Fenwick Gardens

"Our father was not always so."

2010-11-21T14:05:00.000-08:00

I say this to my brothers and sister, for each of us was loved (and unloved) by a different father. My father taught me to sing. The bass line in Baptist hymns:

There is pow’r (pow’r!), pow’r (pow’r!), wonder-working pow’r
In the blood (in the blood!) of the Lamb (of the Lamb!)

Which, like Harlem jazz players and Southern gospel quartets a half century earlier, after a Saturday night club gig, packed up their instruments—or zipped up their trousers—to appear in church a couple hours later and sing Sweet Jesus I want you—instead of the previous evening’s Sweet Julia I want you—I did something like this, sans the booze and the fornication, and in the opposite direction: my childhood musical migration traveled from church pew to bedroom record player, where I took my hymn-honed ear and sang tenor to the Brothers Four and Kingston Trio—Darlin’ Won’t You Wait, A Worried Man, Hard Travelin’.

When the preaching of my Baptist Pastor B., blessed be he, exhorted its way out to the dreamy frontier of this 10-year-old’s attention span, I turned and whispered my request for (and received) my engineer father’s pocket slide rule. Six inches, yellow, a hairline as straight and narrow as the hellfire Good News thumping in the background. Dad taught me how to multiply by working the mysterious trinity of its hairline, its middle sliding bar, and its body (not broken for me, or by me, for Dad trusted me with it).

This little miracle absorbed my attention until Pastor B.'s voice descended from indignant chiding to something resembling his own personable self, in which voice he prayed a sermon-concluding prayer, always introduced by the unvarying instruction, With every head bowed and every eye closed…—the purpose of which prayer, I observed, was to allow organist and song leader to tiptoe unseen into their respective places so that when …in Jesus’ name, amen! finally arrived, and every head was unbowed and every eye was opened—voilà!—there were the organist and song leader in place, ready to wind things up and dispatch us to our overheated car interiors and our pot roasts.

Ten years later, jilted by my mother, Dad married the organist.

RIP, Cruiser

2010-07-03T15:43:00.000-07:00

Our cat Tom Cruise (aka Cruiser, Cruzinsky, et al.) left this world on a dreary, wet July 1. He was 14. Plagued during his last year with deteriorating thyroid and kidneys, and apparent diabetes, he was tenderly euthanized by our neighborhood vet, and with a teary Cheri stroking him into his final sleep.

I dug a diminutive grave, then fetched Jay and Clarissa from down the street—neighbors who particularly knew and appreciated Cruiser (especially Jay, who for years now has graciously and appreciatively tended him when we’ve been out of town visiting children and grandchildren)—and they were kind enough to don their raincoats, bring flowers and liqueurs, stand out in the rain with us as we all buried and remembered Cruzinsky.

A sprig of rosemary and several orange nasturtium on the toweled bundle that was his graveclothes…gently shoveling wet dirt back into the grave…wet eyes, too…libations poured onto Cruiser’s grave as well as into us. And shared memories of Jessi’s choosing him in 1996, of his lordly explorations and exploitations of the neighboring houses. Of how one cannot pass a cat lounging on a couch or curled on a chair without touching it, like a talisman.

Our house has lost its talisman, its very local and vocal deity, who with the first morning light leaped onto the bed, and gently but inexorably head-butted whatever human extremity was available outside the covers to rouse us to his morning feeding.

I will miss his beautiful tabby coat…his late-night companionship on the other end of the couch where in the midnight quiet I could hear him breathe, curled and content…the dimpled bedspread or cushion that indicated his favored nesting spot of the month…of his quick-trot up the driveway from God knows where, when we returned home after an extended absence.

It didn’t matter if he was happy to see us, or happy at the prospect of food, or just wanted in the house. On whatever terms Cruiser deigned to make himself available to me, I was grateful.

Harris, Dudley, conversions, closure—sad constants at Jefferson HS

2010-06-19T12:03:00.000-07:00

This week's swirl of decisions, meetings, protests, and editorials about Jefferson High School—my neighborhood school—reminded me of a piece I wrote for the St. Johns Sentinel three years ago. Now with yet another Jeff principal removed from her office—not to mention an imminent overhaul of the school's program, if not outright closure—I found these musings (slightly edited here) still heartbreakingly relevant. And probably moot, at this point.

Breakin’ up is hard to do

My children are now grown and settled into marriages. Yet I remember their dating years, when their mother and I always, foolishly, became friends with our children’s serious romantic interests. Foolish, because there was nothing but loss when our sons and daughters broke up with said interests. They lost lovers, we lost friends. Meals had been shared with these people who were so central to our children’s lives and affections. Gifts had been exchanged. (I have a book on Chinese medicine given to us one Christmas by a young woman who seriously dated and eventually jilted my son. I still appreciate the book as well as the girl’s thoughtfulness, though I don’t say this to my son. Or to his wife.)

I felt something like this last month when principal Leon Dudley was removed (or removed himself) from the principalship of Jefferson High School. (Okay, the district says it’s paid leave through June. Yet I can’t imagine he will return to any school in this district.) Unlike many in the Jefferson community, I hold no animus toward him. Yet even if I hadn’t particularly cared for the personality of this boyfriend that the district brought home to us in North Portland, he was here, there was a relationship whether I liked it or not, I didn’t know how long it was going to last—but the way I saw it, you at least get to know the individual and try to support the couple where you can.

Now that he’s gone, there are more grimaces than tears. It got just plain ugly toward the end, by all accounts. Rudenesses and hurt feelings on all sides—students, teachers, Dudley, district. In the wake of it all, I’m left with a puzzler:

With 10 principals in as many years at Jefferson (including interim principals), has anyone considered that just maybe it's not the leadership that's the problem? Could the district's hiring record for Jefferson’s administrative leadership be that consistently bad? All five school superintendents during the last decade utterly incompetent when it came to tapping a principal for Jefferson? Why does the principal’s office inside Jefferson have a revolving door when other high schools in our district have at least a tad more stability (and some, a lot more) in their administrative offices?

I can’t help but think that the answer lies not in goofball conspiracy theories (The board wants Jefferson to fail so they can unload it to PCC across the street) but rather in a hairball of distasteful realities: Jefferson has little if any functional parent constituency to organize and advocate for the school in meaningful and persuasive ways. With the smallest high school enrollment in the district, yet with one of the highest teacher-to-student ratios, still the academic performance levels at Jefferson are generally dismal. And on a bad day, nostalgia seems like the only reason to keep the school open and operating.

Of course, there are qualifiers galore. Parents with the savvy and the time to vigorously advocate for their school are typically in the more educated and higher income demographic. This is not Jefferson’s demographic. (Or hasn’t been. The neighborhood is changing, however.) There have been curricular regimes in the last five or so years that were actually producing some of the highest rates of academic improvement in the district. And what can you expect when nearly a third of Jefferson’s students are classified as special ed students? Or when too many teachers are forced to spend an inexcusable proportion of class time simply trying to keep classroom order instead of actually teaching students?

If Jefferson High School is to recover from the slow burn that has been gradually consuming faculty morale, driving neighborhood students to other schools, and singeing the resumes of principals, it may be with the reasonable assumption that all parties want the best for Jefferson and its students—that principal (whoever it is) and superintendent and school board and teachers and parents and neighbors and activists and all start by assuming that we may see different roads to a thriving campus, but it’s still a thriving campus that we all want.

In any case, the school district’s break-up with Dudley after only eight months makes us parental types in the neighborhood feel a tad guarded about supporting The Next Principal. How much relational energy should we invest in her? How long will TNP be around? For our students’ sakes, for the sake of eventual stability at Jefferson, everyone—from students to superintendent—could stand acknowledging the social and operational complexities, then starting to repair its share of problems that continue to stymie Jefferson.

Human nature just doesn't change...

2010-04-20T12:22:00.000-07:00

...and the patterns of behavior are intriguing but predictable. Neither Pat Robertson in his apocalyptic, demonizing fundamentalism nor South Carolina governor Mark Sanford was the first to be silly and shameful in their singular ways.

April

2010-01-18T14:23:00.000-08:00

The local deities, undecided: pelt them with ice
Or pour warm gold on them this afternoon? A little of both.
Inside, mere embers on my hearth gasped for rekindling,
So I stepped out to the woodpile—
But the glow on doug firs across the street stopped me,
Stunned me, drew my eyes higher—then
The bruised and livid sky drove out all thoughts,
Kindling or otherwise.
There I stood, chin in the air (am I already eccentric to my neighbors?)
When T pulled up. Good thing my friends
Understand me; it saves a lot of explaining.
Before twilight had rubbed all color from the sky, we had seeded
Snow peas, spinach, beets,
And when he left I trimmed out last spring's herbs,
Now mostly soggy naked stems.
But the wet dirt, lavender, thyme lay redolent on my hands.

A languid late-summer evening...

2009-09-10T21:14:00.000-07:00

...and stepping out to let the cat in, I look up. The Summer Triangle is at its glorious zenith. Straight up. Can't get any straighter upper. At least to us in the absolute midlatitudes. (I mean, here in Stumptown we're almost exactly midway between the equator and the North Pole.)

Everything, all day, has been excruciatingly vivid and clear. When the humidity drops around here, you can really, really tell. As in feeling like I could discern the very needles in the doug firs across the river in Forest Park. On a typical, moisture-laden late-summer day, the snow-free shoulders of Mt. Hood blend into the blue sky. But not today—everything stood out, starkly, as if I were wearing polarizing shades.

And with darkness came Vega and Deneb and Altair—three high summer stars that are bright even with Swan Island's blazing dock lights, a half-mile away below the bluff, washing out my sky. The Summer Triangle, an asterism of stars in three separate constellations, each with a story. As luscious as the rising moon has been during the last several evenings, it's nice to stand under a dark sky now.

And much of this points somehow to Jessi's' pregnancy. My youngest is with child. Due April. Rich with newborn twins, rich with a man-child due to Christina in November, and now here to Jessi, within arm's reach. Wow.

mystery

2009-04-18T18:32:00.000-07:00

I am looking at a mystery in my backyard. Actually, I suppose, there are many mysteries there, a recent one being a sinkhole that sank while we were out of state visiting family. Came home to find a gaping, perfectly circular maw of a sinkhole five feet in diameter and nine feet deep. Ridiculous. Surreal. Took nearly six and a half cubic yards of dirt and gravel (scavenged from various sources) to fill, scores of tedious wheelbarrow trips from the pile of fill in the driveway through the garage to the backyard. The sinkhole captured the imagination of my wife, who considered it a gift with limitless possibilities. That the Universe sent it to us was obvious—the only question was, what are we to do with it? An effortlessly acquired rainwater cistern? A root cellar for potatoes that we should now cultivate? The beginnings of a hot tub? As I started emptying wheelbarrow loads of fill into the hole, my wife bit her lip and rose above the death of a vision.

The mystery I am looking at now is nothing so exotic. Our back fence is a ramshackle affair of veneer-thin strips of wood woven, basket-like, among vertical one-by-twos spaced two feet apart. Most winters a strong east wind blows down a section, and a repair is tricky because there is scarcely any portion of the fence that is not punky and squishy. It is rotten to the core. I have a plan to replace the fence—I’ve even prepped my supply of 218 boards for sealing. Then I’ll think about actually using the sealed boards to create a new fence. Until then, the issue is Keep The Existing Fence Together At All Costs Until I’m Ready To Replace It. So over the last several years the fence has acquired the look of a hillbilly’s overalls. Patches galore, at all angles, plywood patches with which I desperately try to tie a decrepit section of fence with a (rare) sound length of post or stringer.

A two-by-six-foot section along the bottom of the fence, however, refused to be so patched. So a year ago I simply leaned a half sheet of plywood over it. The current tenants of the adjoining property have no dog, so my fix hardly had to be hound-proof.

Yet every morning the plywood is tipped back into my yard, stopped only by a pole of a raspberry vine that runs parallel to the fence, a foot or two away from it. And every day I tip the plywood back over the hole, and the next morning—well, you know.

Hence the mystery. Well, I suppose the who isn’t a mystery. It’s got to be the urban raccoons or possums I’ve seen on occasion, nocturnally foraging in our compost pile, or merely using our yard or trees as their interstate freeway to a better feeding destination Beyond The Fence. The mystery, maybe, lies closer to this: what does it look like when our continent’s only native marsupial, night after night, undoes what I do? Or if a raccoon (another American native), what grasping, pawish intelligence systematically dismantles my barrier?

I read that a hundred years ago, a scientist recorded that raccoons were able to unlock nearly all of 13 complex locks in less than 10 tries, “and had no problems repeating the action when the locks were rearranged or turned upside down.” Fenwick Ave. raccoons scoff at the Plywood Leaned On Fence ploy. Among raccoon youth, my fence constitutes Introduction to Barrier Removal, nothing more.

Still, until I sit up late in the backyard with a flashlight and actually see the beasties at it, each morning the back-tilted plywood mocks me, and renews the mystery.

Overheard...

2009-02-25T13:18:00.000-08:00

Inuit: If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?
Priest: No, not if you did not know.
Inuit: Then why did you tell me?

Can't have it both ways

2008-11-09T18:24:00.000-08:00

It intrigues me that, in 2000 when Dubya was elected, evangelicals tended to speak in terms of a godly man of convictions and biblical morality whose election God had a hand in.

And in the recent election, these same evangelicals concede that an American majority has spoken, democracy works, we may not like it, but they'll observe the law of the land and pray for our leaders, including president-elect Obama.

Why aren't evangelicals as enthusiastic about associating Obama with the will of God as they were Bush 2? Bush was God's man of the hour, but Obama is merely the sorry choice of a misled American electorate.

Okay, this is not entirely accurate, for American evangelicals have splintered deeply during the last four years, many of them having disagreed with the Bush-was-God's-choice theory, gradually realizing the need to clean up the eight-year frat party that has been Dubya's presidency and legacy.

Orion rising

2008-11-08T21:44:00.000-08:00

When I lived in San Diego County, the starry seasons rolled overhead in scarcely perceptible increments. Nights were generally clear, and I could usually see a very early appearance of Capella or Lyra or whatever, then follow it for a few months as the star or constellation inched westward across the night sky until finally sinking below the horizon.

Not so in the northern Willamette Valley. Visual silence for weeks, then a stunning glimpse (Where'd THAT come from?!), then gone again. At least during the nine months surrounding summer. Clouds, overcast, fog, more clouds...I see no sky for a week or two or more of nights. Then bang—I walk out tonight and see Orion's shoulder thrusting up in the east. Rising. That hoary hero is waking once again. I mean, it's nearly 10 pm, been plenty dark for four hours for the last week or so since the resumption of Standard Time. But only tonight did the clouds break so that I, flipping off the front porch light and stepping outside for a last look around, actually saw Betelgeuse and Bellatrix and the Belt.

Whoa. It's been nearly a year since I saw (in C. S. Lewis's phrase) "that earnest constellation." It's always like a reunion, when a star pushes up into my view again after a half-year absence. Good to have you back.

Then back inside to scrape out the buttercup squash I baked this afternoon, then out a half hour later to lock up things—and I look up, and the sky is gone behind the quilt of clouds.

Hey, at least I saw it, know Orion is there. And will be, the next time my nighttime glance upwards coincides with a break in the weather.

The trouble with the high road

2008-10-06T12:21:00.000-07:00

John McCain divorced his wife of 15 years who saw him through prison and recovery, for a 25-year-old he was seeing before his divorce. In the early 1980s he worked in public relations for the beer-distribution business belonging to the family of his new wife. Only public claim to faith is prison cross-in-the-sand anecdote, with only the vaguest of church connections. Running mate’s 17-year-old daughter pregnant by boyfriend.

None of this makes McCain unfit for office. (His running mate is ludicrously unfit for office by any measure.) But it does make the GOP’s attempt to monopolize what they call “family values” laughable. Don’t take the high road if you keep falling off it.

Yet when skeptics point out this lapse between what the GOP says it stands for and the facts of their nominees’ lives, “family-values” Republicans tell us to stop savaging people and invading their privacy. Wish same-sex couples and pregnant women and Americans under unprecedented government surveillance could have a slice of that privacy.

Veni, vedi, velcro...

2008-09-26T09:56:00.000-07:00

I came, I saw, I stuck around. Could well be this administration's motto for its imperial invasion of Iraq.

Waiting for 1.20.09

2008-09-22T11:26:00.000-07:00

Two days ago the Bush administration requested “unfettered authority”—a blank check, essentially—for the Treasury Dept. to spend up to $700 billion in salvaging our supposedly free-market system. This would raise the national debt ceiling to $11.3 trillion and “would place no restrictions on the administration other than requiring semiannual reports to Congress, granting the Treasury secretary unprecedented power to buy and resell mortgage debt.”

And today, irked that Congress is actually deliberating, weighing, and suggesting some accountability (rare in this administration—consider DOD contracts in Iraq, the unprecedented frequency with which the White House has claimed executive privilege in order to avoid explaining itself, and especially Cheney, to the American public), George “The Decider” Bush is fretting that his plan must be passed as-is, and quickly.

This sounds familiar.

The Patriot Act (I can scarcely type those words in connection with the horrific legislation they represent) was foisted on us within weeks of 9/11, while sentiment was still running strongly enough that lawmakers who should have known better still realized that a vote against the act would mean sure defeat in the next year’s congressional elections. And so we were gifted with unfettered executive powers with only the thinnest accountability. (Is there a theme here?) Not to mention our country being spent into trillions of dollars of debt fighting the wrong people, the wrong way, for the wrong reasons.

Pray let Congress do its job—that is, deliberate—in an attempt to compensate for Dubya’s belief in his imperial presidency. Two and a quarter centuries after our revolt against a British George III, our nation and our Constitution are in dire need of being rid of our own George III.

We protect what we value

2008-09-18T10:59:00.000-07:00

"In this country," I heard an economic observer say yesterday, "we privatize profits, but socialize losses."

Which means that the next time pharmaceuticals or energy companies make a killing profit, don't expect our government to step in and say, "Okay, time to share some of that with strapped school districts, with at least a start at fixing health insurance in this country, with services to children of low-income families"—made low-income, in many instances, by governmental accommodation of U.S. businesses moving jobs offshore in order to hike investors' profits.

It's clear what the current administration values, by what it is willing to go into debt to save ($40 billion of debt, for just this recent spate of bail-outs): profits, not people. And don't even start in about how profits trickle down to common working Americans. All that mantra does is incite citizens to vote against their own best interests.

Another luvly bike sticker

2008-09-07T17:46:00.000-07:00

LIVE FREE OR DRIVE

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac

2008-09-07T11:35:00.000-07:00

God forbid we nationalize or (gasp) socialize health care in this country.

Yet when the victims are not uninsured Americans in need of health care, but a pair of capitalistic corporations whose shareholders are in need of a return on their investments—then here comes the government to the rescue.

Call it a "conservatorship" by a federal agency, not the nationalization of the corporations...say it's only temporary until the imperiled businesses are on a stronger footing. Mere semantics. Even the conservative Wall Street Journal calls it a takeover.

It's simply another instance (of a spate of them during the last eight years) of conservatives and capitalists in this country changing the labels when their interests are threatened. Fiscal restraint was a sacred Republican party plank, until Dubya wanted to invade Iraq—then there was no cost most Republicans were unwilling to pay. A federal government empowered to surveil Americans' private lives was similarly anathema to Republicans and conservatives—until Cheney's imperial vision for the U.S. has put us all under a quiet and constitutionally questionable federal scrutiny that Reagan would have called communistic.

Speaking of our veep: this weekend, I hear, he condemned Russia and Putin for "bullying" Georgia. Us? We don't bully—we liberate.

And when Europe mocks such international myopia and arrogance, we just say they're jealous of us.

I should probably go back and reread George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language." Political language, he wrote in 1946, "is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind." It is language, he wrote, that is not for expressing thought, but for concealing or preventing it.

Something, maybe, to take with us into a season of campaigns and debates.

The morning after

2008-09-05T10:44:00.001-07:00

Jesus was a community organizer. Pontius Pilate was a governor.

Summer

2008-05-18T19:42:00.000-07:00

I know the solstice isn't here yet—must wait for June 20 for that—but it has always made more sense to me to follow the cross-quarter days as season starters. Which means summer began May 1, will hit its height on the solstice (Midsummers Day), then gradually taper off till the first day of autumn (Lammas, around Aug. 1). Old Norse and Celtic agrarian, pagan roots here, which early Christian bishops worked hard at converting, by decree, into Christian celebrations. Wasn't that difficult to swap polytheism for the Trinity, a local fertility goddess for the Virgin Mary, the phallic tree for the wood of the Cross. Whatever. The truth is down there at the bottom of everything, composting for millennia, nourishing belief and faith and myth and hope, whatever form they take.

Solstices and cross-quarter days aside, here is how I know summer is imminent.

The butter tray, out on the kitchen counter, liquifies for the first time in 8 months. Time to store it in the fridge.

Garden hoses come out. Especially the one I snake around the perimeter of the backyard, that feeds the soaker hose for the raspberry row.

The solid brass 4-hose adapter gets screwed on to our (only) backyard spigot.

Vegetables (seedlings, at this point) and shrubs get assigned a watering cycle.

Lawn is mowed weekly, ought to be mowed twice weekly. (This is actually a springtime thing, not summer. In full-on summer, mowing like crazy becomes watering like crazy, that is if we want a green lawn.)

I begin scouting the neighborhood for free firewood for next winter.

Nighttime routine shifts from closing up the house, to opening it up: what exterior doors have lockable screens, we leave open all night.

Ceiling fans get turned on to a slow lazy speed, and stay on mostly from now till September.

Cruiser's white coat turns gray, and needs brushing before letting the beast—filthy from rolling ecstatically in the carport's dust—into the house. (To his credit, Cruzinski has learned how to Assume The Position for optimal brushing: rear feet on the grill's side counter, front feet up on the grill cover, so I can brush him down.)

Fireplace given an almost-final cleaning (although modest fires will still be needed to take out the morning or evening chill between now and July 1—on which date the hearth is given a terminal cleaning, and candles are arranged in it).

"Our" bats are looked for every evening at twilight. (A record five of them were seen a couple nights ago. Mama and litter?....)

So what are your rituals of approaching summer?

My five minutes with Donald Miller

2008-05-18T12:47:00.000-07:00

Yes, the Donald Miller of Blue Like Jazz notoriety. The angsty evangelical who came of age spiritually in the Hawthorne district here in Portland.

He was the keynoter at the annual conference of the Evangelical Press Association conference (also here in Portland this year), at which I was not a keynoter, only a presenter of a couple workshops on writing and editing. I did not attend Miller’s rambling address (as those who did attend later described it), because I had already had my moment with Donald Miller.

It was a couple years ago that I heard about Anne Lamott coming to Powells for a reading and book signing. Her Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith had just been released. I was already a Lamott groupie, enchanted as I am by her subjects, her prose, her perspective, her dreads. So I arrived at Powells, locked up my bike along Couch St., went upstairs—and found the room SRO. Oh well, I thought, it’s not like I haven’t seen her, heard her read, enjoyed her commentary on herself, her son, faith, Dubya. So I headed for the coffee room.

A while later I packed up and started through the store for the exit and my bike—but via the reading room, where I figured the crowd would have thinned out and I could rest my eyes on Lamott for a moment. For some reason, her diminutive self is a restful object for my eyes. Sure enough, a mere half dozen devotees remained, patiently, in the book-signing line, so I planted myself on a stray chair at the back and just watched Lamott interact with her admirers. She looked fatigued, but was gracious to each person. Especially to the person she was listening to at the moment. Something about correspondence between publishers, and he was chagrinned about a misunderstanding, and she said Not at all, I was happy to get the advance copy, and although I’m a little tired, if you can wait a few minutes till I’m finished here, we can talk more.

So he turned from the table to wait, saw me sitting by myself at the back taking it all in, and as he walked toward me I realized that I knew this face: it was on the cover of Willamette Week, which had recently featured a profile of Donald Miller, whose Blue Like Jazz is conspicuously set in Portland.

He spoke first. “Are you with her?” he asked, his with clearly conveying partner, and his eyes confirming the intent of his question. Admiringly confirming, it seemed to me.

Stop, O Beating Heart. Me and Anne Lamott. Anne Lamott and I.

“No,” I said. I may have laughed, too. “Just watching.”

“Oh,” he said.

“So whatever possessed Thomas Nelson to publish your book?” I asked him. “It’s hardly your, um, typical evangelically approved book.”

“Dunno.” Donald Miller smiled a little smile. “They offered me the most money, and I had rent to pay.”

By then the final person in line had snagged Lamott’s signature on the title page of Plan B, and Miller told me See ya, and joined her at the table to resume where they had left off.

Why would I want to hear Donald Miller ramble when he has already asked me—personally, unambiguously, and admiringly—if I was with Anne Lamott?

Things that make me go "Huh?"

2007-09-25T08:52:00.000-07:00

The president wants no child left behind educationally, yet is willing to leave four million children behind and outside of a federalized healthcare system (a system that he and members of Congress are insured with) for fear that some children who could afford private insurers would dip into public coffers for their healthcare.

When Iran's president Ahmadinejad (yesterday at Columbia University) soft-pedaled about the Holocaust, said no one's denying it, but as any other historical event, why shouldn't it be subjected to more scrutiny?—he was scathingly and publicly insulted by the moderator (the university president). Meanwhile, our own president soft-pedals global warming, says no one's denying it, but like any other theory it needs some "sound science" applied to it.

The state of California (with 11 other states) is trying to enact rules that would cut global warming pollution from new motor vehicles by nearly 30 percent within the next decade. The current administration's response—according to emails between DOT staffers and the White House released yesterday—has been a concerted, behind-the-scenes lobbying campaign among congressional offices and other governors to undermine California's plan.

Huh?

Goodbye, Happy Medium

2007-09-08T16:01:00.001-07:00

Madeleine L'Engle died last Thursday, Sep. 6, I just heard. It was she who remembered in writing her long and loving marriage to Hugh and—in the same book—the final months of Hugh's life (Two-Part Invention: The Story of a Marriage). And who will remember her as lovingly, as eloquently, as she remembered him? Then again, she has probably written her own best memoria. A Wrinkle in Time...The Small Rain...The Sphinx at Dawn...The Rock That Is Higher...The Summer of the Great Grandmother...The Weather of the Heart—these are how I at least remember her.

This woman gave me a language of God and spirituality that made sense to me, that transcended my literal, monocultural narrowness:

The One I cry out to is not limited by size or number, and can be glimpsed only in metaphor, that chief tool of imagery of the poet. And it is only in the high language of poetry that anything can be said about God.

When we first learned of Hugh’s cancer I was dry as the parched land suffering drought in the Southeast. Now the tears are close to the surface. For the third time this summer I come to the Psalms for the evening of the fourth day and read, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” and the tears rush out silently and stream down my face. Music, too, tends to pluck at the chords of emotion. Tears are healing. I do not want to cry when I am not alone, but by myself I don’t try to hold the tears back. In a sense this solitary weeping is a form of prayer.

I was in Colorado Springs in the mid-nineties, at a retreat-conference center called Glen Eyrie. I arrived there a day early, and so took supper by myself in the lodge's dining hall. A small group had assembled there, too, beginning whatever event they were there for. A second glance told me it was a Christian writers group. We're not talking LaHaye or Dobson, but Philip Yancey and Eugene Peterson—and Madeleine L'Engle. There she sat, her diminutive self, dyke-cropped white hair and flowing hippie skirt. I can only hope that she was acknowledged as a matriarch, the idea of which she would of course wave away. (Read how a matriarch interviews in this conversation with a Newsweek reporter.) I don't remember a thing about my own conference that week; seeing Madeleine I remember.

Two questions...

2007-05-28T12:22:00.000-07:00

...I've been mulling for a while, responses to which always intrigue me when I pose them for my evangelical friends:

Why is it that just about the only people who believe in hell are those who believe they aren’t going there?

If you discovered that, in fact, there was no afterlife after all—no heaven, hell, purgatory, whatever—that it all ended with one's physical death—would you still be a Christian?

Just wondering.

Next they'll tell us we can go swimming less than an hour after eating

2007-05-23T13:04:00.001-07:00

Mothers of my granddaughters, take note: pacifiers, crackers, and blueberries that get dropped on the floor can remain there not five, but thirty seconds before bacteria start swarming over them. And if it's dry food, a kid can wait a full minute before finding her missing bread crust under her chair.

At least that's what student researchers at Connecticut College concluded. Thanks to them, we can all now breathe easier. And eat fumbled food with less angst.

In the final quarter hour...

2007-05-14T10:50:00.000-07:00

...of the seventh of May, let it be known that earlier today I hung the first laundry load outside to dry. This event requires itemization: I pulled from the washing machine three pairs of jeans, one sweatshirt, one T-shirt, and 4 pairs of socks, shoveling them all into a 15-year-old but still sturdy wicker laundry basket. To this pile of sodden but clean clothes I added the stainless steel dogfood dish demoted to clothes pins container, which was about to see its first action in 7 months. I tromped it all upstairs and outside into a delectable combination of spring and summer, and clipped everything on the clothesline, which has hung naked since last October. And just now I check the hourly temp records for the city, and discover that it hit 80 degrees around 5pm.

This is cosmically appropriate: that the first outdoor laundry hanging day is also the warmest day of the year so far. I feel attuned to the universe.

Which is looking at midnight now different from a couple months ago. Orion's bright belt dips out of sight in the west almost at dusk now...Saturn has Leo on a leash for a couple years, and even that springtime constellation is wheeling westward now...but oh, Jupiter rises in the southeast in all its piercing regal luminence not long after Venus sets. (Although, as the neighborhood trees in that direction leaf out more, that planet will be harder and harder to see this low.) And the red giant Arcturus rules the zenith these nights.

I wonder if my Grandpa Mac—Chester Chambers McLaughlin, dairy farmer of Clackamas County—ever rose from his desk where he did the paperwork required of him as clerk of Milwaukie High School (a volunteer position he held for 20-some years), swung open the back screen door of his Lake Road house, and stepped outside into a balmy May night, in 1937, when he was my age now. I wonder if he looked up and traced the passing of the night and of the season, and imagined the passing of his life. Or wondered himself if his great-grandfather, enroute from Ulster to Philadelphia, ever left his sleeping family in a brig’s cramped, stagnant passenger quarters and went above to the main deck on a mild mid-Atlantic night in 1814 and looked up at oceanic stars and wondered what the hell he was thinking, bringing his family—including a 2-year-old son—to God knows what. Squeezed as they had been in Northern Ireland between their Scottish Presbyterian roots and the local Catholic Irish rebel rumblings, was this overseas migration worse? Would they have been better off assaulted by political upheaval and inconstant potato crops than by moving to another world altogether—an infant republic already engaged in a second war with its parent nation?

That 2-year-old boy was my great-great-grandfather William McLaughlin, and whether he learned its name or not, Arcturus must have become a familiar springtime companion to him as he grew up a farmer and moved from Pennsylvania to Missouri (gradually—he settled for a while in every state in between those two places). Springtime meant long hours disking and plowing and sowing deep into dusk, until, twisting in the leafspring seat, he could no longer see the furrow he was cutting. Arcturus dominated the high eastern sky in many a May twilight as he turned his team toward the barn.

Stars and dirty laundry will outlive us all. It's the stars I'll pass on to my granddaughters, starting with Arcturus.

Two bike stickers...

2007-02-18T13:48:00.000-08:00

...that I must have:

Welcome to Portland. Now get on your bike.
If you were riding, you'd be happy by now.

Happy cycling this week. At least I have fenders now, so this week's impending soppy weather will be less of a pain to ride in.

Our first of two weeks in the Southland...

2007-01-31T02:23:00.000-08:00

...injected us into the daily routines and rituals of Matt and Meesha's family -- diaper-changing, baths, reading books with cardboard slabs for pages -- and of course we're relishing it. Ann is 2, Cara a tender 2 weeks; one is chattering and running, the other simply snuggles. Brian, Christina, and Juliette dropped in to visit on their way home to the Bay Area. -- Chester, meanwhile, resigned recently from his job of six years in order to take a web-developing position with Hume Lake Christian Camps, a mile high in the Sierra Nevada (just outside Kings Canyon National Park).

Cara Jean is in the building...

2007-01-09T14:06:00.000-08:00

...as of January 8. Meesha delivered the 7 pounds of sweetness quickly and easily, and Cara took to feeding immediately. More pics at our gallery
(and, of course, lots more at Meesha & Matt's gallery).

2006-12-08T20:49:00.001-08:00

Yuletide greetings to all! Herewith I post a poem, composed several years ago during an all-day traffic school thanks to my running an orange light at midnight in Santee, California. As you will hear when you read it aloud (the only way poetry ought to be read) to your young daughter, son, niece, or nephew, it is offered in fond memory and gratitude to Theodor Seuss Geisel. (Who knows—this ditty may scratch that itch you have to see The Nativity Story.)

A Seussian Christmas

If you saddled your six-legged droozle and rode
Toward the north, at a gallop, until you hit snow,
(And we all know a six-legged droozle can scoot
At one hundred and twenty when you give it the boot)
Anyway, on your droozle, you’d finally arrive
At a hamlet called Nazareth—this town has survived
Since the time that the Romans ruled everyone’s lives.
In those days Joe was bummed, marriage prospects seemed dim,
’Cause his Mary was PG, though—he knew—not by him.
But a dream and an angel cured him of his fears
So that even in distant Faloop, in Algiers,
Glad tidings were heard there—the best news in years.

From Yreka, Poughkeepsie, and Kalamazoo,
To Nome, East McKeesport, and far Katmandu—
Bring in Noel and yuletide and cheer
And see how the Light of the world draws near!
So let’s greet the Christ child—no humbug, no bah,
But lift up your glasses with an al-le-lu-ia!

So things were patched up between Mary and Joe
(Though the way neighbors talked still made them feel low)
But it just didn’t matter to either of them,
’Cause the tax man had called them to Beth-eh-le-hem.
Joe hoisted up Mary on his donkey named Snout
(Who took a whole fortnight to travel the route
That a droozle could make in an hour or two)
Which explains Joe and Mary’s slight rooming snafu.
Yet even in distant Shabingo-Laneer,
Glad tidings were heard there—the best news in years!

From Croatia, Toledo, and Albuquerque,
To Nice and Southampton and old Ken-tuck-y—
Bring in Noel and yuletide and cheer
And see how the Light of the world draws near!
So let’s greet the Christ child—no humbug, no bah,
But lift up your glasses with an al-le-lu-ia!

Meanwhile, in an overplushed palace of marble,
All quarried by slaves in Fandango-Goobarble
(Who chip on the white stone with hammers ball peen
While their bosses talk only in PowerPoint screens)
In that grand marble palace sat Herod the Great,
Sipping decaf espresso la mocha latté.
He hoodwinked the Magi to spy unawares,
Who returned to the trail toward the babe in Pampers.
So even in downtown Chicago, at Sears,
Glad tidings were heard there—the best news in years!

The rest of the story you’ve known for a while,
How the tyke in his Pampers soon left for the Nile.
He then came back home, with his folks and a tan,
And grew up to redeem every woman and man.
So that even in Thessalonica’s frontier,
Glad tidings were heard there—the best news in years!

From Osaka and Cancun and Kuala Lampur,
To Greenland, Samoa—anywhere that you’d tour—
Bring in Noel and yuletide and cheer
And see how the Light of the world draws near!
So let’s greet the Christ child—no humbug, no bah,
But lift up your glasses with an al-le-lu-ia!

All right already, enough about Ted Haggard...

2006-11-06T12:03:00.000-08:00

...but only after a couple of smarmy observations:

"I can't believe it," Cheri lamented. "I mean, I buy drugs and get massages, but the media doesn't camp out in my front yard."

Then this nightmarish tidbit: the elders of Haggard's (former) church have required him "to submit to the oversight of Dr. James Dobson, Pastor Jack Hayford, and Pastor Tommy Barnett."

Yowsa, the Scary Trinity itself. I'd wager that the poor man (rated 33 among The Top 50 Most Influential Christians In America) would fare better and emerge healthier submitting to his gay masseur.

Meanwhile, Haggard's publisher is undoubtedly drafting a proposal to the bestselling author hinting at a 2008 release. The delayed publishing date permits the required Decent Interval between an evangelical leader's Big Sin and his earning beaucoup bucks in royalties from a book detailing his fall from grace, his long road back, rebuilding his marriage and his ministry, etc., etc. If you're evangelical and famous, there's money to be made on both sides of sin for a season.

Number 100

2006-06-16T21:42:00.000-07:00

Anyone who knows her well knows that Mom regrets at least half her life. At age 36, in the middle of a delayed adolescence and individuation, she handed Dad a divorce—a poorly executed proceeding that cost her custody of her children and nesting rights in her ex-husband’s house, a rare legal judgment in 1968, even for Oregon. So I guess that’s about half her life, if the measure of a mother’s life is raising her children (she didn’t) and living in the house that her grown children and their children come home to on holidays (she doesn’t).

After 17 years with Dad, Mom’s three or four subsequent marriages eventually drove her back to Jesus and into apartment 100, where she lives now, one of a cluster of mustard-colored fourplexes. Some fifteen years ago she lived in this same apartment complex, though in a different unit, one that backed against Kellogg Lake. She liked the foliage just a few feet away from her patio, and the birds, and especially the privacy, but moved out for a reason I cannot remember—probably money, or fear of not having enough of it. Then her last marriage came and went, and she moved into number 100.

One of the few pieces of furniture she retained in the divorce is a darkly lacquered and carved mahogany Japanese chest, obtained by a sailor neighbor in the 1950s, during his Cold War cruises to the Far East. An antique American hutch stands against the living room wall, filled with dishes and goblets and other glassware from Mom’s mother and aunts. Gone, however, is the coffeetable sculpture I remember from my visits to her 1975-ish apartment—a two-foot high nude couple embracing, arms and legs entwined. Inspired by Love Story, symbolic of her own midlife sexual awakening, carved in Taiwan, purchased at Import Plaza.

Decidedly less erotic is Mom’s teddy bear collection. It has grown over the years, Paddington and Poo and their fuzzy cousins now lining a high, wall-long shelf I installed for Mom a few years ago. And her dozens of angels—porcelain, wax, wood—are not something I remember from childhood; she must have started acquiring angels after she left Dad. You can always find a couple or three angels here and there throughout the apartment, but soon after Thanksgiving Mom unpacks and displays all of them in a kind of Christmas spectacular, like the Rockettes. Except that Mom’s angels aren’t leggy—in fact, you can’t see a leg among them—and her Christmas Spectacular isn’t in Radio City Music Hall, but on a cotton snowfield unrolled on the Japanese chest.

Then there’s her penchant for century-old popular art, of the sentimental, maudlin sort. Think the Little Match Girl, The Real Mother Goose, lasses in bonnets and petticoats, tykes in knee-breeches, guardian angels levitating over barefoot peasant children in storm on rickety bridge above angry torrent. You get the idea. Images, I suppose, from her own girlhood longing for A Happy Family, The Good Old Days. God knows her mother’s anxieties and consequent nagging drove her father to the bar at Mac’s Pit, drove Mom's ideal of A Happy Family out the door too, drove her away from home at 19 into a marriage that went bad within weeks of the wedding.

Anyway, here and there throughout the apartment are color prints of—guess what?—angels (female-ish, judging from their golden tresses, their cocked wrists, their beardless faces—whatever breasts or waistlines may lurk under those acres of white drapery are quite invisible) and children (barefoot, cherry-cheeked, seemingly happy despite their humble if not outright wretched conditions).

The effect is vaguely Victorian, Edwardian. For all I know, the ghosts of Christopher Robin and Nanny are hovering somewhere in apartment 100, keeping watch over the bears by night.

What used to keep watch over me by night was similarly Victorian: a glow-in-the-dark, six-inch white plastic version of Heinrich Hofmann’s 1890 painting “Christ in Gethsemane.” Just before clambering into my upper bunk, I’d hold it close to the desk lamp, give it a good charge—it was probably saturated in radium paint—stand it up on the dresser, kill the lamp, climb into bed, and then marvel at the ghostly, kneeling Jesus fluorescing there on the dresser, arms outstretched on the flat-topped boulder, his face tilted up, gazing placidly into the heavens.

(It always puzzled me, even then, why my Baptist church was so fond of such art, in light of the fact that, at least during the decade of my boyhood and adolescence, no one in that church ever prayed kneeling and looking up toward the church’s laminated beams. Everyone knew that the acceptable posture of prayer was “every head bowed and every eye closed,” as the pastor reminded us at three services a week. To the restrained, undemonstrative, teetotaling, anti-dancing folk of my church, such pathos in prayer may have been permissible for Christ—I mean, he was God after all, and God can do anything He wants, right?—but it just wouldn’t be appropriate for His followers. For starters, Baptist pews had no kneelers. Then there was the problem of the congregation praying eyes wide open, a practice that would rob the organist, pianist, and songleader of their chance, during the post-sermon prayer when every head was bowed and every eye closed, to slither silently from their pews—into which they had descended when the sermon started—back into their performance places for the closing hymn. The effect, especially on a child who resisted peeking, was impressive, at least the first few times: the last thing we saw as the pastor began his prayer was just him, there behind the pulpit. At his amen, our eyes opened and—Behold!—the musicians had somehow appeared up there, too. It was the closest thing we Baptists had to transubstantiation.)

Keeping the air swirling around the the bears, the angels, and the art are Mom’s fans. Her apartment is not palatial—two bedrooms, a dining nook adjoining the living room, typical apartment fare—but neither is it particular small, and it is certainly not stuffy. Yet from April through October or so, the electric fans are always on—one by the sliding glass door that opens onto her small patio, an oscillating fan in a corner of the living room, a third in her bedroom. For half the year her apartment becomes a vortex of whirlpooling air, of eddies curling in the kitchen and hallways.

When I visit Mom, I can manage to talk over the rushing whirr of the fans. What I can’t tolerate—what is as distracting to me as a piece of salad in the teeth of a dinner date—are Mom’s electronic pest repellers. These gizmos plug into outlets like nightlights, except they emit not light but ultrasonic waves that are supposed to drive rodents and insects out of the house, like the Pied Piper, or like we hope this November’s midterm elections will do. The waves may be ultrasonic and beyond human hearing, but they still do this hellish clicking—every few seconds a click, first from the one in the dining room, then I begin hearing the one in the kitchen. Then I start anticipating the clicks, the conversation is drowned out in my head by the odious little torturers. I feel like the psychotic narrator of “The Telltale Heart”—the damnable clicks fill my ears, I no longer follow any conversation, I end up getting on my feet and unplugging the loathsome things.

“What are you doing, honey?” Mom whines.

“I’ll plug them back in before I leave.”

“You won’t remember.”

When the time comes, I do remember, and on my way out give her a hug and cheek kiss, tell her I’ll come again soon to the localized whirlwind that is her apartment.

Rachel's funeral

2006-04-26T11:31:00.000-07:00

A week ago Tuesday was a brilliant, sunny, four-mountain day, though what with the firs and the Lincoln Memorial slope, you could see only Mt. Adams, from Rachel's plot at least. Dry skies, but soggy lawn there at the cemetery--even muddy, thanks to the backhoe having recently mucked up the area scooping out the grave. So there the 20 or so of us stood, making squishy sounds every time we shifted our weight, behind a row of seated mourners: Charlie, Rachel's daughters Nancy (and husband Chuck Reagan) and Marjorie (and husband Max Luce), her son Ken (Rachel's other son, Richard, had to drive home to North Dakota last week, just prior to his mother's passing). And Dad and Shirley. Enid Briggs may have sat down, too....anymore when she and Adele go places, Adele (who still moves and converses with caffeinated liveliness) always reaches the door a full minute ahead of Enid, who is really slowing down these days.

A Dr. David Stevens, the pastor of Central Bible Church where Charlie and Rachel have attended for decades and decades...this trim, tall, smiling, pleasant FYO type (Fine Young Officer--thanks to Seth for giving me a succinct way to describe this type of personality) cheerily administered the first of two floggings: Don't feel sad! Rachel is in heaven! Don't feel sad! You'll see her again! Don't feel sad! She's happy now! Don't feel sad! Christ is risen!

Meanwhile, we stood around feeling sad, and slowly sinking a tad into the sodden ground. It was 15 minutes devoted not to Rachel, not to remembering her place in our lives, but to Jesus. "If there was one thing Rachel would want, if she were standing here right now," the pastor said fervently, "it would be that everyone here knew Jeezus as their personal savior and was assured of a future in heaven."

Au contraire. If Rachel had been standing there then, and if precedent was any indication, she would have regularly interrupted her pastor to correct his facts, to add details that he omitted and she thought necessary, to direct the conversation. Not once did Rachel ever talk to me of her Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, or even talk about him in my presence. What she did talk about around me were her hiking treks, her kids, her sweet corn. Yet no one doubted her spirituality--after all, she swam in the same American-Protestant-farmer ocean we all did. (Although we all obeyed the subtle, tacit signals to avoid looking too closely at the details of each other's lives. The modern virtues of personal accountability and transparency, even in a church setting, make most of the older people in my clan just plain itchy.)

Anyway, when the pastor ended, Lois Johnson played a sadly sweet hymn on her flute, accompanied by distant birdsong in trees around us. No one else said a word, and we were dismissed. No memories spoken by family members, no laying of mementos on the casket or dropped into the grave. Nothing to sate the human craving for ritual at a time like this. Only the sermon-flogging, a couple prayers delivered with forced cheeriness, some snuffling into hankies, then shuffling into cars. Talk about grievius interruptus.

Then came the signal that this fam has yet to master the logistics of food at funerals. "There'll be a meal for us following the memorial service at the church," Chuck Reagan announced. "But if you want lunch between and the service, you're on your own." It was 1:10 pm, we'd been at the cemetery an hour or so, people were hungry, we would most certainly grab a quick bit enroute to the church service--and another meal at 3:30? I remember at Jean's funeral, the church meal immediately preceded the service, which meant there was no organized reason to sit down together following the service and remember Jean over food. At least in this case, a meal together following the service would give us a way to decompress from the day, even if we weren't really that hungry.

The loop of road that surrounds the oval of cemetery that holds Rachel's remains also holds those of her sister Jean, whom we put in the ground a year ago (March 8). So on our way to the cars, some of us walked the few yards to Jean and Elman's graves, sighed a little, remembered the years engraved on the marble markers, thought fondly of glass eyes and old goats and springerle Christmas cookies and Studebakers.

Perhaps the high point of the afternoon for me was the quick lunch hastily arranged with Betsy Ray (my second cousin, I think) and her three delightful and youngest girls Emma, Abby, and Marta...and Robin and Nate...and soon word got out to Eleanor Briggs (Betsy's mom, who lost her husband a few years ago), and Enid and Adele, and Becky and Bruce...and so we had a lively and talkative time at a nearby Red Robin over mushroom burgers, oriental chicken salad, and french fries on steroids.

Then, at church, a redundant sermon (how dare we feel sad! After all God's done for Rachel, and us!), crimped logic (the psalmist writes that God heals all our illnesses--which is exactly what God did when he took Rachel home to heaven. I.e., death = healing), and a solo by a quavery soprano with vibrato big enough to throw a cat through. And still no voices from family and friends remembering the livewire that Rachel was. More prayers, a hymn, out to the lobby to mingle for a half hour, then to the fellowship hall. We may not have been particularly hungry (having eaten lunch only 90 minutes earlier), but good church potluck people that we were, we would never disappoint deaconnesses who made scalloped potatoes and broccoli salad and fried chicken just for us.

A more private and personal service took place the night Rachel passed, when I drove directly from her apartment to Becky and Bruce's, where we set a fire in the firepit and, through cigar smoke and between sips of port, remembered Rachel, her family, and our place in it, talking long into the dark that night.