Variation on a Theme

My good friend, deep philosopher, excellent mother and all-round-great-read Quiltnmomi is currently doing a few riffs on the topic of love.  Any time QM gets herself immersed in something, it's worth perusing more than once.  Although to be honest, her work does lead us self-styled "well-educated and mature" audiences to sadly reclassify ourselves as a Bears of Very Little Brain, sitting stumped on our front stoop, paw on chin, saying woefully:  "What does this mean?  Think, think, think!"

So here's my own early-am riff on the topic, and I'll start with a blanket statement:

I don't know what love is.

Oh, I should know.  Here well into my fifth decade in this social sphere, having experienced a loving family, known loving friends, taken more than a few lovers of widely varying stripes, enjoying a thus-far sixteen-year marriage, and had two children:  you might say I've met love coming and going. 

But what is love, exactly? 

I think I'm stymied in some respects by what I know love is not, so I'll start there.

Ms. 7, suffering through a series of -- let's be charitable and say "misunderstandings" -- at school, listened to my telling her that no matter how many times the teacher called me to explain the latest abrogation of the rules on her part, I would always love her.  She then heard my delineation of the punishment with outrage.  "You don't love me!  You're being mean!"  she cried.  Ms. 7 made the common error of believing love nonjudgmental.  Oooooh, no.  Just wait 'til the first time she hears her new partner, proudly brought to a gathering of friends, make some social faux pas.  The greater the love, the more judgmental, actually.

Hollywood and Madison Avenue like to misportray love another way.  Handsome couples accompanied by swelling background music,  having overcome great obstacles (harrowing opposition by evil enemies intent on their demise, or the smell of morning breath, depending on the context) swirl into each other's arms, eyes locked, bodies intertwined.  Love?  Nonsense.  Lust, yes.  Satiation.  Infatuation.  Satisfaction, even.  But love is not so ephemeral.  Love is not an in-the-moment sort of thing.

Or is it?  Let me try another scenario for size.  Last summer, when many of my male colleagues threw themselves as usual into local sporting clubs, one of them sustained a serious injury in mid-play.  He explained to me later that as he lay rolling in agony on the ground, with the usual hovering and helpless well-wishers wringing their hands above him, he saw another colleague and long-time friend sprint across the fields for near-by medical assistance.  "I've never seen him run like that," he said.  "I've played sports with him for years and he's never bothered to run half that fast to win the frickin' game." 

Much though my straight-as-arrows young male colleagues would cringe to think it, what gave wings to his friend's feet was, of course, not just the chance to play real-life hero, but love.  Love definitely doesn't limit itself to one's sexual-partner-for-life sort of scenario.  Love is much more all-encompassing than that, and sometimes, contrary to my first thoughts on the matter, it does express itself suddenly.  Love is the thing that seizes you and carries you from the mundane into the extra effort (whether that's dropping work to pick up the erring child and mete out appropriate punishment to make her a better person, or flying across a field faster than you would ever run just for a game). 

But love is also something else, something much less showy but more important.  Love is about staying power.  Sticking with it, even after the background music dies down and it turns out that the hot date isn't such a great a kisser after all.  Love is about ignoring the social faux pas -- and yes, even ignoring the morning breath -- in lieu of the long-term.

....so that's where I've got to, with all my 'think, think, think.' 

You?

unexpurgated remarks left by Ms. 7 on notepad in my office while I was phoning a client.

High Water Mark

If we wanted to repeat our stomp rocket experience today, we'd have to take remedial swimming classes first -- and rent a wetsuit or two.  Things are a little moist around southeastern Ohio at the moment.  I'm lucky to live on a hill, and all I need to get from work to the office is one bridge.  Fortunately, one bridge is still operational.  When I called back home to let the spouse know I'd made it without so much as a hem-wetting, he took a black-humor approach:  "Well -- go out at your lunch break and do some disaster tourism, okay?"

So I did.  I snapped the police at the high-water line on the commercial road east out of town, the helicopter circling the closed routes, the rushing river pushing old plastic bottles and other bits of detris higher and higher toward the road -- covering the drains, the first flood terrace, the flood transit, the bike path, the parking lots, the dumpsters.

It didn't feel like true disaster tourism, because after all, I do live here, and even if I'm personally unaffected, these are places I know and frequent that are being -- not pummeled, but slowly and inexorably sodden and then overcome -- by the force of nature.

Admittedly there's a reek of the rubber-necker about it, but there's also a sheer element of awe.  In the face of other true disasters flung across the globe, perhaps "awe" is too positive a word.  But for anyone who thinks we humans have things under control, on a personal, here-and-now level, even the sight of a well-known playground turned pool begs the question.

So This is What Happened....

So this is what happened.  You were for some unknown reason sitting in my local community rec center, staring disinterestedly out at the mild grey winter day, when you saw me slogging by toward the office looking somewhat sheepish.  Four minutes later I went back the other direction with a determined glint in my eye and a pool cue in hand.  Ten minutes later, I'm back, cue drooping and sheepishness increased.  Another few minutes, and here I go again, this time holding a basketball.  Inexpertly. 

By this time you're intensely curious, and dropping all pretense of disinterestedness you wander outside around the corner, where (aaaahhh, yes) a situation desperately requiring a Hero presents itself:  twenty feet up in the gnarled bare branches of a tree at the edge of the playground is a bright stomp rocket.  The perpetrator of the deed (6, male) is hanging his head.  I'm attempting to dislodge it with the basketball, but can't actually throw the thing much higher than my own arms-reach.  Another mom takes over, much more successfully, and actually nudges the rocket -- but it only falls five feet before entangling itself even more firmly.

So you stride in with your best nonchalant gallantry, politely seize the projectile, expertly bean the rocket on the first shot, and grin kindly at the cheering kids.  Then (given that you mildy resemble -- oh, let's not discriminate on the basis of gender or age and say: Sean Connery, Emma Thompson, Denzel Washington, Susan Sarandon, or, in a pinch, Viggo Mortensen (with beard)) you give me a laughing squeeze of the shoulder and kiss on the cheek before walking out of the scene forever.

* * sigh * *

Okay, okay.  It was all true.  Except for the "you" part.  So all I've got to say is:  where were you? (and if you want another chance, at last check the rocket was still there...)

tree image outtake from photograph © Alain Briot

Lights, Camera......

The three kids at the center of my family's festivities this year seem to have received their full surfeit of surprise, delight, sustained enjoyment, and even that inevitable sprinkling of finger-tapping boredom (grown-ups' preparatory banter is excruiciating, wouldn't you agree?). 

There was the usual stack of presents.  There was my mother's painstakingly hand-crafted and exquisitely detailed four-foot-high doll tree house ("How professional!" breathed my eldest).  There was the bushy evergreen hauled exuberantly in from the woods and hung with my youngest brother's annual labor of love:  tens and tens of homemade, carefully decorated cookies.  There were the evenings of challenge and laughter at my middle brother's latest games of strategy (I haven't tried the hand-made one with cups and letters yet myself, fearing my six-year-old nephew's mastery, but I did give "Puerto Rico" a try:  highest marks for that strategy-based high-skill board game).

Then there was the modern-era chorus to that age-old song-and-dance, and it goes something like this:  "Kids, could you please move aside a little?  Your uncle's trying to get a shot of Poppy opening his present."

My relatives are camera-mad (one moonlights as a not-so-amateur photographer, another's gifts include DVDs of his latest family vacation).  In many respects our holiday scene resembles the "making-of" disk in your latest favorite extended-version DVD.  Tripods, power cords, and preoccupied camerapersons litter the background.  Repetitious remarks include:

I never bring my own equipment to my family's events; not only would it be superfluous, it would leave very few actors actually on the stage.

As someone who's whiled away more than a few leisure hours this holiday watching my own latest favorite "making-of," I know how addictive it is to see made-for-camera moments dissected and displayed in all their well-planned, carefully-executed parts.  I particularly like watching polished well-known actors off-camera and getting a feel for their real personas.  Or so I like to think, anyway.  Of course any good actor knows where the cameras are, and can certainly act like he's The Actor Who Plays the Hero, for the purposes of the Appendices.  Just like any self-respecting four-year old can mug and smile and coo and tilt a head to the side for the uncle's videocam.

What is staged and what's real?  What candid and what edited? 

Like me, do you ever (especially?) play to the audience, when you're alone and unfilmed and the house is empty? 

Out of the Frying Pan

Every holiday season there's a moment (and depending on the state of my other obligations, the mood of the kids, the weather and other unknowables, it comes late or early, but it always comes) when I hit the panic-depression point.  I feel like I'm sitting inside the stove with my back up against the firebrick, sensing that sizzingly emotional expectation mount, and mount, and MOUNT.  There's gifts to buy, work to get through, festivities and events to orchestrate and attend, the creative muse to evoke, familial ire to soothe.  It's all a spend-and-smile, smile-and-spend cycle.

So I stood up against the sink the other night, hands in the cooling dishwater, blinking back I'm-more-than-overwhelmed-I'm-drowning tears.  Were the stocking gifts adequate?  Would the hastily-crafted treasure-hunt story bring more rage ("But his character got to solve the problem, not mine!") than enjoyment?  Was I focusing too much on the kids' presents and not the adults'?  Would I be able to stomach all the standard family in-fighting, borne of people born together and knowing each other all too well?  Would everyone remember the fun and not the frustration?  Would....?  If.....?  How.....?

But I'm over it now (whew -- that barrier breached, for one more year).  Can't take responsibility for everyone else's happiness, like I keep telling my kids.  The only power I have is power over myself.  And where I am, just right at this moment, is on the outside of the firebox.

Feet up.  Deep breath.  Relaaaaax.  Join me in a toast?

Rainbows and Patriotism

Last night was my children's private school's Winter Presentation.  True to our hopes, it was a moment to stop worrying about funding and future options and just revel in the creativity and beauty of our little ones.  My eldest was a 'rainbow unicorn' in the 2nd and 3rd grade play, and did herself proud, as did her fellows students, whose own self-chosen roles included everything from the Mutt to Luigi to a Magical Train.  My youngest, much to my astonishment, launched into the preschool's cutsie rendition of a variation of "I Love You In The Morning" with a clear, tuneful little voice that echoed into the farthest regions of the theatre.  I gaped.  I wondered how a tone-deaf mother helps a budding soloist.  I was very, very proud.

But the most riveting moments of the evening was the play put on by the oldest kids.  Their teacher has a background in drama and does a lot of theatrical work as a hobby, so her students' presentation always exceeds expectations.  Early in the year, her class selects a historical era of study and each of them conceive of a character from that era.  They maintain three months'-worth of a journal, speaking as that character, and researching details about that character's life to ground-truth their writing.  Their teacher draws from the journals to script a play.  This year, the class created an early British settlement during the period of American independence.  The play, using period costumes and a dark, minimalist set, chronicled the attitudes of the British sympathizers, the revolutionaries, and the townspeople of all ages, genders and occupations, as they reacted to the events around them.  In an extremely moving scene, the entire cast parodied loading, firing, marching and recharging their rifles while commenting on their circumstances and falling when enemy fire took them.  The sole actress left standing then delivered an incredible few words which began something to the effect of "Only those of us who are not mothers understand why we needed to die."

The second most moving moment of the piece came toward the end, when the boy playing the printer (in real life the son of two first-generation Americans; the mother from Canada and the father from Japan) leapt on a bench and spelled out the words of the new Declaration to the rapt townsfolk.  Echoing into this theatre of largely left-leaning, highly educated, highly political adults living through a time of war and internal strife, came the words:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness ...."

The audience, clapping and crying simultaneously, was left to juxtapose the attitudes of the era that created those words in a time of hope, challenge, dissension and deep sacrifice, to our current era, in all its similarities and dissimilarities.

Between Sun and River

There's a bike path by the river a few hundred yards from my office.  I was striding along it today, in that irritated jerky way you do when you've forgotten your gym clothes and need to work off the one-slice-too-many of pizza from the employee lunch.  I saw a figure on the path ahead.  I use 'figure' advisedly; with the westering sun against my shades and the glint from the river, that dark, lithe, slow-moving form could have been anything from a person to a mythical beast of some sort.

It turned out to be my colleague, a new employee originally from mainland China, dressed in a dark ankle-length coat.  I stopped for the requisite polite exchange. 

"Do you like this river?"  she asked.

"Do I like this river?" I asked.  I was stymied.  I knew this river in its original form, before the Corps of Engineers reformatted it for the convenience of the city.  I've known it so over-polluted that children were warned away from it.  I've watched it throughout the seasons, walking there, as a peripheral to my mood and the appropriateness of my footwear.  I was suddenly having a difficulty with 'like.'

We both laughed awkwardly.

"You know feng shui?"  she asked.

The answer was "yes," as in, 'associated with Martha Stewart, and the butt of jokes from the uninitiated;' and "no," as in, 'not as would a native of the ancient civilization that originally defined it.'  I choose "yes," for expediency, but I think she knew the whole of it.

"Feng shui is a balance," she said, holding out her open palms, see-sawing up and down.  "In China it is very important.  Here, the name of our company, with 'sun' in it, and the light on the river next to it ... this is a live river.  It is good feng shui.  Maybe the company is lucky because of the feng shui."

And we went on in our opposite directions, me with that taste in the mouth that comes from a tantilizingly fleeting touch of the alien. 

What more is there to the fortune of any organization, than the work done and the price paid?

I also thought I now knew why my colleague, walking by the river, looked like an amorphous sprite dancing between wave and sky, and I looked like a stolid American marching too fast in the wrong shoes.

The Stone Cold Center of 'Normal'

Hello, my name is Faith, and I am a hypocrite.  My (current) claim to the title results from my habitual sense that I'm the stone cold center of 'normal,' and everyone around me is just a trifle off.  You know how that is?  This friend of yours is a little harsh on her kids; that colleague has a tendency to over-emphasize the positive in lieu of complete honesty; that buddy of your spouse's drives way too fast on the two-lane; and speaking of your spouse, isn't it irritating how you always have to clean up the joint late-night snack?

I know I have my own quirks, idiosyncrasies and failings, but when it comes down to specifying them I often find myself with an absurdly short list, and some strong caveats.  Like:  okay, I don't cook, but I could make a damn fine loaf of homemade bread if I ever took the time out from caring for everyone else's non-gastronomic needs.  And yeah, I generally have a simple formula problem or two in my spreadsheets, but I give my colleagues plenty of time to review them, and what's it all about if it isn't about constructive teamwork, anyway?

At this point I'll drag out my too-often-cited tale of my original Peace Corps telephone interview.  It all went swimmingly until I was asked to detail an incident in which I had failed to acheive a set goal.  I hemmed and hawed and finally acknowledged that it appeared I'd never actually failed at anything.  Later, telling this tale to my mother (with that sort of fake humility the good daughter always assumes), she hestitated not one iota of a millisecond before informing me that yes, of course I'd failed at something:  I failed to finish painting the silo brick red one summer, leaving her to complete the task, and I'd also failed ..... at which point I think something incredibly important caused me to cut the conversation short.

So in sum: I know full well I'm slightly off in one way, or another, or six or seven ways; and my inability to see through my own blind spot about my off-ness doesn't obviate the obviousness of the fact that I am.  But I still have a really tough time living-and-letting-live, and not sniping at the off-ness of others, in contrast to my own mis-perceived near-perfection.

Anyone out there with true humility?  Let me in on your secret?

Thanking, Thinking, and Not Shopping

So here in the land of that frenetic two-day holiday newly known as "Turkey Day/Shopping Day," I'm sitting watching the birds come and go around the battered much-bitten sunflower outside my kitchen window.

Ms. 4 is occassionally audible in the background.  Sometimes she says:  "Mom, your computer time is over," but otherwise she seems occupied enough.  She did push a dining room chair behind me and demand that I start the train and go very fast to the beach.  After the requisite amount of chuffing, puffing, whistling and pistoning my bent arms back and forth, she hopped off. 

We also played dolls for a while.  I seldom have the opportunity to play dolls.  Well -- okay.  I seldom make the opportunity to play dolls.  With Ms. 7 and the spouse off at the library, Ms. 4 and I had the rare chance for some just-us playtime.  I was a little surprised.  I sort of expected to take the Ms. 7 role:  giving all the directions and having them cheerfully obeyed.  What was I thinking? Ms. 4 was no slouch in stepping right into the director's chair.  "No, Mommy, do not do her hair like that."  "That is not the right skirt for a ball."  "The babies haven't finished eating yet; don't get them out of the high chairs!" 

We both had a good time; her being Director, and me remembering how tough it is to be directed.  Dang it.  I wanted her to wear that skirt.

I'm very thankful I have Ms. 4.  I'm very thankful I have Ms. 7, and a spouse who takes her off to the library sometimes.  And I'm thankful I'm not shopping, because goodness knows it's not more of my money they need.  It's more of my time.