothes, bibs, and dust rags, lugging bags of groceries up flights of apartment stairs, replacing all of the items that a toddler rearranges in the course of any given hour, and feeling like any time spent doing things for myself was stolen time. And for all of this, I know our lives aren't as difficult as most people's lives, and that we are in fact quite priveleged in many ways. I can't make sense of it, except to conclude that it is best to avoid comparisons as a rule.

Being here for a week, leaning on the great, stable pillar of family-- a marriage that has endured the lean years already-- has given me respite. Marybeth, whose home might win an award for "most adorned" during the Christmas season, was remembering a Christmas many years ago when all they had was a tiny little tree on top of their television. It helped me to hear this. Jeff and I did not even put up a tree in our little apartment because it seemed like one more thing that Esme would simply knock over and dissimilate. I kept remembering the things my own mother would bring out for Christmas-- an elaborate ceramic nativity scene on top of the piano, a six foot tree with ornaments that increased in sentimental value each year, a Santa house that lit up from inside, which I would stare at while Christmas music played from the kitchen. Just these few things captivated me as a child and made me feel carefree, warm, and far removed from the unhappy schoolday for a little chunk of the year. Now it's my turn to create something like this in my own family, but left in the kitchen alone for the first time, I somehow botched the recipe, and the magic of Christmas eluded me completely this year. I was only relieved that Esme is not old enough or aware enough to have memories of our hard candy Christmas 2007. I wonder how much practice I will need, i.e. how many Christmases, before I will succeed at getting this thing off the ground, tending to all the domestic details in such a way that will achieve that over-all Christmasy affect I have enjoyed so much from the hands of others.

Interestingly, after a week of pampering and leaning on the strength of my elders, the empire of home traditions that they have built up, I'm ready to go home and have my little life back. It may be a harder life, more paltry, more effort-filled and with less results to show for it, but it's still my life, my project. I'm ready to go back to my short list of crosses and put my one little box of Christmas decorations back into storage until next year. I'm curious about 2008 and what it might contain.