9/11

The date comes on my calendar every year, like any other date. People go to work, schedule meetings, roll out new movies and products. As if it were any other date.

From the end of August to the middle of September, I try to pretend it's any other date. I try to mentally skip past it, hoping to forget it like the anniversary of something insignificant. But in waves, I remember.

As the waves of other people's pain and memory rise, mine are stirred. And there are so many memories, all dark, all mingled.

9/11 was my dad's birthday. When the twin towers were attacked in NY, he had just lost his dad to an early heart attack. The last time they'd spoken was an argument, & he never got over that.

Dad's second marriage broke up that year, and we spent his next birthday together, with sadness that was palpable. He tried to be enthusiastic, and he was glad not to be alone, I could tell, but nothing really brought much joy.

Soon after that, his sister died, unexpectedly and mysteriously. She had been his best friend, only a year younger than he. They shared the same birthday. Again, though, she had been estranged from Dad since her own divorce. It was hard on him, but when the chance of reconciliation was gone, I think that's when we lost him, really.

The grief ate away at him until he collapsed with his own heart attack. He was only 48 and had never been in the hospital before, but he spent three solid months in ICU, with one complication after another.

He recovered, and walked my sister down the aisle. We thought he would be fine. His dad suffered with heart problems for 20 years before he died.

9/11 was the last time I saw my dad alive. We went to celebrate his birthday with him again, but he was miserable. It was his first birthday since his sister had died.

Two weeks later, Dad died. The shock and the grief were so incredible, they shook my marriage, as his dad's death had dislodged his own. I felt myself slipping away, the way I'd watched my dad slip.

My dad and I had had one of those complicated divorced-parent relationships, in which it's hard to know what's true and if you're loved. He'd said it so many times, had clearly been afraid I might not know, but in the over-analysis of what's right, I had often missed what was good.

Things had gotten better between Dad and me in the years before he died. We'd become friends, thanks to our spouses' understanding of us. It turned out we were a lot alike, and once we saw that, I think we understood each other enough better to allow space for each other. And we each had a refuge to run to, who would turn us back to each other.

We had those few years together, and we spent a half hour alone together the last night I saw him. He often dealt with grief with anger, pushing people away, but before I left that night, he sat beside me and told me how he missed his sister. He had spent most of the evening furious at everything, trying to hold it in, and blowing bits of steam through clenched teeth. I told him how I loved him. And because of that 30 minutes, my last memories of my dad are good.

I try to remember my dad in my relationships now. I try to forgive quickly, think about how I'm feeling versus how I'm acting. I try to treat people the way I'd want to remember treating them when they die, since there's no guarantee we'll see each other again.

Except in September, when I try to forget. But the flags of other people's pain, of so much sadness surrounding the date, remind me. And I wish business could go on as usual, so I could forget, so the memories would not be stirred.

The signs of healing and moving on, of meetings and birthdays and business on the date...they remind me, too. Perhaps that means I cannot forget, because I want the whole world to stop on 9/11 so I can grieve, so my loss is acknowledged. I want others to be able to stop and grieve their losses, too.

My children make the difference. Before I was pregnant with #3, I dreamed that my dad told me we were going to have a little girl and that her name would be Abigail. The name means "your father is rejoicing," and it gives me peace that at last his sadness is gone.

Abigail was born nine months later, and she is sitting in my lap now, bringing me back to the present, out of my memories, reminding me with her own fat tears and incredible smile and labored words that I'm needed and loved, and the pain of the memories softens with the mysterious blessings of the mundane.

The Plagues (Not Religious) Or: Christmas in September

I got hit in the eye with a fried egg this morning. Not the actual eyeball, just the lid.

Then I got accidentally served last night's coffee in a dirty coffee mug. Oops.

By 5:00 it had been a bad day. The kind where you think maybe you should have crawled UNDER the bed & waited to try again tomorrow.

So I declared Christmas. That's what I do on bad days. Maybe once a year besides the actual holiday, we have need of cinnamon-flavored festivities.

We got a pizza for $6 from Little Caesar's, & the kids were told that they had the time it took us to get the pizza plus 2 min to gather gifts for whomever they could gather gifts for. The rules were no money, no art supplies (because of irrelevant art supply infractions), & no more than 2 min beyond the time spent in the van driving to the pizza place.

We all got home & raced around the house. I wiped the table & swept the floor. Landon got out the sidewalk chalk & created a rock-tossing game akin to skeeball. John got stuff to wash, rub, & slipper Landon's feet. Books were set aside to be read to Abby. And for a finishing touch, I lit some Christmas-scented candles & set paper towels on the table.

They caught fire. I grabbed them & waved them around & grew goggle-eyed as the teeny fire grew flames. The big kids & I screamed. The babies began crying. Landon was stuck on the other side of the kitchen yelling instructions from his foot bath.

When my hand got hot, I threw the paper towels on the floor & started stomping on the fire, yelling, "MY FOOT'S ON FIRE! MY FOOT'S ON FIRE!"

One gray sock & melted shoe later, the fire was out, & the doors were opened to let the smell out as we all shook out the adrenaline.

In came the wasps.

He Laid His Hands Upon Them & Healed Them

I was just reading through Leviticus this summer, after attending a Michael Card concert, in which he sang his way through the Bible but apologized for skipping Leviticus because he just hadn't found a way to sing about the Law. Of course the first thing I did was go home & write a song from Leviticus—two songs, in fact.

One of the interesting things about the Law is the idea of cleanness & uncleanness. We read this as a symbol of sin, which is fine, as long as you're not reading Leviticus too closely because a closer read leaves you indignant. How is it fair that someone born lame or blind cannot approach God? How is it fair that women are unclean after giving birth or during their menstruation every month? How is a natural state the equivalent of sin, & how can we be judged for that?

I imagine a crowd of people, trying to please the Lord, reaching up to Him, and He says, Sit down if you are wounded. Sit down if you are blind. Sit down if you're a woman, if you have buried the dead, if you have any defect at all. Sit down if you have touched anyone who's wounded, etc. Sit down if you've touched things touched by someone who's unclean.

The point isn't that you can try to be the one man left standing holy before the Lord, if you can just dodge all these bullets. The point is that you can't stand. The point is that none of us are clean. He spends a whole book of the Bible trying to convince us that our righteousness is like filthy rags. Because the point of the Law is to point us to a Savior.

Instead, though, people are pushed away. Lepers live outside the city, and they're forced to cry out, "UNCLEAN! UNCLEAN!" if anyone approaches. Women became second-class citizens. And men hoped that their bodies would stay whole, even as they knew their hearts were dark.

Then came a man who, by healing the sick, made them CLEAN. And as He healed them, He told them, "Your sins are forgiven." I'd forgotten that being sick in that society would make you untouchable, would keep you from the synagogue, would make you the subject of judgmental whispers and dirty looks.

But Jesus did something else. When He healed people, He touched them. I had never realized what a violation of custom that would have been. He took the sins of the world upon Himself on the cross, but He was taking our sins upon Himself each time He healed people, too.

On the Blood Covenant & Divorce

The kids and I have been reading The Miracle of the Scarlet Thread & the Gospel of Luke the last couple of weeks. MST focuses on blood covenants throughout the Bible. It very simply outlines the customs & shows examples of these in the Scripture, while continually drawing parallels between these stories & Jesus' sacrifice.

Last night, they laid a couple of paper plate liners on the floor & walked around them the way Booker explains that people walked around the two halves of the animal sacrifice in MST, exchanging imaginary robes & belts.

They giggled, and we were about to move on when my daughter asked, "What about divorce?"

Um...what?

"Divorce," she said. "If a covenant can't be broken, how can people divorce?"

I really do love it when they ask these deep questions, because I've found that I learn more from these than I do from anything I read.

There's the pat answer, of course. God hates divorce. It's a bad thing. It's sad.

I could have said that and moved on, but a passage from MST stuck with me. The two people entering into covenant start out back-to-back between the two halves of a bloody animal. They make a figure eight around the two halves, keeping their eyes on the sacrifice, and come together again, face to face. Part of the point, Booker explains, is that they're symbolically saying, "May God do that to me and more if I ever break this covenant."

In the end, I told the kids that divorce isn't possible because a covenant can't be broken. You can try. Two people can live in different places, but it's like cutting yourself in half. The result may be two different locations, but not life. Your insides will be like the two halves of the dead chicken. (I know it's not a chicken; somehow in our example, it was.)

I guess it's like the Garden of Eden. God told Adam & Eve that they'd die if they ate the fruit of the forbidden tree. As a child, I wondered secretly that they didn't die and felt guilty for wondering. As an adult, I can see that they did, in fact, die, and that death touched them at every turn through the rest of their lives until their bodies died, too. They buried first their relationship with God, the animal He killed to clothe them, and their home in the Garden, then their son, full bellies, and peace. At last, they buried each other.

So, yeah, God hates divorce. But I think our paper plate liners that represented dead chickens that represented the sacrifice of a covenant relationship is a sobering image of the reason He's so passionate about it.

May the Lord do so to me & more, if I ever try to break my covenant.

How I Learned to Write

In elem school, I hated writing. I had no idea how to think up a story, & so every other year, when we had to fill in those big blank books with our own words & pictures, I sat frozen. I ended up rewriting stories I knew—Little Bear became Little Dog, because I couldn't imagine anything else. And so I hated writing, & I floundered.

Until 5th grade, when I had this amazing teacher who actually taught us to write. We spent the year writing stories, and the other kids would beg to hear mine. I was a really, painfully shy kid, so the attention was...good. It sort-of thawed some of the fear, you know. Anyway, when we got our big blank books that year, I was thrilled with the possibilities instead of stuck.

So what did she teach me? That good story-telling comes primarily from observation, & that good observation takes more than a paragraph to tell, & that that's ok. That a good story is as long as a piece of string. That when you register by yourself at a hotel & you're a woman, you should simply use your 1st initial, so that no one knows a woman is staying there alone.

From that time on, I earned straight As in English classes, won awards for my writing, & settled into the idea that writing was what I could do well. I breezed through GT & AP English in high school & graduated early.

Somehow, though, someone forgot to tell my Freshman Comp teacher in college. Imagine the shock when I received an F on my first paper. Through many tears, though, & talking through what she wanted, etc., I left my 2nd paper w/ her & actually hugged her. Now that I know her reputation, um, that was probably a first for her.

I failed the 2nd paper. At that point, it was obvious that it was her, not me, so I filled out the necessary paperwork to drop her class while she was administering the midterm exam & dropped it by her office afterward.

She ripped it up & excused herself to go start the next class's midterm. I sat in her office in shock once again. This woman was insane. She terrified me. And she was coming back, & I was no longer armed: my drop slip was in her trash bin.

Dr. Whosit & I sat in her office that afternoon with a paper between us & in less than 30 min, she made me understand what she wanted. It was a formal essay, & I'd never had to write one before. It wasn't hard; it was just different. Sentence fragments that can be added for great effect in casual or creative writing were automatically wrong in formal essays. It took longer for me to accept it than to learn it.

Since then, I have only received two Bs on papers. The rest have been As, & I've gone on to earn a BA in English & an MEd in Teaching. I've taught writing to high school & college students—even some grad students preparing for the MBA entrance exam. I received a perfect score on the writing portion of the GRE—all because Dr. Whosit tore up my drop slip.

Since then, she's been promoted to head of the English Dept. at that college, & she's complained to me that I got my master's in Education instead of English, so she can't hire me. It's a quiet compliment, but I take it...because she still scares me a little.

So what did she teach me? Primarily that there are different kinds of writing, but also that there are things in the world such as thesis statements & comma splices. Lovely, concrete rules for grammar & punctuation that not a single teacher in all my grade school & high school years taught. Some that they even taught wrong!

So you want to know about the Bs. Comp 2 is supposed to be How to Write an Argumentative Essay—for freshmen. But I had a brilliant grad student who didn't know how to water down the information for those of us who didn't already have 10 grad degrees. She also didn't know how to stop teaching. She eked out a meager grad student existence while pouring herself into her studies & her students. She spent long, LONG hours with me, a pair of scissors, & my essays. She became a dear friend, whose company I have missed since she went on to teach FT when she'd finished her PhD.

This last teacher taught me to form an argument, & she taught me enough logic that when I enrolled in the formal class, I earned a final grade of 103 for the semester. She taught me to think clearly & be more careful & purposeful, not just with what I write in a formal essay but with what I say in day-to-day life.

Friendships have been preserved because of the lessons she taught me, & she helped me choose a good school to move to after jr college, convinced me to apply for scholarships, & helped me later when I bit off more than I could chew when I decided to do a major class project on a little poet named TS Eliot, despite having not yet studied either of the world wars or Dante. She knew everything, & therefore was happy to be a crash course in everything. Her guided tour of the DMA was priceless.

And so, abruptly ended, is my tale. I hope someday I can be a character in someone else's history of how they learned to write. Dr. Whosit will be a fine title, thank you.

The Problem of Pain

 I'm moving books today, trying to get them in a more efficient layout. How nice it would be if they'd all fit in piles around my feet & I never needed to leave them.

Anyway, my husband loves C. S. Lewis. He insisted a while back on buying everything written by the man...at least, everything that was available at Half Price Books that day.

So I'm moving piles of Lewis' writings, reading titles, thinking. I try to soak a lot up from titles these days, busy as I am. Actually...I've always been that way, given my vivid imagination & impatience with pages upon pages before getting to the good part. Then upon getting to the good part, I'm mad that it's over. I have a sort-of love-hate relationship with books & reading.

Anyway, I came upon the title The Problem of Pain...or was it With? Anyway, I was thinking about Lewis' title, thinking about the question of a good God who allows people to suffer. (I assume that's the topic of the book; it's the topic of so much religious discourse.) I don't like this topic. Not only is it ugly & complicated, it produces so many weak answers. There are the weak defenses of suffering from those who haven't suffered, and there are the weak-minded defenses of God from those who are afraid to look hard at the question, afraid that perhaps suffering is indeed proof of God's depravity, or, perhaps worse, of his nonexistence & thus our own meaninglessness in a wide, senseless universe.

I don't like the question.

But thinking about pain, thinking about it as a problem in a philosophical sense, I began to imagine a world without pain. We would still point our fingers at God, for the absence of pain would be proof to our fragile minds that we had no need of salvation, no need of divine help of any kind. We would think sin was a lie or a fable for making children mind; we would think sacrifice was a foolish waste.

Ironically, we see the presence of pain the same way. It's proof for us that God is either cruel or nonexistent. With or without pain, I think, WE would be the same. Since pain is a natural consequence of a fallen world, though, I suppose it is more honest of Him to allow suffering. If we can somehow make the connection between the pain we see & feel & have no control over & the judgment we pass, the anger we entertain, the arrogance & self-righteousness & other kinds of lies we tell—then maybe we can begin to turn to him, begin to see the logic of sacrifice, of giving up our rights so that sin cannot breed, so that the curse cannot pass my doorstep because here the law is love, though it cost me everything.

We think that the answer is forgiveness, & that's a good answer, but I think that's an allowance for the human condition. I suspect that the goal is giveness. No 'for.' Like in Les Mis: if you give that which someone tries to take, there's no place for forgiveness, repentance, Hell's victory, for there was no sin in the first place. There's only the soul that you have saved from sullying itself. There's only the advancing of the kingdom of God on earth. There's only love.

So maybe I'll read beyond the title one of these days. For now, I've got a toddler who just ran SMACK into the foot of my bed, & so I've got my own problem of pain to handle.

Curiosity Pet

I don't know how it came up exactly. We were reading The Wizard of Oz, and then we were talking about George Washington Carver, and then I was leaned in, telling them about this magnificent creature, this faithful friend, the first pet you ever own.

You were born with it, I tell them, but you have to feed it & care for it, or it will fall asleep, and it sleeps a deep sleep of hibernation. These creatures are very hard to awaken.

It's your curiosity pet, I told them, & you can see it ALIVE & THRIVING in little ones. We glance over at the baby, almost walking, who looks up at us with banana on his face, grinning. Not banana-that-I've-given-him, but banana-that-he's-found-&-filched-from-the-fruit-bowl. Banana, peel, & all.  Banana-that-he's-chewed-through.

Ok, so maybe it's not as much Curiosity as it is Hungry, but it's at least a little bit curiosity. Because when he dumped the trash out yesterday, he didn't just eat it in that moment before I could dash between him & the coffee grounds—he patted it, threw it, put his head in it, & came up with a smile that looked like a 5 o'clock shadow. So there is some curiosity there.

Then I told them what this wonderful round little ball—the curiosity pet, not their brother—eats stories, books, nature. He likes to look & read & see & try.

Learning! they said.

Sure, I agreed, but...what if you didn't have good teachers? Or a good school? What if you didn't have the bright blocks & the great curriculum? What if you were a slave?

WHO IS RESPONSIBLE FOR THE CARE & FEEDING OF YOUR PET?

Us, they said, surprised at their own answer.