Rituals of Return

Too often, I remind myself of Lewis Carroll's breathless White Rabbit who, with an impossibly large pocket watch, runs from one event to the next as he informs everyone of how very important and late he is. The finish line, although worthy, is always distant, and the work of getting there on time is never quite done.

So my life hurtles on until from the shadows along the edges of the hustle and bustle I start to notice a quiet voice that calls me to soothe my blistered soul in a ritual of return.

I never know what will trigger it, but, when it comes, it's call woos me like no other. A Siren's song. Maybe. Slow. Steady.

Obedient, I go. Wiser, I return. Home tastes sweeter. Today seems more dear.

The question, I suppose, is do we really find peace in the past or do we simply shipwreck the spirit against the jagged rocks of personal history?

Quote of the Day

"The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing." 

~Albert Einstein

Quote of the Day

"Have compassion for everyone you meet, even if they don't want it. What appears bad manners, an ill temper or cynicism is always a sign of things no ears have heard, no eyes have seen. You do not know what wars are going on down there where the spirit meets the bone." Miller Williams

Snea-kee, Charlie, Snea-kee

Here is a link to the original Charlie the Unicorn.

Who are you?

Do we see ourselves the way others see us? I am startled sometimes at the softer, fuller face that stares back at me from photos. I don't remember when the laugh lines became laugh furrows, or how the weight that I seem to lose 50 pounds at a time (or not at all) always manages to come back...and then some.

"Who gave this strange woman permission to pose as me?," I ask.

I have an unreasonable urge to destroy photos so no one can see. And, then I realize, this is what people see every day. No one else is surprised. Just me.

So, I look closer at the familiar stranger. Those eyes. Not quite blue. Not quite green. If they are, indeed, a window to the soul, they show only a smudged shadow of my devotion and the smallest hint of my despair.

The smile. It still has that crooked quirk that forever stops me from claiming symmetry. My chin is rounder, and my neck has more folds than I think are humanly possible. A crop of white hairs sprout with the tenacity of dandelions at my temples and at the crown of my head.

It is me. And, I wonder, can I be gentle with who I really am?

Safety Belt

So, here is a writing exercise: Remember a photo that means something to you. Describe what is happening in the photo in present tense. Who is in the photo? What is just outside the reach of the camera's lens? What are you thinking? What might the other person be thinking?

"How can this be my baby?" I ask myself.

Jayna is sitting in the drivers' seat of my green Mazda 626. Her hands are resting responsibly at 10 o'clock and 2 o'clock on the wheel. The seatbelt harness fits neatly over her shoulder and buckles her safely in place. She is wearing a black knit cap trimmed with bands of red and gray. Her long patchwork skirt is a crazy mismatch of color that reminds me that this flower child of mine has missed her decade by more than 30 years.

It is Easter. We are in the deserted Shaw's parking lot in North Beverly. And, she is practicing her driving skills. Newly turned sixteen, she is eager to learn the rules of the road. We have spent the afternoon in the empty lot working on the fine details of parallel parking, anti-lock brakes, and any other driving exercise I can dream up.

I am so proud and so petrified when I think that she will soon be officially on the road and a little bit farther from the safety of home.

We have stopped the lessons to talk for a while. The keys still hang in the ignition.

It has been several years since she told me, in that lurching way that adolescent girls break free from their mothers, that she wasn't sure she loved me anymore. At the time, it felt like she broke up with me, and I sobbed myself to sleep. In the months and years since then, we have made a new relationship. It is a wary sort of truce, but it is growing into something better.

This afternoon though, it is hard to remember ever being anything but close.

I step out of the car and lean in through the window to take her picture. Her smile is that of a girl well on her way to becoming a woman.

I wonder if I can really let her go. Maybe, just maybe, I think, I can hold onto her a while longer. Then I remember what small freedoms mean to the growth of the soul.

How bad can it be? She already has the keys, and I did teach her to wear a seatbelt.

Upside Down

Sometimes, no matter how hard you try, your world seems to be upside down. And, you wonder, will the downside ever be up again?

Safari

The summer before I turned 32 most of what I had known and trusted for a lifetime came tumbling down. With the dissolution of the Kingdom, my faith lost its resting place. And, I was left in the rubble of a doctrine that had dictated so much of who I had become.

For most of the last decade I wandered a lonely wilderness. I called that time in my life a "safari." But, I can see now that it was only the beginning of my soul's long journey to a new Promised Land.

Taming the Tongue

"Death and life are in the power of the tongue..." Proverbs 18:21

Shorthand

Last night after we climbed into bed, Jim rolled over and bumped his backside against mine.

"Butt check," he declared.

I smiled in the dark. It had been so long since I had heard him say those words. When you have been with someone for 23 years, you forget to remember the shorthand you created when love was fresh and young. And, suddenly, I wanted more than anything to pull those lost phrases, one by one, from the shadows of time.

In the early days, "butt check" was used when there had been a slight stand-off between the two of us. It was used when we wanted to connect, but needed to build a bridge between his side of the bed and mine. With a simple "butt check," you could say you were sorry; and, by accepting a "butt check," you could agree to let go and move forward. A "butt check" smoothed the differences; and, it served as a gentle reminder that we were still playing on "the same team."

Some of my other favorites:

Tapping: Three taps meant "I love you." The correct response was four taps: "I love you too." One very long tap with sufficient pressure meant, "I want you NOW." Our own version of Morse code dotted and dashed us through those early years of marriage. 

Nap clothes: These were the clothes we wore on Sunday afternoon after church to unwind. Sometimes we actually slept in our nap clothes. Sometimes we watched football in our nap clothes. And, almost always we ate Italian subs loaded with hot peppers in our nap clothes. My nap clothes for years consisted of an oversized t-shirt with a Big Boy on the front. 

Buggle: The word "buggle" was born one evening after we had both worked long hours. I was exhausted to the point of tears when Jim leaned over me on his hands and knees to tuck me under the shelter of his body. He said, "Snuggle in, little bug." Snuggle became "buggle." And, so it remains a part of our family lexicon. Jayna told me a couple months ago that she didn't realize it was not a real word until she asked her boyfriend to "buggle" her, and he looked confused.

"I'll say! I am going to start a paper route right now!" This line comes from our favorite movie, Pee Wee's Big Adventure. It is used sparingly when one or the other of us is too fired up about something. It brings a sense of reality about what is important. 

"You're livin' in the 80's!" We've found this phrase to be the quickest way to de-escalate an argument. Its origins are traceable to a heated debate Jim and I were having one day when we stopped at a gas station. As I came around one side of the car, and Jim came around the other, I punctuated my point with an emphatic, "Yeah, well you are livin' in the eighties." The person one pump over burst out laughing and so did we. How could we not?

"M-M-Mayville..." When I get too big for my britches, Jim likes to remind me of the first time I navigated a border crossing as a driver going from Michigan over the bridge into Canada. When asked where I lived, I spoke up loud and answered, "U.S." The border guard rolled his eyes and asked again, "Where do you live?" I stammered, "M-M-Mayville." Ever since then, my hometown of "M-M-Mayville" carries the unspoken subtext of "You are not so tough."

Ours has not been a perfect marriage. On the contrary, there have been times when we would have called it quits if we could have afforded to split. We have lived together, and we have lived separate. And, we have grown in so many ways to be where we are today.

Once in a while though, life reaches across the differences to offer a "butt check," and we would be foolish not to accept it.

Vows

When you take wedding vows, you say... "for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health." I remember wondering even as I repeated those words what they would mean for us.

As it turned out, they meant everything.

The morning after I turned 25, Jim woke me up to tell me that he was having trouble breathing. We went straight to the emergency room. A series of tests showed that he had congestive heart failure due to a congenital heart defect. His heart was enlarged and there was an aneurism the size of a man's fist in his aortic arch. His open -heart surgery was scheduled before the end of the week.

He did recover, but that process was the turning point. Jim, who had always believed in God, began to prioritize how he wanted to spend the rest of his life. And, he put his foot on a path of service that has taken our family from the heart of the midwest to the mountains of New Hampshire to settle on the coastline of Massachusetts.

"In sickness and in health..." What does it mean for you? For me it means the familiar fear followed by a firm resolve to soldier on; it means the hospital bed intended for one that expands to hold the weight of the whole family; and it means the knowledge that the world changes without your permission.

The Forest Floor

We went lookin' for faith

on the forest floor,
And it showed up everywhere,
In the sun and the water
and the falling leaves,
The falling leaves of time.

My new header reminds me of Neil Young's song, You're My Girl.

By the way, I did not take the photo. I snagged it from the Internet. And, then I spent 48.5 minutes adjusting the title in Photoshop, uploading to Blogger, and tinkering with html. Can you imagine if I had taken the time to create nine different versions with different fonts and Bible verses--just so you could vote? I would have not the time to bake birthday cakes.

P.S. If you look real close, you will see "I love James" in the corner. 

Tiger Eyes

My brother and I used to fight over whose turn it was to lick the S & H Green Stamps my mother collected when she shopped at Musser's Market. The minty green sheets with their bold red lettering were as good as gold to our family when we lived on Goshen Farm.

The goal was to fill all the pages in a booklet with the coveted stamps. The completed booklets could be exchanged for merchandise. And, it was with the help of S & H green stamps that my parents afforded most of our camping equipment: sleeping bags for all of us, a cookstove, and a Coleman lantern.

The sleeping bags were covered in a deep blue cotton and the inside was lined in a golden flannel imprinted with pictures of Canada geese caught in mid-flight and wood ducks nestled in clumps of cattails on a marsh. Our parents zipped their bags together, for reasons we did not yet understand, while my siblings and I were happy to snuggle into the depths of our own warmth. When my sleeping bag's big silver zipper closed me inside for the night, I would feel like the luckiest girl in all of Lancaster county.

Some of my fondest memories growing up were of the camping trips we took as a family. We would load the pop-up camper and head off for a weekend. These times were extra special to us because amid the hustle and bustle of our communal life at Goshen, we were always under the watchful eyes and listening ears of others. To have our parents to ourselves was the biggest treat we knew.

We camped in places that had trails that wound through the woods and along the water. Muddy Run. Nicely's Pond. Susquehanna State Park. Many of my best childhood memories include the heady scent of new pine needles mixed with the sweet decay of old; the sight of sunbeams poked like long, yellow fingers through the leafy forest ceiling; and the mighty voice of the Susquehanna as it tumbled to empty itself in the Chesapeake Bay.

It was my dad who taught us each how to build a strong campfire. The trick, you see, is in learning how to stack your firewood in a loose pyramid over a substantial bed of paper and kindling. You need to leave enough air pockets to let your fire breathe upwards.

Around those tidy campfires, my dad and mom would take turns reading us such stories as Gentle Ben and Little Britches. We would wrap biscuit dough around the ends of long sticks and hold them over the flames until they were toasted to perfection. The doughy goodness topped with melted butter was delicious even when it wasn't completely done.

The green cookstove always sat at the end of the picnic table in our campsite. Its rickety sides protected the burners from the breeze. It was on that stovetop in a large black skillet that our mother made us the pancake men we adored. Their limbs were always fatter than they were intended to be, and their heads disappeared into their shoulders, but we gobbled them up as fast as she could make them.

After the sun set, we learned to play Rook by the light of the Coleman lantern at the picnic table while dozens of brown moths gathered over our heads to beat their protest against the night air. Later inside the camper, we would watch as my father dimmed the lantern until the mantles glowed orange through the inky dark. "Tiger eyes" we called them.

Once the "tiger eyes" burned low and disappeared, I would burrow down in the warm safety of my S & H green stamp sleeping bag to dream of a new day.

Thank you, S & H. And, thank you, Mom and Dad for lasting memories.

Hello, my name is...

The truth is...I have never been very good at remembering names. Recently, it has gotten worse. Almost every day someone will greet me by name, and the keeper of my memory vault, with stubborn defiance, refuses to release their name to my consciousness.

Perhaps, it is a function of age. I am 42 and approaching menopause. Maybe, it is the reality of a head packed too full of junk. As a habitual multi-tasker, I sometimes have to e-mail myself in the middle of the night just to make enough room in my head for sleep.

Whatever it is, I am challenged to pull correct names to my lips. It has gone beyond the point of embarrassment. It would be nearly unethical, and bordering on immoral, of me to continue on without trying to increase my capacity for name retention.

One article I read years ago suggested that when you select a word to associate with a person's face, you are more apt to remember their name. Armed with this nifty piece of advice, I headed out to a meeting of the PTO at Jayna's school. I was new to the whole PTO thing, and I wanted to make sure that I remembered everyone's name.

This is what happened. I moved through the room-- confident that my strategy would be the turning point in my history of "name-forgetting." I met a woman; let's call her "Molly," who was an artist. Her work was on display in a local bagel shop. I pictured the bagels perched on her face like a pair of eyeglasses. Molly Bagels. This was a piece of cake. (or a piece of bagel)

It was nearly a month later when I ran into "Molly" again. We both smiled in recognition. And, my mind went completely blank. All I could remember was "bagel." And, then I remembered the other details, but I couldn't pull up her name to save my life.

This tip-of-tongue phenomenon has plagued me for as long as I can remember. I am excellent about details; however, the name escapes me 9 times out of 10. And, I have decided to do something about it. Again.

This time I started by trying to better understand metacognition, or the knowledge of my own thoughts and the factors that influence my thinking. One theory suggests that all those little details, such as "bagels," are stored in the frontal lobe. One has to be certain that these reminders are robust enough to correctly retrieve the word you need from where it is stored deeper in the cerebral cortex. The stronger the triggers, the more likely you are to recall the correct name.

Here are a few other things I am doing to flex my metacognitive muscles:

1. I tell myself that I CAN remember names. This doesn't allow me to be lazy about it.
2. When someone introduces themselves, I stop. Pay attention. Too often I am busy thinking about what I going to say rather than really hearing the name.
3. I repeat the name.
4. I ask about the spelling. "Is that Ann with an E?"
5. I look for a chance to introduce the person by name to someone else.

I probably won't try to think of bagels on someone's face again.

Romans 7:15

"I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do, I do not, but what I hate I do."

A Question of Blog Etiquette

I do have an invisible StatCounter on my site. Because I do, I know that there are multiple visitors to my blog who never leave a comment. Their visits are logged about the same time each day. If I had to guess, I would say that a stop over to Divagation is part of a somewhat daily routine. I get that.

I have my own routine. In the morning I grab a cup of coffee and head to the computer. After I check e-mail, I read the New York Times, Washington Post, Boston.com, and our local paper. Lest anyone think I spend all morning reading online news, please note that I am skimming headlines/articles and reading Op-Ed pieces. It takes half an hour. Tops.

Then if I have time, there are a half dozen or so blogs that I check up on--all for different reasons.

Some blogs touch my heart with the honesty of life shared. Some blogs inform me.  Some blogs humor me. 

And, there are a couple of blogs I continue to follow with a sick sort of dedication because I can't believe that anyone actually lives the way they portray themselves through photos, spiritual insights, and stories. Maybe part of me hopes that perfection like that does really exist, while the other more cynical part of me knows it does not--and those authors are full of shit no matter how hard they try to package it as godly.  

In all my blog travels, I leave comments as seldom as some of my most regular blog readers. It is not that I am not interested; it is just that I don't like to leave my electronic footprints all over the world wide web. 

I have been wondering though, what is the etiquette for removing a comment from your blog? It is true; we are all masters of our own cyber kingdoms. We control who may enter, and who may post a comment on our entries. However, in three years of blogging, I can remember only once that I deleted a comment left on my blog. It was a link for some online business startup. It didn't have anything to do with my post, so I removed it.

And, I must ask, if you don't want someone to leave you a comment, wouldn't it be better to have a "friends only" or approved setting? Or, if you know the person who has commented, mightn't  you at least stir yourself to offer the courtesy notification that "No offense or anything, but I don't want your kind to be muddying up the sanctity of my blog? And, P.S. Maybe you would like to be a real Christian like me."

Fat chance.

0's in a Trillion

One trillion still sounds like one of those words we made up as kids to brag about how much stronger our dad was than everyone else or how much smarter we were than our classmates.  

Trillion. Zillion. Kajillion. Infinity. We didn't know exactly what those numbers were, but we did know that they were impressive in size and indisputable in proportion. We tossed them around with all the authority of an 8 year old and dared anyone to defy us.

Today, "trillion" with all the attending O's is not made up. It is a number used to calculate our hulking national debt--11 trillion dollars.  It is very real. And, I will admit, I have never really wrapped my head around just how many O's there are in that number.

The answer: In the U.S. and Scientific Community there are 12 O's in a trillion. 1,000,000,000,000.

In the rest of the world there are 18 O's in a trillion. 1,000,000,000,000,000,000.

I haven't made a career as a financial advisor or an investment banker. I don't claim to know much about anything, but does anyone else see a problem with this kind of math?

Birdie, Rest a Little Longer

I remember my Nana repeating Tennyson's Cradle Song from Sea Dreams...

What does little birdie say
In her nest at peep of day?

"Let me fly," says little birdie,
"Mother, let me fly away."

"Birdie, rest a little longer,
Till the little wings are stronger,"

So she rests a little longer,
Then she flies away...

She would finish by saying, "Julie dear, rest a little longer, till your wings are a little stronger, and then you too may fly away." It has been many years since my wings grew strong enough to carry me out of the nest, but I have never forgotten her words.

My friend Karen reminded me of this today with a post she wrote about her own little birdie who is winging her way to the east coast this week.

Maybe I am cheating by blog pimping, but it is worth a read. She says things so well.

"Fly, little girl with the grumpy face, my bald little baby who came into this world with one eye stuck shut, a startled yell your only concession to being severed from me. Go away from me, now, stern little unsmiling baby with the big hairy ears and unbelievably beautiful face. Your long arms reaching out to stop the swing. You fussed night and day until you could crawl, so why should surprise me that you leave me now? "(read more ...)

Good Mystery Gone Bad

Why is it a bitter disappointment when good mystery writers try to pen a romance novel with the name Sunday in the title? Blech! I had a similar feeling when Mary Higgins Clark wrote My Gal Sunday.  Blech! I don't recommend it even if it sports a snazzy blue "adult bestseller" sticker on the cover. Its absurdity promises only to make you gag. And, it will cure you of being a romantic forever. It wouldn't surprise me if it gets made into a movie though.

The "Rush" ans are Coming

This man is frightening. I do wish he would do something about those awful ties and his putrid politics. That such hate and disregard for mankind exists in one human being is beyond me.

Growing up, I always wished that our family was Republican because we wanted to hang onto our amassed millions. Instead our family politics ran down the rigid backbone of the moral majority. 

It wasn't until I was much older that I thought to ask, "Who made you my moral majority anyway?" I don't remember casting a vote.

Then, more than a decade ago, my adult self chose a different party than the one handed to me by my parents. And, every time Rush opens his mouth, I know I made the right choice.

Talk show hosts and commentators on both the right and the left go too far. They have to. It is how ratings are built. They say the things that offend people to the core. But, there is always the danger of going too far. Just ask Howard Stern. Imus. Jimmy the Greek.

Rush mocking the condition of Michael J. Fox. Rush encouraging a parody of Obama to the tune of "Puff the Magic Dragon." Rush saying he hopes Obama fails. (later amended to say "I hope his policies fail.") These are just a few highlights of a career littered with bitterness and pockmarked with pain.

How far is too far? And, when will we say ENOUGH of your silly ties?