Make your loin fruit climb trees, or I’ll do it for you.

I have frequently been surprised, particularly over the past few years, by how often and unabashedly people dispense advice. Surely you, too, have been told how to fix your relationships/job woes/bad hair days by well-meaning people who, you eventually realize, don’t actually know you. I’m a little ashamed to say I was well into my 20′s before realizing that the old adage “Everyone is concerned with their own lives; no one is talking about you” isn’t entirely true. Some people feel a sense of ownership over others’ choices and lives that is baffling.

I offer that preface because this post makes me one of those afeared people. A woman whose loins are decidedly non-procreative is about to tell you how to raise your children and produce compassionate, relatively non-awful citizens, based solely on something her parents happened to do right. Isn’t that annoying? But bear with me, because this magical, albeit unsolicited, advice comes in the form of a single word:

Simplicity.

I beg you, parents, to create a home that values the concept of “enough.” Tell your children NO. I make this request on behalf of your children’s future teachers, spouses, and other humans who have to peacefully co-exist with your progeny.

My parents — who are like kindly, traditional-conservative hippies — raised me and my brothers in an environment where toys required more imagination than batteries, and time spent together trumped time spent rushing from one social or athletic event to the next. We rarely ate fast food, had extravagant birthday parties, or owned the latest toy craze; television and video games were limited. Angsty pleas to our mother for constant mall trips were often met with, “You need to learn to be content.” And while that’s not exactly what a bored adolescent wants to hear, it’s what most of the world needs to be told.

Instead of “keeping up with the Joneses,” we went to the library, made art, turned cartwheels, built forts, and rode bicycles. I spent most of my childhood pretending I was an animal and writing weird stories about teachers with cancer, as I’m sure you did, too. My parents intentionally created a home saturated with love and creativity, not STUFF, and I owe them greatly for it. So when I encounter children who not only make constant demands for material possessions, but situate themselves squarely at the center of any given universe, I have the strong, possibly inappropriate desire to shake them gently and say, “For Pete’s sake, GO CLIMB A TREE. And you’re six years old; you DON’T need a cell phone.”

Of course, no parent or childhood is perfect…and admittedly I grew into a paper-obsessed, library-skulking semi-hermit…but my brothers turned out fine! And I still make my bed every single day! Most importantly, it feels natural — not overly restrictive — to pursue a life of limited possessions, modest dwellings, and good stewardship, even when the process is brutal.

Every day, I’m learning all over again how to be content — how to relish ”enough” — and it’s a tough lesson that started long before I would ever have thanked my parents for it.

 

The holiday snippets that begat 2012:

At dinner one evening: my maternal grandparents get into an argument over a certain indentation in Granddad’s head, which he believes resulted from a recent head injury. But Grandmom assures the rest of the family that the dent has always been there, just behind his ear; she remembers it. And this seems to me a perfect illustration of a 60+ year marriage: knowledge of {and gentle disagreements about} another’s skull formation. Maybe love is just having someone who knows your weird head better than you do.

In the public libraries of my youth: I read The Hunger Games {which I CAN’T EVEN TALK ABOUT; I can only fiercely chomp bread and mutter unintelligibly about the wondrousness of Peeta} and write letters. It’s like sending telegrams from the mother ship. There’s an older library employee with scrunchy, too-short pants and a curly mane of hair who continually dis-and-reappears from behind unmarked doors. He bobs between shelves with a buoyant step, as if he might lift off at any moment — a Dewey Decimal-fueled rocket ship.

At a New Year’s Eve party: a beloved four year-old holds my hand and says, “You didn’t know me when I was a baby. But when I was a baby, I missed you so much.” Later, during a game of Twister, he informs me that he’s a tiger, and tigers don’t have to follow rules in games or life.

Seems like sound logic for 2012. Want to be a tiger with me?

 

Nothing here but a bunch of molars doing the best they can.

In a campus restroom: a woman approaches the sink next to me, removes a toothbrush and toothpaste from her purse, and starts scrubbing her teeth while humming loudly. You’d think the sight of a stranger’s foamy molars would be uncomfortably intimate, but it was an endearing performance. There have been so many people, lately, humming or singing in public, and I’m intrigued; adding dental hygiene makes it even curiouser.

In the stacks of a university library: a friend and I go hunting for books with the best, most distinctive Old Book Smell. We weave among the third-floor M’s, N’s, and P’s, selecting spines that look promisingly ancient. We crack them open, deeply inhale, and put each back on the shelf, bemoaning the thoughtful preservation. The books are old, we lament; they should smell like it.

And then he finds the perfect one: a multi-volume catalog, of sorts, for The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The brittle pages’ smell sparks acute nostalgia and fizzy happiness, the same pangs I get while watching A Charlie Brown Christmas. Seized by an irrational sense of mastery, I think we must be the luckiest olfactory explorers in the entire world.

Sixty miles outside the city, in a ditch: the green station wagon dies for good. It dies in the frigid rain near a field of cows, who stare speculatively at the predicament for a few minutes before ambling away. The short version of the story is this: I wait almost three hours for the tow truck, passing time by reading and, after it gets dark, singing. A kind elderly man who lives nearby invites me to watch TV, but I stay huddled in the car with a tin of butter cookies and cocooning country silence.

The initial worry of having to pay so much for the towing service and abandoning original weekend plans fades quickly. The solitude and waiting become natural, as if this were the plan of the Universe, or perhaps the cows, all along. It’s peaceful. When the tow truck finally arrives, it is driven by the nicest young man — he seems just a boy, really, though he owns a business and has a son– and we talk about our jobs, families, God, death, and cookies.

Instead of wrenched plans, the day feels like warm luck. It is well, it is well, it is well.

 

The passage to perspective is in basements and barrels.

I am sending this dispatch from the thickly-quiet basement of the university library, ostensibly working, but mostly pondering Life {as awkward former English majors and chronic list-makers are apt to do}. My study table has been swallowed by a sea of half-graded student essays, and occasionally silence is punctuated by sudden, discordant hums from a man a few aisles away.

What is it he’s singing? Something only he knows.

Here is what I want to tell you about mulling life over while surrounded by very old, foil-spined library books: it makes one’s existence feel small, in a good way. From my wooden chair I stare into shelves of books about John Adams and Thomas Jefferson — I scarcely realized so many books about these men even existed — and multi-volume tomes titled Quasi-war with France, and suddenly every pain or joy seems comparatively manageable. I’m not running a country, for goodness’ sake. Human lives aren’t at risk based on my whims, which is good, because I don’t know how to make decisions uninformed by how many hot chocolates I’ve gulped in a given day. I don’t even bear the responsibility of a family, wiping noses and packing school lunches. It is me, alone — I am no one’s lobster or bird, but rather a single creaky heart and set of bones.

So how can that be too much to carry?

Another thing that puts life into perspective: elderly people playing checkers. Earlier in the week, Best Friend Grace and I trekked to Cracker Barrel for the kind of comfort only provided by french toast and meats smothered in gravy. Just outside the window, I watched an elderly woman and young boy playing checkers on the porch of the restaurant, except all I could see of the woman was a veiny, wiry hand occasionally appearing from behind the enormous rocking chair to gingerly move a game piece.

I thought, Now there’s a hand that knows what matters. You don’t end up in your seventies or eighties, I imagine, without a fair sense of perspective. You’ve loved, you’ve lost, and you know what? You still get to play games and eat at chain restaurants with boys. Every now and then, that has to be enough.

 

This week has been all-caps ROUGH. And I just think the world is slightly kinder, and more beautiful, with a new Marcel the Shell video in it.

Enjoy.

 

“Blasphemy” by Martín Espada

Let the blasphemy be spoken: poetry can save us,
not the way a fisherman pulls the drowning swimmer
into his boat, not the way Jesus, between screams,
promised life everlasting to the thief crucified beside him
on the hill, but salvation nevertheless.

Somewhere a convict sobs into a book of poems
from the prison library, and I know why
his hands are careful not to break the brittle pages.

 

Meet me before dawn; bring snacks and low expectations.

I wish you could have been with me on my early morning run today — which is a ridiculous sentence, actually, because NO ONE wants to be putting on shoes at 5 AM, and my “run” is more of an awkwardly intense, hip-switching march.

But I wish you could have fallen in love with the morning by my side. Even through iPod earbuds {RIP Steve Jobs, you beautiful brain} I could hear the wind wrestling tree branches, and the hiss of awakening lawn sprinklers. I ran around a dark college campus, then through it, and I hope you understand what I mean when I say it was like being on the set of Teletubbies after hours — all the waxy green shrubs and shadowy flowers in strange stillness, as if awaiting the flick of a fluorescent light switch.

Had you been along on this excursion of yawns and diligent strides, here is what we may have talked about:

• how you feel about your life
• what is the soul, really?
• the benefits of crêpes versus traditional pancakes
• Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?
• nuns
• the future of Apple, because that’s what the entire world is talking about, and we’re nothing if not marginally informed about hot topics, right?

You probably would have made fun of me for thinking that a giant dried leaf skittering across the sidewalk was a ground squirrel, and getting excited about it.

Maybe you could be the one to tell me why I am constantly mistaking dead vegetation for living things.

 

Loyal to England…and to other things.

Last Saturday afternoon, I went with perfect company to a historic downtown theater and watched Lawrence of Arabia for the first time. I’ve always heard that this movie should only be seen on the big screen, and now, having done so, I GET IT. It is a beautiful, complicated masterpiece, and I can’t stop thinking about it.

I laughed, because camels are hilarious and this movie was full of them. I cried, because war is ugly and sometimes nice guys drown in quicksand. And I ate Hot Tamales, because I’m ALIVE, aren’t I? I felt close to love and humanity and God and the camels. Perfectly, inutterably happy.

Then there was this line: when asked why he was leaving the desert, Lawrence steadily replied, “I’ve come to the end of myself, I suppose.”

And even though I don’t have striking blue eyes or a desert animal, I felt that his words were true. They’ve been bobbing around me like a trailing red balloon ever since.

I’ve come to the end of myself. 

So what happens then?

 

I was a child once, and maybe always.

HERE IS SOME OF WHAT I REMEMBER:

Walking into the laundry room and happening, suddenly, upon my parents kissing. This was a frequent occurrence to which I responded by promptly clenching my eyes shut and making clear how grossed out I was. Still: I knew at an early age what a lucky thing it is to be raised by parents so in love. I’m kind of surprised I didn’t end up with eleven accidental siblings.

Heading up a save-the-rainforest initiative in third grade called Rainforest Girls in Action {or “RGA” to those in the know}. The sole result of this effort was a series of marker-scrawled posters depicting monkeys and birds, with some random facts about forest destruction. My monkeys looked like melancholy little dogs.

Being simultaneously creeped out and fascinated by this segment from Sesame Street:

Pretending, throughout elementary school, to have broken bones and envying friends who actually shattered limbs and needed casts. They came to school bearing their impressive injuries and were oohed and ahhed-over; their bandages bled with rainbow scribblings from concerned classmates. My father once fashioned a pair of fake crutches so I could hobble around the house evoking pretend sympathy, and to this day it represents to me the pinnacle of parental love. Eventually, in fifth grade, I broke both wrists within weeks of each other — but I was homeschooled at the time and therefore classmate-less. My casts were shells of boring beige.

What do you remember most about your childhood? And why are kids so weird?

 

Quiet down, coconuts, and let me sing you a song about verbs.

This week marked the inception of a brand new semester — my fifth teaching college composition, and my first as a full-time faculty member.

May I just start by saying: PAYCHECKS. They’re awesome. Years of teaching for what amounts to minimum wage, and suddenly, an actual liveable income. I feel, almost, like higher ed administration is a wily beast guarding a bevy of gold coins, and I have slain it with sheer determination and my Zumba-sharpened quads, and I must now claim the gold and bolt to a remote cave where I will scoop up fistfuls of the coins and rub them all over my face while shrieking, “IT’S ALL MINE!”

Except instead of gold, it’s more like just enough money to eat something other than ramen.

But income is small potatoes compared to other job-related joys, because what teaching boils down to is this: it is fun. It’s fun to see students engaged in meaningful creation and communication; it’s a rush to make them laugh, encourage them, and watch them achieve their goals. As stressful as the daily grind can be, I have to admit I’m sold out on teaching composition. I’m ALL IN.

Sometimes this still surprises me, considering that even into graduate school I was absolutely insistent I would never be a teacher. I didn’t like that, upon discovering my major, people always followed up with, “Oh, so you want to teach?” The notion that anyone would choose a field in which he or she was expected to make brilliant declarations on a daily basis, with who-knows-how-many brains just waiting to be enlightened, was unbelievable. No, I thought firmly, I will edit books or darn socks or raise bees, but I will never teach.

Then, as a graduate student, I had the option to take on a class, and in doing so get more financial assistance. All my friends were doing it! So I took a deep breath, wore a tailored blouse with an insane ruffle on the first day, and jumped.

And LOVED IT.

So what I’m thinking is that teaching is pretty much stuck with me. Of course, I may end up living on a gorgeous remote island eventually, and instead of staring at seas of student heads, I’ll be staring at…the sea. And in that case, I’ll simply line up coconuts and pretend they’re people. I’ll teach the HECK out of that tropical vegetation. I hope that making exclamations in the margins of student essays never gets old; I hope I die before my passion does, because this is a good thing I’ve got going.

Although can someone tell me why this is what I actually look like:

And this is what I feel I look like when in the classroom? Mystery.