A Letter to My Blog

Dear Blog,

Don’t look at me like with your blank, white face staring back at me. I know you exist. I know my role – I’m supposed to show up occasionally and write on you. Regularly, you say? Regularly show up and write on you? I’m sorry to break this to you, but it won’t happen for a while.

What…you feel abandoned and naked? Listen, you and I need to come to an agreement. There will be times when life feels demanding enough and I don’t need a blog chasing me with guilt or pressure to write a few words on your screen.

Whether you realize it or not, I have some other writing to do which, at the moment, is taking all of the measly energy I have. What’s that? You’re wondering if I’m still writing that silly fiction stuff?  Yes…and no. Not at the moment, is the correct answer. I’ve put it aside and will finish it next year as my final thesis while I take a year to write some creative non-fiction. A not-so-pleasant family story. Stay tuned. In the meantime, I want you to know, blog, that there is a life beyond work and writing. Yup. Sometimes I like to go out and play with my friends – like our trip into Chicago last weekend to see a play in a small, 200-seat theatre where the performers were close enough to allow us to read their nuanced expressions and the looks in their eyes.

 I tried to block all writing from my mind and enjoy a carefree dinner before the show in a great little pub located in an old Brownstone (with TWO fireplaces). I planned to forget about you and words and my writing project and just relax, enjoying an autumn evening in the city. But it’s hard to run away from writing tasks and thoughts about my project when the play turns out to be about….books. We saw an adaption of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey which tells the story of a young girl whose passion for novels causes her to look at the events in her life with an unrealistic dramatic flair. A play based on a book telling the story of an avid reader of books. Just what I’d prescribe to someone looking to get their mind off words.

So here’s my meager attempt at keeping you happy – this tiny little post. In the future, let’s be clear that this is how it’ll be. Sometimes I’ll show up and write you a little post. Sometimes I won’t. Just don’t worry about me when I’m gone. I’m out living life, working on projects, enjoying family and friends or just wondering around my neighborhood clearing my head. And remember, I’m the creator and you’re the created.

Until next time,

Linda

Coming Full Circle

I ran away from the church of my youth in my teen years when I failed to see (or hear) a meaningful message behind all the robes, formal prayer and liturgy, which seemed to represent something shallow and dead. I failed to see spiritual and transformed lives behind the façade, but I did see many, many broken lives in our church which included an abundance of divorces, broken homes, drug and alcohol abuse, neglected kids, suicide and more. The experience sent me running.  

But in the back of my mind, I held close a memory of my first spiritual encounter, an encounter that took place during my young kindergarten years, believe it or not. My father had a dear, elderly employee named Claire who lovingly took me to her house to make chocolate pudding and re-arrange her furniture and just plain visit. And she loved to take me to Mass. It was on one of these visits to her church that I had a powerful first encounter with God, sitting up in the balcony and looking down on the reverent service below. I’m not sure what God said but I remember for a brief moment that a curtain opened, revealing that He was real and present. Then the curtain closed, and I didn’t hear from him again for another fifteen years or so.

It didn’t help that the minister of my childhood church let me down when my parents sent me to see him one day after school for counseling after an episode in my life involving police, drugs, alcohol, and the reading of rights. Oh, and I was just 13. Wisely, the adults thought these might be troubling signs and that the minister might be able to talk some sense into me. When he drove me home several hours later, my mother came out to the car to meet me and there I was sitting on the passenger side of the backseat, trying to get as far away from him as possible. Obviously we didn’t bond during our meeting.   In fact, I wanted nothing to do with church after that – or him. He failed to be a grace-filled voice calling me “to” something rather than pushing me away. 

When I did hear God speak again in my early twenties, I found myself most comfortable in churches that looked and behaved nothing like that church of my youth. If they met in a school or a warehouse, excellent. If the pastor wept because he so deeply believed his message, good. If they had humorous parking lot signs, no robes or pre-written prayers, all the better.

Then one day recently my husband and I found ourselves looking for a church close to home. Our friends coaxed us to visit an Anglican church down the street. We visited, and I kept saying, “Too much like the church of my youth.” And we’d leave and go somewhere else until our friends would ask us to visit again, a little more insistently, sometimes with tears in their own eyes as they described how meaningful this place had become in their lives. Finally their sincerity lured us back.

And we’ve come back each week for a while now, even though I cringe a bit over the robes and formality, while finding the prayers and the life of the church to be anything but dead. I also have discovered as this brain ages, I appreciate someone else writing the prayers, allowing me to read along and agree. And I agree. I find that same Spirit who spoke to my kindergarten self speaks to me in this place with the same message. And He’s been watching me all along.

One Sunday recently, the children returned at the end of the service from their children’s program and joined hands, running through the sanctuary to the closing song, playing Crack the Whip throughout the sanctuary, before the smiles of the adults. I loved the beautiful blend of reference and order, freedom and joy. I hope they felt wooed by God in that place, even if He’s silent for a time in years to come. And I hope the memory of those wooing moments remain as the years tumble over them.

How is that I’ve come full circle, returning to a place I said I’d never go? When I ran away from my early church because “all those formalities shouldn’t matter,” I looked for places where jeans and casual dress made everyone feel welcomed no one feel excluded. I remind myself once again that all those externals shouldn’t matter here either, as long as God shows up. If it’s good enough for Him, which it is, it’s good enough for me. And as I’ve aged and faded, I’ve found myself needing the quiet, contemplative and ordered service, my brain requiring more of those moments. So if you come to visit some Sunday, I’m the person sitting in the way back, a place similar to that balcony from my childhood, but now you’ll find me with tears in my eyes most Sundays, wooed once again by the sweetness of it all.  

 

Writing Without Excuses

And so the second year in my MFA begins. I had a brief, very brief, respite from my first year to the beginning of my second year, if you count reading three books, writing a draft of a creative non-fiction manuscript for residency workshops, and reading workshop materials from fifteen classmates as “taking a break.” And if I were to be honest, as much as I love my program, I feel just a hint of fear and trepidation as I lunge once again into the whirlwind schedule of jugging a full-time job and a graduate program. I fully realize the focus required of me to produce strong material which makes me a bit nervous and, well let’s just be honest, I’m just not young anymore.

So I’ve been thinking about excuses lately, those excuses that writers create (in lieu of books) that prevent them from producing work (“I’m just not young anymore”), and those excuses anyone anywhere makes in any field, preventing dreams from being realized and work from being accomplished, be it painting your house, building a boat, working on a relationship, finding the dream job. As a writer, I’ve struggled with the interruptions of life and writing has always been the first activity to go when something else demands my time. But if I take this calling seriously, I need to be single-minded about writing and push away the distractions, within reason.

As I read William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying for my residency, I stumbled upon a little, fascinating editor’s note about the author in the back of the book. This Nobel Prize winning author wrote his novel at the University of Mississippi power plant where he was employed as a fireman and night watchman. He wrote the book “mostly in the early morning, after everybody had gone to bed and power needs had diminished.” I’ve worked jobs like that one, putting myself through college by working the graveyard shift at an answering service where I monitored phones for doctors’ offices and AAA. And as I young mother I worked often until 2 a.m. at a television station as a master control engineer. Both jobs provided me hours to accomplish things that a 9 to 5 job prohibited. I studied for all my college classes at that answering service and earned a Bachelor’s degree doing it.

I miss that kind of job. (Ssshhhh, don’t tell my boss.) But I now realize that no job in the world should prevent us from writing if we feel passionate about the task. Recently I came across a quote from the memoir of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn which served as a clarion call for me to silence the excuses and the complaints about not having just the right circumstances, needed time, or perfect place to write:

 “In retrospect, almost all my life since the day I was first arrested had been the same: just for that particular week, that month, that season, that year, there had always been some reason for not writing—it was inconvenient or dangerous or I was too busy—always some need to postpone it. If I had given in to common sense, once, twice, ten times, my achievement as a writer would have been incomparably smaller. But I had gone on writing—as a bricklayer, in overcrowded prison huts, in transit jails without so much as a pencil, when I was dying of cancer, in an exile’s hovel after a double teaching shift. I had let nothing—dangers, hindrances, the need for rest—interrupt my writing, and only because of that could I say at fifty-five that I now had no more than twenty years of work to get through, and had put the rest behind me.”

I'm silenced. How can I possibly make any excuses that compare? I wish I heard that call a long, long time ago and managed to ignore the manufactured reasons in my head for doing everything BUT writing.

Macedonia - Part Two

While visiting Kenzie in Macedonia, we had a chance to share a meal with one of his friends who served in the Peace Corps there ten years ago and married a Macedonian woman. For a few years, Jeb and Kristina moved back to the States and lived in Wyoming. But when they had children, the lack of safety in our country concerned them greatly.

“I couldn’t fathom being in a park with my children and having to be afraid someone might kidnap them,” Kristina told me after lunch, amazed at some of the heinous crimes that take place in our country that don’t make us bat an eye. “We decided we wanted to raise our kids in Macedonia where it’s safer.”

The fact that Macedonia is safer than our country puzzles me because there is so much more poverty and very high unemployment over there.  Throughout our travels around different cities, I was struck often by how many older men seemed to be idly sitting on porches or wandering around sidewalks in the middle of the day – an unfamiliar sight to an American. But the Macedonian culture showed me poverty and idleness aren’t necessarily reasons for crime.

Kristina attributes the safety in their country to the fact that they have managed to maintain a strong family structure, unlike here.  Generations still live together and everyone knows their neighbor. “It brings a great shame on the family if someone commits a crime here,” she told me. “Everyone would know the family and know the person who broke the law.”

So not only do we have broken family structures over here, but we have anonymity because of our disengaged communities. We can do things in secret and no one finds out. Part of this comes down to the size of our country compared to a country the size of Vermont like Macedonia. And part of it comes down to their view of relationships. People spend large parts of the day visiting and socializing. But when I came home from my trip and told friends here about how they drop by each other’s houses uninvited and stay for hours, to a person everyone responded, “I don’t want people dropping in uninvited. I’m too busy.” I’m in agreement. Sorry folks.

Kenzie enjoying time with his neighbors.

 Kenzie’s former host dad asked me if I knew my neighbors. I told him we do but we don’t get together to socialize unless there’s a block party or a holiday celebration.  “But you never go into each other’s homes?” he asked incredulous. No, we chat on the street mostly….sometimes for long periods of time.

So how do we make our large country smaller, or do we even want to do so? Is that in violation of American freedom and privacy?

 

 

 

Macedonia - A Far Away Land

We found our son. After a long, overnight flight and an interminably long wait for our luggage in the Macedonia airport, we spotted Kenzie waiting outside glass sliding doors behind a roped off area. I paced the airport baggage claim area until our suitcase appeared. After snagging our bag, we made a dash through the doors to get our hands on our long, lost son. So good to finally wrap him in our arms.

We had reserved a rental car from Hertz since Peace Corps volunteers aren’t allowed to drive and we wanted to visit several villages and cities. I had imagined the car to be a Yugo, Citroen, or old Peugeot, something with questionable reliability but fitting in with all the other cars we would see on our travels. But no. They gave us an Alfa Romeo, making us immediately stand out as different from the locals. Ugh.

When we woke on our first morning to the Call to Prayer from several mosques around the city, I knew we were in a different land. For our first two days, we explored the capital city of Skojpe, slipping slowly into actual Macedonia culture. We began as tourists, eventually making the jump to the life of the locals. In Skopje, we visited the Old Turkish City, an area of narrow cobblestoned streets lined with market after market and many cafés (or Kafana in Macedonian). Block after block of the downtown area serves as outdoor cafes with most establishments providing seating (comfortable, cushioned couches in some places set up like a living room) for a hundred people.   

I grieved the sight of three children forced to sell a box of juices or some such item to people in the Kafanas and people on the street.
They tried to enter the Kafana where we sat but the waiter sent them away. One girl especially won my sympathy, walking with hair in her eyes, fighting tears. I wanted to buy all their goods so they could be children for the rest of the afternoon. “They’ll never see a penny of it,” Kenzie told me, but at least their day’s work would end. For at least one day. At stop signs, children came to the car windows and begged.

When we finally arrived in Kenzie’s small village of 2,000 residents three days later, we found another world. Drugovo sits at the base of a mountain, nestled between the road and the steep hillside and surrounded by fields. On arrival, the elderly men who hang out in front of the store below Kenzie’s apartment swarmed us with true Macedonian warmth as they cradled our faces between their hands, kissed our cheeks, and gave us hugs. They enthusiastically invited us to join them in front of the storefront, an activity called "sitting pred koperacija," and pulled up chairs to make a circle before introducing themselves and telling us how they love Kenzie.

“Welcome to poverty,” one man said soon after the conversation began.   But despite poverty, over and over people invited us into their homes and shared lavish meals and drinks, some extending for hours. The very intimate invitation into someone’s private living space made an impression on us. “They’re the most hospital people I’ve ever met,” Kenzie said and we agree. And time after time we experienced this generosity and warmth.

To an American, the country is a land of contrasts where antiquity and modernity meet and paradoxes abound. Despite access to the internet in Kenzie’s village which brings the world to his apartment, allowing him to regularly check his favorite US sports teams and keep up with friends, an old man drives past his door on a horse-drawn wooden wagon to work the fields, and an old woman walks her goats home for the evening down the dirt road that runs through the main street of the village.

In the evening, we went to a restaurant up the road with Kenzie’s Albanian neighbor, leaning heavily on Kenzie’s translation skills to allow us to get to know each other. The restaurant owner wanted to show us his lovely facility set on the edge of a clear, flowing river. He took me to an outside seating area and I made the international sign of shivering to let him know we would rather eat inside due to chilly air while saying over and over “beautiful, beautiful,” pointing to the river.  I hadn’t learned “beautiful” in Macedonian yet, although I did learn “thank you”: fala. So I became the foreigner who simply said “thank you, thank you” over and over again, whether the word fit the conversation or not. We were confused foreigners unaccustomed to being shut out of conversations, leaving us feeling like we were just dropped into a scene from the movie, Lost in Translation.

Throughout the evening, I sat in awe of how my suburban, middle-class son has made the transition and jumped over the culture gap, building dear friendships with the locals. At the restaurant, our 54-year-old dinner guest also leaned on Kenzie. Once a burly construction worker, Emin had experienced a bad car accident a number of years ago, leaving him slightly paralyzed on one side. So at dinner, he demonstrated his trust for Kenzie by leaning over and asking our son to cut his meat for him a couple of times.

 I wondered what it would take for the locals to trust us as well, we who zoomed into town in our Alfa Romeo and so much luggage that  out of embarrassment we waited until after dark when the men had left the storefront before we brought it inside. We arrived with cameras and laptops, smart phones, warm and cool clothes, a food supply, Starbucks coffee, decaf tea, nonfiction and fiction books, gifts, and brand new sheets.

I suspect more than the rental car kept us from fitting in.

  

My Beautiful Son

I haven’t seen him in nearly two years. I know parents of military men and women often don’t see their sons and daughters for two years, but this is a first for me since I'm not a military parent. My son is serving with the Peace Corps in Macedonia, teaching English in a primary school. The last time I laid eyes on him, we had just snaked alongside as he passed through the half-mile long airport security line, inching along the roped-off outskirts to stay close for as long as possible.

We awkwardly smiled at each other each time he moved in our direction. As we tracked him, my brain tried to imagine how long two years would feel, wondered if there would be visits in between, and if he would change. And of course, the really dark thought hovered – will life and events work in our favor so that we actually will see each other again?

We watched him offer his passport and boarding pass, strip off his shoes and empty his computer bag before going through security. Several times in the line he turned and smiled at us before vanishing once and for all around the corner after a last wave. My husband and I felt wrung out that day, but honestly never believed we’d go two years without a visit.

Soon we'll see how much he has changed. And he’ll have a chance this summer to see himself how he’s changed as he re-enters the States. Other Peace Corps volunteers have described to us in the past how re-entry is one of the hardest experiences for volunteers. Our comfortable and materialistic lifestyles stand out in contrast to the simple way people live in other parts of the world.  On the physical landscape of our small city, he’ll see new apartments going up, some homes razed to make way for a new structure, the disappearance of certain businesses. It may take a little longer to see how his overseas experience has changed Kenzie.

Kenzie is our reasonable, rational, unemotional, level-headed and very responsible son. As a child we always called him “our rule-keeper.” If we gave him a rule, he had to keep it (unlike certain other sons). On a rare occasion when we scolded or disciplined him, we always found ourselves amazed that the boy cried projectile tears, so hurt by our disappointment in him. Thankfully there weren’t many of those moments in his life.

To survive in the Peace Corps though, he had to break a few rules: he needed to turn his back on the American dream of owning more and more possessions and making lots of money. He broke the rule of taking a traditional course of action, foregoing the ladder of success for one of service. He relinquished the American rule of living for his own comfort, entertainment and pleasure, instead living in an apartment heated only by space heaters which allows pipes to freeze five days at a time. He surrendered to loneliness and homesickness that must invade his nights, and wears clothes washed in the bottom of his bathtub while he showered then dried on chairs and furniture in his one heated room - the kitchen.

As his parents, we’re thrilled about his lifestyle choice (although we would’ve loved a visit once or twice). But now my countdown to see him will soon end as I once again prepare to be face to face with my beautiful son.

Boston My Home

 I fall in love with places. Deeply in love. I woke this morning to my husband singing Nancy Griffith’s "Love at the Five and Dime" and had to listen to the song on our iPod. It had been a very, very long time since I’d heard the tune. Anyone who knows me well knows I have a lasting affection for old Woolworth stores, the subject of the song. My father and grandfather both managed Woolworth stores and gave me bittersweet memories of being a child, taking over the store afterhours with my brothers while Dad worked. The old broken down five and dime represents some of the most stable years in my young life.

This morning as Bill and I sipped Saturday morning coffee, listening and reminiscing about the passing of stores and the passing of years, the Chicago Tribune blared its daily headline from my kitchen table: “MANHUNT OVER.”

I’m deeply in love with another place. Massachusetts and all of her close cousins in the New England states still have a mesmerizing power over me despite my lack of residency there for nearly two decades. When I returned to her soil to live after a six year spell in the overheated state of Florida, I wondered if it would be conspicuous if I knelt and kissed the ground in Boston. I was home, in a place I love with all her haunting antiquity.

This week, despite firmly residing in rain-drenched and flooded Chicago, my mind has lived in Boston, traveling her streets, remembering Watertown as my first place of residence in life, recalling trips to Boylston St. with my parents to eat clam chowder at The Pewter Pot, remembering giving birth to my four sons in Brigham and Women’s Hospital where so many victims were taken, remembering the faces and unmistakable accents of her residents, so many immigrants from other places washing onto Boston’s shores. I’m quietly, silently grieving from afar.

I feel I can’t justify the wordless grief that hangs over me, a grief because my loved ones weren’t killed or maimed. My city wasn’t terrorized. I’m not going through the trauma that first-hand victims are experiencing, that official residents are experiencing. And yet empathetically, I’ve been a resident these past days. I see beautiful faces, a beautiful little eight-year old boy and think of all those interrupted hopes. I’ve stared at my legs while working out and tried to imagine learning to adjust to prosthetic limbs – the pain, the loss, and frustration. And strike me down for saying this one, but I also look into the eyes of the suspects and see the ghost of someone’s beautiful boys, beautiful sons, and wonder how they veered so far off track and allowed hatred to rule their lives instead of being a part of our imperfect but rich American culture.

To watch images on the news of swat teams and bomb squads racing through the streets of Boston looked more like a far away battlefield rather than the place of American childhoods and memories. And while people celebrate in the streets at the arrest of suspects, I wonder at our new changing landscape that whisks away old department stores and all of our innocence. I just wonder.