Singing, painting, writing on empty?

Kansas is about to become the only state without an Arts Commission.

I’m not sure whether to cry or throw my shoulders back in pride, because this grim, take-no-prisoners thrift is akin to the qualities that made my home state so wholesome, sturdy and resilient. Kansans don’t like to live on borrowed money or borrowed time. We understand the fickle nature of … most everything, God excepted. For everything else, we expect an honest balance. And we’re willing to work for it. That’s what got us through the Civil War, the Dust Bowl, the Depression, the Great War, the Second War, Brown vs. Board of Education, and everything after that all the way up to the present.

But it’s hard not to panic at the thought of the Kansas Arts Commission just getting … erased. My best effort to stay calm appears in this week’s Gravity & Stars.

 

Where every love story begins

Valentine’s Day draws nigh, and stores will soon fill with an anxious crush of shoppers in search of roses, chocolate, tacky pajamas and stuffed monkeys — inexplicably a popular item this year. I’m unconcerned. I know all about this festival of love. It never disappoints me.

Before I peeked into the cardboard mailbox I crafted in third grade to receive punch-out Valentine cards from my classmates, before I let the strawberry-and-whipped-cream pancakes my mother served for breakfast every year on Feb. 14 melt in my mouth, before I weathered my first crush, ventured out on a date or received a bouquet of roses from a suitor — I fell in love.

At an age inaccessible to my memory, my father won my heart. And my heart was in safe hands.

I know this because I’ve seen the photographs. There I am in my terrycloth sleeper, rigid with glee as my father tickles my chin. He’s a young seminary student with a buzzcut, thin from sleep deprivation and hard work at the Johnny Mitchell factory where he loads trucks to support his family and pay his tuition. The camera has captured a moment of joyful intimacy snatched from the jaws of Hebrew language study. I was, it’s clear, supremely happy.

Other pictures document the love story: Dad daubing oil paint onto the canvas while I labor over my own small painting; a cloth-covered teepee constructed in the basement, an eagle feather for my hair — it didn’t matter that I was a girl, he said, I could claim the noble ornament; the haircut he admired in spite of my glum disappointment; a snapshot taken before a school program. I look a bit anxious, but my father sits next to me, apparently unconcerned about potential failure. He’s there to hear his daughter sing.

I no longer recall the nervousness, nor do I remember how I performed. What shines in my memory is the fact that my dad was there at the track meets, the musicals, the plays, the end of summer camp and the first day of a new job.
He was there, too, to drive me home the day of my divorce. He followed up by taking me to lunch once a week as I started over. He sent me flowers on my ex-anniversary. When a new sweetheart declared he wanted to marry me, Dad chuckled: “Of course he does. Anybody smart would want to.” Fathers are the best answer to the question “How can you mend a broken heart?” They’re also the best way to avoid all the brokenness in the first place.

Presence is a good way to start; perhaps it’s the only way to start. Yet it’s not sufficient in itself. A father snoozing in the recliner, remote control in hand, bears no resemblance to the knight in shining armor little girls envision when they think of love. Viewer Dad needs to rouse himself and get involved. Then he needs to speak. To be a silent spectator is better than showing up to yell from the bleachers — but a word of encouragement is even better.

A man’s power to shape his daughter’s heart presents a paradox. We do not live in a culture designed to cultivate true sensitivity in men. That’s a shame because fathers are able to subtly reassure, affirm and hearten their girls without saying much at all.

My Grandpa Schultz — an articulate man and animated preacher — was not given to flowery speeches. Yet the time he said of his daughter, “Ruth plays piano the way I hear the music in my head,” my mother’s heart blossomed. The compliment glowed in her memory, word perfect, to recount to her own children.
Years later, it was music that brought her to the church where she met my father. He’d arranged for a men’s quartet to perform; the college sent a women’s trio with a gifted accompanist.

“She was so beautiful,” he recalls. She knew how to be at home in her beauty, because her father treasured her.

“She was so intelligent,” he tells me, remembering how they visited at the back of the sanctuary and got so wrapped up in conversation they missed the entire potluck dinner. A virtuous girl, she wasn’t afraid to talk to men because her father had protected and loved her. When he paid visits to the inmates at the state prison, he brought his daughter along to provide music; she was perfectly safe in her father’s company.

“She played the piano so well,” my dad says. Who knows what obstacles might have separated them, had not my grandpa’s Ruthie kept playing that piano the way her daddy heard it in his mind?

Every love story starts with a father. When daughters hear the words as girls — you are important; you are beautiful; you are mine; you are loved — they hear true as women. They recognize the real thing when it comes along. Echoing emptiness, on the other hand, leaves the heart uninhabited, vulnerable to random damage.

The craving for father-love is so strong, a girl never gets over it. And that’s good news. It means it’s never too late for imperfect dads, who, after all, are the only kind on the planet.

Like all men, flawed fathers have a tendency to do their best and still miss the mark. Valentine’s Day is no different. That can result in gifts like wilted roses, melted chocolate, nothing at all, or, possibly worse than nothing, stuffed monkeys.

None of that really matters, though, when you have a father who loves you. I know, because I do.

 

Renamed and recalibrated

Three years of newspaper havoc — including a walkout, a three-way newspaper war in a town of 20,000, and, in a stunning reversal that left me dizzy, a sale of the original paper to the people who walked out to start their own —  have resolved into something that I have described as double deja vu. Once more, I am working with newspaper folks I’ve known for ten to 15 years. The Times, which was a daily publication when I arrived in Liberal many years back, my clothing safety-pinned together and my fingernails dirty, has survived a sojurn in the thrice-weekly netherworld and is daily once more. It’s got a new name, Leader & Times, and so does my little piece of print real estate on the Opinion page.

My weekly Sunday column, which never stopped, has been renamed (by me). No longer “A Word in Time,” it’s “Gravity & Stars.” The name alludes to the way this part of the world, with its wide-open, circular horizon, lends itself to an acute awareness of just how small we are, how huge the world, and how important it is to stop and consider it all. Easy to do with that sky tented endlessly above. Plus, after all the helter-skelter swoops and reversals of the past few years, I feel the need to remain, well, grounded.

 

Straighten out your … attitude

After nearly two years with MS, I still amaze myself — with my impatience. Here I am, able to walk and type and pull up my own pants and I’m still prone to fits of discontent because my walk is not as graceful as I once imagined it to be, nor are my multitasking batteries as easily rechargeable.

Just when a cloud of complaint settles over my head, True Reality whomps me hard with the everyday beauty of the created world. Remember: things don’t have to be perfect to be beautiful. Real wisdom from my once-4-year-old daughter.

Last week’s “Word in Time” column describes how my attitude, if not my gait, was straightened out during my morning walk.

Emptied of vacationing school children and their dutiful parents, the park welcomed me with quiet as I set out on a mid-morning walk. Night’s chill remained beneath the shade trees; even the sunny patches of pavement kept an early-fall air of crisp cool. I walked along the curving loop of asphalt drive that dissects south Blue Bonnet Park and savored the still silence.
On the surface, the park seemed empty of activity, a relief to a woman with an uneven, sometimes halting gait. There was no need to step off the sidewalk for joggers or dogs. I didn’t have to stop at crossings to wait on cars that throbbed with jangly music.
My morning walk felt like a solitary foray into an empty world. In some ways, that was a relief. For me,  exercise on foot is as much a matter of perseverance in the face of humiliation as it is a question of willpower and calorie-burning.
Once I was a competitive long-distance runner, sent off to train with the boys’ team because the girls offered no challenge. To focus on nothing but the next step for mile after mile was a peculiar discipline I loved: sweaty progress in the flat Kansas heat, the chemical rush that erases pain and replaces it with a natural runner’s high, the bone-deep, honest fatigue that settles in after the course is complete.
Decades later, all that is gone, replaced with nostalgia when I see the Liberal High School cross-country team trace a route around town. They can do with ease what is unavailable to this 42-year-old. I sometimes struggle to get my right foot fully off the ground when I walk at a brisk pace. The same ailment that nibbled away at the myelin coating my nerves removed most of the smoothness from my walk and made running a herky-jerky effort.
Instead, I walk. And, most days, I’d rather walk alone than in a park full of fast-moving people no matter how good-natured they may be. You can’t be too slow on an empty sidewalk. When you’re the only one on the route, you can’t be behind.
This morning as I stepped along, I saw the park was not as still as it first looked, nor was I alone. Robins hopped in the nearby lawn, lush green grassblades sharp against the dull red of their breast feathers. Cottonwood leaves ruffled in the breeze, silver undersides of leaf flashing shamelessly above my head. Sunlight glinted on puddles left by the sprinkler system, highlighting the tracery of water bugs on the surface. A squirrel paused to assess my progress toward his high-wire crossing: I’ll fuss if you interrupt me, he warned with a look, his bristly tail a stiff exclamation mark. I’m busy. Always am. I’ve got an agenda of my own.
The squirrel, like the monarch butterflies that have begun to drift through the High Plains on their way back to Mexico, is a work in progress with a schedule to keep. The flowers, too, are at work against time and have given up beauty for fruitfulness. They have replaced silky petals with dry, husky seed-pods to fulfill their purpose of propagation.
Nature constantly streams along, silent, present, too often ignored. It is utterly unconcerned about what the rest of us are up to, even when we interfere. At such times, it finds a way around our human interventions, along with the vagaries of life, like water carving an alternate course around an obstacle.
Examples of this quiet forward motion keep us company as we careen along, blind and hectic, deaf and dumb. It takes a spell of silence before reality registers. On the route I walk, I pass trees that have weathered wind storms and electrical-line amputations, lost branches, grown over the scars and offered homes to the birds and squirrels that don’t dismiss imperfection. Broken eggshells from a plundered nest do not deter the birds from trying again. Regular mowing by the park people doesn’t stop the dandelions from sending out more bright blossoms.
In a world determined to rush forward at any cost, it is easy to disconnect from the natural wonders around us and the wisdom they offer. We try to be productive, fit, prosperous and successful. We lament the losses that come with age and time, measuring ourselves against humanly constructed ideas of how life is supposed to be.
Too many days, I head to the park wishing I could clock myself in a two-mile run, sad that these effortful steps are the best I can manage, dismayed that my middle-aged body doesn’t match up to the ideals on a glossy magazine page. I envy the cross-country kids, as if aging is not a normal part of life.
I know better. I prefer the taste of orchard-grown apples that come without shiny supermarket wax. I’m fond of the battered, unpretty maple tree in my back yard, though it falls far short of landscaping standards.
Yet in regard to myself and my own poor, human body, I yearn for a surface perfection that makes no sense. Even if it were attainable, such an existence would rob me of the ability to appreciate the richness of a real life fully lived, complete with errors, pain and redemption. To walk in this diminished state — to walk at all when paralysis could have been my lot — is a victory. To compare this day’s movement to my thoughtless, 16-year-old sprints is false and foolish.
This week, I went to the park on a quiet morning. I traveled slowly. My path was occasionally uneven. I walked alone and the world spoke.
When I walk the way that I do, I am in good company. Overhead are the cottonwood branches, the wheeling kites, the orange-and-black sojourners who won’t stop till they reach their destination.
We should all be so content.

 

Bad bedtime reading

All summer, I immersed myself in purposeful reading for an Eastern Civilization and Literature semester study I wrote for our homeschool. Finally, I have time to read for pleasure and what do I choose? A harrowing article about near-starvation in North Korea.

There’s an art to selecting the right kind of bedtime reading; choose something bland and boredom will cause your mind to leapfrog to more stimulating topics. The other extreme is just as problematic. An absorbing page-turner might be a great way to escape from the aftereffects of a stressful day — but reaching the end at 2 a.m. will cost a person when the alarm clock rings a few hours later. Nowhere in all these deliberations does a long magazine article about Communism qualify as relaxing reading. And that’s where my troubles started.

The article that pulled me in had been written by Barbara Demick, an international reporter stationed just across the Chinese border from North Korea. Through interviews with refugees who’d defected by walking across a poorly-patrolled bend in the frozen river, she presented a bleak picture of daily life in a country ruled by a Communist dictator of debatable sanity. What I learned was enough to disrupt any freedom-loving person’s sleep.

Ordinary people in North Korea are hungry beyond what Americans can understand. There’s just not enough to eat, for a variety of reasons, some natural and some bizarrely irrational. In the first place, North Korea is not an easy place to farm, with its cold, dry terrain, droughts, floods and poor soil. Obvious solutions — irrigate, fertilize, import food — are not options because of socialist/Communist economic policies that have left the country too poor to build, develop or trade.

Rationing is something I associate with patriotic heroism among U.S. citizens during World War II. In modern-day North Korea, it’s something altogether different, a system imposed on people who have few options with which to augment the meager rice, corn and oil distributed by the government. Food is handed out in accordance with a complex ranking system that takes into account a citizen’s age, gender, work output and documented history. Dissenters, for example, get less than those who are silently obedient. Starvation is common, yet school children routinely sing propaganda songs that insist, “the outside world has nothing that we need!” Really? How about the humblest school lunch ever, a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich?

As I worked my way through the article, I felt a sudden craving for popcorn. Maybe it was the long discussion about food that triggered my appetite. Or maybe it was simply the notion that if I felt like it, if I chose to do so, I could get out of bed, heat oil in a pan and pop corn at will. That’s what I did, munching in satisfaction as I read about the next crisis North Koreans encountered in 2009.

The currency had lost so much value that it meant nothing in Korea or the world, so the government decided to replace it with a new form of money. The plan was announced to the elite — government ministers and their friends — one day before the general news release. Ordinary people had just one day to try to save their money, but this was almost pointless. Overnight, their small savings accounts had been declared worthless.

In an interview with NPR radio, Demick explained why the North Korean government chose to wipe out the country’s monetary system:

“From the perspective of the North Korean government, they saw the very notion of money, currency, as sort of antithetical to the socialist way of doing things. This is a very undiluted brand of communism, and you’re supposed to be handed your house, your clothing, your food. You’re not supposed to buy things for yourself. And the government hated the fact that people were working privately on the markets, buying their own food and having that level of economic freedom. And that’s what they wanted to wipe out.”

Americans would be wise to pay attention to the plight of these people  who live on the other side of the world. They speak another language and their appearance is not “white American” but they are not so different from us.

North Koreans did not sign up for starvation. Starting in the 1920s, they looked to Marxist (socialist) ideals as a way to gain independence — their country was a colony of Japan, their people were viewed as less valuable than other races, and they were poor in comparison to the industrialized world. They embraced Communism in hopes that it would level the playing field and correct racism and injustice.

That’s not so different than what we modern Americans hear from various quarters.  Entry-level Communist or socialist rhetoric usually wins support from the mainstream by pointing an envious and accusing finger at the rich. In the U.S., we often hear about “greedy corporations” that glut themselves with executive bonuses while doling out stingy wages to the common worker. There is some truth to these characterizations, but that doesn’t mean there will be much improvement if those businesses were to be wiped out. We must also be aware of the built-in weaknesses of human nature, which tends to envy those who seem to have it all, or at least have more than we do.

North Korea, with its “undiluted communism,”  and the backing of the U.S.S.R, won a war, squeezed out private enterprise and opened the way for rulers who were just as greedy as the bad capitalists. Today, its people starve, and the government takes aim at “greedy” private gardeners in North Korea, people who just want to stay alive. A middle class family that manages to offer a teenage daughter one egg a week is doing handsomely. As a parent, I can’t imagine trying to help my children flourish, let alone keep them alive, in such conditions.

For two years, I’ve heard a constant stream of talk about Communism, socialism and its presence or absence in the current administration. Some of it sounds overwrought and panicky; it turns me off. Some of it, usually that which calls on a knowledge of real history, rings true. None of it helps me sleep better.

Whether we do so in the dark or during daylight hours, Americans would be wise to read and think about the freedoms we enjoy, how we obtained them, and how easily they might be lost. A look back in history would not hurt, nor would a quick survey of what life is like in places like Brazil, China and the former Iron Curtain countries in eastern Europe.

And though my late-night perusal of the New Yorker magazine cost me some sleep, I came out of it with a new title for my regular reading list: Demick’s recently published title, “Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea.”

I can’t wait to start reading — at tea time.

 

Summer let-downs left behind

The experimental Tigger Melon my son planted late last spring has ripened and dropped off the vine. His father picked up the exotic fruit, striped in a zig-zaggy pattern entirely in keeping with its name, and brought it into the house Thursday.

“Look at this,” he announced with a grin. “I think it’s ripe.”

Maybe, but I left the melon on the counter-top, just in case it needed a day or two to reach optimum sweetness. I wanted to be hopeful but that was difficult because I’m struggling with my annual bout of garden underperformitis. That’s not the condition you feel when certain garments get twisted, though the accompanying chagrin is much the same. It’s the sense of rueful disappointment gardeners often suffer when tomato plants yield smallish fruits and the beans give in to rusty disease.

Gardening requires so many things — preparation, patience. Large quantities of compost. You start out just as soon as the snow melts, sow seed, nurture tiny plants, weed, water, brave the summer’s blistering heat, water some more … and what do you end up with? A huge water bill, a handful of beans and a backache. That pretty much sums up my summer.

Tomato-wise, this year wasn’t all that bad; in fact, it proved a bountiful contrast to 2009, when I uprooted most of the vines in disgust after they proved to be stunted and sickly. This summer, we had slicers, salad toppers, salsa components and more. I should be grateful.

Instead, as I have for many years when summer winds down, I struggle with dashed hopes. If it’s not the beans, it’s the basil. If it’s not the basil, it’s the jalapenos. If it’s not the garden, it’s the vacation. If it’s not the vacation, it’s the overall untidy condition of the house. If it’s not the dirty house, it’s the kids who want to sleep till 10 a.m. You see how it goes: you get a picture of how everything will be in your mind and then reality meanders off in an entirely different direction. It can leave a mother downright cranky.

When I was younger, I figured a great solution would be to lower my expectations. This didn’t work for obvious reasons. If you aim for nothing, that’s exactly what you will have at the end of the day. Children are unlikely to vacuum the carpet or hang the laundry on the line if no one tells them to do so. Those of you who think other parents gave birth to children who emerged ready to make their beds and read with perfect diction might be interested in those magic beanstalk seeds that show up in stories.

There’s no magic at my house. So I write lists. I draw up plans. I talk sternly to myself about expectations, disappointment and the fact that even though life is rarely ideal, it must go on.

Accordingly, I designed a chart titled “Domestic Nourishing.” That’s a fancy way to say, “You over there! You’re on the list to wash dishes every Monday night. And you! Get out the recipes and figure out what to cook for dinner Tuesday.” The chart covers all the bases — meal preparation and cleanup, chores, out-of-the-house activities and what must be completed before the gates open and the prisoners are released. Getting it all done revolves around going to bed on time and rising early.

As I added decorative borders to the chart’s grim content, I realized it was not much different from the garden map I designed last February. The neatly pencilled rows and their labels reflected more than an arbitrary choice to put radishes in front and okra on the north end. Some vegetables could tolerate early planting. Others wanted warm soil. The variables involved were complex and sometimes confusing.

The stakes are higher with families. No one will grieve the death of a tomato plant — or at least, the housewife who grieves will only feel temporary sorrow — but the far-reaching consequences of failure to nurture loved ones are much deeper and more painful. I could throw up my hands in disgust and abandon my garden and I could still be a person of character. The same would not be true were I to give up on my family.

I’m fairly certain I am not the only mother who struggles with some variety of post-summer dejection. At the beginning of the season, the three-month stretch of open calendar pages seems vast, promising, packed with glorious possibility. By the end of July, however, the floaties have deflated and the garden’s fresh growth shows signs of heat stress.

Yet just as the forces of temperature, fatigue and dashed hopes converge, it’s time to focus on working hard once again. All over town, much is required of demoralized parents as public school gears up in earnest and we must enforce actual, mandatory wake-up times. There’s no time to mope.

Maybe this is a good thing. I didn’t feel like setting up a chore chart — but I knew it needed to be done. In the process of working it out, I found a small scrap of optimism buried beneath the grouchy debris of my disappointing summer. That’s why the chart ended up with yellow sunbursts pencilled above the days of the week.

Heartened by the hope that had sprouted in my heart, I trooped outdoors to water the garden. I stopped to pull a few weeds and noticed cucumbers to harvest and carrot-tops poking through the dirt. A couple bell peppers in the center row had started to blush, and there was enough basil for a batch of pesto.

So what if the green beans flopped, I told myself. I have a promising-looking melon back in the kitchen to sample. I can’t wait to find out how it tastes. Then I’ll get the house in order and help my children head back to school. Thank goodness summer’s over. I’m ready to move on to the next season.

— August 22, 2010

 

Strangers welcome

Afternoon had blurred into evening, the worst of the heat subdued by clouds in the west, when I heard a knock on the door. I opened it cautiously: the silhouette I saw through the patterned glass did not look familiar.

“Hi,” the man said. “I’m Michael Mann and I wanted to take some pictures of your house — my grandma used to live here.”

He looked harmless enough, if a little sweaty.

“Yeah, my grandparents lived here back in the ‘70s, and all of us cousins used to come over on weekends,” he went on, “and since my family is traveling through on vacation, I wanted to get a photo of Grandma’s house.”

No problem, I told him. In fact, I could move the vehicle we’d left parked by the front curb if that would help him take a better photograph. As a precaution, I told my daughter to lock the door while I moved the car — just in case Mr. Mann was actually a criminal seeking entry to our tidy but unimpressive home. When I walked across the street, though, Michael Mann’s wife and five children spilled from their minivan, looking hot and a little cranky and utterly normal; they erased all my worries about homicidal maniacs.

We exchanged casual conversation while Michael snapped pictures and then I said, “Hey, would you like to see the inside of the house?”

This is the part of the story that caused my son and husband, a few hours later, to roll their eyes. That led A.J, 13, to say, “Mom! How did you know they weren’t, you know, crazy?” And his father to mutter something that sounded like “I don’t know how you ever got out of Chicago alive.”

“It’s not like I wasn’t paying attention. They were nice people,” I said. “And anyway, I talked to them for a while outside, and they were just your normal family from Kansas. He grew up in Dodge City. They had a baby. They had five kids —” of whom at least one, I had noticed, was not enjoying the blended family’s midwest excursion.

“Has the trip been fun?” I asked the sulky preteen girl.
“No,” she said. “It’s really boring and really stupid.” I couldn’t tell if she was a “his” or “hers” daughter, but I figured both parents had absorbed plenty of attitude as the family toured the Mid America Air Museum and Dorothy’s House.

“We got to climb in airplanes,” announced a smaller sister, undeterred by teenage angst. “Real ones! And go inside of ‘em.”

My interviewee rolled her eyes.

“Maybe it will get better once you get to Colorado,” I said. “The mountains are beautiful and it’s cooler there.”

Meanwhile, Michael Mann and his wife exchanged uncertain looks. He clearly itched to sneak a peek into Grandma’s house. She didn’t want to be pushy.

“You don’t mind?” she said. “I mean, we just showed up.”

“It’s OK,” I said. “I washed the dishes and things are mostly clean.” While I unlocked the door, I told them about how my father, who grew up in India, got to tour his childhood home 50 years after he’d emigrated to the United States. His extended family had shared three houses connected to a common courtyard, uncles, aunties, cousins and siblings in one noisy, affectionate compound.

Union Baptist Church in Khargpur, India, where my father was baptized as a child. Fifty years after his family emigrated to the U.S., he was able to visit his hometown and go inside his old house and church. Watercolor by Robert Seth.

“He was looking at the yard outside their old bungalow and the people who live there got all excited — someone from America! ‘Come in, come in,’ they said, and offered everybody tea. It was pretty cool,” I told them. Though the property was sadly changed, having been divvied into smaller, poorly maintained living quarters, it meant so much to my father to see it again after decades away.

The old cliche claims you can’t go home again, and some people say you wouldn’t want to. After all, things change, change is uncomfortable and memories are often brighter when they remain untouched by time. Yet that was not the case for my dad, whose memories held up at his old house, church and boarding school. If anything, his affections were heightened by visible traces of the past — the slate floors where he and his twin brother scribbled with chalk as toddlers, the unchanged sanctuary at the Baptist mission church where he was baptized, the narrow beds in Friar Tuck House at Sherwood College.

Inside his grandmother’s old house, Michael seemed to take great satisfaction in the placement of our sofa — just where his memories said it ought to be — and the familiar kitchen cabinetry. In the back yard, he paid homage to the old, battered maple tree which looked, he said, pretty much like he remembered.

“Man, we used to climb this all the time,” he said to the children, and, handing the camera to his wife, “Will you take a picture?”

The children — even the unhappy daughter — giggled as Michael pulled a silly face for the camera.
“That’s exactly what I did when I was ten,” he said in satisfaction. “This is so cool.”

I stood to the side and watched Michael Mann grin at the camera. His happiness was so transparent, I could almost see the little kid inside this stranger as though I knew him.

Perhaps the reason we go back to places we recall is to verify that our life story is as real as present circumstances — that those cookies at Grandma’s kitchen table were as sweet and real as the bills we juggle and the daily irritations at work, in traffic, on the road with recalcitrant offspring. Time is fluid and can cause us to lose our bearings. It moves and changes everything from a landmark on the edge of town to a man’s character.

It’s good to look back every now and then to reclaim what is worth saving. The kind of laughter cousins share as they clown in the cool summer grass. The familiar drone of locusts as the streetlights come on, and a hot Kansas day subsides into something softer. The sense of careless security found at a grandparent’s home.

The gift of being able to walk to the door, where someone waits to open it and offer a welcome.

— August 15, 2010

 

Arrows loosed in the world

The week after my younger brother graduated from high school in our small town of 800 people, my parents took him to the airport three hours’ drive from home and put him on an airplane to Boston. He took a suitcase, his disassembled bicycle, and a sheet listing contacts on Cape Cod.

An article in “USA Today” newspaper had described the need for service workers in the popular New England vacation spot. The locals were generally too well-off to consider summer jobs scooping ice cream or slicing pizza, and the need was so great that the Cape Cod Chamber of Commerce had taken to advertising in poorer European countries to bring in workers.

That summer, my brother and our cousin from Montana worked three jobs apiece, pedaling to work, the beach, work again, the Newport Jazz Festival, and more work. I’m not sure if either of them actually came out of the experience with more college money than they would have amassed in their rural hometowns, but they were certainly richer in experience.

Back in our hometown, the folks at the coffee shop could not make sense of it all.

“What did you do to your kids, that they go so far away and don’t come back?” someone  asked my father.

“The world is a big place,” he said. “They ought to go see it.”

I’ve been thinking about that summer all week as my own daughter explored Boston and sampled the same Papa Gino’s pizza her uncle learned to bake more than two decades ago. Back then, my brother and I took it for granted that our parents approved of our travels. I moved to Chicago, my brother to Portland, and between school semesters, we squeezed in trips to India, Europe, New York, Santa Fe. The only protest I ever registered was the time I planned a motorcycle trip across the Alps from Germany to South France; my mother demanded that I purchase a travel insurance policy for that one.

By and large, though, my parents’ response to children abroad was a countercultural one for the place and time our family inhabited. Only now do I realize what a tough position they chose to take as their children traveled to Chicago, Portland, India and Europe. It’s natural to want to keep your children close to home, to look forward to seeing grandchildren arrive, grow up, and follow patterns that have been set by generations of family members. It’s even natural to view this desire as some sort of God-ordained moral requirement: families were designed by God, children are given by God, and everyone should stick together, end of discussion.

But the Bible is full of accounts that describe people leaving what was familiar to follow the path planned for them by their creator. Genesis 12 describes how Abraham was told to pack up and move out and worry about the destination later. God said, “Get thee out of thy country and from thy kindred, and from thy father’s house, unto a land that I will shew thee: and I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great; and thou shalt be a blessing.”

I can just imagine the folks at the tea stall in Ur:

“Did you hear about Terah’s boy? He’s lost his mind, just took everything and left town.”

“Well, that family always was strange. No telling what really happened.”

Back home, I’ll bet Abraham’s mother was furiously baking bread — pita bread, probably, anything to get her mind off the heartache of separation.

I wasn’t sad when our daughter set out on her summer missions trip; the whole thing was a great idea, perfectly suited for her gifts and personality and abilities, and I was all in favor of this two-week deal. It was only halfway through the trip that I realized something else had happened.

“It’s exciting, isn’t it?” I said to the younger siblings as we had afternoon tea and discussed their older sister’s updates from Boston. “Soon it’ll be your turn to travel and see the world. I can’t wait to see what God has planned for you. Where do you think you might go?”

As they listed destinations — India, Washington, D.C., New York City, Miami, Italy — the heady glow of possibility illuminated their faces. They’d seen their sister go somewhere bigger than Liberal, Kansas and suddenly the entire world was open. It would not be long before they, too, would explore.

The realization burst quite suddenly in my mind, the way the wind sometimes catches a door you didn’t realize was left ajar and swings it wide open: This was no isolated summer trip. This trip to Boston marked the beginning of a new phase in our family’s life.

I felt a momentary panic — wait! stop! — but I knew it was no use. The door was wide open. My husband and I had helped nudge it with all that reading and storytelling and geography lessons and missionary biographies. We had said, “Go! See what’s out there.” Now I was going to regret that they had paid attention?

I put my hands around the comforting warmth of my tea mug and looked at my son and daughter. Both looked taller, stronger, more confident than a year ago — more like the adults they would someday be. Was I really ready to send them out into the world? Good thing the youngest is only 11, I thought; it will be a while before she goes.

Children, the Bible observes, are like arrows in the hand of a mighty man: “happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them: they shall not be ashamed, but they shall speak with the enemies in the gate.” (Psalm 127:5). Arrows are not accessories a person slides into a purse pocket next to the cell phone and the wallet. They are meant to be aimed, to be released, to fly through open air, to connect with something — fearless, effective, straight and sure.

When we let go, we should prepare to be astonished.

— August 1, 2010

 

Summer hunger

City Church is located in downtown Amarillo, amid run-down warehouses, a homeless shelter and overall neglect. The family of the late pastor Don Lane rehabbed a derelict building into a vibrant center that nourished, educates and loves the people on the margins of society.

Van driver Rhonda laid on the horn as we traveled slowly up the street. The staccato blare punctuated the sleepy midday heat of the neighborhood. Doors began to squeak open, and out came the children. Some shuffled along sleepily, tousled, dressed only in a diaper or underwear. Others raced to the van, hungry and hopeful.

In this neighborhood, structures the size of tool sheds housed entire families. Down the block at government-housing apartment units, cheap siding dangled in limp strips and weeds provided the only bit of green in dirt yards. Guard dogs sounded the alarm outside many homes, warning visitors to stay away from the rusty cars, makeshift laundry lines and drifting heaps of empty beer cans and trash.

“I’ve never been anyplace like this before,” whispered the girl across from me as we tucked hot, fresh burritos into the lunch sacks. A fresh-faced high school student, she’d told me she planned to major in education at Texas A & M. This summer, her church youth group had scheduled service projects all over the city and she was seeing a side of it that she had never known existed. Today’s assignment, passing out sack lunches on the six routes operated by Amarillo’s City Church, had left her shaken.

“I think it’s great that you’re doing this,” I said. “By the time we’re adults, most people get pretty comfortable living in our own little world and it’s hard to get out there and see things like this. I’m proud of you.”

What we were seeing was not pretty. I understood why Katelyn’s eyes brimmed with tears and she sometimes drew back as we traveled the three-hour route. The hardscrabble surroundings were unpleasant, but most people are able to drive past boarded-up buildings and dilapidated housing without bursting into tears. This day’s heartache came from the children we met. Most bore signs of malnutrition and neglect, and many carried visible marks of abuse — bruises, scars, a tentative caution, a hard-eyed calculation that spoke of a struggle to survive.

A girl who could not have been older than four hoisted her infant brother on her hip, carefully balanced two brown bags on his other arm, and found a solitary spot under a scrubby tree.

“She’ll make sure they eat everything they can right away,” Rhonda explained to us, “to make sure that the adults in that house don’t steal it and eat it themselves.”

More than 2,000 lunches were delivered daily, all summer, to hungry children in Amarillo.

At some stops, more than 10 children poured out of a house no bigger than my one-car garage. How could that many people live in such cramped quarters, I wondered. They didn’t, a staffer explained later: sending the children to a neutral location was often the only way mothers knew to protect them from boyfriends, pimps or drug users who might otherwise harm them. Church staff spend a fair amount of time confirming, reconfirming and tracking down the locations of the children they feed, transport to church and even educate at their fledgling K-2 school, The King’s Academy. For these children, stability is an unknown concept — until they experience the steady, unconditional love from the Christian workers at City Church, usually in the form of a hot lunch and a smile.

Drug- and alcohol abuse have made the neighborhoods around downtown Amarillo a toxic place to grow up. But it’s the breakdown of the family that has left so many boys and girls to fend for themselves. Less than 10 percent grow up with a father in the home; more than half rely on reduced-price or free school lunches for nutrition during the academic year. When summer vacation comes, they go hungry.

Government aid, City Church observes, is “help without hope,” a system that frequently worsens the cycle of poverty by enabling people to continue making foolish choices. It’s the children who experience the worst consequences; it’s the children who chase the City Church vans down the street, desperate for something different.

Katelyn and I, along with the week’s nearly 100 volunteer workers who helped prepare, assemble and deliver 2,400 lunches, didn’t talk politics. We just packed and presented lunches, along with a smile and an occasional “Jesus loves you.”

We also repeated a stern script when adults drifted to the trailer to ask for a handout: “Do you have children? These lunches are for children.” If a person claimed to have children, the next line was, “send them over, and we’ll give them one.” Most would-be panhandlers faded away when presented with this challenge. A few had the grace to look ashamed. For those, I felt a tiny thread of optimism: their hearts had not hardened. It was not too late for them, too, to learn to live differently.

Hours later, we returned to the downtown headquarters, a block of once-abandoned warehouses now transformed into a vibrant complex of rehabbed buildings surrounding a walled park where “City Kids,” as the church calls them, play on soft green grass, shoot hoops without interference from drug dealers or gang recruiters, clamber up the cross-shaped climbing wall, and enjoy the novel sensation of anxiety-free childhood. Hot, tired and emotionally drained, I felt a brief kinship with the children: the church is, indeed, a safe haven. Katelyn, too, had regained her composure — even after meeting a friendly (but still intimidating) pit bull that seemed to think the sack lunch was a sort of hand-delivered doggy bag.

“You have a great school year,” I told her as I headed for the air-conditioned building and refrigerated water bottles. “Don’t forget the adventure we had today.”

Of course, it was much more than a one-day adventure. Once you’ve opened your eyes to a part of the world that usually serves as background scenery, you can’t really go back. I enjoyed the Dairy Queen treat my husband bought for me on the way back to Liberal, but I had little appetite for a sit-down dinner with appetizers and dessert. I know dining out isn’t necessarily sinful. It felt wrong all the same as I remembered the intent expression on the face of a three-year-old boy as he carefully put half his lunch back in the bag and rolled it tightly shut. I’ve never seen such a small child handle food so deliberately. He was portioning out the part he would save for later, when suppertime came and he could enjoy the rest of his apple.

I don’t know the boy’s name, but I see his face in my mind — and as I go about my daily life, I’m sure I will see him in parts of Liberal, too. Many children in our own town are eagerly anticipating the start of school this month. It’s not just that they will have a safe, clean place to go for the next nine months.

They will also, after a long, hungry summer, have food to eat.

— August 8, 2010

 

Text to the future

Perhaps it conveys how I feel about technological advances when I tell you that our family still watches movies on a boxy, heavy old-fashioned television line-dries our clothing and opted not to replace the microwave oven when it kicked the bucked a few years back. I have not missed it.

So it feels strange indeed to find myself peering at the minuscule keys on the cell phone that recently joined the out-of-date television and ancient sewing machine in our household array of appliances. This was not a choice, exactly. Buying a cell phone was imposed upon me by the decision to let our oldest child travel to Bostonto evangelize the children there.

The problems of raising missionary support did not worry me; if she was meant to go, it would work out. I didn’t mind, so much, the thought of her traveling by air with a group of fellow Kansans, through O’Hare and on to the East Coast. It didn’t worry me that the training schedule and mission targets was sketchy at best. Irrationally, it was the requirement that she obtain and carry a cell phone that caused me the most anxiety. Common sense told me that she’d be safer and more confident with a phone in her purse as she navigated the streets of Boston. That same logic told me the text-messaging capabilities of her telephone would serve little purpose for safety or security if her parents back in Kansas could not receive or respond.

She selected and paid for a cell phone back in June, in order to have plenty of practice time with it. I stalled. I’ve held out for years against the cellphone onslaught, guarding my privacy and the comforting margin of time that cannot be interrupted by the obnoxious sound of club music calling from my purse. I like being about to disappear into my house and read quietly. Or at least, I like the concept of such luxury being possible. In reality, I disappear into my house and wash dishes and fold clothes and oversee the daily activities of my offspring.

My efforts to write, sew, cook, garden and even take a shower are constantly subject to interruptions. The fancy modern name for this sort of life is “multitasking,” and I loathe it. The old-fashioned name is “motherhood,” which goes down with a justifying sweetness. There’s a higher purpose to raising children, while just being insanely busy does not see especially noble.

Nor does stubborn resistance to progress that actually serves that higher purpose. A week before her departure, my daughter and I returned to the store to purchase a cell phone for me. Her savvy smoothed my reluctance into something almost pleasurable. The phone was not as scary (or expensive) as I had feared. The first text-message I received was from my patient daughter, who perched on her bed just across the hall: “this is cool” it said.

A reply to this enthusiastic message took a long time to compose because I refuse to write like the poet e e cummings, all lower-case letters and little punctuation. My soybean-shaped gadget required five button-presses to switch from lower- to upper-case letters. Other complaints I quickly lodged: no exclamation point, no semi-colon, no em-dash, and an annoying spell-it-for-you function that constantly suggested words I did not intend to use in the grammatically correct sentences I texted. (Is that really a verb? I don’t think so.)

I was also unsatisfied with the ring tone choices.

“We’re not going to the disco,” I said as my youngest child, delighted with her new access to the modern world, scrolled through the choices in the back seat as we drove home. (The multitasking invasion had already begun, I thought gloomily). She tried a rhythmic rap ring tone.

“No.” She tried a guitar selection that bore the name “blonde.”

“No. We’re not at the makeup counter.” She tried a snippet of classical piano.

“No. That’s so pretentious,” I snapped. Something with violins?

“No. It’s a synthesizer, not the real thing.”

To the horror of the sub-siblings who will be stuck using the “family phone,” I finally settled on the old-fashioned telephone sound. It reminds me of my childhood instead of things you see on television.

The next problem was learning how to answer the noisy thing. I missed several calls because I really did not know which area to “tap.” You would think, I griped, that these pricey phones would at least have the decency to include buttons on the exterior! But the buttons were inside the nifty sliding panel that would, I grudgingly admitted, protect the keys from crumbs and dirt inside my messy purse.

My curmudgeonly thoughts disappeared right around the time Ananda walked up the passenger inspection ramp at the airport in Wichita. Maybe she looked like she belonged in the “expert traveler” aisle, but I knew she was just a 15-year-old girl in a smartly tailored dress and self-stitched matching hat.

“Text me from Chicago,” I said with a fierceness that surprised me. “As soon as you get to the gate at your connecting flight.”

She gave me a loving nod and headed up the ramp, boarding pass in hand.

In the five days since we shipped her off to the urban unknown, I’ve developed an astonishing affinity for my little black beetle of a phone. When a text message arrives, I hear a bird’s chirp — another source of consternation for the subsiblings, but it amuses me and the family parakeet. The electronic bird chirped several times as I traveled from Wichita to Liberal: “please pray for me,” which I later found was prompted by air turbulence; “in chicago and people are nicer than i expected” and finally “i am in boston .”

All week, the family has clustered around the tiny phone to track Ananda’s progress through Boston Harbor, Quincy Market, the American history Freedom Trail, and assorted funky and slightly frightening neighborhoods where my daughter avoids the drunks, eavesdrops on the Spanish she hears in passing and smiles at the babies. She greeted an Indian family in the park and said “namaste,”  to their mutual delight.

That emotion is amazingly contagious. As the tiny reports trickle in, my mother’s heart has relaxed, able to enjoy the fact that my daughter has embarked on an adventure. In a way, I suppose, I have, too.

— July 24, 2010