the rose of kiev

Huckleberry: Part 1

2011-10-20T15:52:00.000-04:00

When Dave and I went out on a scooter ride the night of August 5th last year, we did not leave our apartment with any intention of adopting two cats.

But life is funny that way.

It was 10'o'clock at night, and Dave and I we were driving past a gas station when Dave yelled, "I see kittens!" as he swerved sharply into the lot. "You what?" I bellowed through my helmet. And as soon as he cut the engine, I heard a wild scraping in the bushes by the road, and a jet-black kitten came shooting down from the branches. Paws splayed, he caught sight of us, froze, and then shot back into the shrubbery.

"There's another one!" Dave called out, pointing beyond the bush to an arch-backed kitten, this one grey and white, frozen against the back curb of the gas station lot. A car suddenly pulled into the lot, cutting my visual with the kitten. What already hit Dave finally hit me - if they stay here, they'll get run over. I lifted my face mask and crooned at the kitten as I walked toward her. But after a day of dodging traffic, she was a might skittish, and took her chances running into the road. Where a car was coming. I lumbered out over the curb, looking like a suitless astronaut, and snatched up the kitten, waving my apologies to the car. Once captured, the kitten succumbed without a fight.

After Dave had coaxed the hyper little black one out of the bushes, we looked at each other for a moment, then down again into our arms, dumbfounded. Now what?

We walked to the gas station clerk and spoke through the thick plastic window as he peered down at the kittens. When we asked if he knew where they came from, all he knew was that they had appeared in the afternoon at the same time as a grubby cat carrier shoved up next to the dumpster. We walked over, and found it, the wire door hanging open, a single can of cat food licked clean.

Dave tucked the black kitten into his arms, put the carrier on the back of the scooter, and drove the one block home. I walked, wonderstruck, carrying back the little grey-and-white kitten; she was quiet and alert in my arms, her small face peeked out over the bend of my elbow.

A picture of Huck the night we found Emma and him.

An hour later, the kittens were locked in our bathroom, and Dave and I were in the pet section at Wal-Mart, trying to figure out what to buy for them. Litter box, litter, pooper scooper, flea shampoo, canned cat food...

They were scratching and mewling at the door when we came home, and eager for the food we set in the tub for them. We sat in the bathroom with them, keeping them company as they ate to their heart's delight, and finally, they were calm, bellies full and thirst sated. The little grey-and-white girl curled on the cool porcelain of the bathtub, eyes closed; the black little boy settled down against the vanity between my ankles. He had a perpetual expression of innocent surprise.

We agreed to not name them. We lived in a no-pets-allowed one-bedroom apartment at the time, and the plan was to eventually-in-the-very-near-future find homes for them. I even called a friend of mine whose parents own a farm and a barn full of fifty-odd farm cats. What difference could two more make?

Well, that was the plan, until our neighbor across the alley put her upstairs 2-bedroom apartment up for rent. A comparitive Taj Majal, I fell in love with the spacious kitchen, the deep endless closets, the large sun-filled windows.

And it didn't hurt that she was a fierce animal lover. She owned four Shih Tzus, and responded with enthusiasm to our timid inquiry about keeping the two kittens.

The day that Dave helped the landlady pluck the FOR RENT sign from the yard, we sat down with our tiny nameless beasties. "I guess we should name them," one of us said.

Dave named the girl Emma. And I named the little black one Huckleberry.

(Part 2 - coming)

Heart

2011-10-04T14:06:00.000-04:00

Leaving a church you love is difficult.

What a small word, "difficult". Nine letters, three syllables, a small vague word full of heartbreak.

It is October now. And in October of last year, I left a church I loved.

It was the right decision. But it was "difficult".

Dave and I left at the end of October. At this time last year, we were in the final throes, and I was thrashing, in agony, miserable. The church I loved and the people I loved were hurting me. And worse, the wounds were inflicted with imperfect judgement and the best intentions.

Some mornings, I still wake up angry thinking about it. Misguided love is a dangerous thing.

For some reason, it helps to know that it hurts so much because I loved them, that church, so much. My heart was there, had grown vessels and nerves, was pumping blood, deep-set in the chest of that church. And then when we left, I had to cut it out.

I sometimes wonder if my heart will ever beat right again.

The healing has been slow, and confusing. It was six months before Dave and I went to church again, and still, it was tentative. My mother invited us to the Easter Sunday service at her church, and I begged Dave to go. Being there tugged on the ragged stitches; we bickered and fought; I cried a lot.

It is hard to try again. For weeks, it was unbearable. Standing next to my mother as the sanctuary filled with worship music, my throat would close. I would push my long hair forward to hide my tears. My heart was still so bruised; it felt so misshapen in this new place. I missed the church I loved, hated that I missed it, knew that I would never go back, longed for a new community to give my heart to, and also wondered if I could ever give my heart like that again. I loved that church; it broke my heart.

It has been getting better. Slowly, raggedly, like physical therapy. I went to my mother's church's picnic and ate cake and played cornhole and exchanged numbers and made friends. I came home smiling. I went to a movie at the dollar theater with a Taiwanese girl my age, and we spent a beautiful evening in disjointed English and the getting-to-know-you awkwardness. My heart is fearful now, more than it ever has been before, but I ache with hope. I am so afraid of the commitment of community, yet I also want it so much. My fractured heart can hardly bear it.

I am fragile right now. We have been at this church for five months, and I am approaching the point where I want to do more than just Sundays. I have not yet taken the steps to do so, and my bruised husband is hesitant. It is hard - "difficult" - to give your heart away again after heartbreak. This world offers no guarantees - Dave and I are very conscious of the cost of giving our hearts away. And there is no insurance policy for it.

This gamble, that awful fact of love and friendship, that it can only be bought by taking my heart from my chest and putting it in their hands, utterly exposed, my vulnerable soul stretched out on the stone altar trying to trust that I will not be sacrificed...it is "difficult" to reach through my ribs, to go up those steps, to get up on that altar again, when you've been gutted on it before.

But what else can I do?

C.S. Lewis said:

"To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to be sure of keeping your heart in tact, you must give your heart to no one....lock it up safe in the casket of your selfishness. But in that casket - safe, dark, motionless, airless - it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable."

These are my options? A cold heart of stone kept safe, or a warm heart of flesh offered up for butchering again and again?

It is not an easy thing to love, really love. Especially after heartbreak. To know what you are offering up, what you might suffer, every time you place your heart in the palm of another. The thought can be agonizing, maddening even.

But please, God, I hope I always have the courage to stick my fist in my chest and offer it up again and again, bloody and scarred and weeping in fear. I hope it is always soft enough to be cut to pieces, to be broken. I don't understand why the world has to be this way, why it's better to be so vulnerable, but if that's the way it is, then, alright.

Alright.

It's October. I left a church I loved a year ago. I loved it, and it broke my heart.

May God help me in offering up my heart again in this new place.

Good Things

2011-09-25T19:02:00.000-04:00

A couple of months ago, I went to a bar with my friend, Tricia. I ordered a pale ale, and the instant she went to the bathroom, two awkward young men swooped over to flirt with me.

Before that, she and I were talking about art and about writing. She is out in California, living twenty miles from L.A. and writing screenplays. She wants to write big action and adventure movies like Cowboys and Aliens with heroes like Indiana Jones, big and blazing romps of fun. "I just wrote a romantic-comedy," she said, and, both of us Christians, we were discussing the value of art that isn't explicitly "Christian" or that doesn't directly talk about God.

Without thinking, I said, "It is good to fill the world with good things."

Last week was strangely sad for me. A relative of mine died of heart failure, one of my young cats suddenly fell ill and had to be put down, and my mother told me Wednesday morning that one of her patients, a 7-year-old girl, is slowly slipping away. Friday was grey and humid, uncomfortable and oppressive, weather to match this haze of sadness I could not shake.

And it wasn't a verse, a prayer, or a worship song that finally burned off the fog.

It was a catchy pop-rock song.

I got in the car to go to work and pulled out of the garage, punching the radio power button as I backed into the alley. Through the speakers, I heard "--time but I'm back in town / This time I'm not leaving without you" and I turned it up - I had caught "You and I" by Lady Gaga in the first verse. I cranked it, screamed it, felt scrubbed clean by the electric guitars and the rough vocals. The song had nothing to do with death, with God, with sadness, with cats or aunts or children, but it was a good song, and that was enough.

When I got to work ten minutes later, my mind had cleared.

One good song was enough to shake me out of the haze.

It is good to fill the world with good things.

Beauty

2011-09-19T15:49:00.000-04:00

I wrote this last week before our one-year-old cat, Huck, got sick. We had to put him to sleep Friday evening around 5:30. I miss these moments with our little buddy.

When I went out to run errands this morning, I almost didn't bring a jacket with me. On an excessive whim, I snatched a tattered fleecy sweatshirt, the one with the cigarette hole in the elbow (I don't smoke, but I used to spend a lot of time on porchs with smokers). The moment I stepped outside, I was reminded that it is no longer August - it was cool, lower 60s, a cold breeze and a lingering fog in the trees of the school yard. I closed the door behind myself and quickly shoved into the sleeves, gathering the cloth around me.

Summer is saying goodbye. I know Ohio well enough to know there are still a few hot days ahead, but I know that Summer's grasp is gone. And our short-lived beautiful Autumn is coming into her prime.

It was a beautiful summer.

Oh, for lots of reasons. But I say that because that was the characteristic that struck me the most - Beauty.

It shocked me, really, the loveliness of my blessings in those hot months.

It was always the simplest, most daily of things, that would stun and stop me. That would punch the air right out of my chest and command me to stop and see.

Because I work in the afternoons, I often get the luxury of sleeping in as late as I want. Dave didn't have classes this summer, and his job schedule is flexible. Many mornings I would have already run, eaten, and showered before I would wake him up. It was a delicious freedom.

And we have this cat, a wide-eyed black furball I named Huckleberry.

And there were several mornings I would come out of the bathroom, Dave still sleeping, and I'd be dabbing a peach-colored towel to my tangled wet hair as I walked into the bedroom. The window on my side of the bed faces east, and when the sun creeps above the roof of the neighboring building, yellow morning sun falls across the sheets. And that black cat would be cuddled into the crook of Dave's sleeping elbow. Huckleberry would look at me, amber eyes wide, bright and innocent like a startled child; Dave's closed lashes casting minute shadows on his stubbled cheeks. And always, it was so quiet: the cat sighing, cars on the street, Dave breathing. The sunshine would gather, puddled gold, in the hollow of Dave's throat, and I couldn't catch my breath.

I got to wake up to this, all summer long. What a gift.

Day 1004

2011-09-13T16:50:00.000-04:00

Thoughts on Marriage

Quiet Time
Dave and I had a lot going on when we were first married: we were in a church that met at least three nights a week, we each had a full-time college class load, and we both had part time jobs.

But in June of 2010, we both got our degrees. And in October of 2010, we left that busy church. Our lives have quieted down a lot, and the quiet has been good for us.

Dinner has become an important part of our evening rhythm. We both get home from work at about the same time, and I put together a simple meal. There's an unassuming melody to it, a gentle heartbeat. I ask how many tator tots he wants, and he always says 15. I knock on the study door when the food's about done, and he gets my silverware and napkin for me. I hear the scraping legs of unfolding TV trays in the living room as I dish up his plate. If it's early enough, we watch the news on PBS; if it's later, we watch Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune, guessing aloud the questions and puzzles. There isn't much visiting, but we get to be quiet and together after our day apart.

And sometimes, on good nights, we'll go out on the scooter together. One night, a quick errand to Target turned into a night cruise around the northern end of the city. Dave went west on 161, and as we passed a high school football stadium, he pointed up at clouds of insects blanketing the stadium lights. By the time he lowered his arm, mayflies - thousands, tens of thousands - were suddenly all around us. I was laughing, in hysterics. I felt their bodies splatter on my shins, and shielded myself behind Dave. He kept trying to cover his mouth, their wings and legs and abdomens colliding with his face and glasses, but it was difficult to steer through the thick cloud one-handed. I reached my hand around to cover his mouth, and could feel on my knuckles the bodies he would've swallowed. We were soon out of the cloud, but I had the giggles for miles. When we got home that night, we didn't say much; my hair was a wind-torn wreck and my shins were streaked with grey wings and bug guts and I reached for Dave's hand as we walked inside. That, too, is our quiet time together.

Strength from Struggles
So my engagement and early marriage were busy, filled with the normal busy goings-on of school and work and church. It was also an unusually action-packed time of our lives: The summer of our engagement, my father's second marriage was ending. Shortly before we graduated from college, my grandmother passed away. And before our second anniversary, we went through the long and painful process of leaving our old church.

Let's just say, it's not a package I would have dished up for myself as a marriage-starter.

But I still remember a conversation I had over coffee with this young guy in my old church. It was March of 2010, and we were talking about the difficulties my husband was encountering with his then-mentoree. Unexpectedly, my coffee mate asked, "How is your marriage doing?" I surprised myself when I said, "Actually...really well."

I stopped to think about my answer. I didn't change it.

It was true. In all the surrounding chaos, Dave and I had learned how to draw together.

Yesterday, I found a long note from Dave in the back of one of my journals. "I've got your back," he said in the middle of it. The phrase reached out from the page and held me with his arms. He had given me the note as encouragement in the midst of leaving our old church.

Crises have never pulled us apart - rather, they have always pulled us together. We never mistake each other for the enemy, and understand the care and forebearance the other needs. He needs me to sit with him and be quiet; I need encouragement and flowers. And hugs. And a carton of ice cream.

Like I said, I wouldn't have chosen the struggles we went through, especially so early in our relationship. And, make no mistake, the struggles were awful, painful. But I am exceedingly grateful for the unity, the good habits, the strength we've acquired as a unit through those hard things.

And speaking of gratefulness...

Gratefulness
I've said it before, but it bears repeating and repeating again: find a reason to say "thank you" every day. It sounds simple, even simplistic, but I cannot express how important it is, even for the smallest of things. Thank you for washing the dishes. Thank you for changing the oil in the car. Thank you for holding the door open for me. Thank you for cleaning the litter box, especially because it was my turn and you know how much I hate doing it.

Each thank you is a small recognition of the efforts of the other in the relationship. I'm grateful that you help me. I'm grateful that you're here. I'm grateful that you're with me. That little message, stacked up day after day, is a powerful reserve of love. Do it. Use it.

Down to Business

2011-05-27T22:40:00.007-04:00

I will probably never blog here with the same faithfulness that I used to. However, that does not mean that I'm not writing.

In fact, I've started a small business:

(Thanks to my father for designing the logo)

The business is simple: as my website quips, it's "designed to preserve the irreplaceable life stories of people in written, audio or video form."

You see, my grandmother passed away a year ago this month. And, as I have previously posted, I am (very slowly) working on a book-size project that snapshots my family in the weeks around her death.

But the timing of her death led to this idea for my business. You see, she died before I could really sit down with her and record her life stories. We had even planned to do it the summer before she died, but it didn't work out. I regretted that deeply when she was gone.

I want other people to be able to keep their heritage, their inherited stories, and I don't want their possible lack of time, equipment or skill to keep them from doing that. And I have the skill and heart for just such a thing. So, I've fumbled my way into a business, step by awkward step. It's the whole nine yards, too, with an LLC license from the Secretary of the State, a website, a business account, all of it. I've been stumbling around in the dark, one domino leading to the next, and having a lot of fun grappling with the creation of a business - something I never ever thought I would do. But the challenge has been delicious.

I may update here infrequently as the mood strikes me, but I won't be attending to this blog with my previous regularity (even as irregular as that was). However, if you are looking to read my writing, I have started to keep a blog on the website. Every couple of days on the Memories in Print blog, I have been posting some of my favorite family stories, both for fun and as an example for the website. It is a different and more narrow focus than what was here, but it is writing nonetheless.

The website is:

www.memories-in-print.com

Go there. Read me. Hire me. Or ignore me. You are, of course, free to do what you want.

And if you never come here again and if you never go there ever, let me say thank you for being here at all. The knowledge of you being out there, caring to read what I wrote, made the writing easier. There is a lot of content in the wide world to read, and you chose to spend your limited time reading mine. Thank you for that gift.

Day 730

2010-12-13T12:33:00.005-05:00

This past weekend, Dave and I decorated our apartment and our plastic 3-foot Charlie Brown Christmas tree.

And two years ago today, I wore white, he wore a tux, and we said, "I do."

Happy anniversary, Dave.

The Problem of Evil

2010-11-27T21:43:00.001-05:00

A few weeks ago, I sat up late with my landlady talking and drinking cheap moscato wine. Our two-hour conversation strayed all over, from stories about her Chilean upbringing to the story of how I met Dave. Halfway into our second glass, God and Evil wandered into the conversation.

She gestured with her wine glass toward the windowed walls, admitting that because of Nature's beauty she believes in God, but she has a problem with all the evil happenings in this world. She reached up with both hands and repositioned her glasses, and looking at me over the rims she told me story after story of the things she has seen: a single mother dying of cancer and living alone with her mentally handicapped son, friends' daughters raped, people shot. "How can I believe in a good God?" she asked, words slanted with her Chilean accent.

Every time this kind of question comes up in conversation I have the same answer. I swallowed a sweet mouthful and replied, "It's the cost of free will." This answer is the only thing that gives me comfort, to me the only thing that makes sense of both a good God and an evil world: free will. Since I was nearing the bottom of my second glass and nearing my limit, I can't remember what exactly I said. But I know I talked about the two options this world had: we could've been programmed like robots to love and do good, or been allowed the real freedom to choose right or wrong. The problem with Good Programming is that no choice is truly yours (Would you like an apple or an apple?); the problem with Real Freedom is that our bad choices have bad, sometimes horrific, consequences. A very long time ago, God decided that this cost of being able to choose evil was a worthy price for free will. I admitted to my landlady that it is a terrible thing that such evil is here, but this must be somehow better than the alternative.

The conversation wandered to more innane topics from there, and I got back to my apartment a little tipsy some time after midnight. I went to bed, a few days passed, and I didn't think much more about the conversation.

At work, I try to read a little bit of the Columbus Dispatch online while I'm eating my lunch. About three weeks ago, I inadvertantly began following a story about 4 missing people in the town of Mount Vernon about an hour away from where I live. As days ticked by, and the missing persons remained missing, the story quickly rose to the daily cover. Each day only had details about how Knox County was still trying to find them; the reporters tried to write the same story three different ways, each day having a little less hope for the 2 women and the 2 children.

Four days after the four went missing, the Dispatch ran a story of how the 13-year-old girl, Sarah, had been found bound and gagged in the basement of a house within walking distance of her mother's home. Authorities arrested a 30-year-old man, Matthew Hoffman, on charges of her kidnapping. Sarah had been found, but her brother, her mother, and her mother's friend remained missing.

The days started to tick by again. 300 people from the community intensify the search. Monday passes, Tuesday passes, Wednesday comes and the people of Mount Vernon are still searching. Somewhere in there, authorities report that Hoffman's records show he purchased a plastic tarp. And then Thursday, the eight-day mark, I get to the Dispatch site and see the word "TRAGEDY" in the headline: the three bodies were found. Details came in jagged bits and pieces: Hoffman had told the police where to find the bodies...the three had been stabbed to death and then dismembered before being dropped in pieces into the top of a hollow beech tree...after the bodies were removed, men in the Ohio Department of Natural Resources cut down the beech tree on Friday.

Last Saturday Dave and I were in Delaware at the outdoor shooting range. You have to purchase a range pass (either for the year or the day) from a gun store before arriving, and then give it to the guy from the Ohio Department of Natural Resources at the range. Around 5, after 2 hours of shooting, we were packing up and signing out and began talking to the ODNR range facilitator. He said he was grateful that Friday had been a late day for him - had he been scheduled in the morning, he would've had to help chop down the hollow beech tree.

Dave and I saw our landlady later that night, and we talked about the story and exchanged what details we knew. Terrible saddening details.

She bid us goodnight after visiting for 30 minutes on the basement steps, and after she went back into her apartment I remembered the conversation that she and I had. I remembered what I said about free will, that it's better to allow choice and evil rather than to program love.

Is free will really worth it? Is it worth this?

I remembered what the range facilitator had told us, that the two women and the little boy had been dismembered by a chainsaw.

Is free will really worth the price?

I know I'm asking questions too big for me to answer.

So I have to trust.

I have to trust that God knows better than I. I have to trust that my microscopic perspective can't understand what I'm questioning. I have to trust that a robotic world without free will is worse than this.

I have to trust that God is right. And remember that the police rescued Sarah. That not all is lost.

Manna

2010-11-07T20:17:00.000-05:00

I sometimes hate the linearity of life.

Some days I am irritated that I can only be in one place at a time, and how long it takes to get from one place to another. This usually happens when I'm hungry but the meatloaf still needs 40 minutes to cook, or I'm speeding down Henderson and running late to work. Do you know how much of my day is spent sleeping and eating and cleaning and traveling? When there is much to be done, having to stop for a sandwich or a nap is grumblesome.

The interstices of life are strange, though. They seem to be built for developing relationships. Road trips to vacation destinations are often crazy glue for relationships. Some of my best conversations with Dave happen on the drive to Home Depot...or Lowe's...or Harbor Freight...or Ace Hardware. We share meals with people when we have to stop and replenish. Most of us share our bedroom, our kitchen, and our home with at least one other person.

But sometimes the thought of all that time maintaining our bodies and moving about in this world irritates the hell out of me.

It makes me think about the Israelites.

They wanted a homeland and they wanted a temple. For centuries they were slaves in Egypt. And then after their liberation, they wandered around the Middle Eastern desert. For decades they slept on sand they didn't keep and built temporal tabernacles out of rods and canvas.

Some days I just get sick of building tabernacles. I wake up and I don't want to keep trudging through the desert. I know the tabernacle is just as holy as a temple, and I am thankful for the manna that keeps coming, but I'm ready to feast.

I'm glad that my physical limitations are used to get closer to people. But I'm tired of packing up the canvas when I want to lay down marble cornerstones.

Paul totally got this. He's ready for the temple. "To die is gain," he said. No more wavering tent walls. But he also gets what he can do here, while he's bound by space and time and body. "If I am to go on living in the body, this will mean fruitful labor for me." He can share his bodily life with people, and, by some grace, he does his work by sharing all the quirks of this physical life.

I'm glad God knows what I'm working with, my limitations and every malfunction and physical barrier. He knows that we have these scraps of spiritual life hidden in a cumbersome mortal physical body - that we are these wraith-like bits of Trueness, of Realness, bottled up in awkward flesh. And somehow, in all the stumbling around, slogging through sand far from a home we've never seen, setting up tents for worship and longing for the temple we were built for, we are getting work done.

I still don't like seeing through the glass darkly, or feeling the sand grit in my teeth, or the awkwardness of being bound by body and space and time...but as long as He's patient and gracious and something good can get done in all this extraneous bulk, I'll try and be satisfied knowing I'll have enough manna to get me to the feast.

Day 584

2010-07-20T10:07:00.002-04:00

Dave drove me to work a few mornings ago.

I was ready to go ten minutes before we had to leave, so Dave asked me to run downstairs and retrieve the load in the dryer. I came up with an armful of an outfit he had washed in a rush after he spilled black oil down his left pantleg. I relocked the basement door and came upstairs; he only wanted the jeans.

Dave works in a machine shop that uses machines like this lathe.

Working with metal in this capacity has the same perils of wood-working - sawdust and wood chips - except that the chips are metal instead of wood.

So as Dave shoved on his pants, he grumbled, "I hate wearing shorts to work. I always get metal chips in my shoes."

"Well, that's no good," I replied.

"Yesterday one fell down the back of my pants."

I began to laugh. "That's terrible!" I exclaimed.

"Yes, yes it is," he said as he tightened his belt.

Adaptation

2010-07-13T11:31:00.000-04:00

This is Claire and her soon-to-be-husband Alan. Claire is one of my best friends and was my maid of honor. Her wedding is four days from today.

And for the last several months I've been convinced that her wedding day will mark the end of our friendship.

No, really. My paranoia is totally reasonable. Let me explain.

The year before Dave and I got married, two of my best friends got engaged. One was my roommate, one was a friend from high school. I was convinced I'd be a bridesmaid in both of their weddings. And the following June, I sat in the audience for both of those weddings. Since they've been married, I had some tea with my roommate, I had lunch with my high school friend, and I haven't spent time with either of them since.

That June was a difficult month for me. I phoned Claire bawling, asking between sobs, "Am I a bad friend? It *hic* must be something wrong *hic* with meeee!" She tenderly assured me that I am a good friend.

2 years later, Claire is, as of today, 4 days away from her wedding. And her engagement has had some rough parts for my husband Dave, because when I convince myself that my friendship with Claire has an expiration date the same day as her wedding, he gets to nurse me back to normalcy when I begin to hyperventilate.

You'd think this is the part where I tell you I'm not one of her bridesmaids. But that's not true - my Aunt Lori just hemmed 7 inches off a glossy black bridesmaid dress for me. Even though I'm one of her bridesmaids, I've still managed to convince myself that what happened to those friendships 2 years ago will happen with her and I the moment she leaves her reception in a cloud of rice.

My paranoia originally stems from those 2 weddings 2 years ago, but added into my madness is the evolution of our relationship. Our friendship began in November of 2007 when she became one of my roommates, and slept 10 feet away from me for the next 4 months. Our friendship began and was originally patterned while we lived together and had easy daily access to each other. And then came that day in early March when we didn't live together anymore. Obviously, our friendship had to adapt, and the changes tested our relationship.

I went down to Texas the summer I was 21, shortly after getting engaged, to visit my favorite aunt, my dad's oldest sister Diann. And several times I heard her describe a woman in Canada as someone she's very close to because she talks to her on the phone at least once a week. She told me this when I lived with a house full of girlfriends I was constantly spending time with, and I quietly thought it was ludicrous that she could claim to be "close" to someone through phone calls alone.

But now I'm married. And I don't live with Claire anymore. And we're both extremely busy. So I've started the Aunt Diann technique and try to call her once a week when I'm at the grocery store.

It was difficult figuring out what changes our friendship needed to go through - I was used to seeing her almost every day, and now I only catch a quick glimpse of her at church once a week if I'm lucky. It frustrated me. I wanted to sit on the kitchen counter together sipping Crystal Light late at night. I didn't like that I couldn't have that anymore, and despair of change met past paranoia when she got engaged this past spring.

But now, 4 days from her wedding, what I wildly predicted to be our expiration date, I feel peaceful and assured. Our friendship isn't ending - it's changing. I can't expect it to stay the same, but I can hope it successfully adapts to our lives.

And I can see now what the problem with my friendships 2 years ago was: it wasn't that they got married (as I frantically hypothesized), and it wasn't that I wasn't a bridesmaid. The problem was that our friendships failed to adapt after their weddings.

Being a bridesmaid in Claire's wedding isn't what will preserve our friendship - loving tenacity and adaptability will keep us together. I can let go of late-night Crystal Light without letting go of Claire, and I can fight for new creative ways to stay close. And when it comes to Claire, I'm gonna show Darwin a thing or two about survival of the fittest.

And if I someday end up in Canada and she moves to Dallas, I'll call her once a week and tell my skeptical niece that she and I are still close friends. And just laugh when she raises an eyebrow at me.

Post-graduation

2010-06-21T19:23:00.000-04:00

Dave and I graduated from college 8 days ago. In this picture, my scarlet journalism tassel is resting against my cheek; Dave's bright-orange engineering tassel is half-hidden under his left wrist, still attached to his quickly-doffed square cap.

Graduation brings the question of "What next?" During the preceding weeks and the following days, the question I've been asked most is, "What are you going to do now?" I tell the Asker that I have a good part-time job in a law office which pays the bills and provides health insurance, so I'll be there for the forseeable future and attempt freelancing in the mornings. The Asker gives a typically bland response, such as, "Well, that sounds good!" and the topic is laid to rest. Meanwhile, I'm fumbling in my purse for an antacid because this scripted conversation always gives me heartburn.

Three weeks ago, I got coffee on a Saturday morning with my dancer friend, Katie. On the whim of caffeination, we walked a couple blocks south to the community market and ambled around the stalls and stores. We ducked into the bookstore to avoid the crush of people and strollers and were surrounded by tall narrow shelves brimming with books that spilled into piles on the floorboards.

I tossed my empty coffee cup in a small metal trash can as we headed toward the back room, a small space suffocated by bookcases 4-aisles deep. And there, sitting on a rusted white stool at the back of a row of poetry, I looked up and up the beautiful rows of torn and peeling books, and a horrifying realization dawned on me: I recognize almost none of these authors' names. And as if on cue, Katie came around the corner, musing aloud as her fingers brushed the spines, "Being in a bookstore reminds me of just how many writers are out there trying to make it."

I wanted to throw up.

It's not because it's news to me - I know what I'm getting into. But seeing it there, 10-shelves tall with nameless names, is disheartening.

And I think of that shelf every time someone asks me, "What are you going to do now?"

But I also think about my part-time job - my black pleather chair, my grey pressboard desk, my cracked plastic in-tray, the hundreds of documents I've labeled, and the hundreds of labelled documents that come back to me to be recycled.

I have a good job. And I love every single person I work with. But I despise the thought of wasting my abilities and my degree (I have a degree now, not just a major!) for the sake of predictability and financial comfort. I taste acid when I think of my writing being ineffective, but I also fear staying in this legal world when I want to throw my mind and body into the pursuit of writing. And sometimes I wonder if I'm being a coward for not dropping my plows in the field where they lay to make chase.

I'm afraid that my voice will be silent, even when printed and hardcover-bound. I'm afraid that I'll use my degree as decoration and stay comfortably at the law office until I'm 80.

But this is my present post-graduate plan: to remain a part-time legal receptionist and begin freelancing in the mornings. And I hope in time I will fade out of the office to focus on writing, rather than fading out of writing to earn money at my comfortable job.

I hope I hope I hope.

Now where did I put that roll of Tums...

Pre-graduation

2010-06-12T22:38:00.008-04:00

Friday afternoon I left the law office on my bike with a graduation card in my purse. I was accompanied by a heavy summer thunderstorm. Biking along the river and under bridges gushing runoffs from the streets felt like being on an amusement park water ride. But I had to go no matter what - I had my university graduation rehearsal to attend.

All ten thousand of the 2010 graduates were emailed and instructed to gather at French Field House (across the street from the stadium) at 1 p.m. Around 12:30 I locked up my bike and waddled wetly into the open garage door of the indoor track field. I wrung rain water from my french braid as it dripped from the cuffs of my jean capris. A few hundred people had begun to gather by the frail 8-foot-tall markers denoting fields of study.

After some confusion with where my fellow journalism majors were (College of Behavioral and Social Sciences) and what color my tassel needed to be (maroon), I spent the next hour swathed in hangover-breath while eavesdropping on Senior Crawl stories. I could smell the whiskey on the guy's breath two spots behind me whenever he talked.

After a sexless voice came on a loudspeaker and spoke as clearly as Charlie Brown's teacher, the name of the game became to follow the butt in front of you. Thankfully, #1003 wore a red flower-print dress that was easy to spot while half-jogging out of the building in a group of people 8 columns wide.

We had our own traffic blockade as we streamed across Woody Hayes drive. We trotted past the entrance of the stadium in the shadow of the concrete pillars and iron gates, mindless ants in a huge colony. The foot traffic slowed at a gate marked "GRADUATES ONLY" as the columns funneled down smoothly into four bodies wide. The post-storm humidity was choking. There were choruses of complaints, even in our barest summer clothes, during the 20-minute run-through. There were lots of jokes about going naked under our robes on Sunday.

This is the majority of the class of 2010. Yes, these are just student, and there were still hundreds more filing into the stadium. This is what happens when you graduate from the largest college in the nation. And tomorrow, the stands will be filled with roughly 3-4 people per graduate - something between 30 and 40,000 people for the ceremony. In a stadium built for +100,000, it will still be positively roomy. However, if it storms too badly tomorrow, the whole bash will be cancelled - there are no nearby venues able to entertain such a host indoors.

The girl I'll be sitting next to - #1008 - has my exact degree: a major in Journalism and a minor in International Studies. I never had a single class with her, not in 3 years of full-time classes. That's something else that happens when you graduate from the largest college in the nation. You don't know anyone, because there's too many people to know.

An announcer, presumably in the cluster of official-looking people on the field, began to drone at the student body. Her enunciated voice was totally ineffectual because of the bounce and echo of the stands. However, we did hear when she announced each college. The medical colleges were tiny whimpers of success, one even having just a single graduate stand and shake his fists. The business college got booed. The engineering college gave a distinctly male whoop. My college - arts and sciences - gave the final roar.

I baked like a potato in the stands, getting a noticeable sunburn in those interminable 20 minutes. The thought of Sunday's three-hour marathon was already unbearable. I was already making a list of things that would reduce my misery for a day forecast to be +80 degrees, rainy, and humid. I rendezvoused with Dave behind the shop he works at, groaning at the thought of those awful black gowns. We knew it was going to be a long weekend.

Dave's parents drove down from Cleveland this morning to help us run some pre-graduation errands, including going out with Eileen to buy ponchos for everyone in the family. I know I drew a lucky card with my in-laws - they are the most generous people I have ever met, and they rained that generosity down on us in absurdly huge ways today. Knowing their admirable modesty, I'll refrain from giving details of their gifts. But I do want to honor them here and thank them for such extreme generosity. Dave and I's quality of life and well-being is greatly bouyed by their love.

Back when Dave and I were engaged, up until a month before our wedding our families had never met. So, in November of 2008, my mom and step-dad came over to my father's house just before Dave's parents drove down from Cleveland. Eileen handed a box of chocolates to my mother, a 6-pack of Great Lakes beer to my step-father, and a bottle of wine to my dad. It was the start of an evening that went magically well, and started our families out very much on the right foot before the big day. That night included a great big barbeque dinner altogether at The Pig Iron, so, Dave's dad wanted to go back and have dinner there tonight, too. I called my family to confirm, and this time we added my dad's new girlfriend and my two siblings to the mix, as well as a very LARGE rack of ribs.

(No, my dad was not able to finish it all by himself.)

The night reminded me of my high school graduation in 2005.

I graduated when the divorce was still a raw sticky gash in my family. And post-ceremony there came the dreaded decision - who will I have dinner with? Who do I have to choose?

Mercifully, unbelievably, everyone in my family went to the same restaurant together. That evening is one of my most precious memories - I sat at the head of the table in my white summer dress and marveled at the interspersement and laughter between the two sides of my family. They had been united by a marriage for 14 years, broken, and were now held together by the children of that marriage. Being that beloved lynchpin was incredible.

And at the dinner table tonight was two sides of a family united by a marriage - my marriage. Here also we've been blessed with a high level of happiness and comfort between his family and mine. It is unreal how much everyone likes each other, and how highly they speak of each other. Knowing the pains of a broken family, the comfortable unity is a staggering gift.

Tomorrow, they'll all be there, sitting on metal bleachers for four hours or more, in the rain and humidity and boredom of our no-name keynote speaker. They'll be lucky to catch more than a glimpse of us with their binoculars from across the stadium in a sea of ten thousand black robes. Our names won't be announced as we receive our diplomas; we will shake hands with the proper university dignitaries, receive our diplomas with our left hand, and whether we have the right diploma or not just keep on walking off the field and into post-graduate freedom. And as we leave college behind, our families will be on the other side to celebrate with us.

This is the gate I came out of after rehearsal. This is the path I will walk and the people I'll be leaving college life with.

I am so ready to go.

Lady

2010-06-01T16:37:00.007-04:00

This is my younger sister, Natalie.

This year she is a junior in high school. And a couple weeks ago she went to her first prom with her brand-new boyfriend.

Do you know what prom means? For the male readers who don't, it means shopping. In packs. Gaggles of girls flitting through frothy racks in department stores, fingering the sharp edges and bright sparkles of jewelry specially selected to match the perfect dress. And oh, the opinions. That's what the pack is there for - the opinions. Too big, too shiny, doesn't fit, I'll get a bigger size, puke green is definitely not a flattering color, you're right you're usually a size 4 but I'll go get the size 16 just in case.

My mother and I had the privilege of being that gaggle and going shopping with my sister. My soccer-playing softball-shortstop sister. Picture that surly face churning upfield and wearing muddied shin guards; now put her in the "prom" department at Nordstrom's. Let's just say, she's not the type to gravitate toward the hooks dribbled with pink and lace.

But there we three were, surrounded by rhinestones and plunging necklines. And, as expected, she got her opinions. Try this one, that one's dangerously close to pink, try on this teal dress just to humor me, I don't think a neckline cut to your belly button would pass The Modesty Test.

(The "Modesty Test" is a part of the pre-prom process at our small Christian high school: female students have to bring in and model their dresses so the dresses can be critiqued and approved by the female staff members. They gather in a sweaty tiled classroom and wave their hands over the girls' selections: hem here, pin there, shorten here. Half of my sister's friends this year were required to sew an extra piece of fabric to their dresses to better conceal their breasts.)

It was when we moved to the dressing room that I suddenly began to struggle with a long-time-coming epiphany.

I haven't lived at home with my family since the end of 2006 - three and a half years. When I moved out I was nineteen and starting my second year in college; Natalie was fourteen and starting 8th grade. And now, here in the dressing room, I had to turn my head as she took off her bra. Again, bra. BRA. My little sister wears a bra, implying that she has boobs with which to fill them.

Didn't see THAT one coming.

As she wriggled out of an unflattering blue dress, I screwed my jaw back on and observed her more carefully. In a picture taken at my high school graduation in 2005, her curly hair had been french-braided, and the usual halo of frizzy strays had circled her face and pressed against my white robe. The girl, the lady, (what is she?) in front of me, the one pulling skirts out from dress racks and joking about the more slutty dresses, has learned to manage her hair. She bought a straightener long ago and has clamped the childhood halo into a sleek frame for her face. I look at her eyes, identical to mine and inherited from mom, and see the make-up around them, the eye liner and mascara she's tastefully applied. Her eyebrows are carefully plucked and groomed.

And I suddenly realized - BANG - that there she is, mere months from being a legal adult and just a little over a year from her high school diploma. Oh. My. God. I'm about to have an adult sister. They better have benches in the next dressing room, because I need to sit down.

We wandered back out into the froth, and another handful of dresses were selected in the second foray - blue and teal and purple (the dangerously close to pink one). I looked away when instructed for discretion, and jiggled the zippers when it was required of me. And then, all cramped together in the dressing room stall with a bad case of the giggles, she raised up her arms and slipped into her Dress. There she was, elegant and happy, my mother's small hands twisting up her long brown hair onto her head as Natalie tugged at the neckline. It was purple; the folds were filled with shimmering sparkles; the cling of the dress suited her feminine curves (feminine curves?!). She looked in the mirror; she looked beautiful.

I stood there and blinked, struggling to remove the superimposed image of My Little Sister, the one who sat in a high chair for an hour because she wouldn't say please for a graham cracker, the one who swallowed a dime-sized rock one afternoon while sitting in her car seat, the one who always scowled so stubbornly beneath that halo of frizz. Because, like an overlaid transparency, that's all I could see. And here, between 3 grey pressboard walls and a cheap wall mirror, I fought to tug it away. Because there before me was a young lady chattering about matching colors with her date, and examining in the mirror how the dress made her look, and responding with that awkward lips-only smile to each compliment my mother and I gave.

My Little Sister is

A Young Lady.

Why Haven't I Been Writing?

2010-05-30T19:11:00.005-04:00

Several reasons.

First:

I've become an obsessive drafter. I have many ideas at various levels of conception in my blog cache, and I've only satisfactorily completed and published a fraction of them.

Second:

Graduating from college has snuck up on me, and it has included things like exit counseling for loans and repayment plans and figuring out how to take care of health insurance. It's a bunch of strangely adult and dead-dry boring tasks.

Third:

The past three weeks in particular have been devoted to a new writing project, something I'm hoping to put up here in chunks as it matures.

When my grandmother began dying May 10th, I immediately began to take careful notes. She passed away the following Sunday, and I continued to take notes until long after my family privately wept over her urn that Friday.

The project will be book-sized, and it will be an attempt to photograph my Dad's side of the family in that two week period.

There are three motivations to this project:

1) To become a better writer. It is an excellent chance to exercise the non-fiction writing that I excel in, and to develop it even more. I cherish the subject matter, which will be a good motivation to push through the pages.

2) To cope with the loss. As the days go by, I keep stumbling into new holes I hadn't realized my grandmother left behind. I want to try and find as many of those holes as I can, and articulate my complicated grief.

3) To make a gift for my family. Perhaps the final version will be good enough to attempt to publish, but I'm not concerned about that. I am trying to give to my family what I can out of the common loss we suffered. The best thing I've got is my writing, so that is what I will give to them.

With college now in its final throes (my very last bit of college homework is due this Wednesday), perhaps I can start polishing and publishing old drafts I've been too much of a nit-pick to previously post. And if I don't do that, like I said, I'll start putting up chunks of my Big Project as it coagulates.

On The Bus

2010-04-13T23:53:00.000-04:00

I have ridden the bus almost every weekday for the past four years.

I first moved out the fall of 2006 into a house 7 blocks from High Street. I would get up early, pack my bookbag for the average 15-hour absence, and plod downhill on Arcadia, past the football field and the high school, and the park area at the corner where the homeless people and drug users would sit on slatted benches and catcall at me. My cheerful rebuffs, and the nearby busy street, were always defense enough.

Rain, snow, and high humidity I would cross the street when the sign flashed into a little white man. Sometimes I'd jaywalk, bag thumping from my sprint, if the bus came rolling up too soon. I've always lived on the east side of High Street, and the northbound bus for my morning commute has, obviously, always been on the west side. There've been days I've watched my bus pass by less than 20 feet away just because I was on the wrong side of the street. Infuriating.

In 2006, I would drop six quarters in the change tower and shuffle to the back for my 30 minute ride. On warm days, if I wasn't by an emergency exit window, I'd palm the handle to bring in the sunshine and the breeze. Sometimes my seatmates were bearers of extreme BO, but not often.

I'd pull at the cracked yellow plastic of the stop cord after passing the Greek Orthodox Church, and the bus would lurch to a halt at the bridge before Nationwide Boulevard. There began the half-mile trek east along downtown's border toward Columbus State. I'd pass the Crowne Plaza Hotel and the line of blue taxis, the Somalian drivers on their cell phones or drawing on cigarettes as their vehicles idled. I passed by a restaurant in a narrow brick building - I always wanted to eat there but never did - and an outlying parking lot of the college. After one more major intersection, I was on campus. And then when I got out of class the hour-long process was reversed.

Over the past four years, I've worked at two different bus-accessible jobs and lived in 5 different bus-accessible homes. I've sweated in the summer when the bodies packed in, and I've shivered in the winter hunkered down on the metal bus shelter bench. I've never ridden any bus outside of the #2. And I've seen the fattest, weirdest, youngest, most chivalrous people during my many accumulated hours of commuting. They have brown eyes and wear straw hats and read romance novels and have dark moles on their cheeks. They sit next to me and tell me how their sister is cheating them, or bless me for reading my Bible. They give up their seats for the old women and listen to the stories the crazy men tell and yell to the driver if they see someone running late to the stop.

I have an internship this quarter, the first place I've needed to get to that I haven't been able to get to by bus. In our silver Taurus I battle through morning rush hour, dodging down side streets and speeding through yellow lights and swearing at the ones that turn red before I can run them.
And I think of riding down High Street, my attention between the open book in my lap and the blonde toddler making eyes at me from his mother's left shoulder.

Perspicacity

2010-03-26T10:05:00.007-04:00

I'm generally comfortable in my own skin and satisfied to be myself.

But if there's one thing I don't have, and am morose to be without, it's discernment. Dictionary.com describes it as "acuteness of judgment and understanding". Some of its synonyms are "shrewd" and "astute". My favorite synonym is "perspicacity".

Solomon asked for discernment when God came to him in a dream and offered him anything he wanted. Proverbs can't stop yapping about those who are discerning (here, here, here and then some). A man of discernment is considered knowledgable and wise.

I have some friends that are perspicacious. I want to be a perspicacious person. And I am not. I wish that weren't the case, but that's just the fact of the matter.

One of my dear friends has been going through some difficulties in her life over the past few months. The problems are all knotted up and intertwined, the strands gummed together and fraying, almost impossible to determine one thread of suffering from another. It's a conundrum that would make discernment a useful tool. But I am not a perspicacious person. And when the fact that I am not gets in the way of helping my friends, it makes me half-crazy.

I went for a walk one day, one of those where your jacket's askew and your arms are windmilling and you're muttering and pulling at the ends of your hair. I railed toward the thin scattering of clouds, venting at God, angry with this limitation. Why put me in situations requiring discernment and then give me none? I am not a perspicacious person. And I do not like that it gets in my way.

I pounded twice around the block in my purple Converse All-Stars, frustrated, demanding answers from Him. What the hell, God? You put this girl in my life to help, and I feel like I can't. It's like I've been given a house to remodel and no toolbox. I can't get too much done without a screwdriver, hammer or a saw. Or some dag-blasted discernment.

I glared at the low orange sun as I rounded the corner of the block. I am not a perspicacious person. And I feel gypped, and I feel blind. My arms spasmed in frustration - why tell me to see when I'm born blind? - and then two passages of Scripture pounded onto my shoulders. My steps slowed and softened and my arms stilled as I listened.

The first section came from Romans. Here, Paul had written to tell the Romans that the church is a body, and just like the physical body each part has a different purpose. "These members do not all have the same function," he wrote. OK, well, I must have a different function, is all I could think. I still think discernment is a very useful gift to have. If there's a gifting heirerarchy, it's gotta be pretty high up there. I am not a perspicacious person. And I feel less useful because of that.

But more words came pouring in my mind, this time from I Corinthians. It's another letter by Paul, this one written to the church in Corinth. And the last verse throbbed in my mind: "And now these three remained: faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love."

I am not a perspicacious person. But I have love. I can love.

I know love is hard. It is rewarding and taxing, draining and exhilarating, confusing and clarifying. But it's something I have I can give. I am not a perspicacious person. But I can love. And that is the greatest of these.

Tychicus

2010-03-04T23:59:00.003-05:00

My hamster is dead.

Two days ago I skipped class to do some badly-needed cleaning around the house, starting with the turd-sprinkled hamster cage. Strangely, I'd come to enjoy the process of cleaning his cage, of improving the life of the creature I love. After removing the black mesh top and engaging in the perfunctory chase, beneath the water bottle and through the cardboard tunnel and behind the plastic green wheel, I scooped up my wriggling pet and stuffed him into his little plastic running ball. He kept running into my feet and legs as I removed the elements of his cage and scooped out his shavings with the leaf of a cardboard box. I giggled as he rammed into my calf again, and with my phone I videotaped him as he hurtled around the room. I was playing a Paul Simon cd that my stepfather bought me for Christmas and sang "Love Me Like A Rock" to him as he careened around the apartment.

He'd been warming up to his plastic ball more and more. At first he would get pissed about being in there and would scritch and scratch at the plastic wall, the same wall with the air slit that he had just deposited a turd into. But he slowly and clearly began to learn the layout of our apartment. Once he got out from the couches in the living room and into the kitchen, he had a merry time careening at thrice the speed across the linoleum, ramming into cabinets and baseboards when he couldn't stop fast enough on the slick surface.

After completing his cage, I went and scrubbed the bathroom sink and left him in his ball, the sounds of his collisions keeping me company. By the time I came out of the bathroom he'd had enough and was scritching at the wall, looking like he was trying to dig that turd out he'd just laid. I popped open the top of his ball and shook him back into his new cage, and left him to reorient himself and redig his customary tunnels, both an entrance and an exit to his burrow in the front left corner of the cage. The corner where I always found the most turds and stashed food, piled together indiscriminately.

I came home today feeling sad. Part of my bedtime routine, especially when I felt down, was to wake Tychicus up and play with him. One of my favorite things to do was clamp my hands around him so he was completely enclosed, and giggle at the tickling sensation of his nose testing the space between each of my fingers for escape. I always left a tiny opening by my thumb and forefinger, which he would shove his little head through until his eyes bulged and his scrabbling front paws emerged. He would always come out looking windswept from the tight squeeze. Then he would run up and down my forearms until I decided to do it all over again.

Tonight, I walked in the door and went straight to his cage. I lifted off the lid and tilted it against the back of the couch, as I always do. He wasn't out and about, but 10:00 p.m. is still pretty early for the nocturnal little guy. So, per usual, I started poking at the front left corner of his cage, which always is replied with a rustling and scrabbling out one of the tunnels.

There was no rustling. I poked and poked all along the left side of the cage, checked his tunnel, and poked by the mostly-undisturbed food dish. Nothing. Panic's seed began to sprout when I remembered staying up late the night before and not seeing him wake up before I went to bed. Dave made a comment as I dug through the shavings on the left side of the cage and touched fur. And the fur didn't move. Panic blossomed as I scraped the shavings away from the top of his back; Dave asked a question I can't remember, I couldn't respond, I heard his footsteps, and all I could see was that my hamster was not moving and the smell of something wrong filled my face.

I immediately sat down on my stool and began to sob. Dave tentatively tapped on the glass next to his body, and murmured, "Oh, poor guy." I bawled for several minutes, my palms stuffed into my leaking eye sockets. I couldn't look at my hamster and I couldn't think. Dave sat on the couch arm next to me and rubbed my shoulders and back.

"I was already feeling sad, too!" I spluttered.

"What did you feel sad about?" he asked as he pulled me into his shoulder.

I gasped twice and my face muscles puckered as I wailed, "I DID A GOOD JOB, DAVE, I DID A GOOD JOB TAKING CARE OF HIM!"

I shoved my body under his left arm, and continue to sob about how I fed him and how I just cleaned his cage and, Dave, I tried so hard! I did a good job! "You did, you did a good job taking care of him," he murmured down to me as a spoke through my tear-wet palms, my forehead pressed into his thighs. I felt so foolish but I couldn't help feeling so sad.

After the wailing subsided into wavering , he gently looked down at me and asked, "How do you want to bury him? Do you want me to do it, or do you want to help?"

"I want to help," I whispered. "Can we find a box, or at least something to wrap him in?"

He poked through the closet and drawers until I saw a small box that once held 25 20-gauge shotgun shells. It was perfect. When I pointed it out, Dave dumped the empty shells that had been inside and tenderly lined the box with a folded paper towel.

I didn't want to see my hamster's dead face. I thought - what if he had died a gruesome death? Would his bowels have evacuated all over his beautiful furry body? Could that have caused the smell? Tears swelled in my throat as Dave pulled on his boots and I went to the cage.

I tentatively scraped back the shavings. He still looked beautiful and perfect, soft and unsoiled. His tiny pink feet were tucked underneath, curled in wakeless sleep, and his glossy black eyes were restfully closed. His whiskers were still wiry and his fur was still soft. Had it not been for the smell and the unnatural cold of his belly, I would've doubted myself. I gently tucked him into the cradle of the paper towel, but left him visible, regardless of the wrongness of his smell. Dave trooped out the back door with me and locked it behind us.

He went to the garage to retrieve a shovel from the trunk of the car. I sat on the two concrete steps of our back stoop and looked down at my poor little pet, resisting an urge to protect him from the early March cold. I ran a knuckle over the downy softness of his back as tears blurred the world again. I looked up miserably as Dave returned with the shovel, the sound of the garage door grinding closed behind him.

He walked around the south side of the stoop, pacing awkwardly. "Where do you want to put him?" A couple of clusters of daffodil sprouts were poking up through the inhospitable ground. He indicated a spot between the last two clusters closest to the stoop and I nodded. His shovel bit into the mud, and I looked down at the tiny body in my hands. "I'm sorry," I whispered as Dave chopped through roots and ladeled half-frozen mud out of the shallow grave. Maybe eight inches down he ran into some rocks. He looked up and gently asked, "Is this deep enough?" I nodded.

I held out the box for him to have one last look at Tychicus, our first pet together, his perfect present to me for our first wedding anniversary, and he peered in and nodded, lips flat and eyes soft. My lips pursed and my chest heaved as I folded the paper towel over my little hamster, the last time I'll ever see him, and carefully tucked in the flaps on the lid of the box. I placed the box flat in the bottom of the hole, and watched Dave refill it with the black earth. I wondered whether I should put a shovelful in, but by that the time the tiny hole was already filled. He broke up the earthen clumps and gently patted the ground flat. I picked up a piece of nearby bark, a little bigger than my hand, and shoved it into the ground as a grave marker.

We stood there for a minute in the cold, and I laughed awkwardly. It was obvious neither of us really knew whether we should say something or not. So I gave Dave a crooked smile when he looked at me and we went inside. I shed my coat and boots and mumbled about washing my hands. I was sad, because that was the last time I'd ever get to hold him, and he smelled like death. I scrubbed my hands twice, our soap dispenser nearly out of the liquid orange Dial soap, as the tears welled up and spilt over again. Dave came behind me and put his arms around me, as my wet hands rested on the sink's white porcelain edge.

We moved from the bathroom to the living room. Dave sat on the far side of the love seat and opened his left arm for me to come in. I drove my face into the olive-colored cotton covering his stomach and whimpered softly. He held me as the emotions worked through me, running their course like the flu, and we talked a little. We prayed for a little while, and we talked about how much we liked him, and about death, and about getting another hamster. At one point he said, "I know it sounds coarse, but there's a reason they reproduce so much." I laughed, and knew I was ok then.

After Dave got up to take his sleeping pill before bed, I went to the cage and gently replaced the shavings where Tychicus had lain. I straightened his wheel and reoriented his cardboard tube. I wanted to keep the illusion of his presence, just for a little while. Seeing his cage as I write this, it's easy to imagine he's just fast asleep beneath the shavings. I wish he were.

Thank you, Dave, for Tychicus. And thank you for being the best when he died. I am so lucky.

Due Date

2010-02-16T22:39:00.001-05:00

My girlfriends like to bother me about when Dave and I will have a baby. Their eyes light up at the thought of having a small wriggling creature to play with...and the ability to give it back to me when that creature diarheeas down both chubby thighs.

So for anyone wondering when that blessed event will even begin to be a possibility, here's a checklist of things to look for:

1) 2 college degrees hanging in frames on the wall. Emphasis on framed, not just received. Just because the tassel's on the other side of the hat does not mean we are suddenly in a hurry.

2) A diminishment in my present glee every time I refill my Ocella prescription.

3) A time when our sink spends more time clean and empty than as a neon-moldy scientific experiment.

4) A clear floor, when we would no longer have to hike over the hills and dales of laundry baskets and bookbags. At this point, we'd have to stack the crib on top of the hamster cage.

5) A trip to the grocery store that isn't determined by how much room is in my freezer and how I can dirty the least amount of dishes possible. Ah, Stouffers, how many times you've saved our busy lives.

6) Dave gets (or builds) his own workroom so that swallowably-small harmfuls (like 9mm cartridges) don't end up in a grubby fist and a drooly mouth. You'd be surprised how many of them I've found rattling around the bottom of the washer.

7) Our bedroom is clean - enough for us to guiltlessly chastise teenage children to clean their room. Because right now, we're folding most things on the biggest shelf. And by shelf, I mean floor. And by folding, I mean piles.

NOTE: NONE OF THESE HAVE BEEN ACCOMPLISHED.

Lessons From My First 4 Articles

2010-01-31T14:00:00.002-05:00

The past 4 weeks of my life have been non-stop chaos since I started working for Ohio State's student newspaper, The Lantern. Not just because I work for The Lantern (a privilege I pay Ohio State for), but because I also work 17 hours a week, have two other classes plus homework, 3 church meetings a week, a home to care for (which is looking distinctly neglected), a husband to love, and this apparently insignificant thing called a social life. I have been crying, ranting, angry, and clawing to keep my head above water, but I think I'm finally catching the quick stride.

In all the madness, I've learned I LOVE the process of writing articles, every single thing about it. I love researching and drafting the questions to ask, having an excuse to talk to such interesting people, the delight of scribbling down very real and beautiful quotes, and the process of assembling it all into an article. It is the most wonderful combination of humanity and the art of writing.

Here are 8 things I've learned in the past 4 weeks and 4 articles:

1) Do something for your articles EVERY SINGLE DAY
Dave and I were engaged for a little more than 6 months. I learned early on to make daily checklists and make at least one wedding-related phone call every day. This was the only way I could manage such a large project with so many other things happening in my life. That same discipline has kept my articles timely these past 3 weeks - not a day goes by that I'm not writing emails, calling sources, drafting questions, or writing articles. If I didn't, the swamp would suck me under and you'd never see me again.

2) Fight to own your article - but know that you won't always win
So far, my worst interview experience was with an artist (how unfortunately stereotypical). She and I went back and forth for a while about the format of the interview. She wanted email, I asked to do phone, she insisted on email. I sent her a list of 12 questions, she told me it was too long, I cut it down to 4. She ignored my questions and sent me a copy of an interview between her and someone else, and I explained why I needed original quotes. She grudgingly filled out my questionnaire, but still copied answers from her other interview for half the questions without telling me - good thing I had already read that interview and saved myself from possible plagiarism. I had to fight tooth and nail to get her to cooperate, and I lost several battles, but I got my piddly collection of original quotes, which means I won the war. The newspaper business isn't a grocery store, the customer isn't always right, and you're the one doing a good thing for them. Step up to that plate - after all, you own it. It's your byline, not theirs.

3) Email interviews are the worst
I made the mistake of telling a source that I had finished my interview questions for him before our phone call, so he fell in love with the idea of an email interview. I dug in my heels and with forceful diplomacy talked him out of it. I still had a bad taste in my mouth after my skirmish with the artist, and wasn't eager to play superficially polite email ping-pong again. But there are good reasons why in-person and phone interviews are far superior. For instance, typed responses sound wooden in an article, and aren't in the voice of the source. What email also eliminates is the flow of conversation, the natural rabbit-trails and side stories that are the real gold mines for good quotes. Also, "stated in an email" makes me wince; "said" is such a nicely personal verb in comparison.

4) Expect communication delays and rescheduling
I got lucky with my first article - a one-source story I successfully called on the first day and then wrote on the second. I already told you about my email back-and-forth with the artist. My third article had splendidly responsive sources, but there was an unexpected 9:30pm call one night from one of them. My fourth article was a barrage of time suggestions, emails, and rescheduling. But it just seems to be the nature of this beast - another reason why something MUST be done EVERY SINGLE DAY. You can't rely on timely replies and easily accessible interviewees. It's just another example of the wonderful and unpredictable humanity of writing articles.

5) More sources = more dimensions and more headaches
My first story had one source, my second had two, and my third had four. Because of that my third story is the most well-rounded of that set, but man, that's a lot of talk, and a lot of time writing questions and selecting quotes. The more ingredients you cook with, the more complicated the recipe, but often the better its taste at the end as well. I prefer the headache of many sources to the flat Dilbert-ness of a one-source story.

6) Skype is an amazing tool for interviews
So I just discovered Skype for my fourth article. How I have not gotten into this before? This tool is God's gift to journalists interviewing people outside of their present location. I had a video phone call with a source in England, and I didn't have to pay a dime for it. I get to hear his voice and see his mannerisms (a writer's delight) without any charge. Yeah, Skype is FREE. Beat that.

7) Learn how to shorten ramblers and draw out the silent type
I really hit it off with this 24-year-old entrepreneur, a source for my fourth story, and we ended up stretching the interview to 2 hours on Skype...I'll repeat that: 2 straight hours of conversation and staring at a computer screen and typing madly to keep up with his responses. An average interview for me is anywhere from 15 to 45 minutes. His ramblings did produce a leprechaun's pot of interesting information and colorful quotes...but I'm not going to be able to fit much of the ten resulting pages into my final article. In the future, I plan on setting an hour time-limit at the beginning of my interviews to save myself precious time. However, I've gotten pretty good in other areas of my life at drawing out the quiet type. But when you get someone talking about themselves, it's amazing how easy it is to get a mountain of monologues, no matter how withdrawn they are.

8) Be ready for only 10% of your sweat-pouring harvest to appear in the article
There are HOURS behind every single story. So far, I've put between 4 and 10 hours into each article, depending on the number of sources and how cooperative they are. Here's the process: I find the story idea and pitch it to my editor who (ideally) assents. I send out emails where I can and begin doing research online to figure out who else to talk to and what to ask. I go back and forth with people setting up interview times, and then finally have to sit down to spend time interviewing them in the best method available. Once all the sources have been interviewed, I go back and highlight the best quotes from my interviews, and then write a rough draft of the article. I always sleep on an article before editing it, letting my unconscious sift through the story and separating myself from my writing so I can better edit it. Then I give it to someone else to read, typically Dave, or sometimes one of my coworkers, to make sure it makes sense and is clear. And then I email it to my editor. By that point, it's usually pretty short, anywhere from 450-800 words (typically no more than 2 pages, condensed from sometimes 20 pages of notes and quotes). And then the copy editors like to go through and see if there's any fat they can further trim off, and figure out what size it needs to be to fit in the newspaper layout. All that time and work and effort is funneled down into a mere handful of paragraphs. It's maddening. It's exhilarating. I LOVE IT.

Thanksgiving: Part Three - POSTPONED

2010-01-20T14:23:00.003-05:00

Sorry about the delay, folks.

Due to technical difficulties, it might be a while until this third Thanksgiving entry is posted. I would like to do it justice, because it's a good story, but I don't want to sit on my hands until the kinks get worked out.

I will let you know when Part Three is perfected and posted. Until then, I'm going to plow ahead with other entries.

Thanks for your patience, all.

Cheers,
--Heath

Thanksgiving: Part Two

2010-01-08T22:05:00.001-05:00

Dave and I padded down the seven cream-carpeted stairs and joined the rest of the grandchildren around the TV. My brother and cousin Jake had eyes riveted to the screen, elbows extended, thumbs a blur: the Boyer competition had already been aroused in a James Bond video game. My 17-year-old sister lay sleeping on the pale yellow-and-blue striped couch, long brown hair concealing her face and the shoulders of her wine-red cowl neck sweater. My youngest cousin, Libby, was abosrbed in the smaller screen of her pink and heavily-stickered PSP. This down here was our sanctuary before dinner, we 6 of the 9 grandchildren, when you count Dave. Unfortunately, I knew I couldn't hide for long in the basement. As the now-married oldest granddaughter, I had fallen in a gap where I was no longer a child but not quite an adult. But it still meant that I had to go upstairs.

It was a pleasant surprise to find the kitchen a well-oiled machine, my father videotaping as my uncle and father shuffled a smorgesborg of dishes made and brought by every member of the family. My Uncle Scott had arranged a beautiful fruit bowl, brimming with dark berries and rimmed with half-moon orange slices. My father had brought this deep deep dish filled with creamy sweet potato and topped with a very thick layer of brown sugar and nuts (I only ate it for the topping). My Aunt Susan brought her signature chocolate chip cookies, a secret recipe where the embedded chocolate chips remain half-melted. The customary white tablecloth draped over the edges and doilies protected it from the worst of the stains. Oh, the doilies.

As casserole dishes and tin foil pans were transferred from the oven and stove top and fridge, Nana assumed her typical chair and self-declared position of overseer, and as each dish traveled to the table she shrillly reminded each carrier that they needed to put down a paper doiley. My Uncle Scott received said reminder, and the rest of us scrambled to put one down as the sweet potato casserole began to burn his hands through his powder-blue oven mitts. "Ouch ouch OUCH," he yelled as the rest of continued to chorus "Doilies! Doilies doilies DOILIES!" like the gulls from "Finding Nemo". Once the doiley was down and the casserole out of his mitts, my uncle stepped back. My father's blue eyes twinkled as he teased my Uncle Scott about being oh so Martha Stewart in his oven mitts. Scott gave his older brother a stony evil eye, stuck out his tongue, and held up one oven mitt toward him. "Can you guess what I'm doing right now?" The chaos of Boyers around the table laughed; Dave smiled shyly.

Lucky, Scott and Susan's young beagle, kept raising up on her hindlegs, her little black nose level with the edge of the white-cloaked table. Her attempts were enough of a threat to push the giant glass platter piled with turkey meat closer to the center; she was eternally hopefully, but never lucky. As the dining room filled with people, Nana asked loudly over the clamor of Corningware and silverware who was going to get the Boyer table after she died. Such questions have become a norm. For the past 15 years, my grandmother has had a habit of reminding us of how old she is and that she is going to die soon, when are we going to ever call or come visit her or go through her attic and take some furniture home? The past three times I've seen her, she asks me to walk around the house and make a list of the things I want after she passes away. Often, a ruled yellow tablet and dull pencil are shoved into my hands, even when I remind her that I've already made my list, yes, I saved it, you told me to save it because you said you would lose it. After a beat of awkward quite, her question about the Boyer table was glossed over with everyone saying "not right now - let's take a picture".

All twelve of us (and the beagle) squashed our bodies between the stocky china cabinet and the head of the table, the end closest to the door where my grandfather always always sits. Nana's "Why I Love Boston" cross-stitch hung above our heads, heads that were muttering through gritted smiles, "Why is this taking so long? Why are you balancing the camera on a cup? You should get a plate, no, a bigger plate. OW, someone stepped on my foot. C'mon, I can't hold the dog like this forever. Why haven't you tried putting the camera on a plate yet?!" And then the cameras began to blink their little orange eyes, and my Uncle and I stumbled around the counter to the other side of the table. I rushed in beneath my sister; with our long hair and dad-shaped faces and mom-colored eyes, we're getting harder to tell apart the older we get. The flash on my camera brightly illuminated the duck-shaped porcelain gravy boat, and in the back shadows beneath the bottom-third of the dining room's brass chandelier, there we all are, smiling and looking at the camera, most of three generations squished into a single picture frame.

Thanksgiving: Part One

2009-12-30T19:44:00.001-05:00

The Holiday Season has been progressing in complexity during my life. The first 14 years were the simplest because we simply shuffled between my dad's family (a special version of laughter and tensity) and my mother's family (the bigger the gathering, the more step-relatives I never knew I had). Complications increased when my parents marriage ended, but after 8 years of that schedule (Christmas Eve in Mansfield with mom, then back to Columbus with Dad for Christmas morning) we had finally adjusted. And then I went and got married and threw in a whole other family on top of it all. This was Dave and I's first year negotiating what, in my family, is already an area of extreme territorialism. Yeah, there were a couple fights.

In the end, my gracious Dave volunteered we spend Thanksgiving with my father's family. For the first time in a few years 3 of the 4 children were going to be at my grandparents' Akron home with most of the grandchildren, so I called my Nana to tell her we were coming and to ask what Dave and I could contribute. "Everybody else is bringing food, but you can bring drinks. Can you afford to bring drinks? Don't bring any pop. You should bring punch. Do you know how to make punch? Here, I can give you the recipe." And - she's off! Not wanting to be greedy, I put my cell phone on speaker so Dave could enjoy the monologue as well. She had just got to the part about which flavor of sherbert ice cream to bring. I grinned at him and laid my head back on the loveseat arm and pretended to listen to her meandering 10-minute instructions for the 4-ingredient recipe.

I hung up the phone to her happy coos about our attendance; the next day I texted my cell-phone-bearing family members asking what they would like me to bring for drinks. I had zero intention of obeying the "no pop" commandment. My inbox filled as I shivered by the bus stop on High Street, awaiting the #2 to rumble up and bear me home after class. My younger brother immediately responded, requesting sparkling grape juice. My father and sister were ambivalently Diet. My Aunt Susan asked me to bring Dr. Pepper for her son Jake, and a couple of bottles of wine "just in case". I laughed sharply through my orange wool scarf. During past holidays my Nana has run off to motels, pouted when her attempts at micro-management have been foiled, and stealthily pulled family members aside for dreaded private interrogations. Wine was an excellent idea.

Dave and I drove the two hours to Akron the next day, bellies leaden with dreaded resignation. The muscles in my shoulders were coiled and aching, a familiar tension. By noon, our car tires were crunching on the white gravel of their driveway; we were the last to arrive. My father's and uncle's cars were pulled against the grey retaining wall between the yard and the drive; the garage door had been pulled up, and the side door into the house was visible. My nerves tripped and tangled while I unbuckled my seat belt, as they always do in that uncertainty before entering the house my father was raised in; past that door there could be, and has been, any number of dramatic scenes. We gathered ourselves and the drinks, and headed toward that old aluminum screen door.

The house was quiet when we walked in (calm before the storm?), the plastic bags rustling around Dave and I's knees as we took off our shoes, our cheeks dry and rosy from the November air. From the kitchen, I scanned the adjacent living room and listened for where people were gathering. The other half of the house is split-level, cream-carpeted stairs leading up to the bedrooms and down to the game room. I heard my brother and cousin Jacob on the lower level as Nana breathlessly descended from the upper level, taking two steps on every stair and tightly grasping the black metal railing. "Hi, darlings!" She always greets people with "darling", the last of her lost Boston accent in the "a". I hugged her; my head was embraced into her shoulder and my nostrils were filled with her powdery scent. Then Dave and I were shuffled over to the closet to get out of our coats; the old Jesus portrait looked down at us from the top of the stairs where he's always been, hues of brown and slightly parted lips. Dave and I had prayed earnestly about the dinner on the drive up. I looked up and repeated my plea as I shoved the corners of a brass hanger into the sleeves of my jacket and headed toward the voices downstairs.

Motivation

2009-12-26T19:06:00.002-05:00

Prayer has wrought a mess of good havoc in my life.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about how praying had boosted my self-confidence and given me a "holy spunk". One of the essential ingredients to that lesson was the taking away of both a fear of Man and a desire to please Man; they were invaders in place of holy desires to fear and please God.

An unexpected new issue has arisen in the wake:

Apathy. And a resulting lack of motivation.

I couldn't place where it came from at first, mostly because it neatly coincided with the end of Fall Quarter. But as the days passed, the apathy remained in atypical forms. I usually pack my schedule full of hangouts with different people, cramming in coffee with someone at every gap in my day. But for some reason now, even with multiple whole days free from work and school because of the break, I would feel no compulsion to schedule time with even a single person. It was such an uncharacteristic thing that I started asking questions about my motivation.

I then remembered the two taskmasters in my life that I had just demoted: fear of Man, and the desire to please Man. I had taken their whips away. And the immediate consequence was not having False Guilt barking in my ear to get off the couch, you lazy bum.

It wasn't that I no longer cared about people or stopped enjoying time with them. But the wrong motivation had been nipping at my heels so long I had forgotten why I was really running. The apathy frightened me at first; I wanted to crawl back in the shackles of fear and pleasing, just so I could get motivated again. But I knew better than that; I know that those two Man-centered poisons are not sustainable healthy motivation. So I went to the Bible asking -- what IS a healthy motivation?

It wasn't a scholastic scouring of the book, but I saw that our healthiest motivation is:

Love. Love for God and Man because God loved us.

That's it? Love?

I was irritated by such a simplistic answer.

What does that even look like, to be purely (or at least mostly) motivated by love? Sure, I know what it looks like in Christ's life, but what does it look in Average Joe's life? Different passages kept confirming that, at the heart of it and beneath the surface, love is the best motivator. By this point, I know that I'm in trouble. Because love does not speak as loudly or prick as sharply as fear and pleasing did. Not that I don't love the people I spent time with, but the fear and Man-pleasing sure helped spark the motivation when love hadn't been enough to get me moving before.

Honestly, part of what I hated is that I knew I don't have enough love. Half of the time, love doesn't even motivate the things I do for Dave - they're often things that I benefit from or will keep me out of trouble. And he's the person I love most, my own husband. I do not want my actions in our relationship to spring from fear and desire for compliments. I want to love him because I love him.

The apathy, as it turns out, was a good thing. When the false unhealthy motivations were stripped away, like weed vines tangled into a rug across the ground, apathy was what I found beneath it. Where I hoped to find fertile soil for and budding branches of loving motivation, I found bare gravelly dirt. It was discouraging, but at least it was no longer disguised by self-motivation.

I'm not even sure how to cultivate love as a motivation. Like I said, I don't really know what it would look like in everyday life. But unlike the weeds that keep sprouting up, I don't think it's something that will grow on its own. I don't even know how much I myself can cultivate it. After all, what love I have was first His, and that plant is not native to this soil. But I want it to grow here; I would like to be motivated by love, even though I know I'm not.

Day 365: Paper Anniversary

2009-12-17T10:28:00.002-05:00

One year and four days ago, I woke up quietly at seven in the morning, wide awake long before my alarm went off. The metal rungs of my bunk were cold against my feet as I climbed down. Energy was surging in me, a great and quiet pulsing. The house was quiet that last morning; all the girls were still asleep. The stairs creaked under my steps as I went to the first floor bathroom. I pulled aside the brown shower curtain, and reveled in the hot water. If it could be washed or shaved or scrubbed, I did it all twice. I came out of the bathroom in a cloud of steam; it was cold outside, but the sun came warmly through the dining room window. I ate a bowl of cereal at the sunlit dinner table. The quiet throbbed with anticipation. After I had rinsed out my porcelain white cereal bowl, I laid down in the tan leather couch to edit my vows in green ink. Then the floors began to creak, doors slammed open, and the happy shrieking began. But for an hour, the morning before my wedding just belonged to me, full and peaceful.

It's quiet now, too. Memories have been coursing through my mind this week, about that day and the following 2 weeks in Florida. And I keep trying to reflect about the past year, because that's the kind of post this should be: summing up the past year of marriage. But for some reason that's been difficult. I keep sitting down to write this, and I just keep rewriting it, scrapping the last idea and continually trying a different one. With so much to say, it's difficult to sum up.

I'd like to tell you that I've got this marriage thing down now, but that's not true. We do have a much better handle on it than when we threw ourselves into this life a year ago, but this first year also served to reveal our problem icebergs and their true size below the surface. Marriage sonar has been pinging against such issues like my selfishness and it is titanic. You see, one thing I have learned is that since marriage is for the rest of your life, there are infinitely larger levels of patience and endurance required. Here, problems in character and sins of temperament are excavated with depth and precision never before possible because there simply wasn't the time. Who else are you going to see almost every day for the rest of your life? That first layer of dirt and debris has been chipped away, and the ugly bones are coming out now; we can see the mammoth skeletons of some problems, and we've got whole decades together to dig them out bone by bone. The thought of working shoulder to shoulder with Dave on this is thrilling.

Also, it really sucks to let down your spouse. You promised that this would be the person you would be most devoted to for the rest of your life; little did you know that this would also be the person you let down most in your life. With your lives so intertwined, you're too close to keep your failures to yourself; like it or not, you share them. If I think about it too long, it makes me want to file for divorce and run away to the smallest Galapagos island where I can't hurt Dave by my mere existence anymore. Unfortunately, hurting is an inseparable part of living and loving that must be accepted. Rather than crawling into a hermit crab's shell, it's better to be able to keep getting back up every time you fall down. You're both too broken to perfectly love each other, no one is surprised by that, so you have to learn that pattern of helping each other up. Life is full of falling, and marriage is designed for you to have a partner to pull you up when it happens. Marriage isn't perfect, but it is designed to deal with life's Imperfection.

God also seems to delight in balance in this world; he did not make a situation for repeated failure without also endowing it with one of the highest potentials for joy. This year has not been easy, but oh, it has been so good. When we ungrateful malfunctioning creatures do get some things right, it's a pretty big deal. And I think of the very long list of things that went right this past year with Dave. Like Dave buying that fake miniature poor-quality absolutely-perfect Christmas tree and decorating it with me. Teaching ourselves how to argue effectively with each other, with both compassion and reason. Spending late nights on campus doing homework together. Slowly but surely organizing our tiny over-stuffed apartment. Watching movies on a blanket and pillows laid out on the living room floor. Adventuring together this past July in Summersville, West Virginia. Buying our new hamster, Dave's anniversary gift to me, together and laughing at his tiny furry antics. All those things and more, profound and simple and silly, were joyous victories.

So, to my husband: thank you for your everlasting patience, for your loyalty and trustworthiness, for working hard next to me to make us good, for paying the bills every month, for saving Youtube videos that you think I'd like to watch, for double-checking to make sure I turned the stove off, for my lovely dwarf hamster Tychicus, and for loving me. I will never say "thank you" enough for all you are to me.

Holy Spunk

2009-12-06T20:24:00.000-05:00

I wore a uniform from my first day of 6th grade all the way through to my high school graduation. For seven years, my only clothing options were a limited number of colored polo shirts, navy blue or khaki uniform pants, and a plaid skirt. Technically I could've worn a jumper too, but the socially cognizant stopped wearing those the day they left the 6th grade.

Options to stand out were rather limited, and with that high school herd instinct, not many wanted to. Even though we got to choose our own shoes and socks, there were a lot of girls wearing black Mary Janes and white knee highs those years in order to fit in. I, however, chose my shoes specifically because of their uniqueness: a pair of purple Converse All-Stars. It was my small way of defying the status quo.

Some people think the words "God" and "church" equate with losing your individuality, and a mandated rigid conformity. If that were the case, I can say honestly that I would not still be here. What I've instead discovered these past few weeks, as I've prayed more than ever before, is that my spunk and self-confidence have both multiplied significantly.

For the past several weeks, my self-confidence had been declining as my anxiety was on the rise. As I became more anxious, I became needy and clingy with Dave. My emotions were on a hair-trigger, and the nights it got set off were late ones for Dave. I was consistently self-conscious and asking for compliments. I felt lost whenever he would have a bad day, and never wanted to disagree with him. I felt increasingly depressed and I didn't slow down long enough to figure out why.

The first smart thing I did was stop over-scheduling myself. I used the new-found time to cry (which I hated), to read, to write, and to pray. I've never been good at praying, but I prayed a lot that week. Probably more than any other week before. And most of those prayers were pretty ugly; but at least I was praying.

I had finally slowed down long enough to look down at my own feet, and I saw I was wearing those damn Mary Janes. I had been striving to meet a status quo that wasn't mine to fulfill, trying to win approval from people who could not satisfy my anxiety, and hadn't been asking The Man In Charge what job He had just for me. So I started praying more, and I started asking.

It really was the praying that made the difference, which surprised me, I think because I've never really understood it. The more I prayed, the bolder I became. I wasn't making decisions to make people happy; I was learning to separate my Self from their reactions.

Dave and I spent yesterday together, and our interaction was vastly different than the past few weeks. When Dave teased me about my clumsiness, I laughed along and teased back. I was already happy and confident, and therefore not pleading for compliments. When he got tired and slightly grouchy at the end of the day, I easily shrugged it off. I wasn't depending on his reaction to define me.

Earlier this week, I confronted a friend on a minor disagreement. Not only did I initiate that discussion, but I didn't need emotional reconstruction after my friend disagreed with me. If the disagreement had come up a week earlier, I would've been paralyzed and said nothing. But this time I myself was marvelously gloriously separate from their reactions, buoyant and resilient.

Prayer had put my purple shoes back on, and God was commending it because they came from Him; He had given me a holy spunk. Since I've been praying more, I have felt more whole and full of spark, bolder and steadier. I've been anything but blending into the ranks or becoming monotone. My roots are deeper and my colors are brighter and my voice is louder and my laugh is fuller since I've been praying. And that's what The Man in Charge is all about.

The Unlocked Gate

2009-12-02T20:24:00.000-05:00

In her life, my grandmother has tried many tactics to get the love she longs for from her family. She'll throw a fit at my brother's ballgame to draw attention. She will show up unannounced on doorsteps. Many Christmases I've received a set of "Thank You" notes under her tree. She is generous; and often that generosity comes with fine print. She works very hard in all the wrong ways to get the affection she's so desperate for.

All my life she's been like a woman holding a handful of water, not understanding that the tighter she grips, the more drips away; rather than having more control, she only has less of it to hold.

My grandmother is an intelligent and well-read woman who has been in church almost every single Sunday of her life. I have no doubt that she's read and heard and been taught the story of the prodigal son many times. And I wish so badly that she could've really listened to it and heard what the story had to say about who God is.

There's one specific instance I know that illustrates her lack of understanding:

It was my father's third year at Ohio State that he met and began dating my mother. After the school year ended, she invited my father to come down and stay for a while in Florida at her father's home. My grandmother was against this arrangement from the start. On the day of my father's flight, she barricaded the second car in front of the driveway and hid the keys in order to keep him from going to the airport. Of course, my father called a friend to drive him and went anyways. Later that month, I was unintentionally conceived.

The prodigal son did far worse with less resistance. After telling his dad to "drop dead" by cashing in early on his inheritance, the prodigal son walked right out the front door and through the unlocked wrought iron gate. There was no car blocking the driveway; his father let him go.

I have no doubt that if there were a gate at my grandmother's house that day, it would've been locked (interestingly, the manner of exit didn't stop either son from doing what he wanted). So why did the God-figure in the parable leave the gate unlocked? Out of trust - did he not think his son would leave? No - it was respect for his son's free will. Unless he could choose to leave, it didn't mean anything if he stayed.

That unlocked gate has taught me much about the great value of free will. I think about it when I want to drag a friend kicking and screaming into the right decision, and am reminded that it's not mine to decide. The times I am angry when God doesn't force someone to do the best or right thing, I think of that freely-swinging gate. As I've learned before, God wants to be chosen - enough to allow people to not choose him. So who am I to choose for them when even the Almighty does not?

I've also seen that it remains unlocked, no matter which side of it you are on - an equally difficult lesson. When the prodigal son came back with pig's food smeared on his chin, the gate was still open then. And his father was watching the road from the kitchen window. He gave his son freedom, even at great cost and injury, but he waits at the window and hopes.

God is not so foolish to try and control us for our love. As a shepherd, he doesn't pen the sheep in - they willingly follow the sound of his voice. And as a father, he leaves the gate unlocked. I hope my Nana sees that next time she thumbs through the book of Luke; she would find her hands much fuller if she learned from Him to relax her grip.

Becalmed

2009-11-22T19:53:00.000-05:00

A baked ship on a listless sea lies limply on the waves. White light tramples on the splintery boards as the vessel rocks in the glare of the sun. Deck is bare and sail is empty; the lonely helm creaks as the weak current catches the rudder.

I stumble up on deck, a bottle sloshing in my hand. My eyes are unable to focus; puking over the side helps the hangover. And I look over to the wheel from the railing, remembering the storm that drove me below decks.

The storm came quickly; I had not been scanning the skies for the hints. Suddenly the rain had begun; a gust pummeled the sail as the tide kicked at the rudder beneath. I clung to the wheel, already straining to breathe, to stand, to steer. I lashed the wheel as another of the storm's tantrums pounded down upon the deck with heavy waves grasping at my shoes. I battled over to the mast and fought to furl the hysterical sail. The salt and the raindrops stabbed into my bare hands, as the storm's shrieking began to grow.

Louder it shrieked as I struggled to stand on slick boards, and I fell onto my knees and my left wrist as I abandoned the possessed kite to get to the wheel. I felt the warm blood on my palm briefly repel the ice of the deluge, until the salt dug into my broken skin and began to scream. Numb hands clamped onto wooden spokes, and I fought to stay my course, battled to find the way as my own ship bucked against me. Over and over again the spokes wrenched free and battered my knuckles, until I could no longer use my hands. The storm mounted and roiled and ripped the energy from my limp body. Salt water poured under my eyelids and into my ears, and scrubbed my throat raw. I knew I had to stay my course, but I could only see the storm.

I leapt from the helm before it struck me; it began to spin wildly in the chaos, the ship her own master now. I ducked under the boom as the wind cackled along the sheet of the sail, and fled below decks. I uncorked a bottle of whiskey as the ship bucked and weaved as she wished. I then looked to the opposite bunk where my father had remained asleep. I had not thought to wake him. And the wind whistled as I drunk myself into distraction and sleep.

I lay on the railing under the angry sun, an aimless failure on a becalmed sea. Sweat beaded on my forehead and rolled down the channel of my spine. I had failed. Another rush of sea water and whiskey races up from my stomach and back into the waves.

And then I hear the footsteps on the planks. And want to follow my vomit.

I slither to the boards and hide behind my knees, my hand still on the railing. His eyes are clear as they rise from below the deck. The bottle rolls as the ship tilts, and I pitch my head over the side again to expel another mouthful of bile. I feel it dribble down my chin. I cinch my eyes shut against the waves, my knuckles tight and white. The boots stop behind me. I brace for blows and bellowing. I've lost our bearings; I should've stayed the course; I should've woken him up to help.

I suddenly feel his hands beneath my armpits and he grunts to lift me to my feet. He steadies me by the shoulders as I stare at his shirt buttons. A sigh; he cups a hand behind my head and pulls me to his chest, his left arm clamped around my back. I press my face into his shirt and wrap my arms around his middle until my breathing slows to meet his.

He pushes me back again to look into my face, combing back the salty tangles from my face. His thumb finds the sticky of the vomit on my chin. He reaches into his front pocket for his handkerchief and wipes the spit away, and murmurs, "I'd glad you're ok."

We Dying Immortals

2009-11-08T14:48:00.000-05:00

A few months ago, my boss took everyone in the office out for drinks to celebrate a new big client that one of the lawyers had just signed on. We cheerfully paraded out of the office at 4:30, ready to drink to the occasion. The evening sun sparkled through the tall bar windows on my glass of rum and coke as we swathed ourselves in a haze of laughter at the corner of the bar. A few stools down the other legal receptionist, a middle-aged Southern blonde, politely declined the appetizers because her husband was already at home cooking dinner for her. One of the lawyers joked that her husband was trying to get her in the mood; she replied with a smile and quickness, "He doesn't have to work that hard to get me in the mood." We all laughed.

That laughter has gone.

At the beginning of October, she called off work one Thursday. She had taken her husband to the hospital the previous night with severe abdominal pain, and the doctors couldn't identify the cause. After several tests, he was diagnosed with 2 forms of cancer, one of them very advanced. She texted our office paralegal the following Thursday when their doctor suggested hospice. She wanted to get a second opinion, but they never got the chance - they were informed that Saturday that he had only days to live. When I came into work the following Tuesday, one of my coworkers gently informed me that he had passed away on Sunday. 10 days. 10 days between fine and gone. I couldn't taste my food the rest of the day.

The funeral was that same Tuesday night, and everyone in the office went. We took up three rows of the too-narrow chairs; my knees banged against Dave's on the one side and one of the lawyer's on the other. And the body of a man I had only met once in my life at a summer work cookout was in a powder-blue casket at the front of the room; I had a clear view of his face for the whole sermon. I felt awkward and helpless.

I brought no tissues with me. I sat dryly through the slideshow, the stories, and the service. I heard one of the lawyers' wives sniffling a few chairs away as the pastor spoke. We all rose after the service ended, and through the arms and coats I could see that little Southern blonde walk straight to the casket, followed by her adult son. I watched her bend over his face, her curls falling over her shoulder as she kissed his forehead and said many soft and broken things to him. My insides wrenched. I should not have been able to see that. And the tears came then.

I clasped Dave's hand tight as we crossed the damp parking lot of the funeral home, still feeling that ill helplessness. I found myself touching him and looking at him more that night, instinctively seeking to imprint his details on my mind. I wanted to count the freckles on his shoulders because I had been reminded that my time to look at them is shockingly short.

Yet my eyes can see so little. All I've seen is passing, a fleeting projection. My eyes tell me that since I can no longer see her husband, since he is no longer manifested in the body of that shy-smiling man, that he is gone and done. But my eyes are liars. We humans are too grand and immense for our own bodies; and how little we know of it, both for ourselves and others.

"I'm bigger than my body gives me credit for," John Mayer crooned. That's true.

Decades ago, C.S. Lewis wrote:

"There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations--these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit--immortal horrors or everlasting splendours."

I cling to that truth now with my face briefly lifted to the ignored inevitability of loss. I love, therefore I have much to lose. But all those I love are more than I can know, creatures transcending the physical world I live in with them. In losing the mortal form of one I am reminded of the immortality of others; that fills me with very real terror, and acute pangs of hope.

So I laugh loudly and count Dave's freckles again.

Normal

2009-11-01T11:03:00.008-05:00

Normal is underrated.

Three weeks ago, I had a cyst removed, and for the next week I was in post-scalpel misery. Even while popping painkillers like Pez candy, I was rendered virtually immobile. I couldn't lie on my back. I couldn't walk. I couldn't sit. Not without pain rocketing throughout my body. While lying on the floor with an oversized pillow and watching bad TV drama to distract from the throbbing, I often thought back to before, when I stupidly took those normal actions for granted.

Those times without are when we understand the value of normal. It's when I'm at the bottom of the deep end that I realize how sweet air is. It's when I'm too busy to eat lunch that I get to dinner and remember how good food tastes. Normal is a delicacy we've become accustomed to dining on.

Being married to and loving Dave feels so normal now, almost alarmingly normal. Telling him I love him is part of my daily routine. Watching him sleep while I get ready for work is a daily treat. It's really good, but why does it feel so normal? Water-drinking air-breathing food-consuming normal?

Dave is a river and I am a trout. That's what being with Dave feels like - I'm a fish in water. Loving Dave is like breathing - it's a natural part of my body's construction, like a dormant organ that inflated after I began to love him and starting pumping. But I have to remind myself that this wasn't always normal.

I remember the previous unrest in my life, the ground's constant heaving and the humidity of tears. Family crises were normal; earthquakes and volcanoes tore through my life's landscape for years. And I remember what a bastion he was to me, and continues to be. I've forgotten what life lived on a fault line was like, I'm now so used to walking on solid earth. It is so unbelievably incredibly normal.

And it's because of this I understand better than ever why not having someone to love aches, why losing the one you love wounds. Because we were built to love, just as we were all born to breathe. It's in the blueprints. And we forget the fantastic normalcy of breathing our beloveds in and out every day.

Breathe! Breathe in the normal things of your life! Breathe them in deep; catch the warmth and the scent of it. Because there are many abnormally normal beautiful things in our lives, and you don't want to miss them just because you get them every day.

Wholeness

2009-10-25T11:39:00.002-04:00

I hate my flaws.

I hate having them, hate seeing them, and the work of hiding them.

But life seems to breed the issues I'm so eager to conceal, as though every day is a walk through a thorn bush wearing a pale silk dress. I just want to make it through the day with my clothing in one piece, but the environment makes that impossible. Of course I'll lie down at the end of the day bloodied and scraped with rips and tears. But why do so many other people around me seem to reach their beds unscathed? Is it something wrong with me?

So I'll stay awake late into the night, needle and thread hacking my frayed dress back together. Because what if they see? I can't let them see the holes. Because that's the message out there: You must not be flawed. Why else do more than a million people a year inject Botox into their aging cheeks? People flash white smiles and don't talk about their teeth whiteners, just like magicians don't reveal their secrets.

That's what we want. We want The Secret. That Secret I pretend to know while I'm stitching my shredded dress. We may be adults now, but we still play Pretend. All we did is sophisticate the rules. We're told that we should not be flawed, so we strut like we aren't, lest they all see the patches.

We lie to each other. We go to lavish lengths to prove to others, and ourselves, how "good" things are. We tell each other about all the good things we have, like our money or our wives or our children or our beachside cottage. And we genuinely believe that satisfaction comes in these forms. Yet even those who have all that lie down at night with holes to patch. And worse, the patches ravel: divorces, death and bankrupcy... We don't have enough fingers to plug the dam.

Oh, what we would give to be whole.

Isn't that what drives us? Isn't that what all this frenetic boasting and American Dream-ing is all about? The holes of our brokenness throb to be filled, so we seek to find what fills them. We seek wholeness and contentment.

But with all our effort there's still a draft, still a leak. We remain unfixed and disrepaired.

An ancient fable tells us that demons are fallen angels. Man is described as "fallen" as well. And wherever we started from, falling into the thorn bush means something was broken. What good is a patch for my bruise when the bleeding is internal?

Here's the paradox that comes with healing and wholeness: I must admit to my tears and breaks, and admit that I cannot fix them. Physically, what else is a doctor's visit? After 3 days of limping around on a broken ankle insisting that "I'm fine", I will have to reach a point where I admit that my body is broken and that I cannot fix it myself. That principle translates spiritually.

We don't like that. We want to fix ourselves. We want to own our wholeness with pride, because everyone else seems to have it. But everyone who struts is lying, and at the bottom line it just doesn't work that way. An engine cannot fix itself - there has to be a mechanic.

What a terrifying thought to people who think that they themselves are their only hope, to sit on their broken ankle with no doctor to go to.

The God called Yahweh claims to be a jack-of-all-trades, the key to that wholeness our souls cramp hungrily for. If He had a truck, he would have everything from bolts of cloth to bags of concrete in the back. And when we admit that we cannot fix ourselves, He claims to be the one who can. I picture Him wearing a leather jacket and having grease-stains on His hands from all the work He does.

He'll wait for me to call before He comes. And when I show Him the muddied bloodied tatters of my thorn-wrenched dress, He trades it for a beautiful new one. Because wholeness isn't patching the rags I have.

It's admitting I need to be given something new.

Bare Feet

2009-10-18T14:09:00.000-04:00

I have this lovely pair of brown flats that I like very much. However, judging by what they did to my heels when I wore them last week, the love is hardly mutual. In the time it took me to walk to my first class from the bus stop, I was already limping and fantasizing about Neosporin and a box of Band-Aids.

My heels were lucky enough to be raw on a warm and dry day, and the bulk of my path happened to be across the campus Oval, a grassy park area criss-crossed with sidewalks. With my shoes in hand, the undamaged soles of my feet padded through the soft Bluegrass blades of the Oval's circumference. And I endured a surprise lesson on the terrain.

In that short walk, my toes sunk into a miniature swamp, and then were covered by a patch of sand on the opposite side of a sidewalk. One moment the turf was luxurious, then a looming pine tree would choke out the grass with its shade and needles. And just when I'd think I'm in the clear again, I realized from the acorn lodged in my arch that a fruitful oak is nearby.

What must life have been like before shoes? Or when all we had were animal-skin moccasins? How slow would we have walked, and what would we have known? With bare feet, we would've found the rich damp soil to plant our farms. We would've seasoned our meals with the herbs we crushed while walking, and felt the hoofprints of the deer we tracked. Identifying trees would be easy after picking out enough pine needles and crab apple pits from our soles. Our paths would not have traveled as far, but we would've intimately known our homeland.

With winter at the door, I know I'll readily forget this when standing in a six-inch January snow drift. But when spring comes back again, I'll wonder what I'm missing.

Autumn

2009-10-08T11:23:00.003-04:00

Autumn is a woman taking her clothes off. The sun falling upon the leaves of her garments, her cheeks and fine clothes blush one more time before she starts taking off the beautiful layers of summer. Summer-green pumpkin vines bulge with warm orange, and corn husks open to reveal checkered orange and rust-red. She unfolds her arms and apples come spilling out into pie crusts and cider pitchers, herself a cornucopia of bounty. She laughs in the plenty and dusts her hands on her cornfield apron.

She smiles first when someone bites into that tart early apple. There is always a piece of hay in her hair and a pie on her sill. Her scent is sweet in the corn maze and the child's trick-or-treat bag; she smells of warmth and change.

But she never visits long, with her rosy orange cheeks and gentle breath. Because Autumn is a woman taking her clothes off. And the apple trees are shaken and picked clean, and the pumpkin vines shrivel and turn brown, and every day another tree loses its leaves, and she is a little more naked. October is her festival, and as the month ends the orange in her cheeks begins to pale. The last of the leaves are firey on dark branches now clearly showing through the last of her veils. She gathers the final stitches of her rich clothing around her as the cold slowly pulls them away, an icicle for an empty cornucopia. Until she lies quiet on a field of snow with dark eyes and arms, the white of her skin exposed now that all her colors have gone.

So we hang colored Christmas lights in her hair until the leaves return.

Kite

2009-10-02T18:36:00.002-04:00

(I wrote this back in March)

Writing is flying a kite, and as of late I have been trying to fly it with a stiff iron pipe. Holding the cold metal in my hand I should know better – I’m merely trying to hold my kite to find the pre-approved Jesus section of the sky. And I’ve endured enough sub-par creativity to know what a failure kite-flying is under such stiff direction.

I pull a loose yellow cord, bright with hope and fearful lack of control, from my front pocket to attach to the kite. The bright cloth dangles loosely from the string, and perspiration rolls from my palm to dampen the cord. What control do I now have? A running start of inspiration, a frantic toss into the air, and dragging the kite along until it catches the winds and begins to climb. The wind bucks and weaves, bellows and quiets, and the satiny square floats upon the gusts, what I can only pray are the breaths of the Spirit.

This is no child’s kite, to crash into branches and electrical wires with laughter, because my nerves have been sewn into the kite and my pulse is visible in the string. Crash it may and crash it will, but I crash with it. Tear a hole in the fabric and bleeding scrapes appear on my hands; bend the frame and my bones begin to ache. Yet once again, I will coil the cord and gather my feet and relaunch. I will crash and crash and crash again, but I must get up each time. Cord taut, stained red, I was built to fly.

Operation: Yard Sale FAIL

2009-09-27T09:30:00.001-04:00

Long before I knew I would be getting married in December, I knew for a fact that I would never have an outdoor wedding. I would not be able to handle the stress of planning 2 locations for the ceremony and making paranoid visits to weather.com for the prior 3 weeks. I'm also a person that when I develop a certain expectation (such as getting married outside) I would not be able to roll with the punches if it rained. In fact, I just might start punching people.

Why didn't I remember this key aspect of my personality before I started planning my yard sale? Hours and hours of rooting and tagging and pricing and ad-placing - and what do I get? Torrential downpour, one tentatively dry hour, and 7 lousy guests during an 8-hour day.

My damn yard sale got rained out. And I want to punch someone.

The good news? At least I've earned a little more money than I spent advertising for the dumb thing. The bad news? I've made an equivalent of $2.50 an hour. That right there is enough to piss anyone off.

It was maddening, sitting there on our apartment stoop in an uncomfortable black folding chair as the deluge inundated my pitiful plastic-covered pile of a yard sale. At one point while the rain was pounding down so loud on the plastic sheet I couldn't hear my radio, I looked up at the sky and said, "How about hail? Or fireballs? Maybe a plague of locusts?" And for a few seconds, it rained even harder. Figures.

Thank God my mother brought me a Chipotle burrito and kept me company for a couple hours. That kept me sane.

Cars would slow down to squint through their rain-streaked windows, and then almost inevitably speed up again. WHY? WHY GIVE ME FALSE HOPE? It would've been better if they had just kept on going.

And, fittingly enough, Dave helped me pack everything up half an hour early as it continued to steadily rain. So I sat on the couch for an hour and pouted - yes, full-blown pouting - and looked at the unchanged size of the pile eating up the other half of my living room.

Now I had originally planned to write something optimistic out of the situation, about how much I love storms, and this was the longest I've ever sat outside during one, and I've never stood in one place long enough to watch rain water run down the trunk of a tree. That was the original plan.

To hell with that. A storm rained out my yard sale and I am now going to go outside and punch that tree.

Holden Beach: Day #6

2009-09-10T21:05:00.002-04:00

I'll remember this day for years.

We girls woke up and read together; shortly after our discussion was over the natural movement toward the beach began. Just before leaving, Brandon and Thomas showed up. I hunkered down at the kitchen table with my laptop to do a little blogging catch-up. One by one Thomas and each of the girls took their towels and walked out the door, but Brandon sat down across the table from me. For 40 silent minutes I continued to write and he sat waiting until I closed my computer. "Alrighty, I'm heading over to the boys' house to have lunch with Colin."

"Ok," he murmured. "I wanted to ask you something, but it can wait until after lunch."

I paused over my beach bag. He'd been waiting forty minutes, I might as well hear him out now. It probably wouldn't take too long anyways. So I went back to the table and asked, "What's up?"

"Well, I've been feeling an increased need to get baptised this week. I've been asking people what their opinion is, and I know you know me better than most of the people here. I'm just afraid of casting spells instinctually, and I wonder what you think of it."

Sitting there, 18 months of history reeled through my head. Snapshots of Brandon's struggle flipped like album pages. The prolonged uncertainty of whether or not he was a Christian. The ever-present tension of his Wiccan past and spell-casting. The hours spent in argument and conversation about spiritual matters. The worn patience and frustration pulling against the reigns of a stubborn mule. His consistent unwillingness. And the prayers from the last 2 months, always as a skeptical afterthought, that he could give up his Wiccan past so Dave and I could baptise him at the beach. And I knew I was asking for the moon.

I told him, as I had before, that priority number one was declaring one lifestyle behind him before engaging in a ritual that symbolized commitment to another. His interest in the ritual itself was nothing new; but if there was a desire for the commitment it illustrates, then that was a cataclysmically new event. So I asked what he thought about renouncing, expecting the same stubborness I'd heard for 18 long months.

"I think I'm ready," he said quietly, then paused. "Yeah. I'm ready."

It took a while for his words to travel from my ears to my brain. And what a lightning bolt when they hit. My stomach caved in and all the air left my lungs. My body was pressed to the chair and my mouth filled with laughter as my eyes were flooded by tears. Words fled the sacred space that had just erupted and called itelf JOY.

Shortly after, he walked me back to the boys' house, and I was left with Colin and a toasted PB&J sandwich. And I was freaking out. I wanted to dance (so I did). I wanted to tell everyone (so I did). I wanted to play Scrabble (so we did).

Even though I lost to Colin in Scrabble, the day was all uphill from there, floating on an unpoppable bubble. At three, Katie and I left our Scrabble defeat to an afternoon date with 2 girls coming into our group. Just as the boys played poker with the Diesel guys, we were connecting with 2 of the girls from Diesel over orange julius drinks and an impossible puppy puzzle.

And then, come seven, our house was stormed by an army of boys weilding casserole dishes. They had promised to make us dinner one night, and what a feast it was: eggplant and meat lasagna, crab legs, a tilapia mix, perfect scallops, roasted red potatoes, even wine and dessert. They forced the girls to sit at the table, and then came around to us one by one to serve us. It was absolutely incredible. I heard one of the girls admit to tearing up as a result.

We planned to have communion together after dinner. So after a line past the 2 boxes of wine and passing around a couple of French bread loaves, we all sat down together in the living room. Some of the girls started us off by singing "Amazing Grace", and then we all began praying together for a little less than an hour. And Brandon, for the first time ever, prayed out loud in front of the group. Thankful for our patience, grateful that even though he's a "stubborn ass" he got to this point. Absolutely amazing.

Holden Beach: Day #5

2009-09-09T18:21:00.002-04:00

After the I led the morning reading and we had our daily dance party, I tried to get a hold of Dave so we could go out for our date day. While everyone else was waiting for the evening to go out for Date Night, we wanted to drive 45 minutes to historic Wilmington for a date day. When I didn't immediately hear back, I of course donned my bathing suit and went for the beach. I joined the group and watched 8-inch fish leap out of the water every few seconds all along the beachline. Dave was on the beach shortly after, and we waded out into the water, watching Gordon's raft get smaller and smaller. Schools upon schools of fish shimmered and leaped around us, darting between each other and even between our legs, the girls shrieking in terrified laughter. Regardless of the temptation of such a fishing situation, we left shortly after and got cleaned up for our day out.

After a lunch at Hardee's, we crossed the Cape Fear River and wandered into historic downtown. Across the river was the enormous USS North Carolina battleship, but the anchor was left by the riverside boardwalk on our side. The ferry and its live music passed us while we were on the boardwalk. It was a perfect day for leaning together on a railing by the river.

More recently, Wilmington is famous as Michael Jordan's childhood home and the city where A Walk to Remember and Dawson's Creek was filmed. But this city has deep roots. During the Civil War, the city served as a major Confederate blockade port, but was far enough away from the action that the old houses are untouched. Dave and I spent a couple hours walking around the residential area near downtown before heading for dinner. Almost every house had a historical plaque, most built in the 1800s and even a handful still standing from the 1700s, their large southern wrap-around porches shaded by big old trees. Mines were turned into plant decoration and fountains meant for horses were now little more than historic charm. And judging by their choice of art, Confederate pride is still quite strong.

It was a quiet day spent together, which is exactly what we wanted. While beautiful and historic, there isn't a whole lot of interaction available with said history. Original buildings are still there, and most of them are now modern-style bars. After getting lost in a small bookstore whose owner had a puppy named Edith Wharton, Dave and I ate dinner in the Front Street Brewery, which was decent enough. We then went to a small sweets shop we had scoped out earlier. Everything was wooden and it smelled of sugar; full of a locally-brewed IPA, I went light and got 2 half scoops each of lemon and raspberry sorbetto. We went down and ate together by the river as the sun set.

I've missed him.

Holden Beach: Day #4

2009-09-08T11:25:00.000-04:00

This was the girls' house for this week, "Tig na Mara". Every morning we've been getting up and reading and discussing passages from an unpublished book by Dennis McCallum about the church as we feel the house sway slightly. Every morning after we finish reading we then crank up the music and have a mini dance party on the steps. Every morning we all put our bikinis on and then take off for the beach together. And today we were lucky enough to see SUNSHINE. What a glorious sight after all the overcastness, one that we capitalized on.

In the afternoon, after some fun at the beach, a lot of boys and Emily Morris and I went to the second annual tennis tournament. Last year's tennis tournament happened on the day where happy hour involved headdresses, so most bystanders were Arabian from the earlobes up. This year, Cynthia and Emily Maxwell cheered us on from the sidelines, minus the headdresses. They cheered me on to a magnificent 6-0 loss to Emily Morris. We left the boys shortly afterwards, men (like mine) serving balls at speeds we could not, and did want to, compete with. Besides, we were running late for our girls' ice cream date. (We left around 3; we heard that the final round wasn't even over until after 8)

Claire was catching up with a friend that lives near the beach, and the rest of us went to this little ice cream place just over the bridge called "The Scoop". While Grace was driving past one of the beach shops, she saw a sign in front that said "Welcome Xenoids", much to our delight. After being served up by a rather disinterested young guy at "The Scoop", Emily Morris made the mistake of getting a waffle cone with a hole in the bottom, so she spent half of her time bent over a trash can as it slowly leaked away; there was a trail of ice cream drops leading from the swing to the can. We talked about who was going with who for Date Night the following night (always on Wednesdays night every single year) and took silly pictures of each other. Which is no competition for the pictures that were taken an hour later.

You see, today's happy hour theme is "Trashy Tuesday", and while we were eating ice cream the girls had an epiphany for how they wanted to dress up: cut up white garbage bags and make their own trashy prom dresses. So they're rushing around the house, teasing their hair, talking in ridiculous accents, and deliberating over what their drawstring pageant sashes should say. Then some of the boys showed up in their attire, dressed to the nines for the event. I was feeling a little peopled-out at the time, so I took everyone's picture and wished them well, and grabbed a book for some quiet time on the beach. Later, after Dave spent some time at 'Merica's happy hour, he described how everyone was wearing trash bags and talking in very loud hick accents. I can only imagine.

Out on the beach, I found the sad rubble of Grace's enormous sandy turtle serving as a platform for a small child's sandcastle. Apparently, the girls' had watched the family building it, but it was obviously too late. What do you say? Hey, you, yeah, the 4-year-old with the pigtails, buzz off. This is OUR sand pile.

I sat on the beach reading for a short time but was continually distracted by the beauty around me. For a split second I regretted forgetting my iPod, but immediately realized what a stupid thought that was. It was staggering, sitting in the middle of a panoramic picture jam-packed with creation and life and beauty. Clouds of abstract shape littered the sky, cooling from afternoon orange to an evening purple. The waves crept farther and farther up the shore as the sun slid farther and farther down; the air was clean with the tang of the salt. Such big beauty reminds you that: it's all taken care of. We frenetic little insects, we barely lift our heads from the grindstone to see that it's all taken care of. This is part of what this trip is about - getting to pause long enough to see it, to see that you're in the world and not running it. A world of motion and poetry and a delightful abundance of frivolity.

I walked down the beach toward the boys house to meet Dave for a walk, the waves unrolling before my feet like a silky carpet. He and I drove to eat a late dinner together at Hardee's, a treat that's unfound in Columbus, and to reconnect. It's amazing how even this short of a time apart, and even not that far apart, really matters. And by the time the night had ended, he had walked me back home while holding my hand, the stars were out and my belly was full of a strawberry shake. And still, going to bed, I was wrapped in the feeling that it's all taken care of.

Holden Beach: Day #3

2009-09-07T23:40:00.007-04:00

Another grey morning on the beach, but at least it makes hot tea taste better. As the day went on we experienced a lot of erratic weather, a little bit of sun then misty rainfall, but it was another day mostly made for being indoors. We spent some time outside in the early afternoon helping Grace realize her vision for a sand-sculpted turtle bigger and better than last year, but aside from that we were indoors for a lot of the day - so it's no surprise that the theme of the day became food from lunchtime on.

Katie came down to the beach trip for the first time this year. And I love her. And we already have nicknames for each other. With a little bit of butter and a box of noodles, she turned out a delicious meal for me: sauteed mushrooms, red sauce and angel hair pasta. Way better than the box of mac-n-cheese waiting for me in the cupboard. We sat in the tall-backed rockers and waited for the sweet corn to cook, talking about siblings and high school and phone numbers with Grace's cousin, Emily. Then I invited Katie for a walk on the beach just the two of us, so I could get to know everything about her. We walked for an hour, sunshine hot on our shoulders as we walked toward black thunderclouds, the sky enduring an afternoon of split personality disorder. (These pictures below were taken of the opposite ends of the beach only 2 seconds apart) It didn't take too long to find out that Katie loves art and is a dancer; as in, her major in college is Dance. How cool is that? And she's fun, non-pretentious and serious about it. And she talked about how she sees movement in everything, and we geeked out about being artists and Christians. By the time we walked back to the boys' house, we found Dave waist-deep in the storm-swollen waves with a fishing pole. He caught a small strand of snot-looking seaweed when we walked up and Katie pretended to sneeze it out; which earned her exactly one thousand brownie points in my book.

After the snot, we looked up and saw a neon-green cork bobbing out on the waves. Apparently, Dan had bought a raft, a pair of paddles and a captain's hat and gone out to sea with Cynthia. Yesterday Dan had attempted (and failed to) set sail in his neighbor's tattered wading pool held together by beer bottles and duct tape, so this was definitely an upgrade. The goal was to row down to the 'Merica house for happy hour, but they found turning in a circle so entertaining, they spun for a while and then came back into shore. At which point Cynthia mutinied and stole his proud vessel.

My dinner is a rather epic tale, begun by my manly man wrestling this beast from the watery depths.

Ok, so it's kind of a small beast. But I stood next to Dave for an hour in the drizzly rain, running in and out of the surf and chasing after schools of fish rippling in the shallows, before this happened. And I also learned how to cast; my next goal in life is to learn how to get farther than 5 feet out into the water. But how exhilarating to participate in the process from start to finish! After Dave unhooked him and dropped him into the bucket, he laid on his side on the bottom of the bucket, and we thought we had literally shocked him to death. Until I nudged the pail with my foot and he came thrashing out onto the sand! I laughed and laughed until Dave chased him down and plunked him back in. From there, Dave hauled the bucket to the back deck, and as he pulled him out, his other hand holding a filleting knife, he hesitated. For a few moments, he felt compassion for the life of the fish, having never intentionally killed an animal of this size before. But he finally cut off his head (that picture not included for obvious reasons) and cut two small fillets for me. Then we took them inside, fried them in butter and oregano, and it was the best damn fish dinner that I'd ever had.

After my fine fish dinner, accompanied by a tiny frozen pizza that Dave had picked up specially for me at the grocery store earlier that day, I headed back to the house for a second dinner with Daina. More mushrooms, and broccoli, too, but now in a white sauce and with a glass of my White Zinfandel each.

And now everyone knows that I am not a wine connoiseur. Moving on.

Daina and I sat on the porch and went through a couple chapters and discussion questions from Oswald Chambers' "Spiritual Leadership" book. We talked about a good discussion she had with one of the girls in the house, how she felt about being more of a leader since 2 new girls are moving into the ministry house during the next 2 months, and how much she loves Pat. I thought of how far a distance the past 2 years has spanned for her and my heart swelled with happy pride. I love her so.

We later watched the parade of girls in our house come home from the "Mom Suit Monday" happy hour wearing one-piece swimsuits and over-sized shorts that all looked like neon triangles had barfed on them. When I heard "suit", I had assumed more of a business suit when I was at the thrift store; needless to say, that shoulder pad-toting polka-dot flaunting high-waisted Sunday school mom outfit will never again see the light of day. But I think I will have to keep my Christmas-themed mom shoes, just because they're too good to throw out.

Shortly after, Daina dropped me off at the boys' house as she went to karaoke with Pat, and I watched "The Godfather" as Emily knit the neck of her new sweater and the boys announced their favorite scenes. I then went on a midnight walk with Dave, loving that we got to talk even if it wasn't of the most fun topics, and loving that I got to be close to him for a little while. It's only been a couple nights, and we've only been married less than a year, but I do miss him.

Holden Beach: Day #2

2009-09-06T21:18:00.007-04:00

So it rained today. Not the kind of weather one hopes for at the beach. In the morning it was simply grey, but we had heard the forecast and knew what the clouds were bringing later that day. Since it was our first full day, we all went down to the beach, sun or no sun. As the girls laid out their towels and stretched out, their sunning positions were almost laughable. Myself and a few others opted to play in the waves; Thomas taught Cynthia how to bodysurf since it was her very first time in the ocean. She and I weren't very good at it, and the pre-storm waves were pretty forceful. As we got sucked and dragged and crashed against, battered by the waves and currents, this is what it felt like:

It was brutal fun. And as we were out in the surf, we figured out why they were so many fisherman lining the beach. Many many times as a large wave would swell, just before the crest would break we could clearly see entire schools of two-inch long fish, which we later learned are called blue fish, caught up together in the wave. Sometimes their little heads would poke out of the water and at one point I went into a screeching panic because 3 of them leapt fully out of the water and ran into my shoulder, my thigh and my knee. No wonder I saw pelicans swoop into the ocean several times - they were probably feasting.

After an hour, I reached my limit on how much salt water I could stand being forced down my nose, so I retreated to my too-tiny beach towel. I ripped through a book I had just ordered online as Emily laid on the towel next to me, studying for her homechurch teaching next week. Most of our group stayed out in the water a little while longer, but the rain had finally arrived. We all trudged back under a timid drizzle and went our separate ways preparing lunch. As I left the boys' house with Brandon, the smells of garlic and chicken following me out, I wished I had something better than macaroni and cheese waiting for me at the house.

The rain forced everyone into indoor activities, and laptops sprang up like mushrooms. Back at the girls' house, I went about cooking my macaroni and cheese, adding some frozen broccoli for nutrition's sake. The kitchen was full of loud women Brandon isn't used to talking to on a normal basis, so he (surprisingly) turned to the pile of packets on the counter. For the next hour, he was sucked in - he couldn't even looked up when I passed him the bowl with his half of the meal. I read quietly next to him, amazed for several reasons that this was happening and praying it would keep on as long as possible.

Every year on the beach trip, a particular reading is given out to all the college homechurches, typically divided out into one reading for every day that we're here. Then over breakfast, each individual house will read and discuss the packet together and pray at the end. The topics and selections vary from year to year, and are always sent to the homechurch leaders a week before we leave. This year when the leaders received the selection, they thought the email was a joke - until they saw that it came with discussion questions. The co-head pastor of Xenos and leader of our college group is Dennis McCallum; if you do a search for him on Amazon, you'll find that he's been published several times in non-fiction theological subjects and that he's brilliant. But there is this one fiction attempt of his that's infamous in the college group, because it's little more than a poorly-disguised theology book. Most I know who've started "The Summons" haven't been able to finish it. And for at least four of the days here we were given reading selections from that book.

So here it was, in a pile on the corner of our countertop, and Brandon began to read it. Brandon, who has turned down several book suggestions because "I just don't read", treated the handout like a page-turner thriller for more than an hour. Because of his past, Brandon has been struggling for the past year-and-a-half to figure out his beliefs, and here he was drawn to this infamous book. In my head, I went between praying for him to continue reading and lauding praise on Dennis and his almost-fiction book. That hour of reading turned into an hour-long conversation on the porch between Brandon and I, saying that he identified with the main character for several reasons and better revealed more of his barriers.

Another tradition at the beach that has grown over the past couple years is themed happy hours. As in, happy hours with alcohol, yes. The Lord has given wine to gladden the heart of men, so we intend to make merry. Every day is a different theme - for example, Saturday was Super Spandex Saturday, but I think it was poorly attended because of people recouperating from the drive. Today, Sunday, was Soulful Sunday, previously called "Thick Asses, Big Glasses". Before Claire left she had on sequined snakeskin-patterned spandex pants and brightest red lipstick. These boys...well they went like this. And we don't exactly know why.

After the happy hour crowd cleared out for the mile-long walk to the party, the house was fairly quiet. But a little while later, Daina came back to the house with Pat, both of them as excited as I was about walking a mile in the rain both ways to happy hour. So after some digging in the closet, we found a 750-piece puzzle of New York's Time Square, one with lots of words on it to make it easier, to occupy our rainy evening. For the next three hours, we pored over it together as Daina put on cd after good cd in the background. Emily sat on the couch knitting the neck of her sweater and egging on Pat and Daina's good-natured bickering. Certain chunk of the puzzle took on identities, such as "ugly sweater lady", "the leather jacket lady", and a small elusive section Pat dubbed "cleavage lady".

A little while after starting the puzzle, there was a knock at the door and Dave came in all out of breath, excited to show me something. And there in his hand, still very much alive, was a beautiful purple shell. He had run all the way from the beach where he found it just to show it me, and I loved him a little more for that. He offered trying to eat the mussel so we could save the perfect shell, but I said I had plenty of shells already and I'd rather this little guy continue living. Dave agreed. He gave me a kiss and jogged back to the shore. Later I heard that he had caught some of the fish that we had previously seen in the waves; all the ones he caught were too small, but a neighboring fisherman gave him a couple of extra ones. So he gutted them and ate them, fresh from the ocean. He asked me to look up simple blue fish recipes for when he catches more later this week.

We continued to work long and hard on the puzzle, with the help of Andrew/Darkness, to put the last impossible pieces in. Only to find that we were missing One. Damn. Piece.

I found the piece an hour after everyone left on Pat's side of the table. There has never been a more anti-climactic placement of the last piece of the puzzle, which upset me a little bit.

A little while later a few straggler boys came in from the rain to kill some time, because a poker game with boys from the Diesel homechurch was dominating their house. Because one of our Kodiak girls is about to marry one of their Diesel boys, and it'd be no good for them to stay in separate homechurches, Luke is coming to our homechurch to be a Kodiak. And not only that, but he's bringing a few other Diesels to come merge with us. So the Diesel boys played poker with our Kodiak boys to start getting to know each other and get ready to become one group. Excitement, change and growth.

Holden Beach: Day #1

2009-09-05T21:32:00.012-04:00

So we made it. We made it the beach. And from now until the 12th I pledge to write about every day here, to show you our beautiful little family.

Dave and I left at three in the morning to pick up Brandon for the 11-hour drive. What a good man Dave is - the only break he got was a 90-minute window in Virginia before I quickly wussed out and became too tired to drive. We passed several cars along the way that we could tell were headed to The Beach, even if we didn't know who they were. After all, there are at least a dozen other Xenos homechurches each of 30 or more people going the same way to the same place, so we're bound to encounter a few. Through the dark farms in Ohio and tumbling into the Appalachian hills of West Virginia, getting lost in Virginia clouds and then emerging upon the pines and sandy knolls of North Carolina. Passing through Wilmington, passing the Food Lion, passing the gift shops, to get to the bridge. That bridge is our one way onto our beach; it curves up a hundred feet in the air over the small marina, and it's there Brandon gets his first glance ever of the row of beach houses. This is my fourth time here and it's still a beautiful sight.

Oh, the fruits of our anticipation. We've all been counting down all summer long for this trip together. And it's a long drive down the narrow strip of beach houses: house addresses start in the 100s at the bridge and your destination isn't until at least the 900s, sometimes into the 2,000s if you're unlucky enough. Until we're there, at a beautiful house, piling in our luggage in canvas avalanches. The first night is a flurry of settling: claiming beds, buying groceries at the local people-choked grocery, unpacking bathroom supplies, figuring out who's arrived and who's still forthcoming, maybe a shower if you're lucky enough.

Exhausted, we trickle over to the back porch of whichever house is on the beach and spend the evening together in a post-road-trip stupor. This year is the boys' turn to overlook the ocean; the girls' house is a block farther and across the street. We pull up wind-beaten rockers and perch on banisters, filling our greedy eyes with the sight of sand and dune and wave.

Most cannot resist the pull of the Atlantic, so girls don bikinis and boys lose their shirts and go tearing across the walkway to the ocean. The feel, the feel of those waves after so much time hyping it up to each other. We play in the waves like children, 20-something-year-olds sinking into the sand and kicking spray at each other as the setting sun splashes across our backs. Nothing but joy, and freedom.

As night comes, the smokers pull out their crumpled cigarette packs and cow-patterned lighters. Brandon even brought his hookah this year, and a supply of fruit-flavored coals to share. That ornate pipe tastes incredible passed around a circle of friends to the sound and salt smell of the ocean. We talk about the trip down, how good it is to just spend some time away together, and attempt to nail down times during the week to hang out with each other. So far, I'm planning on building a sandcastle with Dorian, having lunch with Colin on Thursday, spending silent reading time with Andrew, cramming in Dave and Pat and Tammy and Daina, and then a whole lot of walks on the beach with a whole lot of other people. I love them all and I wouldn't have it any other way.

I won't be sharing a bed with my man tonight, or for any of the nights down here. It'll be like living in the ministry house again, only now with some who are too old or too young for me to have roomed with before. Tomorrow morning I'm planning to get up early and make myself a cup of hot tea and sit on the porch. Mornings and evenings here get extra cool because of the sea, and the air feels sweet and clean. I hope that means I'll hear God's voice with an ocean air crispness.

Day 262

2009-09-01T22:21:00.002-04:00

Marriage Is:

Good Days and Bad Days

As a child, I had an innocent view of life getting better as a straight and steady 45-degree inclined line. But as life progressed, a different pattern became obvious - waves, undulating good and bad. It's just the way it is. And no matter what you do, how good you are or how hard working, circumstantial stuff unpredictably affects your life. Exhibit A: Marriage. One morning you turn over and are awe-struck by their sleeping face, compelled to reverently kiss their forehead. The next morning you roll over and inhale their noxious morning breath, and small offenses mount like hash marks on a prison wall: Left his beer can out last night for me to pick up. Didn't do the dishes last night like I asked him to. Didn't breathe right when I told him goodbye before work. Mental note: give him the cold shoulder and a snide remark about the dishes later tonight. And sometimes it is that childish, even if it may not be that conscious. Ride it out and do your part to make it better. The next bad day will be a little easier, and tomorrow will probably be the next good day.

Consideration

It's harder than you think, really. To grind my mental gears to a halt and intentionally take time to process "How can I make Dave feel more loved?" is not a natural pause. I don't think anyone does it naturally, either. When you're dating it's different - if you only have one planned date night a week, of course you'll put thought into it, you've got 6 other days to think about how to make it good. But when you see the guy every day and the last three date nights have been catching up on chores, it's a little more difficult. He becomes your routine rather than your nice night out; he sees my cowlicks every morning so why bother with the charade of nice dresses and make-up? Because this is special. Do not allow him to just be your roommate. Just because he knows what your farts smell like better than anyone else doesn't excuse your nicer side to be lazy. Put some effort into it and put on a show. For me, that's buying a box of 30-06 ammunition for Dave and planning a day at the range, but I wouldn't recommend that for everyone.

Losing the Idol

To me, Dave is the safest place in the world, my Safety with a capital 'S'. So my world got rocked when Dave started having a hard time after we got married. And I got pissed, because he wasn't doing his job. So Dave got pissed and confused. You know how in the Bible, sometimes God's name is written in all capital letters? I think GOD wants a monopoly on that capitalization - so he reached through the temples of my head and wrenched out that idol. Man, that sucked. To watch the burnished bronze scraped away to raw human flesh and feel the impervious arms beneath tremble under my weight. So Dave hadn't failed. I was just wrong. The statue of what I wanted him to be lies splintered at our feet, the ropes used to pull it down still tied at the broken neck; but now I'm standing next to Dave, shoulder to shoulder, bone of his bones and equally fragile.

A Good Bunch

2009-08-30T20:21:00.005-04:00

I have a lot of compassion for people who have past scarring from bad churches. What a terribly confusing dilemma - looking for the place reputed to be the first haven for the ragamuffins and outcasts, only to find the family of Christ full of judgment and all sorts of grief.

I know. I've been hurt by the Christian church in the past. I have suffered as a result of misunderstanding, fear, and the imperfections of the people who makes up the church. But I'm still here. And I want to help woo the alienated and give them hope and a reason to fall back in love with God's church.

In my life I have been in three churches: one Baptist, and 2 non-denominational. Presently, I go to a college-age homechurch in Xenos. We call ourselves Kodiak; this is some of us in the picture above. And it's a good little church. We're 30-some young adults between the ages of 18 and 27. We're a weird, abrasive, creative, and passionate group of people. We meet in the living room of a half-double less than a mile from Ohio State's campus; on one wall there's an assembled puzzle of "The Last Supper" opposite a rug mural of "Dogs Playing Cards".

And I have heard, and told, one too many bad church stories in my day. So I plan to combat that with what good stories I do have. That, here at least, we are a diverse and loving group with a quirky spread of abilities and personalities. A circle of people that welcomes in and tries to love the castout ragamuffins of the world that wash our way. A bunch who will stay up late together smoking cigarettes and telling stories around a campfire. We mentor each other, pray with each other, write encouragement notes for one another, bicker and cry at each other, and find more of God in the whole messy process. Some of us live together, often we'll vacation together, and are in fact about to spend an entire week down in North Carolina at Holden Beach. An imperfect and splendid mess.

It's not all sunbeams and unicorns; I've scars to show from my time here as well. But the alternative to the normal bumps and scrapes is a plastic peopleless bubble. And I'd like to start showing you reasons why it's worth the risk and hurt. The abundance of laughter and energy and friendships; the maturity and humility and sense of purpose. And the potential to be in one of the most real and beautiful things you'll ever be a part of.

Movie Arguments Aren't Real

2009-08-23T13:35:00.000-04:00

I love a good movie argument.

I was watching "Hitch" a few days ago. During a speed-dating session Hitch and his potential girlfriend, Sara, are arguing about a misunderstanding. She (wrongly) thinks that he set her friend up with a guy, Vance, just so he could get laid. Once Hitch realizes the misunderstanding, he leans across the table, already on his feet, and with the attention of the room yells back at Sara, "Vance is a pig, and I refused to take him on as client!" This was followed by her stunned silence and Hitch stalking out of the room, righteous and wounded.

It's the kind of argument that everyone wants to have, but probably never will.

I've had enough arguments with Dave to know this by now. Even the times when I think I'm going into an argument lily-white right with both barrels loaded, I never have a clean get-away. There's always, every single time, a way I am wrong or something I didn't think of. I have never gotten a chance to make a profound conclusive remark, stomp my Prada heel, dump my dirty martini on his head, and leave the room.

So how come it happens so often in movies?

We project into our stories what we want, like happy endings. And we like being right, and dramatically publically perfectly so.

But also, movies aren't as complicated as real life. After they stalk out of the room, they cut the scene instantly to two weeks later when the heat has blown over and they're finally figuring things out. In real life, you have to sit through every hour of those two miserable weeks, and the plot line of your life doesn't make promises about the resolution like a romantic comedy does.

And while that righteous moment would be awesome, there's a price to pay for it. Because you get to be right...but that's not the real goal. Being right doesn't mean you're resolved. That vindictive moment is a false ending, because if things are going to get worked out, there's inevitably more to come. And Hitch may have been right when he left the room, but I'll bet my bottom dollar he felt like crap as he walked out.

In the real world, I have to give up my stalk-out rights. Many is a time I've wanted to turn up my nose and turn my heel, but I know. I know better than that. There's a sigh, and a feeling of rolling up your sleeves; and it's definitely not as gratifying as throwing your cocktail in someone's face. Heck, if that's all it took, I'd carry around a martini glass with me wherever I went.

But real arguments are less like a flying mixed drink and more like a pair of beers at the table. You sit down. You talk for a while. You get to the bottom of the bottle and feel better, feel closer. It's low on glitz, but highly effective.

But, regardless, I still love a good movie argument.

Mother, May I?

2009-08-14T10:33:00.002-04:00

Everyone played "Mother, May I?" as I kid. One of the players is nominated the "Mother" and stands separate from the pack, whom are all lined up an equal distance away. Then Mother goes down the line and gives instructions as to what each player may do. "Carrie, take 3 giant steps forward," to which the player must respond "Mother, may I?" and wait until she hears "Yes, you may" before taking her steps. If you move without asking permission, it's back to the starting line with you. First to touch Mother wins. And is apparently the biggest suck up.

What a weird thing to base a game on asking permission.

But as a child, it's true that your every move is cushioned and guided by permission. Some kids rebel against having to ask for it. Some kids embrace its safety. I remember I used to love using the "they didn't give me permission" card when I didn't want to do something. "Well, if you don't want to go," my mother would say, "then just say I didn't give you permission. I'll take the blame."

I loved getting to blame my mom.

Blame goes hand in hand with permission. Permission shields the young from blame, who are too little to carry real responsibility, but as time goes on the mantle is transferred from the parents' shoulders onto the child's. Blame becomes heavy and permission a courtesy of the past.

For example, moving out is a big shift from permission to responsibility. And as time goes on, if successful, that responsibility continues to blossom. You no longer have an "allowance", it's your hard-earned money, free and clear. It's no longer school work, it's a diploma and a real job. It's no longer an apartment with three roommates, it's a house with a wife, a baby, and a golden retriever.

These past couple years, I've given up a lot of permissions, and accumulated greater odds for blame. I went to a church that wasn't with my parents. I moved out. I became more than 90% financially independent. I went to school and maintained good grades. And then I got married. That's a lot.

When Dave and I were driving down to West Virginia for a vacation last weekend, during the ride I was thinking about how often I still feel this child-like need for permission. I'm the kid who loved the safety of asking permission. I didn't want to own my "no", and was happy to have my parents say it for me. Often times, even now, I am still scared to take the hit of blame for something. Because permission was safe. Permission protected my desire for everyone to like me. Blame and responsibility promise no such thing.

And there I was on the winds of a West Virginia mountain road, surrounded by green and a strange realization of my independence. Mostly strange because I was sitting next to a man whom I'll probably have to ask permission for on more things than I ever did with my parents. But it's different. It's not, "Dave made the decision," it's "We made the decision." And I felt this fierceness, this perilous wildness rise up at the thought of looking over that edge with him, the weight of our decisions yoked across our shoulders.

Over that edge is the first sight of the end of school, less than a year away. And permission will diminish even more, crystallizing into our personal responsibility. Less and less we are those children asking "Mother, may I?". And it's a fearful and glorious thing.

Good People

2009-08-03T08:21:00.005-04:00

2 years ago, I lived in a house with other girls in my homechurch; as the group grew, my house split in two, and I was in the half that moved out. I asked my friend Patrick to borrow his parents' minivan and help me move some stuff the night before the big day. And oh, what a misadventure it was. After 30 minutes loading the minivan, Pat halted by the driver's door and heard the hiss of a flat tire. So we undid our work, drove it back down the alley that had provided the nail, and I helped change my first tire. The donut was so flat we barely got it around the corner. So we took the donut back off (deja vue, no?) as someone tried so hard to ignore us they almost backed into us. All our friends weren't answering their phones and every car that passed our plight took a piece of my soul with them; everyone could see us, and no one, NO ONE, was helping. People are selfish. People are jerks. I'm going to secede from the human race because people are such assholes. And then, more than 2 hours after that first hiss, hungry and tired, hunched in the dark with our pitiful flashlight, humanity finally brought forth a shining star. A man and his wife who lived across the street came home after dinner and took pity on us. They were the first to acknowledge that, yes, indeed, we were not invisible, and if they had done nothing more I would've loved them just as much. She brought us a pair of sodas, and he brought out his air compressor, and they saved the day. As we drove the van back to his parents' house, I turned and said "Pat, I'm going to name my first child after that man, even if I have a girl." And then broke down into ten minutes of hysterical laughter.

This past weekend Dave and I drove 4 hours to Summersville, West Virginia. He had replaced the car battery the week before, but because of a disconcerting battery light during our vacation, we stopped in at Advance Auto Parts to have it checked out again before we left town. After an assurance that we should make it home, no problem, we drove 2 hours toward the border of Ohio. And we almost crossed it, too. But while on the highway, the RPM needle suddenly dropped to zero...then the MPH needle fell like a rock...the radio was unresponsive..."Here we go," Dave said...and the car sputtered and died. We coasted to the berm in the middle of the West Virginia hills. I immediately sent a text to my parents asking for prayer, and prayed that the text itself would make it over the hills. I watched the cars stream past us with a glowing coal of resentment, the same I had felt next to Pat 2 years before.

It was the alternator. As we were merrily trucking along with the company of that firey red battery light on the dash, the alternator had conked out and left the battery to fend for itself. With the hood up, staring at an alien mass of metal and motor, Dave called his father. Who gave us the number to the highway patrol. Who gave us the number for a tow truck. But before Dave could dial the number, two cars pulled over. Call them angels, call it luck, call it karma, call it whatever you damn well please. What happened to us doesn't just happen.

Two engineers from the West Virginia National Guard coming back from drill were suddenly at our side and already had their heads under the hood. We told them the problem, and at a glance the older soldier, Greg, said, "Oh good, your alternator is on top of the engine. That means it'll be easy for us to take out." They just happened to have the necessary socket set with them to remove it, and the know-how to do so. For twenty minutes, they were elbow-deep in our engine and successfully removed the weathered part. They then drove us to an auto parts store at the next exit, and as Dave opened his wallet for that expensive hunk of metal, both men chimed in and said, "Y'know, we can help pitch in on it." Are you kidding? Is this real? This NEVER happens. We politely declined, and with Dave's wallet $120 lighter we drove back to the car, where Jason and Greg easily reattached the alternator. They wouldn't accept gas money, they wouldn't give me their information so I could thank them later. "We've all been there before, we know what it's like," was their simple response. We got the car started and the men drove away, leaving Dave and I to marvel. Breakdown to back on the road took no more than an hour.

We had gotten away with replacing our alternator with neither labor cost nor the time of leaving it in a shop. A job that my mother has been charged $300 for the labor alone Dave and I got for free on the side of the road.

From what we can gather, my mother's prayer was only moments before the soldiers pulled over; and because they wouldn't share their personal information, my mother is convinced they were angels.

Honestly - I hope they weren't.

Because that would mean that they were people. Good people.

Day 219

2009-07-19T23:57:00.002-04:00

Marriage Is:

Opposites Attracting (and Annoying)

While praying together recently, Dave said, "Sometimes, God, it seems like you intended Heather and I to be together because of how different we are, and it's a good thing even when it's frustrating." I'm happy with anything, and Dave is picky about everything. I can make a decision on a dime, but Dave needs a week's notice before he can make a decision. I crave the stimulation of people, but Dave is perfectly content without it. I am Dave's excitement and motivation. Dave is my prudence and wisdom. I thrust people into Dave's life and he diminishes my need for their affirmation. It usually works out well, even though our opposing opposites sometimes manifest in ugly nagging and feet-dragging, but all said and done, together we get It done and do It right.

A Lot of Kissing

I have a dim memory from when I was twelve of walking into our yellow kitchen while my mother was at the stove. My father was hugging her from behind as she stirred the noodles, and they laughed and kissed over my mother's shoulder. I can still feel the sloshy happiness. My aunt told me about a time when my young cousin, Jake, discovered she and my uncle mid-kiss, and he laughed loudly and yelled, "Do it again!" Kissing is important. It's a conjunction, a thermometer, a punctuation mark, a transition. It's a symbol of reconciliation, an affectionate salutation, an expression of wanting to be close to the other person, even a comfort to those around you able to witness that the relationship is healthy. I make sure to kiss Dave a lot, even when it's forced upon him, like a puckered great-aunt descending on her protesting 8-year-old nephew. Those kinds of kisses are more fun to inflict, anyways. But the other kinds are pretty good, too.

An Emotional Swamp

Dave and I were arguing about our vacation - at least, that's what the tip of the iceberg looked like. It was one of those arguments that we had been pacing the shore of for a while now, and when it was finally clear there was no way around it, we put on our waders for the long slog. We were chest-deep in muddied water, sure we would drown in our miscommunication before we reached the other side. I can't understand why Dave will go on vacations with our friends, but not with just me. Dave doesn't get why I will spend money on a weekend that can be saved for a better trip later. Bumbling through the emotional swamp toward each other is dirty painful work; we sat on the bed, staring at each other over the impasse, knee-deep in muck and internally asking Why again did I marry this unknowable alien lifeform? I don't understand how he can be such a perfectionist. I don't understand how she can be happy with anything. And then, unexpectedly, our weary feet hit the mossy shore. The unfathomable absurdity became amusement, and we began to laugh. After all that work, all we can say is that we now at least know what we don't understand about each other. And, with any luck, the crossing of this swamp will give us more courage and hope when we come to the next.

Moments

Two weeks ago the orbit of the International Space Station came at both the perfect time and angle for those in Columbus to witness its passing. The first pass went by at the sky's meridian while we were still out with our friends, nothing more than a fleet bright star. About an hour later, after going completely around the earth in the time it took for Dave and I to get home, it circled back around. Looking at the clock, we rushed outside together across the street and Dave pointed to the left of the elementary school, saying it would be coming out of the southwest. For a full ten minutes, we stood there at the playground fence and watched that dot glide across the sky before us, now barely above the treeline and dimming as it crossed the distance. I remember the air smelled summer sweet when it was finally lost behind a cluster of branches. Dave's hand was warm when I clasped it for the walk back to our apartment.

Yesterday was a good day. Dave and I were both in good moods, and planned to spend the evening in the machining lab so he could get some work done. There was a moment before we left when Dave was boiling Kroger-brand macaroni and cheese and I came around behind him, wrapping my arms around his middle and pressing my nose into the back of his shirt. It was slate grey and redolent of soap, and joined by the smell of the summer rain coming in the kitchen window. The water boiled and the drops pattered and the linoleum felt sticky under my bare feet, and I wanted to stand there forever with my arms around him and the box fan blowing.

Baseball Magic

2009-07-17T11:02:00.002-04:00

Something amazing happened when I graduated from high school in 2005. My family was a little more than three years into my parents' divorce when I walked the stage and flipped my tassel, and when it was all over it was time for a celebratory dinner. Uncles, grandparents and cousins crowded happily around me and the question arose that any kid from a split family dreads - do I want to have dinner with my mom's family or my dad's family? In such a setting, the potential for family drama was off the charts.

But something incredible happened. I can't even remember who initiated it, but the next thing I knew we were at Don Pablo's and I was at the head of a table of twenty people. My mother's relatives and father's relatives were all interspersed and passing baskets of chips, laughing together as though the clock had been set back four years and there was no heartache. I remember little else about my graduation, but that memory sticks clear and strong and precious.

A couple of years ago my mother got remarried to a guy named Trent. And amazing things have been occurring lately.

I first saw it one night at the baseball diamond. After one of my sister's softball games on a sunny Saturday in May, Dave wanted to stay behind to practice pitching. My siblings joined us on the field, followed by my stepdad and my sister's boyfriend, and then my father as well. Dad and Trent made amiable small talk as we threw the ball around the bases and took turns at bat, nearly able to fill the whole field with our motley crew. I marveled at the scene as I stood at third base; it was so bizarre and wonderful.

Dave was a pitcher in high school, and I had been a catcher - the perfect match. I was raised listening to Cleveland Indians games on the radio in the car with my father every summer. Trent is actually a Cincinnati Reds fan, but we can forgive him of that. And now both of my younger siblings are on baseball and softball teams during both school and summer. We all love baseball.

I tell you this because baseball is what started to bring the splinters of our family back together.

And just this past weekend, it happened again. Dave and I invited all of my family to the batting cages. And one by one, everyone showed up and had a good time together. After that, my siblings campaigned for a game of mini golf, and everyone ended up playing. What a strange group we were, centered around us three children - my husband, our mother, our step-father, and our father. Dad ended up winning the game, and made sure to thank me for inviting him before he left. Of course there was a little awkwardness, but, incredibly, it was only a little bit.

And then, I thought my head would spin straight off my shoulders, Trent invited my father to a cookout the following night and Dad accepted. There we all were, lined up in my mother's kitchen passing out drinks and picking at the relish tray, a happy mess of people. We made cheeseburgers on the grill and played badminton and a lawn game called "Washers" that my dad brought over. It was an abnormally near-normal family summer cookout.

I couldn't explain it. I have no idea how such a beautiful thing happened, and I'm probably idealizing it. But it takes a lot of guts and a lot of grace from my parents to make such a gift to me and my siblings happen.

So thanks.

Gnats

2009-07-12T23:45:00.001-04:00

There's nothing like the practical to cure moodiness.

Everyone has those days when their nasty internal critics catch up with them, chanting poisonous little lies and half-truths. It's a dirty collection of "always" and "nevers", buzzing like gnats at your ears. Not pretty enough. Too lazy. Not smart enough. Too loud. Coward. Hypocrite. No one really likes you. You'll never be good enough. Like bugs on hot days, there's always at least one or two to swat away, but when they come in swarms it can be paralyzing.

During a two-hour afternoon nap last week I was surrounded by a cloud of them, the annoying buzz rising to piercing shrieks. The dense darkness pressed down as I laid on the couch and watched the clock tick, becoming slowly more convinced that three hundred orphans and a baby kitten would die horrible deaths if I continued to be so incompetent. And if I can't get anything right, if I can't even keep my own kitchen clean, why bother at all with anything? I sunk deeper into the maroon couch cushions beneath the crescendo.

Then Rationality came charging from the back with a fly swatter, bellowing above the noise that it was all nonsense. Doing nothing is far worse than getting a few things wrong while trying to get it right. And what does a sink full of 5-day-old dirty dishes have to do with the orphans? Get up. Get UP.

So I went to the kitchen and filled the sink with water, the oppressive cloud stalking my movements, still thick and violent. But with each glass I scrubbed clear and each pot I scoured clean, the screech of the gnats would fade and the cloud thin. The irrational introspection was being replaced by the pleasure of work, of usefulness. A cacophony of "never do" was confronted with the evidence of "just did" by the filled dish rack.

I ended the day with both a cleaner kitchen and a cleaner mind.

In Defense of the Unpractical

2009-07-06T14:10:00.006-04:00

Right about this time last year, Dave and I were sitting at a card table in the second story of his house on 12th Avenue making an attempt to whittle down our guest list. We crunched the numbers together on Excel, both per head, and how much each head would cost to be there (food, cake, favors, beer, tablecloths...). It was one of the more stressful days of our engagement, so we took a break to sit on the roof and watch a distant set of belated fireworks. While we were out there, my pragmatic Dave had an epiphany.

"So...by the time we add up the cost of everything involved in the wedding, how much will that cost in comparison to the stuff that we get?"

I scuffed the shingles with my sandal. "If you add up the bridal showers, bachelorette party and wedding presents together, we'll probably break even."

"How does that make any sense? Why not just use the money we have to get the stuff that we need? Why all the extra stress?"

I smiled and looked toward the miniature fireworks, unsurprised by the response. In one sense the guy has a point, honestly. But there's a deeply relational side to this extraordinarily elaborate tradition, something loving and healing and good.

After having a frustrating week, I went to a wedding on Friday. It was a beautiful wedding, with warm air and cloudy blue skies, the bride's veil caught in the breeze. One of my dearest friends was the maid of honor; she wore a royal blue dress and a pure grin. It was the kind of wedding that gives you hope, that you really can believe has a chance of making it.

The reception was held in a refinished barn. I could see kids playing croquet and frisbee outside as myself and other 20-somethings played jenga inside. The decorations were beautiful, the cake was delicious, and we danced the electric slide twice. Everything was perfect, from the maid of honor's toast to the dip at the end of the couple's first dance. And as glad as they were to have us there, we were equally as happy to be there.

I sat at a table at the edge of the room after the ties had all been loosened and the sleeves rolled up. As I talked with good people and watched them laugh together, I realized that a warm peacefulness had slowly replaced the strain of my frustration. I wish I could've told my husband a year ago: this, these few moments of peace and joy, this is why we don't do it the practical way. The wedding was never about the presents, it was always about the people. We need to celebrate, we need parties. To do nothing more than to hope and laugh together and give love to each other is such a healing exercise. And I had needed to be there, to have that opportunity to simply be joyful and be healed.

So - thank goodness for impractical weddings.

Day 201

2009-07-02T08:21:00.001-04:00

Marriage is:

Someone Who Believes in You

Girls have these weird things called hormones. When those IFAW commercials come on showing the starving kittens and begging for donations, it's the hormones that make girls cry. It takes a feeling like sympathy and tips the scale to tears. And last week, hormones turned my uncertainty about my writing into full-blown paralysis and a tear-choked throat. Squeakily I asked Dave to sit down and talk with me for a little while because I felt weird. And with that quiet assurance of his, he laid down on the bed with his arm around me as I clung to him, tears slowly darkening his light blue shirt. He waited until I was ready to talk, until enough of his warmth and strength had seeped into me to ask, "Do you think I have a shot at being a writer?" He rubbed my shoulder. "Of course I do. I wouldn't be encouraging something I thought was a pipe dream." He had cured me in fifteen perfect words.

About Honesty

Want a good marriage? Keep no secrets. Man up and talk about what's going on, even if you made a mistake. Are you really going to avoid a day or two of uncomfortable arguing at the cost of driving a tiny wedge into your relationship? Again, you must have that willingness to ride into battle for your marriage. Secrets are yours, they're not ours. That is the peril, the breakdown of the 2=1 formula. It takes a special courage to sit down together and work through problems, especially when you know it's going to be a difficult long-term project. But you're on the same team, you share the same goal, so act like it. Set that good habit now.

Being Silly

I've learned in the past few months that a good marriage brings out the silly side in everyone. If Dave comes home from work and starts joking with me, I know he had a good day. Another friend of mine said that her husband sings a ridiculous version of the "SexyBack" song whenever it comes on the radio, which confirms just how much she adores him. For Dave, the joking could come in a variety of ways. It could be playful chauvinistic questions about why I'm not in the kitchen, or sitting on top of me and blocking my view while I'm watching TV, even doing somersaults over my belly when I'm lying down. I always squall that he's being a little brother when he does that stuff, but I love every second of it, even if my only real defense is cheating and pinching him, hard. Sometimes my grandmother gets concerned when she hears about our roughhousing, but I flash her a grin and tell her how much I love playing with him, and she shruggs it off.

Someone to Hold Onto

Dave and I spent our first weekend apart a few days ago, and I wanted to spend some time feeling close to him before we left. All it took was laying next to him on the couch and watching TV with him for an hour before getting packed. There are also days when Dave will come home, quiet and distant. Those are the days when he takes me by the wrist to the bed and curls up next to me in silence. I'll typically pester him about why he's feeling down, but he doesn't always want to talk about it immediately. So I'll become quiet and still, knowing that all he needs right now is peace and his arms around me.

The Acrobat

2009-06-29T11:15:00.000-04:00

Imagine: You're at the circus, sitting under that great red-and-white striped tent, watching all the glitz and spectacle. Kernels of popcorn fall from your mouth because you're so mesmerized by the sparkling parade of elephants in the center ring. Then with a grand flourish, the ringmaster bellows into his great yellow bullhorn and the spotlight slides up and up to illuminate the band of acrobats waving from a tiny platform. A thin metal wire stretches before them, and one of the acrobats steps upon it, far above the ground. You lean forward in your seat, captivated. With barely a wobble, she successfully crosses to the other side with a small bow; at the second platform, she's handed a long pole to balance in addition on her walk back. And then her fellow acrobats pile china plates on the ends of her pole, and her arms begin to shake from the weight as she carefully turns to cross again. As the trick becomes more precarious, your popcorn bag is forgotten, scattered across the floor. You are transfixed by her ungainly silhouette, worrying about what would happen if she fell and rooting for the seemingly-impossible feat of her making it across the wire in perfect condition. Plates chattering, she takes the first step, and you hold your breath.

But why? Why are we so wrapped up in her successful crossing with that absurd burden of hers? Because even sitting in the bleachers, we know that terrible feeling. The pole starting to tip and the plates sliding off, tumbling to the ground with shattering sounds; your heart chugging as the rod pulls away toward the ground, leaving you to cling to your thin wire with little more than your skin. You don't have to be an acrobat to know that sick feeling of failure - just human. And we watch her, wanting her balancing act to succeed and assure us that we will be able to get to the other side, too.

As a child, you don't realize how true to real life her balancing act is, but with age you experience moments of feeling a very precarious balance as your responsibilities pile up. How do I get my homework done, and go out on a date? How do I make it to my son's baseball game and not upset the boss by missing that work meeting?

There are the circus freaks: those who can coordinate 3 kids' soccer games and work a full-time job and bake cookies for the PTA meeting. But, I repeat, they are circus freaks. I am as fascinated with them as I am the bearded lady. The rest of us gawk at their towering burdens and wonder how heavy their dosage of Ritalin must be for such feats.

And eventually you do learn that there are too many good things, too many voices telling you what you should carry. When it gets to the point where you're trying to haul a fully-loaded china hutch across the wire, it must fall. And it will fall, with a sickening sound of breaking, when inevitably you can no longer bear it. Learn from it and lighten the load. Shake your head. Say no. Better to cross with two plates than to fall with ten.

Grit

2009-06-20T09:01:00.003-04:00

Six months ago I put on a white dress and a ridiculously high pair of heels. I walked down the aisle with my father wearing my mother's veil. I met Dave at the altar, and we read the vows we had written to each other in front of nearly 300 of our friends and family. I walked back out of the auditorium with Dave as "First Kiss" from The Last of Mohicans played over the sound of clapping. We got out to the hallway and hugged each other until our attendants followed, shrieking with happiness for us. I remember looking down at my new ring through the happy tears and spluttering, "Oh my God, it really happened!" There was joy, such an awesome amount of joy, in those first five minutes.

But there was no magic.

Let me explain.

I was raised in the church by Christian parents and graduated from a Christian high school. At every moment in my young life, the wonder of marriage was on a sacred pedestal. Living together with someone "in sin" was the unthinkable. And looking at those who lived together and those who were married there was that one major difference: the wedding. Something transcendent must happen at the altar, like invisible cherubs sprinkling extra doses of Fidelity and Happiness onto our heads. And so I walked down the aisle at my wedding expecting the cherubs.

I climbed the stairs on-stage, said my vows, poured the unity sand, exchanged the rings, and was pronounced. It was a great and happy moment. But in the midst of my incredible joy was a twinge of surprise: the cherubs had never showed. Outside the auditorium doors, crying and laughing and yelling, I looked at my ring and then up to my handsome new husband. And he still just felt like my boyfriend Dave, he didn't feel like my husband yet. I thought, maybe I mistimed the cherubs, perhaps they'll come after tonight, the "two shall become one" deal like in Genesis. So Dave and I hooked arms and walked into the reception, a beautiful amazing party simply celebrating us.

We left our party (you know what happened), morning came and we opened our presents at my father's house surrounded by our loving family. Two days later we drove to Florida and had the best two weeks of our lives. Six months after that I sit here and write this - and I'm still waiting for the cherubs. I should've known better. After all, my parents made the same promise and I saw first-hand what has happened to millions of people; that magical promise I believed in as a child failed.

But I repeat: there is no magic.

That's not a slur to my wedding day, because it was perfect. And it's not a grudge against my husband, because I love him and love what we have. A wedding is an amazing thing, and magical in the sense that, my God, six months of work is actually coming together and happening. And the fun and the joy and the laughter is incredibly pure and loud on that day. But the vows themselves are not a magic spell. And most importantly, your wedding is not enough to keep you married forever.

What I'm saying is that your vows are not magic, they're just an example of what you are going to promise to this person every day for the rest of your lives. Do not expect the wedding to suddenly unite you body, mind and soul. Do not assume that the "cleave" God commands in Genesis is effortless. Don't wait for magic to make it happen. This is the person you love dearest of all - fight for him, fight for her.

When I told people that I was engaged, everyone considered that to be permission to give me their marriage advice. I got a lot of awful and weird advice as a result from people in relationships I did NOT want to replicate ("Marriage is a business contract, that's all it is - so she does her thing, I do mine, and we just share the same bank account"). However, on the airplane to Dallas last summer, I sat next to an older couple that was still teasing each other after at least 40 years of marriage. Enchanted, I asked how they made it work for so many years. The husband was quiet for a moment, and then said, "It takes grit. It's hard, but it's a very good thing." As the months went on, I continued to get bad advice, but the marriages that I admired would always tell me basically the same thing: "It takes grit."

Though the task is daunting, it's satisfying knowing you don't have to leave it up to the magic of cherubs. Staying married simply means you have to be a scrapper, you have to have that 'grit', that 'firmness of mind and spirit and unyielding courage'. And when in battle you take those hills and reach the top together, sweating and exhilarated, it's another victory won and it's worth every minute of the struggle.

Boomtown

2009-06-15T12:28:00.002-04:00

Every time I go to West Virginia it seems that I am being adopted by someone else's family.

My high school friend Tabatha brought Amy and I down the week after our graduation to spend a week on the holler where her mother's side of the family lives. I talked Tabatha and Amy into piercing my ear for me, which I quickly regretted with loud obscenities when they picked a needle too small. Later that summer, my dad's then-fiance Leah drove us down to her parents' home for a weekend of card games and adventuring in the woods. That was the week Josiah convinced me to bike down their steep gravel driveway; I came limping back to the house with a bloody hip after I used it as a brake.

This past weekend I was officially adopted into a happy mess of McCray, Matheny and Mitchell relatives at an annual family reunion that Dave's Granny Rena and her cousins hold in their small birthtown of Nitro, West Virginia. The wide Kanawha (KA-NAW) River cuts through the soft Appalachian foothills, Nitro cradled softly in one of her bends, a long-faded Mayberry boomtown. But the residents of Mayberry haven't all passed on yet.

We met them there, at a potluck feast held at a shelter near the river that afternoon, and most of them were triple our age. But all of them are such good people. I dominated cornhole with old cousin Danny for more than an hour, and then came in and sat next to affectionate Aunt Doris. Her Alzheimers keeps her from finishing a single thought or sentence, but she was cheerfully content to pat my hands repeating, "But that's ok, that's ok," laughing innocently.

After lunch, some of the group crossed the Nitro - St. Albans bridge, the bridge that Dave's great-grandfather had worked on, and made our way to Great Aunt Reta's house just up the hill past St. Albans. The air smelled of the natural gas leaking from the mountains and the house quickly filled with energy and people, all eager to meet me and adopt me into the family. But of all those loud wonderful people - Mary Katherine helping raise her grandson, and Rogey who works night shift as a guard down at the prison, or blonde Patty with the skulls on her necklace and earrings and shirt - of them all my favorite was Great Aunt Reta.

Reta is Dave's Granny Rena's older sister and she has lived in West Virginia her whole life. When she was a young lady, back in the days when Nitro was a boom town with 5 chemical plants, her job was to come early in the morning and take samples of all the products for testing in the lab. One day she ran into her boss and he turned to the man next to him and asked, "Bill, have you met Reta, our lab girl?" Bill and Reta reached their 63rd wedding anniversary this past weekend. I love Aunt Reta for her spark and her spunk, her compassion and her determination, and her damned good humor.

As the bulk of the family members trickled away before the sun fell, leaving behind half-eaten potato salad and none of the homemade pies, a small cluster of people remained in the living room, including Aunt Reta, Granny Rena, and Pappy Brooks (Rena's husband). The three of them had all graduated from Nitro High School at the end of the forties, and the old stories started coming out.

Beautiful earthy stories, tales that felt like digging carrots out of a garden. Pappy Brooks recalled the truck ride with his brother-in-law Ronald when he first mentioned to him this great lady he meant named Doris. Aunt Reta remembered a time when she was grocery shopping with her young daughter Denise and tight on cash; after the store owner's wife, Mrs. Duncan, rung her up and they were walking out Denise said, "Mommy, she gave you more bills than you gave her." And on a different occasion, Bill's car needed new tires but there was no extra money for it. He went and talked to Mr. Duncan, who gave him four new tires and said "Just pay me back when you sell your house." Granny Rena recalled Halloween night of 1949 when she was dressed like a pirate and Brooks walked her home for the first time. "His eyes were so red, you could travel from here to Los Angeles on his bloodvessels," Pappy Brooks said at one point, describing an alcoholic mechanic he knew. Granny Rena made fun of her sister by reminding her of the time her high school boyfriend had given her a diamond ring for her April birthday, and then told everyone else that it was an engagement ring.

They told sad stories, too, like cutting down sick apple trees. Doris had a son named Terry who died because he choked on his bottle milk and drowned. Rena and Reta's cousin Clarence owned a bakery in St. Albans; his wife died in a car accident that his daughter survived when she was eight, and then Clarence himself died of a heart attack in her sophomore year of high school. The two years before her graduation she lived with Aunt Reta, and now owns an alpaca farm in Kansas. She had been at the house earlier that day, looking hungrily at the old pictures of her parents that Granny Rena had brought with her from Cleveland.

I wrote it all down, every precious word I could capture as I listened. Aunt Reta and I were the last to turn in, and I scribbled the last details while she drank a glass of milk and watched the news. She grew bored during a story of a pair of African-American parents starting a youth baseball league to better a bad neighborhood, and I made a comment, something neutral. "I ain't got nothing against Negroes" she replied. "The way I see it, there are good and bad Negroes, just as there are good and bad Whites." She then leaned forward in her rocker and confided, "And I ain't against abortion either." And it was in that moment of confidence that I completely fell in love with Great Aunt Reta.

I crawled into bed next to Dave shortly after, happy and proud to be a McCray.

Day 170

2009-06-01T10:23:00.008-04:00

Marriage is:

Like Popping Zits:

After an hour-long conversation in the car with Dave, I realized the relief I felt after talking everything out was the same feeling I have when I drain a big pimple. This is the grossest and most effective way I can illustrate what marital conflict is like. Everyone who's endured adolescence knows the different classes of pimples: the surface whiteheads, the simple but deeper blackheads, and then - The MegaZit. It hurts, it's bright red, it's perched on the tip of your nose, and you have to wait 3 days before it's ready for you to do anything about it. And the more potato chips and HoHo's you ingest, the more frequently and grotesquely do you break out. But think about it: there are the "whitehead" moments, where you ask each other nicely to please stop leaving cups all over the living room because it's irritating. Then the "blackhead" arguments, at which point you have to talk through your annoyance and a schedule of dish days so that we have spoons when we need them and the apartment doesn't smell like old hamburger fat. And The MegaZit incidents: over a period of a few days little annoyances snowball into little grudges that can't quite be articulated until - finally! - the frustrations come to a head, and after an hour of honesty and emotional outlet the pressure and soreness is gone. Zits are unavoidable in every sense, but can easily be managed: wash daily with affection, scrub often with honesty and openess, and make sure your time together is nutritious.

The Life-Long Tuning of a Well-Oiled Machine:

Before Dave and I got married, my dad tried to explain to me that as a couple we would become more than the sum of our parts, that as we got to know each better we would work better together. Since I played softball as a kid I had an inkling of what he was talking about – I cover 2nd base, you take 1st – but didn’t realize that Dave and I were walking onto a field where our positions were mostly unassigned. Who washes the dishes on Friday? Who will take care of the laundry? What’ll happen when the car needs fixing? In the first few months, we started figuring it out, and the creaky new gears started getting oiled in the right spots. I don’t worry about the bills getting paid and Dave doesn’t worry about groceries every week; I’m this piston, he’s that wire, and this is how our machine works. A machine will output error messages such as “XrtlP45x” and you’ll have to speak it’s language to understand how to fix it; just like Dave has figured out that when I say, “I had such a bad day I can’t see straight,” my error message really means “I need a hug and an ice cream cone”. We’re learning how our Marriage Machine works and how to speak each other’s language, and it is satisfying rewarding work.

Kickstarted By Adventures:

There are few things I find as satisfying as sitting next to Dave in a conversation and being able to turn and say "Remember the time when....?" Those adventures, and the stories of those adventures, create unbelievably strong tethers for the relationship and the more there are the better. The week after we returned from our honeymoon, I made it my project to immediately print out the pictures and put nine of them in one of our brand new frames. Pictures of the starfish we found, and kayaking with the alligators, and riding the scooter in St. Augustine are all in there. And the first month or two of our marriage was rough - we got back from worry-free paradise to a hopelessly-dissheveled apartment, an impending quarter of school, and our part-time jobs on top of that. But those pictures, those memories, acted as a steel cable guideline in the midst of our first storms reminding us of how much fun and goodness can be in our relationship. We just went on an adventure this past weekend, driving four hours to a shoot in Kentucky and camped with 15 other gun enthusiasts, and effectively attached another strong tether for our relationship. It'll be even stronger when I get to later say, "Remember that time at the Kentucky shoot around the campfire when they pranked the snoring guy with the cherry-scented dildo?"

Strangely Inexplicable:

The point of these particular posts is, to the best of my ability, shed light on the workings of marriage and show the hope and humor that exists in it one snapshot at a time. I look back to before I was married and wish people had given me a better picture of what to expect. I must be forgiving, though, because it's almost impossible to adequately describe to the unmarried what being married is like; just like hitting a home run or traveling to a different country, you really can't know the experience until you've done it yourself. And there's also the wonderful fact that every single marriage is a unique structure, the intricate particulars that grace its basic frame never to be duplicated again; this wonderful fact compounds the problem of explaining "Marriage" in the general sense to another. But I can tell you the essential materials: determination, gratitude, laughter, love, and humility. And assure you that, done right, it is good.

The Problems of Pleasure and Imperfection

2009-05-25T08:56:00.006-04:00

I had been up since seven that morning, which, since I should've been out of bed by 6:30, meant that I had been running late all day. Running behind stresses me out, and as any girl can testify a hormone-stress cocktail is volatile if allowed to mix, and I could feel the spoon stirring inside of me. Even though I was running late to dinner with a friend on campus, as an act of prudence I changed course and sat next to Mirror Lake for 5 minutes to calm down.

I sat in the grass and watched the fountain, waiting for the emotions to settle. Then along comes a happy couple of ducks waddling along the edge of the lake toward me pecking at the grass for food. Their boat-shaped hips swayed awkwardly from side to side as their flourescent- orange pancake-thin feet slapped the stones; I noticed the disproportionally pompous curled feathers at the tail of the male and began to laugh out-loud. Never before have I ever been so assured of two of God's attributes - His pleasure in the act of creation, and His sense of humor - as when as I was watching those two silly creatures. Could you come to any other conclusion? How utterly and delightfully impractical ducks are. God must have laughed when he made the first one, and that is a comfort to me.

I went to a different lake 2 weeks ago at Whetstone and a friend and I marveled at the too-obvious extravagance of our surroundings. Maple, oak and pine trees lined the water - why are their leaves different shapes? Or their bark different textures? An obese pond fish highlighter-orange wiggled over to us into the shallows - why practically bother with color at all? Dogs can't even see in color. A turtle's red-striped snout broke the surface, followed by his textured shell - why have a geometric pattern engraved like art along his back? Why bother loading food with taste and texture and variety, why go to the trouble of filling honeysuckle pips with sweet scent? Another pair of ducks were here, paddling with their bright orange feet, and the sheer enjoyment and extravagance of creation filled me. How could anyone look at a Desert Box Turtle's yellow paint stripes and say there was no painter? How could anyone look at the Clown Fish's colors and not see the marks of his make-up artist?

Walking in German Village this weekend, I had a less-euphoric experience with nature that touches on the "why" of that "how". Dave and I were walking along the brick streets of southern columbus when I noticed a small defect in the sidewalk the size of a fifty-cent piece. We never stopped moving, but as I looked down I noticed it was the grey remains of a baby bird, small wings perfectly outstretched as though in flight. His body was flat and had few remaining feathers on it; ants were trudging in and out of the holes that had developed in his delicate body, carrying on the process of decay. I would rather not know what exactly the ants were carrying as they were walking away.

The ducks and the dead baby bird represent two problems: the problem of pleasure, and the problem of imperfection. When I look at all of creation and its enormously unnecessary attention to detail and variety, I see God. But when others look at that exorbitant creation, they see the dead baby birds - it's not enough that it contains the ability to be incomprehensibly and impractically enjoyable, because it's not perfect. Which is an absolutely true problem.

But that dead baby bird is exactly why I do believe in God. I couldn't put hope in the existing goodness in the world if I didn't believe the world has been broken, damaged. To me, that assurance of brokeness is one of the truest things keeping me sane in a world that seems to be full of contradictions. Something is undeniably wrong, but then something is undeniably right as well. I could not believe in God were it not for my freedom of choice; if we can choose to love, that means we can choose to hate, and for the choices to be real the results must be real as well. Every night at six'o'clock we see its very real symptoms on the news. This truth also, the truth of corruption, is an elementary admittance that God must, and does, make. This world seems to be an apple filled with worms, and believing in God means being able to both admit the presence of the disease and the sweetness of the fruit as it was made to be.

Who's really persuaded that what we have here, an imperfect world diseased with worms and filled with dead baby birds, is all that we have and nothing more? Our base hunger for a perfect world is too strong to be denied and will very certainly not be met here in this place. I believe there's an apple untouched by worms, a tree where baby birds are born and don't fall out of their nests, a place where our cravings will be satisfied. Imperfection will no longer be a problem, and Pleasure will be enjoyed uncorrupted. In that place, the food will still be spiced, only with more precision and variety; and the flowers will still have colors, only with more vibrance and creativity; and if I'm lucky, that place will still have ducks, but with brighter orange feet.

I'm grateful for what spices and flowers and ducks we have here, but am glad I can call it all both broken and good and look forward to the best that is yet to come.

A Free-Willed Lover

2009-05-16T13:26:00.007-04:00

I laid in bed at around six'o'clock in the evening a couple weeks ago, listening to the ceiling fan as I stared at the wall. It had been an exhausting week filled with a rainy birthday, a sinus infection, and not enough time with Dave. Earlier that afternoon he and I sat in the Lowe's parking lot for an hour wearily talking through ways we had let each other down and how to get through the rest of the school quarter. As I began to wake up from the three-hour afternoon nap we had taken together, I contemplated many things that fit into one general heading:

Marriage is hard.

Those who are married understand that small sentence with every fiber of their experience and being. Those who are not married may be aware of its truth, but the hard wisdom isn't in you until you're in it. But for me, the difficulties have been opening my eyes to see something about God and the importance - the beauty - of freedom in love.

What's so strange about God is that He is both a parent and a lover to us, both of which are especially clear in His Old Testament words to His beloved nation, Israel. In the Psalms, David talks about God's role in the womb itself; in Hosea, God the parent speaks tenderly of "when Israel was a child" and that he fed him and taught him to walk; in Isaiah, God illustrates Himself as an ever-attentive mother. But to these same people, God is their wooing lover and husband. In Isaiah, he talks of rejoicing over Israel as his "bride"; in Jeremiah and Ezekial, he calls her "an adulterous wife"; in Hosea, God "allures" Israel into the desert in order to reconcile with her and to "betroth" himself to her.

Phil Yancey gives a deft summation:

"Good parents nudge their children from dependence toward freedom. Lovers, however, reverse the pattern. A lover possesses complete freedom, yet chooses to give it away and become dependent ... The difference between those two relationships shows, I believe what God has been seeking in his long history with the human race. He desires not the clinging, helpless love of a child who has no choice, but the mature, freely given love of a lover. He has been 'romancing' us all along." Disappointment with God (p163)

Love does not, cannot, exist without choice. Men were not only given the ability to choose for or against loving men and God, but God has made the choice to love Men. And the choice to love does not come easily; some days, the vow words "and for worse" roll around in your mouth like a sour grape.

God the Ragged Lover has been unbuttoning his shirt to show the scars, the terribly beautiful wounds, of Love that I'm beginning to wear and understand, finally as a lover myself. And He is smiling. Because Love is choosing to stay when my legs tremble with the desire to run. Love is choosing to take the blows and throw the punches, rather than back out of the ring unmarked and independent. Love has the courage to scrap and endure, to take a hit and keep on coming. Love has a tender tenacity that makes the choice every day, in weariness and anger and sadness, to put the gloves back on for another round.

Dave didn't have to talk through things with me in the parking lot - he chose to sit there for an hour with me and work it out. I didn't have to come within 10 feet of him after our discussion - I chose to take a nap with him on the same bed so we could feel closer. And all those situations are an exercise of our freedom and demonstrate the fighting heart of Love. And damn it, it hurts.

That's what God wants. He wants us to understand that loving is fighting because it's choosing. He wants to be loved, which means he wants to be chosen. Yancey says that love is "what power can never win." And that is what Dave and I's decisions to choose each other and to fight for each other is teaching me about Him: God would rather woo the uncertain choice of a lover than demand the obedience of a child.

And I love that freedom.

Laughter After Auschwitz

2009-04-26T14:24:00.004-04:00

The other night Dave and I stayed up late to watch an hour-long show on PBS titled "Swimming in Auschwitz"; it was a compilation of interviews of 6 different women, and since it ran without commercials, Dave and I were sucked in until the end. Each of the women lost one or more family members in their stay at the camp; all had an admirable composure and dignity in retelling their stories, and one of the women was even able to recount some of her memories there with laughter. Laughter.

Something I have been learning to appreciate more and more lately are the loving and good-tempered elders in the world. You know who I mean, the people one or two or three generations ahead of us who care about others and are genuinely good-natured. I think they are so precious because they seem to be markedly rare. In my growing appreciation for such people I also have been obtaining a growing knowledge about how hard living is; that gratitude, of all the disciplines, gets more difficult with time; that a playful spirit can so easily be shriveled up by daily responsibilities; that as personal injustices heap up over the years the temptation to turn inward and care only for oneself grows in strength; and that as you see more of your dreams clearly slip through your fingers your hope and imagination can easily fade.

Early in the show the women were describing their arrival to Auschwitz and the process of their individuality being taken away. First their luggage was thrown into a pile and they were told they would never see it again. Then came the 2 lines everyone was filtered through, the able-bodied to the showers and the grandparents and child to the chimneys. At the showers, they were separated into men and women, and then were each instructed to take off all of their clothes including their underwear. Naked, their heads were shaved and then they were thrown a different unfamiliar set of clothing. One of the women ended up with 2 left shoes; one of the mothers ended up with a stranger's ballgown thrown at her to wear in this dismal muddy place. As one of the women relayed the memory she began to giggle as the ridiculous image came back to her, their heads shining and bald in these ludicrous outfits that made each of them nearly unrecognizable. She said all the women in the shower were howling with laughter, partly to relieve tension, but also because they all looked so silly. "It's not really funny," the old Jewish woman chuckled as she wiped away tears of mirth.

Amazing. She laughed in innocence before she knew the suffering she was about to endure. And decades later, after living through those years of dying and starving and shivering and injustice, she was still able to laugh. She was not only able to laugh after 50 humdrum years of paying bills and mowing lawns and going to work, she was thriving and laughing when life had given her the worst. With every reason to be destroyed by bitterness this woman had kept a precious sense of humor.

This gives me hope. Working at a grocery store for 3 years, I've had enough run-ins with old people who've grown up to be grouchy to know that I don't want to be that way when I get to be their age. But is it just an unavoidable side-effect of age? You have to wonder when you bump into enough bad-tempered grandparents. This woman's laughter, however, gives me hope that there's a choice in the matter...and it's no secret that it's not an easy choice. Life does what it can to beat you down, and sometimes its blows are bone-breakingly heavy. But the fact that among those who suffered the very worst are women who have come out yet laughing can lead me to no other belief than their remarkable power to choose against destructive bitterness.

Watching these women tell their stories, I wished that I would be able to make the choices necessary to mature me into a lady as graceful and good-natured as those 6 women.

Spring

2009-04-22T18:07:00.004-04:00

Certain sensations have a way of bringing back memories with stark clarity. My father's cologne is a familiar and distinct smell that goes back to my childhood and warm nights spent playing board games on the carpet as a family. When I was even younger and we still lived in that apartment on 13th Avenue I began to associate the smell of coffee with my Aunt Susan, who used to live on the floor below us.

But years from now, what will bring me back to the early days of my marriage are the smells of Spring and the chiming of church bells.

There are few places in the world that can really truly appreciate the tender hope that spring brings with its budding weeks, but I believe Ohio is one of those places. Winter is our longest season, and it's icy and windy and wet and miserable; a good snowfall is a rare treat, and when we still get snow in April it ceases to be a treat at all. But when the good holidays end after the first of the year, and January follows December like an icy punctuation mark, the body longs to get past the cold lingering wetness of February and stretch into a hopeful, if tempestuous, March. March is a flirt, and not a nice one at that, the way she gives one warm and sunny 70 degree day only to bluster in with sleet for the following week is cruelly coy at best.

But March brings the bravest of flowers, the tiny trumpets of purple crocuses poking through the winter-weary lawn. Daffodil greens start to take shape on every street, and by the end of the month they're pregnant with yellow and ready to shine. Then April, beautiful April, seems to be the world waking up. Birds once quiet with cold can't help but to sing from every branch, a delightful cacophony, the original and unequalled album of music. Trees' hard nubs begin blushing with life and unfold everywhere with quiet sighs of satisfaction. Magnolia blossoms the size of my hand, petals the size of my tongue and pink as sunset, steal the show. Bradford pear trees turn snowy white and in the suburbs they line the neighborhood streets, soft as cumulus clouds. But now, in late April, the pinks and whites on the trees and the purples and yellows in the gardens are giving way more and more to an overwhelming GREEN. Leaves are usurping the trees, branch by branch, and petals are perpetually falling in the warming air.

I walked home from the library, past tiny weeping cherries with small pink petals and vivid green lawns long enough for the first time this year for the wind to whip through in waves. The wind is brisk, but not sharp; the sun is bright, but not hot; if I stood still I would shiver but when I walk the temperature is perfect. Cutting down a sidewalk path across private apartment lawns as a shortcut home, the bells began to ring. Within a mile of my house there are 3 churches who play (at least recordings of) their bells. It was six'o'clock, and the church on the corner of Henderson rang the full hour and six soulful dongs. As I stepped off the green green lawn to cross the street, the church began to play as it does every day, at noon and at six, an old hymn with its chimes. Hymns that go back to my childhood, tunes that I recall but I've long lost the old lyrics. I opened my door to the last refrain of the hymn, and from my window as the last verse played in the April air I took in my neighborhood: the dusty brown baseball diamond at the elementary school, the purple puddle of violets under the tree across the street, the tentatively blue sky being whisked away by a dark stormy cloud.

I love where I live.

Day 122

2009-04-13T15:50:00.004-04:00

Marriage is:

Finding Out How Awesomely Your Husband Handles Conflict

I could not brag big enough to describe how amazing my Dave is in handling our arguments. Calmly and with a twinkle of humor, he'll take his emotionally over-wrought wife when she's defensive and stubborn and inarticulate and force her to sit down (even if it takes dragging her to the couch and pinning her down) and work through it NOW so it can be done and over with. His conflict skills are revolutionary for me - you mean you can be mad at me AND still love me just as much? You mean it's ok and normal that I make mistakes?? WHY HAVEN'T I GOTTEN THIS MEMO BEFORE? And more, we usually both end up laughing at the end.

The Good Made Better and the Bad Made Worse

Shortly after I got married, unmarried friends were asking me what being married was like. And with all my deep experience of, oh, a month, the first thing I was able to articulate was this: "The good things are a lot better, but the bad stuff is also worse." They nodded and pretended to understand, but I don't think they could. Intimately sharing the victory of a passed test you had both been concerned about or a successful confrontation with someone else that you had sweated and prayed over together...the joys of that "A" and that resolution were doubled in the sharing and they then become opportunities to affirm each other. And the bad stuff...being married makes the bad stuff more complicated. For the one directly suffering, they gain support and comfort, but for the other they have to sacrifice as they said they would in their vows, "for better or for worse". Marriage, in a sense, doubles your opportunity for heartache - my losses belong to Dave just as Dave's failures belong to me. And when your relationship is having a bad day, EVERYthing in your life is made worse by it. And that sucks. But what's more amazing is that the goodness is so good, it's totally, without contest, and unquestionably worth it.

Comfort

This morning I had an early breakfast with a friend and when I returned to the apartment Dave was still fast asleep in bed. It was an overcast Ohio morning, the kind whose cold white light just makes you feel crappy, and I was cold and grouchy and tired. I got under the covers, and Dave pulled my cold body close to him, and within minutes I fell asleep feeling warm and peaceful. There are many days where I'll come home wound up about something and Dave will just take me by the hand and lay me down and curl up next to me until I feel better. Just being in the same room with him gives me this sense of calm and togetherness I have a hard time maintaining on my own.

Learning to See and Say "Thank You"

One of the factors of living in a house full of people was the assignment of house jobs: you may not like having to clean the downstairs bathroom every week but you would never have to clean the attic or the living room ever because those jobs belonged to other people. On your own in a smaller place, there's less space to clean, but you get to do all versions of it yourself. Dave doesn't like washing dishes or cooking and I don't like taking out the garbage or killing bugs and neither of us really get motivated to keep our little place well-organized. So if Dave sees me doing dishes on his dish night, or if I see Dave cooking something for dinner for the two of us, it deserves a notable "thank you". Magic words, those, and they can never be over-used; and if opportunities for "thank you" get over-looked, they add up with interest and a lot more words have to be used later to rebuild your gratitude.

Negotiations of Compromises Among Gifts and Sacrifices

Just because neither Dave nor I like to organize doesn't change the fact that it needs to happen and it won't be done by anyone else, short of paying a professional (side note: can you even imagine being a professional organizer? If I were one, I'd be tempted to insert the nozzle of the chemical cleanser into my left nostril and end my misery). The responsibility of some chores can be successfully divided up, such as Dave taking care of the bills and myself doing the bulk of grocery shopping and cooking, but there's always a few that can't be. When such distasteful chores or tasks come up, you've got one of four options: (1) compromise and split the work (2) choose to do it all and sacrifice for his benefit (3) get lucky and reap the benefits of his sacrifice for you, or (4) sweep it under the rug for another month. This is the mechanism of the common phrase "give and take", and when you get a rhythm it's the most strangely motivating thing. I'll make a plan for our date day together, then 2 days later Dave buys me a perfect bouquet of flowers, and that night I'm in a good mood and wash the dishes he so despises doing, and then I find a note under my pillow 2 nights later, and the following weekend I wash and fold all the laundry without complaint. We're on a roll right now and I hope we can keep it that way.

Perfectly Preserved by Laughter and Gratitude

Side Effects Include:

2009-03-30T20:11:00.004-04:00

There are many recipes of things that potentially lead to feelings of happiness. It is the most impossible thing to cook if everyone is right – it takes an enormous number of ingredients and an unbelievable amount of hours spent cooking and preparing, and in the end seems to boil down to sheer circumstantial luck in the end. Not to mention the people around you and their moods, too, complicating the whole process and offering no guarantee.

Happiness could theoretically be comprised of a healthy diet, a skinny body, the perfect dessert, several hours a week exercising, more sleep and longer naps, more money, better people, nicer in-laws, jobs with more fulfillment, families with less stress, increased leisure time, free concerts, 3 weeks every month away on vacation, wild romance, free beer (free of hangovers and stupidity), unbreakable beautiful cars, removal of health problems, no more fights or arguments, increase in education, a bigger house than the Joneses, and no more death.

But all these Vendors of Happiness didn’t bother to go back and edit their flyers. Think of all that work: I measure 8 hours of sleep a night and an hour of jogging and sit-ups every day, then I still have to count my calories and pack my lunch for my 7^th year of college as I earn my PhD to be a psychologist in Honolulu so I can have the money to get me the Ferrari and waterfront property with 6 bedrooms, and I can’t forget to be planning the big perfect dream wedding with champagne fountains for after I graduate. And by the time I run my mile and have my smoothie and write my dissertation and go to the car dealership and mail my wedding invitations and put down my down payment and have my professionally-baked slice of tiramisu, I’ve forgotten why in the world I’m running myself ragged doing all this stuff.

The scenario is obviously unrealistic and simplistic, but I find myself in similar fruitless hamster wheels to achieve happiness. I’ll wake up one morning and decide I don’t feel good because I don’t exercise enough, by lunchtime I’ve decided it’s because I’m worried about my paycheck being too slender this month, and when I crawl into bed I conclude that it must be because my apartment is too small and messy.

What few people make known is that happiness is a side effect, not an achievement. And that it’s all about one thing rather than the accumulation of many, that one thing being gratefulness. Happy that I may walk in health even if it isn’t perfect. Content that I can afford rent and more than enough food. At peace because my apartment is cozy and in a very good location.

The world we live in, it’s busted. It’s amazing and its beautiful, but it's sick and broken. And sometimes we suffer its symptoms. Which means the odds of our lives ever being perfect for any length of time is highly unlikely, so if our happiness hangs on the stars aligning for us in order to call ourselves happy....dude. Our lives are going to suck.

Zoom in from the panoramic pessimistic view and focus on this moment; choose a ray of light to step into and bask in it. The bad isn't gone and the good may still be sparse, but count the pennies you do have and smile for now.

Fresh Coat of Paint

2009-03-23T15:39:00.003-04:00

In the time between living at home and being married now, I lived in a series of ministry houses with other girls in my church - 4 houses total. Several months ago the last of the girls I once lived with in the first on Dayton Avenue vacated the half-double, and its vacancy has made it a prime location for the boys in my present homechurch to move into. Being in that house and bringing in their belongings, I felt as though these boys were moving into my memories; it was a strange feeling, as though a good old painting I had was suddenly being painted over by someone else.

As we walked up to the front of the house perched atop the steep lawn, repainted a less-offensive shade of teal than before, memories untouched for many many months came back to life with bright vivacity. We walked around to the back as the moving van door slid open, and I stared up at the back wall of the house. I did not want to go in, didn't want to see the empty spaces filled with boys' things because my memories had kept the house filled with girls and girls' things. Looking at the second story window, I still wasn't fully convinced that I wouldn't find Erin curled up on a couch watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer when I went inside. Furniture started moving, so reluctantly I grabbed a few blue-painted boards to a bunkbed and walked inside.

I immediately dropped the boards in the second room and came back to touch and remember everything. All the colors of the walls on every floor were the same, the kitchen still dark red and the middle room still dark brown; I looked up and suddenly remembered painting the ceiling 3 years ago. Everyone else may have seen an empty front room filling up with desks and mattresses but I could see Erin's DVD shelf against the wall, the TV in the corner, Andrea on the couch dipped artichoke hearts into butter and watching soap operas. I could see the pictures on the fireplace mantle and the small plants curled over the small window ledges above the couches.

I walked up the stairs in a daze. I opened the 2nd story fridge, expecting to see my green grapes and yogurt on the first shelf. I looked at the windows where the memory of Erin on the couch was vivid; so much has happened in both of our lives since that afternoon, yet I can almost touch the blanket over her lap and sit next to her again, both of us 19 and new to the house. In the attic bathroom I had a picture of tucking my towels away on the second shelf, and at the door I remembered loaning Sara a shirt of mine for one of her very first dates with her now-husband.

The memories became stronger as I walked into the large middle room; I had spent a lot of time here. A power strip lay in the corner where Erin's desk once had been; Niccole's keyboard and Andrea's computer were as if they had never been there. Memories of the colored Christmas lights strung across the bedroom door, and the conversations with Erin as we listened to Justin Timberlake online. And the red and orange walls of our attic bedroom, "the Freshman Floor", spoke loudly. The ceiling sloped over where my bed had been, and no longer with that Star Wars poster pinned to it; the screw holes from the corkboard Dave had put up as a surprise for me were still in the wall, though. The chimney comes up through the room and dominates the center, and I remember my dresser pressed up against it and early mornings fumbling for clothes. Clear as though it happened this morning, I can remember Erin's alarm going off or Niccole shifting in her sleep (strange: all three of us are now married).

And then I began to remember what came after my three months in this house, those 6 long and hard months in my second ministry house spent missing the first. The boys moving in almost made it feel as though I were leaving the house all over again and it made me sad.

But they have a good house. Within spitting distance of Diary Queen and a block away from the girls' ministry house, they'll soon learn about the way the sun warmly hits the back stoop and the perfect breezes on the front porch just as I did. My time spent in that house was good, and I hope they enjoy it and repaint it well.

The High Price of Convenience

2009-03-09T14:26:00.004-04:00

Our world's technology is rather amazing. If I really wanted to, I could never leave my house or see another human being ever again. I could even get a jump start on the ever-enviable Old Cat Lady syndrome. I could finish my degree online, get groceries and take-out delivered to my house, buy all my clothes from internet distributors, save money from not "going out", and talk on the phone with all my friends and family. No more sitting next to classmates who haven't showered since the beginning of the quarter. No more Bangladeshi cashiers who have such heavy accents you don't know what your total is. And no more spending the money on a dinner that didn't taste that great when all you really wanted to do was talk. This kind of lifestyle would be efficient and far more painless without such people hassles...

But strangely...no it wouldn't.

Relationships are utterly inconvenient and inefficient. You spend money eating meals with people, money on gifts for their birthday, hours and hours of time with the only rewards being strangely un-quantifiable. And if you live with them, you have to deal with their bad habits and bad moods: a sink with their dirty dishes, a stove top burner left on, and then they snap at you for no reason after they have a bad day. Yet some of the people who have inconvenienced me most (or who I have inconvenienced most) are, strangely, closest to me.

One of my present closest friendships started out with infamous inconvenience - she puked on the stairs in my house in the first month that I knew her. As in, I had to get a bucket and a rag to clean up the vomit she deposited along the length of my stairs. Yet a year-and-a-half later she was second in line among my bridesmaids. My grandmother and I became closer because of the enormous inconvenience my wedding burdened us both with. And when I inconvenienced "my chinese family" to donate their evening to cutting vegetables for my reception's appetizer trays, we had the best time we've ever spent together.

Relationships exact a highly inconvenient cost: personal time. But they've yet to invent a convenient way around that.

Convenience is something that's a measurable cost cutter - saves time, saves money, saves hassle. And in America, convenience is king. From Wendy's to Netflix to Amazon, we expect expedited convenience. We've probably been stumped in a convenience-worshipping climate because relationships simply refuse to become convenient. Convenience is about quantity, but relationships are inescapably about quality. There's no fast-forward button for the slow process of trust building, and no substitute for the pure presence of a person. Ask any kid to compare how they felt when dad came to their game, and when their mom had to tape it for him. The score doesn't change, but for some reason it's not the same.

There's a cost for relationships, but immeasurable rewards after paying the small fees. And convenience, at the cost of avoiding those relational fees, comes with a greater price: loneliness.

Loneliness is a strange thing. It's not just about being in a room full of people - any one who has felt left out at a party can testify. It's not about living in the city, either - most people probably only know their neighbor's names because of the letters on their mailboxes. And it's not just about talking - we live in an age of unmatched global communications technology. We've streamlined meeting our practical needs that it has cost us the social structures of meeting our relational needs. And beating it is all about quality of friends and taking delight in the sheer inconvenience of them.

Essentially, I believe the crowning of convenience in our time has crippled our community. And, especially now that it's warm outside, I plan to start inconveniencing myself and my neighbors much more.

What Did YOU Do This Weekend?

2009-03-03T13:17:00.011-05:00

One of my favorite things about meeting and talking to people is that each person is a doorway to a very specific set of passions and interests you've never ever seen combined in one person before; and one of my favorite things about friends is that you get to walk through that door and experience their passions with them. And, when it comes to my handsome husband, this past weekend I found myself walking through the doors of Veteran's Memorial into a gymnasium-sized room to a now-familiar sight: a gun show. I am fully aware that this room full of people is a very specific stereotype, sometimes one that is jeered or even feared, and I'd like to show you the humor and the faces of a place like this.

I have been to many gun stores and gun shows since the start of my relationship with Dave, so many that I'm beginning to recognize the dealers' faces as we walk past them. That's no small feat, since all gun shows have at least a hundred displays on folding tables strewn with various products ranging from the small to the exorbitant. Dave spent a lot of time lingering over this particular dealer's variety of old spare parts because of his small personal collection of beautiful World War II rifles he needs to keep in working order. If you're a history buff, especially one for the second world war, this is a fascinating place to be. It's common here to have an interest in all that is World War II, and we passed a pair of men proudly hawking an original SS helmet in excellent condition...yours for only 3 grand. Magazine pouches from the war are common finds, World War II helmets from every country are prominently displayed by those who have them, at least one display case of wonderful old medals with colorful ribbons, and even the occasional jacket from that era. Sometimes you get lucky and stumble across some originally packaged bullets for sale, still with the German print on the box.

The interesting thing about the people who sell their wares here is that they're commonly committed to two other things: their children and their dogs. I couldn't tell you how many well-loved pooches I saw with a leash tied to a display case, keeping their masters company between customers. And many a table had brought their kids to help out for the day. Some of them pressed into a corner of the sales area in a folding chair, hypnotized by the glow of a PSP, but most of them were fairly involved. This little gal to the right was trying to find where her father went off to. At another display one aisle over, their spread of wares was a true family effort. At one end of the table the wife had a display of beautiful hand-beaded jewelry, her head bent over her current project in her lap (because hey, the wives who come with their gun-loving husbands have money, too). Dave bought a good Amish belt from the family, and the seven-year-old jumped at the chance to look for the one that was the right length because of her promised one-dollar commission from mom for the sale. As we walked past the other end of the table sporting gun cases, the father thanked us for our business, his daughter gloating to him about the dollar she had just made.

Gun shows have plenty of their own fair share of crazies, too, and that's why I'm always up for tagging along. Dave will pause at table after table with historical rifles, able to identify the country and caliber at a glance; at the gun show, all the rifles blur together to me and the weird stuff stands out. I watched the little man running this particular table do a sharpness demonstration with some of his far-out weapons, everything from Samurai swords to the Wolverine claws and mace you see depicted on the left. A woman had a self-defense tools stand, and every ten minutes or so, no matter where you were in the room you could hear the sharp crackle of her tazer demonstration; Dave looked longingly into a case filled with oh-my-gosh-expensive night-vision goggles; later we passed a jerky stand that sold every kind of meat except for beef. There's also always one guy selling a really outrageous collection of gun-pride bumper stickers, saying things to the effect of "If you can read this, you are already in my sniper sights."

But the outrageous crazies are far from the norm here. For the most part, the people I have interacted with are down-to-earth guys, good guys who are willing to give you a good price, and smart enough to know the worth of the things they have and stick with their prices. They'll spend time talking with you and are interested in the projects you have and the things you collect or have experience with (not that they're talking to me, but think about the man I married). And they're usually just as interested in buying something from someone wandering around as they are interested in selling their own things. Once Dave brought a rifle to a gun show to sell, and without any advertisement had 3 guys ask his price in the first hour we were there. Depicted here is a family outing to the gun show, a man pushing his young child's stroller with a sign on his gun case letting passersby know he's interested in selling. I also crossed paths often at this particular show with a short scruffy guy toting an old rifle by the stock, the muzzle above his head with a small crude sign advertising: "SELLING. ASK PRICE."

I don't think I will ever tire of going to the gun show with Dave. It's too fun to watch the sparkle in his green eyes when he sees something he really gets excited about. It's too hilarious to read and see the so-crazy-it-must-be-true merchandise for sale at this kind of place. It's too one-of-a-kind for me to ever be bored, because it's not an experience easily replaced by anything else. It's too important for me to remember the limitations of stereotypes by meeting the people lumped into them. And it's just too darn awesome to be able to tell people, "Hey, guess what I did this weekend? I went to a gun show."

Rest

2009-02-25T15:07:00.004-05:00

My friend Sarah and I had lunch the other day and we spent the time catching up on the past two weeks apart. Roommates this and graduation that and how short on sleep we both are. How technology gives us the power and expectation of ceaseless communication and immediate results; that the world seems to turn faster than it ever used to.

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Walking to class this afternoon a stroke of twitching red in the gnarled crab apple to my left caught my eye. A perfect red robin was standing on a branch just behind a shield of red berries stretching his small scaly legs and shaking his feathery body, his movements the equivalent of a yawn. With a small sharp dive, he alighted on the mulch under the shade of an OSU building's smokestacks, and I felt compelled to stop and watch. As multiple students passed me by, in groups and on cell phones with destinations and deadlines, I watched quietly as the robin's little wife cautiously hopped out into view from behind the bush at the foot of the crab apple tree and timidly began to help her mate forage the fallen berries. Sometimes she would suddenly stop and hunker down to glare at me, but she followed after her husband until they were both on the green grass. They seemed more uncomfortable so far from the tree, and I doubt my stalking was too terribly discreet, and they paused often to listen with ears I could not see. I heard what sounded like the faint chirping of young chicks, and on an unspoken cue they took off into the warm air together. I watched as they went gliding along with the occasional beaten wing, landing in a tall beech tree some 100 yards away from where I was standing. The whole scene had taken less than ten minutes. I felt very still. Calm. Refreshed.

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At lunch Sarah and I were musing together about the pace the world is going with the opportunities it has available. And we agreed that people shouldn't go as fast as they can, mostly because it's practically impossible. Look at our bodies: they have these strangely necessary defaults for rest that, in an era of constant motion, I believe is hard to understand. Yet psychologically, we must stop to appreciate beauty, such as music, such as art, such as I did when I was watching the pair of robins. And biologically. we must stop to eat and we must stop to sleep. We must stop to rest.

And, especially now, rest is costly, because of the numerous and various expectations of so many people. Yet we must take the time to understand our abilities and limitations and be able to say "no". We must develop the discipline of rest. But we're so busy being busy that we forget some important things that bear remembering:

The author of Ecclesiastes said that there is a time for everything, a time for speaking and for silence, a time for tearing and for mending. In this time of going and running there needs to be a time for slowing and stopping and resting. We forget that our running will be much better as a result.

Victor Hugo said "When you have laboriously accomplished your daily task, go to sleep in peace. God is awake."

I think at the heart of this frantic pace is the forgetting that we don't have to be God.

Street-Smart Grace

2009-02-18T10:26:00.005-05:00

I have realized that some of the most gracious and affable people are those who have a practical construction of grace in their lives. Often times, it seems those least able to point to a verse or rattle off a quote are the most able to live it in their lives with gratefulness; that those most educated in the vocabulary of grace have the most difficult time in the practicality, the street smarts, of grace.

Grace is most definitely a religious word, but it's something I have more visible examples of outside of any church building. This is what I mean when I say gracious here: a disposition to act in kindness, pleasant, one who offers a reprieve, compassionate and forbearing. As of late I have been thinking more specifically of those who are gracious as an attribute of character.

I've been in the church or church settings quite literally all of my life. I was in the pew with the floral dress and white panty hose, I was in the Christian school's folding chairs in my plaid uniform skirt, and I am now sitting on a couch near the fireplace in my church. Always surrounded by church-raised Bible-educated friends, pastors, teachers, principals, and family members, I have been thoroughly immersed in a very knowledgeable part of God's family.

What's most surprising though is that those who taught and showed me what living grace meant weren't among the more spiritually educated.

I've been loved by some very gracious people, all very grateful people. They all seem to have this underlying understanding that, "you know what, I'm not perfect and you're not perfect and we're never going to be, so let's love each other and not waste time fooling ourselves." I doubt these gracious people could even articulate that to me, but their actions have said it to me.

True, often it seems the most gracious of people are those who have had the biggest issues in their own lives. They are easy to judge from that perspective, and yes, we are called to live the best lives we can, but they know how to keep score...and that you don't win by trying to be perfect. They are humbly screwed-up and genuine people, and they are grateful and easy to be around.

And then I see some people, who have read books on grace, memorized verses on grace, talk about grace in every conversation, but I see little of it in the workings of their lives. Though they of all people, trained and knowledgeable, should know that perfection isn't the goal they continue to strive for it to their despair. They could write me a dissertation on grace yet have the hardest time being gracious to others around them and I tend to feel judged, not loved, when in their presence. Their standard for themselves is unrealistic and that becomes imposed on those around them, which is to their disadvantage in relationships; they resent those who are realistic and gracious because people are attracted to them and it "isn't fair". They seem to play by an extra book of rules that they think is the standard, and are upset when others do not conform their legitimate freedom to it. Some of those who know most about grace are the least gracious of all.

Lately I have been reading a beautiful book by Henri Nouwen titled "The Return of the Prodigal Son", and he articulately compares the resentment of the ungracious and the gratitude of the gracious:

"Resentment and gratitude cannot coexist, since resentment blocks the perception and experience of life as a gift. My resentment tells me that I don't receive what I deserve. It always manifests itself in envy. Gratitude...claims the truth that all of life is a pure gift...Gratitude...involves a conscious choice...Acts of gratitude make one grateful because, step by step, they reveal that all is grace."

I know it's a blanket statement, I know there are some ungracious "sinners" and some gracious "Pharisees". But I understand the stories now why Jesus would eat dinner with the uneducated prostitutes and humble tax collectors rather than the Jewish teachers steeped in prestige and knowledge; these self-acknowledged imperfect people, they were genuine, they were grateful, they were gracious.

With my own history showing a susceptibility to resentment, I hope I am able to pull up a chair to many tables like that in my life to learn more about a gracious life.

Day 66

2009-02-16T17:54:00.004-05:00

Marriage is:

The last loss of privacy

I used to live in houses that held up to 7 other women, always sharing a bedroom with at least one other girl. Whenever you rose there's sure to be another morning person up, and when you go to sleep there's sure to be someone who is staying up later than you. But in the bathroom, that sacred hour in the shower, unless the other bathroom was locked and an emergency "evacuation" is upon us, you could latch the hook on the door and have some precious privacy. But even though I've cut down my roommates to one, I've lost that last boundary. You get company while peeing as they brush their teeth, and usually you don't even bother to shut the door around each other any more. It's not like THAT is a secret anymore, but sometimes I forget that it's still a secret to my guests who come over and they would like it to remain as such.

No longer being able to call something "yours" and have it only be "yours"

The two of us went to Target to zap barcodes for our registry (the most fun part of an engagement, aside from actually getting the stuff) and I was talking about what I wanted for my kitchen. "Our kitchen, you mean." I reminded him who would be cooking in there and he reminded me who paid half the rent that included that kitchen (of mine).

Also, when I was twelve my Nana gave me a wide white bureau to put my clothes into. As always, there's the underwear drawer, the sock drawer, and the junk drawer; the pants drawer, the shirts drawer, the pajama drawer, and the athletics drawer. After the honeymoon and he facing a woeful pile of bureau-less clothes, I made what I thought was a generous offer: "I can clear space in my drawers for you if you want." He looked at me. "Those are 'our' drawers now." That's taken a few weeks to sink in.

Learning the creature of "man"

I have two siblings; Natalie is 5 1/2 years younger than me and Erick is 7 1/2 years younger than me. If gender made a difference in that age gap, I definitely am more used to dealings with my sister. Not to mention that for two years I lived in various ministry houses all packed with every variety of girl imaginable. Of course I lived with dad, but dad's are different to live with. Dad would tell me when to come home and remind me to brush my teeth; Dave may still have to remind me to brush my teeth from time to time, but I draw the line before curfew setting. But this man, this husband, doesn't have overemotional reactions toward me, doesn't commiserate about uncomfortable bras or PMSing, starts a playful wrestling match every day of the week, doesn't hold a grudge or have a potential to gossip, leaves shorn-off bits of beard in the sink, and for once in my tomboyish life I have the most hair and exfoliate products in the shower (I lived with a hair stylist for 6 months - she had several bottles that each conditioned for advantages I had never even heard of).

Beautiful

It's kissing Dave goodbye in the early morning while he's still asleep. It's the Valentine's Day bouquet Dave personally arranged for me with all my favorite flowers. It's my burning the bacon from his Valentine's Day breakfast and setting off the smoke alarm. It's a belated Sunday morning writing in bed with Dave lying quietly next to me. It's his arms around me from behind as I wash the dishes. It's listening to him talk passionately about the importance of the Second Amendment. It's working for an hour over chili or cookies and receiving his long-awaited taste approval. It's watching "Spongebob" and "Dirty Jobs" in our living room with a pile of tator tots. It's the smell of coolant and the smear of oil on Dave's hands after a day in the shop. It's the cup of hot tea Dave had ready for me after a long cold trek home on the bus from class. It's listening to Dave Matthews on the radio as we take a late afternoon nap together. It's him tucking me into bed every night before I fall asleep. It's reading pages to Dave out of the latest book I'm excited about reading. It's Dave bringing me home a vanilla Frosty when I'm having a bad day. It's me laughing at him when he freaks out because I can feel his heartbeat. It's him laughing at me because I take myself too seriously and am too cute when I get upset.

Something too precious to ever forget how to be grateful for it and how to laugh at it.

The Currency of Life

2009-02-12T20:08:00.005-05:00

In "The Last of the Mohicans", there is an extraordinarily compelling scene. A handful of captured colonials are brought before the Huron indian Sachem (the wise man) to have their fates judged. Their captor has a debt of life owed by these colonials, so the Sachem rules that one girl will be sacrificed to settle the debt and her sister and their friend Major Duncan may go free. Duncan, shown previously to be honorable, but jealous and a kiss-ass, does an incredible thing. Given a check for freedom, he volunteers freely to trade places with the condemned girl, a life for a life. He is stretched over a fire to burn to death, having to now settle the debt that only a life given, not just generously offered, could have fulfilled. What struck most forcefully was Duncan's recognition of the currency of his life and a willingness to pay that price when necessary.

This theme of sacrifice of life dogs the steps of impactful literature. In Mark Twain's Tale of Two Cities, when one of a pair of look-alikes must die, Sidney Carton makes the decision to cash in his life instead. In Lewis' The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, when young stupid Edmund makes a wrong choice that demands a payment of life and the great lion Aslan steps forward and writes that check for Edmund with his own life. When the just God of the Bible demanded the unpayable debt of all humans to be paid, His son the carpenter spends a couple of perfect decades in the Middle East and then emptied his account for their sake.

What is it about this currency of life that is so compelling, so gut-wrenching? Why is the willing sacrifice of life such a thing that it grips us so we may not look away?

Humanity has always been fascinated by the value of life, and given it the utmost value. When someone loses their life, we call it "paying the ultimate price". In ancient times and ancient religions, sacrifice of life was the only thing powerful enough to breach that barrier to the realm of the immortal. Yahweh asked for spotless lambs; Aztec gods wanted virgins; Molech held his brazen arms out for infants. Life has always had a high, even transcendent, value.

Why?

What is it about life that is so valuable? Perhaps that, for each being, they only have a single life to give?

The currency of life can be used to fulfill many ends; one is strategy, for example sacrificing a bishop in chess to win, showing a heirarchy of values. Some things are more important than life (such as pleasing the gods or saving another). Another end is justice; why did the ancients cut the throats of so many lives on so many altars? To be justified. They understood that in order to get the rains to come, in order for the crops to grow, in order to be thought right with God, there was a price to pay. And what was more precious than life?

But what a wearisome cycle! Eons of lives, our highest form of currency, spent on stone altars under whispered petitions, and the rains don't always come and the crops don't always bear fruit and there is still something wrong between us and our God. All these installments, these payments, on a debt seemingly infinite or capricious.

Where are the funds that satisfy? What is that last best sacrifice?

When Abraham was poised over his young son with a knife to sacrifice, a voice from heaven spoke of a suitable substitute.

We mortals have spent so long trying to breach and bridge the barrier to the immortal for so long with the little supplies we have. What if, beyond hope, the barrier was breached from the opposite side and the immortal came to us? We seeing only the mounting and insufficient cost of our best efforts, what if the being we sacrificed life after life to reaches into his back pocket and opens his wallet and pays the debt that he awakened the guilt for in us?

How would we respond?

Investigation of Holiness

2009-02-08T09:06:00.005-05:00

Holiness has lately become an object of fascination for me. In the Bible, the word "holy" crops up over 500 times, and that's not counting other words like "sanctified" or "hallowed". God is holy, He made the Sabbath holy, His Spirit is holy, His name is holy, His angels are holy, and He wants to make his people holy. But, pardon my unholiness, what the hell does it even mean to be holy?

After some minimal online research I've put together something somewhat satisfactory.

Holy is: perfect, set apart, unique, pure, sacred, of divine quality.

God was emphatic about communicating His holiness back near the beginning when giving laws of every kind to His Israelites. They would give holy, eat holy, anoint holy, wash holy, sacrifice holy in a holy place, live in a holy city, commanded to be holy because they are set apart, God's showcase of holiness to the world. Holiness is something we do to show ourselves different and unique. And they worshipped a holy God who is dreadful, a consuming fire, great and redemptive, King Creator of holy words on his holy mountain. Reading through Leviticus and Isaiah, you get sick of reading the word "holy" because it's absolutely everywhere.

Between the Testaments comes an obvious switch in the use of the term. I don't know why God spent so much time emphasizing the first use; best guess is that he needed the Israelites to be a living definition of just how set apart Holy God is from imperfect people. I don't claim to understand how God works, but I can see the change and appreciate the end of it that I am on.

The New Testament as a whole uses "holy" differently. Jesus, the Holy Spirit, the prophets, and the angels are referred to as holy and dominate the use of the word. The holy law is a tool for exposing sin and not acheiving victory over it, and there's that strange business of greeting with holy kisses. And the handful of times we encounter commands to be holy, we find many other places that show holiness to be our calling, what we were chosen to be by God, that Christ's reconciliation is what has attained that holiness for us because of his mercy. Holiness since Christ is something we're given that makes us different and unique.

I am unique, set apart, and of divine quality.

Not because of achievement, but because of strange concepts like faith and mercy. Faith, an element that in the most minute measurements can move mountains and please God. Mercy, a debtor's dream easily forgotten. I believe this would fall into the category of what Phil Yancey would describe as "the scandal of grace"; because of this ridiculous amount of grace not only is there forgiveness for an entire life of horribly gross actions, both self-aware disobedience and self-deceived self-righteousness, but God looks down on we petty pitiful creatures and sees holiness. He sees the glow of the pure and divine that we accepted with grubby empty hands from Him, a check gladly cashed into a bankrupt account.

Holiness partners with grace to show us God's loving and wild exorbitance in regards to his creation.

Venice is Sinking

2009-02-05T12:38:00.004-05:00

Last winter I took an Anthropologie class to fulfill a science class requirement. At the end of the quarter when the student evaluations were handed out, the teacher asked for a willing student to deliver it to Brown Hall, since she was no longer allowed to handle it for fear of tampering. I'd never been to the Anthropologie Building before, so I raised my hand.

You could tell the building was old from the way it faced the street. Every other edifice was square with the curb, but Brown Hall tilted away from the road at almost a 45 degree angle, possibly because it preexisted the road itself. The front steps were old stone slabs bordered by brick, and beneath the front steps 2 opposite sets of stairs dove beneath the surface, leading to the lower levels. Dried ivy remained on the grey bricks at the corners, and I went in with anticipation to one of the diminishing few old buildings on campus.

I deposited the manila envelope with the secretary of the appropriate office, and I was about to leave when I saw above her desk two newspaper clippings about the building. The first was a fundraiser to help save the building; the second article read a tearing down date, proving the fundraiser had failed. "Are they really going to tear down this building?" I asked the secretary, a frizzy-haired hippy long past her flower power days, but still with the long hair and activist tendencies. We talked about our disappointment for a while, and she told me how the building's basement had an original entrance to OSU's off-limits (and student-coveted) underground steam tunnels, and other various things about the building she loved. Before I left I made sure to check the basement to try and get a glimpse of where the steam tunnels might begin. Going back to the first floor, I remember grasping the wide walnut banister wistfully, the wood chipped from use and smooth from age.

The first thing they did was take out the windows.

Whenever I would walk past Brown Hall I would glance over and see what its status was, hoping that maybe someone would change their mind. But a chainlink fence began to grow on the grass like a disease. And last month I was startled and sad to see all the old glass windows replaced overnight by crude plastic sheets. Walking to Biology today, I was startled again when I looked up from the sidewalk to see a corner of the building shattered to bricks and pieces, reduced to rubble.

It was strange to see inside; I could see inside both main floors and the interior of the attic. The roof had so far maintained most of its integrity, and it sat like an awkward cap on the empty gouge of space. The corner classroom on the second story was completely gone, and you could see the thick layer of bricks that had supported the floor. The two adjacent classrooms were cracked like eggs; the one to the left still had 3 chalkboards hanging on the walls, awaiting destruction. The other had a corkboard with a piece of paper still pinned to it. A silvery insulation pipe hung limp and jagged from the attic, like a severed nerve. The last piece of the west wall went up at an awkward angle, much like a diagonal line on an Etch-A-Sketch, with the last window frame on the first floor within still fully intact. A backhoe was perched on the mountain of rubble, idling; a small pipe had broken next to it and was spraying freezing water over the scene.

There were so many bricks, such an enormous number of bricks for only a portion of the corner of the building. A hundred years ago there had been a plan, a blueprint, a large team of workers sweating and straining and building Brown Hall. As shovels were driven, these bricks were carted to erect a place for learning; they had a purpose and a design. But that time has passed. A man with a calculator figured out it would be more efficient to invest in a new building rather than maintain upkeep on this old one. And the bricks so carefully laid, the drywall so painstakingly placed, the chalkboards so deliberately hung, are being torn down to make way for something more efficient. The plans have changed.

How many buildings has man designed and and built only to tear down and rebuild 50 years later? How many cities have risen up in prosperity only to be a slum within the century? How many empires on the face of this earth have risen up with crowns of gold and immortal wishes only to fade away once enough years and winds have passed over their decaying edifices? Great and old Venice is sinking and Brown Hall is being torn down.

The reality of Ecclesiastes hit me like a wrecking ball.

All of this life, all of it, is so temporary.

Price Check

2009-02-04T16:30:00.004-05:00

It's strange, this writer's mantle I've been consciously bearing lately. I fear that if I am not constantly unraveling it into print, then it will consume me by its sheer weight of thoughts and descriptions and questions. I feel I must constantly be feeding a loom of writing with the disheveled threads of my thoughts, trying to turn it into a beautiful piece of fabric, presentable and sensible to the world. I fear that I cannot keep up with this newfound deluge of materials, now that I'm actually sitting at the loom.

Also, I promised myself that I wouldn't write entries like these, mere diary entries of my days and emotions. For the training I want, that simply will not do. But it has to be said at least once what the strange pitfalls of an inarguable need to write are.

When you read a book, a good book, do you even know what that author went through to get those words on that page in front of you? Perhaps weeks in a cabin, isolated with his pages, doing solitary battle with the plot. Lonely hours tucked behind library shelves and buried beneath books to cross-check pertinent information. Or the time spent staring at a flat screen and willing the information to come from the internet or the words to come out of your fingers or the paragraph to end. And that's only the beginning. You pour your mind and heart and sweat into this intangible living thing, and then bring it out for dissection: personal editing, others editing, sometimes you cut off whole limbs, and sometimes they slaughter your beloved creation and tell you to go back to page one. No wonder authors have gone mad from such a necessarily lonely and harsh way of living.

I agree with Annie Dillard. In the way that a good magician never reveals his secrets, a good writer should never punish the reader with the suffering they went through in the process of writing.

"Every year the aspiring photographer brought a stack of his best prints to an old, honored photographer, seeking his judgment. Every year the old man studied the prints and painstakingly ordered them into two piles, bad and good. Every year the old man moved a certain landscape print into the bad stack. At length he turned to the young man: 'You submit this same landscape every year, and every year I put it on the bad stack. Why do you like it so much?' The young photographer said, 'Because I had to climb a mountain to get it.' ... How many gifts do we open from which the writer neglected to remove the price tag? Is it pertinent, is it courteous, for us to learn what it cost the writer personally?"

--Annie Dillard The Writing Life

Yet in this medium, as friends and family who read here, I can be less vigilant with this aspect, yet it is a discipline I must cultivate. Yet you must know that I write because the writing won't allow me to not write. That if I didn't write the mantle would weigh my footsteps so heavily that my life would end up stopping that I might save myself by writing away the burden. Yes, there is joy and purpose to be sure in the process, but the fact that I'm a writer makes it my job, my duty to write. A mother loves and gets joy from her children, but being a mom is still a job.

It's such a strange thing, with ears attuned at odd angles. Simple small events will snag my thoughts, or a past happening months or even years ago will call out. And there are times when I have to drop whatever I'm doing to put that luminous new thread on the loom; for integrity of self and, hopefully, for the sake of giving to those who read.

Shadows and Greyscale

2009-02-02T16:12:00.005-05:00

This afternoon I suffered from what was probably the fourth headache I've ever had in my life. Blessed mightily by an excellent immune system, the times when the rogue bodily malfunction slips into my life I am completely lost. The last time I threw up (2 years ago) and was forced to rest my body, I thought Ramen noodles counted as the soup required for sick days. My appalled roommates quickly corrected my naivete. And when my headache came today, Dave had to forcibly tuck me into bed so I could sleep the effects away.

There is a window in our bedroom that, somehow, no matter what hour of daylight is always gilded in yellow sunlight. It makes for waking up on Saturday mornings a warm and gentle process, the shadows from the leafless branches painted onto our cream-colored blinds.

As I was waking cautiously from my nap, gauging whether the vice had been removed from my temples, my eyes were drawn to the blinds by a flicker of movement. The shadow of a sparrow had alighted on the shadow of the branch, and began to groom itself in quick dithery movements; I could barely make out the silhouette of his small round head and flat-edged tail before he sped away from the window like an arrow.

I have heard the world described several times as "a mere shadow of the things to come". Think of the day when in this world, after a lifetime of seeing nothing but mere silhouettes of reality to have the blind's cord pulled to reveal another dazzling world of texture and color and light. It would be like Dorothy walking into Technicolor Oz. Crags in the bark of the branches and snow in the feathers of the sparrow, previously mere 2-dimensional colorless shapes. The sun shining full on your face and your wide eyes suddenly filled with detail and form far more complex than ever seen by eyes before. I'd imagine it would be too overwhelming to look at for too long at first.

And if the world we live in, with rainbows leaping from prisms and parrots cawing from the branches of banana leaves and icy mist rising from the very puffs of air you breathe, if this beautiful world is little more than shadows on a scale of grey...when the blind's cord is pulled at the end of the age I want to be at that window with greedy eyes waiting to be overwhelmed.

A Letter To God

2009-02-01T11:14:00.003-05:00

So how do I pray, God?

After a lifetime in 3 churches, after reading the Lord's prayer, after praying aloud a thousand times with friends, another thousand times trying to bumble through it with just you, I still don't know how to pray.

How frustrating.

It's not for lack of want. I just don't understand the methodology. After reading Miriam's Prayer and Mary's Prayer and Moses' Prayer, all with formula and poetry, is there some unknown code I need to crack? I long to overhear Daniel's long hours spent in prayer, hunched over the windowsill facing Israel. I long to overhear Elijah's conversations with you up in the mountains by the brook, or John's communiques with you as he walked the hot sand in his camel tunic. The people who knew you and knew how to pray, but their most intimate communions with you unshared and secret, and the silence of such drives me mad.

It's not for lack of want. I just don't understand the methodology. You used James to let us know that when we need wisdom, we should ask you and you'll give it to us. And I am asking for wisdom in prayer. Yet how does such a thing manifest? I balk harshly at rhetoric and worn-out cumbersome words in prayer, yet does that mean I am not giving you your due and deserved awe? And when I pray, what do I pray? You grant what is in your will and do not what is not in your will.

So God, do I have to know your will before I can really pray? If so, than I ask for even more wisdom for that...and I am getting even more frustrated.

God, I am here. I am stirred up and agitated; I want to be able to do this, I want it very badly. I know that the times I approach you rawly in want and in question the more peace I feel after such. If I am disrespectful, show me. I am asking to learn.

I have learned a beautiful thing: that while almost everyone else in the world asks you to be perfect, you know me far better than to ask for such a foolish thing. So here's my two tiny copper coins, here's my mustard seed, here's my most basic possession of willingness. If it takes one hundred prayers to show me 99 wrong mindsets and motives and 1 request that miraculously overlapped with your will, than it's worth the 99 frustrations. I'm willing to make the wrong prayers if you're willing to show me and teach me the right ones.

And God, you know I'm not patient. If you could help me learn stuff sooner rather than later, that would be great.

(Doesn't hurt to ask, right?)

Something for a Friday Evening

2009-01-30T17:40:00.002-05:00

I've realized a tendency of mine in writing: I hoard.

My earliest memories of that need to write are found in fuzzy pictures of a 14-year-old girl, scribbling poems borne of family sadness. Writing began with and was fed by hurt. Steadily throughout high school I produced hundreds of poems, yet two months after I started dating Dave the flow of poetry ran almost completely dry and has never returned. Life had gotten better.

What I mean when I say I hoard is exactly how webster defines it (also, you know you're a nerd when you have Webster.com on your favorite links). Tracing the word back down to its Old English and Gothic roots, it means"to hide treasure". And unhappiness has always compelled my pen more than happiness has; as it were I save the good memories, the treasures, for myself, reluctant to give them away to others in words. Maybe that's why I've been hesitant to post about the wedding or our honeymoon adventures in any detail...

But this is something beautiful I share. A very good gift out of an extraordinarily dense history of gift receiving.

Mama came over today, bringing a gallon of milk from the grocery that Dave and I badly needed and the promise of a present. I opened my apartment door at her soft knock, and with the gallon in her right hand and her left hand clamped strangely across her jacket, she came in for a moment. She looked at me with such excitement and said, "I read your blog - and I get it." Grinning, she pulled out of the folds of her coat (what else?) 3 books: Orthodoxy, Silence, and The Return of the Prodigal Son. I realized the selection immediately.

To explain: I'm presently reading a book by Phil Yancey, Soul Survivor: How My Faith Survived the Church, and it is essentially 13 chapter-long biographies of extraordinary people and how they directly influenced Yancey's life. Dr. King, Chesterton, Nouwen, Dr. Brand...an amazing collection of people. And my mama "got it": the majority of these 13 were writers that Yancey had read, and in the reading these authors had shaped his life and his writing. Those three books came from among these thirteen people. That's what those 3 books meant - passing on life-shaping books with the great hope that they would help to shape my own.

You should've seen how her brown eyes glowed when she presented them to me, happily increasing my sizeable hoard of good things; a hoard I hope to more successfully unearth and employ in the future.

A Toast to Menstruation

2009-01-29T15:45:00.002-05:00

Ah, all those adolescent years of whining in celibacy when the female curse would arrive every month to inconvenience my clothing, my comfort, my life.

With my life the way it is now, as a young married lady I'd like to raise my glass and say:

"Thank you God for the sign of another baby-free month."

Cheers.