Just under the wire

There are a lot of creatures living under this roof.

Two little boys.

A little girl.

Two indoor cats.

One gone-wild outdoor cat, who shows up in the evening, yowling for dinner.

An old, stubborn but still incredibly sweet little dog.

Sometimes they get along, sometimes they don’t.  They are all very different little beings.  In fact, the one and only thing they all have in common is that I’m in charge of caring for them.

Taking care of kids and pets, you guys all know that drill.   There’s messy stuff . . . and then there’s MESSY stuff.  And by messy I mean those events that require lots of bleach and a promise from everyone involved never to speak of it.  Such events usually follow directly AFTER having one’s carpet cleaned.

And so.  There are days that I, just like so many of you reading this right at this very moment, go from caring for one creature to another to another to another, feeding and walking and wiping and cleaning and petting and patting and snapping and clapping and begging and commanding and holding and molding and laughing and crying.  And laughing and crying some more.  And, at times, if I’m being honest, looking to the heavens and asking How did I get here, with these seven creatures depending on me for absolutely everything they need to stay alive? By the way, this question is usually followed by a quick pang of guilt for the two creatures, Pepper the Mouse and Rainbow the Fish, still in the freezer awaiting burial.

But.

The other side of that coin is this.  When they do thrive, when they do good, I get to take a little bit of credit for that.  Not all of it, of course.  Some goes to their dad (a whole lot).  Some goes to God.  Some goes to the fates and forces at play beyond our reach.  And some goes to just pure, dumb luck.  Whatever the case, we have our moments.

Cats and dog, living together.  And, impressively, napping together.

Also, this.

That was while we were in line to see Santa last month. Zach, teetering so precariously on the edge between what he so wants to believe and what he has no doubt started hearing at school and figuring out on his own.  Zach, who pulled me aside while we were in line but before this picture was taken, to say “Mommy, I won’t sit on Santa’s lap.” (And who can blame him?  Once you even start to doubt the concept in the least, suddenly you’re potentially just sitting on the lap of some stranger who is really out of shape and doesn’t groom himself too well, either).  Zach, my sweet sweet Zach, who still had so much magic of Christmas in him that he said “But, um, you know, I do still want to tell him what I want for Christmas.”  And, best of all, as seen in that photo up there– Zach, putting his hand on Eli’s back and telling him “Look, Eli.  It’s Santa.  RIGHT THERE.  Santa Claus!”

This must be a thing, the slightly-older-kids-who-still-want-to-talk-to-Santa-just-in-case, because when we got up the front, they put this little stool out for Zach to sit on so he could be in the picture but didn’t have to be on Santa’s lap.

I’ve wandered all over the place today in this entry, like an old dog who is a little stubborn and won’t stick to the path.  But it is the last official day of the Christmas season, so if I was gonna get that Santa-with-my-kids-picture in this blog, this was the day to do it.

The paper of yesterdays and tomorrows

I’ve spent three days going through paper.  I’ve opened all the files in all the cabinets in the house.  I’ve opened every box and taken out every keepsake.  I’ve pored over old journals and letters.  I’ve looked in amazement at the tiny footprints of my children, inked when they were just a few moments old.  I found a receipt for a ticket for my first-ever train ride through Europe, stapled to a description I wrote as I looked out the window.  I came upon a stack of newpapers I’ve kept through the years and broke down and cried for all our country has been through, all our world has been through. I found birth certificates, death announcements and paper documenting everything in between.

I found stories I wrote when I was ten years old and put them aside to show Zach who has started writing his own stories now.  I found pictures I drew when I was five years old.  Those I put aside to show Sophie, who sits at the little table in our playroom and draws and draws and draws, for hours on end.  I found the aged sheets of music from my very first piano recital when I played (proudly, so proudly) a very fine tune called The Pesky Fly, and I put that aside for Eli so he could learn to play it, too, in that little way he has, sitting on the bench with both hands on the keys and his eyes scrunched up, reading the music.  I found sheets of typing that I did when I was just a little girl at my Grandpa’s office, keeping busy while he finished up, full of nonsense words and my name, typed over and over again as I sat in his office chair with my feet swinging, in love with the sound of the typewriter smacking the letters onto the paper.

I would open a box and lose myself in it.  I read it all, every word on every piece of paper, some of it practically coming apart in my hands.  I laughed some and I learned some and I shook my head in frustration some.  And I cried some, of course, surrounded by my history and pieces of the people and places that are lost to me now.

And what will my children go through, when they are in their 40th year and they find themselves with days to themselves?  I have some hope that it is all of these same things, with lots of themselves added in.  They’ll find the handprint turkey they made in Kindergarten and the programs from their 1st grade Christmas pageants and their birth announcements and the invitations to all their birthday parties.  They’ll find their report cards and letters to Santa and notes to the tooth fairy asking could she please leave the tooth so we could show it to Grandma.  And all of it, paper.

Paper.

I’ve long had  a love affair with paper.  Paper for drawing, paper for writing, paper for wrapping.  Paper that is made into books for reading.  Newspaper, of course,  for . . . so many things.  For giving news.  For binding together a city or state or nation by sharing the stories of its citizens.  For comic strips that make us laugh on a Sunday morning in daddy’s lap.  For putting pictures on Silly Putty.  For house-training impossibly cute new puppies.  For spreading on the table before painting a wooden birdhouse for Grandma.  For wrapping fragile things before they are packed away.

Paper is how we share ourselves.  We send cards to celebrate important moments and we send invitations to surround ourselves with friends on special days.  We make signs for help in finding lost pets and for selling lemonade by our front curb.  We use scraps to jot down our phone numbers when we run into an old friend at the coffee shop and we use business cards to spread the word of how we’ve chosen to make a living.  We sign legal documents to make choices we’ve made real and official.  We fold a one dollar bill into a little bird to keep a child quiet during dinner at a fancy restaurant.  We pass out sheets of music at church so we can all sing together.  Paper.

I know a lot of it is going away, our use of paper.  I know that I’m typing this on a laptop and will hit the “publish” button and it will get sent out to the world and there won’t ever be even the tiniest bit of paper involved in the process at all.  Except of course all the paper in my life that inspired me in some way to even pick up that very first pencil and write my very first letter or story or poem.  That paper is part of this, what I’ve written today.

Happy New Year to all my dear friends and family.  Thank you to all of you for being a part of my history and also a part of my tomorrow.  For all of us, may 2011 be full of laughter and moments that are real and days that we wish would go on forever.  May we appreciate the joy we find and may we also take the defeats in our lives with grace and strength.  May we always have someone to reach out and take the hand of when we need it and may we always provide that to others who need it, too.  All my love and warmest wishes to all of you.

Who are you?

The other day, the kids went outside to play in the yard.  About 1.5 seconds later they were back at the door.  ”Mommy, Mommy, come see, come see, COME AND SEE.”

And there, written on the sidewalk in front of our house, was this:

What’s this?  A declaration of love, impulsively scrawled and left unsigned?  But we had just been outside not an hour before!  And we hadn’t even heard the gate!  Who had done it?  Where had they gone?  And would they be back?

Well, I don’t know who did it. Or when or why or how (Seriously, who did it?  And when and why and how?).  But I do know that the kids were beside themselves.  We had a pretty lengthy discussion, complete with lists, of who might have written it, ranging from sweet neighbor girls that we’ve known practically since Zach was born to a boy in Sophie’s class who lives down the street (nevermind that he doesn’t necessarily have such studied penmanship, she was holding fast to this option) to their grandma (Mom, WAS it you?) to just a random stranger full of good will and on and on.

And so Zach did the only reasonable thing to do when you get an I love you.  He responded Okay, yes, but who ARE you?

And now we wait.

Well, we waited.  We played and ate dinner and played some more.  Then we got ready for bed.  We went to sleep.  By the next morning, both messages had been mostly rubbed away and we still didn’t know who had done it.  Zach was driven a little crazy by this (but who, who wrote it, who?) and was not quieted by my words of wisdom extraordinaire.  And who can blame him?  Sometimes it’s just enough to know we are loved, Zach.

Pffffft!  It may be enough sometimes but not on this day for this nine year old boy.   I amended those words of wisdom to Well, we don’t always get what we want.  But we get what we need, to which he responded I know you stole that from a Rolling Stones song (thanks, Zach’s hip guitar instructor, way to introduce my kid to one of the very best songs ever and thus undermine my obnoxious habit of quoting famous lyrics as my own words of wisdom).  Which didn’t get us the answer we wanted but did get us inside to play that song for Eli and Sophie who had never heard it in entirety, which was darn near as sublime.

And then, later that next day as we played in the yard and pondered it yet again, I said to the kids  ”Instead of asking who they are, maybe we should have just said We love you, too.“

And from Zach:  But how do we know if we love them if we don’t know who they really are?

Ah.  Yes.  Right.

And he didn’t even steal it from a song.

Be Still

This is Still, Still, Still sung by Mary Chapin Carpenter and would make lovely background music to reading this blog entry.  So please do click play and enjoy it.

Be still and know that I am God (part of psalm 46:10) is one of my favorite passages.  I am no expert but in my heart I always take it to mean this:  I cannot always be strong.  I cannot always do everything on my own.  I will fall down.  I will mess up.  But all I really need to do is to be still.  I can surrender, I can know that it’s okay to be weak sometimes, it’s okay to not shoulder every little thing, every little moment.  I can just . . . be still.  There are forces bigger than me at play that will hold me up, there is a God who is strong for me when I cannot be.

Christmas approaches.  Quickly, so quickly.  It is a hard time to be still.  There are parties to attend, Barbie Dream Houses to put together, hot cocoa to drink, carols to sing. There are gifts to hide in various closets, meals to plan, old friends to see.  There is an ethereally beautiful midnight Mass waiting for you if you can keep the kids up that late.  There are friends and family to gather round and there are friends and family we’ve lost, a loss we feel even more acutely now, in this season.

If you can be still in this time, you can find peace.

My wish for you is peace.  Peace in this world.  Peace in your home.  Peace in your beliefs, whatever they may be.  Most of all, because all else springs from there, I wish you peace in your heart.  I wish for a peace in your heart that is calm and listening so you don’t miss a moment of the joy and life that surrounds you.  I wish for peace in your heart so that you find, amidst all the busy and chaos, amidst all the missteps and heartache that it seems we can never truly avoid, a way to be still.  Be still and feel the love of your family and your friends and God and this beautiful earth that we all share.

So be still.  Close your eyes, take a deep, clean breath, and feel the peace in your heart.  It may take a few tries to find it, depending on what is surrounding you and the voices you hear when you close your eyes.  But keep trying, you’ll find it.  Cherish it.  Think and act and speak from that place, at least for a little while, this Christmas season.

Peace!  To each and every one of you.  Love and Warmth and Peace.

 

Help

No need to worry if you haven’t mailed your letter to Santa yet.  Eli has your back.  He wrote his letter today.  One part of it detailed what he was asking for from Santa:

By the way, for those of you not versed in that crazy language known as First Grader Learning To Spell, he’s asking for a hockey table, a video game, an arcade (an arcade? where did he even learn this word?  And, more importantly, where will I find one small enough to fit under our tree?), an electric keyboard and a “toy machine.”  The toy machine, not unlike the third wish to the genie being “a million more wishes” is the fail-safe gift ensuring that even if none of the other stuff comes through, he’ll have a machine that will magically create any toy that he might imagine.  Again, taking ANY suggestions here on how to have that sitting out on Christmas morning with a big red bow on it.

BUT as for you, you other people out there with your holiday wants and wishes, he’s got you covered.  In another section of the letter, he makes it clear what all the rest of us need to make our season bright:

Santa?  Are you listening?

Oh, baby.

Sophie turned five years old a few months ago.  No longer a baby, no longer a toddler.

Except.

I still see baby Sophie in her face.  It’s there, in that photo up there.  It’s the eyelashes, skimming her cheek (her cheek that still has some baby in it, too).  It’s the barely-there smattering of freckles that only show up in the summer.  It’s the hair, so light and fine, falling around her neck in perfect, weightless little curls.

Will I see the baby in her face forever?  When she graduates from Kindergarten next year?  When she turns sweet sixteen?  When she leaves for college?  When she’s all grown up, working and living and making her own way?  When she has babies of her own?  Will there always be some moment when the light hits her just right or she turns her face just so and I see, for the briefest of seconds, the baby she once was?

I believe so.

Best Burger in Town?

Okay y’all.  Let me have it. What is your very favorite burger in Austin?  The one in that picture up there was from P. Terry’s (the roughly 23 seconds it lasted before ending up in my tummy), a clear favorite in this category.  But I want to know where you go when you want the best burger in this town. The kind where you bite into it and NOM NOM MMMMPH it is just so damn good.

A few things to consider:

Greasiest hole-in-the -wall diner to chi-chi upscale steakhouse and any place in between.

Veggie burgers count (and Austin has some good ones).

Type of french fries are a factor in the decision because (1) it should be illegal to eat a burger without fries and (2) the type of fries can dictate the entire mood of the meal (steak fries, shoestring fries, sweet potato fries–it changes things).

Do you get a coke with the burger and fries or do you go milkshake all the way?  It’s not a factor in the decision like the type of french fries are but really, I simply must know.

By the way, I know that not all of you live in Austin so feel free to give a shout out to the best burger in your town.  That way, when I come to visit you, I’ll know where the locals go for the best.

So tell me, burger-eating friends. Tell me!

Unless first it is dreamed

I found a box of my old journals today.  Most of them look like some version of this one which is from my junior year of high school:

Pages and pages and pages (and pages and pages, honestly, did you think my rambling writing style was a new development, because the pages and pages and pages beg to differ) of, well, gosh, let’s see . . . honestly?  Some pretty cringeworthy writing.  I found myself, at times, sort of holding my hand up in front of my face, like “No, no, no. I just can’t look anymore.” And yet I couldn’t look away either.  When I opened up that journal, here’s what I saw on the inside cover:

I know. Pretty corny.  And I totally love it.

So.  The journal itself.  The writing?  So drama.  The angst level?  Off the charts.  The good times?  Soooo good.  The bad times?  You guessed it.  The urgency of every bit of it?  Palpable.  Scrawled across the pages, pencil leads breaking left and right, my hand not able to move fast enough to capture one thought before another one tumbles out behind it.  And what was with the writing on the entire surface of the paper? Every millimeter of every page, top to bottom and side to side, so that by the time a notebook was filled up, it was just busting at the seams with all these . . .  words. Lots and lots of words.

Are some of you getting a tad nervous that I’m going to share some of those words with you?  Hmmmm?  Don’t worry, I’m entirely too embarrassed to ever let anyone read any of this stuff (and have in fact wondered if I should have some sort of ritual journal-burning, Come on! Won’t you bring all your junior high diaries and join me?).  There was one line in that journal though that gave me enough pause to, just briefly, see myself in the words and remember being in that place so many years ago.

It’s in the middle of some ridiculously long entry about–of all things–feeling different!  Imagine that, a teenager feeling different (this stuff was cutting-edge, I’m telling you), that kind of different that on good days means “special” and on bad days means “no one will ever understand me ever.”  Anyway, I was waxing on (and on and on) about it and eventually ended up scribbling out “I’m stuck in this place of knowing I’m different and forgetting that it is a blessing.”  So yeah, it’s not original or interesting or even remotely great, but it took me back there.  Right back there, remembering feeling that way.

The other thing I did, aside from all the words, was glue in little quotes I found here and there, just glue them right in the pages of the journal.  Thank goodness because I’m reading along today, thinking Oh come on, enough with the self-indulgent blah blah blah (some things never change) but then I’d come across a page with one of these little gems glued on it:

And countless others (including an inordinate number of Rilke quotes, wow).  But I think my very favorite was this, which is the ending sentence of a most wonderful article that Annie Dillard wrote back then for the New York Times about writing (and which by the miracle of these crazy internets, I found a link to here if you want to read the whole thing which you most definitely should):

The reason why I love that yellowed piece of paper glued into my journal so long ago?  Because I took it to heart.  I was inspired by that and never forgot it.  So much so that when I did finally find this journal and came to this particular page, I said the words aloud from memory before even reading them.  Draw, Antonio, draw, Antonio, draw and do not waste time.

Which is why, in the end, I never do end up having that journal-burning ceremony after all.

Crazy

Reason #394 that I am completely in love with my kids’ preschool:  Crazy Hair Day.

 

Glory, Glory

It seems I have truly arrived to parenthood.  This morning, amongst the chaos of three kids doing the pre-leave-for-school-rusharound of Get Dressed! Brush Your Teeth! Eat Your Cereal! Stop Hitting Your Brother! No Seriously Go Back And Brush Your Teeth But This Time Use Toothpaste! craziness, in which I was busy taking care of a very sick little dog who has forgotten, apparently and understandably, how to use the bathroom outside (sigh) and, perhaps most shockingly,  I was also trying to shower and wash my hair (Wash my hair! Will I never learn?) ANYWAY, amidst all this chaos, we needed to be in the car by 7:25, all dressed and ready for the Veterans’ Day Assembly at the boys’ school.  By some stroke of luck (helped along by me setting all of our clocks five minutes ahead but not telling the kids), we were in the car by 7:32.  Good enough.

Aaaaaaand then the bickering starts.  Before we have pulled out of the driveway, the bickeringbickeringbickering about . . . what?  I don’t know even know; I tune it out as a matter of rote.  But this morning, as we drove along and they nagged at one another about the most trivial and annoying things, it was getting to me.  After some “Okay, enough, really, stop arguing, let’s please stop with all the noise” then I finally broke down and came out with this rather unpoetic but impassioned gem:

Listen to me, kids.  LISTEN.  Today is Veterans’ Day.  Today is the day we celebrate and thank the men and women who (cue voice crack as I begin to choke up) sacrificed everything for us.  For you and you and you (yes, I was pointing at each one of them in turn, if I’m going to be a cliche, let’s just go full force, shall we?) and me and all of us in this country, they sacrificed for all of us that they don’t even KNOW (now I’m not even trying to hold back tears) so that we can be free.  And there you all sit, complaining about who had a better breakfast or who has a cooler pair of shoes or who DIDN’T GET TO WATCH T.V. YESTERDAY (Oh, now I’m really getting going), while these brave souls go to far away lands, away from family and friends and all that they know (wiping the tears furiously now as I drive like a crazy woman to get us to the assembly on time) and fight for us.  They risk their lives.  They risk their lives and some of them GIVE their lives, all to make your life better.  So . . . So . . . So . . . (emotion is peaking now but I’m aware I need to wrap it up pretty quickly here as we are, miraculously, getting close to the school) . . . So (big, deep breath).  I want you to remember all of THAT, while you sit there and complain about your day.  Your amazing, wonderful day that is FREE.  Free because of the veterans.”

I don’t usually go in for these types of speeches.  This is like the Veterans’ Day version of the “I walked to school uphill both ways in the snow with no shoes on” lecture, isn’t it?  Or perhaps the also-well-known “Oh you’ll eat that dinner.  There are starving children in Africa that haven’t had that much food all month.”  But today I did.  And so another parenthood badge has been unlocked.

It wasn’t necessarily my proudest moment, what with the crazy driving and the pointing at them and high emotion, but I’ll tell you what.  When I was done with my little diatribe, they were quiet, with the saucer eyes and the audible blinking.

But then Eli says “Like Grandpa.  And Papa.  That’s what they did.  They did that for us and we weren’t even born yet.”  And Sophie says “What?  What did they do?”

And so I tell them.  I tell them how my grandfather, who retired as a Lieutenant Colonel, fought in World War II as a bomber pilot, flying B-24′s.  Zach chimes in with “He was trying to find Hitler, so he could bomb him and end the war.”  I tell them how my Dad, their Papa, was a captain in Vietnam.  A flight surgeon, who helped the soldiers who had been hurt, either making them better or making them comfortable.  Again Zach chimes in with “Papa showed me his dogtags, I saw them, the ones he wore when he was in that war.”

About ten minutes later, we were all in the assembly hall, the boys with their classes and Sophie on my lap, watching.  The Girl Scouts brought in the American Flag and the Boy Scouts brought in the flags of the various branches of the military, while we all sang.  We sang the Star Spangled Banner and the Battle Hymn of the Republic and all the other songs that no one I know can get through without a knot in their throats.  I’ve been through a lot of Veterans’ Day celebrations that were amazing, days that did, somehow, come close to befitting all those soldiers who gave so much.  But nothing has compared to hearing the voices of children sing America The Beautiful while the veterans in their lives, in this case their fathers and grandfathers and great-grandfathers, watch from the audience.  It was a glorious moment.

So tomorrow we’ll go back to complaining about breakfast and shoes and dogs that have accidents.  But for today, we revel in the glory that is the United States of America.  Today, we take a big breath and realize that it is a breath of freedom and that we have a soldier to thank for it.

And today, we say we’ll count our blessings . . . but truly, they are too many to number.  So today, find a veteran and say thank you.

 

The After

Remember this, from way back last week?

After an astounding amount of time and effort (and keeping Miley Cyrus’ The Climb on repeat on iTunes for inspiration There’s always gonna be another mountain, I’m always gonna wanna make it move, Always gonna be an uphill battle, Sometimes I’m gonna have to lo–o-o-o-o-o-se), I did it.  I changed the raw materials in that picture up there into this:

My main directive was, of course, to make Sophie smile.  And smile she did.  I mean, she liked the owl-ness and all but I think she was mainly just tickled that our costumes were exactly the same, in slightly different sizes.  And by the way, HI, I DO NOT SEW but should maybe send these pictures to Liquid Stick because, seriously, look at us from the back:

I love that the costumes came together, I really do.  But more than that, I love that Sophie still wants to be so connected.  She is five years old:  Every tiny moment is borrowed.  By the third child, this is so clear to me that the passage of time is palpable; I can feel it going past me.  Life is flashing by quicker than lightening, zooming by so fast that if I blink, I’m quite sure that I’ve missed something.

So.  When I send her up to a neighbor’s door to trick-or-treat and she gets her candy and turns around and heads back . . . and spots me at the end of the sidewalk and breaks into a grin that makes my heart expand . . . and then breaks into a run because, oh my gosh I’m her Mommy and by golly she just wants to get to me as soon as she possibly can . . . Oh my.  And it’s then that every ridiculous second I spent on those silly matching owl costumes makes perfect sense to me.

I mean, really.  How many more years will I see this running towards me?