It's All Greek to Me

In my mind, I imagine it like an AA meeting.  Tucked away in a midtown church basement, a semi circle of disparate people, held together by a tenuous thread, shuffle their folding chairs into position as the meeting begins.

"Hi.  I'm Jane.  And I'm a . . . Pi Beta Phi," I stammer.

"Hi, Jane!"

It's true.  I am a Pi Beta Phi, even if I tend to reference it in the past tense.

So, why all the discomfort?  It's not like I'm admitting to getting my thrills from huffing cans of whipped cream or something.   After all, I did nothing during my four-year sorority tenure to be ashamed of.  Well, that's not entirely true.  But I did nothing terribly out of the ordinary during those formative years.

I mean, everyone occasionally goes the wrong way on a one-way street, right?

I think it comes down to image control.  For some bizarre reason, long ago, in a Ford Galaxy far, far away, I settled upon an image of myself.  Not an overly flattering image, but one I found peace in, nonetheless.  It's an image of a plain girl, not prone to fancy things or ritualistic tendencies. 

Stereotypically speaking, I settled on a non-sorority-going image of myself, even though I willingly pledged my faith to the wine and silver blue of Pi Beta Phi.

And I enjoyed those four years on campus, meeting nice folks from across the nation, most of whom had a better fashion sense than I ever would, but all of whom seemed to accept me for who I was.  But I still tend to blush when word gets out that I once owned t-shirts with Greek letters on them.  At lunch, when such truths unravel themselves between bites of day-old leftovers, the news is usually greeted first with a collective gasp and then, soon after, with great guffaws of laughter.

Well, so be it.  I'm a 50+-year-old woman who's birthed me some children, had me some jobs and lived me some life.  Why not complicate the simple picture others have of me and throw in a little Greek life? 

Today, then, I pledge a new/old beginning, as I weave my way towards downtown for a Pi Phi reunion of sorts.  Sure, there will be moments of weirdness, when I flash back to musty images of times spent in that grand, old house on 16th Street.  And I'm certain to struggle with synapses as folks I haven't seen in 30 years come back into my circle of life, if only for an afternoon.

But I'm going to be open to it all, even if I take some ribbing.  I'm going to let myself enjoy that strange sensation known as "reunion," laughing with folks who, long ago, accepted me despite my square peggishness, people who took me under their crisp, Polo-inspired wings and gave me second and third chances, as needed. 

Who knows?  I may even utter a few lines from some Pi Phi favorites, no longer embarrassed as the ditties come pouring happily from my unembellished  lips, remembering what it was that I enjoyed all those long years ago.

"Pi Pi Beta Phi!  P-I-P-H-I Pi Phi!  Me for my for Beta Phi for I just love Pi Beta Phi!"

A Good Conference Call

Most people would think that there’s not a lot of joy to be had sitting on a folding chair in a noisy gymnasium for three hours.  Especially after you’ve already put in a full day of work.  

That’s the funny thing about Parent-Teacher conferences, though.  Turns out that they actually are kind of fun (don’t tell my union rep).  And the fun starts right after school, when some fine folks agree to feed the teachers.

I don’t know how food is treated at other work places, but teachers view food with a kind of rabid reverence that is not for the weak hearted.  Come into the teacher’s lounge some day and set out a plate of day-old cookies.  Heck, they could even be a week old.  Within the hour, they’ll be gone.  The plate, too, if it’s got a little life left in it.

Here’s the truth.  It is impossible for a group of teachers to eat together without laughing.  And not that polite, sniffling snickering, but great, heaping, snorting guffaws.  Top that with the excellent food that our parents feed us on conference night, and you can see why I head to my hard, rusty chair in the gym with a smile on my face.

The gym, where the parade of parents begins, tall people wending their confused way between rickety card tables manned by tired teachers.  Nine times out of ten, though, when those parents sit down and we start talking, I can’t wipe the smile off my face.

There is something wonderful about telling a parent that you love his or her child.  Even if there are bumps in that child’s road, bumps that harsh my mellow, I can always find the silver lining, the beautiful essence of that child who is theirs.  And I relish the job of reminding them just how swell their kids are.

Maybe that’s why it’s always hard for me to fall asleep after parent-teacher conferences.  My stomach is happy digesting delectables and my head is buzzing from the good conversations I’ve had with parents.  

It is good to love their kids, even when they can be aggravating knuckleheads who occasionally wear too much Axe. Truth is, I laugh as much with those kids as I do with my peers at lunch.

Lucky me.

A Child Only To His Parents

What a thing to have a child teetering on his twenties. And, really, Eric is only a child in the familial sense. His bones no longer aching to grow, his face long cleared of the acne of adolescence, his mind far more settled than my own was at his age, Eric is more "man" than "child" these days. And for all the days to follow.

It is very easy to love Eric Carlson Holt. And not just because I am his mother.

Throughout his life, his radar has carved out a space for others. I have always been wooed by his anchoring questions: How are you, mom? How was your day? Even as a young boy, he'd occasionally remember to ask me these things. And, each time, I felt bathed in his attentiveness, warmed by his ability to bounce back the questions that a parent is expected to ask.

Unlike his mother, who can be prone to attention-getting antics and whose voice has been known to pierce the very atoms in the air, Eric has never felt the need to turn the spotlight on himself. As such, he'll never take up karaoke, I suppose.

Ah, but it's to be expected that a mother faces occasional heartache. . . .

I love that Eric is neither Mark nor me. Not a blending so much as an emerging, like a butterfly emerging from the chrysalis, wet with possibility.

He is earnest, honest, kind, courageous. He is a very good friend to others. And his heart is good, through and through.

Long ago, I gave up trying to identify the tenuous strings that extend from me into my children, that strange, ego-driven desire to see me in them. Or maybe I've just quit expecting to locate that evidence.

And I must say that it is a pleasurable thing to simply enjoy the presence of another human being, one whose essence may be sprinkled with mine, but who has managed to dry his wings and fly despite that.

Like the butterflies I've been enjoying these days in our tired, diligent garden, I find hope in my offspring, knowing that they wake each day with a sense of who they are in this world and the ability to carve out a path for themselves.

I am a blessed bystander, whispering my well wishes into the breeze, my heart swelling with love.

Lobbying for a Hobby

Last weekend, when Eric was home on an 18-hour layover (i.e., he laid down over here between more interesting events), he spoke longingly about his desire to have a consuming passion.  It surprised me, considering all the disparate and quirky interests he has--from politics to horror movies.

Maybe his interests aren't so disparate after all . . . .

Regardless, he spoke with fondness about the folks he knows who are obsessed with something.  I reminded him that being around people with such a singular focus can be a drag, especially if that focus is, say, macrame or brown foods.

Secretly, though, I started to doubt my parenting style, one in which I have sought to raise generalists, rather than specialists.  It's possible I've been a bit too obsessed about that outcome.

But it's not as though Eric hasn't had his own obsessions, beginning with "The Lion King."  My god, I don't know what Disney put in those celluloid waters, but something tarry and dark wedged its way into my young son's brain.  There even came a point when I pondered canceling my subscription to National Geographic, in hopes that all lions--even Nala and Simba--would just die off and go away.

Last weekend, Eric got a super-8 movie camera in the mail, thanks to a high bid on eBay.  He thought that maybe this media relic would become the object of his affection, and I kind of got what he meant.  Two of my brothers had super-8 cameras, which meant that I spent many a happy childhood weekend re-enacting scenes from "Superman" and "Kung Fu."  Their filmmaking pursuits pulled in kids from every corner of the neighborhood, each one of us getting a delicious taste of my brothers' obsessions.

I, too, have had my laser-like loves, from swimming pools to Scrabble, bacon to beer (both the making and consumption of), I know what it's like to fall in love with something.  And both Mark and I have felt like falling in love with something again.   That's why, 15 years after having sold our first beer-making kit, we bought another one last week.

Mark bought me my first beer kit for my 30th birthday and I had five or six great years with that thing, loving the experimental nature of the beast, the way the malt bubbled up, dangerously close to the lip of our steaming pot, the way the yeast smelled, burping itself from the containers where magic--or mishap--was being made.  The only reason I gave it all up was because of my children.  With two young kids in the house, suddenly it seemed unreasonable to have to wait 5 weeks for a cold one.

But my kids are all grown up now.  Which means I'm free to fall in love again with an old hobby.  And, to that, I say "cheers!"

Pro Choice, Even When I Don't Like the Options

"The thing about hiking the Pacific Crest Trail that summer, the thing that was so profound to me. . .was how few choices I had and how often I had to do the thing I least wanted to do."  --from "Wild," by Cheryl Strayed.

Strayed's words, relating a profound realization atop the rugged trail, caught me off guard last night.  Off guard and on alert.

I think I've needed an alert to sound for some time now.  I'm grateful Strayed was up to the task. 

Heaven knows others have tried to make their voices heard to me, no doubt having grown tired of my whining about new job duties that feel overwhelming and underfinanced.  Ah, but apparently, I needed a woman broken by death and heroin, empty sex and divorce to pull me aside and remind me that, sometimes, we just need to man up.

"Man up."  What a stupid expression.  As though monthly bleeding, birthing humans and 2/3 pay for the same job somehow fall short in toughening up a person.

Alas, whatever term you want to use, the point remains the same--it's time for me to quit whining and just do my job.  Surely I would have learned by now that the times I grow the most, the times I am most human, are the times when I do what's necessary, even when it's hard.  Or not fun.  Or unnoticed.

But I am a slow learner, having just discovered, at age 50, a foundation and blush that my daughter approves of.  Half a century and I'm just now realizing that no one else is going to swish that ring off the toilet or walk the dog in the rain.

Tom Osborne often talked about the importance of delayed gratification, saying that, if he could teach his athletes--and, later, all those Teammates--to do the hard work first, then they will wake up some day--long before they turn 50, I'm sure--and discover the strength that is within them.  Proof enough that the hard choice often is the best one.  You just might need a pair of binoculars to remember that important fact.

Walk This Way

I've been known to leave a book hanging with only a handful of pages left.  Like a misbehaving sea dog whose shore leave is up, I can walk away, guilt free, and say "Last night was fun, but I've had enough, thank you."  And I've also found out that Oprah's stamp approval often is a visual clue to me that I might not like anyone inside.

Endings, I believe, are very hard to write.  As are compelling characters.  And readers are a fickle bunch, each of us bringing our own brand of hopes, dreams and needs to the pages before us.

God help the author who delivers the wrong dish to our tables.

Ah, but to those whose writing is crisp, whose characters are not afraid of their humanness and whose plots possess the tenacity and wispiness of a spider's web?  I bow down to thee.

As a reader, my own inclinations lean toward small lives whose stories are well told and whose days are courageously lived, despite everything.  I think that's why "Olive Kitteridge," a Pulitzer-prize winner, slowly has found its way under my skin.  After my friend Larry raved about it, I knew I'd read this collection of stand-alone stories, loosely held together by the feisty, sometimes frustrating title character.

There is no booming soundtrack to this book, but the collective effect of its stories is hard to ignore.  Full of heartache and humor, lousy decision making and invisible good deeds,  more often than not, "Olive Kitteridge" feels strangely familiar, despite its ocean-side setting.

This week, I also started the book "Wild," a biographical account of a woman's three-month trek across the West Coast's rugged Pacific Crest Trail.  I fell in love with it by the third paragraph.

No surprise, I suppose, since I seem to have a propensity for books about walking (In "The Long Walk," Sławomir Rawicz recounts his harrowing, mind-blowing, 4,000-mile walk to freedom that began with an escape from a Siberian gulag; and in "A Walk in the Woods," I am transported to the wildness of the Appalachian Trail, entertained along the way by Bill Bryson's irresistible writing and often humorous recollections).

Walking, it turns out, represents--both symbolically and practically--what most moves me in life.  It is of the earth, it requires no special equipment, it takes its time and it puts me in touch with both my self and my world.

True, you will find no piles of excess fat mixed among the leaves along those routes I walk each day.  But, look close, and you might see a small mound of detritus from imagined arguments I've let go of, or tiny piles of problems mostly solved.

I feel hugged by all this smallness, from the way Olive miraculously wakes each morning and moves her lumbering, imperfect way through her ordinary days, to the devastating losses and moving revelations "Wild's" author tackles on a rugged mountainside, and, finally, in my own predictable, steadying walks with Finn each day.   Aching feet finding their way to the ground to which they ultimately are rooted, one step at a time.

 

A Case of Nerves

An addled adult brain is not a pretty thing.  I know because it's 4:30 a.m. on a Saturday and I've been up for hours, emailing myself little "to do" lists that I've comprised in bed.  When it's very, very dark outside and even the bad people have called it a night.

I have no idea why my addled brain is set to Pan-Pacific time while my body knows only Central Standard Time.  It would be nice if the two were in synch.  I can only imagine how clever and sharp and appreciated I would be if my brain weren't a night owl these days.

This night owl has mostly been hooting about a new job assignment I've been given this school year, one that has tested me to the limits.  Which is ironic, because the assignment's focus is testing, of the standardized variety.

And, frankly, I feel like a flunky right now.  Which should probably make all those students who are tested beyond their limits feel just a wee bit better.

I cry about every three years, whether I need to or not.  Yesterday, about 8:30 in the morning, I was pretty sure that I needed to dump a load of tears.  I felt stupid, overwhelmed, underpaid and off center, four feelings that should never come together on the same street corner, more or less outside a classroom. 

I kept it together, but just barely.  And now I'm left wondering how I will be able to navigate these unfamiliar waters for an entire school year.  And all the school years that follow, assuming I am not removed from this new position.  Not that that would be such a bad thing.

I didn't ask for this new assignment, but I want to do well at it.  Not because I am a huge advocate of standardized testing (I have taken more of them than I've given, so my ignorance is both complete and very out of date).  I want to succeed at this task because so many other people are affected by it.

But there have been several times this school year when I've felt like a paratrooper who realizes she forgot to pack the chute.  

First and foremost, I want to be a good teacher.  I have no illusions that I'll ever be great at it, but, like a doctor, I at least want to do no harm.  With a work plate that never changes in its size, though, I am starting to think I took too much at the assignment buffet.

I'm not a complainer, but I have caught myself--more than once--sounding like the teacher in a Charlie Brown special.  Wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah.  I'm not a big fan of that imitation, so I guess I'd just better figure out how to do more, how to learn more, how to produce more than I've been doing, learning and producing during the first 23 years of my teaching career. 

Certainly, I'm surrounded by great folks who are happy to help.  But there are times when I feel boxed in by this new thing in front of me, and their offers are muffled by a strange sense of foreboding. 

I suppose what I'm really feeling like is a student who's lousy at tests but is rifling through her backpack anyway, hoping to find a # 2 pencil.

Seasons of Love

I'm trying to imagine one Lincolnite who wasn't talking about the weather around 5 this afternoon.  Maybe a surgery patient deep in the throes of anesthesia.  But that's about it.

As for those people who make fun of Nebraskans for the way we talk about the weather?  I say they are the ignorant ones.  They are the ones who see life simplistically, as though they have control over it, an app for it, a way around it.

In our fervent focus on what's happening outdoors, Nebraskans acknowledge that we are intimately tied to the larger world and we had best pay attention.  We know that our very lives are tied to the land, tested by the sun, moved by the winds.  Just as we know the sweetness of Spring's first hyacinth, its purple buds nudging through the hard earth, filling us with hope.

 In fact, we Midwesterners actually pity those who live with the burden of a single-season year, one so dull, so framed in sameness, that its days do not distinguish themselves from one another.  Rather, they stack themselves, one atop the other, like so many lounge chairs around the pool.

Give me the menopausal frenzy of a Midwestern year, its days punctuated by violence and relief, heat and cold, fear and giddiness.  I want to feel the bookends of this life, not just the soft middle with its fuzzy edges.  I want to wonder, each day, what that day will bring. 

That kind of wonder is happiest smack dab in the middle of the country, where weather's crossroads meet up and exchange stories.

Keepin' It Real (Time)

Mark and I had a friendly disagreement this morning.  While throwing out ideas for how to spend this free day,  I mentioned the usual suspects:  Holmes Lake, Pioneers Park, "Frasier" reruns, all of which Mark was amenable to.  But then he pointed out that we could watch "Frasier" reruns any time we wanted to, thanks to Netflix.

"It's not the same," I said, making an argument for the crap-shoot appeal of broadcast television.  "I like that someone else will choose which episode we get to watch."  And then, like I so often do, I took a bit of a cheap shot.

"Watching 'Frasier' on Netflix is like doing the Saturday crossword on a Tuesday," I said.  "It's just wrong." 

Now, I've been copying weekend crosswords for the past couple of years, stockpiling them for Mark, who spends his weekends at Duncan Aviation.  And, while I'm glad to do it, I also have this tiny little opinion that sits on my shoulders, harrumphing the idea of not doing the puzzles "live."

This is petty, I know, but I like to think that something nobler sits just under the annoying crust of my opinion.  After all, this focus on "live" vs. "taped" spills into other areas of my life as well, so it would be nice to think that there's some deep point I'm trying to make.

I remember when our school started showing live footage of the spring rock concert, airing it on two screens just off of the stage, while the kids were right there, dancing the night away.  I was so confused by those screens, suddenly unsure of how a person watches a concert.  Sure, I could see the kids' faces better, projected on the big screen. But I also felt more removed from the performers and the experience itself.  I ended up leaving at intermission, feeling like I'd been cheated of something.

Even though there are a thousand things in my life that I've missed because I hadn't shown up or I showed up too late, I like the idea that these experiences were both deep and fleeting, that those who were there were in for a real treat.  And the rest of us?  Too bad, so sad.  That's why I've loved the sunrises and sunsets so much these days...these short-run features that treat those who show up, and who show up at exactly the right time. 

By the time I got home the other night, anxious to show Mark the incredible western sky, fiery oranges and reds had been replaced by humdrum greys and browns.  He'd missed the show, and I hadn't taped it. 

Living a "live" life isn't for the weak-hearted.  Heaven knows, you miss plenty.  But you also get something, too--once-in-a-lifetime experiences stacked upon countless tiny moments when being there means everything.