46

 

Today, last day of my 46th year,

I noticed, walking down a hallway, that

I seemed to have grown. Maybe my head was

tilted at a new angle, or my spine sent

energy flowing upward. Maybe it was

the shoes I wore to go with

the pearls I wore to go with

my new vice president.

What a pleasure it will be to awake,

to be 46 and just a few hours,

to feel myself in the warm middle but

celebrating a body that feels new.

When God Provides a Worm

Yesterday, Ruth Bader Ginsburg died. It felt like just one thing too many to handle. I never met her, but I almost believed in her the way you believe in a Bible character (I read Notorious RBG but also knew her to be heroically serving the country for the good of us all in spite of multiple rounds of cancer and the fact that she was a frail 87.) Her death felt like the worst kind of blow. How can we survive her loss in the midst of everything else? It was too much.  

I had been on a long walk with colleagues, talking about the dismal state of educators and education when the news broke, and I was cold. I decided to take a hot bath and read the book of Job. Job loses everything. And yet, he somehow manages to still bless God, to say, “The Lord gives and the Lord takes away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.” And when things get worse still, and even his wife says, “Why don’t you just curse God and die?” he tells her that if we are going to accept blessings why should we not also accept hardship? It’s oddly helpful stuff. 

Before I got to Job, though, I finished the book of Jonah, which I had started the night before. Jonah feels familiar. We were both called to serve people who we sometimes think maybe don’t deserve us. We both tried to run away from the call. We both eventually gave in and did what God wanted. And then the people who we thought would certainly not hear us, oddly... do. Here I am, doing a job I didn’t plan to do and was weirdly called into doing--twice. And now, again, I’m being called into teaching in an impossible situation for a community this is being vocally disrespectful and mean. And then kids email me from last year and say mine was their favorite class, and could I please write a letter of recommendation? And what can I do with that except sigh, cancel a few more hours of sleep, and write the letter? And then the kids who are currently failing suddenly turn in all of the things from the last month with a sweet email saying they are sorry it’s all so late, but it’s finally done. Sometimes I just want to walk out of the city of Nineveh and lie down in the blazing sun. I get it, Jonah. I get it.

I had gotten so far in the story on Thursday night and stopped because that was the part that I had really needed. I figured, “Why not finish the last chapter before moving on to Job?” 

In Jonah 4, God provides a great plant to grow up over Jonah and shade him from the sun, and Jonah is very happy about the plant. But the next day God PROVIDES a worm that chews the plant and makes it wither. Then God PROVIDES a scorching wind. It made me pause, this repetition of the word “provides.” Like it’s a gift? Like it’s something Jonah needs? Jonah, still angry that he has successfully saved the unworthy-now-worthy Ninevites is angry. So angry, he wishes to die. And God says, “You have been concerned about this plant, though you did not tend it or make it grow. It sprang up overnight and died overnight. And should I not have concern for the great city of Nineveh, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who cannot tell their right hand from their left—and also many animals?” 

The end. 

Seriously. The book ends there.

I must have known that. I’ve read Jonah many times before. But I still felt shocked. 

All along, I’ve been thinking about the story of Jonah as our (his and my) story: we get called, we resist, we get called again and again, we obey. The Ninevites hear, repent, and live. Jonah might be a jerk, but he saves them. I never thought the book was about the Ninevites. I thought it was about getting called until you cannot resist, about how we can choose to ignore God, but eventually God can be really really persuasive. I had not really thought about what it means that after Jonah obeys, after the Ninevites are saved, God provides a worm. Even after Nineveh and the 120,000 people and also many animals are spared, God is still saving Jonah from himself. 

The story is God’s. The people and animals are God’s. The plant is God’s. The worm is God’s. He will save us from ourselves, whether it takes a storm, a fish, an asshole prophet, or a pestilent worm. 

The book of Jonah ends with the words of God, as it certainly should, but that means we don’t know how Jonah responds. Maybe, for once, he doesn’t talk back. Or maybe it’s because the story is as unfinished as it feels. Fish, worms, winds, pandemics, political chaos: God provides. 

From One White Suburbanite to Another

In this past week, the United States surpassed 100,000 COVID19 deaths (105,557 as of this writing, although there’s some evidence that thousands of deaths should have been included in that number and were not.) Also in the news was the horrifying video of the murder of George Floyd after a white police officer kneeled on his neck for more than eight minutes. This follows closely on the video of an incident in which a white woman refused to put her dog on a leash in a leash-only section of Central Park and then called the police on the black man who was bird-watching and asked her to do so. These events come at the heels of the recent murder of Amaud Arbery by two white men because he was running and black. And the murder of Breonna Taylor, also black, when police raided her apartment for a crime she didn’t commit and shot her.

 

It’s been a dark couple of weeks in America even if we don’t talk about “politics.”

 

I want desperately to be able to write something to help make sense of all of this, but I’ve been reading some very compelling narratives from black men and women about times they’ve been harassed, accused, and endangered because their skin is darker than mine. They live in a world where it’s not safe to go running, to sit in a car, to sit in their home, to watch birds. I have nothing to say more eloquent or relevant or true than what they say. I am grateful to them for their stories and grateful for the people who have been amplifying those stories.

 

For some reason, God saw fit to make me a white woman born into a middle-class suburban life. Maybe She thought I was too tender to take life as a person of color. Or maybe She intends for me to use the circumstances of my birth somehow. I am ashamed to confess that, due to my continued residence and employment in an area that is largely white, most of my friends, colleagues, neighbors, and acquaintances are also white middle-class suburbanites. It turns out that in allowing myself to stay in my comfortable life, I have not put myself in a position to be very helpful to the people of color whose lives are obscenely more dangerous and complicated than my own. I believe, though, that God can use us from any place at any time. It’s not too late for me. And so I start with my own people. 

 

This is for my white middle-class friends who, when I listed the deaths in the first paragraph said in their minds, “But what about the riots?” This is for you who felt as much or more anger and indignation over those riots as over the killings, who think they are equivalent crimes. I write to you with full knowledge that minds and hearts are hard to change and that the people who need to read this either won’t start reading it or won’t make it to the end. I get why the black community is cynical about white allies. I’m cynical too. And yet, I’m not being a better person for not trying. So here goes.

 

Do this for me: look around you and find the most valuable item you own. Maybe you have a really nice car. Maybe you have a really sweet media room with a big TV and surround sound and multiple reclining seats. Maybe you have a really nice phone. Heck, maybe you have ALL of those things. That’s fine. You don’t have to choose. Hold them all in your mind, if you like.

 

Now walk into your bathroom and get close to the mirror. Look into your own eyes. Look until you really see yourself there. 

 

Now decide: which is more important to you, your valuable item(s) or your life? If you could keep one or the other but not both, which would you choose?

 

And here’s an extra credit assignment. Do you have a son? Go look at him sprawled out on your couch or shooting hoops. Or, if he’s not with you right now, look at a picture of him. There’s probably one in your house, right? Now decide: which is more important to you, your valuable item(s) or your son? If you could keep one or the other but not both, which would you choose?

 

If in either scenario you chose your car or your TV, OK then. Let the fury over the riots build in you like boiling acid. Go out into the street and scream. Search for, read, and post more about the riots. Raise awareness about the sanctity of shop windows and Target merchandise. Also, you can stop reading now.

 

If, however, you chose your own life and the life of your son, I’m with you. Me too. But here’s the thing you need to hear: if you chose your life and your son’s life and yet spent more time and energy condemning the riots than the murders that sparked them, you are a racist. I bet you don’t feel like a racist. I bet you feel angry that I’m accusing you of such a thing. But the riots that you think are repulsive are about things, and the murders are about lives. Calm down--I’m not endorsing looting, and I’m aware of the news reports that the evolution from peaceful protests to riot seems to coincide with the interference of outside forces, including allegedly white-supremacist groups, and I don’t endorse that either. Focus. Don’t let yourself look away from this just yet. This essay is about you, my friend. If you are willing to say your life and your child’s life matters more than any possession but you are more upset about someone’s possessions being damaged or stolen than someone’s LIFE being stolen, you need to ask yourself why. Why does the one upset you more than the other? Why do riots raise your righteous indignation more than murders? Why do the riots demand more of your attention? Is it because your things could be stolen but those kinds of murders would never happen to you? Because you never go running? Because you never sit in your home watching TV? No, the difference is something else. 

 

Imagine living in a country in which most of the police, lawyers, judges, governors, senators, and president are black. Really pause and imagine. Does it make you feel uncomfortable? I confess: I feel weird about it. Why? What if every time you saw one of those policemen a story ran through your head about how he could kill you on the spot? Because you’ve seen it happen over and over again on TV. Because it happened to your neighbor. Or your son.

 

We are talking about racism, friend, and you and I need to do the first hard thing and call ourselves out for it.

 

I doubt you set out to be racist, but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t soaked into you. There are plenty of books and articles and talks about where this came from, and I’m going to continue to read and listen so that I can understand better, and I invite you to do the same. You can do it secretly if you’re embarrassed. Just start somewhere somehow. Seeing it is the first step. Or maybe the first step is just wanting to see it, even if you don’t yet. Maybe someday you and I can talk about it. And maybe we’ll know more about what to do next when we know more about what we’re dealing with. And maybe someday our sons and daughters or grandsons and granddaughters will live in a world where they don’t even have to ask themselves which is more important, stolen items or stolen lives.

Immortal Poems of the English Language

Even as a well-acknowledged nerdy English teacher, I can probably count on the fingers of both hands the number of people I know who regularly read poetry and who would claim that they really "get" it. I used to want to be one of those people. I just...wasn't (with the notable exception of Shel Silverstein, whom I loved and who, I thought, didn't count.) In high school, I decided to change that by reading poetry anyway. When, on a road trip, my parents offered to buy me any book in the bookstore to entertain me (before cars had TVs and any of us had cell phones) I reluctantly turned away from the novels I could have polished off in a few hours and bought Immortal Poems of the English Language. It seemed reasonable to start with the best, right?

 

It's arranged chronologically, which means that the first poems were written by "anonymous." Shakespeare didn’t appear on the scene for over seventy pages. Truth: I had no idea what I was reading. I didn't like it. But for some reason that, many years later, I must confess that I admire about myself, I kept going. I read/skimmed/looked at the whole damned boring book. Hundreds of pages of poems I didn’t really understand. I could read all the words, but I felt like I was missing something--the thing that makes poetry worthwhile. There were a few spots around the romantics that made me pause, although I really only READ the shorter poems. (I still prefer a poem to be under two pages, honestly.) There were several that seemed not worth rereading just then, but maybe turning down the corner of the page to read later. Every now and then, I'd go back to Immortal Poems of the English Language and read a bit. I still didn't love poetry, but sometimes, for a second or two, it sort of meant something to me.

 

I took the book with me to college. I wanted to want to read it.

 

One very cold night when my roommate was off-campus and my heart was broken and I couldn't sleep, I remembered one of those poems. I REMEMBERED a poem I hadn't realized I'd learned in the first place. I got up and turned the light back on and flipped through The Immortal Poems of the English Language, looking for it. But while I looked for it, another poem caught my eye, and I read that. Huh. I still didn’t fully understand it, I still felt like I was missing something that I didn’t know how to truly see, but even so, I FELT the poem. It clicked. It spoke to me. It went beyond liking.

 

Heart pounding, I kept looking for the poem I thought I remembered. I read a few other poems along the way. I felt a couple of those two. Awed, I read the poem I had wanted to find. I was lonely and heartbroken and trapped in a small room at 2 am, and the poem said what I needed it to say exactly the way I needed it to say it. It dropped a little something solid into what felt like a deep, howling, swirling hole in my center. 

 

I turned the light back off, opened the curtains, and stared out into the sub-zero night through the crystals that had formed on my window. I repeated the words of the poem. I felt like I was really seeing nighttime for the first time. I felt like I was seeing ice for the first time. My life simultaneously zoomed out into a long, still-empty mystery and focused in on that particular, specific, fully-known moment: that particular scene, those particular words. That was the first moment when I felt both deep gratitude and yearning hunger for the right words.

 

I’d say I still don’t “get” more poems than I do “get,” but that energizing mix of gratitude and hunger for poetry has become regular and familiar, if no less comfortable than that first night I felt it. Every year when I take a deep, trembling breath and try to teach poetry to teenagers, I start by telling this story and showing them my now tattered copy of Immortal Poems of the English Language. It’s one book I never loan out, partly because it means so much to me and partly because it’s actually kind of a dumb place to start reading poetry. 

The magnificence of small

I had a low-electronics high-outside weekend. It meant I had to stay up to midnight last night getting things ready for this morning and that I woke up with a decent (but subsiding, so no worries) headache. I actually feel really good about how much better I've gotten over the past six weeks at riding the waves of living. Granted, the waves right now are small in my little world. Manageable. There are really big tsunami-sized waves in the bigger world that aren't really my job other than to be ready to deal with the impact when/if they arrive in my own little life. But learning to accept my little waves is a good start at being ready for any waves, right?

 

I was thinking, on a bike ride, about how when I was young, I assumed my life was going to be big. I guess I thought I would be "important" in one way or another. Then the reality is that while I am very important to a smallish number of people in a local sort of way, you could also turn that around and say that I'm just your ordinary suburban English teacher--sort of a nobody from nowhere.

 

And then I look at trees budding and ride my bike in the slanting late afternoon sunshine and notice the day on which both the spring frogs and the summer frogs are making their music. There is a moment when my daughter panics because Mother's Day is so close and a moment when my son waits for everyone to finish their s'mores before he goes inside to retrieve a sweatshirt so that he can put away the marshmallows at the same time. 

 

I reworded my vision for myself this weekend. My life might be smaller than I thought it would be, but it's also more precise. The moments are tiny, but they are like those teeny pictures painted on grains of rice or like snowflakes or butterfly wings when you magnify them: small enough to throw away, to miss entirely but, if you look closely, every bit as beautiful and miraculous as anything else in the world.

 

Small, I decided, is also OK. No, more than that. Small is also valuable. Worth slowing down to look at closely. Worthy of reverence and gratitude and awe. My existence looks and feels smaller than I had dreamed, but if examined carefully, if magnified and admired with a sense of appreciation for the endless capacity for life to be more and more magnificent and complex the closer one gets to the details that make up reality, scale reveals itself as irrelevant. 

 

I was reminded of an idea I read in an L. M. Montgomery book (I believe it’s Rilla of Ingleside, if you’re looking for a good piece of historical fiction): in order to be infinitely great, God must also be infinitely small. A God that sees only mountains and celebrities is limited. A truly infinitely large, omnipresent God must also know the microscopic organisms that live in streams, must see the trajectory of every single rain drop, must care as deeply for a fragile baby (even one born in a barn, an expendable subject in a mighty empire?) as for world leaders and sports stars. A truly infinite God must, it seems, care deeply about even the small ripples of my life. And so shall I.

One run

 I am so very grateful for my run today and for being well enough to run again and for what running has been and is in my life. 

Today I ran at dusk on a warm(ish) November afternoon. The light was soft and grey to start and faded to softer and greyer until it was almost gone by the end of my run and my path was illumined by streetlights and headlights. I ran on the Fox River trail from St. Charles to Geneva and back up the other side. I was the only one on the trail, and it was silent. There wasn't anyone to respond to or care for or even be polite to. It was just me and the silence and the river. I didn't run fast or far, since it's possible my hamstring is still healing. It was effortless. Like floating, but better, because I was running. It was my body, my breath, my feet making it happen. There was a twinge on the back of my knee on the previously injured leg, and it was just enough to keep me vigilant. My left foot was striking a little differently from my right. It was perfect in its near-miss of perfection. It was like coming home, but better. Like I imagine it will be to rest in heaven. Not boring, like rest. But a full body welcome. The place I was designed to fit. I was grateful for every previous run on that path and for every path that led me to that particular one on this particular day. Everything that ever happened to me brought me to that run, and that run redeemed all of the moments before it. It made everything that happened all day insignificant but also vital. The run would not have been what it was if all of the things that came before weren't exactly what they were. 

There are a few moments in life that I can return to at will, and I will that that run be one of them. That when I am old and can no longer run, I will be able to close my eyes on life and for just a moment relive that run.

Something I Know About What I Do Not Yet Know

I posted this on my Facebook wall yesterday: “If one hopes to become good at something, one must first be willing to spend some time being not-so-good. If one wants to be strong, one must begin in weakness.”  I wrote it from a position of weakness, of not-so-goodness, and of hope.

Wednesday night I set out to run for 30 minutes straight.  I had recently run 20 minutes non-stop.  I had run 30 minutes total with brief breaks.  But 30 minutes without stopping was going to be a milestone.  It was hard.  20-some minutes in, I really wanted to stop.  In hindsight, I probably should have stopped.  My calf was bothering me some, but that was only part of the problem.  The other part was that I was tired.  I felt like I had been running for a very, very long time.  Uninvited, the thought popped to mind that not two years ago I had run for a little under four hours when I ran the Lost Dutchman Marathon.  I have twice run Chicago in around three hours and forty-five minutes.  I have run, therefore, for more than 220 minutes on multiple occasions, and yet, running for half an hour felt like an eternity. The contrast felt demoralizing.  Now, two days later, my right leg still has not recovered.  I have fallen so far.  I am still broken.

But yesterday was the ten month anniversary of my spine surgery, which means that a little less than ten months ago, I was struggling to walk in circles around the first floor of my house for a few minutes at a time.  When I was finally able to walk for more than ten minutes at a time and graduated myself to the walking track at the gym, I had to relearn how to use my right leg and how to keep my right foot pointing straight ahead of me.  I had to relearn how to use my right calf muscle and then to regrow that muscle, a process that seems still to be in progress.  And I am definitely not done regrowing the nerve that controls the outside of my right leg and foot.  I have made enormous progress.  I have been persistent and patient and brave. It’s all a matter of perspective. 

To distract myself from my tiredness and calf pain, I thought about a book I recently read called The Talent Code, by Daniel Coyle.  The first section of the book focuses on the biology of learning a skill, specifically the myelination of nerves that occurs when they are fired repeatedly.  Each firing causes a little more myelin to grow and each layer of myelin refines and speeds up the nerve impulse.  The book proposes, therefore, that all great talent begins as not-great talent that has been refined by hours and hours of practice.  Current research shows that “expert” status at any skill is only achieved after 10,000 hours of practice.  The most powerful moment in the book, for me, pointed out that in order to be great at anything, you have to slog through thousands of hours of being not-great at that thing.  Everyone who is good at something now was once not good at it.  Ability is not something we are handed on a silver platter. Ever. 

Of course, the book was not at all about people who have nerve damage or a perpetually broken foot, but it speaks to me in many other ways.  It’s OK to spend a long time learning how to run again.  More powerfully, it reminds me not to be afraid of other pursuits either. I haven’t written anything of note because I just haven’t put in the time.  The Bronte sisters, according to Coyle, spent decades writing complete crap with hokey dialogue and stolen plots before they wrote Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre. Just because I have never become good at piano does not mean that someday I might not still take it up again and, after a long, long, long time, be good at it.  I could, in theory, start either of these practices tomorrow.  The reality is that I won’t, given that I don’t even have time to sleep lately, but the possibility is always there.  I can become better at cooking, better at teaching, better at singing, better at anything.  So can my students.  So can my children. The future is bigger than I can imagine and full of possibilities, some of which I don’t even know to consider yet. I need only be willing to be not-so-good, to be weak, to be wrong, to make mistakes, and to keep trying.

Another Lesson on Lessening

This afternoon found me making sugar cookie dough (to make into shamrock cookies later) while my son "played" with his microscope. We looked up rotifers on the internet because he was looking at some prepared slides, and then we looked at salt and sugar and human hair and paper and a piece of carrot that I hadn't cleaned off the table after Adam ate lunch. (Do the benefits of doing nothing never end?) Playing with his microscope was Adam's idea, as was what he is now doing: shooting baskets out on the driveway in full winter gear amid the occasional snow flurries. Several times while looking at things he didn't understand, Adam said, "I really like this microscope,” and “I like the cross section slides the best.” That kid can make me more furious than anyone has since my sister grew up, but he also can be source of pure delight and wonder. I am here to take a teensy bit of credit for that, in a sort of negative way. I think the magic of this afternoon was more about what I did not do than what I did.

Not long ago a friend who also has a third grader remarked that I am good at fostering my children's ability to play imaginatively. I have been thinking about whether or not this is true. I was good at imaginative play when I was young, but I am not particularly good at it now. I read to my kids. Mostly, though, I do nothing in particular to make them play as they do, with microscopes and legos, inventing new board games and "talking" their various little animals and cars, making up songs and putting on shows, organizing and reorganizing football cards, making obscure (and extremely non-representational) artwork out of pipe cleaners and tape and markers and then "selling" their art in a "grocery store". So today, when I watched my son engaged in an act of spontaneous inquiry, I thought about how such a thing came about. I haven't mentioned his microscope, well, ever. In fact, I had forgotten that he had received one from his grandparents on his 8th birthday.

Although it's far too easy to forget it as I plan which summer camps and classes my children will attend in the next couple of months, as everyone I know with a third-grade boy frets about which baseball team he will be on this spring, as I listen to parents discuss who is in the advanced and enriched program and as the school administers standardized tests, my accidental secret to raising kids who come up with their own imaginary games and come downstairs with their microscope and say, "Can I do this now?" is to do nothing.

Nothing. An afternoon in which we didn't go anywhere. We didn't have any athletic events. We didn't invite anyone over or fill up the house with false stimuli in the form of TV or video games (since we don't really own a usable version of either.) After lunch, Gretchen needed a nap, and I lay down on the couch with a book, and Adam roamed about for a few minutes until he saw his microscope in his closet. That's it. That's my secret. I was doing nothing.

Nothing is pretty darn easy, I must say. I was dozing off, in fact. But nothing also takes courage and practice. I will confess that on this chilly damp Saturday, I had two back-up plans: a lego train exhibit at the library and a parade. And maybe I would have made us do one if not both if Gretchen had not clearly needed a nap after spending the night with my mom last night. And it was with reservations that I canceled both plans in favor of what my kids really needed: down time. Living in a wonderful community, as we do, where on any given weekend there are dozens of fun and/or educational activities and facilities available, the temptation is to think that if we aren't out soaking up as much stimulation as possible, I am not being the absolute best parent. But the truth of parenting is more complicated than that.

I am not advocating parents doing nothing ever. My children are generally well behaved because I am intentional and constant in ensuring they are. I try to expose them to a variety of activities and cultural events. Tomorrow we have one thing after another: church followed by birthday party followed by basketball game. My son plays a sport pretty much every season and takes piano lessons, and my daughter takes a dance class and a gymnastics class. But starting when my son was a toddler and we started to sign up for little park district classes and sports and preschool, I carefully guarded one day a week to not sign up for anything. I had an instinct that there was something as valuable about time alone as there is in engagement. I now have a day of the week when my daughter has nothing, and as much as she looks forward to Mondays because of ballet and Thursdays because of gymnastics, and as much as she enjoys preschool, she also celebrates Tuesday because she can hang around and play in her pajamas and doesn't get rushed off anywhere when she is in the middle of an imaginary drama. It isn't that all of the other things my children are signed up for are not wonderful and valuable experiences for them, it's just that I must remind myself to hold back a bit, to worry less about cramming everything into one short childhood and occasionally let what they are learning in their structured activities blossom into something that is their own. And instead of feeling guilty that I sometimes need some downtime myself, I need to remember that it's OK to say that I am going to read for a bit, or cook, or sweep the floor. It's OK to not be constantly playing with or transporting or teaching my children. Sometimes--OK, often--they are far better at engaging themselves in meaningful play and learning than any adult could be.

I need to remember this and remember to occasionally lie on the couch. Sometimes the best of everything that I can offer my children is less of everything.

"And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life? If then you arenot able to do so small thing as that, why do you worry about the rest?" --Luke 12:25-26

All I Can Do Is Walk Him to the Bus Stop

My son is eight. He is, for the most part, a calm and responsible boy. He can get carried away with silliness. He sometimes cries about ridiculous things, like the need to wear jeans to school when it is 20 degrees outside. But I trust him as much as I would trust any eight year old. Even so, I have taken to walking him to the bus stop most mornings. I do this partly for him because he is the only one at the bus stop in the mornings. But if I examine my motives carefully, I realize I don't think that being alone at a bus stop is such a terrible thing. The ability to be alone is quite valuable, in fact, and alone for two minutes while waiting for a bus filled with peers is probably not entirely a bad thing. So I have come to realize that, mostly, I am walking Adam to the bus for myself.

I walk my son to the bus because if I don't, I stand at the front door and watch him cross the street and then walk away, out of sight. He walks confidently but without deliberation, as though this is what he does on a normal day, as though there never was any question of him walking down the sidewalk to the bus stop, getting on a bus driven by a stranger (granted, it's the same stranger every day,) and then spending the bulk of his day somewhere other than home with me. As he walks, I see double: I see my dependable and intelligent "big boy" going off to be dependable and intelligent where all the other kids his age are; but I also see my baby, my toddler, my preschooler, and he is walking away, going off without me, leaving me. Both sights are irrefutably true. I must let my child go out into the world because I want him to learn to be independent and to learn about the magic of words and numbers and the stories of our history and the marvels we think we know through science. But I must also accept that my baby is just walking away. My toddler is leaving. He is going off into a life that will be his and not mine, that he will control and I will, decreasingly, only influence. He doesn't need my hands to hold him up any more, and he isn't afraid to stand on a corner by himself and then get on a bus and not look back at his mother, standing alone and watching.

Today a broken and bent man went into a school full of children like my son, children whose parents scolded themselves for being silly enough to almost weep every morning when their brave dependable children walked out into the world, and did the worst thing I can imagine a human doing. There, but for the grace of God, go I. And one can't help but know that even with the grace of God, people are there already. I can't imagine there is a parent in America today who isn't wearing the clothes of the parents in Connecticut, who isn't completely undone by empathic pain, who doesn't look at the school pictures of their children hanging in the hall or at the top of the stairs and HURT to the point of near-paralysis, and who isn't thinking of how a person could, before she even knew what was happening, lose everything. How can any of us ever be brave enough to let our children go out into the world? I really don't know.

And yet, I also know that I must. If I love my children--and I do--I will eventually have to let them cross the street by themselves, even if there are reckless drivers in the world, because I want their world to be larger than my modest suburban house and yard. I will have to let them get on the school bus and spend a day at school because I want them to be able to understand the marvelous world they live in and the mostly marvelous people who share it with them. The horrible horrible truth is that I can walk my son to his bus stop every morning, but unless I am willing to force him to grow up in fear, unless I am willing to sacrifice all of the brilliant things he might become and the fantastic journeys he might take during the life ahead of him, I have to let him get on the bus by himself.

Those of us who are in the season of advent have an uncomfortable mingling of Good Friday and Christmas today. Our streets are lined with lights and wreaths, preparing a path, lighting the way, and yet we watch our brothers and sisters as they hang on their crosses and ask how God can allow such pain. My God, my God, why have you abandoned me? And yet, since I became a mother, since I felt my son's presence in my womb, for me, Christmas and Easter have become inseparable. Yes, I await that moment of pure joy Christmas Eve when "Silent Night" becomes "Joy to the World," that moment when I transcend hope and actually believe that God is with us, that the kingdom is near, that swords will be beat into plowshares, that "they shall never harm nor destroy on all my holy mountain." But I also think of Mary giving birth alone, save for a man she had only recently married. I think of Mary loving her baby and then watching him grow up and then.... And I think of God, who knew humanity pretty well by then and still let his whole heart be born flesh--the kind of flesh that is first a helpless and dependent baby, the kind of flesh that must be never out of reach of Mama and then eventually learns to walk on his own, the kind of flesh that eventually must go out into the world if He is to experience life in its abundance, if He is to make a difference on this unreliable planet among broken, bent, and hurting humans.

If you've ever watched a beloved child walk down the street to a bus stop, Christmas is equal parts wonder and terror. He will get hurt. He will be grieved, perhaps even unto death.

Lord, have mercy on us.

Then Simeon blessed them and said to his mother Mary, "This child is destined for the falling and the rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be opposed so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed--and a sword will pierce your own soul too." --Luke 2:34-35

Team Chickpea Piccata: Some Thoughts on Deliberately Falling Short

“The true object of all human life is play.  Earth is a task garden; heaven is a playground.” –G. K. Chesterton

“If you want to be creative, stay in part a child, with the creativity and invention that characterizes children before they are deformed by adult society.”  --Jean Piaget

“Imagination rules the world.”  --Napoleon Bonaparte

Comparisons are the death of joy.  I know this.  I know quite well that I ought to go about living my own life the best I can and not worry myself with what anyone else has or does.  Competition, however, is contagious, and it’s a difficult disease to shake.  You would think that abandoning my career and for the better part of a decade earning $0, and that having my running career taken down by a chronically broken foot, and generally doing and having nothing lauded or glamorized or even compensated by our current culture would go a long ways towards breaking me of measuring myself against others, but such a thought underestimates the depravity of human nature.  There are endless ways to keep falling short, even if you protest that you are not really running the race.

The issue I am currently wrestling with is how much is enough.   Likely, the level of enough is different for every family and within each family, every kid.  Still, I think every kid probably has a level that is too much.   Every year it feels like more and more kids are doing everything available, and in an affluent suburb, that’s a lot.  Kids are in soccer—and not just regular soccer, travel soccer with foot skills classes and special audition-only tournaments—and baseball and swim team and Spanish class and piano lessons and scouts.  I feel like Adam is in plenty.  He’s in “recreational” soccer and cub scouts and takes piano lessons.  But all of his friends are in those things and baseball and some sort of tutoring as well.  Maybe football too.  Most are now on “travel” soccer teams.  Today I overheard one mom moaning/bragging that her eight-year-old is on two travel teams and a baseball team.  If you talk to the parents of these over-scheduled children, they will claim that they are doing it for one or both of two main reasons: (1) the child’s friends are all on those teams, and (2) if the child does not play every sport every season, and if he/she is not on the best teams now, he/she will not make the high school team(s). 

Now for my confession: sometimes, I believe these parents.  Sometimes I worry that my son is getting behind by not playing fall ball when the rest of his baseball-playing classmates are.  Sometimes the competitive part of me wonders if I am, when he is only eight years old, causing my son not to “make” the high school soccer team by keeping him in “recreational” soccer while all of the other kids who ought be his teammates and competition are now in travel soccer.  (Side rant: the travel soccer thing annoys me for other reasons too.  If we all just stayed here, the competition would be of the same level.  Instead, people are giving up their weekends to play teams whose members live in our town but on a field 90 minutes away.  And they’re paying a thousand dollars to do so.  Why? Because all of the good teammates and competition have gone to travel teams.  If we all just stayed here, we all could just stay here.  Seriously, folks, get over yourselves.)

Of course, there are all sorts of other ways I fall short of perfect.  Recently, I was at a meeting in a house that was probably close to twice the size of mine and decorated like a model home.  No, much more nicely than a model home.  I was in constant awe.  There were pictures in the bathroom, and they were hung in painted rectangles (perfect perfect rectangles) that matched the matting of the pictures.  The soap and hand towels matched the paint and the matting as well.  And that was just the bathroom.  Moreover, the house was immaculate.  Not a stray anything.  Every surface—and there were a lot of surfaces—was polished and shiny.  No dust on the framed mirrors.  No sock fuzz on the carpets. No toys.  Not even any toy boxes.  No papers.  Of course I didn’t go exploring around the house, so it’s possible the upstairs was grimy and chaotic, but I really doubt that was case.  Gretchen, who did go upstairs to play, told me that she hopes she can go back there someday because the house was even more like a castle inside than it was outside.  I wonder: how is such a life possible? 

How do other people live these lives?  And, because it’s really all about me after all, why do my children and I seem unable to pull it off?  Why are there piles of papers that I don’t have any idea what to do with but am afraid to throw away?  When should I be scrubbing the kitchen floor and tile walls (not that   I have these) and polishing the bathroom counters?  Do my kids have more toys than other kids, since the toys in my house seem not to all have a place to go other than the floor?  Frankly, I suspect that even if my son was on three travel teams, he still wouldn’t be the best soccer player in the third grade.  He’s small and neither particularly fast nor aggressive.  Nothing I do is likely to change that.

I know there is no point in making these comparisons.  In the end, when I’m, say, eighty, I don’t think it’s going to matter to me that my floor was dirty or my mantel was dusty or that my mirrors were splattered with soap and toothpaste.  And, let’s be honest, some of our kids are not going to be on the high school soccer and baseball teams, and that’s OK.  Really.  Some of them (gasp) might not want to be on the high school soccer, basketball, and baseball teams.  Furthermore, when I pull out my rational self for a few minutes and think through this thing, I suspect that it’s too early to either predict or prepare for those years-away try-outs.  If I’m being completely logical, do I think that playing fall ball in third grade is going make that much difference in Adam’s baseball playing two years from now, much less six or seven years from now?  No.  I don’t think it will.  What I actually believe is that there is far more to be lost than there is to be gained.

For example, the other night while I was making dinner—and I’ll return to that activity in a moment—my children got to (read: had to) play by themselves.  Adam had already had a piano lesson; Gretchen had already taken a nap.  We had already had some time together for snacks and a trip to meet Adam’s new teacher and discuss his allergies.  And so my children had something they would not have if they were on multiple sports teams: down time. 

Segway to a snapshot of our home: our dining room is neither elegant nor neat.  We have a big indestructible table covered in colored paper and cardboard, markers and crayons, scissors and tape and popsicle sticks and googly eyes.  We have a play kitchen and a lego table, and the floor is often strewn with plastic food and lego blocks and pretend money and a few stray dominoes and other detritus of childhood.  The chaos of that room often makes me cringe and sometimes makes me angry.  Interestingly enough, however, the response the room more often than not garners from visitors (at least visitors of a certain type) is, “This room is awesome!” 

The chaos of the room more accurately reflects the mind of my youngest than any of the rest of us, although all of us are prone to leaving things where we last used them when we get distracted by (or startled into) the next activity.  Gretchen, though, lives in a world of constant imagination, a world with multiple simultaneous plotlines and lots of made-up songs.  During this one late afternoon, she wandered past the lego table and decided to set up a petting zoo.  She built a number of enclosures that were neck-high to the various animals she was going to display.  She built a slide entrance for the visitors, so they could get in but the cows could not get out.  She mounted pretend lights on tall pillars so that the zoo could stay open past sunset.  She surrounded the penguin enclosure with cooling blocks.   The longer she played, the more details she thought out. 

Adam had returned to the play he had started on a previous afternoon.  He took our big tub of plastic animal figurines and sorted them into teams: the snakes, the frogs, the birds, the sea creatures, the wild dogs and cats, etc.  Then the teams competed in a baseball tournament.  He would periodically call out to me the current score.  On the evening in question, the frogs were winning, although the birds, being able to fly, are usually very good at fielding.  Yes, he could have been at real baseball practice then, had I signed him up for fall ball, but I couldn’t help but think that he has many years ahead of him for organized sports and likely far fewer years to make up a new world, to “believe” that the frogs could play the birds and win, to govern the rules not just of the game but of nature and physics as well.  You can’t sign your child up for imaginary play, but you can sign him up out of it.   

Meanwhile, I was making chickpea piccata over mashed cauliflower on a bed of arugula.  We had roasted squash and zucchini on the side and fresh blueberries and wheat-free, dairy-free chocolate chip zucchini cake for dessert.  It took some time, yes, but the end result was the sort of dinner I wish I could get in a nice restaurant but usually cannot.  I couldn’t help wonder if the people whose children are on two or three travel sport teams at a time ever eat that way, much less every night.  Doug commented to me recently that as he stands in line at grocery stores, he compares what most people buy to the food in our cart. (I confess I do the same, in a shamefully self-righteous way.)   Other people, he said, buy a lot of processed food: chicken strips, pizza rolls, crackers, fish sticks.  It’s quick and easy, no doubt, and it doesn’t mess your beautiful kitchen.  Likely, people eat that way because they don’t have time to chop and sauté, to study recipe books, to plan menus in advance, and then to wash several loads of dishes when dinner is over.  Likely, they do not read labels because their children are not allergic to wheat, milk, eggs, tree nuts, fish, and shell fish.   Perhaps they never think about the impact they are having on the environment by supporting factory farming, the over-production of genetically modified corn, and chemically processed and over-packaged food-like products.  Unfortunately, somehow we’ve come to believe that by making such decisions, we are prioritizing our children’s futures—namely, their chances of making the high school soccer and baseball teams—while failing to recognize that such decisions, in fact, only look towards a few years of sports competitions and not the long-term health and survival of the people we claim to love.

That night, I surveyed my messy house: the kitchen covered in dirty or air-drying dishes, the dining room covered in half-completed craft projects and a lego zoo, the family room set up as a baseball diamond with the birds in the field and the frogs lined up in their batting order, the shelves and bags and tables over-flowing with books and magazines and homework .  My kids did not get “ahead” at anything that evening.  Had someone come to our house, they would not have been impressed by either my domestic prowess nor my interior design skills.  For that moment, though, I thought that  maybe by making dinner and making my kids amuse themselves, we all came out ahead anyway.

Enjoy the Walk

This weekend was the two week anniversary of my back sprain.  The physician’s assistant who diagnosed me refused to give me a timeline for recovery, but from my subsequent internet exploring I learned that a sprain generally takes from two weeks to two months to heal.  Clearly I am not on the two week plan.  On Wednesday, I tried running in 30 second intervals, but my back couldn’t make it the full 30 seconds.  Oh well. 

The truth is—and hopefully this confession does not disqualify me as a “real runner”—that I have been enjoying walking.  Every so often I see someone running and think, “Oh, I’ll do that again someday,” but really any agitation I feel from being downshifted to walking is more about the events I’ll miss because I won’t be in shape for them.  I meant to run a 5K this weekend, but this is obviously not going to happen.  I meant to run a 10 miler in May.  Also not going to happen.  Triathlons in June are probably out.  These things make me sad.  (And of course it makes me crazy that I can’t do the things that I see need doing: a trip to Costco, gardening, mildew cleaning.  Honestly, I don’t particularly love to clean bathrooms, it’s just not having it done that annoys me, but that’s a rant for another day.) 

The background truth, again at the risk of losing my runner status, is that I’ve been slogging through my runs for a while.  I knew I ought to be enjoying them, but my hips were sore all the time.  I did stretches and leg lifts and hip hikes all day long.  Nothing seemed to make it any better.  My body felt  heavy and slow.  I have been feeling unreasonably fatigued.  When I tried to fix the sluggishness by doing some speedwork, I found I didn’t have any speed.  I just plain ol’ could not get myself around the track quickly, and that was demoralizing and depressing, even though I wanted to be able to shrug it off and just appreciate that I could run at all.  I was frustrated with the fact that I couldn’t keep up with my running groups.   I was embarrassed that I was so slow and so easily worn out.  I maybe should have hung it up for a while at that point, but that’s not my style.  Instead, I figured the only solution was to try harder, to run more, to start doing speedwork again, to try a new lighter “natural” running shoe.  And that, my friends, is how a person sets herself up for something like a sprained back.

I’m not going to abandon running.  I am mentally prepared for a long slow road back to health.  I’ve been here before.  Several times, actually.  There will be weeks of short easy runs then months of base building.  If I’m lucky, I might be ready to do some races again by late summer or fall.  The reality of that timeline makes me feel a bit impatient in advance, but in the meantime I am surprisingly content to walk.

Last weekend I decided to have a goal to walk about 20 miles this week.  So far, I’ve walked 26 miles in six days, averaging about four miles a day.  Of course, it takes me almost twice as long to walk four miles as it would take to run it, but for some reason, I’m OK with that.   This is one of the ways that walking is healing me.

Walking through my injury forces peace upon me.  I do find peace in running, but often my running is about, well, running.  Even when I say I don’t care about my pace, I still notice it.  I’ll come clean: I had said I only wanted to finish the Lost Dutchman Marathon and that if I had to have a time goal, it would be to finish in under four hours, but then when I did finish in under four hours, I was still disappointed in myself.  Yes, that was a “race,” so maybe it invites those types of emotions, but for me, so did group runs.  I too often cared who was running ahead of me; I cared that there was a whole world of people with whom I just couldn’t keep pace.  I told myself not to care, but I did.  Even when running alone without a watch, which I almost never do, I felt slow and sore and therefore disappointed in myself.  More: even when I felt great, the running was about running.  Putting forth a sustained effort takes some mental as well as physical effort.  The ease of walking, in contrast, allows me to pray, to notice more details—in the last two weeks I’ve seen three Eastern bluebirds, wild turkeys, a toad, baby killdeer, several hawks, and some wonderful spring blossoms—and  to work out some internal tangles.  Being injured, being a walker, I also find that I am far easier on myself.  I am not bothered when people run past me.  I don’t even keep track of time, other than to make sure I get back home when I need to be there.  I walk with the time available, and whatever distance that happens to be, I accept.  I’ve never once calculated my walking pace.  I have tried, in the past, to have that attitude about running, but it’s difficult.  Being relaxed about running is its own kind of effort, an annoying oxymoron.  There is always a little corner of my mind where I store a speck of panic that somehow I am falling behind, that I’m not running far enough or fast enough.  Enough for what?  I couldn’t tell you, exactly.  Perhaps I’m chasing down the runner I used to be, or maybe I’m chasing the runner I wish I could be.  When I walk, I’m not chasing anything.  I’m never behind.  I’m always just outside, moving, being alive and glad of it.

More importantly, walking has helped me regain some perspective.  On Wednesday night, I had the pleasure of walking with my friend Joe, who is also a downshifted runner, having had bypass surgery last summer and a heart attack this spring.  His running suspension is a bit more serious than my discomfort. I had just told him that although it had originally been my plan, I probably won’t be signing up for the Philadelphia Marathon this fall.  It seems not to matter how many 20 milers I put in beforehand, something about the marathon seems to beat me up to a level where I can hardly recover.  It’s happened too many times to be coincidence.  I’m not going to be well enough to do another one this November.  At that moment, Sasha and Elena ran past us, the first of the running group.  They had just run the Boston Marathon a week and a half before, and Elena had placed third in the 50-54 age group, beating Joan Benoit Samuelson.  And back in February, one week before I ran my marathon, Elena WON a marathon.  Not just her age group, THE MARATHON.  As in, she was the first woman to cross the finish line.  Pointing to Sasha and Elena I asked, “Why can they do it, and I can’t?”

“Do you think Cassie ever sees you and asks that?” he replied.  “You play with the hand you are dealt.  That’s all you can do.”  Good point.  I can never trump the Cassie card.  We walked.  “You know about Bruce, right?” he asked. 

A man from our running club, someone around Elena’s age, was recently diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease.  I was silent for a moment.  Bruce is a great guy: joyful sense of humor, world traveler, proud father of three.  “There’s no getting over that, is there?” I asked.  “It’s a death sentence,” Joe replied.  Worse, it’s not an easy way to go.  The news silenced me.  I hadn’t known about the diagnosis.  What I did know was that Bruce had recently walked a marathon with Joe and that they had signed up to walk another one in the fall.  He’s living the life he has.  On facebook, someone had posted that Bruce is his hero.  Mine too.

Wednesday was a beautiful evening for walking: clear, cool, with trees all covered in their tender new leaves, a green that only exists for a couple of weeks mid-spring.  Living where we do, we have the blessing of seeing, repeatedly, mercilessly, undeniably, that it’s OK to break down, to come to a halt, and to start anew.

Yes, Elena is one of my running role models.  I’ll never achieve what she has because I’m not starting with the same body, but what inspires me even more than her national-level rankings is that she is setting marathon PRs in her 50s.  I want to think that my best running years might still be ahead of me.  I’d like to think that with time and determination and my love of running restored, I’ll someday be able to keep up with more of my talented running friends (but not Elena.) For now, though, I am content to keep walking.  It makes my sprained back feel better: loosens up tight muscles, helps me to straighten out my sore spots.  More importantly, it’s been helping me straighten out some things that matter more than muscles and ligaments. 

Even when we were both running, Bruce was never faster than I was, but it turns out that he, too, is one of my running role models.  Yes, I’d enjoy being fast, but if I had to choose one, I’d rather be courageous.  I’d like to know I could keep up with the winners, but rather than lament what I am not, Bruce reminds me to live out the life I have.  Eventually we will all slow down.  Sooner or later, the bodies of even the fastest runners will shut down, will crumble, will break.  This needn’t be the case with the spirit. 

There isn’t anyone, fast or not fast, who doesn’t have to live with mortality and make peace with it.  If you’ve been given a today, and if today you can still put one foot in front of the other, at any pace, consider this a blessing.  Enjoy the walk.