Once more to the lake

It's been awhile since I taught E. B. White's classic essay "Once More to the Lake," but it's elegaic title and tone capture the experience of this summer's brief trip to Michigan. As I mentioned in the last post, in early June, my youngest daughter and I flew to Traverse City to meet up with my parents, my older brother and his partner, and my sister and her family. Last summer was reunion year - all three of my siblings and their families, all my nephews and nieces, and all of my own children gathered on South Shore Drive for a summer vacation that was both relaxing and emotionally draining.  There were a lot of people to feed and entertain.  We weren't all on the same schedule, but even so, we did make some great memories. This summer trip had no expectations and so less drama, but also fewer emotional highs. 

Like White, my experience of the lake is colored by memories of my own childhood as I witness the experiences of my youngest.  As I've written about before, when I was growing up, our family went to the same place every summer. We did the same things - swim, bike, read, eat cherry pie and ice cream, watch the sunset, shop in little gift shops, and take a hike or two. Occasionally neighbors would take us out on their boats. My dad, brothers, and grandpa fished. A couple of times, I went on the charter boat, but I mostly read. We didn't mind doing the same thing every year - we craved tradition.

My own children have different memories. Visiting the grandparents has been our tradition, but we've done a lot of different things in the summer the last few years. We have gone to the lake many times, but not every year.  My youngest had few memories of it before last summer. Now that we have gone twice in a row, she has memories of the places and people. But her experience is so different - instead of a handful of cousins around the same age, it was just she and my niece this year.  They play quieter games than their brothers did at the same age.  When I was that age - 10 - I had two cousins and a sister to pal around with, but I also loved solitary time. I was a reader and a dreamer. I liked to spend time at the lake drawing and painting and writing stories. I wanted to hike up into the woods.  In White's essay, he watches his son play in the water and feels time condensing - he is both his son and his father in that moment. Mortal and immortal through memory. I experience a similar emotion when I watch my daughter, but I also am missing not just my own childhood summers, but the childhood summers my children experienced.  Nostalgia threatens to overwhelm at times.

Meanwhile, reading a book about nostalgia on the flight - Ann Patchett's Tom Lake, which as I mentioned takes place in upstate Michigan - reminded me of how unreliable memory can be, and how some memories are resurrected at surprisingly or unexpected times. Visiting the cherry orchard I remembered made me realize I didn't remember the cherry orchard as it was, but rather I remembered what it meant to me. I either never knew or never absorbed the connection of the orchard to Bruce Catton. How often my memory is untrustworthy! I biked to it this summer and stopped to take a few photos, but it no longer is a thriving orchard. Even though house looked tired. I didn't poke around much because I didn't want to trespass, but I remember posing for photos among the trees one summer with my sister and cousins when we were in high school - pre-digital photo/selfie days, but at that age when we loved to envision ourselves as models.  We were beautiful - maybe not by worldly standards - but in our awkward, hopeful, unique ways.  

So here we are - five weeks after this vacation, and I'm just getting around to finishing this post. Somehow this summer has not had the time for the reflection that I was hoping to find. 

In the cherry orchard

Flora of the Michigan coast

This photo is supposed to be of a bald eagle swooping over the lake, but I missed it!

And here is a photo of a deer that just ran into the woods...

Another view from the orchard that doesn't exist any more

Lady's slipper! A rare sighting

Great color contrasts

Modeling

Looking forward, looking back - Year in Review 2023

 Although January is almost halfway over, it feels like 2024 is still in its infancy. We barely had time to get used to writing 2023 before the new calendar arrived.  My mother-in-law always sends a calendar to her children with the birthdays of family members, anniversaries, and fun little notes prefilled. Last year she sent Texas State Parks, which I meant to visit more of. This year she sent one with a gardening theme. As I filled in the birthdays of my family members and made note of some of the dates I already know, I felt encouraged by the thought of a new year. I love the optimism that resurges with the new year after the rest and revivifying effects of the holidays, but I wish time would slow down a little bit!  

On the other hand I went back and looked at my new year's post from last year (on January 25th) and felt depressed. How did I fail so miserably at everything I thought I would do? I should make it a point to reread what I write every once in awhile in order to save myself some time and misery. 

Here is the summary from last year, although the post began with thoughts about feeling unsettled teaching at the community college and reflections on my aunt and uncle's funeral. I had resolved to be more grateful with what I was doing. (Why didn't I listen to myself before taking this job teaching middle school?) 

So here's what I have to work on this year: Let go of disquietude/be content about where we live and what I do. Be more attentive to the people around me and lift them up. (Next fall, our sixth child will be a high school senior. Need to make good memories with her this year.) Write letters. Practice hospitality (which means buying new chairs or upholstery fabric!!! a leftover goal from last year. I just can't find what I want...need to settle for good enough).  Maybe read St. Francis de Sales in toto instead of as small quotes here and there. I've started it before. But make a list of spiritual reading. Keep working on photos/family history. Write more. Make memories - go see family and friends.And of course, drink water, keep trying for 7 hours of sleep, and do more weight lifting to protect my aging bones!

I did not let go of disquietude. I did not write letters. I did not practice as much hospitality as I would like (although I did buy new chairs at last - something accomplished!!). I did not write more letters, except thank you notes. I did not read St Francis de Sales, write more (except slightly more blog posts), nor print more photos. I did go see family and friends. I slept less than ever and barely touched the weights. Ah, humility.

Despite abundant failures, I will try again. I relish the optimism of making resolutions, even though I'm also already failing at them. I'll keep making the same practical ones that I make every year: Do more spiritual reading, drink water, lift weights, sleep more, print photos.  This year, I really want to back off sugar, be more organized, and be more active in charitable giving. 

And of course, either stop worrying about the future (that line from Wendell Berry's "Peace of Wild Things" echoes in my mind: "I come into the peace of wild things / that do not tax their lives with forethought / of grief." That taxation exerts a price - on my own peace and the peace of my family and those around me when I let anxiety rule my mind)  OR figure out what it is I want to devote the next 20 years to before those years pass away in idleness and bemoaning fruitless desires. 

I have not read anything spiritual this Christmas season, unless you count Plough magazine, which I really enjoy, or A Little Princess, which is secular, but has such a good message - very St Therese of Lisieux.  I meant to read a book a week last year, and may try that again, even though I'm not quite achieved it even with counting books I skimmed and children's books. I count 50 on my list, but I may have forgotten at add some. Less than many previous years because of the time I've spent on classwork.

To assist in being organized, I have a new planner that I started to fill out with lists of things to do, but haven't put birthdays, school holidays, planned trips, or hopeful goals in there yet. It's not a fancy planner, but it has nice spaces and a pretty wildflower cover.  I've started planning the school year-  writing the plan being more fun that executing the plan.  

Getting more sleep is perhaps my biggest priority because it will help me with the other goals. Most of the year I averaged 6 hours or less of sleep a night. Unsustainable. My goal is seven, but so far this year, that has only happened twice. And I've had a couple 3-4 hour nights because of planning or worrying about some plan. There's been a lot going on at the house this past year, much of it brought on my lack of planning and my ability to worry about many things. I should adopt Padre Pio's slogon, "Pray, hope, and don't worry." Easier said that done by someone in middle age, even with the help of melatonin.

Not helping me sleep is trying to write more - and trying to keep making family memories. Our Thanksgiving and Christmas trips were big hits. I just returned from a track meet in Arkansas with my senior daughter, during which we sparred over college applications but made peace by belting out Taylor Swift, Kacey Musgraves, and old One Direction songs - our car trip replays. 

In fact, reviewing last year makes me feel not quite so badly about the failed resolutions. We did make a lot of family memories - trips to Indiana, Michigan, New York, Boston, Maine, California, Oklahoma, North Carolina. We may not have been as hospitable as I would like, but we did take advantage of other people's hospitality quite frequently.  And we spent a lot time on the back porch toasting sunsets with those friends and family who did come to visit. Hoping to hosts more guests - our fourth son's girlfriend just came for a short visit - the first visitor of the year, after having all the family here.

I could meander on more about memories from last year and hopes for this coming year. This has been a short year in review post. I am meaning to review my reading and to write about teaching to try to write myself to some clarity about next year. But now, if I'm going to sleep more than six hours, I need to log off. More to come. 

Still remembering

 Continuing the theme of memory, I had a dream last night that has stuck with me all day.  I don't remember the first part or the exact setting of the dream, but there was a threatening aspect to the situation. I was on a train with our second son, only he was a toddler, maybe 2 or 3. Old enough to talk, young enough to be held. At first we were playing some game where children were getting lost, so I grabbed my son and got on the train to go somewhere to rest and hide.  And he did rest - his little body relaxed into dreams. As I held his sleeping body, his face brightened into a smile. It was one of those sweet moments of total trust and relaxation when a baby knows he's safe with his mother, even though his mother knows she can't keep him completely safe.

In the dream, I knew I was dreaming, and I knew he was really grown up.  So even in the dream, I knew I should savor this moment, when I could love and hold him because he was small again. It was like I was able to time travel because I knew he would grow up fine, and I could hold him freely, almost with more love because I no longer worried about raising him. The dream was a gift; it was so realistic. It was a moment to forgive myself for the times I didn't sit down and hold my older babies without worry of what comes next. This may be what being a grandmother is like. 

I woke up slowly, relishing the feeling of his little boy body, the lightness and flexibility of his arms, the small of his head, the softness, etc.  And then I booked a trip to visit our son!

Memoirs and memory

May was a pretty good month for reading for me. Not that I read copious amounts, but what I read was really good. I finished two very different books - Educated by Tara Westover, the bestseller about the girl who went from apparently no education to a Harvard Ph.D., and The River Why by David James Duncan, an odd book about fishing, philosophizing, and finding faith that I had seen recommended on lists of books for my nature writing class but had never encountered. - Saving that for another post...

I was on the library's wait list for Westover's memoir for several months. After finishing it in a few days, I'm not surprised that it is on the bestseller list.  Westover tells a good story and tells it well.  It's thoughtful and heartfelt and fascinating - I kept wanting to find out what crazy thing would happen next in her family.  (I also read Wired for Story this month, which posits that the most important part of writing is tantalizing your audience with the prospect of what's on the next page.)

Westover has a fascinating background, which is familiar to readers of book reviews: her parents are Mormon survivalists who live on a farm in Idaho and run a scrapyard and now an essential oils business. The story begins with an account of her mother becoming a midwife, so she can help other mothers give birth at home. The parents are skeptical of the government, the medical establishment, the educational system. The younger four of the seven children don't have birth certificates and never go to school. The father regularly puts the children in danger by employing them in the scrapyard, where several are injured, including a son who is severely burned, and himself. His recovery from severe burns is the catalyst that enables the family to make millions from essential oils. He doesn't go to the doctor, but instead is healed by the used of salves and balms that his wife makes and administers to him.  She was severely injured herself in one of two bad car accidents caused by the father falling asleep at the wheel while driving at night.

These are the incidents that keep the reader turning pages. There is also the minor drama of Tara's coming of age - she has a beautiful voice and is allowed to take dance and music lessons and participate in musical theater, even though she doesn't go to school. The father suffers a couple mental breakdowns, and she later realizes he suffers from psychiatric disorders. And then there is the major drama of the older brother beating and berating his sisters.  Fear and frustration over these interactions are part of what eventually propel Tara to apply to college and leave home.

Despite the family's suspicion of the government and other public institutions, they don't forbid Tara from going to school. They have a computer and internet, which she uses for finding out about BYU. Her older brother who has also gone to college helps her study for the ACT. None of this causes a large rift in the family. And while Tara attends BYU, she comes home regularly, even as she begins to question the way she was raised.

I would warn about spoilers ahead, but I think all the press about the book has revealed the end of the story.  Tara goes on to do extremely well at Brigham Young University and gets a fellowship to study at Cambridge for a year. A don there encourages her to continue her studies of history, and she eventually attends Harvard as a visiting scholar and earns a Ph.D. from Cambridge.  Although she claims not to have received much if any education at home (and suggests she didn't know what the Holocaust was when she first attended a lecture on it at BYU), she apparently can write and read and think well enough to earn degrees from prestigious universities. She is a prodigy, as are two of her brothers, who also have Ph.D.'s.

While she is away at school, her family has phenomenal success selling essential oils and profiting from her mother's energy healing business. The family home is expanded and help is hired, so people are in and out of the house all the time. For many years, Tara stays connected with her family, but after she accuses her brother of abuse and tries to get his wife and her sister to speak up about the way they were abused by him, too, she is cut off from the family.  Her father, sister, and two brothers no longer talk to her, and her mother won't see her until she reconciles with her father. This causes her great pain, even though she struggled to move away and sees harm in the way she was raised.

After I finished the book, I was curious about the rest of the story, so I went to the trusty internet to find out the name of the family essential oil company and what happened after this book that reveals so many intimate secrets and complex relationships was published.  The family business wasn't familiar to me, although that's not surprising. I found many glowing reviews and interviews with Tara about her story.  Obama and Oprah praised it.

There is also a statement on Goodreads by one of the brothers who Tara appealed to for help writing the book. He claims that the story is Tara's and that her memories don't entirely match his own.  He notes several events he remembers differently, including his brother's burns and his other brother's traumatic accident at a building site.  And Westover does note these discrepancies in the book. She includes not just footnotes but also paragraphs about how certain events - like her brother's burns - are remembered differently by everyone who was there.

There is also a letter from the family's lawyer that claims that Westover exaggerates her lack of schooling. It points out how three of the kids have advanced degrees, and how the other children are successful at what they do, and it connects this success with the family's home school.  It claims she has exaggerated the arguments with her brother. The letter doesn't accuse Westover of libel, and there is no lawsuit, but it does claim that her memory is faulty.

These postscripts add another layer of meaning to the story. On the one hand, the book is fascinating because the characters are unusual and extreme.  Crazy things happen to them. And yet this girl -  and her brothers - manage to have incredible success.  And for a number of years, she wants to come home. She loves the mountain she grew up on and she craves attention and love from her parents.  As I read, I was surprised she would spend any time alone with her abusive brother, and yet she does. She wants her father's love and attention, even as she acknowledges he is mentally ill. She shows up from overseas for family events.  She doesn't want to be alienated from her family, even though she isn't willing to swear she is possessed by demons.

As I read, I also wondered how she managed to do so well in college. Almost no details are given about her mother teaching the children, but some of them are able to read and write well.  This discrepancy either makes Westover's achievements nearly miraculous, or it causes the reader to question whether she is telling the whole story about her education.

But memory is another fascinating theme. In our own family, the kids either don't remember things or remember them quite differently.  They say things about the past that are a conglomeration of different stories or that leave out great big details. Their stories shift as time goes by. My husband remembers me saying things that I swear I never said - perhaps he interpreted something I said as meaning something different from what I intended.  My own siblings and I have different perspectives on things that happened when we were growing up.  Sometimes I wonder if we were at the same place at the same time.

Memory is unreliable.  It seems as if memory has a great deal to do with personality and perspective.  Does the truth of history belong to the person who tells it first and tells it best?  Or is the best option to consult different sources and knit together some relatively reliable account of events based on probabilities and similarities between stories? 

The difficulty of knowing what is actually true vs. what is true for Tara Westover's story is impossible to determine. And perhaps unnecessary, especially if her story is taken just to be an interesting read and a meditation on the way education occurs and its effects on individuals.

Capturing Memories

In the days following the Christmas Feast, we had some memorable moments, many of which I captured on film for the viewing pleasure of my family and maybe a few friends.  I recently read an article about how if you take a lot of pictures at an event you may not remember it very well, unless you spend time looking at the photos afterward.  But in that case you are in a way creating a narrative in your mind about what happened through the photos, much like what goes on in the minds of Facebook friends and historians and other people who view photos but who weren't present at an event.  Try to create a narrative from these photos because I don't have time to write one. Captions provided to assist your imagination and my memory.

Drinking from the dog bowls - we had a canine visitor for the holidays. Dog sat for a friend
Almost made me want a puppy. Almost.

Learning to taste some chords

Christmas morning exhaustion

 

Baby mermaid elf at the beach Christmas morning in her Valentine's shirt

Shrine and relic of Our Lady of Guadalupe

Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, LA

Nativity outside the Cathedral

Visiting LACMA, discovering Houdin

Enjoying LA food trucks with the grandparents

Interactive sculpture beats out videogames for a day at LACMA

Another lady for my collection of Reading Women in Art

Saint Anne reads to her baby also

Goodnight playground! A local friend told me it is pollution in the air that makes the sunsets so colorful here.

The neighbor's floribunda

New Year's Eve Lantern Lighting, courtesy of a friend

Prayer lantern on the way to Heaven

Reading and Remembering

I began a list of books for 2014. I have only finished one: Lord of the World (discussion at Reading for Believers.)  Meanwhile, I have started many.  Can't seem to find time or attention to finish them.  And maybe the fact that I fall asleep while reading or saying prayers with the kids at about 8:30 has something to do with it. Last night I couldn't finish our chapter of Charlotte's Web. I fell asleep with my mouth open on the couch.  I heard my older boys comimg in from their Tuesday night Bible Study, chatting with my husband, getting something to eat. I hadn't seen them all day. But I just couldn't move. My brain was still halfway functioning, but my body was paralyzed in its slouch. In my half dreaming state,  I invented a conversation with the boys. I wondered what their impression of pregnancy is from my slide into indolence. Earlier in the evening, I neither helped make dinner or clean-up, but let my husband heat up leftovers while I sat riding shotgun on my 9 year old so he would finish up his mission scrapbook.  Guilt and discomfort finally pervaded my consciousness enough for me to roll my body off the couch, prop open my eyes, and pose some obligatory questions about the day to the boys before going to get on pajamas and get into bed. Such is the state of affairs of this pregnant 40 year old.

These kinds of nights happen more often when I spend the day away from home, as I did yesterday.  Had field trip duty for the fourth grade - they went to see a one-man play about bullying called "I am Jack."  It made me wonder about how easy it is to take a mediocre storyline, some emotional and slightly naughty dialogue (jokes about underpants), and make money off of it if it is about a touchpoint issue.

After my chaperoning duties were over, I ran some errands, including checking out some books at the library with the intention of finding something EASY to read.

The books I have going: Mansfield Park. It's been some time since I read any Jane Austen. This one I downloaded on the Nook last year, but only looked at after finishing Benton's Lord of the World early enough one evening that I still had energy to read. Reading Austen is pure pleasure, especially since I'm defecting right now from Downton Abbey. I'm just a few chapters in, but it's enough to highlight the superiority of Austen's dialogue over DA's. Probably going to switch from the Nook to my copy in the Penguin collected works of Austen; although it's a cumbersome object, I have very pleasant memories of my grandfather purchasing it for me at a little bookstore in the town where we vacationed in Michigan. Although I was perhaps too young to really appreciate the tensions in Austen, I was attracted to the book's size and pretty pink cover. The pink cover is now falling off, but it is a book that has been well-loved for its content and provenance.

Number two: The Reef by Edith Wharton. Again I am not far along, but already enchanted by the dialogue, even though Wharton's book is tinged by melancholy that threatens to get worse, while the early melancholy of Fanny Price in Mansfield Park promises to be relieved.  I was looking for another E. M. Forster book when I came across this book in a drawer of my desk. I don't know when I bought it. A surprise, like finding $10 in the pocket of your winter coat when you first put it on for the year.

Number three: St. Francis de Sales' Thy Will Be Done.  This is one of those spiritual books that I have started more than once and never finish. Like spinach, it is sure to be good for me to read, but it's written in a style that's hard to digest in its certainty and sweetness.

For balance, at the library yesterday I picked up Anne Lamott's new book Stitches:A Handbook on Meaning, Hope, and Repair.  It is a long essay on finding meaning.  Sometimes I like Lamott's writing better than other times.  I've only read the first chapter while hiding in the bathroom, but so far it lacks the charm and originality that the other books of hers I've read (Bird by Bird, Traveling Mercies) have had. Maybe she overemphasizes the uncertainty? Or as the reviewer said in the link above, maybe it's the weariness detectable even in the first few pages that colors the idea that we carry on through tragedy by relating with others.

The engaging, easy book I started reading at breakfast is a new memoir, "The World's Strongest Librarian," by Josh Hanagarne (his blog here).  It's the story of his struggle with Tourette Syndrome and finding work and love, intertwined with a memoir of his life with books. I prefer life with books memoirs over most other kinds of memoirs, perhaps because, with my infinitely ordinary childhood, I identify with them more than with narratives about difficulty and distress. (This morning on the way to school my kids asked me if I said "duh" much growing up in the 80s. I know I did to my siblings, but I  think I was too nerdy at school to pose that kind of sarcasm to fellow classmates.  I don't even remember many conversations with classmates. I could never write a memoir.)  Hanagarne's tone is engaging - and his description of his early years spent falling in love with books and libraries encourages empathy -- a desire to say, "me too!"  Except I wonder, how much does he remember from those years before first grade? I do vaguely remember the branch library near the house where we lived until I was seven, but I don't recall any specific books that I loved at that early of an age, except Tasha Tudor books, Are You My Mother?,"and the illustrated, abridged version of Bambi and the Little Golden books at my grandparents' houses - in particular, The Tawny, Scrawny Lion, the Pokey Little Puppy, Eloise Wilkin's little prayer book, and Rudolph. Richard Scarry books, A Prayer for a Child, and Margaret Wise Brown books were a part of our baby library, too, but they are so familiar, I'm not sure I remember anyone reading them to me, as I recall my mom's dad reading the Pokey Little Puppy and my dad's mom using a deep voice to invoke Bambi's father, as much as I recall them being around and reading them to my little brother who was born when I was almost eight.

This book also brings back sketchy memories of a summer during high school when I took government and economics during summer school.  The summer classes were populated mostly by students who had failed these prerequisites for graduation, plus a couple overachievers like my friend and myself who wanted to get ahead in credits so we could take more electives.  The econ class was taught by a business man, not a professional teacher, and he had us bring in a couple of dollars to invest in a real stock for the duration of the class.  He was engaging in a way that most teachers ground down by the daily struggle to instill some facts in recalcitrant students weren't.  He treated us like we had ideas, even though we were an odd mix of flunk-outs and nerds.  In between his unusual, casual style of teaching, and the several hours that the condensed class consumed on summer mornings, my other overachieving friend and I made friends with a couple of boys who, during the normal school year, usually hung out in the back of the school parking lot where other members of the Future Farmers of American parked their pick-up trucks. (Rural Indiana Public School, remember.) We checked the stock market readings in the business section of the newspaper together to see how our stock was performing.  One of these boys had Tourette's.  He had odd facial tics and would sometimes let loose a string of profanities.  I remember him confiding this to me - at first I thought he was just telling me a story to elaborate about why he used such bad language, but then the profundity of his confidence sunk in. He was telling me he had a disability, which back then was not a label you wore with pride.  I had always judged him to be a misfit by choice, someone who got in trouble because he didn't care about school and spurned authority figures. But I realized by the end of the six weeks or so (over which we each made about $1 on our stock choice), that he might have been someone else, if he wasn't embarrassed and angered by his body's inability to be controlled.

By the end of the class, he was calling me to talk, not just to ask about class, and would show up places where my friend and I were hanging out.  Eventually I asked him to stop calling and following me around.  Shadowy memories of being almost of afraid of him when I saw him punch a wall in frustration have been locked away for decades in the odd spaces of memory.  I have the same deep shame about the way I treated him - rarely acknowledging him on the rare occasions when our paths crossed once the regular school year began -- as I do about the miserable selfishness I displayed when I asked one of my orchestra classmates not to tell anyone I had gone to the symphony with him one weekend.  How and why was I so mean?  I read a lot of books about misfits and empathized with independent characters in books, but in real life I was just as concerned with "reputation" and being liked as most other teenage girls. An ugly stage.

So anyway. I'm reading this book and intend to enjoy it, despite its ability to resurrect painful memories. I expect it will also help me recall pleasant associations with Books I Have Read. I'm also interested in his experience of Mormonism, which fascinates me. Now if I can just stay awake to finish some of these books.

Memory-dipping once more

I started reading Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Froer some time ago. A few weeks ago I picked up a stack of interesting books - A Way in the World by V.S. Naipul, Moonwalking with Einstein, Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Best Spiritual Writing of 2011, Moonlight Over Manifest, a YA book - but I've only finished the YA book, and they all are overdue. (Thank goodness for fineless libraries! Of course, if they had online renewals, I'd renew them, but our base library relies on handstamped cards in recipe boxes, so I just mention to the teen at the desk that I still am reading when we check out other things. They also have a still functioning card catalog. LOVE. But changes ahead are rumored.)

Distracted by all kinds of things, I haven't read past the first 50 pages of Froer's book; I'd turn it in, but it has a number of interesting snippets mixed in among some mental posturing.  The book is Froer's narrative about training for the World Memory Championships, but it's also an exploration of how memory works. Does it get around to wondering why we have memory, or does that tend away from science toward theology?

I don't know yet what conjectures the book puts forth about whys, but I did appreciate a section about how being busy can be a good thing for your brain because it creates all kinds of new patterns, as well as preventing old patterns from becoming ruts. I sometimes fear our life is so chaotic and full that our experiences will be forgotten before they take root and become meaningful. Isn't that what we are supposed to be doing -- having meaningful experiences? Or making meaning out of what experiences we do have. . .

I often crave a quieter routine, but Froer cites research that claims that when our days are too similar, they blend together and are forgotten more easily. Certainly this must be true of days spent working in a cubicle.  I know my days as a young mother were somewhat varied - we might go to the park or the zoo or the library. We'd take walks and read and cook.  But I can recall so few individual moments, so I question Froer's citation's accuracy. I wish I had taken more photos, written more diary entries, held onto more bits of conversations.  I do remember lying exhausted on the floor, waiting for dinnertime to come while babies crawled on top of me, and wishing that time would speed by. Irony.

Indulge me by admiring my cute children 8 or 9 years ago:

I love how the 5 and 6 yr olds are totally in persona in their
costumes from grandma, while the 3 yr old is not quite sure...

But even at 3, he knew about bunny ears

The consolation is that our now will be equally as poignant to look back upon someday down the road.  I should be writing down the things my teenagers are doing and saying - if I could do so without embarrassing them. I came home late from my class last night, and my oldest was wearing the medal he had won in the All-Island high school cross country meet. He was still smiling about the team's victory celebration at Yogurtland.  He still looked very much like the little boy who was so excited to win a prize in a costume contest.  I know he won't forget that moment unexpected victory was announced.

Unfortunately, I probably will forget. My field record for remembering is notoriously poor, and I fear my husband will have to suffer through my senile dementia in the not too distant future.

So thank goodness for photography, the weak attempt to track our travels, record our reunions, mark our maturings...

More efforts at making time stand still: the last few photos of my parents' visit:

Stopping a fight between that former 3 yr old and the new infant

Love the paddleboards

My parents were able to witness a cross country meet ...

They look serious, but inside they are more like their friend on the left.

... and an Eagle Scout Ceremony for Spiderman.

Attempts at family photos

River boat "cruise"

Land crab farm

River catfish - the Japanese translator's dinner. Caught with whitebread on fishing line
tied to an old Gatorade bottle trailing behind the boat.

This is the guide's son "Jelly Bean" who patted my daughter's arm hair.

"Halitai" - monitor lizard.

Model of a Chamorro home

Ancient latte - the foundation stones. Chiefs' homes had more latte.

Honeybee nest in a breadfruit tree.

Our guide with an infamous brown tree snake. For a time, the FDA offered cash for snakes brought in dead, but it was discovered that people were breeding them.

The coconut crab

A trapped halitai eating hot dogs.

Sirena and the Spanish bridge. Sirena became a mermaid because her mother cursed
her when she didn't bring home fish in time for dinner because she loved to swim.

Soccer was also on the schedule - middle school

U10 futsal match - pitch is being upgraded, so games are following
indoor rules.

The umbrella is necessary for rain and uv ray protection

Frozen in joy

A visit from the aircraft carrier USS George Washington