Les Bon Temps

So I just finished eating about half a bag of chocolate chips while browsing Facebook and sipping good coffee. Tonight the Husband and I will split a bottle of wine and eat some red meat (after the PTO meeting...). Maybe I should bite my nails some more and gossip to someone while I have the chance! Happy Mardi Gras, everyone!

Tomorrow, I'll try to make it through the 3-5 pm hours that seem the hardest to fast and look forward to going to bed early. I have a book of Lenten reflections on literature that I bought some time ago and put away.  I need to find it and put it on the back of the toilet so that I'll be sure to read it daily.  Maybe tomorrow I'll also start cleaning out some of the overstuffed closets around here to get rid of a few more things.

I'm really looking forward to Lent. Something different! A physical and spiritual cleanse! The hope for real change! Conversion! A Resurrection of faith ...

Every year I look forward to the liturgical moments of denial and penance, Lent and Advent. I really hope that my heart will become warmer, my faith stronger. I like having a practical list of things to do for spiritual fitness: Fast. Give. Pray.  

But the weakness of my faith is evident in my superficial sacrifices of sweets and drinks and social media.  I really intend to add in a weekly holy hour, or a holy fifteen minutes in the morning or at night.  Lenten fasts and acts of charity are the easy parts, the doable bullet point items. Action items.  As a doer, I appreciate the challenge of physical abstention and asceticism.  Denying myself to give to others? It happens every day around here. 

What is harder is the third practice, prayer. I need to clear out the overstuffed closet of my mind and spend some time being quiet. We've got the nightly rosary down, although often it is the nightly decade or nightly Our Father, Three Hail Mary's and a Glory Be on busy evenings.  We have our grace before meals and a quick blessing as the kids head out to school.  But I'm so easily tempted to forget to spend any time in prayers of listening or even of noticing.  Last summer at a family retreat, we were supposed to talk about times when we had heard God's voice. It was harder than I thought to put any experiences of God's presence into words. Sometimes I want to excuse myself from being comfortable with the suggestion to "Put yourself in the presence of God" because of my temperament, but I also realize my failure is a weakness rooted in selfishness, in an inability to stop thinking of myself.  Selfishness has to be set aside to experience the real moments of awareness of God: when we stop thinking about ourselves for a moment, and see and love another purely.  Moments of epiphany, recognition, outpourings of love, or admiration, of transcendence, like discovering a good poem or listening to good music or contemplating art aimed at this desire for transcendence, for seeing the essence of something here, the divine incarnated in front of us. Ideally, this blog would be an attempt to capture those moments for remembering. Isn't there some Latin or French word for paying attention that shares a root with a word for prayer? 

Still, I am grateful for the wisdom of the Church in giving us the communal prayers and liturgical rituals, routines and practices for the long seasons of ordinary time when our minds are full to the brim, and finding time for quiet listening or contemplation is difficult.

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The two or three weeks that have passed between the last time I sat down to write have been those kind of weeks. A couple weekends ago, my sister was supposed to visit but instead spent the weekend sick with pneumonia, and I spent the weekend working on school work and entertaining the kids.  My husband take over for an afternoon, so that I could spend some quiet hours at Starbucks grading papers.  The man next to me spent about an hour watching people, and then opened a conversation about the "bank holiday" on the following day (Presidents' Day). Turns out he was a British writer, John Karter if you are curious, on vacation. He writes sports biographies and relationship improvement books, and was interested to learn that I was at that moment working on my writing classes, but I tried to correct his impression that I teach "Writing." I try to teach students to document their sources, construct good thesis statements, and correct run-ons and fragments. But it was an interesting exchange nonetheless. 

I ended up spending the actual Presidents' Day trying to fix my hair. I tried to dye my grays to match the rest of my hair, but instead turned the rest of my hair red. Then I tried to remove that color with an over the counter chemical remover and re-dye it, but instead turned it orange. Big mistake! You would think that by now, in my 40s, I would know the perils of playing with hair dye.  Not so. I had to wear a scarf for a couple days until I could get to a hairdresser. Even making that appointment is an action fraught with anxiety. I spent several hours reading Yelp reviews before I made an appointment for the place that charged slightly less than $200 for a cut and color. Then I cancelled it the next morning and ran to the beauty school and had it done for $35.

Those are lost hours of life.  I know there are a lot of people who regularly spend upwards of $150 every six or eight weeks on their hair.  My husband has encouraged me to go ahead and spend money on my hair. But I just can't do it.  There are so many other ways I'd rather spend that money. And all the money in the world is not  going to make my hair long and beautiful, or give me the face to go with long beautiful hair. I'll just stick with my pony tail and let it turn gray.

Part of the hair emergency was heightened because we had a ball to attend on Friday. It was sponsored by our church, not a fundraiser, but for fellowship - and Mardi Gras, I suppose.  We went in on a table with some friends and danced and danced danced. The dinner was unremarkable, but the band was phenomenal. They played everything from swing to 70's disco, to 80's synth pop, to those 90's dance songs we used to jump up and down to in college, from Garth Brooks to Whitney Houston to Beyonce and whoever else is popular now.  My feet were throbbing at the end of the night. As an added perk we walked out with 2 centerpieces that became another Mardi Gras party decoration.  Added to the flowers from my son's art show that were left over, we had a festive looking house just in time for our big Mardi Gras party on Saturday night.

We spent a long full day getting ready for a Mardi Gras party on Saturday. Cleaning, cleaning, cleaning, throwing up streamers and balloons, making gumbo, spinach brownies, chocolate brownies, hip cakes (AKA butter bars), beans and rice, plain rice, dips for chips and dips for vegetables, and also frosting king cake that didn't quite turn out, sweetening tea, assembling muffaletta,  cutting vegetables, fruit, and cheese, setting up platters and tables. At one point, the Evite said 54 people were coming (kids included) - plus I had invited another 10 or so people by text or word of mouth, and ourselves. I started to worry about running out of forks on Friday, but didn't have time to get more because Friday was filled with a strategic planning meeting at the high school in the morning and then the fancy dinner dance for our church in the evening.

Only about 40 people ended up coming - and they all brought food and wine. I had run out to buy more wine at the last minute, but now we'll have to have an Easter party to drink up what is left. I'm planning to hide it down in the garage so we aren't tempted during Lent.

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I have done lots of reading lately - mainly as a form of mental escape.  Working my way through and loving a collection of Neil Gaiman essays. One of the early essays describes his indebtedness to Tolkien, Lewis, and Chesterton - the formative authors of his youth.  I also have a collection of Mary Oliver's observations checked out that I've been dipping into for nostalgic flashbacks to a childhood spent playing in the woods and around the ponds near our midwestern home. I also finally read the Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz.  I kept reading it, but didn't love it. As a portrait of a, well, loser, it reminded me of a Dominican Confederacy of Dunces, which was a book I couldn't stand. This one has more heart, and I can understand why it is beloved, but it won't make my list of favorites.

Meanwhile, I loved almost all of Sherman Alexie's The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian.  Heartwarming, insightful, funny. I wanted to shove it into the hands of my kids and say, "Here, read this and get an idea of how other people deal with the hardships of life. Read and see how much you have in common with a poor Native American teenager, even though you are a middle class white teenager - and see how lucky you are and think this kid the next time you see someone who seems a little lonely walking around the halls of high school."  BUT, there's a chapter about how he sneaks porn magazines and masturbates in the bathroom. WHY? I know, I know, this little confession is supposed to humanize the kid and help others empathize and maybe make some kids think they aren't alone. But why, really? The book is good enough without that little confession. I don't want sneaking in the bathroom to look at porn to be normalized, even if that's what adolescent boys have been doing for generations. This book is on a number of reading lists and if the kids came across it and read it, I would hope that they would focus on the good parts, but it's too weird for your mom to give you a book with that scene in it.

Which reminds me, my ninth grader is going through the health curriculum on reproduction right now. We've had some moderately good conversations, but now is when I miss being a part of a community where other families are around who have more than two or three kids. That's what I want normalized: big, happy families who are too busy enjoying each others' company to worry about interior decorating and fancy cars or hairdresser and aesthetician appointments. We haven't quite found that crowd here. And that's why when my husband mentions that we might be able to stay here longer, I weigh the difficulties of moving with the pleasures of perhaps finding a community of like-minded families... but I also recognize that the ease of imagining that community is not as easy as actually finding it.

Time to postpone that decision - perhaps in Lent I will pray that God's voice will speak clearly about what to do - and eat some chocolate chip cookies. My daughter has been busy baking while I type!

Gymnast

Fancy hair - on a sunny hike. 

Cold hike

This was another dinner out to a fundraiser before dying my hair. Why did I bother? 

Ball dress - wearing my great-great aunt's lace dress. Had to remake the underslip and reinforce the seams before heading out to cut a rug... can you tell my hair is darker? 

Mardi Gras party girl

Wordless stories

I think I have mentioned that one of my favorite days of the week is Tuesday, when we go to a mom and tot exercise class and then head to the library for toddler storytime, followed by play at the park when the sun is shining, and I don't have anything else pressing.

Our library stocks a lot of new books and displays them temptingly along the top shelf in the children's section.  In the years between our youngest moving on from picture books to this newest one, some very lovely picture books have been published.  Also some very dull and ugly books have been put in print - I really can't stand to read Dora books, and Pinkalicious books are almost as trying. I was jubilant when an errant Pinkalicious easy reader was rediscovered behind the dresser. I did not want to have to pay for a replacement copy at the library. Why do I check these out? It is kind of a give and take agreement.  I have the same terms with my teenagers: you can read this stupid YA fairy tale knockoff romance if you read a book of my choice every 2 or 3 books.  I will read Pinkalicious if we can also look at my picture book pics.

Fortunately, we have discovered several that we both love.

The Carl the Dog series by Alexandra Day was not new to me, but there are some additional books in the series that I had never seen before. I really liked Carl's Sleepy Afternoon and Carl's Snowy Afternoon. In both books, the expressions on the children and Carl are what draw me in. LCJ really pored over Good Dog Carl and the Baby Elephant, the newest book, which wasn't my favorite since it had more text and a less believable story line, although the adventures of a baby and a Rottweiler about town on their own requires quite a bit of suspension of disbelief.


Carl's negligent baby sitter

Why doesn't Madeleine's mom catch on?

Similarly enchanting because of the facial expressions are the Flora books by Molly Idle. I don't like to keep these in the house too long because they are pop-up books and thus easily damaged, but they are beautiful in their simplicity:

Here is Flora and the Flamingo from Amazon.com:

Flora and the Penguin from the author's delightful blog

:
And Flora and the Peacocks:

Flora is graceful and expressive in her toddler body. And right now my toddler is entranced by dance and music and colors, so she enjoys these books immensely. I wish I were organized enough to come up with a soundtrack to go with them -  maybe something along the lines of the international dances from the Nutcracker would fit the mood?

Another find that brings great amusement to the toddler are the Where's Walrus books by Stephen Savage. These books, too, could have a fun musical accompaniment, something along the lines of a Keystone Kops caper song. Here's a fun video promo:

Here's an image from Where's Walrus? Where's Penguin?

I love to discover the toddler sitting on the couch studying a book.  The other image that brings me joy is seeing the 10 and 12 year olds equally enthralled by these picture books. A good story well illustrated appeals to all ages.

Closing with a haiku by Basho - wish I could remember where I came across it, but i - that seems to express something of the homesickness for the idea of home, or nostalgia for an age that never really existed. In many ways wordless picture books are very akin to haiku.

Even in Kyoto -

Hearing the cuckoo's cry -

I long for Kyoto. 

I checked the punctuation here.

At the cinema

The Oscars are coming up pretty soon, and while I don't plan to watch, we have actually seen more recent movies this year than in the past. This viewing trend began over Christmas vacation with Hacksaw Ridge and Silence and is now slowing down, but the past two weekends in a row we went to the base theater to watch movies that were very different in subject and style but had a similar feel.

First we saw La La Land. Actually, I went with just my 14 year old daughter and her friend, which is a different experience than going to the movies with my husband and the whole crew.  It was opening night for this show at the base, but we were some of the younger people at the theater. I've never seen so many white heads at a show there. The base theaters tend to show a lot of action flicks and dumb comedies to appeal to their primary audience, young sailors. So this musical romance attracted a different crowd.  This phenomenon interested me; I wonder how the word got out.

I can see why this movie appealed to an older generation, on that grew up with shows that featured music and dancing.  Someone told me that the movie was refreshingly clean, but I was still a little on guard for anything inappropriate.  There might have been a few bad words, but from the very opening, the ensemble song and dance routine on the jammed up LA highway, I was charmed.

And the movie continues to be charming.  The cinematography is color-drenched during the happy parts, the dance numbers are fun; the songs are sweet; the dresses are pretty. Although neither of the stars, Ryan Gosling nor Emma Stone, are strong vocalists, they are good dancers together. The scenes featuring Griffith Park and all the Priuses on the LA roadways are familiar. The movie feels like it could have been made 50 years ago - hence, the age of the crowd? - but it also has an immediacy that makes you feel like not everyone in Hollywood is involved in conspiracies and murder mysteries.

The movie is much fresher and cleaner than most movies rated PG-13, although there are some bad words, and about halfway through the movie, the two stars, who have fallen in love, move in with each other. (No heavy love scenes, fortunately) After their initial romance, which is all bright colors and bright songs, the movie takes on a more muted tone, a minor key.  Both Gosling and Stone, as Seb and Mia, are dream chasers: he wants to be a jazz musician and she wants to be an actress. Seb's apartment is bland and poor looking; Mia lives with friends in a cute, colorful, feminine apartment. Both are struggling when they meet, but Seb finds success - big success - with a former high school friend who has a jazz band that plays contemporary jazz.  Their group tours and sells albums and has a fan base. However, Seb isn't playing the kind of music he wants to play. Meanwhile, Mia has a spectacular failure in her self-authored one-woman show, which she pens after failing audition after audition.

In between Seb's success and Mia's failure, their romance falters. Mia questions Seb's integrity as a musician, and Seb questions Mia's idealism.  They accuse each other of jealousy of their success or passion for their dreams.  In tears, Mia runs away home to start over again and mourn her broken dreams. Seb pursues her when he answers a call from a producer interested in Mia's writing.

SPOILER ALERT:

The two briefly reunite, and Seb apparently leaves the band. But their relationship is still doomed: Mia's new writing gig requires her to go to Paris. In a touching scene back at the Griffith Observatory, they split apart to pursue their dreams.

The ending challenges what has so far been a predictable movie.  Flash forward five years: Mia is a big success; she is married to a guy who looks like the guy she broke up with to be with Seb initially, and they have a toddler. She and her husband head out to an event, get jammed up in LA traffic, and stop at what turns out to be Seb's successful jazz club. Seb and Mia lock eyes, and he begins to play their theme song, while a dreamlike sequence of what might have been plays for the audience. For a minute, the audience wonders, Is it a return to the beginning? Is Mia going to leave her husband and child? But as she leaves with her husband, she and Seb share a secret smile exchange that seems to say "Congratulations and goodbye."

So the ending is a big let down and feels a little unbelievable.   If it had been 10 years later, or if Mia were only on a date and ran into Seb, it might feel more natural. Five years isn't very long to get over a romance that seems to be the real thing, then become a big success, get married and have a small child.  They didn't write or call each other? Social media? Mia never knew Seb finally gets his club?

Regardless of the timing, the ending raises a few questions: Do the two have to sacrifice their relationship to realize their dreams?  Is the conclusion saying that two dreamers can't live together?  I felt that there was a subtext that Mia was more heroic in a way than Seb because he had some dumb lines, but I'm not sure that this is fair. While he may seem stubborn and convinced of his own talent and vision, he apparently does have talent. Meanwhile, Mia's acting ability is dubious. But apparently her storytelling is better because she makes it as a writer, although how many writers have their pictures on a billboard, as she does? And the story she tells to the producer in her audition for the writing job, seems a little weak - maybe because she sings it.

Is the ending a critique of dreamers - showing them to be selfish? - or a celebration of the dedication that it takes to realize a dream?  Were Seb and Mia jealous of each other, or too dedicated to their own dreams to help the other make it?  Is their love not the picture perfect relationship it seems to be at first? Is their art more valuable than their relationship? Perhaps it depends on where you stand on the platitude urging to Pursue Your Dreams Whatever the Cost.

I halfway believe that truly genius artists are somewhat doomed to be loners - because they have to be wed to their genius, like a contemplative religious. Perhaps because - true or not - artists often seem to be mentally unbalanced in a way, either manic-depressive or monomaniacal or something that gives them a different vision of the world. But in La La Land, the characters don't seem mentally unbalanced at all.  In order to realize their dreams, they can't give their relationship the energy it needs to survive, although they can invest in other relationships. (How Mia manages a handsome, seemingly successful husband, a toddler, and a pretty house in addition to writing is the happy fiction. I was glad that she walked away with her husband and didn't run up to Seb.)

So final assessment, I'm glad I saw La La Land because of the pleasure it brings in the first hour and a half, overlooking the shack up. It's fun entertainment.  I really, really enjoyed watching it. I'd see it again.  But since I'm still puzzling about the ending, I'm not running out and telling everyone to go see it.

*****

Because of this slight disappointment, when we walked into the theater to watch another highly recommended film, Hidden Figures, I was afraid of losing my enthusiasm.  This is the story of the three black women who work as calculators for NASA at Langley Field during the early 60's as the space program is building up. This movie I give an unqualified two thumbs up, even though there were several points where the plot could have become troubled. Surprise! No dark turns, no over-dramatization of failure and corruption. The characters face challenges, but they succeed!  Go see this movie, and take the family!

Based on a true story, the characters are bright and motivated students and conscientious employees in a white male dominated business. The three main characters are working moms - all three have young children at home. And their homes seem happy. Two are married, but the main character, Katherine Johnson, is a widow.  She meets a man at a church picnic, and I kept fearing that he would turn unfaithful or something negative would happen, but their relationship develops positively, and he proposes marriage to her and her three girls. Happily, the notes at the end of the movie report their marriage lasted 56 years until their deaths.

In addition to highlighting the challenges that these three women faced during segregation, the movie also alludes to the advancements in technology occuring so rapidly at this time.  While Katherine is involved in calculating landing locations for the first manned space flight, and her friend Mary Jackson studies to become NASA's first black female engineer (even though she is already doing the job), the third character, Dorothy Vaughan, works her way to becoming NASA's first black female supervisor, moving up from unofficially overseeing the black female computers, to overseeing a whole department of computer programmers, because she realizes the future will be about adapting to the changes the come with the enormous IBM computer - the giant, room-sized version of the machine. This machine presents Dorothy with the challenge of potentially becoming outdated and out of a job.  So while Katherine proves her worth by catching other people's - and the machine's mistakes - and by seeing alternative explanations, and Mary goes before a judge to petition to go to graduate school at an all white male night school program so she can become an engineer, Dorothy goes to the library, learns Fortran and how to program the IBM, and then teaches it to all the women in her department.

This movie also harkens back to an earlier time that seem full of possibility.  It seems like a fairy tale that all three of these women succeed.  Mary goes on to be NASA's first African American woman engineer, Katherine continues to work there as a strategist, and Dorothy teaches the white women how to program. They all had long successful careers at NASA for decades.

These women achieved great success by working hard, looking forward, and maintaining their dignity.  I haven't seen a movie this uplifting in a long time.

I read an article not that long ago about how these movies that are filled with nostalgia for a better time are a part of the political desire to return to this era of technicolor possibilities.  I can't remember where the article was, and I don't have time to look it up, but I'm not sure I entirely agree with the premise.  It's not unique to today to look backward warmly.  And it is worthwhile as well as wholeheartedly entertaining to revisit success stories of heroes like these previously hidden women of NASA, and to celebrate arts like ballroom dancing and jazz that are often overshadowed by more lucrative performances.

Hiking around

After all the glorious rain of the past couple of weeks, we went on a gentle three mile hike at one of the more underused inland parks about 30 minutes away. It was a small park across the street from a longer, more strenuous hike, but since we had only a couple hours, we avoided the crowds at the popular hike and went to the lesser known one. And I think we were rewarded. In addition to seeing only a couple other hikers, we saw all kinds of song birds, interesting fungi, and even a few clumps of narcissus, which must have been naturalized from someone who lived in this area years and years ago because no house foundation was in evidence. I hardly ever see daffodils or narcissus or even tulips here in California. Perhaps it doesn't get cold enough for bulbs to bloom perennially. But a little rain revived these and filled the manmade lake that graced our view from the high spot on our hike.  The hike was just the right length: short enough to avoid complaints from our younger companions, but long enough to restore the spirits of us older folks with fresh air and mild exertion in a place of beauty. 

My new shirt from my older son's girlfriend: a quote from Cervantes about the dangers of reading

Sisters

And today we celebrate the birth of this fine fellow 17 years ago.