On being replaced

As many of you know, I have another baby: the book I'm writing about the time Bob's liver failed. (A memoir about illness, healing, authority, submission, faith, and doubt.) This past weekend I started writing about the part where Bob and I both are replaced at work thanks to medical leave. Very easily replaced. I kind of like how it came out: 

Bob and I have been away from our jobs one and two months respectively. Pretty much all during seminary Bob coached basketball to teenage boys in North Minneapolis, mostly Liberian immigrants on the edge of trouble. You could say that Bob has a benevolent outlook, and he does, but it’s more than that. It’s about this man’s bona fide zeal for sports. In all the modest places we’ve lived in, never a garage, closets or no, we always made room for his collections of golf bags, baseball bats, basketball paraphernalia, sports theory books, and buckets of assorted balls and gloves. No matter how strapped our budget, we always subscribed to the golf cable channel. Sit on any toilet we’ve ever had, you’ll have a stack of sports instructional magazines at your fingertips. I used to think Bob’s clipboard that is a whiteboard with the permanent basketball court lines etched in black, omnipresent in our apartment, was quaint. How cute, an itty bitty gymnasium! But to Bob it’s not just a cool clipboard for basketball lovers, it’s a serious tool to diagram plays for the team. He used it a lot.

Presently, an intern coaches Bob’s team. And he is kind enough to call every once in a while to update Bob on the team’s progress. I don’t totally get the obsession with sports but I admit its inspiring to see the boys get excited about playing together.

An intern has taken over my job too. In a way, I’m glad that my tasks are covered. Yet the fact of the matter is, we are both replaced by 22-year-olds. Sometimes when Bob is in a moment of cognizance, we joke about how exchangeable we 40-50-somethings are. I’ve known for years that my interns are on a faster track to greatness than me. After their internships these young people moved on to work overseas, learn languages, make films, study law, lobby congress, direct nonprofits, or be theologians and philosophers. Their visions and dreams read like a laundry list of all the things I wish I’d done before I got a husband, children, and car payments.  

Seismic shifts in routine reveal the truth of what does and doesn’t matter, and it’s usually not what you originally thought. If it wasn’t for the fact that I have other things to worry about, such as my dying husband, I could be bothered by the fact that my twenty-something intern is now “me” and I’m professionally invisible. But I’m not bothered. I’ll care about that later. 

...

More later! Two years and 131 pages done, about another 100 pages and who know how many years to go.  Time to go to my day job.

With love, T

Blown Out Redwing Boots :: Part I

Do you see the blown out sole?
Just upped and blowed out.

I'm pleased to introduce you to my boots. They are Redwing Boots, purchased from the home store in Redwing, Minnesota.

These babies are ten years old and I love them. When you live in the upper midwest, fashionistas like me wear these things for a good five-six months of the year. I believe these boots have taken on the shape of my feet.

So last December, right before I was about to take off to California, my right boot blew out. The rubber just fell out one Saturday afternoon while I watched Aidan play basketball.

My babies on their better side.

Redwing Boots are patriotic boots.

Made in the U.S.A. No outsourcing. And to make things even better, the company is worker owned. No zillionaire CEO, but everyone shares the profits.

Dang, I should invoice Redwing for a marketing fee, but really all I want are my boots back.

They say that Redwing will replace the soles free of charge. Maybe, maybe not. But guess what, there's a Redwing outlet just a few miles from here so I'll give it a whirl. If I'm successful, you'll be the first to know, my dear blogger friends. I know you'll be waiting for this news and I promise not to let you down, friends. Stay tuned.

Thanks for coming over!

With love, T

The Blues Club that is my Church

For those of you who were not able to join me at the blues club that is my church yesterday, St. John's Lutheran, I wanted to share this explanation of one of the pieces offered out. the explanation is almost, ALMOST as good as the soulful sound that filled the sanctuary of the space, and the remote crevices of all who were there. This is lifted right out of the service bulletin, and no doubt can be attributed to the amazing Larry Christianson, Director of Music, Worship and the Arts.

Here goes:

Explanation of the "Gloria" sung during today's offering:
In contrast to more lively settings of the "Gloria" text, this piece creates a melancholy mood with the presence of two melodies: Amazing Grace (a British tune entitled "New Britian," and text written by reformed slave trader John Newton) and "Sometimes I feel like a Motherless Child" (a mournful African American Spiritual). Even though Old Testament scriptures commented on the tragedy of slavery, Christianity sill inspired both the slaves and the slave owners of the New World. The "Gloria" explores this painful paradox of our history by placing a melody of a slave trader next to a melody of a slave. This piece resonates with the Book of Job by exploring the mysteries of innocent suffering. Latin American cultures were born out of the conflicts and collaborations of Native populations, Europeans and West Africans, therefore, this piece expresses "Glory to God" within the context of their tragic history.

...

With love, T

For MLK Day: "Beloved" by Toni Morrison, annotated

Read this book and be grateful if you believe in forgiveness
and the potential for Beloved Community. 

To commemorate Martin Luther King Day, I'm pleased to post my annotation of the book Beloved, by Toni Morrison:  

Beloved by Toni Morrison is a novel set in Cincinnati the immediate years following the civil war, centering on a former slave, Sethe, and her family. “Family,” defined by slavery standards as family didn’t exist for slaves; would-be loved ones were bought, sold, rented, burned, hanged, or otherwise lost. Sethe’s family was her mother-in-law, her daughter, her new lover who was an old co-slave (for total lack of a better word), her two runaway sons, her vanished husband and her ghost daughter, Beloved, who forms the center of the plot line. The book demonstrates why it was nearly impossible for a slave to form bonds of love, and the reader understands how love could be best shown through infanticide. Yes, read that last sentence again slowly. Love through infanticide. I won't give away the spoiler, the method.

I wanted to read this book for two reasons. First to further my quest to read the classics. In 2006 The New York Times Book Review deemed this book as “the single best work of American fiction in the past 25 years.” The original NYT review was written in 1987 by Margeret Atwood who wrote this about Toni Morrison: “If there were any doubts about her stature as a pre-eminent American novelist, of her own or any other generation, Beloved will put them to rest. In three words or less, it's a hair-raiser.”

What would I give to find a nonfiction story like this to write (and I have to believe they exist). Or better yet, I only wish there were no nonfiction stories like this. This is a story of our American heritage and it’s really hard to read. Just as Sethe and her lover, Paul D., wanted to “unremember” their horrific past—perhaps they had most severe cases of post traumatic stress—so do we as a country. Perhaps this book could help serve a national truth and reconciliation effort, to tell stories of our slave history and collectively heal. Idealism.

The second reason I wanted to read this is to see how Toni Morrison writes the supernatural. (My writing and research interests include writing nonfiction supernatural.) Morrison writes the narrative like a conch shell—circling wide with big open holes in the story and rotating the prose inwards, winding towards a tight ball of tension and providing details to the circumstances of Beloved’s past and present. Slavery is horrible, yet is also just a word that cannot in itself evoke the complexities of what it did to people, white and black, and to our society. Morrison puts flesh and bones to slavery; not only to its enormous injustices, but also to its tragic nuances. The inwardly spiraling accounts of chronic and severe abuse suffered by all of the characters seem to beg for a supernatural telling as the haunting seems almost as expected as killing your own baby in order to save it. It seemed a person enslaved lived constantly on the border of life and death, and so to accept a ghost into your household, to accept existence as a straddling of the present world and the next, wouldn’t be out of the ordinary.

The book opens with the supernatural: “124 was spiteful. Full of baby’s venom. The women in the house knew it and so did the children. For years each put up with the spite in his own way, but by 1873 Sethe and her daughter Denver were its only victims” (3). Yes, indeed, Morrison is writing about ghosts of the poltergeist-type, including incidents such as “a mirror shattered” and “two tiny hand prints appeared in the cake” (3). Yet the way Morrison writes the supernatural, it could also be referring to the super traumatic. Would not anyone who murdered their own child be haunted, and thus negatively influence everyone around them?

As part of the inward spiraling of the narrative, Morrison tells the story through different characters in their own voice, in a non-linear fashion. The disjointed style of prose emulates the jarring uncertainties faced by its characters, yet it all works together to tell a thick, multi-layered story of attempting to love in a nightmare.

With love, T

Teenager Economics

This is a random RHS cheerleader pic I found on google images.
But I'm pretty sure my favorite cheerleader is the girl in the back right.
Are they adorable or what? xoxoxo

I just spent $5 to get into a Roosevelt High School basketball game to deliver $15 to my daughter who has a $30 public library bill due to go to a collection agency soon. I should have been able to get into the game with my $80 season pass, but we lost it, and so I've chalked that up to putting us into major donor status with the RHS booster club. For whom I recently volunteered in the RHS concession stand. I thought it was cool that I mastered the popcorn machine until the 10-year-old son of another mother mastered it better than me. I paid $5 to get into that game too, just so I could report to concession stand duty and get one-upped by a 5th grader. I kept telling myself that working consessions was an innovative way to network. "So where do you work?" I kept asking other mothers as we sold skittles and walking tacos. A question which experience tells me inevitably leads to a conversation on the topic of rampant job dissatisfaction. Irrelevant to this post, but just saying.

Anyway...

It paid off. I mean, the networking. Not so much professionally, but from a parental standpoint. Because my teenage daughter keeps wanting to hang out with her friends instead of stay home with us. Even on Friday nights! It's uncomfortable, because you always want your babies close to you. But at least I've met some of her friends and some of their mothers, and so it helps.

There was a lot of energy tonight at the RHS gym. The varsity boys were just starting up and the pep band finally got showed up tonight. My goodness, this school has a reputation for it's music and vocal arts program and there's been no dang pep band! So it was great to hear them tonight although they don't seem to be your usual pep band, playing "Louie Louie" and assorted Beatles songs. (I love pep band songs. I keep harassing my girl that the cheerleaders need to come up with little dances to go with the songs. Not that  I have strong feelings about it.) The RHS pep band seems to feature bass and electric guitars so you can't easily tell if it's a pep band or a recording. Tonight they played, "Hell's Bells." If that's not a nightmare song from my high school years, but that's another story. ACDC songs seem to be big among RHS varsity sports. They liked to play "Back in Black" during the football game warm ups. It felt so been-there-done-that to me, but the kids thought it was really cool, including my 7th grader. I'm just a lowly parent.

So tonight, after the $5 admission fee I realized there was nowhere for this parent to sit -- and I kind of wanted to stay for a while because there was a lot of energy in that gym, I mean, the whole RHS student section was full of students wearing onesie pajamas. Yes, you read me right. An entire bleacher section of grown children in adult-sized, onesie pajamas standing up in full chant of hell's bells. It's called school spirit, people. And I was feeling it too, but since there was no where to sit, I did my one important thing and then returned home.

My one important thing: I marched right up to the cheerleader section, found my favorite girl, pulled her aside, gave her the money, and reminded her that I had my cell phone with me at all times and that she could call me whenever she wanted to. No matter what.

That's all.

How much did all that cost?

Thanks for coming to the Charmer blog. I wish you all a lovely weekend.

With love, T

My nightmare, their nightmare

"...motherhood is a series of emergencies..." so writes Debra Monroe in her memoir, On the Outskirts of Normal. In a chapter called "A History of Fear" she writes about all the ways her newly adopted baby could be mortally hurt, due to her imagined maternal inadequacy.

You start loosing your child the very minute you get one. Because every time your child learns something, the child moves further away from dependence on you. The fact that Amanda can now occasionally find transportation with friends is yet another step on that slippery slope of our separation. We still drive her to most places, but sometimes she doesn't need us. (It's probably more accurate to say that her need for us changes.)

"Mom, Katie will take me to the game tonight," she told me earlier today. The game was at East High School. Amanda was cheering for the Roosevelt High School varsity boys basketball team, the away team. (Even though Des Moines'ers know that the two giant-sized schools are separated by just a few miles of  I-235.)

Fine. The plan sounded good to me. She'd go with a friend, and I'd arrive by second quarter, watch her cheer, then bring her back home.

But then something happened that scared me. Felt like one of those emergencies you dread. A flash of nightmare.

I was in the kitchen preparing pizza toppings for Bob, thinking I'd have his pizza ready to bake before I left for Amanda's game. (He'd taken Aidan to his basketball practice, where, damn, that coach had Aidan scrimmaging on the "skins" team, I found out later. My son is not a "skins" kind of kid. Had I been there, I would have died inside, or at least embarrassed a couple people, especially Aidan, by talking with the coach.)

What time did Amanda's game start? I forgot. I texted her: "What time does your game start?" I continued chopping onions and slicing garlic.

Amanda texted me back. Except it wasn't Amanda. The text said (exact words), "Your fucking kid lost her phone."

My mind went wild. I imagined Amanda kidnapped. I let her ride with a friend to the basketball game and now she is kidnapped. She's too young to be alone, she's so vulnerable, there's so many predators out  there. Of course predators are going to stalk teenage girls at a high school basketball game. A predator has her. They will use her phone to torment me. Wait a minute, calm down. They didn't say you lost your kid, they said your kid lost her phone. Big difference. For whatever reason, some creepy person had my daughter's phone and was texting me. Had I been cyber bullied? Is this what high-schoolers do to each other regularly?

I came so close to texting back my own version of cyber bullying. Fortunately, even in my state of panic, I held it together enough to realize that I was totally at my bully's mercy. Totally. There was nothing I could do but to be polite. Courtesy was my one and only chance.

And so I texted back: "Will u pls return it?" And then I fumbled around with the T-Mobile 800# and disconnected the service, imagining all the apps and ring tones my texter was downloading. Still, it occurred to me that even if my bully texter was willing to oblige my plea, I'd cut off the service before we could further communicate. There was no way to make arrangements to return the phone.

No  longer in the mood to finish making Bob's pizza, I got in the car and headed over to East High. I was sure that when I got there I'd see Amanda decked out in blue and white with the silver poms, cheering with the rest of the team. But what if I didn't? What if I got there and she was the missing cheerleader? What if there were five girls bopping around the sidelines instead of six?

I called Bob to tell him about the creepy text. He was weirded out too. "Maybe you should just go right over there," he suggested. I already was on the road. He asked that I call him when I saw her, when I could verify with my own eyes that it was her phone, and not her, that was stolen.

If a child falls in the woods by herself, does the parent hear? Children shouldn't be alone in the woods, but sadly, as they grow older, it's inevitable. Or maybe more sadly, there are far too few chances for children to play freely and safely in the woods. I always like the times when we're all home together, just doing nothing but being together. It seems so secure.

I got to East High, parked the car, winded my way through the sidewalk, ramps, hallways, and stairways to the gym full of screaming, teaming kids. I'd never before been in a high school where the public gathering space felt situated in the bowels of the building. The basketball court and its environs seemed to enjoy its posture of strength, like an enormously sturdy bomb shelter. I found the visitors' section. Looked for the cheerleaders. Counted them, 1,2,3,4,5...6. All accounted for. Amanda was there as if nothing had happened. She couldn't see me as I was just a spec of a bug in the massive section of fans, parents, and students, but I could see her. Her cheer smile beamed all across the auditorium. Her pony tail bounced as though her lost or stolen cell phone was a figment of my thinking. I called Bob to let him know that I could see Amanda with my own eyes.

Maybe she had her phone after all. Maybe her friends were just fooling around with it. That would be awesome, I thought. If this was true I wouldn't even care if her friends dropped me an f-bomb. I just wanted the phone back.

During halftime, Amanda confirmed with me -- no cell phone. She had it one moment, and not the next. It simply disappeared. At this point, knowing that indeed she wasn't kidnapped in the woods, my concern turned away from predators and turned towards lost property. I considered that now we were two for two with lost kid phones. (Aidan had an earlier mishap.) And even Amanda's phone, or I should say ex-phone, was a Craig's list special because she'd lost her original phone.

How can regular folk like us keep up with children's cell phones?

But my laments were minor compared to other parents' because one of the Roosevelt basketball team members got terribly injured. He was pushed somehow into diving position, headfirst to the floor. Landed smack on his temple and just laid there like a human puddle. I saw it happen and it was truly horrifying. The game was stopped for a half hour to wait for the paramedics. A half hour with a gym full of RHS and East High kids, no game, no music, no cheers, and only one fistfight in the bleachers. The police broke it up pretty handily.

The old gym held us all in check. It hadn't yet reached the ranks of modernization, still ordering the people with its original built-in bleachers, not the kind that nimbly tuck back. The gym roared its own brute strength, simply with the weight of its massive cement walls and levels. The space reminded me of a ginormous cavern you'd discover deep inside a cave. Were we actually underground? I looked for fire escapes. Painted lettering boldly proclaimed "East Side Scarlets." Scarlets was an odd mascot name, I thought. I'd never heard of that before. Red was the main accent color.

Officials scrubbed blood off the floor where the player had crashed his head, while we all waited for the paramedics to arrive. It was the twilight zone.

Many friends had told me that East High has the most robust alumni association of any high school in the U.S., perhaps in the world. The gym was the very same gym that has held all those thousands of former students. I wondered if anyone believed the place was haunted.
It was troubling that officials moved the injured player to a chair instead of stabilizing his head and neck, keeping him warm, and talking to him. The boy was catatonic as he rose and walked to the bench. I hate to say, but I think moving him like that was a bad, bad mistake on the part of the officials. The mistake was made with the scarlet gym and all of us watching. When the paramedics came, they attached a neck brace and wheeled him out  flat on a gurney. Everyone stood and clapped. The pointless remaining six minutes of the game commenced.

I'm too old for these 15 hour days. I'm too exhausted for these "motherhood emergencies" although I'm told they never go away. Ever.

The gamed ended in a Roosevelt win (yay?) and the gym erupted into the frenzy of everyone leaving all at the same time. I always just stay put and let my cheerleader find me. Through the commotion I hear an announcement on the loud speaker. "Amanda Speirs, please report to the score desk." Did I hear that right? Did they say my daughter's name? "Amanda Speirs, please report to the score desk." I look down from the bleachers and sure enough, there's Amanda claiming her phone. Evidently, my bully texter had turned it in.

All the way home we tried to figure out how my bully texter knew the phone belonged to "Amanda Speirs." Her name wasn't anywhere. The only explanation we have is that it was someone who knows Amanda and knowingly took it, which is another layer of creepiness. Yet, I want to give a small shout out to my bully texter: thank you for changing your mind. And leave my daughter alone.

How will I ever let this girl go to college?

Thanks for coming over to the Charmer blog.

With love, T