These days,

I am...

1. Learning Italian! Thanks to a generous loan of some audio CDs and workbooks from Vowsh, I have a plan that will get me here all the sooner. Rolling basic phrases off my tongue makes this treasured aspiration seem so much more tangible and near.


http://www.flickr.com/photos/cgoulao/3594151487/

2. Laying the groundwork for my transfer, hopefully this summer, to a less expensive school where I can complete my degree and get off this mountain. It may not be THE wisest move, but I'm standing by it. Any change is improvement, at this point--I'm that restless.

3. Reading a book a week. So far, since January, I've knocked out The Brothers Karamazov, The Whimsical Christian, The Power and the Glory, Auralia's Colors, Consider This Senora, and Ethan Frome. This practice has done me so much good already, stimulating my mind and heart. Reminding me of important things. Holding me back in the best sense possible.

Lately--in case you haven't already sensed this--I've been feeling like a bottled-up reservoir of recklessness, corked by coffee and routine and my own harassed super-ego. Hopefully doing these things will take the edge off of my fretfulness.

At any rate, they are making me feel a bit less adrift in my own life.

Thursday. My haggard mind is doing its best this morning, but keeps losing focus. The dense fog cosying around my psyche is unsettling. I cannot count the number of times I've found myself standing slackly in the middle of a room, or regarding a paper towel dispenser with almost utter blankness. "Almost utter blankness" is so much worse than "utter blankness." It's that niggling tooth, that word on the tip of the tongue, that vague deja-vu sensation all rolled into a feeling that is distinctly less than the sum of its parts.

I finished reading Greene's "The Power and the Glory" yesterday, and have been gnawing on it in my mind ever since. The priest even made it into my dreams last night, begging me for a place to stay the night. I was in character as Sara, the protagonist of Harriet Doerr's "Consider This, Signora," and was very afraid that my ex would appear and get the wrong impression, especially if he saw the wine I was thoughtfully procuring for my fugitive. For some reason it never entered my mind to fear the wrath of the lieutenant dogging my winebibbing refugee.

All dreaming aside, it was a book brutally faithful to portraying the dark side of the glamor of the Christian faith (the side nearer to apostasy than hypocrisy), and to revealing how the dark side is often, in the that paradoxical cliche, closer to the light than the glamorous side (which is nearer to hypocrisy than apostasy). The priest experiences a terrible fall from grace, finds himself both metaphorically and literally in the same camp as the publicans and sinners, and is forced to recognize the crippling extent of his depravity. It contrasts the petty compromises and complacencies of his prior comfortable existence to the state of mortal sin--drankenness and fornication--that shadows his current existence. In his journey down the slippery slope, the father learns how to love by learning more and more personally about the nature of sin. While he never overcomes his terror of death, he at length does choose it over the safety and hypocrisy of life in a new country.

The novel reminded me that the most important thing in life is to strive after holiness, even though that path is never the easy one. Even though the choices that face me will often seem small and innocuous enough in themselves, whenever I choose the lesser good I am choosing wrongly.

And when I fail (as inevitably I will), the novel reminded me that the plan and providence of God are much vaster than I can dream, and will make everything right in the end.

It was the most discouraging bit of encouragement I have read in a very long time.

"Waste"

I know a man who loved his bird so much
He paid a tidy fortune for its cage.

Why is my regret for Juliet
So different from the way I feel about the way this parrot died,
Poisoned by the toxic grain of costly bars?

I can see the humor in the stunts Death pulls
So long as they are distant from myself.

Until I see the man who stares,

guilt-wracked as Juliet, upon

The lifeless fruit of his propitious planning.

weekend

Last Friday, yet another snowstorm descended upon the area that Al Roker has designated "my neck of the woods." Earlier that morning, I had skipped out of my front door wearing only a light spring fleece over my short sleeved shirt, expecting yet another day of unseemly warmth. Three hours later, my boss was shooing me back to the shelter of home, where I watched out the window as God shook snow over tree limbs and shingles, smoothed the knotted ridges of the tire-scarred driveway, and delighted my mind with notions of angels.

Over the course of the ensuing snowbound weekend, I did my inner compass proud and never once got lost during my frequent rambles through the transfigured woods and trails--unless, that is, you count getting lost in thought, in which case I was jubilantly adrift for hours at a stretch. I firmly believe that getting lost is the best way to know your way around a territory, whether the terrrain you cover be geographical or intellectual. The past few days of wondering through the weathers of my inner wilderness have been quite productive, cartographically speaking. I covered a lot of ground, and always found my way home by the time I'd curled my fingers around a hot ceramic mug and made small talk with the nearest house mate.

Never underestimate the transformative power of a winter snow.

Face it: Art is everywhere. Everywhere is Art.

There are several little areas on campus, rooms less traveled, that have been decorated with posters in an effort to neutralize the ugly nakedness of cinderblock and the desolate lack of furnishings.

When I pass through one of these small holdouts, I find myself in the crosshairs of a mute conversation between a soulfully glossy Elvis Presley and a shaggily somber John Lennon. John Coltrane, eyes closed, leaning back with his lips to the mouthpiece of his gleaming saxophone, ignores my intrusion. The Beatles stride across Abbey Road in their bellbottomed suits towards the abstract landscape of a guitar chord guide, which must be traversed before they can arrive at the juicy psychadelic explosion of color that is Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Louis Armstrong's eyes roll up from the floor. He is still focused on pumping air into that trumpet as my shadow flits over his felled portrait.

I'll tell you why this quiet little room makes my skin tingle.

In the medium of the presence created by all those faces is rendered an intangible portrait of the person who purchased them and puttied them to the wall. By appropriating these posters, this person announced her personality. She gave it a certain life of its own, detached from her physical being. You might say that she created a spirit and housed it.

The faces of Elvis and the Beatles have become the faces of Rock and Roll, just as the faces of Louis Armstrong and John Coltrane have become the faces of Jazz. Altogether, these faces paint a portrait of the face of Music, an image that is dated like a Rembrandt self-portrait: Music at a certain age, in a certain lighting, with a certain backdrop.

That is why my skin tingles. I step through that door. There is the face of the anonymous person who decorated the walls. The face of Music. My own astonished face.

Whose personality are we announcing?

glimpse

It's my lunch hour, and I am listening to Yo Yo Ma's "Gabriel's Oboe" beneath the vivid yellow smiley face beaming down at me from its post-it perch amidst the scribbled notes that adorn my computer. This office would make a prime candidate for an "I SPY" book, if only I assembled its contents into rhyme.

I spy three mugs, a blue trash can,
A smudged coffeemaker whose name is "Stan,"
A flower vase, bottle of glue,
A toilet plunger and fire extinguisher, too!
A stuffed dog o'erlooking a vase of flowers,
Two stubborn clocks that won't agree on the hours.

Of course, the ditty could go on and on. Markers, pens, and pushpins, broken vacuums, torn paper snowflakes, outdated Bagpipe issues, beheaded squeegees, cans of cleaning supplies, a butter knife, trashcan liners.

And always, always, the incessent drone that buzzes from the utilities closet in the wall. I like to fancy that this closet is the place where every swallowed complaint comes to dwell. Its tireless groan is the audible manifestation of all the unvoiced weariness of every bored student, every grudging laborer. By seeing it in this light, I can train myself to enjoy an otherwise exasperating sound effect.

(Yes: enjoy. As a supervisor of a janitorial labor force, I have been programmed to thrive off of such expressions of weariness. Or so I find it necessary to pretend, at times.)

This is the hub of all my daily exertions, and I enjoy its incohesive sprawl.

grateful

I've been puttering around yet another slow private morning during my week of night shift duty, pulling the front door open to admit the sweetness of a surprisingly balmy January day. In the semi-thaw, the sunlight radiates real warmth, and the brittle stalks of the trees even seem to bend (a suppleness that my imagination has probably imposed on them). U2 got my heart thumping, my spirits soaring when I ran the trails after waking. I watched some favorite fragments of "A Knight's Tale," fixed some waffles, made myself an espresso. For accuracy's sake, I'll also record that I plunged a toilet and swabbed out the drain of the kitchen sink. Loaded the dishwasher. Wiped the counters. Cleaned my bedroom.

All these quiet ministrations leave me feeling becalmed, a placid sea, reflecting sun and sky, rolling strong slow swells of consciousness over the smooth slick pebbles of my mind.

Just over the threshold of a new year...

...this is how I feel.

Time is pouring out of the pitcher and I fail to drink it

Half-asleep, I skim over it in a derelict little boat.
I admire it, smell it, dip my fingers in as I pass,
but neither cup my hand nor lift it out to drink.

Moments themselves have texture, weight, like food:
cheesecake or toffee richness, thick cream: being
and being in a moment seem the only worthwhile things,
to somehow get at the food of moments, to taste
every single one, finish one blessed meal before I starve.

Every person, too, is a well, a column of water going deep
into the earth. Like dogs we lick the brackish surface,
too stupid to lower a bucket to fresh depths. Our tongues,
impatient organs, rule the hour, killing us with our own thirst.
Even the wells we are we cover with planks and long nails.
Even the bucket-drinkers are parched then; even the well-diggers.

Moment and person, both seem not of this world.
Arrested (as we once or twice have felt them each to be
if we've had any life at all) they are in no way related
to time or space. Personality, the who-you-are, seems then
not just well, but sea. Not a drop in the ocean, but the ocean!
And not an ocean on which you float, but in which you drown,
skillfully and alive, like a mermaid. The Other is your oxygen
right then. For just a moment. Lost but not losing. Emptied,
beggared, without missing an ounce of your own gold.

Then the Moment is time gain. Eternity retracts its lovely claws
and stalks out of sight, but never out of the house, aloof as a cat.
Yet it was here, wasn't it? You can't deny the lingering sting;
those wounds in your arm; those blooming beads of blood.

[Diane Tucker]

resolve

"These young men [honest in nature, desiring truth...and seeking to serve it at once with all the strength of their souls, seeking for immediate action, and ready to sacrifice everything, even life itself] fail to understand that to sacrifice five or six years of their seething youth to hard and tedious study, if only to multiply tenfold their powers of serving the truth and the cause they have set before them as their goal, is utterly beyond the strength of many of them."
[The Brothers Karamazov]

This little reminder fell into my lap yesterday as I reread a favorite novel. I suppose it is easier to throw everything into a grand gesture rather than devoting one's "seething youth" to a prolonged effort. I needed to hear that, as the completion of my degree drags on and I constantly tell myself all the reasons that quitting is fine and good and nothing to be ashamed of. Even if withdrawing from the pursuit of a degree is not the worst thing I could do for myself, even if it offers many advantages and likely will not put an end to any of my exceedingly modest dreams, yet still I must recognize the intangible personal meaning that it will hold for me. Discipline and endurance are byproducts of staying my course. Also, there is beauty to a work completed, whatever it may be. I'm sure that Odysseus, lying in the arms of the beautiful enchantress far from home, could easily have talked himself out of the daunting journey back to Penelope rather than devoting years of his life to hardship and peril. But he didn't. Persistence is a virtue that I need to respect, even if I don't feel the merest twinge of ambition.

I don't want to finish school. I don't have to, either. But I should. And so I will.

good morning

Home is lovely, from the twinkly twig of a tree in the living room, already encompassed by wrapped gifts, to even the frigid outer extremeties of the drafty upstairs and dank basement "junk" room. All my shopping is tucked under my fat black belt, and I've been content to drink coffee and study the boisterous life of my household. A pot brews even as I sit here listening to Fleet Foxes in the darksome stillness of early morning, not a creature otherwise stirring, not even my dog. Who, by the way, is adjusting rather well to the pace of things here in Michigan, aside from displaying a new streak of recalcitrance when it comes to returning indoors when she's called from her outdoor adventures. I'm out of practice commanding a leash and she's out of practice submitting to one, but we manage.

It wouldn't be a journey home if there were no revelations. I've had a few. Snow is always a revelation, a keen reminder that if I remain in the south my heart will never be whole. My favorite moments have been evening walks on Elmwood Lake with Janie, outstriding the gasping mental refrain of shit shit shit its cold until you realize your heart is singing beautiful beautiful joy joy joy to the winter sky with its streaked luminosities, to the crunchy snow underfoot and the black-stubbled fields to your left, the cloudy iced pond to your right holding blurred lights plundered from the houses on its far border, the one evergreen halfway down the path, its branches festooned with champagne bulbs. The way the cold has of befriending you after its initial rebuff. The way dark and wind and snow and glittering distant lights make you feel strong and alive, as though your body is the substance not only of God's breath, but of God's own laughter.

Other revelations can keep, need time to work on me. Meanwhile, it is almost Christmas and I feel free and fervent as a bird. Time for a cup of coffee and an early dip into the Word.

Today after work I'll be picking up my car, loading my belongings, shooing Janie into the passenger seat, and striking off for the snowy Midwest and a white Christmas. Hopefully this year's journey will prove less eventful than Christmas 2008, which found a much younger Janie and a much less competent me wedged in a ditch awaiting a tow truck while the snow fell lavishly and insensibly down upon us. I am very eager for the long drive, which always affords me leisure to be silent and thoughtful, and also to sing at the top of my lungs without fear of human censure. Janie might not like it much.

For now, I have much to do before my four new tires hit the pavement of I-24. I want no unfinished work dulling the shine of my departure.

the importance of being earnest

I'm remembering Annie Dillard's Journey to the Pole, and the way she spoke of our strange fondness for penguins. We find them endearing because we see in their biped waddling and earnest bobbing a humorous caricature of ourselves. Perhaps, she muses, a similar relationship exists between humans and God. Perhaps he finds the fumblingly determined circus of our lives endearing because in it he sees a humorous caricature of his own great work.

Maybe if I thought more often about how all my grave pontificating, my frenzied efforts to act beautifully and graciously and uprightly, must strike him (who is the possessor in full of all that I dimly echo), I would find myself spreading my hands in sheepish acknowledgment of how clueless I really am. I would laugh with him.

I don't mean to disparage the wonderful truth about God's image, how my nature is stamped with it. I'm awed when I consider that I cannot but emulate my Creator, that he has intended it to be so and does indeed delight in it. Nevertheless, so often I forget that the flipside of that awe is humility: a recognition of the gulf between the Creator and his sin-darkened image in my frail soul. The idea that I have ever felt a moment's self-importance should elicit my most deserving derision.

It is important to be earnest. I ought to spend my life tirelessly pursuing perfect godliness. It is, in part, what I'm here to do.

But before that, I am here to take a good hard look at my outrageous self, and a good hard look at the Beauty that delights in me. And I am to spread my hands towards him and laugh, trusting him to do the work of teaching me how my earnest, godlike emulation delights him best.

Before anything else, I am here to adore.

uncautionary tale

Since everyone knows that you cannot properly celebrate a snowday from indoors, no matter how panoramic the view commanded by your living room windows, I bundled myself into a winter jacket, tucked my jeans into my battered Slovakia boots, whistled for Janie, and followed her out my front door after closing my blog entry last Saturday.

It was nine o'clock a.m., and the sky wore more layers than I did. Even so, the sunshine managed to glow through its cloudy bundling and ignite the white on every bristling twig and trodden leaf. The air smelled metallic with the cold. It rang in my ears.

I picked a direction and went forth. Several moments of uphill trudging later and the woods had closed over my house, leaving me swallowed in black and white. Janie chased ahead of me and looped behind me and kept plunging her face into the snow and licking it, delighted at our excursion. I kept walking.

That is how I got lost in my own front yard. I won't speak for Janie. No doubt she knew the way home, but was delighted at the prolonged ramble. Were it not for the muffled rush of Scenic Highway serving to awaken my seriously faulty inner compass, we might be wandering there still, in a wasteland of mud and crusted snowpatches. As it was, it took me miles of walking parallel to the highway to realize that I was headed in the wrong direction and to correct my error. Suffice it to say, I'm no girl scout.

By the time Janie's bark announced our arrival to our own familiar gravel drive, I was quite a sight: rosy-cheeked, wild haired, glasses clouded by vapor from my exertions, thoroughly damp from shouldering a path through snowy boughs, and numbly sodden from midthigh to bootsole after a tumble in a creek.

I can't remember the last time I felt so foolish and happy. So paralyzed by laughter.

"Not Only the Eskimos"

We have only one noun
but as many different kinds:

the grainy snow of the Puritans
and snow of soft, fat flakes,

guerrilla snow, which comes in the night
and changes the world by morning,

rabbinical snow, a permanent skullcap
on the highest mountains,

snow that blows in like the Lone Ranger,
riding hard from out of the West,

surreal snow in the Dakotas,
when you can't find your house, your street,
though you are not in a dream
or a science fiction movie,

snow that tastes good to the sun
when it licks black tree limbs,
leaving us only one white stripe,
a replica of a skunk,

unbelievable snows:
the blizzard that strikes on the tenth of April,
the false snow before Indian summer,
the Big Snow on Mozart's birthday,
when Chicago became the Elysian fields
and strangers spoke to each other,

paper snow, cut and taped
to the inside of grade-school windows,

in an old tale, the snow that covers a nest of strawberries,
small hearts, ripe and sweet,

the special snow that goes with Christmas,
whether it falls or not,

the Russian snow we remember
along with the warmth and smell of our furs,
though we have never treveled
to Russia or worn furs,

Villon's snows of yesteryear,
lost with ladies gone out like matches,
the snow in Joyce's "The Dead,"
the silent, secret snow
in a story by Conrad Aiken,
which is the snow of first love,

the snowfall between the child
and the spacewoman on TV,

snow as idea of whiteness,
as in snowdrop, snow goose, snowball bush,

the snow that puts stars in your hair,
and your hair, which has turned to snow,

the snow Elinor Wylie walked in
in velvet shoes,

the snow before her footprints
and the snow after,

the snow in the back of our heads,
whiter than white, which has to do
with childhood again each year.

[Lesil Mueller]

Last night Lookout Mountain became a Sherwood for goodwilled guerrilla snow. It crowned each of the pie pumpkins standing sentinel on my front porch with little rabbinical skullcaps (a deserved recognition of their fortitude), and put stars in my hair when I went out to the woods with Janie for an invigorated walk.

I've only come in for a cup of coffee and a moment's rapture before I return. Snows in Georgia never last long, and I intend to make the most of every flake.

"Suspended"

I had grasped God's garment in the void
but my hand slipped
on the rich silk of it
The "everlasting arms" my sister loved to remember
must have upheld my leaden weight
from falling, even so,
for though I claw at empty air and feel
nothing, no embrace,
I have not plummetted.

[Denise Levertov]

Sophistication

It was the final piano lesson of her twelfth year of life, and Evelyn had just finished playing through the Turkish Rondo. She knew, before Mrs. Schwartz uttered so much as a syllable, that she had done it again. Too fast, too loud, too rampant—too much! But the beat of her heart and the flush in her cheeks, not to mention the way that the surrounding air rejoiced as it lapped up the final chord, allayed any stirrings of consternation. She leaned her chin on her right shoulder and knew her eyes were dancing as they focused on the crisp elderly woman beside her.

“You certainly had fun with that one, didn’t you?” Mrs. Schwartz’s sardonic tone soured the finale. “I’m sure that after six years under my tutelage, you can guess what I didn’t like about that performance.”

“I overdid it.”

As she made her impenitent confession, Evelyn watched Mrs. Schwartz’s gaze drift across the room toward the clock suspended on the opposite wall. This brief journey was traveled so often during the course of a lesson that Evelyn sometimes thought of the clock as a magnet like the ones she’d studied in school, exerting a pull irresistible for her teacher’s small lead-grey ocular shavings.

“Precisely.” Mrs. Schwartz’s eyes strained away from the clock and trained them once again on her pupil. “You overdid it. It isn’t supposed to be all one furious fortissimo that somehow incredibly manages to crescendo and accelerando every measure. You need to pace yourself, to feel the natural ebb and flow of the music. Your quarter note should be the same value the entire length of the piece. Your pianissimos should be a whisper.”

She poised her right hand above the keyboard and executed a coy trill. “Soft and disarming, like that, see?” Evelyn jumped out of her skin when the next moment Mrs. Schwartz’s left hand fell into a deep and thunderous tremolo. As the growl died out, the woman patted her student’s shoulder and smiled. “See how effective that contrast is? What you don’t yet understand, my dear, is that by pounding the notes into the ground you are actually robbing them of their potency.”

Evelyn nodded, but her face was impatient. It wasn’t a question of whether or not she understood. She did understand. It was a question of whether or not she cared. And she did not.

Mrs. Schwartz sighed. “Good. Next week, I expect you to be less self indulgent and to show a little more respect for Mozart when you take it upon yourself to perform his work.” The magnet drew her eyes up once more. “And that’s about all the time we have this week. You’d better bundle up tight for the walk home. It looks sleety out there.”

As Evelyn dutifully shrugged on her jacket, Mrs. Schwartz poised her pen above the little notepad that Evelyn was meant to consult during her daily practice sessions. Evelyn threw her scarf carelessly around her neck and embraced her stack of music books.

“Thanks, Mrs. Schwartz.”

“You’re welcome, dear.”

The girl paused with her hand on the doorknob, and then asked with impulsive curiosity, “Mrs. Schwartz?”

“Yes?”

“Don’t you ever play just to see how loud and fast you can go? I mean, even though you know it won’t sound as good? Just for fun?”

Mrs. Schwartz’s face grew suddenly still. When she spoke, her voice was soft. “Well now. There’s a time and a place for everything. You have to know, Evelyn, that when you sit at my piano, I expect you to be true both to yourself and to the work that you have been given to perform.” She paused, and smiled slowly. “That said, I don’t think there’s a person on the face of the earth that doesn’t push the limits every now and then, just to prove a point.”

Evelyn made a mollified face, her interest sapping away as quickly as it had been aroused. She grinned as she pulled open the door. “Well, all righty. I’m off! Have a great week, Mrs. Schwartz!” There was a ripping noise behind her back as she skipped lightly down the doorsteps. A moment later the older woman’s reedy voice arrested the girl’s escape through the wet flinty air.

“Evelyn, you forgot your notepad!”

She whirled around and retraced her steps in several bounds. “Oh, thank you! Goodbye again, Mrs. Schwartz!”
---
When Evelyn arrived home, she dropped her heap of music books on the piano bench. The notepad fell to the floor, and she knelt to pick it up. As she did, her eyes fell across the words Mrs. Schwartz had scrawled in it moments ago. Instead of the usual litany--polish these measures, master these scales, memorize this theory--a single sentence jazzed up the blank page.

"You should above all be glad and young. Happy Birthday!"

Embarrassed by her heart’s sudden leap of pleasure, Evelyn rolled her eyes. “Whatever,” she muttered under her breath, tossing the notepad aside. She looked down at the vacant piano.

The scrupulous ranks of black and white stirred within her an embryonic reverence.
---
Mrs. Schwartz stood in the cold for a moment and watched her ward tango down the sidewalk towards her home a block away, scarf unwinding and whipping in the air behind her. Then the old woman shut the door and leaned back against it. She looked down at the vacant piano.

The gap-toothed ivories grinned a rakish invitation.

I only have to work three days this week, it being the week of Thanksgiving and all. You would think that would boost my work ethic, but your supposition would be false. To the contrary, the bratty child that inhabits my brain has decided that it wants to be off NOW, and ponders the work ahead of me with sulky ill will. Isn't that human nature? Give me an inch, and I'll pine after a mile.

Today manifests all the ingredients of November: bitter damp winds, tattered brown branches, and a general color scheme of vein blue and cement gray. I look forward to going home this afternoon, fixing a cup of cozy chamomile tea, and sitting down on the couch by the window to just sip and ruminate. I don't take advantage of the companionship of own mind and imagination as often as I should, choosing instead the far more sensational company of TV, or even of books or music. I remind myself constantly that gratitude and contentment dwell most abundantly in a mind that is still and attentive, so that I will continue to aspire to this inner equilibrium.

Some days it is harder than others. It is always easier said than done.

wakeup call

I am a custodian of a college residence hall, which means that interacting with people who have just awakened is part of my job description. It happens to be an aspect of my job that I particularly relish. Each day I witness multiple instances of the vulnerable process of waking. I see puffy, wrinkled, squinty faces, hair in all stages of Frankensteinian disarray, fashion statements that run the gamut from indecent to frumpy to outlandish. And like a beneficent fairy I flit among these poor shambling lead-footed figures, doling out clean white toilet paper rolls and gooey pink soap refills to smooth the road to consciousness.

They all survive it daily, that rude tumble from the charger to the cement floor of reality. Some of them even muster a smile for me. After all, I’m a survivor, too.

I am realizing, however, that more often than not my heart is content to remain dozing sweetly on that private charger somewhere deep within me. I permit it to stay there, where the woods are lovely, dark and deep.

Waking, even at the heart level, is offering your unwary, shabby, half-blinded self to frigid air and appraising eyes. Sleep offers a tantalizing if false defense from this violation.

Nonetheless, dear heart, arise and shine. Laugh at your unappealing reflection in the bathroom mirror. Assume the heavy mantle of your responsibilities. Travel the necessary miles with grace and goodwill.

Retrospective

They were playing fetch with a football in the front yard. It was early evening. The shadow of the house slipped further up their playing field with each elapsing quarter hour, its relentless border breached time and again as Dante launched himself after Nora's indiscriminate passes.

Flashing cars happened by too swiftly to pay much attention to the wholesome tableau. The dinner hour was looming, and however charming the house, it was not their destination. When the red setting sun finally renounced the porcelain sink of the sky, light drained fast. By the time Julia slipped out to the front porch only a waxen sheen remained to see by, and it too would soon evaporate into darkness.

Julia stood in the gloom. She watched Dante's ecstatic leaps, Nora's tireless arcing arm in its vivid red sleeve, the cars, the sky. She had not ventured outside all day until now, and she felt like a gigantic knotted nerve whose throbbing had dulled only because it had grown habitual. The open air helped a little.

Her eyes sought out her daughter's face, but so blurred by motion and tangled mane was it that she caught only fragmented glimpses of red cheeks and white teeth. Julia reflected on how different things were now, ten years since she could encompass Nora's entirety--soft pink pate to soft pink feet--in one look. At that time she had watched with leisurely wonder as complete emotions visited her child's quiescent face. These days Nora lived her life at such a pitch that Julia's total awareness could never arrive on time. How many heartfuls of love and blessing had she bestowed upon evacuated air? Or, as today, on a pair of sparkling brown eyes, a whipping brunette haze, a crimson smear against the dim suburban scenery?

At that moment, Nora caught sight of Julia's pale purple shadow in the open maw of the porch. "Hi Mom!" she shouted, waving and waving her scarlet sleeve. Dante's bark distracted her from the reciprocated gesture several yards away.

Julia let her arm fall again to her side and inhaled the coppery scent of autumn air. Her skin prickled. Turning her head slightly, she saw, encased in the dim yellowed frame of the living room window, an old woman.

Julia's mother could still stand with the aid of a walker. She leaned heavily against it in her bulging gray sweatshirt and wrinkled black stretch pants, from which the fringe of a red turtleneck and the mousy gray toes of fur-lined slippers peeked. The lamplight winked wistfully off of the oversized glasses that sat on the bridge of her nose.

Julia waved her arm and smiled. "Hi Mom!" she called.

Nora's laughter distracted her from the reciprocated gesture several feet away.

beautiful things are everywhere

This morning as I marched out of Founders to walk down to the gym, keychain jangling, I felt terrific. Sun-gilded blue skies, God's own impeccable duomo, vaulted above me. The chemical janitorial squad, more commonly known as C.O.F.F.E.E., was getting busy in my system, cleaning the glass behind my eyeballs, vacuuming all the sleep lint from my brain, polishing the chambers of my memory and imagination till they gleamed, oiling my joints and sweeping my sluggishness out the door. And for some reason my subconscious had latched onto a handful of words (as the subconscious tends to do): "Beautiful things are everywhere." Not the most poetic, artistic phrase, but true nonetheless, and no doubt planted by the most Beautiful One of all as a scarcely-acknowledged blessing on this day.

And that is how, through no conscious effort or questing of my own, I find myself living abundantly. To think that God can work that in me: secretly stirring my energies to joy and delight overnight and then surprising me with them upon waking. It's an incredible gift. How I wish I too had the power to bestow it!