Just Thinking

Community generosity

Over the years I've taken a good number of community education classes. If I include church adult education classes the number would significantly increase. My husband and I learned how to buy our first house from a 6-week class taught by a local realtor named Mae. We almost learned to ballroom dance. I've learned about computers and writing and knitting.

Here's what I'm continually amazed by: the generosity of the teachers. They stand in front of a group of students whose only qualification to be there is that they paid money (or not) and showed up. The teacher has no guarantee that anyone in the group will make them proud someday by applying what they taught. There is no worthiness threshold to prove you deserve to receive the teacher's hard-won knowledge and instruction.

This was again my experience this weekend. I took a class at The Loft, an incredible literary center that has been in Minneapolis for 35 years. Mary Carroll Moore was the teacher, and she poured out what she knew, which was a lot, for the 30 or so of us that paid our money and showed up.

Parents as people

There's a website called "My Parents Were Awesome." No words, only pictures. People send in photos of their parents, separately or together, when they were young. The photos are posted with only the subjects' first names. The cumulative poignancy is amazing and terribly moving. Every parent could be a movie star or a teen idol or a heartbreaker, or the smartest or most popular kid on the block. Parents are dating and in love, courting even. They are people, not parents. If one of my sons were to send in a picture I'd like them to send the one of their father at 17 or 18--long wavy hair, jeans--sitting alone on the low porch of an old abandoned farmhouse, his feet sunk into the overgrown field of a lawn.

(ht: Jeffrey Overstreet)

Free juice and cookies

They give you free juice and cookies. There’s a choice of apple, orange, or cranberry-apple. There’s a choice of Lorna Doones, Fig Newtons, or Oreos. Peanut butter and chocolate chip cookies--bakery-style--are in a large Tupperware. You can choose multiple varieties of tea and coffee with flavorings from a little machine that makes it one cup at a time. The people around are all smiles and warm hellos. All this in exchange for 500 mL of blood.

After donating blood only occasionally for a number of years, I decided last fall to make it more regular. Life as we knew it seemed to be falling apart according to the evening news, economically speaking first and foremost, but you know how that trickle-down-and-around effect works. I decided that not ignoring the blood bank next time it called but to instead pick up the phone and schedule an appointment and do it again 56 days later was a positive act of citizenry. I couldn’t save Goldman Sachs, but I maybe could help save a child. I’ve tried to donate regularly since then but unintentionally skipped one or two intervals. I was there again last week.

I find myself collecting--maybe latching on to--images of hospitality. Maybe that’s because I was raised by a mother who made hospitality---not in an entertainment sense, but the welcoming sense--an art form. The basis of the television show Cheers stands out as an image of hospitality. Flaws and all, the bar’s patrons have a place and “everyone knows your name.” The blood bank is another image of hospitality. I was 40 years old when I gave blood for the first time. I had worked in hospital labs for years where blood--not donated in bags but drawn into test tubes--was our stock and trade, and I had a growing sense of guilt over not contributing my own to this system of caring for the sick that employed me. I confessed this to the phlebotomist at that first donation. “I’m feeling guilty because I’m 40 years old and this is the first time I’ve ever given blood,” I said. She smiled, touched my arm, and said, “All that matters is that you’re here now.”

Pregnancy loss in 750 words or less

The newly arrived summer 2009 issue of Harpur Palate literary magazine includes a creative nonfiction essay of mine, "Ontology." It's about pregnancy loss. Although the essay is only 744 words and was written over a period of a couple days, it incubated for 18 years. If you read it (sorry it's not online), I hope you'll write to me and share your response to it, particularly if you've also been through this experience.

Writer and priest: Akpan's dual dream

Oprah's latest book club selection is Say You're One of Them by Uwem Akpan. Her selection is noteworthy because it's the first time she has selected a book of short stories, and because he is a Nigerian Jesuit priest. Although I've not read the book yet, I was much moved by his story "Communion" in the Faith and Doubt issue of The New Yorker (June 9, 2008). I also heard him speak in 2008 at Calvin College's Festival of Faith and Writing and was very impressed. Akpan told of growing up with a dual dream of being a writer and a priest. He kept praying, "Lord, I have a dream." He became a priest, but didn't have much success at being a writer until he was struck by two verses that changed his thinking. One passage was from Daniel (3:16-18). It's the story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the fiery furnace. In defiance they say to the king who put them there: God will save us, but even if he doesn't we will still worship him. For Akpan, this reminded him that whether or not God helped him to be a writer, God is still God and he would praise him. The other passage was Micah 1:8: "He has showed you, O man, what is good. And what does the LORD require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God." Up until then, Akpan had been writing things related to adults but then began to think about the children and the injustices they suffered. Who was writing about them? That was the beginning of the short story collection that will now surely be a bestseller.

A big and interesting world

Often there are stretches of time when I don’t get out much. The last month or so has been one of those stretches. Between a heavier-than-normal workload and sharing a car between three people I’ve been home more often than not. But there are times I do get on a plane and fly somewhere, mostly for work. When I leave and return I bring back images that feed my imagination for a long time, like bringing home fresh supplies for the pantry.

Earlier this summer I went to Berlin for a couple days for a work project and saw Checkpoint Charlie and a remnant of the Berlin wall in a free hour, ate white asparagus for the first time, and bought a bar of dark chocolate with juniper berries. Last week I broke my home-/office-bound stretch with a 48-hour trip to Denver, again for a work project. Due to the trip’s short duration, I didn’t see anything more than the hotel and what I could see on the ride to and from the airport. But even that is something. Between the airport and the city the land is suprisingly wide open. The first shuttle van driver--who seemed to love his job--discreetly danced with his fingers to the 80s disco music he had softly playing on the car radio, and occasionally tapped out the beat with the most intentional shakes of his head from side to side. I’m sure he thought no one would notice.  The small homes on city lots that lined the back streets he drove entering Denver are laviously landscaped, favoring a trimmed topiary style. At a stop light, the driver suddenly threw open his door and jumped out, running first to the street corner on our right and then to the corner on our left, pushing the “walk” buttons at each corner’s light. Back in the car he beamed with pride over this trick to coax a light to turn sooner in his favor, despite the fact that a car turning left from the intersecting street nearly shaved off the van’s front door as he was running from corner to corner. The second shuttle driver polled his passengers on where they lived and what was historically or culturally interesting about those places. “I want to know where I should go once I have the opportunity to travel,” he said. As we approached the airport, he pointed out the commissioned blue mustang rearing up between the inbound and outbound lanes, controversial now because of its eery red eyes and the fact that it fell on and crushed its maker during its making.

While walking through the Denver airport I thought back to the last time I had been there, a little more than 4 years ago. My son and I were flying to the west coast to visit a potential college and had a couple-hour layover there between Minneapolis and Seattle. As it turned out, his final college decision swung east and so he spent his four years on the opposite coast. All graduated now, he moved to New York City yesterday to start his life’s exciting next chapter.

I recently read Willa Cather’s O Pioneers. In the novel, Alexandra, the novel’s main character, told her friend Carl the story of a neighbor who was despondent over the sameness of life, but after going away to visit relatives in Iowa for awhile, came back happy and stayed happy despite the sameness, “contented to live and work in a world that’s so big and interesting.” Alexandra concluded it was similar for her. Although unlike her neighbor, she had never really left the prairie and experienced that bigness herself, but just knowing it was there, imagining it, seeing herself operating within that world--and knowing she worked in part to send her brother out into that world--was enough to reconcile her with her life.

Today, I’m home, back at my desk and the computer and relative sameness. The house is quiet. My son is gone--this makes two of them--out into the big and interesting world. Knowing it’s there and imagining them operating within it is at once a joy and a grieving, a longing and a thrill. Let the reconciling proceed.

The requisite posture

Last Saturday we went to the Stone Arch Festival of the Arts and spent part of our time listening to Roma di Luna perform on the City Pages Stage perched on the peninsula of land near Nicollet Island just adjacent to the St. Anthony Falls on the Mississippi River. The lead singer, Channy Casselle, was a twenty(?)-something young woman with brown hair pulled back in a ponytail and long side-swept bangs and fair porcelain-like coloring. She wore a black tank, a blue-and-black plaid A-lined skirt that fell six inches or so above her knees, brown knee socks, and black boots, which from where I stood appeared to be of unequal heights with one reaching just below her knee and the other, mid-calf. We only stayed for a handful of songs because there were four other stages dotting the river on Main Street, the birthplace of Minneapolis, as well as art booths to be perused and snacks to be purchased in between, but I liked what I heard in those songs. And I admired what I saw in that lead singer and wondered if she might be a good model at the writing desk. She stood on that stage in front of that crowd and sang her songs—eyes closed, face tilted upward, body swaying, foot tapping, shoulders back, arms out to her side and open, not holding on to a single thing.*

*that is, when she wasn’t playing her violin.

I, circa

I bought Robert Clark's Dark Water: Flood and Redemption in the City of Masterpieces last November when Clark came to St. Paul for a reading sponsored by Garrison Keilor's  Common Good Books. Starting to read it, I settled in for 320+ pages in which Clark would weave his life around and through the Arno River, Florence, Italy, and the region's art within the context of the damage caused by the great flood of 1966. Clark was one of my mentors in the SPU MFA program and lived in Florence at the time, flying back and forth for residencies. Every three weeks I received his feedback on my latest writing submissions in a large white envelope postmarked Florence, Italy. I was eager for insight into his life over there while we, his students, had been diligently at our desks.

Clark disappears on page 10. The chapters flow on without him down a timeline of Florence history that begins with Dante and St. Francis, Cimabue and his Crocifisso. Undergirded by a bibliography of more than 120 references, Clark tells the story of how Florence came to be the City of Masterpieces, which is the story of its artists and expatriots.

But where was Robert?

Although surely present as the narrator persona, the "I" had gone into hiding. Since "I" had been there in the first chapter it was reasonable to look for its return on the next page or the next, but the story continued without this character. The Arno floods again and again until the big one. Angels in the form of college students come from around the world to salvage books and art. Photographers, journalists, and art historians take center stage. Finally, on page 261 the "I" returns. The year is 1997 and two pages later, 2005.

In a literary permutation of Where's Waldo? a wave of the author to his reading audience just before he steps away becomes a technique of suspense, much like the gun mentioned in chapter one of a mystery surely will return before the story's end. But more than a technique of suspense, Clark as self, and not just narrator, emerged at the appropriate point on the timeline. Until then the timeline belonged to Cimabue, Vasari, Michelangelo, Da Vinci, Mary Shelley, George Fairholme, John Ruskin, Robert and Elizabeth Browning, Henry James, Bernard Berenson, E. M. Forster, Dorothy Lees, Edward Gordon Craig, Frederick Hartt, Ugo Procacci, Nick Kraczyna, Umberto Baldini, David Lees and many more. Page 261 was Clark's turn. Only here does he return, and we see what he and Florence make of each other.

I like the humility in this restrained use of "I". The point at which any of us intersect a unique moment and a unique place is borne up by centuries of what came before. To assume one's role within that timeline, to withhold the "I" until the appointed time seems respectful and true.

For more discussion of Dark Water, a truly beautiful book, see Greg Wolfe's Good Letter's blog post and Brian Volck's review in Image journal, issue 60. Click here to listen to Clark reading excerpts from the book.

Holy Saturday reading

In this issue of The Other Journal, Eric Severson has an essay about Holy Saturday, the "hiatus in the Christian passion story." I read it this morning and while much of it was over my head, I came away with some new things to think about regarding what this mysterious and silent day may be about. You can find "Listening on the Day of Silence: Khora and Holy Saturday" online here.

Waiting

Blue sky, no clouds. I'm looking out at the backyard. The lawn is waking up, now twice as green as yesterday despite a heavy thatch of brown. Still, there is enough green grass such that two rabbits have been finding sufficient sustenance to warrant grazing the last few evenings. They are amazingly plump after such a long hibernation. The corner of the deck where the flower pot usually sits is empty while the pruned geranium practices resurrection in the basement laundry tub. Along the back of the fence, shrubs are stick bouquets awaiting buds and blossoms. Ferns lay furled underground. A yellow day lily counts down. Lilacs are a month away. Two Adirondack chairs face southwest, the best position to catch the afternoon sun. Empty now, but open. Everything seemingly empty, but open to be filled. Expectancy. Invitation. Promise in this still moment of not fighting against winter, yet not fully alive. This neutral moment before the concert begins.

Great idea: The 3/50 Project

A Minneapolis woman, Cinda Baxter, has started a national campaign to "Save your local economy three stores at a time." The 3/50 Project works like this:

3: Pick three local retailers that you would hate to see go out of business.

50: Spend $50 at those businesses each month.

Simple! Baxter says that if even half the employed population did this, $42.6 billion dollars in revenue would be directed to locally-owned small businesses.

I first heard about this project from a news story on KARE11 last night, but my husband and I have been thinking along these lines ourselves. A great coffee shop in our neighborhood went out of business a couple months ago, and I feel guilty every time I walk past the empty storefront that I didn't splurge on a coffee or scone more often there, even when I knew they were having a hard time of it. We don't want the same thing to happen to our favorite neighborhood restaurant,and so we go there more often than we would typically allow ourselves. They've been offering a great special and we've been taking them up on it. Eating out as civic duty! Seriously, I think about how much this restaurant has added to our community and grieve at even the thought of its disappearance. Then there's the locally-owned gym above it, and the locally-owned grocery store down the street, and the vet and the ice cream shop and the hardware store and the bookstore and ....

Words to be silent by

In a couple week I'll be giving a talk on solitude and silence and so my radar is on hyperalert for things related. I laid the just-arrived issue of Pilgrimage journal on the table and there on the back cover were words from Henri Nouwen:

Somewhere we know
that without silence words lose their meaning,
that without listening speaking no longer heals,
that without distance closeness cannot cure.

My new favorite soup

Digging through my cupboard for a red box of Minute Tapioca, which I thought I had but didn't, I came across half a bag of red lentils, which I didn't think I had but apparently do. Joy! Without even needing to go to the grocery store I can make a batch of my new favorite soup. What I like best about this recipe I'm not sure. Perhaps its the comforting smoothness or bright yellow color of pureed red lentils (they dissolve in a way green/brown lentils don't), potatoes, and carrots? Perhaps its that all the other ingredients are simply carriers of lots of lemon and garlic? Or perhaps its because anything called "potage" is appealing in this cold winter (although the recipe says it can be eaten cold, with even more lemon, so it may be good for summer fare as well). The cookbook's description of the soup says that it is a traditional Jewish soup sometimes called "Esau's Soup." Here's the recipe:

Potage of Lentils

3 T. olive oil
1 onion, chopped
2 celery stalks, chopped
1 or 2 carrots, sliced
8 garlic cloves, chopped
1 potato, peeled and diced
1 generous cup red lentils, rinsed
4 cups vegetable stock
2 bay leaves
1 or 2 lemons, juiced (go with 2)
1/2 tsp cumin, or to taste
Cayenne pepper, to taste
Salt and pepper, to taste
Lemon slices and chopped parsley for garnish

1. Heat the oil in a large pan. Add the onion and cook for about 5 minutes or until softened. Stir in the celery,  carrots, half the garlic and all the potato. Cook for a few minutes until beginning to soften.

2. Add the lentils and stock to the pan and bring to a boil. Reduce the heat, cover and simmer for about 30 minutes, until the potato and lentils are tender.

3. Add the bay leaves, remaining garlic and half the lemon juice to the pan and cook the soup for a further 10 minutes. Remove the bay leaves. Stir in the remaining lemon juice.

4. Pour the soup into a food processor or blender and process until smooth (may need to be done in batches). Pour the soup back into the pan, stir in the cumin and cayenne pepper, and season with salt and pepper.

5. Ladle the soup into bowls and top each portion with lemon slices and sprinkling of chopped parsley.

Source:  The Complete Book of 400 Soups. Annes Sheasby, ed. London: Hermes House, 2008.

Travel companion

An overdue notice from the library hit my inbox last week, but before I return this book I want to make a note of it here. Upon a friend's recommendation I read Grammar Lessons: Translating a Life in Spain by Michele Morano. What a beautiful book. There are some books that are life-changing based on their content, and there are some books that are companions along the journey. Grammar Lessons is the latter. Morano's beautiful precise language, keen insights, and dexterous handling of time transcend the generic travel memoir to create a text I couldn't wait to open each night in those moments of relaxation after a long day.

Here's a sample:

"Now I listen and the words float through me in phrases that will never make sense. Now I look around at the faces, the slight smiles, closed eyes, the full-stomached belief in the power of rituals even though not one of us understands what is happening here. Even Chus does not understand, or remember, all of what he's trying to say. This is a poem, a prayer to the dark spirits, a rhyme he tries to call back from the depths of memory. In place of certain lines, he hums, the rhythm held deep within his throat, within the motion of his arm and shoulder. Our faces are beginning to glisten, and I am memorizing the movements, listening to the almost familiar sounds, like Castellano but not quite, like the language of my sleeping dreams, always on the verge of being remembered. The sounds swirl and lift and pour and burn, and I am so open, so thankful for the warmth and the transport back into the part of my mind where language rises and falls like fire dancing on liquid, that I don't notice Chus is humming and humming, dissolving with the last line, the final word, into laughter."

Essays not to miss in this collection are: "In the Subjunctive Mood" and "In Praise of Envy."

(In)voluntary storytime

"Once upon a time," and so it began. An eight-hour train ride seated in front of a child and mother who believed in the virtues of reading aloud. A lot of loud reading aloud. We weren't even beyond the city limits when my frustration at the encroachment upon my personal auditory space began to build. No iPod buds or Bose headphones to block the sound. Yet, I had to admit, her voice was clear and smooth. Expressive in all the right places. Accents! She even sang when the text called for it. It's hard to maintain frustration when in admiration mode. Maybe I could listen, I started thinking. Just sit here and secretly let myself be read to. After all, it had been a long time since I'd heard "The Princess and the Pea." Down went the book I'd taken out of my bag. I settled in. Then came Cinderella and a magical pumpkin and glass slippers that had inexplicably slipped past the reality of midnight's stroke.