The last days of February

Being back on a college campus to visit the older boys always brings me joy. I love walking around the quads, eating in the dining hall, sitting for coffee in the basement of the Arts and Letters building, going to Mass in the beautiful basilica where so many young heads bowed in prayer gives me joy. It all brings back memories, although the campus has changed; there are lots of new buildings, and older ones on the main quad are slated to be bulldozed and rebuilt. I'm not sure how the university funds all this building nor why they are spending so much on structures and infrastructures.

It also brings to heart the fact that campus is the boys' home most of the year now.  And they will be returning to our home less and less. Someone in the university world must have realized that Junior year marks a transition when they planned this parents' weekend.  Students are looking for summer internships and trying to make job decisions about the future that may take them far from home. They are turning 21, and some have real relationships that may become lifelong ones. I enjoyed meeting the boys' friends, who seem like well-meaning, earnest, and hopeful young people.  I think they are discovering the consolations of having long hours for studying and talking late into the night.

The weekend has a loose program but leaves plenty of time for visiting. I arrived late Thursday and stopped by campus for a quick hug and to drop off some clothes I had brought. Then I stayed with a friend whose husband now works for the university. Friday morning, I met the boys for breakfast at my favorite coffee shop on campus, and then went to Italian class with my second oldest, because the junior had two engineering classes on Friday that I don't think I could have stayed awake for. I thoroughly enjoyed sitting in on the small Italian class, which is a condensed conversational class geared for the students going to study in Rome next year, including all of the architecture students (not all were in this class.) The professor was a British woman teaching Italian at an Indiana college. She was funny and charming. I wished I could go to more humanities classes, but Ben had studio after lunch and Joe had an engineering class. After having lunch at the dining hall with some of the boys' friends (the girls were glad I got to lay eyes on some of the young ladies who show up in Ben's instagram posts), Joe walked me all over campus (that night his fitbit, which he received free + $20/month for being a part of a professor's study on college students and sleep, read over 20000 steps - over 10 miles) to show me the new buildings and his favorite places. Walking and talking, my favorite combo. 

While they were in their afternoon classes, I went back to my friends' to change for the evening. I had the wrong clothes all weekend, since I don't have dress up clothes for the winter. (Now I want to revamp my whole wardrobe, which is out of date and too casual.) Then back to campus where I met the boys at Mass and then took them out to dinner in South Bend. We went to a restaurant, Fiddler's Hearth, that didn't exist when I was there. It was a great recreation of an Irish pub, and the food was surprisingly good, even for Friday in Lent. We didn't stay late enough to hear the band, which was setting up as we left to go back to campus for the Friday gala, which involved walking around meeting parents and students and trying to talk over loud music. Since it was Friday in Lent, I didn't have any wine, but many of the other parents did. This is the kind of event where I missed my husband, who stayed home with the other kids (he'll go back to campus for a football game next fall); he is much better at small talk than I am.

Saturday was equally full. The morning was devoted to a breakfast and open house with the engineering department. I did really enjoy hearing the head of the college and the head of the mechanical engineering department speak about the application of engineering toward making the world a better place. Although they mentioned the employability of engineering majors, they also spoke about contributions engineers make toward humanitarian causes - sustainable energy and access to resources for people in underserved areas, prosthetics, nanotechnology and improvements in medical treatments and computing - and the one professor tied his talk to Levin from Anna Karenina and his advancements in agricultural technologies and practices. He claimed the book was more Levin's story than Anna's. The way to a liberal arts major's heart...

The rest of Saturday afternoon was spent having lunch at the dining hall, going to the track meet, where I relived old meets, but forgot to watch a neighbor's daughter race, and then on to the Mass and dinner for 3500 people.  I enjoyed meeting Joe's friend's parents, but again felt my shortcomings in the ways of small talk and dressing up. Only later did I think of topics I could have brought up to ask about. 

Sunday morning we met again for Mass at the basilica so we could go with Ben, and then went to breakfast at a fun little cafe in town that had a Cajun theme. The food was decent but more entertaining was the band that sang covers of "Freebird" and bluegrass.  We lingered over coffee and conversation. Then back to campus for another walk in the snow that had fallen Saturday night.  But eventually, the time came to say goodbye so the boys could go back to their studies and projects. We said a prayer at the Grotto for close to a weekend that was both exhausting and exhilarating. 

From South Bend, I drove to Chicago for dinner with two of my alumnae friends. I had my own discussion late into the night with college friends, whom I stayed because I was flying home from Chicago. It was a reminder of the blessings of friendships that endure despite time and distance.  On the flight I finished the book on literary friendships, A Secret Sisterhood: The Literary Friendships of Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, and Virginia Woolf, by Emily Midorikawa and Emma Claire Sweeney. It beautifully illustrated the consolation of having a friend, even if only a pen pal, like Marian Lewes and Harriet Beecher Stowe, who understands your challenges and responds with similar vulnerability. It also revealed a side of these authors that doesn't often show up in biographies.  Just when you think you've heard or read all of the details of Jane Austen's life, someone shows up with a packet of letters that reveals another facet. And I didn't know much about the life of the later two authors. George Eliot/Lewes friendship with Stowe and Woolf's friendship with Katherine Mansfield both offer windows into fascinating minds during fascinating times.

I read this book at the right moment - when sitting down and writing letters of appreciation and affection is on my heart. In between this reminder and the Lenten resolution suggested by Mrs. Darwin and birthday season, I have been writing more letters.  February contains the birthdays of two of our three oldest. Number three turned 18 on the first and number 2 just turned 20. It is Irish twin month for the two oldest. My memories of the days when they were all three little together is a blur. I wish I had recorded more of their lives.

But I also love who they are right now as young men. I don't want these days to be forgotten either. I don't take as many pictures of my big, often grumpy kids as I do my small, cute kids. But I've started doing that more. I need to get them off of the camera, though, and into an album.  Here is a bit of what I would print.

Last Sunday all the kids were home before the oldest returned to campus.

Not a birthday haver, but a fourth rugby player.

Happy 18th Birthday to James!

This might look like cigar, but it is a roll of chocolate Necco wafers. He did go buy a cigar just to do it later in in the day.

The 15 year old about to go to a dance.

Hiking in the Cleveland National Forest with the boy scouts.

The Friday gala

Meeting for coffee at Waddick's, the place that has my favorite Irish soda bread in the whole world

St Joseph teaching Jesus about carpentry - or Jesus teaching Joseph about the scriptures? - a beautiful statue in the engineering building at Notre Dame.

The beautiful chapel in one of the new classroom buildings - maybe engineering

Joe giving me a tour of the beautiful Jordan Hall of Science, another newer building with a great mini museum of skeletons.

From the Snite Museum of Art, A Visit from Death. 

Some places on campus remain unchanged, such as the Grotto.

And the view of St. Mary's lake

And studio... Ben drafting in the same room where I used to visit his dad years ago. But a new architecture building is under construction.

Enjoying a walk around the lake.

Another place I used to spend a lot of time: The indoor track. A meet was going on Saturday, so we went to watch. But I totally forgot to watch for my neighbor's daughter. Can I blame jet lag?

Saturday night snowfall

After the mass and dinner. I felt underdressed the whole time.

Enjoying the music and food at Chicory Cafe after Sunday mass.

One last walk around the lake.

Alma mater

Another pretty statue on campus, a tender depiction of the Holy Family.

Saying goodbye outside of one of the original libraries, now the architecture building, but soon to be remodeled, hopefully not torn down.

With sorrow

You know how in old movies and cartoons, sometimes a fluttering calendar is used to show that time has passed? The months start to flutter off the calendar faster and faster? That image resonates right now. The past two weeks have just been a blink, and time is moving faster. I want to take a metaphorical letter opener and stab it into the calendar so it will stop fluttering for a day or two.

I didn't know when I was writing that last post about love and death, that across the country another school shooting was taking place. I didn't hear the news until late in the day because I was getting ready to go on the road to visit the college kids for Junior Parents' Weekend. As I spent the weekend traveling, I didn't hear many reports of what was happening in Florida until I returned home. Now I am more grateful than ever that I did go on this trip.  It isn't often that we have the kind of time to spend with the older boys just visiting, and this trip was a reminder that they are becoming their own people, and our time with them is brief.

This school shooting coming so quickly on the heels of the shooting at the Texas church and the shooting in and the shooting in Las Vegas seems to be striking people differently, including me. What was once a rare, isolated, horrific catastrophe now happens every couple of months. A couple of years ago I didn't feel compelled to discuss or participate in political action for gun control, probably because a number of people in our family own guns.  Nonetheless, I have never felt safe with guns in the house because of too many reports of accidental deaths caused by brothers and sisters fiddling with a relative's firearm.  My grandfather once gave my husband a pistol, but it never came home with us. It stays locked in my father's gun safe.  I've quietly agreed with the arguments for restrictions on buying guns, any type, and for outlawing automatic weapons.  When we lived in Guam, a mentally insane man drove his car into a crowd of shopping tourists and jumped out yielding a knife.  His crazed attack on the crowd left two people dead.  Horrifying. But what if he had had an automatic weapon? How many people would have died? It would have been a massacre.

Enough is enough. There is no justifiable reason for automatic weapons to be available on the market.  The senseless deaths of those young people and teachers seem to have created a swell of support for action on gun control that is sweeping me out of apathy. I've signed a petition. Our kids are taking part in a walkout at school on the one month anniversary of the shooting, and I'll be there to support them in taking a stand.  There is no logical defense for keeping on the market weapons meant to kill a lot of people. The time for a change is now.

In the wake of these young people's deaths, I am ever more grateful for the time to spend with the older kids. Like others, I feel moved to show them more affection, to nag a little less. One of my daughter's teachers wrote lovely notes to the parents to compliment her students.  Another gave each student a valentine with a note of encouragement and praise.  These small acts of generosity honor the students who have died in ways their families will never know but that affect the hearts of those who are removed from the situation but still grieved by it and fearful for where the next episode will be.  Several months ago a young man made a threat at our school. He was apprehended and suspended, but I don't know what steps were taken to help him get over his anger. And I wonder what his situation is now. I remember to bless the kids, touching each one of them, as they leave for school.

Love and Ashes

Valentine's Day and Ash Wednesday make odd companions. Being a person of faith and having never been a huge fan of Valentine's Day, I easily decree that Ash Wednesday takes precedence, and gave the kids homemade Valentines and some boxes of conversation hearts yesterday. They all are giving up candy, so three of the five boxes of hearts are still sitting on the front table, even though we had a dinner guest last night. Since my husband and son (and maybe one of the girls - who doesn't like meat) are giving up meat for Lent also, I made steak and roasted vegetables. The vegetables weren't cooking fast enough and the puff pastries were underdone, so I put the oven on convection and burned it all. Happily, I had bought caramel gelato at the store as a back up. And we had salad with a few roasted potatoes.

We did not host our usual Mardi Gras party this year because we have been busy and have two confirmations and two graduations (ok, one a promotion from eighth grade) and an 18 yr old birthday and a 16 yr old birthday (the second oldest turned 20 yesterday. Just got a party in a box).  Instead I hosted book club on Monday. We read The Book of Joy, a conversation between the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu edited by Douglas Abrams. So I tried to make food that honored three cultures: pickled okra, sausage, sweet tea and a pathetic king cake for the Gulf Coast, mumus, naan and curried chicken for Tibet and a sweet potato, syrup, and coconut bake for South Africa. My daughter made cheesecake bites and my friend brought tiramisu. We also had cookies and candy, a veggie platter with homemade hummus, a pistachio honey cream cheesed dip, raspberries filled with white chocolate, and wine. A veritable feast, which was mostly admired and not consumed because friends had eaten dinner. My children, however, had not, so they hoovered most everything left on the counter when we vacated the kitchen for the living room discussion.

I think I have mentioned before that this book club is an offshoot of a book club started in about 1998 with a friend who also now lives in San Diego.  She had been a part of the great books program at University of San Francisco, so we found kinship in reading hard books.  We pulled in some moms from a mother's group that met at her church, and started meeting to read and discuss books about Catholic teaching, spirituality, or experience. That book club was still flourishing when I returned to Virginia in 2005. And when we moved here, my friend and I started up again in 2015. This year we were joined by another of the original group, whose husband is a pilot and just got stationed here.  Serendipity or providence or a small Navy?

Now it is an evening of lively discussion. Most of the members read most of the books and come most of the time. It's rare than more than a few people finish the books, but there is always plenty to discuss. It's not a book club where we meet and talk about kids and husbands while eating bonbons and drinking wine, although sometimes I have to push people out of the kitchen to get started. 

The point of this digression about book club is that The Book of Joy, while not a Catholic book, has many conjunctions with The Joy of the Gospel and The Joy of Love, which we read earlier (and even Bishop Barron's book To Light a Fire). I think Abrams should have invited Pope Francis to this party, but the Archbishop and the Dalai Lama had a preexisting friendship, although they met rarely and had only spent a minimal amount of time together. They had a kinship. 

In an attempt to synthesize these texts, I feel like the relationship between Valentine's Day and Ash Wednesday becomes obvious.  Love of others is the source and direction of our joy. Looking outward with compassion helps us turn our eyes away from ourselves and our own fears, desires, and loneliness; we realize we are not alone.  Practicing compassion, forgiveness, humility, humor, acceptance, and hope are all means of achieving a joyful heart and of uniting our will with God's. Spending time in quiet prayer, practicing detachment from consumerism and material well being, giving of our time, treasure, and talents are all sources of joy - as well as the practices of Lent. 

Happiness and joy have received a lot of attention lately - as well as the opposite emotions of loneliness and despair, especially when teens 10-14 are attempting suicide at a 200% increase over a few years ago.  And really the way to find joy, that deep-seated emotion that exists even when we might feel angry or annoyed occasionally, is so simple. Love God and love your neighbor. Don't love yourself more than anyone else. And yet that is our tendency.

So for Lent: I'm going to fast as usual from sweets and alcohol (and probably most meat since everyone else is). For prayer, I'm going to participate in a parish women's Bible study and Stations devotions on Fridays. I'm going to keep writing little lists of good things that happen each day. And I'm going to keep trying to begin each day with a little reflection on the daily readings, even if I don't get to Mass. For almsgiving, I'm going to put change in the little box on the table and give to our charity of the month, but I"m also going to stay off Facebook unless I need to check a meeting. I want to use the time I usually spend checking in to give more attention to people around me, mainly the kids.  I'm going to try to remember to always assume the best about others' intentions.  I want to try to reach out to give charity to others in the form of time and attention, in addition to money. I want to copy Mrs. Darwin's idea of writing letters, and write to my children the things I keep forgetting to tell them.  I want to remember to offer my sacrifices for specific intentions, too. 

I have been looking forward to Lent. I know it's not meant to be a time of self-improvement, but redirection toward Christ and toward what is essential, love. 

A New Author to me - Elizabeth Bowen

Some time ago I finished The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen. I had picked this up at a book cute gift shop in Galway, Ireland, without knowing anything about it or the author, other than she was a female Irish writer born at the turn of the century. While planning our visit to Ireland, I noted that most of the notable writers of the Irish renaissance who came of age around the Easter Rising of 1916 and the World Wars were male, and I don't think I read any female writers in my Irish literature class in college (although I could be forgetting someone).  A little research on Wikipedia reveals Bowen was quite different from the group of male writers who were motivated by a desire for an Irish national identity. She was a member of a well to do Anglo-Irish family, and moved to England with her mother after her father had a nervous breakdown according to other sites when she was around 7. Her mother died when she was thirteen, so she was raised by aunts. In England, she went to art school and married, and eventually became acquainted with the Bloomsbury group. Wikipedia notes a number of affairs she had but calls her marriage "contented." After her husband retired, they moved back to her ancestral home, Bowen's Court, in County Cork, where she hosted other members of the Bloomsbury group. Her husband died shortly thereafter, and she continued to write, but had to sell the house because she ran out of money. Before her death in 1973, she had written about 10 novels and a number of short stories, and apparently was admired for her ghost stories.

Does she have a faithful group of readers in Great Britain?  I found an article that called her one of the most influential novelists of the 20th century. But I also found different citations for her age when she moved to England (6, or 7). One of her books (The Heat of the Day) is ranked number 69 on The Guardians list of 100 best novels, so maybe I just haven't paid attention to her name, or perhaps because other novelists of her period outshine her, she doesn't make it to the top of many TBR lists.  A review of a Bowen biography by Neil Corcoran from The New York Times, starts with the caveat that most articles about Elizabeth Bowen begin with "little read" or "unappreciated," but is effusive with praise for her observations. She may be an author who is poised for rediscovery because of an interest in women writers and the popularity of the Bloomsbury Group in particular, but she may be an author who fades into obscurity because her novels have little plot combined with highly literary writing and subtle emotional content.

Based on my feelings toward The Death of the Heart, I am curious to read more of her novels, but not anxious or highly motivated to read more. This was her first published novel. The plot is basically this: a young teen, Portia, is orphaned and goes to live with  her half brother Thomas and his wife Anna. Thomas and Portia's father had left Thomas's mother to be with Portia's mother, so theirs is a complicated relationship, but sympathetic. I almost wish there were more of this. Anna and Thomas have a childless relationship, and were married after Anna had broken off a temptuous affair, so their marriage is complex, but not unsympathetic.  Portia has a flirtatious affair with a young man who is a devotee of her sister-in-law, is sent away to stay with her SIL's old governess at the ocean, and then comes back feeling betrayed and unloved and throws herself at a kindly older gentleman who is a pitied friend of the old lover of the sister-in-law.

Bowen has been compared to Henry James and it is easy to see why. There is not a lot of action and the emotions are all slightly suppressed. But her writing feels luxurious, rich in word choice and metaphors and other literary devices. Her themes of displacement and loss of innocence are perennial favorites of mine with my obsession over the uprooted nature of our family's life.

In The Death of the Heart, we see the contrast between the young, idealistic, emotional Portia and the complacent, anxious, unhappy couple. I'm not certain whether to see Tom and Anna's marriage as a compromise that works or feel sorry for them. Portia, too, is both sympathetic and pitiable. She has the rashness of a young teen and more emotional attachments to the people she meets. But she becomes irrationally upset when she discovers Anna has read her diary.  She is blind to Eddie's instability and desparate for attention and affection.

My favorite part of the book was about her stay at the seashore with the family of Anna's governess. There Portia comes to life, and the whole book seems livelier with more animated characters and more actions and events. Of course, Eddie acts abominably and Portia discovers other young men might admire her. She seems more comfortable at the seaside home of a working class family than in the townhome of her wealthier relatives, even though she is a border. The whole tone of this middle section of the book is lighter and livelier than the beginning and end which are dark and focused on indecisiveness about how to act and feel.

SPOILER ALERT

Another article notes that the titles of the sections of the book refer to parts of the rite of Baptism in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer. "The World," "The Flesh," and "The Devil."  I disagree in the interpretation that this site gives of the ending - that Anna learns to handle Portia more carefully. It ends on a complicated note. Anna fails to retrieve Portia after they learn that she has run to the apartment of their old single male friend, who has been like a kindly uncle to Portia. She has just been rejected by Eddie and then by this guy, and in her loneliness, she is retrieved by the maid who once was her confidant but now has been alienated after the diary incident.  The book is a meditation on how childhood innocence is lost by initiation into the world of adults.  Portia has encountered the world (wealthy society is not so happy and carefree as it seems to those outside of it), the flesh (love is not so happy and carefree as it seems ...), and now the devil appears to be the inability of those closest to you to love you the way you need to be loved.  Only those who mean something to us and can hurt someone so deeply. It is a melancholic ending to a melancholic book, but one that was written so well that I kept reading. It is also set in a period just before WWII that is fascinating for all the changes about to take place. It was not the book I expected, but one that provided an excuse for research and meditation.

Whale watching and the benefits of living where people go on vacation or business trips

A couple weeks ago, we heard from some friends we met in Guam that they were going to be coming to San Diego. Happily, our weekend was relatively open. We were going to join them for a day at the beach, but because the friends that they were visiting (to go rock climbing with at Joshua Tree NP), had free tickets to go whale watching, we joined them for a three hour tour around the bay and beyond.  The friends had plenty of tickets because they had purchased 35 of them for their family reunion (at a great price), but hadn't seen any whales, so the tour company gave them tickets to come again. Our lucky day!

Our older kids were busy and didn't come, and having seen whales before, weren't too disappointed.  We met this family because we were both homeschooling in Guam, and our girls really got along well together. They aren't military, but he works for the government. The wife and I also did a lot of long distance runs together when I was marathon training. They are an outdoorsy Mormon family - running, hiking, rock climbing, camping are all regular activities for them. The dad and oldest son went to Mt. Everest from Guam, they traveled to Mexico in the summer, and the mom and dad last spring went to France and spent a week hiking Mont Blanc. But they aren't boastful about any of that. Their trips are focused less on checking off a bucket list than on spending time together as a family enjoying the world. And they are a lot of fun to talk to and spend time with - the kind of family you can easily spend a day with even though you haven't seen them for several years because you share similar interests and values and like to talk.

So we had a great time talking on a boat with them and their friends, who were equally friendly and interesting people.  And we did see whales - four or five grey whales on their migratory path along the west coast.

Also part of the day's fun was watching the three year old make friends with the other family's three year old.  How lovely it is to be the age when you can make a new best friend in fifteen minutes!

The girls also easily dropped back into their friendship.  I wish we lived closer because I know they would have a great time together, and I wouldn't have any of the reservations I sometimes have with other friends about what their family allows their kids to do.

We also passed this scenic sailing ship, which had a group of nuns in what looked like Dominican habits out enjoying the frolicking of the whales also. 

Whale watching was a wonderful way to continue the feeling of being on vacation after school had returned to session after Christmas break. One of the benefits of living where we do is that we frequently have friends and family show up to visit because they are on vacation or a business trip. Last weekend we were joined by the cousins who live just three hours north who came down to watch Hamilton.  The San Diego show was much more affordable than the LA show, but when it comes to measuring all the things we want to do and how much, going to it fell below a number of other things on our list. But we were happy to host the cousins for a night, and even happier that they were willing to take our almost 18 year old for a special birthday outing.  

The show goers came home singing and raving about the lyrics and performance.  Their enthusiasm made me question whether or not we should have reorganized our priorities and gone with them. At least we can listen online. I do love a live show.

Another funny coincidence: We were sitting with the cousins outside the coffee shop on the main drag of our town enjoying Sunday afternoon with a cafe, when my husband says, "That looks like a H____ kid," naming a family we knew from Virginia years ago.  My response: "No, they live in Texas." (not to mention the fact we haven't seen them in several years when this girl was in elementary school). But sure enough, a minute later, here comes the whole family! So we have an impromptu reunion in front of the coffee shop. They were here for the husband's business trip. He used to be in the same Navy community as my husband, but he recently retired.  We didn't think to take a photo, but we did have a great chat.  Just another perk.