This last Friday, Martin taught his last class ever at Waynesburg University.  Seven years of dedication to his students, to scholarship, to building programs.  Seven years of packed schedules with committee work and envisioning a better place and working long hours to create community.  Seven years of parenting alone when I had to so he could devote himself to his work.  Seven years of students in our home, for dinners and tea and long nights of discussion.

And life goes on.

When he came home, sad and resigned, we strapped Bea in the car and drove to Morgantown, WV for sushimi and miso soup.  We ate with three different sets of people over the weekend, including a lovely, long dinner with a few students.  We wrapped Chinese dumplings and Martin cooked up three different stir fries. We drank lots of tea.  We spent a wonderful afternoon with two beautiful people yesterday in their log cabin, decorated with artwork from over fifty years of world travel.  We sat under huge poplar trees while the girls caught salamanders in a pond.

And life goes on.

Today we prepare Martin's poetry manuscript for half a dozen contests.  We'll lick the envelopes and send them off.  Hoping.

Now this remains: faith, hope and love.  But the greatest of these is love.

And what can we do but fight to love all of it, to pull people into love, to accept that we too are loved.

There's a kitchen full of breakfast dishes, a floor scattered with blocks, laundry, showers to take, manuscripts to compile and post.  Another day, full of dayliness.  Maybe a miracle or two if I open my eyes a little wider.  Maybe.  Whoever compiled my personality in the dark before I was born must have had themselves a good chuckle:  She'll still be looking for magic when she's thirty-four, when her husband's out of work in a year and she's gained ten extra pounds over the winter. 

Or maybe that was the blessing laid on me at birth.

I'll take the latter today, the invisible train headed for someplace good.  With a flask of tea along, of course. And the whole lot of you for company.

After Martin received his letters informing him that he'd been denied tenure, the journal that he advised, (and the biggest reason his career here ended), was left without a faculty advisor.  But completely without his knowledge, an amazing issue was just released, completely student-produced.  Read it here:  UNDERGROUND MUSE & STONE.

To our students over the past seven years:

With exam week right around the corner and the reality of the end of this year coming into focus, I wanted to write you all a letter that communicates just a little of our gratitude to you all.

This has been a good place for us. We hope and trust that it has been (and for many of you will continue to be) a good place for you too, a place of learning and growth in understanding—and most importantly, a place where you find safety and love as you continue to become who you have been made to be: unique, loved, imaginative, powerful with words and exacting in expression.

Please know that it is with deep sorrow and gratitude that we say goodbye to each of you. I have not had the privilege of knowing most of you as well as Martin, my husband, but let me speak for him: he has felt deeply honored to be in your company, to teach and to know each of you. His years here were busy beyond my expectation, but that is because he was fully dedicated and genuinely concerned about each of you as scholars, writers, and people. He has loved living among you, teaching you and growing as a teacher and as a person.

These years have been years of learning for us. Many of you come from hard backgrounds and situations that we have never encountered. Whether we are from easy or difficult backgrounds, writing gives us a voice to claim our histories and begin to understand not only ourselves but those around us. You all give Martin and me courage as writers to continue to seek our own voices and to articulate all that is ours.

I know you are all from very diverse spiritual backgrounds and convictions, and that has made our experience here richer. As Mennonite Christians, Martin and I believe that we are charged to find God’s presence in everyone and everything and to value each part of God’s creation as good, charged with God’s grandeur and filled with God’s light, even if that light is very hard to see. As writers, we believe that we are called to engage with every part of life, ugly and beautiful, difficult and easy. We hope for humility and for wisdom, but if we take Jesus’ life and teachings seriously, we must extend our hand in greeting to everyone; with God’s help, we must wrap our imagination even around darkness, trusting that God is there, too. This is a hard task, and one that I continue to approach with trembling. But Jesus charges us not to be pleasant and uncontroversial; on the contrary, his teachings are hard. They point us to a suffering world.

In this way we have not sought to retaliate or even to seek justice. We do this not from a place of weakness but from a place of love. As followers of Jesus and as artists who seek to create and not to destroy, we feel that we must seek peace and reconciliation wherever we can, even—and especially—when it is difficult. Many battles are worth fighting--battles for ideals and values and vulnerable people.  None of those precious things have been destroyed for us--they can't be taken from us so easily.  As we prepare to leave, we are filled with a deep sense of gratitude for our community here, a place that has fed us with unexpected grace. You are, and have been, an important part of that community. Your creativity and courage leaves us speechless.  Our daughters have enjoyed having “the students” in our house and Martin has looked forward to each year of interacting with you with joy.

We wish for you the same sense of abiding peace that we also seek, one that is stronger than anger or grief, a peace that floods into every part of your being, points you to all that has been truly wonderful and gives you the clarity to choose a future filled with hope--and yes, a lot of writing.

Thank you for all you have done to make our sojourn here—a much treasured chapter in our lives—so precious. We are thankful.

Last evening I sat on the porch swing, looking out over our yard through layers of green: the climbing rose arching against the brick of our porch, then the lilacs, bursting with first purple blooms, then the peach tree's long fish-shaped leaves; behind that the flutter of the quaking aspens, lime green against white bark, and finally across the street, the velvet backdrop of a purple plum. Beatrix played at my feet with a pile of sticks and rocks, building a house. The weather was perfect, all was beautiful, beautiful, and I found myself just able to enjoy it.

In the last few days I've realized that my joy, a pool I've always bathed myself in, managing to find at least a few drops on a dry day, has been running quite low. I didn't know.

And I write this next bit unspecifically, with no identifying details: Our situation has wearied me, the knowledge that one rash decision by a few men--that their decision has ended our lives here--this continues to sap my energy. That the petty cruelty continues (before the 'sheets are even cold' they've listed the position, packed with pretty Christian descriptions of an ideal candidate), tires me. I have forgiven, shrugged off, let go of a need to retaliate, but all the same, my mind is changing, readying myself to leave. When I look at the house I see resale; when I look at the garden I'm filled with the heaviness of what needs to be done before another can begin to love it as we have; when I slip into full enjoyment of our community, an undercurrent of encroaching departure checks me. And in all this, I've tried to cling to the kernels of truth that are stronger than the diminutive evils at play: we love one another, we are loved, a new place waits for us somewhere. To imagine a different life--this is what we must do, all while enjoying every moment here in the fullest way we can. It is a hard task!

This morning I steeled myself again: I will not let small, miserable people rob me of my joy.

I realize afresh that turning toward joy, when to snap to anger and justice would be so easy, is a choice I must make day by day, moment by moment. When I tell people that we're doing fine, I mean it. On good days I revel in all the goodness that is mine, and I believe it and I am grateful. On other days I look at what is beautiful and have to squint through the smut to see it fully.

Martin and I were talking the other night about the Quaker idea that everyone bears a light within, the light of God's image, the stamp of being fully human and inherently worthwhile. It is this belief that convicted the Quakers that Native Americans must be treated with respect; it is this belief, too, that filled them with the courage to fight slavery.

When I look at certain people, I admit I find it very hard to find their inner light, especially when it seems they have done everything they can to deaden their own light. Of course my eyes are cataracted by my own pettiness--what I want, what I feel I deserve, anger. But I believe in the inner light in everyone and everything; I believe that all that is created contains at least a small pebble of goodness, and probably much more if it is loved. So then, is that what I must do? Is it possible to really see without love? People say that love clouds perspective, but I think, in the case of inner light, that it is the other way around. I think love gives us the eyes to see light burning in another person, and when I am given the task of loving something unlovable, then I must call on courage. Nothing is transformed, least of all my own sight, without love.

The other day I found myself taking care of a baby who was not mine. I was the best candidate to hold him and try to coax him into sleep, but I was tired, overwhelmed by children (also not mine) who were acting badly and whom I could not wait to leave behind with their parents. Someone handed me a bottle filled with bright red punch to feed to the baby, and the idea of feeding a sugary drink to a child repelled me. When I was honest with myself, the baby repelled me as well; his nose was runny, he was rather unattractive (seen by my frustrated, weary eyes at that moment), and he kept reaching up to put his hand in my mouth, as babies do. I saw my own repulsion, and it was horrifying to confront. I asked for eyes of love. I had to. I had no natural maternal feelings or compassion--those were all spent. And I sat in the rocking chair and held the baby and sang "You are my sunshine" and fed him his terrible sugar drink. I noticed the way his jaw trembled when he slipped into sleep, the last sucking instinct, the same one my babies had when I breastfed them. And while my love for this baby was not perfect, while I still feel troubled at my unimaginative coldness, I was given enough love to hold that baby, to act rightly, not to pass him off until he was soundly sleeping. And that was, I suppose, enough, and perhaps all I could receive at that moment.

So today, Kim, call on courage. Joy, love, courage--all three. I'll try.

I just wrote an e-mail to some friends of mine about how absent-minded I've been lately (writing can make you schizophrenic). I cut this bit for your benefit:

I've been spending a lot of time with Maple [the character in my book for young readers] these days. So much, in fact, that in the car I couldn't get out what I wanted to say to the kids, which was, "Roll up your windows!" What came out of my mouth was, "Boil your seats!" I wish the kids just knew what I meant. Mental telepathy, while dangerous, could be helpful.


And then tonight when Elspeth hurt her pinky finger I said, half-paying attention, "Don't worry, honey, you'll get a new pinky soon," and she stared at me blankly and a little worried and said, "What?" Oh, man. I'm losing it.

In other news, my friend Sal fulfilled a life-long dream of mine and rented a rollerskating rink for my birthday. What do you get when you combine a bunch of thirty- and forty-somethings with a bunch of kids ten and under? We were falling like flies. One of my friends ended up wrapped in heating pads and she and her daughter, whose sprained ankle was on ice, watched a "Mythbusters" marathon as they recovered. But baby, all those years of skating on cobblestones in Kenya paid off--I had the time of my life and even remembered how to skate backwards so I could finally fulfill a fantasy--skating in my true love's arms. Martin looked a little less than relaxed and we weren't terribly close, but we made it around the rink one entire rotation without wiping out. Sheer bliss. Check out Bea 'n friends "shaking their grove thing" by clicking HERE.

I'm entrenched in my own vocabulary.

When Martin told me that it's 90 degrees today for the Boston Marathon, I said, "That's terrible." I thought about it some more. Ninety degrees for a spring marathon! It was unusually warm in southwest Pennsylvania, too; we were driving with large gas rigs into town and the roads gleamed with heat and the sky darkened with the threat of a thunderstorm. I imagined running, a sport I detest unless I'm being chased by dogs, and I said again, "That's terrible. Terrible. Ninety degrees." There was a pause. "That's terrible."

My thoughts shifted from the terrible April heat to my vocabulary, so lacking and barren. I spent the next few minutes in despair.

I have been working hard on a third draft of a book for young readers, and there's nothing like writing a novel to realize how limited your bank of words really is. Last night I took a break to read a book--a published, popular one, and though the writing comes with its own set of predetermined words, they're different than mine. I read the word, "preternatural." Of course I've used it before, and it's not exactly a grandly unusual word, but I mentally flogged myself. Why can't you use that word sometimes? You're terrible!

I've been combing through my novel with the aid of the "find and replace" button. I type in "sparkly" and I find all one dozen mentions in the 170-page book and replace them with glitzy, shiny, twinkly. . .I was never aware of how predisposed I was to "sparkly." Or "miserable" or the idea of someone's ears burning when embarrassed. Now I know. It's not a pretty discovery.

If you have any favorite synonyms for 'sparkly' or 'miserable' that are appropriate for young readers, let me know. I need help. Don't give me any for 'terrible,' though. I'm on a roll with that one.

More news from my parents, this time from my childhood home (see above), where my mother brought me back from the hospital after my birth. I remember so much though I was young. Note the lovely old brick paths--I can almost feel them warm under my bare feet.

One of my favorite memories or stories (when you are a small child they are often the same thing) is about Ebrahim, our old Bengali gardener who kept me out of trouble. My mother sent me this e-mail on Easter, for my birthday: "Here's a pretty gift. We were sitting under a shelter in the yard between what was our house and the guesthouse when a slight figure of a man with white beard and lungi walked up to us. My heart took a turn-it was for all the world Ebrhaim who was coming toward us. Turns out it was his son who insisted that we must come for a meal the next day. And we did, and they laughed and asked about Kimberly. You were born as the baby of the whole project, but as the special charge of Ebrahaim, who followed you devotedly as you went visiting house after house, spreading your joy."

I had just finished editing a poem about Ebrahim the night before, where I thank him for his tenderness with me and wish I could know him now I am grown up, a gardener myself with my own children. There was something so lovely about being remembered by people I have not seen in thirty years--when you grow up overseas, you rarely encounter anyone but your own family who has known you for that long. It made me long to see them again--Ebrahim himself, who died twenty years ago, and all the people who gifted me with their love so early, made me feel precious and worthwhile. I am deeply grateful.

Here's another photo, which took both my sister and I back to this familiar place--the jungle that Heather used to pull me away from, reminding me of snakes and death, the jungle that hung with orchids!--though in my memory the colors are purer and more vibrant.



But here is more of my mother's wonderful e-mail (just a part of the longer story of meetings with people we once knew):

So many memories flooded in as we walked from house to house...here's where the Ragans, etc. lived...here's the nurses' house where we went for tea and gamma globulin shots...here's the road (steep) where Meredith was on his freshly repaired bike, brake shoes installed backwards, went hurtling down the hill, across the main road, tossing him into the rice paddy....here's where the water buffalo went poggle (crazy) and stampeded down the path...remember taking the girls motorbike riding along here... We walked down to Mokamtilla, veering off up the hill where we would take Koolaid and M&M's on Sunday afternoons to picnic and watch the 4:00 o'clock train come by. It was stunningly lovely, walking along the crest of the hill, looking down across rice paddies, a cow here and there, ducks and woman w/her water buffalo, listening to a bird singing his 4-note song again and again.

In one of the houses, a leprosy patient still lives (illegally). She stepped out with her 12 year old daughter. The mother was bald and with only stumps for hands, and cradled her daughter with Down's syndrome so she would have the courage to step out. Meredith took her hands and talked to her until she began to smile; she was lovely. We rounded the corner and encountered Demond, who looked at Meredith in a shocked way and said, "Long Sab!" He had been a watch man while were there. I couldn't believe he remembered.

[My parents visit with people at two houses, and are fed well at both. At one of the homes the electricity goes out and they all sit on a bed and watch a magnificent storm through an open door].

Then on to Ebrahim's son's house, a welcome walk down the main road and across rice paddies to a surprise...a strong, cement house set up high in the middle of the rice paddies, complete with solar power lights. We were so happy to see how well they were living; they talked and laughed as they remembered you girls and we remembered Ebrahim together. They served us a bowl of noodles even before the curry meal arrived, and besides a chicken curry and vegetable curries, a special treat, fried duck eggs. We took pictures together, give them a gift in honor of Ebrahim and he hugged Meredith for a long time and cried. It was a precious visit.

___
After this my parents went on for yet another full meal--"We just couldn't keep up that level of eating," Mom wrote. "We are overwhelmed once again, at the deep hospitality of Bengalis and realize how much we were shaped by the years we lived here. How rich it was and how privileged we were to be here."

Today Beatrix turned four and I turned thirty-four. . .thank you, friends and family near and far, for wonderful birthdays! Special thanks to Aunt P and Uncle AJ for their package of magnificence. . .We love you all dearly xoxoxoxo

Airports, Poop Tea, and a Familiar Place

My parents have arrived back in the place of my early childhood. I received an e-mail from Dad this morning. I feel memories about me suddenly as if someone laid a coat around my shoulders--dusty Dacca (as it was spelled when we were there almost thirty years ago), the call to prayer early in the morning, marketplaces with oddly- shaped, wonderful balloons, the sounds of afternoon--planes high in the sky outside my window, calls in the street from beggars and peddlars, the clink of tin:

We're in very dusty Dhaka-in the Baptist Guest House. We get here about 1 am this morning and were in bed just after 2. Portus, the cook and helper has worked here for 25 years, and remembers seeing us before. Water shortage for flushing the toilet but things pretty much the same except the house is now surrounded by high rises.
Off to the office shortly.
Much love,
Dad

My mother wrote to us from Bangkok, and her memories are much stronger than mine:

So, we have just come from a swim in the lovely flat pool on the roof of the hotel, swimming in bathtub water, surrounded by banana plants, looking u[p at the moon and evening star and feeling as though we were in paradise. We walked into the evening air last night 24 hours after we had left home to the familiar thick air, sauna like and layered with rich and haunting smells. Suddenly I was back 25 years ago, a young woman with our children living a great adventure. Even the fact that the person in the plane in front of us had poured his tomato juice down through the seat over my sweater and carry-on case not to be discovered until hours later when it was coagulated and clinging, even though the hotel had put us in a smoking room...it was dizzyingly happy to be here.

We are back in the land of showers that simply happen on the bathroom floor, where you need to remember to close your mouth and not drink the water. Our hotel is across the street from the Dang Lee Massage Parlour, where the ladies lounge out front, extending their lovely legs out from their sarongs to attract passersby.

The sidewalks are crowded with tables with people eating wonderful things and the cars dart in and out between the people and motorcycles, and amazingly it all seems to fit together. We walked to the office past great piles of mangos...in season!...and vegetables I couldn't identify. At lunch we walked with others to an outside shelter about the size of a football field filled with long tables and chairs, edged with dozens of food vendors. We pushed our way through to a woman who let us point to what we wanted: fish, sticky rice and spinach. For about $1.10 we had a delicious meal in the happy chaos of all the noise and comings and goings of others. On the way back to the office, Kim Ta Teet, a beautiful Thai woman in her twenties, said she was going to a shop for tea, and would I like some? Yes, definitely. The tea turned out to be a milky tea in a large plastic cup with ice. Bouncing around the bottom were a pile of black pellets...with a laugh she said that she called it "poop tea". The pellets were like gummy bears, so you sucked it up with the tea and then chewed them. The children would have loved it!

Dad and I were really fading after lunch for a while; we had had about 4 hours of sleep in the past 36 hours.

And then I received a funny e-mail from my parents from the Kuala Lupur airport, which sounds like an incredible place:

Hi dear people. We are waiting in the Kuala Lupur airport for a flight to Bangladesh. The Bangkok airport is amazing with hundreds of glitzy shops, like a sophisticated mall that happens to have airplanes coming and going. This one too. There's a stunning jungle walk in the center of this concourse where you go through a mesh that is designed to keep birds in and you actually go outside into a jungle environment with big trees and vines and calls of birds and roaring waterfalls. It is surreal.

I suspect that the Bangladesh airport may not have reached this level yet.

This e-mail, which seems to have been written in a tearing hurry (I corrected some funny errors, such as "treesn vinesn calls of birds. . .) was followed by a pithy note from my father:

Mom hit the wrong button and we need to finish our $5 bottles of water!
Love,
Dad

I love that my mother is along with my father on this two-month trip; though they're both working hard the whole time, I think my mother will take time to write us detailed accounts of places we haven't seen since we were young children. Heather was eight when we left Bangladesh; I was turning six; and my brother was a toddler. Both he and I were born in Bangladesh.

Well, my own child summons. She's trying to make a "clam shell" out of two pieces of string and a paper plate, to very little success.

Here's another little story I wrote for our Lenten reflections about my parents, who have just left for a two-month working trip to Asia. A recent e-mail confirmed that they have arrived in Bangkok safely.

*

My mother gave away the curtains. She slid them off the rod in our living room, folded them, and pressed them into the hands of our visitor as if it were no big deal. She let them go as if she really didn’t want them, but I knew that wasn’t true.

They were the color of onion skins, with delicate brown embroidery, hundreds of stitches that painted flowers and swirls. I hung them at my mother’s living room window shortly after we moved back from Kenya with very few possessions and little money. Though we’d always believed that we were wealthy (and we certainly had lived where poverty was evident and unforgettable), in Wheaton, a wealthy Chicago suburb, I think we might have been quite poor. We weren’t allowed to say “poor” of course, since an altered setting did not suddenly negate the world’s truth, but with two daughters in college, my parents lived like graduate students. Others climbed the ladder toward financial stability, but I watched as my parents descended it, by choice, rung by rung. They laughed off the idea of ever wanting to “arrive,” while other people their age signed mortgages and bought dream cars. Then, as now, they told us that “arriving” was an illusion, and that whether you ever settled down physically or not, the dream was to move, always journeying, changing, living with the cleansing tension between enough and too much.

But my mother loves beauty, and she filled our lives with certain possessions that made her children understand that life should be marked by sacred spaces and delightful rituals. My parents understood that grace was incarnational, and that spirit meets material and that is good and needed. We had Sunday teas in the familiar Dutch blue and white china; at each new house we buried our noses in favorite books and breathed deeply. Ah, the smell of home. My childhood, covered, surrounded, held by the things that bound me in the love of my family: the photograph of Bengali boats, framed in dark wood; vases of roses, fresh from market; the cedar chest of blankets. The first thing my parents did at each new house was to air our blankets and make our beds, sweet beds that felt like strong ships in the middle of quickly changing seas.

Soon after arriving in America for college, I’d experienced a moment of pure, unadulterated capitalism as I stood in Target. I had a little money. I needed an alarm clock. I realized I could buy one. After eighteen years of incredibly limited purchasing, charity clothes and suitcases from America that contained everything I needed, from toothbrushes to underwear, it was an unbelievable discovery. I could buy what I chose, and then I would have it. I would have it and be able to use it and then, when I made more money, I’d be able to buy more. I looked around my parent’s townhouse and realized that with a little money, I could begin transforming their graduate school look into something a little more elegant. I scoured thrift stores, searched through piles of dross to find the few treasures that would make my parent’s first American home, a small townhouse at the end of a quiet street, beautiful.

I hung my mother’s curtains with love; I believed she loved them. And then, a few weeks later, in one dizzying instant, she gave them away to our visitor, a woman who had recently arrived in America, too, who admired them as they hung at my mother’s window. “They are pretty, aren’t they?” my mother said. “Would you like them?”

My mother grew up below the poverty line. In high school, she cleaned dormitories to buy the material to make herself a dress. In college, she worked three jobs and paid semester by semester. “There are always people who are less well off,” she’d say, and tell me about the family they knew who ate sandwiches made from the fibrous inner skin of banana peels.

So what could I say to my mother when she gave away the curtains?

Recently, on a rainy evening, I stomped into a poetry reading and met one of my students there, a woman from a background of pain and poverty. She was soaked. I thought of my mother. I took off my raincoat, a recent gift, and pressed it into her hands. “Take it,” I said. “Someone gave it to me and you need it.”

I reveled for an instant in the freedom of releasing something to someone who needed it more than I. It felt good. But unlike my mother, astonishing giver extraordinaire, I agonized later over my gesture. Would the student even wear it? It was a really nice raincoat, but she’d said, as I handed it to her, that it wasn’t her color. Would it go to waste? I really needed a raincoat, I thought. Why had I given it away?

But my mother slid the curtains from the rod, beautiful things, and gave them away.

I realize again: how am I called to live? I imagine a rushing river. I kneel down at the bank and dip my hands into the strong current of water, and I keep my hands open, ready to receive what the current brings to me and ready to release it again just as quickly. It is the only way to experience joy, I think, to give away my curtains, and my coat, and all that I would lock away.