The relative dignity of not being noticed

cystalize

There are plenty of times you want to be noticed.

There are many times you wish not to be noticed.

This blog post is about the latter.

Once, about 15 years ago I had to leave the office early because of food poisoning. You know that feeling. Headache escalates. Nausea grows. You calculate if you can get home before your vomit, or if you should wait until you vomit and then make your way home. I'd decided to make my way home before heaving up the Chinese food from the night before.

I was working in Manhattan and going home meant a 45 minute subway ride to Brooklyn. I decided I could do it. To tell you how sick I felt, I'll tell you this: I didn't ask my boss if I could leave, I told my boss I would leave. (I'm old school and generally I don't "tell" my bosses anything. Often to my detriment but that's another blog post.)

I left the office, made way to my train stop, and sat miserably as we snaked through the bowels underneath the city. I made it as far as Canal Street, about five stops or so, when the heat of stomach bile steeped in my throat. I would be throwing up soon. Vomiting on the train seemed like a pretty low option. Vomiting on the station platform was a far more desirable choice and that's what I did. Next stop I barely slithered off the train and upchucked my guts all over the platform as others moved off the train, upchucked more as the train departed, and upchucked more as people gathered to catch the next train. No one noticed. No one cared. No one removed their bored facial expressions. No one even looked up from their reading material.

In hind site, I could be wrong because how would I have known if anyone noticed or not? I was staring straight into my own puke, prepping for more heaving. Still, at least the perception of not being noticed was a glorious experience. I gave thanks to God that I wasn't in the Midwest where strangers would have rushed up to me asking how they could help. I got on the next train that came by 15 minutes later, feeling sorry for whoever would discover the puddle of my stomach contents and be forced to clean it up. I hoped that some hungry rodents might get to it first. I went home and lay in bed all day, grateful that my personal pride remained mostly in tact thanks to the anonymity.

Yesterday was another day I was glad to not be noticed. The occasion: crying at my desk at work. The tears flowed steadily for hours as much as I tried to stop them. My alibi would be allergies, had anyone asked. No one did. No one noticed. And I was grateful. At least I could be somewhat alone in my misery. Old school me at work again -- since my body wasn't spewing vomit or blood or a communicable disease, I didn't feel justified in leaving. Plus, the whole point of being in the office was the cause of my crying so it would've been doubly stupid to go home.

I vowed not to blog about this, but here I am. The self discipline lasted about 36 hours for it was yesterday morning when my family pulled out of the driveway on their way to a Brooklyn spring break without me, because of my "vacation time snafu." Let's leave it at that. It's probably my own damn fault for wanting to go to grad school. I want it all, evidently. When I realized I couldn't go to spring break, of course I insisted that my family go without me. There was no choice. At the last minute Bob, feeling really bad, reconsidered the trip, and I said, go!

But I tell you, when that dented up silver Buick pulled out of the driveway I wasn't thinking about all the things I'd been wanting to do for at least two years. I wasn't thinking about sleeping, reading, watching TV, catching up on movies, or cooking. I wasn't thinking about progressing my book or my essays. I wasn't thinking about the quiet I've longed for, the slowness I've craved, the solitude I've missed. Nor the yoga, biking, or walking I've been badly wanting to do. Nor eating while sitting down, taking normal showers, hanging up my clothes, brushing my teeth longer than 30 seconds, or picking up all the crap on the floor of my car. I wasn't thinking about the 100 miles per hour I've been living too long and how I would have some so called down time.

I was only thinking that I wanted nothing more, positively nothing more, than to be crammed into that car full of stuff on it's way to a cheap motel in Ohio en route to Brooklyn, New York. I only wanted to be with my three lifelines. In that moment when the nerdy suburban sedan drove away from me, my priorities suddenly crystallized. My husband. My daughter. My son. That's all I wanted.

"It isn't normal to know what we want. It is a rare and difficult psychological achievement." -- Abraham Maslow. I saw this on my twitter feed today and it occurred to me that I may be experiencing this kind of "rare psychological achievement." Not that I want to. This truth is surely, sadly known already among those those of you who have lost a lifeline. You just want him back. You want her back. It's crystal clear.

So I played mind games and cried all morning, in relative dignity. I'm better now. But still playing mind games. Working on a way to heave-ho the sick feeling without anyone noticing. I've got some ideas. And I've got a little help from my friends. (Awesome, incredible, amazing friends, by the way. Thanks all! xoxo)

Thanks for coming over to the Charmer blog.

With love, T

Phantom of the amoeba-stick-man

"Mom, my teacher sugar coated her way of telling me my art project was bad."

This was 7th grade Boychild's way of informing me that he didn't get a very good grade on his art project, which was apparently a bunch of sticks that he picked up from the yard somehow made into a marionette. It was a group project, he said.

"Yeah, she said we needed 'more color' and 'more imagination' and whatever," Boychild said, rolling his eyes, emphasizing the teacher's words with a dull sarcastic tongue twist.

It reminded me of the time Boychild, while in kindergarden, brought home a daily amoeba-stick-man drawing. Pencil on lined spiral paper. A black circle with stubby short black hairs jutting out all around, with a somber stick face, black stick arms and legs projecting out from the head/amoeba. There was no neck nor torso. He brought one of these home every day of kindergarden. Boychild's four-year-old black and white number two lead pencil creativity. Other kindergardeners were coloring wild, flaming rainbows and ponies with a crayola 72 pack. Boychild drew black and white amoeba-stick-people. (I plan to make a collage of those amoeba-people to hang on the wall but haven't gotten around to it yet.)

Wait a minute, I know what this 7th grade art project is all about.

"Did you make a puppet version of your kindergarden amoeba-stick-man?" I asked with furrowed eyes, in my firm mother-knows-best tone. I may be stressed, tired, and brain drained, but I will not tolerate a 7th grade version of the amoeba-stick-man. This mother demands more.

"No, mom, I didn't," boychild said. "It had a neck and we used color...aqua!"

On the dark early mornings when Boychild had picked up sticks in the yard before bumbling into the back seat of the car so I could drive him to school, I told him I needed to see this art project when he was done. One morning, when the art project had been close to finished, we had driven about five miles to school, late as usual, when Boychild realized that he forgot his finishing touches -- two shoe boxes -- at home. We turned around, I think it was icy streets that day, returned home for the shoe boxes, and Boychild was about 45 minutes late to school. I played mind games with myself that missing my own breakfast and being late for my own job wasn't a big deal.

I was really curious about Boychild's art project and what exactly it looked like, how much thought and effort really went into it. But, evidently, somehow the project busted up, according to Boychild. "It broke," he said. It would be impossible for me to see the finished art project, the alleged amoeba-stick-man in 3D.

And then the news about the art teacher's "sugar coated" way of saying that it was a terrible art project. Flatly denied by Boychild.

So, since I'll never see the art project with my own eyes, who should I believe? Boychild or teacher? What do you do with a boychild who doesn't give it all in art, even though he says he does give it his all? Or maybe he really does give it all. Or maybe he just doesn't like art. Or maybe he doesn't like anything.

How is a human mother expected to exert this level of wisdom?

With love, T

Gambling away Monday morning

I don't know why, but family poker night is working for us. We are notoriously bad at family "traditions." We don't even eat dinner together, which is basic practice in household community building. Yet we can barely shop, can hardly cook, and can rarely sit down alone, let alone together.

I've noticed that when I do eat with other people, say, a friend, I always finish far faster than my companion. When I was a kid I could blame my fast eating on my three brothers and that's just the way we ate. Now days, I blame it on a chronic lack of time. I'm always in a hurry. Always.

Maybe that's just an excuse and I should just admit to a lifetime of bad manners.

Yet lately Sunday nights have taken a different tone around this house. We sit down together. We take time together. We deal cards and anti up together. We slow down together. We're learning about the true value of a poker face, which no one in this household but me actually has, although it hasn't served me so well. But hey, it's just red, white, and blue chips and not real currency. And the beverage in my kids' stemmed glasses is just pink lemonade and nothing else. We are not glorifying drinking and gambling. We have simply found something that we like to do together.

At last.

By about 7:30 p.m. it's pretty much over. Time to get back to real life. Laundry. Dishes. Monday morning. The dreaded Monday morning which can give some people nausea for a good part of Sunday afternoon. Monday morning could almost evenhandedly ruin a glorious weekend, if it weren't for family poker night.

Thanks for coming over to the Charmer blog. Wishing you all the best Monday morning you can possibly have.

With love, T

On being drenched

Writing as life taking.

"If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they're happy." -- Dorothy Parker

Writing as life giving. 

"Writing is not only a reflection of what one thinks and feels but a rope one weaves with words that can lower you below or hoist you above the surface of your life, enabling you to go deeper or higher than you would otherwise go. What excites me about this metaphor is that it makes writing more of a lifesaving venture." -- Phyllis Theroux

Which is it?


If you asked my husband it would probably be the former quote by Dorothy Parker, as he bears the load of listening to my endless frustrations regarding the lack of the second choice. It's not that my writing sucks or doesn't suck, that's totally beside the point. It's just that there is no writing. There is working, there is driving, there is living. Working, driving, and living are not all bad. It's just when you get a glimpse at the glorious panorama of all you could do, all the possibilities, and you see what others do, the teaching, the workshops, the publications, the conferences, the travel, the ideas, the performances, the growing, the lifesaving, the incredibly relevant essays on the here and now, the storytelling that makes people care -- it just makes you want something you wouldn't otherwise want had you never learned about it.

I think that's why I cling to David Foster Wallace, even though I've barely scratched the surface of his brilliance. Sure, his vocabulary is stratospheric, his voice complicated, yet only he could go on a cruise and write paragraphs about the sound of the toilet in his cabin. He seemed to long to understand the absolute ordinariness of everyday. And why it makes us all so sad, even though we mostly don't acknowledge it. He did. We're all just quietly frustrated by the working, the driving, and the living. His writing says, basically, screw the big stuff. Embrace the small stuff. Because the small stuff -- aka the working, the driving, the living -- is usually, in actuality, what's most important. (Easy for him to say, I'm tempted to think to myself, because he could write, write, write his hearts desire. Yet, he took his own life. RIP. His torment about the banality of everyday life was real, and tragically unresolved. I'm still sad about his loss, even though I'd never even heard of him when he was alive. He was born the same year as I.)

Tomorrow, though, Saturday morning, the small sanctuary of my time, I will gather up notes from three short interviews that took me a month to conduct, and write an assigned piece for The Lutheran Magazine, thanks to a generous editor. A piece that I hope will maybe, just maybe be relevant, clever, and surprising. It's about LGBTQ Lutherans. No, it's about faith. Really, it's about labels. Hopefully, it's about appreciation.

For now, I invite you to watch this three minute excerpt of David Foster Wallace's most famous writing, his Kenyon College commencement speech in 2005, now referred to as  "This is Water." (Here's the full transcript. Trust me, you won't regret reading it.)

Which of course begs the question, what is my water? Yours?

Tropical Steel benefit concert for Haiti

Today, we all came to church dressed in bright colors and tropical dress (me, and my Kenyan gear) and we worshiped to the Caribbean stylings of Tropical Steel. Our morning included a benefit concert for Haiti's earthquake recovery and I was pleased to be asked to deliver an update. I thought I'd go ahead and post my remarks here, just in case some of you feel moved to further support the effort.  Here goes:

Haiti is a tiny country on the west side of a small Caribbean island called Hispaniola. Haiti holds a rich heritage of culture, a long history of slavery, a hard record of poverty, and an incredible hero in the man of Toussant L'Ouverture, a slave who led an unlikely and successful slave rebellion in the late 1700s, mostly by sheer wit and diplomacy.

In modern times Haiti remains a complicated society and when a magnitude 7.0 earthquake hit in January 2010, it just got worse. The problem with natural disasters is that they always impact the poor countries, the poor neighbors, the poor people the hardest – because the poor usually live in the most vulnerable constructions and risky landscapes.

In that earthquake, nearly 250,000 people died, some 300,000 people were injured and more than 1.5 million people were displaced. Most are still living in camps.

Our Lutheran human service agencies are at work there, and in a big way. Thanks to the support of so many people like you.

Here’s a quick summary of what the ELCA is doing in Haiti:

·     About ten days ago there was a groundbreaking ceremony for a new resettlement village that will provide housing for 1,200 people

·     The village will include the construction of 200 solar-powered homes with indoor plumbing, a "green" sanitation system and community space that includes a children's playground and multipurpose community center.

·     Women-headed households and people living with disabilities will be among the village residents.

Other work includes:

·    Opening a vocational training center that will train in masonry, carpentry, and heavy machine operation and repair

·    The containment of cholera and the care for cholera patients

·     Increasing access to clean water and basic sanitation

·     Providing chickens to some 200 farmers to develop egg production coops

·     And plans are underway to build three schools and to train people to prepare for future disasters

But it’s not just what we’re doing. It’s how we’re doing it. We don’t just go into Haiti, or any county, as if we have all the answers. We’re don’t act like we’re “saving” people. Instead, we work through Haitians and Haitian organizations to bolster what they’re already doing. We work together, as if each other’s survival depends on working together. We work with both immediate and long-term needs. We don’t cut and run after media attention subsides.

I’ll close with a quote from Joseph Livenson Lauvanus, president of the Lutheran Church of Haiti: "We Haitians will not be defined by the rubble, but by restoration, for we are a people of the resurrection."

Thank you.

...

The plate was passed to benefit the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America's Haiti projects. You can still donate online. 

The boychild and his peace rally

So once, long ago when I worked on the 8th floor of 23rd and Park Avenue South in Manhattan, "in the city" as New Yorker's call it, a colleague went out for lunch and returned with an announcement: "I just saw the Dalai Lama." It was one of those New York moments, so casual, yet so, holy crap. I mean, she just took a short lunch break, maybe 20 minutes. And BAM, there's the Dalai Lama. When you live in a condensed population that is the center of the universe, tongue partially in cheek, you just see stuff like that, and it becomes kind of ho hum. (My bro-in-law has a meeting Mother Teresa story that would have you in stitches.)

I thought of that Dalai Lama lunch break today when my 12-year-old son announced that he'd bumped into a pro-Tibet rally with a friend in downtown Des Moines today after school. I'm like, wow, that's so cool. He's like, yeah, just another rally. I'm like, wow, I didn't even know you'd heard of Tibet. He's like, yeah, so what's the big deal. My son is not much of a talker, but wanted me to know that he was there. He wanted me to know that he's heard of Tibet, and he knows they need to be freed. Apparently he knows that, like, I dig that. (And maybe he's still trying to make up for the paper mache' bazooka he made in 2nd grade arts and crafts.)

If you haven't already heard, it's a big deal around here these days because the future prez of China is touring Iowa and a state dinner was in Des Moines tonight. Hense, the pro-Tibet rally. Des Moines is that kind of place -- big enough to be a city, small enough for a kid to bum around after school with a buddy. The boychild's school and Bob's office are both downtown, so the city has become boychild's playground. He's figuring out the public transit, the best place to get a sandwich, the skyways, the public library amenities, and how to best get from point A to B with the least amount of physical exertion. He's figuring out what it means to be free, to be who you are, to fly your own flag.

Wait, stop, I'm sure you're not thinking provincial thoughts about Iowa and Des Moines. That we're all about corn and quaintness. But if you are, I invite you to watch this short video. (Mom, heads up, there's a little bit of language in it.) That was a short diversion.

Anyway, just wanted to shout out to the free Tibet people -- Welcome to Des Moines! Thanks for coming. Thanks for educating my son.

With love, T

Crash landing pad

There are three ways in which I serve food to my kids. All I ask is that you don't judge me. Anyway, the three ways are the helicopter method, the spaceship method, and the crash landing method. They go something like this:

Girlchild or Boychild: "Mom, will you make me a turkey sandwich?"

Me: "Sure." I make the sandwich. I set it on the kitchen counter top.

Me: "Here's your sandwich."

Girlchild or Boychild, who by the way are probably sitting in front of the TV: "Mom, can you helicopter it in?"

Me: "Sure."

Suddenly the plate arises and makes a fast paced thicking noise and rotates in circles as it makes it's way towards the Subjectchild. All the way across the living room straight to the Saidchild and lands gently onto the lap landing pad.

The spaceship method is pretty much the same thing, except it's called a space ship instead of a helicopter. It kind of rotates like a round flying saucer from Mars. Sometimes the turkey sandwich is served on a platter with other food and drink, napkin and fork. Then, the entire platter rotates across the room, same quick thicking noice.

The crash landing method is a whole other thing. That's when the turkey sandwich, or whatever is being served at that particular request, sets so securely on the plate or tray that it suddenly takes off, runs across the room. It makes a screechy "rrrrrrr" sound like a car that has slammed on it's brakes. And then smashes onto the lap landing pad, still in tact for eating of course.

When crash landings occur, Girlchild and Boychild say: "Mom, that's just weird."

And I take heart in the way that author Mary Karr describes the way her family used to eat meals together in her memoir, "The Liar's Club." They used to all sit on the parent's bed, each facing a different wall, with their backs towards the center of the bed, with their food on their laps, all facing outwards. And it worked for them. I think it sounds kind of peaceful. (Rare moments of quiet in that book, anyway.) The way she writes it, it's hilarious. (Lots of hilarity in this read.)

All for now. Thanks for coming over.

With love, T
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