It was nothing

After a good two and a half months at home, my husband is off again for a work trip, this time to the land of the Lion King. The Seabees are busy there. Beware, pirates.



This trip is only going to last 11 days, 5 spent traveling, so we didn’t weep and cry at parting. In fact, I woke up this morning, and the first thing I said to my esposo was “I really am mad at you.”


Nice way to say goodbye, don’t you think?


It was raining out, and I woke up tired; I guess I didn’t sleep long enough to get over my irritation from the night before.


I won’t tell you why I was mad. It’s too personal. And too petty. But I chewed on my wound for a good couple of hours.

Then we went to Mass together and shared the kiss of peace. And it stopped raining. We drive to the airport together, so I could take the car home. The café at the airport was out of coffee, so I could transfer whatever remaining peevishness I had left to it. By the time my husband boarded the plane, we were laughing together.

As I left the airport parking lot, I turned on the radio, which was tuned to the country music station. Some song was playing about a man who lost his house in a tornado. “That was nothing” because he had also lost his dad, his brother, his best friend, his left hand, and his wife. “That was something.”

Gotta love country music.

Choices, choices - to say yes to one is to say no to another

My newest hobby is teaching English Composition I and II at the local community college. I applied for this job last year, before I realized how quickly a school day can pass, because I thought that if I were putting the kids in school I should at least try to earn part of their tuition to make up for quitting home schooling. At that time, no adjunct positions were available, but a little less than a month ago one of the fulltime faculty members abruptly retired because her husband’s health was in decline. The dean of the English department remembered me from last year, and he called to ask if I could take over all of her classes. That was more than I could handle, so I declined, but when he called back to ask if I could teach 2 classes, I jumped at the chance. 

The pay doesn’t cover much of the school tuition – in fact, it doesn’t cover the cost of one kid - but I love it. I love reading the stories and the student essays and spend hours going over the stories in the text and criticism and meticulously correcting papers. But I’m afraid the students aren’t loving me. Not one class has gone as I expected, mainly because only about 3 students per class do the assigned reading. Fortunately, they help move the conversation along when I lack direction.

Having an overarching theme for the class would help maintain focus – I need a thesis statement! Having a theme would also help me with the struggle to decide which stories to assign. When I took over the class they were reading Hamlet, but since we left the drama section behind, I’ve spent a lot of time spinning my wheels in a state of indecision over which stories to assign.

Today we were to discuss were Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown" and "Greasy Lake,"by TC Boyle. The topic was supposed to be the importance of setting to these stories. I’m not sure if it were a good thing or a bad thing to have assigned two stories with such similar themes and settings, but I’m afraid I left the class with the impression that all human beings are depraved and that being an adult means recognizing the depravity of the human soul. Now this is not at all the message that I meant to convey; the discussion just seemed to focus on the ugliness described in these two stories instead of the moment of the sunrise in the TC Boyle story and the unchanged beauty of Faith in Hawthorne's. I forgot to call attention to the fact that she still has her hat with the pink ribbons when Young Goodman Brown wakes up/comes out of the forest. She still runs up to embrace him; he scorns her, not the other way around.

What I need to do is now pick a couple stories with that don’t focus on depravity. One is going to be the "Gift of the Magi," which may still be ubiquitous on high school reading lists, but if most of the students have read it earlier, maybe they’ll have something say. I want a few hopeful ending stories, but many, if not most, of the stories in the anthology (edited by Dana Gioia and X.J. Kennedy) end with death and despair. We read Willa Cather’s “Paul’s Case,” Alice Walker’s “Everyday Use” and Tillie Olsen’s “I Stand Here Ironing” for Wednesday, and then I have to choose 8 more stories. One will be Flannery O’C’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” but after that I’m having trouble limiting my choices. So many good ones, but I can barely talk about one story, let alone 3, per class. As the syllabus is set up, we have two weeks more to talk about short stories, and only 4 classes for poetry before review week. I guess for the short poetry unit I’ll assign each day a period: Ancient/Medieval, Neoclassical, Romantic, Contemporary.

The short stories in the textbook are arranged according to elements of fiction. We’ve covered Fable, Fantasy, and Plot with a couple fables, Grimm’s “Godfather Death” and Poe’s “The Tale Tell Heart.” Then we “discussed” Point of View in Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily,” Carver’s “Cathedral,” and Updike’s “A&P” and Setting with the above mentioned stories. Theme was the topic for Wednesday. Left to talk about are Characterization, Irony, Diction, Tone and Mood, Symbols and Motifs. I’m trying to pick stories across a variety of periods and cultures, but the book has more contemporary female authors than anything else.
Any votes for a top 8 out of these choices?:

Faulkner's "Barn Burning" and Welty's "Why I Live at the P.O." both have regional significance as does Kate Chopin’s “The Storm,” but we did Faulkner already, and I don't love that Welty story.

Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried,” Jack London’s “To Build a Fire,” Ernest Hemingway’s “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” and Ambrose Bierce’s “Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” have macho appeal. Ralph Ellison’s “Battle Royal” is in that category also. Joyce’s “Araby” and D.H. Lawrence’s “The Rocking Horse Winner” have name recognition. Another masculine story is Ha Jin’s “Saboteur,” which is new to me, but I really liked it and think the students would like it, too.

As for multicultural themes, I also liked Jhumpa Lahiri’s “Interpreter of Maladies” but that’s one the students might find boring. Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl” was on the previous teacher’s list, but that was another one I didn’t care for. Margaret Atwood’s “Happy Endings” also doesn’t appeal to me. I see the cleverness of Joyce Carol Oates’ “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been,” but am hesitant to have yet another look at the dark side of life. I'd rather do Alice Munro’s “How I Met My Husband” but is it top 8 material?

Like O. Henry, Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” may be one students are familiar with; both seem to be so entrenched in the short story canon, I’d hate for them to be missed. Same with “Lady with the Pet Dog” by Chekhov.

The text has several science fiction stories, which I think students like because the meaning is so obvious, but I can’t decide how to weight the choices. If I were going to pick one, it would be Vonnegut’s “Harrison Bergeron” over Ursula Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.”

Katherine Mansfield’s “Miss Brill” and Katherine Anne Porter’s “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall” are two stories in the text that I’m familiar with from my own days in anthology class. Steinbeck, Cheever, Kafka, and Virginia Woolf are also represented – and James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez and more and more…

Help!

Getting ready for the next step

We just found out we won’t be moving overseas at the end of this tour sometime early next summer. (Relieved, Mom? This means no cheap vacation for you.) Just as we suspected, the Navy won’t send a service member with more than 3 dependents OCONUS (outside the continental US, for nonmilitary types) without special dispensation. Although I think my husband is special, he’s not the only person who can do the jobs available in the places we requested: Hawaii, Sicily, and Guam.



I’m a little relieved myself actually. For a long time, I told my husband that I didn’t want to go abroad to live. It wasn’t the international living that I was hesitant about; it was staying overseas for 3 year orders. I didn’t want to be separated from my extended family that long. In retrospect, maybe we should have tried to get orders while the kids were little and little in number. Three years isn’t really that long. The kids have a hard time remembering events that occurred three years ago. For that matter, so do I. What would we have missed being gone?


We would have missed weddings and some funerals and a lot of birthdays, many of which we’ve missed anyway.


On the other hand, what would we have gained? Some unique family memories and awesome photograph opportunities? An opportunity to learn another language? To immerse ourselves in another culture? (To a certain extent, we’re doing that now…) A spirit of adventure?


I’m not a risk taker. I’ve never been one to argue that you have to experience life in order to feel like you’ve lived well and to understand others. That’s what books are for. An armload of writers – most? - never travelled very far from home but exhibit wisdom and empathy in their books. But my fear of the unknown has directed my life’s path a number of times – where to go to college, when I discouraged my husband from taking a job outside of the Navy that might have landed us in New York City right after 9/11 (accompanied by a loss in pay and job security and perhaps job satisfaction), and when I discouraged my husband from asking for an overseas tour years ago.


Now I would be just as happy to stay put here another couple years. I really do lack a spirit of adventure, I’m afraid. Can I excuse myself by pointing out how much I’ve come to love my little community here? I’d rather be surrounded by people whose company I enjoy than be surrounded by coral reefs or ancient history or whatever beauties would draw us someplace else.


But someplace else is where we’ll end up. And the truth is we’ve always found a community to belong to, usually among our fellow Catholics or military types or homeschoolers or people in the neighborhood. Multiple communities.


So I told my husband that I am not going to give any input on his next request list. Take me wherever. Where you go, I will follow, with our gaggle of children and all our kit and caboodle. Your people are mine.

The Book of Ruth and Naomi

Marge Piercy

When you pick up the Tanakh and read

the Book of Ruth, it is a shock

how little it resembles memory.

It's concerned with inheritance,

lands, men's names, how women

must wiggle and wobble to live.

 

Yet women have kept it dear

for the beloved elder who

cherished Ruth, more friend than

daughter. Daughters leave. Ruth
brought even the baby she made

with Boaz home as a gift.

 

Where you go, I will go too,

your people shall be my people,

I will be a Jew for you,

for what is yours I will love

as I love you, oh Naomi

my mother, my sister, my heart.

Show me a woman who does not dream

a double, heart's twin, a sister

of the mind in whose ear she can whisper,

whose hair she can braid as her life

twists its pleasure and pain and shame.

Show me a woman who does not hide

in the locket of bone that deep

eye beam of fiercely gentle love

she had once from mother, daughter,

sister; once like a warm moon

that radiance aligned the tides

of her blood into potent order.

At the season of first fruits, we recall

two travellers, co-conspirators, scavengers

making do with leftovers and mill ends,

whose friendship was stronger than fear,

stronger than hunger, who walked together,

the road of shards, hands joined.

from http://jhom.com/calendar/sivan/poem.htm

Stepping back

A couple weeks ago, I was thinking about how it’s hard to tell sometimes whether our choices are in accordance with God’s will. I’ve never been a person to say, “This is God’s will for me” because, frankly, I’ve never felt entirely sure. If we have free will, we can make bad choices, which I would guess are against God’s will, and then we find ourselves in a rut we didn’t really want to get stuck in. On the other hand, the only explanation I’ve been given about how to know God’s will is that you are where He wants you. God’s will is for you to be where you are in the moment.

That’s always seemed a little bit of a dodge.

But this weekend, I really felt I was where I was supposed to be. And I didn’t really want to be there.

A couple months ago, one of my friends here had asked me if I wanted to go on a retreat. She was going to be the director. When she asked, my husband was still on deployment, and at the time a weekend away with Christ sounded like a great thing. When I finally turned in my application a month later, only 4 people had signed up, and so even though I was starting to feel the pressure of fall busyness, I committed to going because I felt sorry for my friend.

Imagine my surprise when I found out a few days before the weekend that 40 women were signed up.

I was strongly tempted to back out.

Not only was it going to be a big crowd, but I had just started a parttime job teaching 2 classes at the community college, in addition to teaching Latin at the elementary school 2 mornings a week, subbing occasionally, and putting in my community service hours, along with the daily attempts at keeping up with the kids’ hygiene and nutritional needs, and occasionally my own.

But I was still a little hopeful that I would have some quiet alone time. Time to pray, time to take a hike, time to read at bedtime if my roommate didn’t mind.

Only I had 40 roommates in a bunk room. I wanted to cry when I walked into the room and saw all those beds. I wanted to call my husband to come and get me immediately. But the retreat team had taken all the cell phones and watches. Tricky.

The next morning I woke up more confirmed that I wanted to leave. If I could say I woke up, because I’m not sure I ever completely fell asleep with the orchestra of night noises – snuffling, snoring, mumbling, tossing. Then began the race for the 3 showers shared among 40 women.

Fortunately, Mass was the first event of the day. And providentially, the priest gave a wonderful homily about discerning his vocation. He’s a handsome young Indian priest formerly of our parish who once was a successful business man in Bombay, but always felt empty. One day as he admired the sunset and thanked God for its beauty, he paused to ask God what He thought was beautiful, and the young man felt an inner voice say “All of you.”

Can’t reproduce his accent here, but his message was a part of the mesmerism that pulled me out of my bubble of surliness.

Needless to say the rest of the retreat progressively lifted my mood. Although the schedule was modeled after boot camp, by the end of the three days, my spirit was energized. Through the testimonies of the other women, I was reminded that my problems are small and mostly of my own making. I haven’t lost a husband to war; I haven’t lost a husband to drug abuse or alcohol. I haven’t had to run away from a violent one. I wasn’t orphaned or abused as a child. None of my children has died. My house hasn’t burned down after my husband lost his job. Enough sob stories were shared to script a season of soap opera episodes. What have I to complain about?

The women sharing these stories told them from the perspective of survivors, but they shared them because they knew the retreatants were also struggling with similar issues and weren’t able to envision what their lives would be like in a few months, or even next week. But the retreatants could look at the team members who had gone through these difficult situations and who were now smiling and laughing as they worked together to present the retreat. They weren’t getting a lot of sleep either, and they were doing a lot of hurrying about and bending and kneeling and standing, even though most of them weren’t young. They were acting as ministers to their sisters. Love was written on their faces. As I watched and listened, I realized that what I needed from this retreat was not time alone with Christ, but time to see Christ in others.

In the busyness of this season, I often neglect to look people in the eye. I rarely look my children in the face. I’m not naturally outgoing anyway, but I sometimes use busyness as an excuse to avoid connecting with people. Instead, I’m constantly looking at my list of “to-dos.” But this retreat reminded me to look beyond myself, to worry less about my small issues, and to pause to listen and look into other people’s eyes for it’s by connecting with other people that we encounter Christ.

(I'm happy to reconnect with my blog, too!)

It was good we had a relaxing weekend, because over the past week a variety of obligations have come up that have eaten up my computer time. But I did want to make some notes about Madeleine L’Engle’s Two-Part Invention before I turn it back in to the library. I picked it up after repeated references to L’Engle by Pentimento and Embretheliel, and am so glad I did. What a different perspective I have on it now than I did when I first read it, as a high school student nosing through my mother’s books. I wonder, though, how much of it sank into my unconscious, and helped formed my understanding of marriage.

I was struck first by the tone – no long rants, no unsavory details. (Admittedly, she does deride the dehumanizing, synthetic quality of modern life, with its objects of planned obsolescence: “I don’t want to be a consumer. Anger consumes. Forest fires consume. Cancer consumes.”) Reading the book was like a mini marriage retreat. L’Engle mentions her youthful naivete as an aspiring actress and some of the struggles she had finding a suitable husband, as well as a rocky patch during her courtship with her eventual husband, but she doesn’t dwell on the difficulties she may have had in her marriage. Instead she shares some of her memories, small glimpses into a well-lived life, marked by rich friendships and appreciated experiences. She acknowledges peaks and valleys, but keeps her focus on reassessing what made her marriage a happy one, juxtaposing their early years with her thoughts and prayers by the bedside of her dying husband.

What did make their marriage happy? Both were in positions to be tempted by other offers. They spent a lot of time apart. They struggled early on with money. But it sounds like Hugh and Madeleine both were caring, independent people who respected each other as well as the commitment they had made. They both were aware of the possibilities of betrayal and of growing apart, and so made sacrifices to protect their relationship and made clear even to their children that their marriage needed nurturing. She had her kids make their own breakfasts so that she could stay up late and greet Hugh after performances.  Telling her children that their father needs her more than they do – at ages 7-12 - seemed bold at first to me but, as she remarks, it is a gift to children to have parents who love each other.

Hugh and Madeleine made time to spend together, but they also valued each other’s independence. She quotes Chekhov, “If you never commit yourself, you never express yourself, and yourself becomes less and less significant and decisive. Calculating selfishness is the annihilation of self.” She mentions that she didn’t feel she had to give Hugh all her burdens, and he likely kept some of his difficulties to himself. She also emphasizes the importance of quiet communion: the need to be alone with each other, the need to spend an hour listening together to a Mozart sonata or walking, learning to live in the “Cloud of unknowing”: of God’s mystery, of the next hour, of observing the oneness of creation seen in the image of lovers, of learning that each thing that happens makes a difference everywhere

I can think of relationships where one person in the couple acts as a vampire, sucking the life from the other by being too needy, too possessive. I wonder about the health of relationships in which the wife makes herself a slave to her husband, probably with the best of intentions, but how can she be his helpmeet if she has made herself his doormat? I wonder if there is a risk of being so focused on the salvation of their souls on the part of these subservient wives that they forget to be present in the moment to their husbands, and allow their husbands to suffer spiritually by not offering them opportunities for self-sacrifice? (How’s that for convoluted reasoning? I’m really not trying to say be a difficult wife so that your husband can grow spiritually…)

I think part of what I’m getting at relates to what L’Engle describes so well as the incarnational aspects of marriage: caring for her husband’s dying body, making love with the pressure of fingertips, delighting in being present together, recognizing the Word made present in flesh through the powerful responses to touch. As Hugh is dying, his things and things they have collected make present memories, illustrating the need to touch a thing. Even the house they love, Crosswicks, becomes an emblem of the incarnational aspects of their love, in the experience of rootedness they feel there, and in their connection to people and places. She writes:

“A love which depends solely on romance, on the combustion of two attracting chemistries, tends to fizzle out. The famous lovers usually end up dead. A long-term marriage has to move beyond chemistry to compatibility, to friendship, to companionship. It is certainly not that passion disappears, but that it is conjoined with other ways of love.”

This companionate marriage exists when couples are equally yoked, aware of the need be present to each other, appreciative of the others gift of self, not only taking, not only giving. My husband is frequently reminding me to let other people be generous, not to turn down offers of assistance, but to accept them graciously.


Perhaps frequent separations such as Hugh and Madeleine survived while he was acting and she was giving lectures, force the growth of those other ways of love. After my husband returned from deployment, we had our reunion honeymoon with plenty of fireworks, but it also seems like we’ve settled into a closer relationship than what we had before. Greater confidence in each other? Months of corresponding at a deeper level than “Can you pick up the kids after soccer?” Greater devotion to being attentive to each other during the time we have together? All of these experiences have moved our marriage into a good place for the time being. With the kids moving into adolescence, difficult times lie ahead, but recalling L’Engle’s eloquent reminders to be fully present to others, to be aware that nothing is more important than love, will assist us in the years ahead.

At the end of the book, as she watches her husband suffer multiple setbacks, L’Engle reflects on cancer as a result of consequences – not a punishment – but the effect of choices. She hopes that Hugh’s doctors can be willing to fail – to let him die when all ordinary means are exhausted. She suggests that doctors, like artists and actors and parents and married couples, must live with the risk of failure or betrayal.  After discussing the decision not to prolong artificially Hugh’s life, she writes, “I think of Lady Julian.”Wouldst thou witten thy Lord’s meaning in these things? Wit it well: Love was his meaning.”

After Hugh passes away, L'Engle realizes she does not feel empty like a nutshell, but overfull of memories. And she closes by recalling the poetry of Conrad Aiken that Hugh recited before proposing: “Music I heard with you was more than music, and bread I broke with you was more than bread.” A lovely expression of deep, abiding love.


Some other of her notable observations:

“Coldness of heart has never been (or should never have been) a Christian attribute. It was coldness and hardness of heart that angered Jesus. . . . I remember George MacDonald’s writing that it may be infinitely worse to refuse to forgive than to murder, because the latter may be the impulse of a moment of heat, whereas lack of forgiveness is a cold and deliberate choice of the heart.” (This thrust an icy dagger of self-knowledge in my heart, as I am guilty of turning a cold shoulder and maintaining a freezing silence when offended. Luckily for me, my husband and I, in our 15th year (!) of marriage (not even half of L’Engle’s 40), are learning to recognize the idiosyncrasies that mark our personalities, and as L’Engle writes, they “become endearing, part of the complexity of a partner who has become woven deep into our own selves.”


“There have been times when we have misunderstood each other, demanded too much of each other, been insensitive to the other’s needs. I do not believe there is any marriage where this does not happen. The growth of love is not a straight line, but a series of hills and valleys. I suspect that in every good marriage there are times when love seems to be over. Sometimes these desert lines are simply the only way to the next oasis, which is far more lush and beautiful after the desert crossing than it could possibly have been without it.” Certainly true -- the deployment we just came through was a desert, which was followed by an oasis, and then a rocky patch, and now we in another oasis period, one perhaps less flowery than the first but more lush, richer. Cooler nights, ironically, helped melt my most recent bout of iciness.

Along the same lines, she quotes Yeats:

“But Love has pitched her mansion in
The place of excrement;
For nothing can be sole or whole
That has not been rent.”

“The world of science lives fairly comfortably with paradox. We know that light is a wave, and also that light is a particle. . . I do not find it any more difficult to live with the paradox of a universe of randomness and chance and a universe of pattern and purpose than I do with light as a wave and light as a particle. Living with contradiction is nothing new to the human being.”


“I have read and read and am still wide awake. When I am in bed with Hugh I can lie close to him, my foot touching him, or my hand against him, and be able to relax. When I am alone the night is darker and the wind less friendly. Our marriage has seemed to settle and develop this year into something much warmer and deeper. It is much more quiet and I think this is the way it is going to have to go on growing.”


On imagination and survival:


“How could I live, endure this summer, without imagination? How can anyone even begin to have an incarnational view of the universe without an incredible leap of the imagination? That God cares for us, every single one of us, so deeply that all power is willing to come to us, to be with us, takes all the imagination with which we have been endowed. And how could I get through this summer without affirming the worth and dignity of human beings? Isn’t that what the incarnation was about?”

On marriage as a new creation:


“I do not think that death can take away the fact that Hugh and I are ‘we’ and ‘us,’ a new creature born at the time of our marriage vows, which has grown along with us as our marriage has grown. Even during the times, inevitable in all marriages, when I have felt angry, or alienated, the instinctive ‘we’ remains. And most growth has come during times of trial. Trial by fire.”

On her optimism, in the face of tragedies:


“. . . God is not going to fail with Creation, no matter how abominably we human beings abuse free will, no matter how we keep our own self-interest in mind rather than the working out of a Grand Unified Theory. We talk about how God can come into ‘the flame of incandescent terror’ and purify even the most terrible anguish.” . . . Teaching a course in techniques of fiction involves sharing, no matter how indirectly, one’s attitude toward the human endeavor. Maritain wrote that ‘fiction differs from every other art in one respect: it concerns the conduct of life itself.’ Thus any discussion of the writing of fiction is theological, even if God is never mentioned.”


“Prayer is love and love is never wasted.”


“Lady Julian of Norwich wrote: ‘He said not ‘Thou shalt not be troubled, thou shalt not be travailed, thou shalt not be distressed,’ but He said, “thou shalt not be overcome.’ It is God’s will that we take heed to these words, that we may be ever mighty in faithful trust in weal and woe.” Faithful in the small things as well as the great.

Read a book/give a book

If you read Ezra Jack Keats' The Snowy Day today to a small child today, Jumpstart's Read for the Record will donate a copy of that book to a child in need.  Register at http://www.wegivebooks.org/.  An easy way to share the joy of books!

My 4 yr brought home a copy of the book today because her teacher read the book to her class. Although my kids who lived through our North-of-Chicago years can picture what this kind of snow is like, my Southern Belle can only get a taste of the stuff from books like this, a gentle introduction to winter.

Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes

Inspired by beginning A Song for Nagasaki for Reading for Believers, I picked up Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes, a true story retold by Eleanor Coerr, to read one night to the kids. My young listeners were too busy playing to pay attention to the first 30 pages of the story.  And since it is only about 50 pages long, that means they only listened for about a third of the book. But the second third is most moving. The kids couldn’t believe that Sadako actually died. (They were waiting (hoping?) for someone to die in Little House.) How could the author let the main character, a little girl die? Why does the Author of life let anyone young die?

The owners of our local donut shop recently lost their 9 year old daughter, who attended the neighboring Catholic school, to brain cancer. Our children had been praying for her every day at school. They also prayed for my friend, the mother of their friends in Illinois, every day, and she died of cancer recently, too.  Several years ago, we were able to be at the bedside of the kids' young aunt, who also succumbed to brain cancer.  Other friends and family members remain on our prayer list for the time being.


When I was the age of my oldest, the only people I knew who had died were a couple great-aunts and a friend's grandma.  So far these encounters with the deaths of young people haven’t scandalized my kids or given them nightmares about leukemia. No one has asked why our prayers haven’t been answered the way we want them to be answered - maybe because I’ve talked to them about this idea before, maybe because they just aren’t to that level of critical thinking. They’ve been the funerals of three great-grandparents, and even looked in and touched the body of my great-grandmother, the only one with an open casket, without qualms. But those funerals were peaceful events, celebrating long, well-lived lives.


The death of a young person is harder to comprehend. It was brave of the author to write about Sadako. She writes plainly, without sentimentality. The temptation is not to introduce to children the idea they could die any time (although I admit a perverse pleasure in telling my children the gruesome beginnings of some nursery rhymes). The book only hints at the devastation and despair that must have accompanied the deaths caused by the atom bomb – from the immensity of that tragedy the author spares her readers. Instead she directs their empathy toward a particular victim, Sadako, who becomes a face for all those who died.  It is much easier to comprehend, and mourn, an epic tragedy when we "know" one of the sufferers.


The book had several references to the family’s religious practices, but they were described in such a way that the kids didn’t discern anything in contradiction to Catholic practice, nor was the Shinto practice belittled. I appreciated being able to read without having to edit.


Below are photos of statues of Sadako from three different Peace Parks - in Seattle, two statues from the Children's Peace Park in Hiroshima, and the last from Santa Fe.

Historical fiction movies

I’ll continue with my theme lately of what we’ve been watching, because we had a quiet weekend, where mostly what we did was read books and watch movies. The kind of weekend I just love. We talked about going somewhere and doing something, but all we managed was a short trip to the beach to attempt kite flying, splashing in the waves, picking up tarballs, (even with the risk that we might gain powers like Chevy Chase in Modern Problems) and uncovering oddments on the beach: dead pufferfish, a chain of keys, lengths of rope. A massive, ominous, fast moving storm system chased us back home. And now much needed rain is turning the grass green again and delivering temps under 90 for the past week.*

To finish up our relaxed weekend, we dug into some of my finds from the latest trip to the library. In preparation for Decades Day during Homecoming week, I had picked up Forrest Gump for the kids to watch. I’ve had it on my list of things to rewatch ever since we first drove by the exit for Bayou La Baitre, home of the Bubba Gump Shrimp Corp, on the way to the next big town. But my husband warned me that I probably had forgotten most of the things that made it pg-13.

He was right. I was glad he and I previewed it before trying to watch it with the kids while fastforwarding the rough parts. I would have had to fastforward nearly every scene with Jenny. The movie still would have conveyed its memorable perspective on history being made, but I decided to offer something else for family movie time. In the meantime I enjoyed debating with my husby again whether destiny is something you make or if your destiny is mapped out for you. Forrest certainly seems to be blown about by his destiny, just by chance being in the right place at the right time, while Jenny tries to forge her own destiny and nearly dies in her attempt to become a musician.  I'm actually sorry we didn't let the older kids watch the movie because it provides fodder for a number of different conversations - talks about loyalty, drug use, how to live your life well, true love, ...


The movie the kids picked out was Gone with the Wind - yes, I had forgotten some of the parts that make it somewhat inappropriate for kids, but it was so oblique in its romantic references that the youngers didn’t catch that Scarlett was acting little better that Belle Whatley, and that at heart she was actually a darker character. How Scarlett remains such a memorable heroine while being such a despicable and pathetic person is proof to the power of charisma, or, as the back of the movie box puts it, her “passion for life.” She’s selfish, bossy, greedy, unprincipled, and blind to her faults, but she still has her audience rooting for her survival.
Ironically, the junior class at the older boys’ school chose “1870’s” as their decade for homecoming week. I wondered why a school in the deep south would chose Reconstruction as a period to relive, but instead of dressing like carpetbaggers and their victims, they dressed liked cowboys and Native Americans.


*I actually wrote this last week - now the temps are decidedly below 80 -- Welcome, Autumn!