Lean on Me...Just Not Constantly, Please

Let me say it loud, if not actually proud:  I am averse to discomfort, whether in the form of hardship or controversy.

Such an admission hardly qualifies as waving my freak flag, I know.  But because of this particular aversion,  I spend a fair amount of my waking hours walking the proverbial fence in the fervent hope of not stepping in it.  Like a smarmy deejay,  I'll spin just about anything, simply to avoid the cockleburs of being human.

Such "lofty" goals, however, seldom do squat for me when members of my own tribe are suffering.

Unfortunately,  my tribe has been taking some hits of late.  And, between you and weasel-faced me, frankly, I'm starting to feel a bit worthless and worn out by all these challenges.

What to do for a peep with a problematic prognosis, then?  A friend or family member facing a funeral of someone far too young?  How to handle the heartbreak of someone I love whose beloved sister or grandparents have all too soon left their lives?

Apparently, I have great hope in the healing powers of a HyVee gift card.

I also lean heavily on the gifts of others, relieved by the realization that other people are picking up the pieces and tending to the tough stuff much better than I am.  This parasitic propensity of mine goes surprisingly far in supporting my "HyVee Answers All Things" theory.

Underneath my cowardliness, though, I do possess a willingness to name and lament the elephant in the room.  Not that such a thing comes naturally or comfortably to me.  But, having received and appreciated such acknowledgment from others while I was walking through my own burr-riddled prairies of the past, I know that there is a surprising value in naming things and being there, even without a casserole or quilt in hand.

At the end of the day, then, I do show up.  And that's something, I suppose.  Something, fortunately, that does not have to be everything, thanks to all the other good folks, the ones whose gifts are more practical, more consistent, more delicious.  Together, we do alright in tending to the tribe, a thought that I find oddly reassuring.

A Hankering for Hot Cakes

Earlier this week, when Allison asked about the title of a song (and--shocking!--I couldn't locate the answer in my cranial file cabinet), my eyes and hands returned to once-familiar territory--our dusty and fairly massive collection of CDs.  Running my fingers along the edges of those CD cases, I felt a great longing for the many years I'd spent deejaying my way through our musical library.

As much as I love iTunes and the ability to buy the one good song off of a new release, I realized how much I miss all those other hidden jewels waiting patiently on  grooved discs of hope.

Fall is the perfect season for reflection and nostalgia.  Ever since the autumnal equinox made it official, most of us (at least, most of my Midwestern brethren) have begun scouring the 5-day forecast, dreaming of the first 40-degree low so that we can again don blankets and flannels, socks and shoes.  And, as I ponder this week's menu,  I'm half tempted this morning to add a few soups and quick breads to the list, just to push the point a bit.

And, even if our new-found focus is on "silly" things like crock pots and lined pants, this cyclical impulse is nothing to be taken lightly.  To deny our urge for  three-bean chili, closed-toed shoes or a functioning CD player is downright foolish, like no longer caring if we fully empty our bladders or build up our retirement funds.  And Midwesterners, if nothing else, are genetically practical people.

Thank God.

Heaven help us if our collective memories ever fail us. If we wake one morning unable to recall the magical crunch of fallen leaves underfoot or the crackling pleasure of initiating the fireplace once again.  We will be truly lost if we ever shove aside our ancient desires to slow down and nest, to turn our focus inward, where long neglected family members and music collections await us.  Woe to us if we choose to ignore the quiet walking trails and crisp air awaiting us just outside our well-insulated walls.

Today is a perfect time to explore "out there," to reacquaint ourselves with the patient worlds of crockery and fleece, sleepy crickets and low-slung clouds quietly signaling change.

How grateful I am that Allison loves the music from "Cider House Rules."  And how apt that something with the word "cider" in it again draws me towards an ancient cycling where all things old are made new again.

Shadows and Light

Walking across the dam at Holmes Lake this morning,  I couldn't help but notice the shadows.  They were everywhere, stretched long by a sleepy sun just getting up for the morning.  I'd hoped to get to the lake a bit earlier, so that I could avoid the flood of sunlight that I knew would force my head downward halfway through my walk.  Like the Stones said, though, you can't always get what you want.

Thank goodness.

Had I gotten there any earlier, I wouldn't have seen my own shadow, pulled like warm taffy across the fields of brome, until it rested on a sunny brick wall hundreds of yards away.  And, for a few magical moments, I imagined someone inside that home, reading the newspaper by morning light, a brief shadow yawning its way across the front page.   My shadow.

I don't tell myself that this imagined moment, this brief interruption of light, forever changed that person.  But I do let this thought play out in my mind--that there are no sharp edges in this world, no places of clear delineation.  And that thought both comforts and excites me.

Try as we might--and humans try mightily--we cannot honestly create "us and them" any more than we can  grow feathers and fly.  Of course, that doesn't stop people from pulling out their Sharpies, maniacally drawing themselves into and out of a thousand different boxes each day.  "Us and them" drives much of our political lives these days, not to mention our religious and professional lives, as well.

But saying it or drawing it a thousand times does not make it so.  I know this because I have been painted by a million shadows, gentle fingers of trees and birds, people and buildings, alighting however briefly atop my shoulders as I move through this life.  And my canvas is more beautiful because of those brief meetings.

This is a world of shadows and light, our experiences shaped and changed by sun and moon, clouds and time.  We walk through each others' spaces, touched by things we cannot see or imagine, breathing in the same air, warmed by the same sun, the edges of our lives fuzzied by these thousand fingers of life reaching out for us.

Lincoln Calling

Dear Lincoln,
My friends invited us to go out on the town tomorrow night and, while I was excited at first, now I'm just a wreck.  See, you've gotten all cool on me and now I'm wondering just where I fit in. 

Don't get me wrong.  I was all for the urban makeover.  When you asked me for some money, I said "Yes!  Yes!  Choose me!  Choose me!"  and I happily paid that bogus "arena tax," too, even though I already helped with the bond, which really should have been enough.  And yet, not a single "thank you."  But I'm not resentful, I'm not. 

I'm just worried that you've left me behind.

So, I haven't even gone back to the Arena area since getting lost there last May.   I just keep flashing back to the 80s, when Lincoln went a little crazy . . . 

. . . you know, when they moved all those roads around Pioneers Park?  Well, 30 years later and I still can't seem to shake my old map.  To this day, my heart starts palpating when I get to that light on Highway 77, because I keep looking for that narrow, two-lane road that went past Lee's. 

Only now,  with the Arena, I have to memorize all these weird new names, too.   Canopy Street?  The Railyard?  The Cube? Are you kidding me?  How am I supposed to navigate that?!

And even if my brave, brave, slightly younger friends take us to the Haymarket tomorrow night, and I try hard to act cool, I'm still worried that everyone'll see that it's nothing but a ruse.  Kind of like how I feel when I go to Open Harvest and I think everyone can smell meat on me.  Only now, they'll smell "old" on me.  That musty, unhip, so-beyond-cool-you-probably-eat-dinner-at-5:30 scent that says "bad tipper."

(Seriously, what's wrong with an early dinner, anyway?  It's practical and the parking's better and you can always find a nice table near the Ladies Room.)

And if we do end up eating in the Haymarket area tomorrow, will I even be able to fake the menu?  The Brazilian steak on a stick?  Haute dogs?!  Sebastian's Table, whatever the hell that is?   Do you really see me faking it through a tasting menu or a cucumber-infused cocktail?  Yeah, I didn't think so.

I mean, I'm wearing a skort as I type this.

And yet, I really, really want to be your friend, new, hip Lincoln.  I want to feel like we're each other's peeps. I want to be wanted by you.

But I'm starting to think you only loved me for my money . . . Tell me I'm wrong.  Tell me there's a place for me at your table.  And, no, not that table at Applebee's.  I'm not ready to be that table.

Signed,
Your Friend,
Jane

Meet Mother Analgesia, Patron Saint of Late-Night Pains

Usually, I barely bat an eye when I hear someone up in the middle of the night.  That's because it's typically Mark or me, bowing to aging bodies in need of release.  Whoopee, I mumble,  rolling over into my school dreams again.

Last night, though, it was a door across the hall that groaned, a pair of young feet shuffling along the wood floors.  And that caught my attention.  Surely, by now, my family knows that I'm the one who is supposed to be afflicted.  Frankly, it bugs me when someone else comes padding into my territory.

Ah, but when it's one of my kids, . . . something clicks inside me and I feel nothing but warmth and compassion, even in the middle of the night. 

And so, 3 a.m. be damned.  I'm getting up to tend to my child, to lay my long body around hers, my right hand methodically combing her hair. 

I am not terribly maternal by practice, which is why I am grateful for the ancient murmurings within me, the old stories bubbling up from instinct.  In these moments, I am able to offer a mother's comfort when nothing else will do.  And there is no place I'd rather be at a time like that, than sleepily present at my child's side.

Eventually, all of us were up, so it seemed only natural to do something we'd never done before, to invite Allison to come into our room and lay with us.  As someone whose own few memories of my parents' bed are strong and sweet, I wasn't surprised when Allison slipped on top of our sheets and joined us. 

Soon, tucked safely between her parents, with Finn at her feet, her breath grew long and low, rhythmic and comforting, and we all drifted back to our dreams.

Of Preachers and Pesticide

In the two months following my master-naturalist class, some images from that class keep coming back to me.   This morning, for instance, after listening to a refreshing, surprising and well-tattooed urban minister being interviewed by Krista Tippett, I found myself thinking about pesticides.  I know, I know--What the WHAT?!

Towards the end of the show, Nadia Bolz-Weber, former drug addict and current minister at Denver's House for All Sinners and Saints (a Lutheran church, for pete's sake!), spoke of her trepidation of telling her parents she was going to become a minister.  She feared, she said, that they'd throw the book--the Good Book--at her.  Her dad, indeed, reached for the Bible after hearing her pronouncement.  And he turned to the book of Esther  and read this passage to her:  "You were born for such a time as this."

Bolz-Weber then spoke through choked-back tears, saying it was one of the most profound moments of her life, to have been given a blessing to become something new.

. . . and the connection to pesticides would be. . . ?

During our lesson on entymology, the professor spoke about pesticides and their devastating effect on the 98 percent of bugs killed by a poison whose real target was the other 2 percent.   He said that, in recent years, they'd developed much more specific pesticides, such as those designed to do in roaches and termites, two insects that shed their exoskeletons as their bodies grow.  These new insecticides deliver a hormonal message to roaches and termites, essentially telling their exoskeletons to quit growing.  What happens next?  He said they basically blow up because they really weren't done growing, but there was no longer a place for all that new stuff to go.

As someone who is starting to write the final chapters of my working life, I think about all the ways we tell ourselves that we are done growing--even if we aren't--and all the ways our silence holds back the blessings others need to reinvent and grow themselves.  Without that simple, ancient sentence spoken by her religiously-traditional father, Bolz-Weber may very well have told herself that she was indeed done growing.  And, I suppose, in some form or another, she would have eventually blown up and died inside.

So many conversations I've had with friends this year suggest that we aren't done growing and that our shells are starting to feel too small for our lives.  Like the cicadas whose droning fills the late-summer air, we have started to look for a stronghold, a place, a blessing we can grab onto so that we may begin the hard and necessary work of growing our lives some more. 

It is an exhilarating time, one of danger and vulnerability, our stories still emerging from within us.

Clang Clang Clang Goes My Noggie!

My ears are ringing and I don't know who to blame.

Mother nature and her pollen-riddled skies?  Perhaps.  But then, it could just as easily be the din of my workplace.  Schools are really, really noisy places.

Combine the hallway chatter, the band-room oompahs, the gymnasium grunts and cheers, the classroom clutter, the lunchtime noshing and farting, and, before long,  you find yourself sucking your thumb and rocking in a corner, babbling "Calgon, take me away.  Calgon, take me away."

Teachers who also happen to be parents know that, by the time we pull in the garage at the end of a school day, we want to hear a whole bunch of nothing--not even the sweet burble of our own children's voices.

Sucks to be you, teacher's kid.  

Beyond all the maddening mandates, revised curriculum and continual reinvention that fill a school day, I think it's the noise and the constant, on-our-feet decision making that take the biggest toll.  Let's just say that, f I needed synapses to fire up the stove at night, we'd be eating cereal over the sink for nine months a year.  

I don't claim the corner on this market, of course.  I'm sure that many other professions are filled with constant decision making and improvisation.  But few have the clatter and teenaged clientele that we do.  And those realities make a difference in our ability to refuel between decisions.

Even the best-laid lesson plans fall victim to the endless barrage of baggage that students bring to school each day.  For the most part, most of us are making it up as we go, even if we've got something detailed and creative written in our lesson books.

I'm not complaining.  Not completely, at least.  This on-the-fly thinking is generally something I enjoy.  I like the puzzles, the pickles, the prognostication that come with teaching.  Added up together, it's just a bit wearing, that's all.

For some reason, I am reminded of this awesome, unnamed rock from my childhood that I keep in my school bag.  It has been worn smooth by both time and the granular magic of a long-ago rock tumbler.   Every so often, my fingers find the rock and, inevitably, massage its smooth surface.  It took a long time to get out its rough spots, time and sand and wind and water.

Considering all the elements that wear away at people who work in schools, I'm sometimes surprised that we aren't smoother, shinier, less rough around the edges.