7 Quick Takes...yeah, it's Sunday...

 

1. The Book of Helen....

I am still in limbo about the final edits of Helen.  That doesn't mean I'm being idle though, I've started reading The Odyssey again and outlining.  Having written a book without the benefit of an outline but with the resources of multiple myths detailing Helen's story, I will now try writing a book using an outline to make up for the fact that Penelope has far fewer stories about her life than Helen.  

2.  What I've been up to...

This past weekend, I had the luxury of journeying to Saint Mary's College for my 25th year reunion.  I'd been a bit down as no one from my key core of five friends would be there. Two are deceased. One has deliberately withdrawn from all contact, and the other two for various reasons did not come.  But not having the people I would have naturally clung to, allowed me to rediscover all the wonderful women I didn't quite know while I was at SMC, as I was busy being the age that I was.  One fellow classmate summed it up as she lamented she had lost out on something of the experience by not going to football games. Another thought she had missed it by living off campus.  A third worried about what she missed in going abroad and another, what she did not experience by not travelling to other countries. 

What we all sensed was glow of each other's college education, and how theirs was somehow fuller than our own, but the reality, was each of us had a limited experience of the school based on our own hang ups and need to grow up, and that none of us could have "the Saint Mary's experience."  Collectively, we were the Saint Mary's experience.  It's as if each of us as the bricks of the building were lamenting that we were not the whole building, because we loved the whole building and could not quite see how we fit into the structure, integrity and strength of the school itself.

3.  What I'm Reading...

I just finished Elizabeth Scalia's Strange Gods while on the plane back from Southbend, Indiana.  I have to say, if you buy this book, don't use a high lighter, or you will find your book is soggy from yellow underlining before you get to the last page. I had to pace myself because my natural tendency is to gallop through reading, as if the finish line is the goal, rather than absorbing what is said.  That being said, I found the whole experience delicious. There were wonderful passages and lines that revealed how we perpetually engage in the creation of idols in our everyday life and stories that made me laugh aloud while pondering my own ability to put many things in front of those I love including God.  I also love the cover! 

4.  Understanding Face

It is a gift I've never fully understood but always been very grateful to have.  Despite being a lousy listener who can't remember names to faces, total strangers tell me their stories. Getting a hotdog in the Terminal C in Chicago in between flights, a lovely woman named Lolita served me.  She also told me how she'd lost 70 pounds on weight watchers but couldn't get her sister to do it, her sister opted for a surgical method of reduction. I told her that was inspiring and she should go on the website and send a testimonial. She showed me a before picture. It was an impressive transformation.  Then she served another customer but before I left, she called me over and whispered how she dreamed of one day helping children between 13 and 17 who had been written off.  I told her I hoped she would.

5.     Favorite Moments

I wish I wish I wish I'd brought a camera to the weekend.  But there is a photo in my head of my two favorite teachers, Sister Jeanne and Jean Rodes talking to each other, beaming smiles and arms open across the table from me.  Friday I'd squeezed in eating with them and we took three hours which felt like nothing, I could have listened to their lives all day.  It was a feast in so many ways to just be in their company. 

6.  Other Favorite Moment

Walking to the Grotto at Notre Dame to light a candle, to pray for a family, for all those I carry in the rosary, for all I met that weekend, for all those at home.  It was a walk I'd made so many times but it never grows old.  I love those old trees that cradle the road and the quiet beauty of that prayerful replication of the vision of the Blessed Mother by Saint Bernadette at Lourdes. 

7.  When I came back....

Anna decided I should be a chair.  Paul voted for pillow. Either way, both have determined Mom isn't going anywhere without them.  It's good to be home. 

7 Quick Takes

1.  Trees

A week ago, I was in Texas seeing my family.  I told my husband that there's a certain sort of tree, it grows near the beach, mesquitte.  When I see those wild scratchy trees, they're the trees of home and I love them the way he loves those pines that just start to dot the landscape when you hit Connecticut.  That being said, I love Maryland Spring and keep pointing out the bursts of color everywhere to my kids because for me, even after living here 15 years, it's still a shock to my brain.  They're bored by my color commentary about the dogwoods and the pear and the cherry blossoms now but I know, these will be the trees that make them remember home one day even if they move far away. 

2. Sliding

My daughter plays softball and she's pretty adept at batting. (Very patient).  She throws well and she fields strongly enough to hold a spot at third.  When I signed her up, I was pleasantly anticipating going to her games.  She announced last night she didn't want to play.  I thought maybe it was being 12, maybe she was feeling overwhelmed, I asked why. She couldn't say. 

This morning when I talked about getting her slider pants for the afternoon practice, she related a story about a friend who plays on a travel team who got seriously hurt sliding into base. "Are you afraid you'll get hurt sliding into base?" I asked.  Bingo.  We talked about how the only way to live a life uninjured is to sit and eat and sleep.  She agreed that sounded pretty dull and after breakfast, she gave me a big hug and told me she'd assembled her equipment and put it in the van for this afternoon.  She has practice at 4:30.  I'll be there with her new slider pants, a waterbottle and snacks. Her first game is tomorrow. 

Doing the mental happy dance because I guessed right! Cue Andre(Fessik) the Giant saying, "Don't worry, I won't let it go to my head."

3. We Are Here to Amuse

Having a child with Down Syndrome, I get services at the house twice a week.  These dedicated ladies have been wonderful with my son and very patient with my daughters.  For my three year old's birthday, we'd given her a dress and a crown. One of the ladies brought the Queen a magic wand.  It was perfect.  Gina has been turning people into princesses ever since with a mere touch. (She'd share the crown with whoever she deemed Queen for the day...hour....two minutes).  I got to wear it for a time but I forgot I had it on when I loaded the car to go for pick up and so the people on the road got a chuckle until I got to the stop light and realized I was still in Cinderella mode. 

4. Potluck

I have been asked to join a group of conservative political women who blog occasionally on issues called Potluck and I have said yes.  Potluck is just that, a series of articles or links with some analysis of articles by a group of conservative women.  It is dependent upon the person as to the style and the mood. While I sometimes write stuff here that is political, it is usually with a bit of humor laced generously in the mix.  Potluck is more serious and I'm still finding my way in it.   I'm honored to have been asked.  I post about once a week.

5. Happy Birthday to my brother Danny! 

He wrote a great piece called a year in review at the age of 38.  Link is here.  Can't wait to see what he writes for 39! http://www.facebook.com/home.php?ref=home#!/notes/daniel-green/the-year-in-review-age-38/387308881569 Go click on it and wish him happy birthday.

6.  It's Not Wrong...

My older kids play a card game called Magic with their father mostly; and each card has a little bit of humor at the bottom, a flavor text.  "You go first."  is a flavor text for a magic spell that forces creatures to tap during their turn without getting to do anything.  "Aieeeee." is the text for a goblin flunkie that gets sacrificed to give every other creature a stronger attack power. You get the idea. 

My four year old sometimes watches these games with interest but sometimes, she mishears or misunderstands.  So she piped up the other day, a bit of flavor text.  "Let us be creditors and not prey."  I know it was supposed to be predators but...she's not wrong.

7.  Summer Vacation Will Happen

We planned a reunion in Gaitlinburg in mid July. (Cue the song, A Boy Named Sue...). My daughter that was worried about sliding into home wants to go rock climbing on one of those walls....with me.  I'd tell you that I counseled prudence but not so secretly, I want to go do that too.

Why We Live in Maryland

Yesterday I cut my finger and required a jaunt to the emergency room. Stuck for three hours waiting to have a steri-strip, Neosporin and a tetanus shot, I began to read a book I'd held onto for over a year. "The Liar's Club" by Mary Karr. Like me, she is an East Texan but she's a generation older and the narrative from her non-fiction memoir paints a richly raw world that I found familiar.

I recognized the tall grasses that stunk near the beach, and the brown surf and the men drinking beer as they seined. I could smell the petroleum air of Baytown and see the once brightly painted but now chipped and faded wooden bars and stores that peppered the Southeast Texas coast sparingly and now not at all, owing to the recent Hurricane season.

As I waxed on and on about these little slices of memory that the book evoked, my husband who had waited up for me, (a gallant gesture of solidarity at 1:30 a.m.), shook his head. Having been caught up in the visions of seeing jellyfish and the story about the snake my uncle cut up with a children’s toy metal hoe, I didn't grasp that what for me was poetry, for him was prose.

"Give me a snowy winter and moderate summer where I can go out in the afternoon and tend my garden. I don't want a summer where I sweat." I was almost shocked that he didn't understand the allure. But maybe it was the hour.

The conversation continued the next morning as he looked over his garden before leaving for work.

Neither one of us consider Maryland "home," because home has the stars that you grew up with, and the little places like Jimmies --where my beloved would go to eat lunch by the beach with his father and grandfather. Home is where he went to pick fruits at a local farm with his mom, and the lake where he and his brother would catch sun perch, and the field where a very mean cow once gave him a scare, now a series of townhomes. Home has the streets where your best friend drove too fast. It was where you made bad trades in baseball cards because you wanted the complete set. It was where you built forts out of snow that were six feet high and walked home with your shoe laces untied because the teacher wouldn't help.

I shook my head. Connecticut. To me everything in that state seemed something one had to be "in the know" to find. There was a certain place to get pastries and the place to get hot dogs and bread and flowers. I had now been to many of the places he talked about, and they were fun and I liked them but like the places I considered jewels in the book, these were invisible to the non-native, untraceable, inscrutable. No one would find it if they didn't already know, "This is where you go to get crabs and feed hush puppies to the alligators afterwards." "This is where you go if you want the best Pizza on the planet." You could experience it via the other person's memories and create your own, but the depth, the poetry did not always convey. I did concede Pepe’s was the best and I did love the nooks and crannies type experience of one of kind places that Connecticut still held.

But like him, for me this was prose, not poetry.

So he only knows of that street where I got a warning from a policeman because five of my best friends got out and did a mock fire drill by running around the car three times after a CYO dance. And I have seen from the safety of our car, the mountain he and his friends accidentally found themselves on while hiking, the one called "Mount Lamentation" because of its high poison snake population.

Neither one is quite comfortable with the extreme climate elements the other one holds as part of what is "normal." Clear cold snappy air after August and plenty of snow and ice all winter as versus "squinting in the shade," and the bulk of the year and having that toasty air that late summer sometimes saturates with, and so we reached a place which is the spirit of compromise; Maryland.

There are days now that evoke South East Texas, and in January, sometimes he goes outside without a coat, spreads out his arms, breathes deeply and says, "Yes." "This is how it should be."

In writing, one is supposed to sit down at the chair and open a vein. Apparently, the left first finger of my hand had the blood in it that channeled "Home."