And in other news...

My sister has a cd! Order one here: https://sistersinjin.bandcamp.com/releases. Buy some for Christmas presents for yourself and friends!

And for your enjoyment, some fifteenth century art:

Here is a vibrant picture of St. John by the Spanish Master of Saint Nicholas from the San Diego Museum of Art

A rather serious St. Catherine of Siena by Sano di Pietro of Siena

And a thoughtful young Madonna and child - Madonna of the Roses by a follower of Filippo Lippi, Pseudo-Pier Francesco Fiorentino

Linkage

Interesting ways to spend time:

First off: Let me plug my own kid's music!  He and a friend have formed a duo, The Righteous Cubicles.  I think I would call their style Americana.  Not sure really. They are their own songwriters and play banjo, guitar and ukulele. The friend's little brother also plays accordion on one song. They just recorded a cd with 7 songs. The quality of the recording is low, but their lyrics and music are good, according to this prejudiced mom.  I love listening to their CD, which is now available for the incredibly low price of $5.  It is priced so affordably because they have only performed live once - at the school talent show - and because they are producing it themselves - and, moreover, because I have bankrolled part of the production costs (Color copies!) Get a preview here:  https://soundcloud.com/righteous-cubicles
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I love my teenagers. I can't believe I was so afraid of having them.  Maybe because my brother and I gave our parents a difficult time in high school. And then my sister went through a difficult time in college.  My younger brother, the quintessential phlegmatic, never intentionally gave my parents a really bad time. He did drive their van into a corn field off a gravel road and got his ears pierced. But he let the holes grow in and is an upstanding father today. Hope for all!

My own kids give me the occasional heart stopper, but usually it is accidental. Like a car accident. Or because I am overcome with pride.  Or because, TIME!  I saw a post from an old friend about her son participating in a senior class Mass. Wow, can he be that old!  But hark! My OWN son will have a baccalaureate Mass in just two weeks!  I am not ready.

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Part of my fear of teenagers is rooted in knowing teenagers who acting like the kids in "Greasy Lake" by T. C. Boyle, always a favorite in my lit class. Well, maybe my acquaintances weren't quite that 'bad,' but they had their sins.  One of my students is writing about Boyle for a research project, so I went on a rabbit trail. He was once a Catholic and counts Flannery O'Connor as an influence.  Maybe someday he'll come back.  Somehow, I got linked to reading about a book about Mormons, always fascinating to me: Latimes review of Elders by Ryan McIlvain, which lead to an article about Marilynne Robinson and her book When I was a Child I Read Books and on to a literary magazine called The Believer I never heard of before.  All interesting.

Needless to say, I didn't get to bed early that night.
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My late night computer habits can sometimes cause a strain in our marriage. I try to keep them to Phase 2, when distance is imperative, at least for now. (Some friends and I just read The Sinners Guide to NFP by Simcha Fischer for an informal book club. Really enjoyed it and the conversation. I left it sitting out in the living room, just in case my teenagers happened to get curious. Perhaps the easiest way to talk about these things with teenage boys? "Here. Read this." End conversation.)

I wrote this about marriage meaning to post it sometime, so now: I have said that marriage is a thing. An object unto itself. Not perhaps a material being capable of being touched, but an idea to be contemplated that is made physical. In the meeting of bodies, love is incarnated.  Here in these bodies of children lolling and lagging about me. Clinging and clashing. Pulling and pushing. A roiling mess of humanity under a roof too low to hold all the emotion and energy that pulses sometimes faster, sometimes irregularly, sometimes in even steady syncopated beats all of one accord.  Not me, not you, not even you and me, but us and it and them. Impossible to decline.  This marriage is not just the two of us, but the household, the furnace at its heart.  Where it is weakest is where the selves attempt to move alone or to grasp too hard.  "Most like an arch"  writes John Ciardi so wisely, falling in when not leaning toward. 

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I love poems about marriage. And here is an article about Wendell Berry on poetry and marriage.  I need to read it more closely, but at first glance it was intriguing.

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And I'm running far again. Thought I'd do a half marathon while we lived here, but can't bring myself to drop $100 on a race I can't win.  Nonetheless, I've started running a 10 miler regularly on the weekends.  It is surprising how easy it is to do this when you have a friend to run with.  Really. An hour and a half of running flies by when you are talking.  Blessedly, one of the Navy wives is right where I am with running, and I really like her. There are certain people you meet with whom you know you have a kinship (also the women in the NFP book club). You see them and know they are kindred spirits even without speaking.  What breaks my heart is when you don't really get to start to know them until it is time to move away. Alas, alack.

Like this quote by Earl Nightingale from seemomrunfar:

"We are at our very best, and we are happiest, when we are fully engaged in work we enjoy on the journey toward the goal we've established for ourselves. It gives meaning to our time off and comfort to our sleep. It makes everything else in life so wonderful, so worthwhile.
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Also like this article on surfing and God by Peter Kreeft. So many good things to read out there, so little time.  

In my year of little reading, my latest novel to finish is a YA book called Here's How I See It by Heather Henson about a girl whose dad runs a summer theater. The main character, Junebug, is having a difficult summer because of her parents' troubles and her own foiled hopes. Lots of Shakespeare and Chekhov quotes. I'd put it as a book for the 8-15 yr old crowd. And it ends happily! Hooray!

I'd read more if I didn't have a smartphone.  In the old days, when I nursed babies, I sat around and read.  Now I read emails and Facebook.  Lots of people who need prayers out there - for comfort and for gratitude.  At least Facebook is good for keeping track of people who need prayers.
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My days of nursing are growing shorter and shorter. Baby can go all day and has gone 1 whole night without it, but she doesn't like milk, and I don't mind using her as an excuse to sit in a quiet room every once in a while. 

All too soon she'll be graduating from high school.

From "Light of the World"

My latest read is the Peter Seewald interview with Pope Benedict XVI, Light of the World. Not as meaty as I had hoped, but this quote was good:


“There does need to be a new realization that being human is something great, a great challenge, to which the banality of just drifting along doesn’t do justice. Any more than the attitude that comfort is the best way to live, that feeling healthy is the sum and substance of happiness. There needs to be a new sense that being human is subject to a higher set of standards, indeed, that it is precisely these demands that make a greater happiness possible in the first place. There needs to be a sense that being human is like a mountain climbing expedition that includes some arduous slopes. But it is by them that we reach the summit and are able to experience for the first time how beautiful it is to be.”

Arduous slopes and higher standards. We were just having a conversation last night around the dinner table about why I don’t want the older kids downloading heavy metal Christian music. Yes, it has a Christian message, if you can decipher it, but the mode of delivery has an anti-Christian origin. Can heavy-metal music be “baptized” like other artifacts of pagan culture? That arduous slope of fighting against popular culture is just beginning to get steeper at our house.

A second conversation with my husband this morning was about whether or not a servicemember who presumably committed suicide should be buried at Arlington National Cemetary.  While I am usually the sort of person who tries to assume that people act with the best of intentions, I surprised myself with how strongly I felt about this predicament.  This suicide victim didn't just give up on the mountain climbing expedition of life, but he deserted his comrades in the military. He may have served honorably until his death, but by taking his own life he went AWOL.  Apparently since he did not leave behind a note, the people in charge of the decision making about this burial are assuming that his intentions were unclear.  The stance they are taking is that, while there is no question he shot himself, maybe it was an accident or he was under some undue influence.  And I join them in hoping that perhaps he regretted the decision as he pulled the trigger.  But burial space at Arlington is not infinite; it should be reserved for those who stay and fight. By allowing suicides to be buried with the pomp associated with military funerals, it may give those left behind the message that it's okay to quit.

I feel very callous writing this, and I wouldn't withhold the right to burial on sacred ground for the young man in question. The image of Ophelia's burial in Hamlet is nagging me, but I'm feeling a little tired of excessive coddling, of trying to make everyone feel okay. Like the Pope says, comfort is not the sum of happiness.

Another List

Today I went to a short professional development session on "Teaching Millenials." I was hoping for a few more practical tips, but the tips were limited to "use technology" and "provide opportunities for group projects and teamwork," ideas I'm aware of, although I don't incorporate them often. The presenter focused primarily on stereotypical characteristics of the Millenial generation and the three generations preceding. I noticed that he left out one characteristic that my generation, Gen X, shares with the Millenials - we like to make playlists as gifts.  There's a "Truly Pathetic Love Song" tape still floating around in our car (which has a tape deck), one of the first gifts I gave my husband, back in college when he was getting ready to go away for a year in Rome. (Proof of Memorex's enduring quality?) We'd only been dating a few months, so maybe it was a little bold of me to send him a bunch of sappy love songs, but then he made me one, too. Sweet!!When he went away this past spring to Afghanistan, I made another love song mix, this time from the Itunes songs we have. And now, because I'm trying to butter him up, here's a list of those songs. Some are from the original mix.

• In Your Eyes – Peter Gabriel
• You Are the Everything – REM
• Fall On Me –REM
• Strong Enough – Sheryl Crow
• I Shall Believe – Sheryl Crow
• Better than ice cream – Sarah McLachlan
• Don’t You Forget About Me – Simple Minds
• Joy – The Sundays
• All I Want is You – U2
• Brown Eyed Girl – Van Morrison
• Don’t Let Me Be Lonely Tonight – James Taylor
• How Sweet It Is – James Taylor
•  Follow Me – John Denver
• Walking ON Sunshine – Katrina and the Waves
• Stay – Lisa Loeb
• Anyone Else But You – Moldy Peaches
• Come Away With Me – Norah Jones
• Turn Me On – Norah Jones
• The Nearness of You – Norah Jones
•  Livin’ On Love – Alan Jackson
• Home - Alan Jackson
• I’d Love you All Over Again – Alan Jackson
• When You Say Nothing At All – Alison Krauss
• The Lucky One – Alison Krauss
• If I Had a Million Dollars – Barenaked Ladies
• She Talks To Angels – Black Crowes
• She’s Always a Woman – Billy Joel
• You’ve Made Me so Very Happy – Blood Sweat and Tears
• I’ll See you Soon – Coldplay
• Longer – Dan Fogelberg
• Crash Into Me – Dave Matthews
• Lover Lay Down – Dave Matthews
• Wonderful Tonight – Eric Clapton
• More Than Words- Extreme
• Your Song – Ewan MacGregor
• We Make A Lot of Love – Harry Connick, Jr
• Better Together – Jack Johnson
• If I Could – Jack Johnson
• Banana Pancakes – Jack Johnson
• Do You Remember – Jack Johnson

 

 

It was nothing

After a good two and a half months at home, my husband is off again for a work trip, this time to the land of the Lion King. The Seabees are busy there. Beware, pirates.



This trip is only going to last 11 days, 5 spent traveling, so we didn’t weep and cry at parting. In fact, I woke up this morning, and the first thing I said to my esposo was “I really am mad at you.”


Nice way to say goodbye, don’t you think?


It was raining out, and I woke up tired; I guess I didn’t sleep long enough to get over my irritation from the night before.


I won’t tell you why I was mad. It’s too personal. And too petty. But I chewed on my wound for a good couple of hours.

Then we went to Mass together and shared the kiss of peace. And it stopped raining. We drive to the airport together, so I could take the car home. The café at the airport was out of coffee, so I could transfer whatever remaining peevishness I had left to it. By the time my husband boarded the plane, we were laughing together.

As I left the airport parking lot, I turned on the radio, which was tuned to the country music station. Some song was playing about a man who lost his house in a tornado. “That was nothing” because he had also lost his dad, his brother, his best friend, his left hand, and his wife. “That was something.”

Gotta love country music.