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.

Here is another day; a ribbon of blue sky. Six doves pass above my office window. My neighbor's Japanese maple, adolescent in pink, lilacs only a mist of purple, forsythia waning.

A frost caught the newly leafing butterfly bushes and turned them to twisted, dead things. This morning as I cut red tulips and rather tattered daffodils for Sally's mother, who is in the hospital, Sally noted the bushes and said, "Well, they'll survive, but they'll probably be a bit bare where the frost got them, a little less lush than they usually are."

I feel that this is true of our little community now; one frost or another has seized all of us in surprising ways these last nine months. We lost a dear friend, (mother and wife) Nancy; two of us lost our jobs; we've dealt with sickness and uncertainty; another family mourns another dear friend, and now Sally's beloved mother is in the hospital. We're all a bit barer on the outside, stripped to vulnerability even in this wonderful spring.

I hope. I believe. I trust. Such overused words, and so hard to say with my soul. The trend in literature right now--fiction and poetry--is to hide these words, to replace them with perfectly wrought cleverness. Smart and clipped, sarcastic and a little bitter, apparently offhand but squeezed and skinned to a certain ugliness that leaves us all bereft. Sincerity is out. We have become so afraid of sentimentality (and we should abhor it) that we have lost the ability to bear goodness.

But sentimentality is word without flesh or joy or pain, without all that comes with being human: un-incarnated words. We pull it over us when we have lost our courage to articulate. I look for Believe in Nancy's garden, in her roses that have become lithe and green again, that remind me that death is not ending. I watch Sally drive off to see her mother yet again in the hospital, her car cluttered with tea cups and knitting and flowers, and I find Hope. I touch the faces of my children, watch them in sleep, and I see Trust. Words dwell in the bodies and blood of all I love; I collect them, I hold them, they are bird calls and color, they are new every morning.

Here is goodness: sitting on the floor next to Sally this morning, watching our children. Tulip leaves pearled with early morning rain. A hot cup of tea. Toast with jam. The love of a community, strong overlapping webs of meals and words and presence. All the things that current under us, that deepen us, that help us say the words that seem sentimental and facile to others. I hope; I believe; I trust. One hundred thanks that spill from my cup, even in a morning of frost. What was it that John, Nancy's husband, said to me as we stood broken over Nancy's grave? He looked at me with eyes struck through by pain. Behind him, tall-shouldered pines darkened in first nightfall. "We are waiting for the eternal spring," he told me. There were low mountains around us, the leaves of winter at our feet. We stood over the grave mound and the sound of Nancy's daughter's sobbing filled us. We are looking for eternal spring. Let it come. Let us see it.

These moments, sun and tightly budded lilacs, the peach tree blossom waxing to new leaf, crabapple flowers and white-tipped bird wings, these moments I am filled. Roar of the heater, running water, song of chickadee and sparrow.

Ooof. A flesh-colored spider just scrambled over the screen of my netbook, reminding me I am not alone. A black fly, iridescent wings, a woman walking by the house, arm extended, pulled by a dog I can't see. I am never quite alone, and I like it that way--flash of light on passing car, windows of houses, the fly, bulwarked by screen, buzzing in protest. Silence pregnant with the small sounds of a thousand lives if I listen closely enough, the creak of floorboard, the shadows of birds.

This morning Martin and I sat in the sun room and read from Phyllis Tickle's Divine Hours. Whether you are religious or not, new traditions unfolding in spring are wonderful, and this is one of ours. We read ancient prayers that seem as if they are being spoken to us newly, written and sung by people vulnerable to injustice, some of whom were fleeing for their lives. While Martin and I are certainly not in such desperate straits, we feel freshly acquainted with injustice. So often we have been protected from these things with wall upon wall of privilege and safety so that a month ago, when our lives stretched out simply and easily before us, these prayers would have seemed flatter and less interesting. But now they are springtime for us.

Today, like millions of people the world round, Martin and I prayed for our daily bread. As Martin reflected afterward, we weren't asking for weekly bread, a couple of extra loaves in the freezer or a whole storehouse just in case. Just enough for today. Enough to fill us. And then tomorrow we'll ask for more. What is the poem I love? Everyone who thirsts, come to the waters, and you who have no money, come buy, and eat.

This is the sort of morning that fits me like a glove: cool, overcast, perfect for short-sleeve weeding. It's a Nairobi morning, and in my garden this morning, birdsong with black dirt under my fingernails and worm-squirm and distant laughter of children, I could almost smell bread baking at Adam's Arcade.

Adam's Arcade was a short walk away from our first home in Nairobi. We lived in the second-story flat of a large house belonging to an older couple who were on home-leave in the US. Since it would take almost a year for our shipment to arrive from America (due to extensive testing of my mother's dangerous bottle of McCormick Poppyseeds), the flat with its lovely old furniture, dusty puzzles, and enormous, screenless windows was perfect. An elderly British woman lived downstairs in a flowery apartment and she and my mother took tea on a regular basis. There was a large, sunny courtyard where I once took a sketchbook and toiled with my pencils over a sketch of a bicycle wheel. There was a pool but I never remember swimming in it, and there must have been a high gate with a night guard sitting in a little hut.

That was the house in the spreading trees where my mother caught a baboon on our dining room table, eating calmly from the fruit bowl. Baboons are not trustworthy, polite creatures and my mother chased his rubbery bottom all the way down the hallway and back out the window.

Nairobi was younger then. Friends tell me that it takes an hour or more just to drive across the city now. I haven't been back in fifteen years but my memories are as clear as if I left just a month ago. Mostly I remember colors and smells, the sound of my own voice as I opened a window, struck by the beauty of the city--thorny trees, bougainvillea climbing over thick hedges, the jangle of music and the distant roar of downtown traffic. I suppose it was dusty and loud and rather unsafe (almost everyone we knew had been robbed in one way or another), but it was the place of my childhood, and beyond that, it was objectively beautiful in many ways. Why is our culture so monochromatic? In Nairobi, color, color everywhere, on tin cups and matatus and clothes and up walls and in the market.

But today I'm thinking of Adam's Arcade, which we loved for its awkward concrete playground and difficult slide only manageable by squatting and sliding on the soles of your shoes. The bakery smelled different than any bakery I've sniffed since; it was a warm mixture, I suppose, of french bread and samosas and mandazi, mingling with the dust and exhaust of Nairobi. I don't remember many of its offerings beyond the chocolate croissants, which my mother asked for in a French accent since our Canadian friend, who worked for the embassy or the consulate or something important, had once mocked us for sounding American and uncouth. "A loaf of bread and three cwaasant," we ordered, and that's how we still pronounce them today, much to the vigorous mockery of Americans (like my husband), who chide us for being ridiculous.

Today the morning is a grey umbrella, and the air swims with birdsong and spring and the voices of my children on the porch. And I too, just for a few minutes, am a child, lifting my nose to find a rather mediocre bakery I once loved and anticipated as a world-class treat. Sometimes, just before sleeping, I find a place like that deep inside, and I long to stay in that cool place above worry and adulthood just long enough to slip into a dream, and soemtimes, if I'm lucky, I do.

*
For a vision of loveliness, as my mother says, see my friend Sal's photos (plus I got a little mention :) at her blog: Sally's Blog

It doesn't feel like March.

70 to 80 degree weather, warm nights, and our world is gaudy with color--crabapples the color of pink lemonade, Bradford pears in lacy pompoms, magnolias opening their saucer blooms to a robin's egg sky, bedecked daffodils (Happy late Daffodil Day, by the way), and the forsythia going absolutely lemon-wild. Some of you will remember that I thought "Forsythia" would be a gorgeous middle name for Bea, who was born almost at this time four years ago, but she took "Fern" instead, much more sensible but not as fraptious.

I do love forsythia, even though they are only truly glorious for a week. I don't understand why people dismiss something because its beauty is short-lived; you'd have to pooh-pooh the butterfly, and that's just the beginning.

I can only think that we as middle-class consumers look for the most enduring bang for our buck, so to plant a row of forsythia, which can grow quite gangly and only blooms yellow for about 1/52.18 of the year, seems like a meaningless extravagance.

And I suppose too, that in the same attitude of economy, you could dismiss a whole cornucopia of magnificence, but as Babette's Feast or simply being in love teaches us, we often find grace only when we allow ourselves to embrace extravagance.

I remember someone telling me once that they found themselves holding back active friendship from a dying person, because of the energy expenditure and the output of love that would only end in loss. It's a cliche--"'tis better to have loved. . ." but it's true that it's always better to exhaust myself loving well, though it opens me to pain.

It would be easy to take what has happened to us in the past three weeks--a horrible, dark thing of injustice--and throw it over our last seven years here. But that would be like throwing a cloak over our garden, snuffing out every lovely flower blossom, sorrowing over the whole thing because the end was disappointing. I refuse to do it. As I told an about-to-graduate student the other day, we won't let this ruin things for us; we'll celebrate every good thing that has happened and leave knowing that this was, indeed, a good place, where we came to love better and where we were loved well.

At the grocery store today, waiting at the deli, I chatted with a woman who, like many people I've talked with lately, shook her head warily over the amazing days we've been having, warning that it will only end badly with a freak snow storm or a summer of swarmy mosquitoes. It's beautiful now, sure, but in a couple months? Pestilence!

Meanwhile? Meanwhile, I'm enjoying every minute, gobbling this feast of beauty while it lasts, and I won't stop until I have to.

It's Sunday and the children are a'bed. Last night, a good friend of ours (and a colleague of Martin's), wonderful poet and wise fellow Bob Randolph (his wife, Amy, is also a lovely poet and songwriter with whom we have sung many a time), sent us this e-mail after we potlucked with some good friends on Saturday evening. . .Thought I'd share it with you.

*

Hi Martin and Kim,

Amy told me that at Noah's house the other night, when Amy was there, Martin told about writing a poem and reading it to Kim as she stood working with something on the stove, her back to him. He said he finished reading and there was no response, so he asked what she thought of it. She turned around with tears in her eyes because the poem was beautiful.

Amy said that at that point, when she heard Martin recount that, she said to herself, "Ah, yes--they'll be ok."

I agree and want to amplify that a little. Tenure or no tenure, as important as that may be, is not the core, neither is promotion or not promotion, and where a person works or doesn't work isn't the core either--Stevens sold insurance, Ginsberg got kicked out of college, Snyder sailed around all over as a merchant seaman--writers write; to a writer what can matter more than writing something so beautiful it brings tears to your soul-mate. That's what we do. That's what we build our universes out of. The rest is stuff, but that's the heart of it.

So I'm with Amy on this.
The two of you standing by that stove may not be much to some people, but to me, Martin, it's exactly why you should be hired at Harvard, or anywhere else.

(At least, that's the sort of thing the universe I bank on comes from.)

In the midst of talk of . . ., talk of abiding sorrow, a man reads a poem to his wife in the kitchen as she is cooking, and the poem is so beautiful it makes her cry. That's the diamond and the truth.

Bob

When I came in late from eating pie (Happy Pi Day!) with some good women tonight, I ran upstairs to say goodnight to the restless girls and noticed Beatrix's neck was sunburned. I hate to celebrate a sunburn, but it is a the mark of one unbelievably gorgeous, summery day, with the daffodils waving like gospel singers and the grass busting out so green it's almost bad taste and the robins taking back the neighborhood. It was THAT sort of March day, the kind of day that makes you want to forget all your troubles and fly off into the lonely white cloud in the azure sky.

Though I did not fly, I did walk quite a bit and sat in the sun and continued with the forever job of tidying the winter-weary yard. I pulled on Martin's thick hide gloves and went at the piles of nasty thorns, trying to wrestle them into big garbage bags (a tricky task). Soon after the buses pulled through the the streets, Roberto, Nancy's middle son, arrived in our driveway on his bike. Roberto, middle-school, big-talker, sweetly handsome young man (originally from Guatemala, with a sweep of dark hair, big, brown eyes, a bit shorter than many of his peers), is a good story-teller and is extraordinarily skilled with wee kids. And my two little girls love him. They've both grown up with him, calling him either "Berto" or "Bobo." One night two-year old Bea prayed for "Uncle Berto," which Merry and Catherine thought was hilarious. Elspeth and Bea love to torture him in a good-natured way, pulling on his legs and slugging him once and a while (this is not encouraged by their mother, by the way.)

This afternoon he somewhat awkwardly hung out with me for a few minutes while I shoved rose branches into a trashcan. He responded politely to my stock questions--How was school today? Do you have testing this week? That means no homework, right? Etc. (How boring I must be, just like the grown-ups I remember from my childhood; I'd answer with a smile, wishing they would ask about something other than school. . .and mostly they never did). After a genial interlude, Roberto disappeared down the hill and the next thing I knew, he was hitting around a plastic baseball with Elspeth. I looked up again and he was pitching to her, slowly and patiently. And then Elspeth gathered some black walnuts from our big tree and began throwing them to Roberto, who knocked them to kingdom come, down our chimney and off our roof.

"Home run!" I heard Elspeth yell, and then to me up the hill, "Mommy! Roberto's GOOD!"

I gazed down at them in the sea of emerald grass, six-year old Elspeth (often a handful) and Roberto (often discouraged by his lack of ease with sports), both middle children, and they seemed to be glowing like suns. I could feel the warmth.

John, Roberto's father, had told me a few days ago that Roberto had come home from playing baseball at a friend's house discouraged and in a bad mood. Today Roberto admitted to me he can't hit a baseball. But he could sure hit those walnuts Elspeth was pitching to him--boy, was he slugging them. And to Elspeth down in the field by our creek, Roberto was Babe Ruth.

It struck me: we all should be so adored. Adoration is wonderful. When we know it from another person we love, adoration transforms us, helps us come closer to understanding who we really are--worthy of celebration. And when we see it in the pure, loving adoration of another, and it moves us to strive to be more generous givers.

"Well, I think I'll just come back tomorrow," Roberto told me a few hours later, after he had hung out in the garden, eating graham crackers distributed by Beatrix, who warned him "not to get a tummyache" and then on the porch with Elspeth as she cut out a paper crown.

"That would be wonderful," I smiled. "You're really good with the kids, Roberto."

He shrugged a little. "It seems like you could use someone to play with them," he said. And as he inched toward the door, he added, "I'll just come over after school."

"You can come over any time," I said.

"I told Elspeth I'd bring my aluminum bat."

I remember what my dear childhood friend told me when she fell in love with the man she will marry this summer. Her eyes were full of a new place, as if she'd just travelled to the most beautiful country she had never known existed. "It feels so good to be loved like that," she said. "I didn't know how good it would be."

We all deserve to be adored, not in a sentimental silly way that clouds our faults and coats us with sugar, but in a real way, a way that strips off our veils and shows us who we really are, and we realize that we are, after all, worthy of being loved sacrificially. Perhaps the adoration that I silently celebrated this afternoon is a glimpse of the eternal, where we will be at last truly joyful without reservation, where we will love without having to draw back, where we will accept the love that has always been waiting for us, that has surrounded us from our birth.

This is a reflection I wrote for our Mennonite church about giving, and, by jove, it seemed so appropriate I thought I'd paste it here.


Right away I think of this story: my first truly sacrificial gift, and how it was given in ignorance that ripened into bitter regret.

I was about six, old enough to know how rare and wonderful a silver dollar was. My granddad gave these gleaming discs to us on our birthdays, and they were precious things. My sister never spent hers’, and I once bribed her out of one, but that’s a different story.

We were at our grandparent’s church—a place of plush carpet and gleaming wooden pews softened by long red cushions. When the offering was taken, I fumbled in my pockets for a quarter—then, as now, I felt a compunction to place something in the offering, even if it was from a panicky impulse not to be embarrassed in front of the solemn offering men in their suits, looking like Mafia envoys. As the velvet plum-colored pouch, split in half by slick walnut handles, passed me, I slipped in a quarter—a small offering, perhaps, even for a child like me who received allowances, but enough to get by, I thought, much better than a dime, say, or a handful of pennies, pathetic as they slide from the palm. In any case, I’d be guilt-free at least until communion, when my mother would cry and I’d struggle to come up with a list of sins to confess silently to God so I’d not drink unbearable punishment on myself. At least offering was over with.

But my sister passed the pouch to my father, as it disappeared out of reach down the aisle, I realized what I had done. Oh, no! My silver dollar. Given to me by the warm, old hands of my grey-haired grandfather. Given to me in love and in trust. I’d put it in a pouch with other meaningless coins, and it would be counted and dropped into the church coffers by more men in suits. Nobody would know how precious it was to me—nobody.

I pulled my mother’s ear down to my mouth and whispered, “I gave away my silver dollar. Into the offering!”

She sensed the desperation in my voice, I knew it. Would she help me retrieve it? God didn’t care what denominations the money came in, after all! Couldn’t I just give four quarters, the same amount of money but not the monumental treasure that my Granddad’s silver dollar was? I only got one once a year, and not even that often, since we lived overseas. Granddaddy had to go to the bank especially and exchange regular paper money for the silver dollars he’d place in his grandkid’s palm. Surely God would understand that this gift was too precious?

My mother leaned over in the church-way she had, where she could whisper in our ear without moving her eyes from the front of the church. “Never regret giving anything to God,” my mother whispered back.

What? Why did parents never understand?

I spent the rest of church—the scripture readings, the long sermon, right through the last hymn—in agony over my loss. I pictured how it had happened over and over again. I’d felt in my pockets, yanked out a silver coin, and tossed it in the offering pouch. I saw it disappear down the aisle again and again, and I thought about what my mother had said—never regret, never regret, never regret.

I still think about this moment. I don’t know if the loss of my silver dollar, which was of utmost significance to me at six, was a defining moment in my life, but the memory still defines me today, when I struggle to give away what’s precious. The giving, done in a moment of spirited generosity, perhaps, is not as hard as the trusting—the trusting that the one to whom I give can appreciate the gift enough, will be careful with what I have given—my money, my time, my children, my love.

God will take it all—and in my clearer moments, I realize it was never mine in the first place. I realize that there is no such thing as possession in the Great Story—that all things are entrusted, but not given away for keeps. God is not trustworthy in the way I want God to be. I want to receive a gift and hunker down in my favorite chair, savoring it without fear that a thing I love so much will be taken from me. But there are no such promises, and love rarely makes such promise. I can’t tell my children that their lives will be easy. I wish I could, and believe it, but I can’t.

One thing—no, two at least--that have not been given to me with any conditions. Love and grace. Love and grace—they are the sky, the stars, the ground, the ocean, the very air I breathe. No one can take these from me, and these I can give freely, freely, forever.

It’s the silver dollars I’m still struggling to find in my pockets, and knowing what I give, slip them into the offering basket. Today my silver dollar is my sense of security, control, and my knowledge of the future. Surely something else would do just as well. Surely it can’t be expected of me. Perhaps it’s not quite clear how much it means to me. And yet, I fumble about in the darkness of my pockets, untangle it from my grasping fingers, and let it go.

And as I watch it disappear down the aisle, as I watch other hands dropping coins—gifts that I cannot begin to understand or know—I feel panic, fear, grief—and then a growing sense that all is okay, not perhaps in the particulars, the lists of worries I love to obsess about—but in the large sense. I ask regret to leave me. All will be well. And all will be well. All manner of things will be well.

I found myself heartily upset that Martin has had to spend his spring break in front of a computer screen, looking for jobs. Mostly I've felt this positive energy, even if it's only simmering, through all of it, but the beginning feeling of crisis has waned into a daily reality--one where my dear friend and companion is often glued to a screen, trying to make sense out of the future. I guess since Mom left a couple days ago, this afternoon was waiting for me--an afternoon of sadness, punctuated by a few hot pops of anger. Sometimes it feels rather like a dream I'm waiting to shake myself from.

But now I feel better. We took a crock pot of pork and sauerkraut over to Kevin and Sally's house, drank a bottle of wine, ate well, and then challenged four pints of Ben and Jerrys--and won! (I don't think we quite finished off the ice cream, though we made an impressive dent). And we laughed a lot--the best medicine of all. And they gave us a disc of "Chopped--" seven episodes of culinary competition. I think I can tear Martin away from the applications long enough to watch one before bedtime. Who will survive to the dessert round? I'm getting excited just thinking about it.