Forced Penance

I've been haunted by Job this week.  Troubles are cascading; am I being tested?

Over the weekend, we got a letter from the middle school saying our son was on the "Choices" list, which means he can't compete in after-school sports - in other words, the track team, of which I am one of the coaches.  I know he got a referral one day for playing a video game in class (I'm ready to join a crusade against computers in the classroom - a topic for another day), but to be on Choices list requires three referrals, or two U's in citizenship (he did get one from the same teacher who gave him the referral), or a suspension. He can't remember anything else he did. I've heard nothing from the school about him being in trouble. I'm hoping it's a mistake, but the school is on spring break.

Tuesday I got a $240 ticket for rolling a stop sign. I didn't even realize I did it; I wasn't in a hurry. I wasn't intentionally thinking, "Oh, good, no one's coming, I'll just go."  It was just morning.

Then the pilot light on the stove was not igniting the gas again. I decided I could just clean out the lighter with a paper clip like the repair guy did when he came. But the little pilot clicker didn't
hold still - it ducked into the stove top. I'll just take off the stove top, I thought. This is nigh impossible. When the way to access it wasn't obvious, I got on youtube and watched a video. Then I started unscrewing screws, one of which dropped into the oven netherlands, which caused an additional excavation.  An hour later, my husband came home, kicked me out and fixed it in about 5 minutes. I got stuck cleaning up the rat droppings and crusted pancake batter behind the stove. I know the pancake batter is old. I'm hoping the rat droppings are remnants of the rodents we haven't seen since plugging in little ultrasonic emitters. The stove is still not lighting well, so I have to call the repair guy anyway. At least our landlord has a warranty.

Yesterday I started off the morning consoling my fifth grader who didn't want to go to school. This is the child at the parish school. The other kids are on spring break.  (What have we done? Go to Target and Michaels, clean house, and make a short trip to the beach. This is not even a staycation. It is just time off school. Which is enough, I suppose. I did take the middle schooler on a hike with friends - my friends. The oldest has worked at the candy store every day. The freshman has been finding friends to hang around with. Two have been to a movie.)

At any rate, the fifth grader wouldn't get out of bed. She doesn't like her teacher, who apparently really is unkind, as one parent approached me at the jogathon the other day and asked if I would join the committee to get her fired. I demurred, but I wonder if she will come back next year.  I finally convinced the fifth grader to get out of bed by promising to go to Mass with her that morning and taking her out early on Friday, which was already my plan as the kids are going camping.

Then I called the PT clinic, where I'm finally going to get treatment of plantar fasciitis that won't go away, to reschedule a Friday appointment. Turns out I was supposed to be there right then. I rescheduled for an hour to avoid the fee for not showing up and then rescheduled a walk I had planned with a friend.  The treatment includes a deep tissue massage of the bottom of my foot, so I love it.  But on the way home, as I was crossing the long, high bridge to our neighborhood, I felt the car begin to shake. I thought the front bumper was coming off because I scraped it across a piece of rebar sticking out of a concrete parking border the other day.  The bridge has no shoulder. The speed limit is 60. This is the bridge that is so high that suicidal people who want a sure death jump from it. I envisioned the bumper dragging in the street and the car stalling out and Caltrans having to shut down the bridge to rescue me. But I made it across and pulled over as soon as the road had a shoulder.  It wasn't the bumper but a blown out tire - not just a flat, but a shred.  As I was talking to our insurance company to request roadside assistance - I didn't even think to try to change the tire myself - A spare? Why, yes, we have one - the Caltrans guys showed up.  They had my spare on in no time. Hurray, Caltrans!

An hour later, the car was dropped off at the Autoport, an estimate for new tires, an alignment and a brake inspection for several hundred dollars signed off on, and I walked home. A friend was coming for dinner and to drop off his car for us to store while he is on deployment. After a trip to the grocery store, some deep cleaning, and a little park time with the toddler, I got a call from the dermatology clinic. The spot I had removed a couple weeks ago is a basal cell carcinoma. The good news is that basal cell carcinomas are easy to treat and slow growing, noninvasive cancers. Both my parents have had multiple spots. The bad news is that, like rats, if you have one, you probably will get more. So now I will have to go to dermatology clinics regularly for the rest of my life. And be better about wearing sunscreen.

Our friend showed up shortly after that call. He ended up having plans for dinner.  I had just made carbonara, which the kids are happy to have left over.

After the kids were finally in bed, I checked email. I had mentioned doing the landscaping to the landlord, and he had agreed to reimburse for the costs, so I had sent him photos of the work and receipts.  It turns out his wife had plans to have an irrigation system and weed barrier installed, which are probably necessities.  I should have confirmed with them before proceeding. So now I will be digging out everything I spent days planting.  (I was happy, however, that at least my efforts were recognized with a yellow ribbon certificate from the garden show committee.  Our town has a big garden show the second weekend in April. A committee judges all the front yards, as well as the entries that are submitted in many categories.)

Better than dirt.

The happy side effect of this bad news is that my kids have been sympathetic and helpful around the house, as has my husband.  The weather has been beautiful, as are all the flowers blooming right now. And in the back of my mind, I am thinking of the people I have on my list to prayer for: a friend with a daughter on meth, a friend with aggressive ovarian cancer, someone whose husband deserted the family, a friend whose mother just died, that family that lost three children to the same genetic disorder, all the families that will be fed from the meals that we packaged on Saturday - which likely will be their only meal of the day.

All around me people are struggling with much, much darker and heavier troubles than my problems with cars and clinics.  And all around me I see much, much for which to be grateful.  One of the blessings of Lent has been frequent reminders to be grateful, to recognize my own selfishness and limitations, to trust that all will be well.

And it is. My family is healthy, my husband loves me, we have a home and a community that supports us and plenty to eat.  And my sister is coming to visit! Hurray!

God is good, all the time.

Life in Lent

We are over halfway through Lent.  I love Lent, even though I am not doing such a great job of staying off Facebook (I just intend to look at a pending house rental, or wish this person happy birthday, or see this picture of my kid someone posted, but then I scroll through 20 posts.... I am struggling with an addiction I claim not to have!) nor am I going to bed early (maybe twice I've made it to bed before 11). I haven't eaten sweets, but I have had wine on Sundays (does after the vigil Saturday night count as Sunday? Another sacrifice I thought would be easier to make.)

On the other hand, I have been reading lots.  And praying more  - which is easier because our Church is offering such wonderful resources: 24 hours of adoration and confession, a healing Mass, Soup and Stations on Fridays, a Lenten study for moms with free babysitting, a Taize service, etc.  They have all been beautiful, especially the 24 hours of adoration. It is so peaceful to sit in church in the darkness of midnight.  I don't know that I hear God's voice speaking, but my heart is open and full.

And we have also had the opportunity to do some extra acts of service. Today the teens served breakfast at the homeless shelter and then we all worked at a food packaging event where we filled bags of meals composed of soy protein, spices and dehydrated vegetables, and rice. 50,000 meals were packed. It was pretty amazing and productive, as well as a fun social activity. I love opportunities like this to get together with people we don't know well but want to know better.

I also love the quiet, introspective time of Lent. The freedom to say no to extra social events.  The greater dedication to acts of corporal and spiritual mercy, the greater focus on what is essential. Attention seems heightened. Affection comes easier.  Causes for adoration are plentiful.I just read a good article about why Catholics love Lent by Fr. Raymond de Souza in the National Catholic Register.  It mentions the extra devotionals offered by parishes and beloved by parishioners - as well as non-Catholics who love Stations or Taize, or other devotions, and come to be fed, but it also notes how penance and discipline suit us:

"We proclaim ourselves an Easter people, but we are not quite ready for a life fulfilled by singing the praises of God, as we will in heaven. Lent, though, seems to correspond to where we find ourselves, perhaps sitting for a while in the ashes of disappointment or failure, or perhaps in need of timely encouragement to take up anew the discipline of the Christian life.Easter may indeed give us a foretaste of heaven, but Lent provides support while we still eat the bread of affliction.Why is Lent our favorite season? Perhaps because it best gives to us what we need on the journey, having not yet arrived at the feast."

The anticipation of the future and the pleasures mixed with the pains of long journeys bear testament to the predilection for the journey.
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Another good article: "Stuff Nobody Wants" by John Horvat.  We have a lot of that around here. But this article takes a different look at that stuff. He sees in it a connection to the past and to familial roots. The loss of respect or understanding of the provenance of things can be traced back to the breakdown of the nuclear family and to the loss of the familial stories about our heritage and our family identity."Just as most individuals see themselves as unlinked to others, so also most families today see themselves as a social unit without connection to others—even their own.

"Thus, the modern nuclear family does not see itself as a continuation of a family tradition. Its members do not see the need to maintain an old home or property that should be kept “in the family.”
To them, the family is just the sum of living members composed of a father, mother, and children. Once one reaches adulthood, the individual becomes an autonomous being with few binding obligations and no need for the old stuff of their parents.
This is so contrary to the traditional notion of the family. Throughout history, the family has always been understood to mean the unbroken unity of the whole lineage of ancestors and descendants."

I have thought often about this, mostly in relation to my own longing to be rooted to a place and to be closer to family. I have thought that my relics handed down from my grandparents and relatives are accessories to our way of being rooted in a transient lifestyle. I want to return to our ancestral home, but as we leave little bits of our selves across the country, and learn to love places that we originally only tolerated, our roots have spread - perhaps more shallow than deep, but someday we will pause and be still.

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Another penance of Lent: Doing taxes and college financial aid paperwork, which are oh so painful, but finished!  I spent hours filling out forms - online - and calculating and recalculating to make sure I did everything correctly.  Glad to have that behind me for now. It did raise some awareness of the complexities of being self-employed, even though technically I'm not.

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Is it a penance to get a letter from the school about misbehavior? Yes, most definitely it is a lesson in humility, but also in patience in waiting for a response after spring break, especially since I question that the punishment fits the crime.

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Is it penance to try to potty train? Yes. I have cleaned up many accidents this week, but the toddler is at last interested in using the potty. I owe her new underpants. As much as I looked forward to potty training, it makes me realize that this unexpected baby is no longer a baby, and it makes me sad. Her third birthday is in just a few weeks. She has been - and will continue to be, I'm sure, - such a source of light and life. She is generous with hugs and amusing facial expressions. She is cuddly and independent. I want her to stay small as much as I anticipate her growing up.  I have loved having a baby in the house at the same time we are sending college students out of the house, even though that was not my initial thought.

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During the past few weeks of Lent, I have also done a lot of reading. The book selection at the library has been good, and a couple of people loaned me books. I want to write about them, but it's too late now, so it will have to wait for another time.

Till then, may peace remain!

Packing up meals

A job for everyone

Art enthusiast

Artsy photos at the art museum

Making art

Admiring the blooms at the Japanese Friendship garden.

A dress I made for a niece 12 years ago. 

Broken stuff I can't seem to fix or throw away.

Travels

We spent the past weekend in Tucson, Arizona, where our two college boys were playing rugby in a fundraiser tournament.  Three of the four younger kids complained daily about having to go; the fourth had her little suitcase packed days in advance and played a game called "Going to Arizona"  until the moment we walked out the door, and then we were really going to Arizona. Her enthusiasm finally infected the others that morning, and for the most part they were good traveling companions. 

The complainers finally accepted the inevitability of their fate, and so the drive was pleasant.

This trip was oriented around seeing the big boys, so we didn't do much site-seeing or hiking, but we did get a good introduction to desert life.  For short time in southeastern California, we drove through the dunes that fit the stereotypical image of deserts from cartoons and movies. I was surprised to see RVs parked at parking lot campgrounds. My husband thinks they were dune buggy people.  For a short time, we could see the wall separating California from Mexico that already exists. I also was fascinated by the enormous cattle farms that spring out of the desert. Here are these hundreds of thousands of cows packed under shelters that are basically a roof covering a feeding trough. Row after row after row of hamburger meat stood lined up with little room to move. Their water must be trucked in? They have no green fields for grazing, and no room for them to move even if there had been fields. I thought I'd been exposed to large animal farms from growing up in Indiana and living in Virginia and driving through the midwest all those years, but these are farming on a ten times greater scale. Who thinks of raising cows in the desert? Someone who has a farm that produces noxious odors that can be smelled for miles.

On the drive I read a picture book about the Saguaro cactus to the toddler, and it caught the interest of the others in the vehicle, so once we entered the Sonoran desert area, they all started to pick their favorites with their funny arms. I was fascinated by some green trees that I had never seen before that were used as landscaping plants along the highway.  The sunset Friday night as we drove was just as brilliantly hued as you would imagine a desert sunset, although it was behind us, and once the full moon rose, it provided enough light to see the forms of the cacti and further in the distance, the mountains.

We stayed at an Air Force Lodge in one of their Temporary Lodging Facilities. These facilities are designed to accommodate service members who are on temporary duty or who are preparing to PCS, but when they are empty, they are rented to active duty on leisure travel. They are a perk of military life that we discovered late in the career, but intend to make use of as much as possible. For $68 a night, we have a recently remodeled two bedroom apartment, full kitchen, pull out couch, portacrib, a safe place to park, and the commissary was right across the street. Makes traveling much more affordable.

After a breakfast from the convenience store, and a visit over coffee with the rugby players, we had a few hours for being tourists before the rugby game. Some friends had recommended the Arizona Sonoran Desert Museum, and although my husband wanted to just drive out to the Saguaro National Park, I was in the mood for something educational and thought the kids would enjoy it more than a hike.  When we were discussing our options, I realized how powerful personal recommendations are; I usually prefer less mediated interactions with nature, like visiting national parks, and am always looking for ways to save money, but for once, I really wanted to see this museum and could justify the cost because it was educational and something like a donation to a conservation organization. And it was a great place - museum is almost a misleading term. It was more crowded than I expected, and bigger, so that we didn't have time to see everything. It was part zoo, part botanical garden, part art museum (although we missed the art gallery to my dismay), and part natural history museum. A recreated cave was a highlight for the kids, as was a archaeology exhibit with fossils cast in concrete that they could chip away at. I loved having labels for all of the wildflowers and interesting plants. I learned the green trees were the Palo Verde, which stores chlorophyll in its bark as an adaptation to the desert climate and I know recognize by name the ocotillo and the chollo, in addition to the saguaro, the barrel, and the prickly pear cacti. I struggle to remember the names of the hardy western wildflowers that are so different from the delicate woodland ones I am a familiar with from childhood, but they were blooming in profusion.

The rugby game itself would be better forgotten. The Arizona team crushed the Notre Dame team. They were bigger, stronger, faster, and more skilled with the ball. Our team was missing six seniors who chose to go on a spring break trip, and they looked pale and pasty in the hot Arizona sun after being in the cold north all winter. They also had just started practicing a few weeks ago, but I know at least my two boys were playing on little sleep after a rough week of midterm exams that just ended. Our band of fans was dispirited and wilting. We had to revive with one price Big Gulps from the gas station next to the field, another highlight for the younger kids.

After the game, after the hot and exhausted players showered, we joined the team for dinner at a Mexican restaurant. It was only so-so food, but the company was good, and the couple that sponsored the charity foundation paid for the team's dinner.  I wondered if the cost of dinner depleted any funds that were made from the game. I also wondered what it might be like to receive a diagnosis that three of your four children are going to die, and then have to watch them die.  How do you go on? Yet here was this couple, smiling and laughing with all these big grown boys surrounding them, eating their food.  Perhaps the only way to continue is to turn yourself inside out and keep giving. 

The next morning we went to early Mass and were grateful that Arizona doesn't change time for daylight savings.  The visiting priest must have been a chaplain at the university because he mentioned the inspirational quotes in college classrooms as he gave a really good homily about the quote from St. Irenaeus of Lyon, "The glory of God is man alive; the life of man is a vision of God," which he illustrated with the story of Eric Liddell, of Chariots of Fire fame, (which my kids don't remember watching - correction time!) and the story of Malcolm Muggeridge's conversion after doing a story on St.Mother Teresa for the British press - BBC maybe? I knew the story that Muggeridge had converted from his Something Beautiful for God, but I don't remember hearing that after the crew filmed Mother and her sisters in the dimly lit home for the dying, a former temple to the Hindu goddess of darkness, and viewed the tape thinking nothing would show up, they discovered that on the film the sisters seemed to emanate a warm soft light that bathed the house with a glow bright enough to illuminate all the footage of them serving the poor and dying. When we got in the car and commented on what a good homily it was, all of the kids agreed that even they had listened! It helped that the priest had a deep sonorous voice and great delivery. Maybe he was a missionary.

We grabbed our bigger boys from the hotel for breakfast at the "Sunny Daze" cafe that is famous for "Sunny puffs," which turn out to be like little beignets that the waitresses bring around to everyone while waiting for pancakes and eggs. Then is was good bye to the boys who were going to mass at the Newman Center at U of A before boarding a bus and going to the Flagstaff area for some training and then more games in Phoenix for the rest of their spring break. 

On the way home, the baby cried, sad to leave her little house, while the other siblings were happy to be getting home in time for dinner and homework.  We still had time for a quick stop in Yuma to see some friends stationed there, and to give thanks that it wasn't us stationed there, even though the downtown area where we met them for a late lunch had charm and an odd vibe of old west kitschiness.  And they have made wonderful friends through bonding with the rest of the military people exiled to the base on the outskirts of town. It is so hot in the summer that it is illegal to walk dogs during the heat of the day. 

And then home: unpack, reset, ready for the next adventure. Baby is keeping her suitcase packed with toys. 

Blossoms from my Fruit Salad tree

My photo of the green branches of the Palo Verde didn't turn out so well

Studying the chollo

Bat ears

Malachite

Desert blooms

Young paleotologists

A friendly squirrel

Sleeping coyote

Saguaro love

Rugby

Not letting go

Brotherly love