Monday, November 24, 2008

Janie

4 am, Monday morning. The dark house hunkers down on the mountain beneath a cold drizzle. Inside, it still smells faintly like the mulled cider candle that had been extinguished five hours before by the person who now sleeps deeply in the cozy queen bed. She is so warm, in her oversized long-sleeved T-shirt and her fuzzy pajama pants, beneath the heavy blankets. Another hour of bliss awaits her before the cellphone charging on the floor will call her to the things of this world.

She probably is having a delightful dream.

A tremendous THUNK from the vicinity of her closet reverberates through the stillness. She twitches, but does not stir until a second cringe-inducing CRASH booms out, followed by a stream of whimpering half-barks and the scrabbling of little paws on linoleum. As she staggers to a sitting position, the barks escalate to full scale woofs, a shrill whine providing a backdrop for them like the drone of a bagpipe.

The erstwhile sleeper falls back onto the pillow with a groan expressive of all the weariness in the world, but the occupant of the back room has no sympathy.

That is how I found myself shivering out in the front yard at 4:05 am while raindrops dotted the air around me, cajoling little Janie to please please please find a spot and pee on it. Of course, once she had obliged me at last and we were back inside, I found that I could not endure her maladorous pelt. And that is how I found myself stooping over our bathtub and lathering Janie's fur to a fragrant shine, towelling her dry before jumping into the shower myself.

A pot of coffee worked its usual miracle on the atmosphere, and my spirits began to rise as I threw on my clothes and whipped my hair into a towel, rounding the corner to where Janie bounded over and did her prancing happy-dance around my bare feet.

And THAT is how I found myself snuggled onto the living room couch with a sweet-smelling, silky-furred, snoring puppy burrowed into my lap and a mug of coffee in the cup of my palm, my face a study in satisfaction.

Now I call that a happy ending.

Tuesday, November 18, 2008

Stereotypes make the world a sillier place

As I walk out of Mac Lobby into the frosty air, two grounds work study students stand with leafblowers at the ready. Dressed in camo coats, denim, heavy work gloves, and scuffed-up work boots, with their red noses and disheveled hair, they present a rugged vision of blue collar hardiness.

As I scurry past, I catch a phrase from their gruff conversation. "I was aghast!" one of them is exclaiming, in injured tones.

Bless you, Wielder of the Leafblower, for reminding me that the most enjoyable function of stereotypes is to prime us for such delightful surprises.

Friday, November 14, 2008

I could not have defined the change--
Conversion of the Mind
Like Sanctifying in the Soul--
Is witnessed--not explained--

E. Dickinson, of course.

Thursday, November 13, 2008

"Pious girls have tender hearts...They are brought up to think someone ought to love them for that sort of thing..."

I'm in the midst of Marianne Robinson's excellent new novel, Home, which develops the Boughton family storyline from her former novel, Gilead. Robinson has the knack of rendering little scenes so unexpectedly poignant that tears frequently take me by surprise. An EKG of my heart would probably reveal frequent surges during my reading, as my spirit reacts to the truth of the language.

The story has me thinking, with mingled fondness and regret, of my past. Like Gilead, Hudsonville offered an insidiously tame backdrop for the forging of my character, ripe for the fostering of hypocrisy. My Christian upbringing resembled Glory's: allegorical; Right and Wrong so concrete that I barely recognized them when they encountered me on the street. As a result, I grew up divorcing my attitude from my actions, and seeing no harm in it. I used Submission as a barrier to relationships--my posture always giving ground while my inner self remained intact and inflexible. It's incredible how successfully a facade of mildness can safeguard an arrogant spirit from detection...even self-detection! They call that passive-aggression, and I still battle it daily. Hypocrisy and passive aggression. Mix in a cloud of self-deception, and my idyllic childhood unfolds. And none to blame but Human Nature.

It has me wondering what new realizations will emerge as these days fade into perspective. It has me clinging to Grace. It has me saying, with a weary Jack Boughton at his kitchen table, "I am so tired of myself."

Wednesday, November 12, 2008

feelin' callow




Today is the sort of day that makes me realize that I should've paid more attention to high school politics. I feel naive and unsure of my footing in relational terrain that most normal people regard with world-weary yawns (having discovered years ago that those mountains really are molehills). And if the veterans continue to tell me that, it must be true. But I don't see that clearly enough yet to react to those molehills in any other manner than the alarm I feel.

That does not prevent me from feeling silly about how I've handled things. I wish I had the detachment to care less...but pity has a way of muddying my perspective and compromising my poise.

All in all, I definitely feel my immaturity more keenly than I have in awhile. It's unsettling to realize that the woman I thought I was chatting with in my brain is still in the most awkward stage of her social adolescence.
Funny that I managed to decieve myself about her for so long.

Tuesday, November 11, 2008

The world is not designed for keepsake

My oldest memories of Thanksgiving are pseudo-memories, stolen from the dusty home videos that now litter the basement junkroom at my house and ratty packs of photos in our kitchen cabinet. In the earliest of these, Hannah and I are two bonnetted and befrippered babydolls with complacent looks being handed and jostled about by the then-strangers whose faces now hold such dearness and meaning for us: aunts, uncles, older cousins, and most of all the freshfaced woman who beams all her mother pride into the camcorder--and at the man behind it. It's strange for me to think of them then. Of course, it's strange to think of my own foreign little mind then, acquiring a new idea that would inscrutably begin to insinuate itself into the other concepts that were gradually coming into focus: sister, mom, dad, family, smells, lights, color, temperature. A specific blend of all of these: Thanksgiving.

I cherish most the memories of the Thanksgiving family reunions that my dad's side of the family began to hold yearly in Camp Dogwood or Camp Lookout in Georgia. Hannah, Daniel, and I would plan ahead for weeks, making detailed lists of items to bring, packing and repacking, fighting over the best suitcases, and regaling the littler children with stories of the years before. Events like these loomed large in my mind because they were so rare. Cramming eight children into a large van and driving for 12 hours was hardly an experience my haggard parents wished to repeat too often. And, as I recall the year that infant Willem bawled for a marathon three hours through the darkness on the way to Lookout Mountain, I have to commiserate.

Of course, once we arrived all I remember was the rampant fun to be enjoyed. Bunkbeds, fooseball, watching "While You Were Sleeping" and "Much Ado About Nothing," triumphing in multiple games of Boggle, suffering in multiple games of Ping-Pong, preparing and consuming lavish meals, decorating cookies, collecting leaves and berries for the Thanksgiving banquet garnishes, exploring the surrounding woods, bonfires to the choral accompaniment of John Denver and Christmas Carols, prank warfare between the cousins, and talent shows in the chapel. I loved to wander out by myself in the cold, especially at dusk, and tell myself stories...although I felt guilty preferring my own company to the rowdy carousing of my cousins. Half of the enjoyment in those solitary hours was in knowing that steamy fragrance and cheery clamor would greet me the moment I stepped back into the lodge.

Thanksgivings have changed as my generation has grown. We no longer reunite each November. Weddings, which occur at least once a year, have assumed that position. Since attending Covenant, I have not yet celebrated the occasion at home. Although I've never been one to get homesick or depressed, I do feel melancholy as I compare the carefree enjoyment of my childhood to my seasoned appreciation for Thanksgiving now.

It's the heedlessness that I miss most, the assumption of wellbeing. The ability to step out of the toasty lodge into an icy twilight and wander, thinking big thoughts uninterruptedly, free to return when I please to an environment that has remained reassuringly unaltered.

As a company of traveling players carry with them everywhere, while they still remember their lines, a windy heath, a misty castle, an enchanted island, so she had with her all that her soul had stored... [Nabakov, Speak, Memory]

Monday, November 10, 2008

"People legislate continually by means of talk." Herzog, Saul Bellow

I have an uneasy feeling about the decrees my legislature has pronounced in recent conversation.

Oh the tongue, that rogue member, constantly compromising my better self!

To Mom

Who would have thought, when years had passed,  and you had left this world for good, I'd find such comfort remembering the way it felt ...