Poetry and politics

I've been meaning to incorporate more poetry into our days during the month of April, but that hasn't really happened.  Now that the month is drawing to a close, here are a few nods to the art.

A new poet to me is Kayo Chingonyi, whose work I just was introduced to by a fellow teacher. Here is one of his pieces. The title comes from a Zambian word for initiation.

Kumukandaby Kayo Chingonyi

Since I haven't danced among my fellow initiates,
following a looped procession from woods at the edge
of a village, Tata’s people would think me unfinished 
– a child who never sloughed off the childish estate
to cross the river boys of our tribe must cross
in order to die and come back grown.

I was raised in a strange land, by small increments:
When I bathed my mother the days she was too weak,
when auntie broke the news and I chose a yellow suit
and white shoes to dress my mother’s body,
at the grave-side when the man I almost grew to call
dad, though we both needed a hug, shook my hand.
what would he make of these literary pretensions,
this need to speak with a tongue that isn’t mine?

If my alternate self, who never left, could see me
what would he make of these literary pretensions,
this need to speak with a tongue that isn’t mine?
Would he be strange to me as I to him, frowning 
as he greets me in the language of my father
and my father’s father and my father’s father’s father?

I mentioned the Beth Ann Fennelly article about the role of literature in increasing empathy.  Chingonyi's poetry is a good example of how poetry also shares in that ability to shift perspectives and provide insight into another's life. The teacher who shared the info about Chingonyi interviewed him as part of a series of interviews with Dylan Thomas Prize winners. Here is a 10 minute clip of Kayo Chingonyi talking about his writing life. https://soundcloud.com/user-588915112/kayo-chingonyi-2018-winner.  More about his work: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/may/28/kayo-chingonyi-poet-dylan-thomas-prize

Another good clip I have been meaning to share isn't about poetry per se - and maybe I shared this before? - but this video called "Nihonga: Slow Art" touches on the way faith forms art.  This video features the work of abstract artist Makoto Fujimura who was scheduled to speak at University of Dallas for their McDermott Lecture series, but the lecture was cancelled.
  https://www.makotofujimura.com/

Meanwhile art-making happens around here in small ways - pictures for elderly neighbors. Potholders. Painting old wooden ornaments. Painting rocks. Sidewalk chalk designs. Baking. Lots of hair braiding and nail art. I have a large stash of craft supplies leftover from co-op and VBS and CRE.  Might as well use them up.  My intentions to incorporate more art and music into our days are largely still intentions and not actions, a small failure to move from concept to product, but I need to remind myself to focus more on the small successes.

There were a number of small successes and failures yesterday.  A failure was spending too much time responding in my head to a Facebook post that touched a nerve. A success was restraining myself from actually responding. A success was spending a pleasant hour in the afternoon sunshine on opposite sides of the sidewalk from a friend as we let our little girls play charades - a good non-touching game. A failure was letting slip that we had made a little field trip back in late March to the mountains and another trip to the military beach about an hour north last weekend.  I'm afraid she was a little shocked. I have tried not to talk very much about our little illicit excursions because, even though our interactions with others were very limited - and masked and gloved - they really aren't in the spirit of "Stay home" orders.

I'm afraid I'm not a great team player.  It doesn't help that I don't firsthand know anyone who actually has the virus, although a neighbor thinks she had it. A friend of a friend's sister had a bad case and was really sick and in the hospital a few days.  Our acquaintances on the Theodore Roosevelt were among the 4/5ths of sailors who tested negative.  I am not sorry to have the kids doing school at home, and I don't mind the restrictions on shopping and dining out, but I am inordinately gladdened by the report that the beaches and some parks have opened for exercise.  On the other hand, I am sorry to hear about thousands of gallons of milk being poured into the ground, chickens and pigs being slaughtered, and fields of vegetables being plowed under because farmers don't have a market for their food with all the restaurants closed, and they can't afford to nurture, harvest, or process, package, and transport it to the groceries. Meanwhile people are going hungry because they are out of a job and the stores are out of food.  How many kids aren't getting their online schoolwork done because they don't have motivation, they don't have access, or they don't have someone to explain concepts clearly? I tend to sympathize with the governors who think there must be a safe way to start reopening the economy now that more masks are available, and people are accustomed to wearing them, and the six feet rule is mostly followed.  We shall see.

Enough of my partially formed political thoughts for now.  I have been meaning to turn more to reading and research.  A success yesterday was I did look up some conferences and literary societies and graduate programs that focus on environmental humanities.  A failure is that I have not drummed up enough motivation or time to write up ideas for abstracts. On the other hand, I am loving Saints and Villains,  the novel about Dietrich Bonhoeffer I'm reading for my book club.  And success: I finally finished Pico Iyer's The Lady and the Monk about his year in Kyoto and his developing relationship with the young Japanese woman who eventually becomes his wife. I checked it out from the library a week or so before everything shut down. The book is a travel narrative. It rambles slowly through the streets and through different encounters. Sachiko, the young lady, is unhappily married and unhappily restrained by the expectations demanded of her by the culture.  She gradually spends more and more time with Pico, ostensibly to practice English and to show him Kyoto and the surrounding areas, but also because he represents the freedom she desires.  I really like Iyer's writing, but it does not move quickly. It is perhaps akin to the "slow art" that Fujimura describes.

Back to poetry. I learned via social media that Irish poet Eavan Boland died.  The poem of hers most familiar to me is "Becoming Anne Bradstreet," but her passing led me down the rabbit trail of reading more of her poems.  Here is "Becoming Anne Bradstreet," a fitting poem for Poetry Month about the influence of poets and their words and the power of imagination.

Becoming Anne Bradstreet    EAVAN BOLAND

It happens again
As soon as I take down her book and open it.

I turn the page.
My skies rise higher and hang younger stars.

The ship's rail freezes.
Mare Hibernicum leads to Anne Bradstreet's coast.
 A blackbird leaves her pine trees
And lands in my spruce trees.
 I open my door on a Dublin street.
Her child/her words are staring up at me:
 In better dress to trim thee was my mind,But nought save home-spun cloth, i' th' house I find. We say home truthsBecause her words can be at home anywhere—

At the source, at the end and whenever
The book lies open and I am again

An Irish poet watching an English woman
Become an American poet.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/55336/becoming-anne-bradstreet

Shakespearean Feasts and Glowing Dolphins

Although we don't seem to be doing much, time is flying by. I tend to spend a lot of time fiddling - I have cleaned out a couple of drawers in my dresser and desk, and although I didn't pick out much to get rid of, everything is nicely folded. Same thing in the garage - tidied the stacks, but the give away pile only grew slightly.  I went through all of our DVDs and organized them into categories - animated, religious, action, drama, live action kid movies, documentaries. We don't watch DVDs very much anymore, and we have some that we haven't ever watched (notably The Bible documentary made by PBS and a collection of The Wonder Years and Seventh Heaven  that a friend dropped off. The kids did watch a season or two of Seventh Heaven, which was show I never watched. It starts off promising but is dated and the mediocre acting/sit-com cheesiness make it easy to put in the give away pile.)  I have a whole stack of DVDs I got for 10 cents each at a sale at the NEX, but most of them are mediocre, too. With the advent of streaming movies, watching DVDs is becoming outdated. In addition to the give away pile, I have a pile of "If we don't watch these by the time the shutdown ends, I'm getting rid of them."

What has been worth watching? I still have the Divine Mercy movie and The Two Popes on my list to watch, although I wonder if the free streaming has ended on the Divine Mercy movie.  I think I mentioned that I've tried to motivate the kids to balance meaningful movies with series like The Office, which the teens just finished, and Parks and Rec, which they just started, and the old TV series Criminal Minds, which has caused the thirteen year old to come into our room a couple of nights after nightmares woke her up. It was made for TV, but the criminals are pretty heinous. I can't remember if I mentioned the movies that were worth watching: Just Mercy, Peanut Butter Falcon, and Freedom Writers. There are some language issues in these, but the themes were powerful, and the films well made.  I made the mistake of putting on Shakespeare in Love the night after Shakespeare's birthday, which won a lot of awards and remember thinking I loved, but it starts off with a lot of adult content. . . oops. Had to fast forward a bit, and then the kids all got frustrated and went to bed, but I stayed up and loved the second half, when the players begin to work on performing Romeo and Juliet. It is a fun film, but much too graphic for family viewing. Star studded cast.

I tried to get festive for Shakespeare's birthday - although I was off by a day. For some reason, I had the 24th in mind, but realized on the 23rd my error - in part because my arts and leisure college student reminded me and crowed with delight via text when he was right and I was wrong.  We had a driveway socially distant social planned for Thursday with the neighbors, so I stuck with my initial plan to celebrate on Friday. We had scones and cream for breakfast, but though I looked up the recipe, I didn't make Yorkshire puddings for dinner because I made meat pies using frozen puff pastry and beef chunks stewed in beer.  The meat never softened up enough to be a good tender, shredded texture, so I was disappointed, but the boys liked them.  Roasted squash, potatoes, and beets accompanied them, along with rotisserie chicken because I went to the store that day, and the idea of chicken legs was appealing. I was supposed to save a bone for the bone -in-vinegar experiment because the girls were wanting to try it, but I forgot.  We don't eat a lot of meat with bones anymore.  Angel food cake with whipped cream and fruit was for dessert - It was going to be trifle, a nod to the sherry soaked pound cake trifle that I read about on a Renaissance cooking website, but went for the labor saving option.  An article on National Geographic's website had an inspiring description of making shaped foods, like deer shaped buns filled with red wine or currant jelly, so that when they were torn apart it looked like blood spilling forth.  Maybe next year! (this site was fun, too.)

I have not cooked much the past month - that has been the other favorite pastime for the girls. Particular successes: two different varieties of lemon tart - one filled with lemon curd, the other with lemon mixed with sweetened condensed milk kind of like Key Lime pie, naan, scones, different varieties of dinner rolls and biscuits, Nutella cookies (although Nutella is too precious to bake with...), homemade granola, and some nutritious cookies - one variety of ginger snaps and another almond flour/almond butter/chocolate chip delicious nugget. I still like the no-bake nutritious cookies made with peanut butter, honey, powdered milk, oats, and various nuts and seeds, all rolled in coconut, better, but these didn't last long.  A few recipes didn't turn out as well: The chocolate mousse needed more whipping, the covid cupcakes were dry, as were the hipcakes made with homemade cake rather than cake mix for the crust, and some of the bread experiments were less successful.  Have I gained a thousand pounds? I have only avoided excessive weight gain by being obsessive about averaging five miles on the step counter... (We've also polished off probably something like 10 gallons of ice cream since Easter.)

Other news: Today the beaches reopen in our area for exercising. No stopping, gathering, or sunbathing allowed. Of course, today is overcast after a sunny and warm weekend, so crowds probably won't descend. Opening on a Monday was as a wise strategy, I think. Meanwhile, the base beaches, which had remained open, closed during the weekend - perhaps because too many people were gathering.

Last night we drove down to the oceanfront to catch the bioluminescence.  The kids all complained when I made them load up in the car at 8:30, but I hadn't ever really seen it, other than little dots in the water in Guam during our one night snorkel that resulted in me almost being drowned by my younger children who clung to me in fear while the older ones swam off with Dad.  It was beautiful. You may have seen this video that was filmed off the coast of Newport Beach about an hour north of the dolphins swimming in it. They glow in the dark as they play in the surf. The effect is caused by certain algae in the water. During the day, the tide looks like it is dirtied by reddish mud, but at night the crashing waves glow electric blue. My iphone camera didn't capture it very well, but you can get the idea below.  Now I need to catch a grunion run...

Better quality photos are available elsewhere online, but this captures the effect

The kindergartner creates her own checklists for school

In an attempt to enlarge our home gym we bought a basketball goal.  It nearly caused a trip to the ER when one of the boys tore open a half inch gase on the bottom of his foot near a toe. He sliced it on the base of the goal after dunking a ball. We heatedly debated the merits and drawbacks of going to get stitches, but I won out with my appeal to field medicine. And we had some Nuskin on hand. So far it's holding together just fine.

Covid cupcakes

One of many tea parties. They are on the schedule.

Everyone loves angel food cake with whipped cream and fruit.

Not everyone loves reading a sonnet after dinner.

The pool is open!

My roses are thriving - but no flower show home judging this year.

fancy tea party

Online reading and online school

In addition to enjoying the books I wrote about last week, I've also run across some interesting articles that I'll share here for future reference.

First, in relation to the original sin discussion yesterday, there was an article about Martin Scorsese movies in the latest Notre Dame Magazine. Here is a director who has spent a career studying the darkness of the human heart. I haven't seen The Irishman and I've never been a huge fan of mob movies, although I always enjoy them when I am watching them. The article makes me want to take another watch with a more critical eye: https://magazine.nd.edu/stories/the-dark-gospel-of-martin-scorsese/

My favorite article in the magazine, though, is this one about the power of literature to teach, or at least to encourage, empathy: https://magazine.nd.edu/stories/what-good-is-literature/.  Beth Ann Fennelly's "What Good is Literature?" is a pertinent read during this time when reading more is a good antidote to surfing social media, which I would think encourages insular thinking, or whatever is the opposite of empathy. Fennelly, who is the poet laureate of Mississippi, or was, summarizes a few studies that seek to prove the affective power of literature, but it makes explicit what I try to explain to my literature 101 students when I give them Azar Nafisi's essay "Mysterious Connections that Link Us Together" and Gregory Orr's piece "The Making of Poems."  Both of these short essays are old now but have timeless messages that capture the imagination and the heart of readers, and pertinently reluctant readers, to show both how literature creates relationships between readers, characters and authors, and provides a way to heal from injury and still be compassionate and vulnerable.

My aunt just sent me the link to the Harvard professor's rant against home schoolers that seems based on some imaginary ideal of home schoolers.  I suspect she wrote it before all parents became home school parents because of Covid closures.  I will say I have run into home schoolers who seem to want to outsource all aspects of home schooling or who seem to have jumped into home schooling without a lot of thought about how to home school, but the majority of home schooled children we've met are bright, cheerful, interesting kids. The relative number of odd birds is probably equal to the number of odd birds in the school system as well. And the number of wasted hours that school children spend looking out of windows or listening to their peers get in trouble or ask the same questions over and over probably outweigh the number of hours a home schooled child might spend playing or reading novels, activities with educational value. (Easy access to video games and vapid media might be the downfall of home schoolers, though, as our recent struggle in our return to home schooling has shown.) I have a horrifying memory of telling my high school history teacher when she got mad at me for reading Anna Karenina in class that I was learning more from that book than for her. My impertinence was unacceptable, but I can't help but agree with my 16 year old self. She was an older teacher who put old copies of notes on an overhead projector for us to copy and then spend the rest of the class trying to catch students who were exercising all of their creativity in coming up with ways to be naughty. "Slamming" was a favorite - the room was on the second floor, so students would lift their desks and let them slam down to disturb the classes below - and our own. The teacher was terrible at catching the perpetrators.

Meanwhile, my kids' teachers are sending them to Khan Academy and Quizlet and Discovery Channel videos, even Brainpop, for their assignments instead of crafting their own or having synchronous learning. All of these resources have been used by home schoolers for years, so if they are acceptable replacements for public school now, they should show that home schoolers have had comparable or better educational opportunities.  At any rate, the article seems to have mostly garnered negatives responses.

Time to disconnect and get back to life and trying to educate my children.

Miscellaneous thoughts

I went on a 10 mile walk the other day with a friend (wearing bandannas as masks! staying apart on the sidewalk and street!). We just kept walking and talking, and even when we stopped in front of our house, we talked another half an hour (about 3 hours altogether - a pretty good pace).  My husband had to cut us off.

Among the many topics we covered was original sin. My friend is reading Augustine's Confessions for the first time, and she said she had read or heard somewhere that the idea of original sin originated with St. Augustine, so she started reading with a combative attitude because she admitted to having theological problems with the idea that God created people predestined to sin.  While the idea of free will takes away some of that difficulty, if I understood her explanation correctly, the problem she has is with the understanding sin as something evil, so if people have original sin, they have this evil element.  I tried to explain how I understood original sin - and I'm not sure my argument is theologically sound or that it really removed the obstacle she had - but here goes. Original sin isn't actual sin, but that capacity to choose to sin, which is related to what I understand Augustine means by concupiscence. Concupiscence is usually related to lust or sexual appetite, but in a way I think you could expand the meaning to apply to any desire to possess for selfish reasons - so that concupiscence is selfishness. Our spiritual journey is from the tendency toward selfishness/self-centeredness of infancy to the capacity for selflessness/gift of self mature love that is exemplified by Christ. It's a constant up and down trek.  Just when we think we are capable of real selflessness, we revert back to the "what about me!" attitudes of youth. Or at least I do - I still have a long way to go toward selflessness.  Original sin is that capacity of human nature to put self first - an evolutionary/biological tendency? Or a spiritual problem? At a certain level spiritual and biological explanations of human nature should overlap.  If the way that we are in the image of God is that we have the capacity for love that overflows (as well as for creativity, for beauty, for magnanimity, for wisdom) rather than for lust that seeks to possess - as a sexual possession and as greed or power.  My friend also objects - as I often to myself - to blaming sexual longing for most sins, or for being the root of the most egregious sins, but there is a power to seeing sexual desire as a metaphor both for self-transcendence (as in the idea of a spiritual ecstasy) as well as for selfishness.  Certainly many of the best dramas circle around the conflict between love and lust and possession and power. (Another topic of conversation: If men have exerted power through dominance (symbolized by sexual possession), then women have let their desire for power be expressed through manipulation.)

So to circle back - being born with "original sin" doesn't mean being born with actual sin, but with freedom to choose selfishness over selflessness, pride over generosity, vanity over humility, etc.  To become like God is to let love and purity of intention guide our decisions.  The difficulty of doing this the source of many a crisis of faith.  And yet relying on a purely materialistic/biological explanation of human nature doesn't explain why we admire those people who exemplify altruism and self-sacrifice or why we take pleasure in doing something good for others.

I would think there is a lot of potential for sociological and theological research during this Covid quarantine (and environmental/economic research). My own reaction is a combination of optimism and pessimism - a mix between enjoying the simpler structure of life coupled with a desire to help serve the greater good and assist my neighbor. and being bothered by the closures, especially of things that don't seem to contribute much to the spread of the disease such as outdoor spaces, and fearing that the disease is worse than is being reported - or that the next pandemic is right around the corner and will be something more like a flesh eating bacteria that spreads more rapidly and causes a more painful, certain death.  More people seem to be turning to altruism and to prayer, to compassion and spiritual enrichment, to conversations with God instead of with the world; it seems like a lot of people are tuning into church online, but will there be a movement away from church/sacramental life when the restrictions are lifted? Will the strengthening of the domestic church result in a strengthening of the institutional church or a weakening?  I need to remind myself not to indulge in conjectures that lead to  pessimism, and instead focus on the positive outcomes - that homes are becoming more faith centered and the reduction in consumerism and environmental impacts are positives that hopefully have longlasting influence.

Recent Reads

During the first week or so of the stay at home order, I wandered the house flitting from one activity to the next with no real focus or finishing power. The kids and I had several discussions about ADD because we all had trouble staying focused. I'd walk away from things cooking, change topics in the middle of conversations, and put things down and be unable to find them minutes later. This isn't really atypical behavior for me, but I was a bit more foggy than usual.

This cloudy brain really manifested in my reading. I thought I'd get all this reading done, especially since my husband was gone, and I could leave the light on and read in bed. But I couldn't focus on the pages. I'd pick up one book and then another and read a few pages and forget what I just read or set the book down one evening and forget what was happening in the book the next.  I thought I would organize notes for school, too, since I'm not teaching. That still hasn't happened, but I did break through the reading block.

The book that did it for me was Jessmyn Ward's Sing, Unburied, Sing. Maybe the reading block was because what I was reading was dense and meditative, rather than plot driven (I still haven't finished Pico Iyer's The Lady and the Monk, about his year in Kyoto, or Beldan Lane's Backpacking with the Saints. I really like the writers' styles and their topics, but they, too, write in an unconnected way. Lane quotes almost too many saints and describes so many trails, I can't keep the epiphanies he has straight. And while Iyer's book is more narrative, it moves slowly, serpentinely, almost like the streets of Kyoto he describes.  (I really wanted to go to Kyoto when we visited Japan several years ago, but we didn't have enough time, and the cost of the bullet train was prohibitive for our group. Since we never summitted Mount Fuji, we are still due to return to Japan.)

Then last week I picked up Ward's book in a Little Free Book Box.  (I bless and curse those things. I can't pass them without looking in. Even though they are probably full of germs, they are also full of surprises.)  I haven't read anything by Ward, a National Book Award writer, nor was she really on my list of to-reads, but I picked this book up one night and never set it back down. Good thing I started around 10 and it was only about 1:30 when I finished.  Not as late as some nights.  It's the story of a family in Mississippi that is struggling against drugs, racism, poverty, and ghosts. The last part immediately recalled Toni Morrison's Beloved. The ghosts show up after the characters are very solidly real in your mind, although they are sketched in lightly, a testament to Ward's gifts.  The family retains their dignity and their capacity for love and to be loved despite some dark moments.  Ward makes empathizing with meth addicts possible. The narrative evolves around some dark moments, most told in flashbacks or as stories within the story, but the bonds of the family, particularly the love of the grandfather and grandson, hold them together.  This is one I want to sit with a while and come back to.

I also just finished T. C. Boyle's collection of short stories, Wild Child. The title story is the last in the collection, and it is different in style and content from most of the other stories, which are about contemporary characters who fail to make connections with others, who have stifled desires and dreams, who look for love and meaning in their small lives, usually without finding it, although some of them do. The story of a courier who rescues a woman's child stuck in a mudslide was notable for that brief heroism.  The title story is about a feral child in France from the turn of the nineteenth century. After being caught by villagers, he is turned over to an orphanage for deaf-mute children and comes under the care of a young doctor who sees his humanity and spends years trying to teach him to speak and communicate and wear clothes. The ending isn't entirely happy. But despite the comparative darkness of Boyle's stories, I do enjoy his writing. His settings are usually around Santa Barbara where he lives, so they are familiar. And his characters skirt around hard questions of faith and purpose and meaning. They usually fall short of finding answers, but they are haunted by the desire for something more to life. 

I slowly finished a few other things over the last six weeks. I'm in a Read Harder challenge book club, so I've been reading some atypical books for me to complete that challenge. One of the categories is to read a literary magazine - and the little Free Book box had an issue of The Sewanee Review, Summer 2019. Picked it up in a little free book box, of course. The Review is the oldest lit journal in the country, I'm pretty sure, and has been the first place of publication for many famous writers, poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and reviews.  Favorites from this issue: Poetry: Garrett Hongo's "A Garland of Light" which is about a walk around Rome in honor of Robert Hayden. Also a war poem, "Collateral Rabbits" by Graham Barnhart. Fiction: "Family Oracle," by Celia Bell about a women who talks to the dead, and Michael Hawley's "Somerville," about a creepy woman who takes on her dead roommate's persona after she burned their apartment down. 

I also finished Alice Walker's newest poetry collection, Taking the Arrow of the Heart, and since I heard her read from it in February, I included it in the category of Spoken Word poetry, in case I don't get around to listening to a whole book.  

A short read I finished: A collection of essays by Rebecca Solnit called Men Explain Things to Me, which came out in 2014 and most of the essays were previously published essays in response to earlier issues that became the Me Too movement. I'm a fan of Solnit's other books: Wanderlust and A Field Guide to Getting Lost are the two I've read.  The title essay begins with an anecdote about a party she attended with a friend where the host, a wealthy businessman, discovers she's a writer, asks what she has written about (Eadweard Muybridge, the pioneer of movement photography, which paved the way for movies), and then tells her all he knows about Muybridge, because he read a review about an important book about this man -- which is Solnit's book, of course! It's a funny anecdote about a all-too-common occurrence, but Solnit writes fairly, in my opinion, and doesn't indict all men, while still critiquing a culture that has a long way to go towards equality. On that same theme, I'm also finished Ta- Nehisi Coates's Between the World and Me - it was eyeopening.  

I also finished George Saunders's Tenth of December, which I started probably a year ago. I really liked this collection of essays better this time around - they are a bit dark and perhaps suit the season better than when I started them and couldn't get into it.  Saunders's characters. like Boyle's, are misfits and losers and bad things happen to them, but there are a few bright spots of hope - a skinny kid who gets beaten to death protecting the popular girl next door from getting raped, a participant in a clinical study of mind-morphing drugs who smashes his head in rather than watch another participant get killed because he condemns her, a boy with mental disabilities accidentally comes across a man who is trying to kill himself, and then he falls in a freezing lake and the suicidal man has to save him - they both walk half-naked through a wintry woods to return to the road.  Saunders's writing is spare but creates unforgettable visual images. The endings were more hopeful overall than Boyle's. Loved it, but not one I'd recommend to everyone.

Anne Bogel's Don't Overthink It  is self-help book I finished, a genre that is often fine, rarely great. This is also a fine book, which I kind of expected. I usually don't buy these kinds of books, but I like the author's blog - and I am definitely an overthinker, so I bought it from her local bookstore in a moment of NOT overthinking. I thought it had some good advice, but some of her personal anecdotes were familiar from the blog.  

   

More fun were a couple picture book stand outs: Under My Hijab by Hena Khan (who notes in the afterward that she does not choose to wear a hijab, although she is an observant Muslim) is a fun way to introduce the younger set of non-Muslims to the tradition of wearing a hijab. It's told in rhyme with brightly colored, simple illustrations from the viewpoint of a young girl who notices how each of the women among her family and friends wear their hijab differently in a way that expresses their personalities.  One page shows them as professional women (a doctor, an art teacher, a scout leader, a baker, a teenager) in public and the next page shows them at home with their hair down and uncovered. 

Then Jim Ottaviani and Maris Wicks' Primates was another good read: a graphic novel about Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, and Birute Galdikas (who studied orangutans) and how all these women were linked through Louis Leakey. I learned a lot about these women and primates from this book - started a rabbit hole of research for us.  Highly recommend!

For my Catholic women's book club I finished The Return of the Prodigal Son by Henri Nouwen. We held a Zoom meeting for this book that went pretty well - fun to see everyone's faces although the lag time between comments slowed the conversation a bit. My favorite part of the book was the last section on the Father. Nouwen comes to realize he must see himself not as the younger son, or the elder brother, but like the Father in the parable of the Prodigal Son (and in the painting by Rembrandt that inspires the reflections on the parable and the painting.) At the time, Nouwen was moving from his work in academia to his role in L'Arche, a major shift in the practice of his vocation. Reflecting on how we are called to love like the father, forgiving, merciful, welcoming, helped him move away from the desire to be loved to the ability to give love. 

For my rosary group's Lenten reflection we read Fr. Looney's  A Lenten Journey with Mother Mary, which got a lot of good reviews. I found it fine - a nice mix of hard and easy daily "goals."  Not especially profound, but our group was inspired to do more research on some of the lesser known visions of Mary that he mentions, and that was educational. 

So now that I've come to the end of this summary, I realize I have finished a few things in the last six weeks or so. Next project: Organizing photos and trying to decide whether to replace or repair the desktop that just died. I don't really like working on a laptop, and now we are playing musical chairs with devices. I took the desktop in to the local repair guy, and he can retrieve data and install a new driver but my husband thinks we have everything stored in the googleplex and that the computer is outdated, so that it should be consigned to the electronic graveyard. (I think we bought it in 2014) and not worth repairing. Sigh. I hate ewaste and planned obsolescence.)

Celebrating Easter and other happy events

We're a month in to quarantine now, and our days have something like a pattern or routine, although this past week was set apart by many celebrations.  First we celebrated a six year old birthday, then Dad came home after a six week exercise, then we entered Holy Week and celebrated the Feast of the Resurrection (Happy Easter, everyone!), and then we ate more sweets to honor my husband's birthday. Tuesday was back to school day, but yesterday a friend celebrated a birthday, and we walked almost 10 miles around the neighborhood - with masks and opposite edges of the side walk. We tried to maintain the six feet apart, and since we passed several patrolling police cars, and none said anything to us, we must have been okay.  I have heard a police man ask people to keep moving along the beach before it was closed, but I haven't seen them stop anyone. My friend in Spain said her daughter was stopped while out walking their dog. They can only go a certain number of meters from home - I think about 50 or 80 - but she was within that distance.  They've had their quarantine extended another 30 days, even though news seems to suggest that they have reached the peak number of cases.

At one point I thought this quarantine was meant to give hospitals time to gather supplies and prepare for an onslaught of cases. Now it seems to be destined to last until a treatment or a vaccination is found. My husband wanted to talk about plans to fly our college students, who are with their grandparents in Indiana, back for the summer, but I hesitate to assume that by summer things will be back to normal. Our high school senior is losing hope that their mid-June graduation date will happen, although I've seen some creative solutions like ceremonies held at drive-in theaters. I waiver back and forth between frustration that a solution for reopening the economy has not been found yet and anxiety that the disease is much worse than initial reporting indicated.  It depends on what I read. I have stopped checking the daily numbers of statistics from the WHO.  I'm not sure how accurate they are anyway, if many people are still not getting tested. I read one article yesterday in the WSJ about how the virus may attack the nervous system and cause brain damage, a result just being identified as people recover. That was enough to make me satisfied to stay home again.

In the meantime, the past week has been a relatively good one.  Since we hadn't planned a birthday party for the five year old turning six, she was disappointed with her party at home with siblings. Her sister made her a beautiful castle birthday cake, and we delivered cupcakes to a few of her neighborhood friends. She got calls from family and some friends, so she felt like the star of the day. And her pile of random presents, including a stuffed animal from the grocery store, since some online orders failed to show up, made her happy.

The best birthday gift was that her dad came home late the next night. His flight was delayed over 14 hours, but eventually he made it back.  He's now on home quarantine, like the rest of us, although in another week he'll go back to work as essential personnel.  Since his group was in the desert, and they were on a chartered flight with no other passengers, he feels pretty sure he hasn't been exposed to any viruses. And no one is coughing or feverish around here...

Our Easter celebration was similarly happy - we watched the vigil on East Coast time at the University of Notre Dame basilica, which was still a couple hours long without sacraments, and then had a feast afterwards with good champagne and steaks, since several us gave up meat for Lent.  On Easter morning, we put another Mass on, but didn't make the kids sit to watch it. We had our Easter basket and egg hunt, made a big brunch, and then took some cookies to some neighbors in the afternoon, so we had a little social time from a distance.  We had plenty of candy and sweet treats, and although my online shopping was sporadic, everyone had a book and something to wear in their baskets. It was not a sunny day, but it was nice enough for a walk to admire everyone's gardens and to look for the white crosses that a lot of people have in their yards.

All of the rain has made it easier to stay at home. It also has made my garden healthy.  I finally have little seedlings in my garden boxes, but they look like mostly beets. My lettuce seeds apparently weren't viable. I may venture out next week to look for salad green starts at the hardware store, but we'll see. We also have lost a computer - the desktop gave up the ghost. I'm trying to decide whether to get a new one, or another laptop, or whether to try to find a repair person to try to fix it.  It's about 7 years old, which is about as long as computers last these days.  I think all the photos and documents have backed up to Google, so I am not mourning lost photos - but it is a good reminder that one of my quarantine goals is to print photos.

Time to pass the laptop to a distance learning student. Next time I'll write up some of the books I've been reading - although I seem to have a lot of books started but not finished.

An attempt to take an artsy photo from inside the 6 yr old's new kaleidoscope of my bookshelf.

My orchid rebloomed! A happy thing!

A reader!

A gift from my son - another source of smiles

And here is a dog in a carriage defying the no parking order at the beach.

Oldest daughter made carrot cake for Dad.

A roller blading six year old

The croissants made by my son in Indiana - lots of butter required.

Easter afternoon feast - the traditional ham, asparagus, scalloped potatoes and Watergate salad, also with homemade bread cross on the good dishes.

An old favorite

We added more eggs along the walk

Not everyone was excited about an Easter walk

Our vigil altar

A friend made us some stylish masks

The castle cake

Now we are six!

While dropping off cupcakes, a friend left a birthday message.

An attempt to take artsy photos through Facetime of spring at my parents - I miss these flowers!

Boxes from a friend who moved - another fun quarantine activity - fort building in the garage.

Palms for Palm Sunday

April Update

Back in March, when I wrote something about the month coming in like a lion and going out like a lamb, I didn't think it would be quite this quiet.  We hold in prayer the sick and the medical professionals caring for them whose lives have been more completely absorbed or destroyed by the coronavirus pandemic.  We pray for those who have lost their jobs and who suffer with mental illness and anxiety.  (I did see a report the other day that overall deaths are actually down. And my friend who is an ER doctor has commented on how empty the ER is - fewer car accidents, sports injuries, broken bones, fights, etc.)

But I also admit to feeling still more grateful for this stay-at-home order and the slower pace of life.  While we miss spending time with friends and some of the activities, many of them I don't miss at all. And I'm glad to not be the bad guy when it comes to saying to the kids that tonight is family night.  Although I am missing the pattern of the liturgical life of Lent - adoration on Wednesdays, stations on Fridays, confession a couple times, Sunday masses - I am trying not to feel guilty about really enjoying the new pattern of liturgical life at home. We hadn't prayed the angelus in years until last week. Our dinner conversations are more leisurely. We're sitting around in the living room reading the stations instead of at church trying to get the kids to participate.  There are many silver linings in this dark cloud of the pandemic.  

So what have we been doing since the last update? The days actually fly by. We are never bored - at least I'm not - but I don't seem to have made any progress on any of my projects.  It's a strange phenomenon. I'm not even sure I can tell you where the time has gone. 

The big event of the week is grocery shopping. I've been trying to limit grocery shopping to once a week, but the commissary is still pretty picked over and only allows the purchase of one gallon of milk at a time (although I did sweet talk the cashier the other day), so I usually make another trip to the little local market for produce and milk (also limited to a gallon at time). I still haven't bought toilet paper since school let out, so I'm going to have to figure that out soon - despite the news that supply lines are open, I have yet to see paper goods and many cleaning supplies at our stores. And as a treat, on Sundays, we've been ordering family meal specials to go from local restaurants, which is more often than we ever ate takeout before.

One change that I would like to reverse is that our schedule has shifted from early morning activity to later nights and later mornings. Our kids did not had any required school assignments until yesterday.  They got out of school three weeks ago and have had three weeks of spring break.  Online school "opened" yesterday, but it is mostly a list of assignments that will mostly be graded on a Turned in/Not turned in scale. 

The high school AP teachers have been regularly posting lists of recommended activities, but now the AP exams have been modified and made easier, and will only cover the material of the first 2/3s of school. Teachers are posting online office hours and video lectures, and a couple have assigned Zoom study groups, but for the most part, the kids have web links to do to keep them busy.

I have mixed feelings about this arrangement. I'm glad an outside source is curating information (I hate that word curate but it fits) and providing external motivation. But I hope to encourage the kids to supplement with more book reading.  I'm frustrated it has taken three weeks to come up with such a lite curriculum. 

Meanwhile, our kids' private school peers were doing online school the Monday after school got out or within a week. Many, if not most, of them have some synchronous learning component.  This is easier to do with a small group, granted. But our school district is not that big -  about 3000 students in the 4 schools in the district - I'm not sure why online learning didn't happen sooner.  And I'm frustrated with the pass/fail arrangement - I suspect this is because they are concerned about cheating or copying off of the internet - but it does not encourage extra effort.  I envy the rigor and the expectation of excellence that the private schools seem to continue to require. 

On the other hand, I recognize that a lot of school work is busy work, especially for the younger kids. The students will miss about 3 months of school from mid-March to mid-June.  What would they have learned in that time? How much of that content can be mastered through reading and writing or reporting to me about it without all the busy work?  How much can they step away from their laptops to learn on their own?  

The struggle in my home, and I suspect in many others, is motivating a couple of my teens to actually take some interest in learning. As they transition from school time to home time, they are settling in to doing some projects instead of rushing through the list of chores/activities I've given them to get to screen time.   I am sorry they are missing out on the discussions in their humanities classrooms and the labs in science, but they are starting to pick up some books and games and art supplies on their own - or with my insistence...  And we have watched some good movies lately, highlights being Just Mercy, Freedom Writers, and Peanut Butter Falcon. I'm mandating meaningful movies in between crime shows and episodes of The Office.

What I've appreciated most about being at home is that the kids are enjoying each other's company more. We've always noticed this when we have forced family fun like hikes and campouts and other vacations. They'll play cards or board games when I hide the remotes, and I tolerate The Office because the two who are at each other's throats most often are watching it together and bonding over it.  

Until a rainy week arrived, we had some time to spend together outdoors. The girls are still meeting their one exercise buddy to meet for socially distant bike rides, so they get a little fresh air and social time. I tried to buy some weights online for the boys but everyplace was sold out.  I admit I've enjoyed my runs and bike rides as quiet time for me, too, although I'll often take the youngest out for a bike or scooter ride to get her moving. Her brothers will take her to the field across the street to kick the ball or play pass, which is another nice respite for me, as well.  

The beaches, the trails, and most of the parks in our community have now been closed. The one grassy field across the street is still being used by families on the block. Everyone seems to be respectful of having only one or two families there at a time. Since it has no equipment or parking, the city hasn't posted signs or put up yellow caution tape. It is on a busy street, so it doesn't attract very many people anyway.  I keep hoping the city will also keep the bike path open, pictured below, even though they've closed all the parks and beaches, so this path gets congested on sunny days. 

We did sneak away for some hikes before the national forests were closed - that was a welcome respite, and had we waited a couple of days, it would have been impossible. In the initial period of uncertainty, (as opposed to the expected uncertainty now) I did consider driving to my parents' house in Indiana where we could meet up with our two college sons who didn't make it home. (Our oldest was in Arizona on spring break when his university announced they were closing and students shouldn't return. He rented a car and drove here and has been a big help, although he does have a lot of schoolwork online and is tutoring online, as well. He's making more money tutoring now than he was at school.) But for a minute it seemed like my husband might return from his exercise in the UAE early, and we have a lot of books and games and craft stuff and better internet here, so I never did pack up. If the kids were younger, I probably would have, but as teens, they needed something stable when it seemed to them that everything else was being taken away.

Now here we are in Holy Week, we have several things to anticipate and celebrate.  The youngest turns 6 tomorrow, so we are planning to make this afternoon a castle birthday cake and Easter basket cupcakes to deliver to a few friends' doorsteps in this limbo time between Palm Sunday and Holy Thursday.  I have ordered too much stuff from the internet - although I'm feeling virtuous about entering a trial period of quitting Amazon Prime and ordering from other places, mostly ones that offer free shipping on orders of over $10 or $25 (Better World Books, Thriftbooks and Target, mostly, although I ordered some Easter stuff from Catholic vendors).  I got tired of sifting through cheaply made in China stuff on Amazon.  

Then we have the Holy Week triduum. We've been watching our parish's live streamed Masses on Sundays, but I think we may take a "tour" of different online churches during this time. We'll tune into Mass at the Basilica at Notre Dame. And we've tried Father Barron's, but I need to do some research on which ones we'll visit.  Our church is still open for adoration on Wednesday and Thursday mornings and the church is open during the week for prayer, which has been a big blessing. The prayer garden behind our church has a stations of the cross walk that we did one Friday, although I have enough little books at home that we have stayed home to read them the other two weeks.  I have been picking up food here and there for our Easter feast a little early to make sure that I can find them, although I only have a tiny ham, but I'll go to the store one more time for fruits and vegetables.  

When my husband calls in the evenings - which are morning to him - he asks about the day, and I don't have much to report. I have tried to call a friend or family member every other day or so while out on a walk, so these conversations are news of the week. We might talk a little about what the real news is reporting, but we have no crises to solve, nothing urgent that needs to be addressed, now that the older boys are settled in away from school. 

I have been doing some reading, which I'll report on in the next installment, whenever that happens. I did really enjoy this article about the gift economy posted at Image magazine's website: https://imagejournal.org/article/gratuity-who-gets-paid-when-art-is-free/  So many free shows and articles and websites are around that I can't keep up. The increase in generosity among everyone in the community is notable. There are more volunteers here than there are people who need help, at least in the immediate vicinity. Not so in other areas, but the desire to do something, to give something, is strong.   

At some point we'll have to reenter the real world. But for now, I give thanks for this time to prepare for Easter and to find joy in small things. 

Can you see the flamingo in the distance? 

The bike path along the strand

We added two more garden boxes - I planted seeds that may be too old to sprout. We shall see what the rain does for them. 

The second box - the succulents are divided to be given away. 

The doll is ready for Mass. 

Making unleavened bread

Renegade freesia

A rainbow

This flamingo was sharing food with the coots and ducks - not chasing them away from his food. 

These are the flamingos that live at the now closed hotel not too far from our house.

The statice and ice plant are blooming.