What I Learned at the Rock Concert

Part 1 Last week I went to a concert with my parents and my husband.  We saw Crosby Stills & Nash. And it was awesome.  It took me half an hour to figure out which one was Stills and which was Nash, but it was still awesome. My husband and I were definitely in the minority, most of the audience was over the age of fifty.  But they sure knew how to have a good time!

The woman sitting directly in front of me was having an especially good time.  Every time the band played one of her favorite songs, she would jump up from her seat and dance in place.  Sometimes other people around us were standing up, clapping and dancing, but often she was the only one on her feet.  But she didn’t care.  She didn’t care that she was the only one in our section dancing, or even standing up.  She was celebrating this moment, this song, this experience.

Of course her celebration was basically blocking my view.  Since her seat was right in front of mine, whenever she got up to dance, I could only see a third of CSN. At one point my husband looked over and gave me a sad faced kind of grimace, apologizing that I couldn’t see.  But truthfully, I didn’t care. This woman was so darn happy; it made me happy just to be around her.  She was getting such joy from the music and the performance; I couldn’t help but be affected by it.  Whenever she would get up and dance, I couldn’t stop smiling.

This woman was probably older than my mom, and all I could think was, I want to be that happy, that excited, that rocking in thirty years.  I want to be the kind of grown-up that celebrates life and grabs onto joy whenever its around.  I want to rejoice in those pure blissful moments.  I want to stand up at a concert and sing and dance and clap along with the band.  I want all those whippersnappers to look at me in awe and say ‘that is one groovy old lady’.

But nothing happens overnight right?  I can’t expect to wake up at 60 with all the answers and a convenient pair of rose tinted glasses on the nightstand. So I’m starting now, today; I’m making new habits.  First, I’m going to dance more; just put on a record in the middle of the afternoon and boogie in my living room. Second, I’m going to make a conscious effort to recognize the joy in my life.  To be in the moment and appreciate the bliss that finds me every day. I'm going to celebrate my life.

And in thirty years, I’m going to rock that concert.

From Cannes, France...

Dearest Clara, August is for going to the beach, isn't it? I didn't necessarily used to think so always, but the older I get, the more I miss the salt water air and carefreeness that comes with hot summer days and cool ocean water.  We were lucky this year - the beach in Cannes called our name.  Maybe if we're lucky next year, it will call again.  Here are a couple of things I've learned from this beautiful coast:

• Rosé goes with everything: Everything.  Remember how I said prosecco goes with everything in Italy? Well here you can’t go wrong with rosé.  Lunch, dinner, aperitif, fish, chicken, anything adn everything . . . when in doubt, go pink.  And you can even throw in an ice cube or two.
• There will prettier girls sometimes: At least, that’s what you’ll think, even though it is not true.  And sometimes there will be thinner girls and ones with more money, a deeper tan, cooler sunglasses . . . This is a place where often people have more, and it’s easy to get caught up in comparisons.  But believe your mother on this one, you are just as beautiful as any person out there and it will be your confidence that makes you so.  Whether your bathing suit costs $20 or $200, the ocean water will be just as refreshing.  And when you come home, you’ll wonder why you did all that silly worrying.
• You can have cheese for dinner:  Really.  Our hosts are such wonderful entertainers and chefs, and evenings around the dinner table featured so many good things that were on endless parade.  Yet, one of my favorite meals is the night we were all tired, and we had “cheese for dinner”.  Of course, there were several different platters of all kinds, and accompanying breads, and baskets of fresh figs and honey.  The milk and the creams that go into French cheeses are so good, and the process still true to what it always has been.  Sometimes, something simple can steal the show – give it space to do so every once in a while.  And don’t forget the rosé.
• Enjoy a quiet night in the garden: Cannes has a way of feeling hectic sometimes, but it’s amazing how many pockets of solitude you can find, and absolutely everything that is beautiful and fragrant seems to grow here.  I guess that’s why so many perfumes are from here.  Enjoy these plants and smells…the lavender…the olive trees…the herbs…it all comes together in such a unique combination.  You’ll come back in the future just for that experience all over again.
• Go to the beach: That’s what you’re there for.  Whether it’s a little cove off the road, or in a full on beach club, go to the beach and get in the water.  Nothing sparkles quite like the ocean in the south of France – this is your chance to be part of it.

And of course, don’t forget your sunscreen.

All my love,

Mom

A Half Moon Land Between Sky and Sea…

Liguria, Italy.

My Memories.

When I was little, my grandparents bought a house in Sestri Levante, a small village located along the Ligurian Riviera, in Italy. Since then, I like to take refuge there every time I can, losing myself in thoughts and simply relaxing. It’s easy for me to reach this half moon of land between sky and sea, as it’s only a two-hour car ride from Milan. Yet, this place seems so far away too, perhaps lost somewhere in my memories. I still remember when I was four or five, and my grandma used to push me around Sestri on my stroller because I was too lazy to walk. Well, she never suspected that I only played lazy, but I actually loved knowing I was the center of her world.

 

Nowadays I like travelling throughout the region with my husband, in search for hidden corners in a salt and sun smelling blooming nature. Liguria is a dream land to me, rich in intimate and unique details which suddenly appear to your side and fascinate you for their beauty---ancient defense towers stretching out towards the sky, small churches, chestnut woods, miles of walks with gorgeous panoramic views on sea and inland. It is the land where I spent my summers as a child and nourished my first innocent hopes and dreams.

Celebrating The Land - A Famous Italian Poet and His Words.

Prose writer, editor and translator who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1975, Eugenio Montale was born in Genoa. He spent his summers at the family villa in a small village nearby the Ligurian Riviera called Monterosso, and later images from its harsh landscape found their way into his poetry.

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A white dove has landed me among headstones, under spires where the sky nests. Dawns and lights in air; I've loved the sun, colors of honey, now I crave the dark, I want the smoldering fire, this tomb that doesn't soar, your stare that dares it to. 

Collected Poems, 1920-1954, translation by Jonathan Galassi.

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To slump at noon thought-sick and pale under the scorching garden wall, to hear a snake scrape past, the blackbirds creak in the dry thorn thicket, the brushwood brake.

Between tufts of vetch, in the cracks of the ground to spy out the ants’ long lines of march; now they reach the top of a crumb-sized mound, the lines break, they stumble into a ditch.

To observe between the leaves the pulse beneath the sea’s scaly skin, while from the dry cliffs the cicada calls like a knife on the grinder’s stone.

And going into the sun’s blaze once more, to feel, with sad surprise how all life and its battles is in this walk alongside a wall topped with sharp bits of glass from broken bottles.

“Meriggiare pallido e assorto”, by Eugenio Montale, translation by Millicent Bell.

Liguria Through My Eyes.

 

 

When Memories Collide

You could have fit five people in the front of this car. In Alexandria, maybe even eight.

In the early days of knowing one another, before love, we crammed into a 6-person van to see the other side of the Mediterranean. Having grown up in Thessaloniki, Greece, the Mediterranean always faced south of me. Watching the waves crash with an awareness that more sea lay north was a sight I needed to behold. Accomplishing that involved cramming 11 foreigners in a car that was designed for 6. My first glimpse of Alexandria took place while I was sitting on a woman's lap with my head bumping up against a sticker of Hannah Montana. Next to me, there were two men in the driver's seat. One of them was holding the door open. Or closed. Whichever way you look at it.

Those early days of Hannah Montana and two drivers and a stranger on your lap set the precedent for our driving excursions in the years to come. There was that one car we rented with an engine so loud that we would have to shout directions to one another to be heard. There was that other car-like vehicle with seats so small that our fingertips touched as he steered and I unfolded the map.

***

And now we are sitting in a car named Valor. A car with front seats so wide that you could fit our whole Egyptian clan between him, the driver, and me, the recently-arrived passenger.

"It feels strange to have you so far away," I tell him, aware of the irony that he feels far one seat away from me when we have just spent two months of summer a continent and a half away from one another.

"I know," he responds. "It's not a rental car if we are not practically sitting in each other's laps."

This is the kind of car that lets you plug in your iDevice of choice to fill the space with music. I fumble with the cables and remember driving through Kentucky with a car that only accepted cassette tapes, through Israel with the car that would not read CDs, through a desert with a car that would only broadcast Galgaalatz FM.

"Beit Habubot!" I scroll through his iPhone and find the music that provided the soundtrack to our last road trip, to what we had then nicknamed The Farewell Tour. Music pours out of Valor's sound system and all I hear is the sound of waterfalls in May, all I see is a green scarf tied around my hair and droplets forming on his forehead as we hike. Higher. Onward.

***

Beit Habubot continues to play in the background and I struggle to catch my breath as he drives through Harvard Square. I am not used to experiencing this space from behind a windshield. There are no one-way streets on foot for foreign freshmen walking to get their first burrito, or for sophomores slipping on ice, or juniors getting their heels caught in the cobblestone. By senior year, I had driven a U-Haul through here. I had already put a layer between myself and the site of memories, reinforced by the rage Boston driving inspires and the need to shelter oneself from cold and farewells.

In a minute, Harvard Square is behind us. We are past it. It is neither our final destination nor our shared one. This was Home for me before I had ever heard of Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros. Before "home is wherever I'm with you." Before him, and us, and love. Redrawing this memory to carve out space for him, and us, and a car named Valor feels like worlds colliding.

***

We park in front of a falafel shop in Davis Square. If Beit Habubot was the soundtrack of our shared explorations in the Middle East, then falafel was certainly the culinary backdrop. I had a favorite "falafel guy", he had a favorite "kebab man", and both of them made us promise that we would come back to Jerusalem in the future. My return to a former home well-loved is accountable to mashed chickpeas.

This falafel shop is hip. The walls are bright red. There are certificates of cleanliness on the wall, and of Not Being a Fire Hazard, and of being Allergen-Aware, and so many certificates that my head hurts with propriety. More typed signs, more instructions on how to make a falafel sandwich. Instructions on how to eat. Instructions on avoiding the garlic sauce. In the back, a woman is sculpting the mashed chickpeas into the perfect falafel ball. I can feel my falafel man cringing a continent away.

***

We take our falafel to go and Valor soon smells of the Middle East. Right by the checkout counter, we picked up a flyer about falafel. More instructions. More information. I read outloud to him in an homage to all the times I read out from a Lonely Planet or an incomplete map. "Falafel was a mid-1962 discovery for coca farmers in remote Colombia."

He does not let me finish the sentence. That is too much for both of us. We can deal with the transposition of Beit Habubot from Zefat to Harvard Square. We can wrap our minds around the slow shift from the overpacked van with Hannah Montana stickers on its ceiling to the Kias and tiny Fiats to the Valor. But Colombian falafel is where we draw the line.

"You know I love Colombia. You know just how much I love it," I offer. "Wouldn't it be convenient if falafel were from there?"

He does not need to respond. We have both born witness to Egyptians and Jordanians and Lebanese and Israelis lay claim to falafel as their national food. We have participated in the taste tests. We were even willing to carve out some room for it in our new home, to let it be part of a new story. Secretly, we may have even been hoping we could draw out a falafel man with his cart on these cobble stone streets. Colombian falafel, however, is too much of a stretch, too much of a collision of memories.

We drive back through Harvard Square in silence. Tamacun by Rodrigo y Gabriela is playing in the background. I picture him making pancakes in our Beer Sheva home and me getting in the way of the ladle with my kitchen dancing. We have each arrived in Boston with two-ish suitcases, but the hidden load is that of the memories of all the Elsewheres we have loved. We do not quite know how to be here. We were not quite ready for this collision of falafel and Colombia and Beit Habubot and Valor, of my Harvard Square and his driving, of his guitar in the corner and my baggage. Neither of us has unpacked. In a sense, we do not need to. There are memories spilling out of everything, slowly filling the empty space.

Eleanor of Aquitaine, The Queen Who Went on Crusade

Last January, I traveled to Lebanon by myself. Even though I tried to hide it, I was terrified. The farthest I’d ever traveled solo before was Victoria, British Columbia, where I was pretty sure I could walk around at midnight with a sign on my back saying “Mug Me” and be alright. Of course, I had a purpose in going there—an academic conference at the American University of Beirut—so it wasn’t an unstructured, completely unaccompanied venture. But still, I wondered if it was wise. Especially being a girl and all.

I was reminded of this when I was reading about the life of Eleanor of Aquitaine, who basically kicked ass and took names through most of the 12^th century and never really let her gender get in the way. This was a woman of vision and ambition who ignored whatever traditions should have constrained her, and who consequently had more power than most of her male countrymen. It didn’t hurt, of course, that she started out as the daughter of a noble of vast territorial holdings; and then, that she was strategically betrothed to the inheritor to the French throne. I mean, she started out strong from birth. But what she did with what she had was still abnormally ambitious.

Eleanor married the soon-to-be Louis VII at a young age, becoming the queen-consort of France. A highly-educated woman with a forceful personality, she contrasted sharply with her soft-spoken, religiously devout husband. Their marriage wasn’t meant to last. The catalyst to their breakup was her inability to produce a male heir (typical), which she attributed to the rarity of his trips to her bed (also typical). The excuse and the means was their consanguinity (read: they were related; for royals, ALSO typical, but invoked or not invoked as desired). This allowed them to get an annulment from the Church.

But her 15-year marriage to Louis wasn’t totally uneventful. Eleanor accompanied him on the ill-fated Second Crusade, traveling to Constantinople, Jerusalem, and various Crusader states in the Near East. Picturing Eleanor atop her steed, French crown stylishly perched on her head, gallivanting across central and southern Europe to arrive at the Crusader castle of Antioch, aside her husband, who unlike her would rather take a pilgrimage than go to battle—well then, traveling to Lebanon on Middle East Airlines for a five day stay at a comfortable hotel doesn’t seem so brave, after all.

(One thing that my trip and Eleanor's trip had in common: We both went to a Crusader castle. However, hers was probably a lot more intact and functional than the one I went to.)

Eleanor’s ambitious career didn’t end with her French queenship. Shortly after her annulment, she married the heir to the throne of England, the soon-to-be Henry II, who was at least a decade younger than her. (I want to make a joke, but I’ve sworn to never use the word “cougar” to mean anything other than the animal.) With Henry, she had seven children, including future kings Richard the Lionhearted and John Lackland. If you’ve seen Robin Hood: Men in Tights, that’s Patrick Stewart and Richard Lewis, respectively.

Years later, Eleanor was accused of plotting with her sons to overthrow her husband, and so Henry, fearful, locked her up in jail, where she remained for 16 years. When he finally died, favorite son and new king Richard released her; then he trotted off on the Third Crusade for a few years, leaving Eleanor as his regent.

Eleanor remained active in governing and politicking and strategic marriage-arranging until her death at the age of roughly 82—ancient by 12^th-century standards. I imagine she was like one of those really cool old ladies who still runs marathons and knows how to use Facebook. “With it” to the very end.

Her longevity is only another facet of her overall impressiveness, though. Queen of France, queen of England, Crusader, coup conspirator, jailbird, king’s regent—by any standards, what a life!

I think that, every time I’m feeling a little constrained by expectations—whether those be gender-based, or age-based, or anything-else-based—I can look at Eleanor for solid proof that expectations can be defied. True, structures exist in society which circumscribe choices and limit options, but the limits are not unbreakable. For Eleanor, the sheer force of her personality, paired with her own limitless ambition, allowed her to not only become, but redefine what it meant to be a queen in the Middle Ages. Twice. If she can do that—I can certainly go on a trip by myself.

Looking Forward: It's the Little Things.

This week, for the first time in nearly two months, I had a work-less weekend. With several of my freelance projects wrapping up at the same time, I'd spent dozens of nights typing away til sunrise. A handful of Saturdays and Sundays perched at my desk. I'd eaten countless meals in front of my computer, one hand holding a fork, the other clicking and scrolling (it’s a glamorous life). Now that my assignments have been turned in, however, my days are marked by a sudden, somewhat shocking excess of free time. It’s such an unfamiliar occurrence that I don’t quite know what to do with myself. Should I run errands? Catch up on a month’s worth of magazines? Watch a movie? Take a nap?

If anything, this dip in my workload has given me time to unwind a bit and think. These periods of rest, these pockets of calm are so rare and precious. It’s tempting to fill the down time with more work, but at busy times like this, I’m often close to burn-out.

I recently received an email from a friend who told me she’s making an effort to “insert more joy” into her life, whether that means making phone calls to friends more regularly, or drinking less coffee during the week. It made me think: how can I add more joy to the cherished pockets of my life that aren’t filled with work? More often than not, I don’t have the time (or the energy) to do anything on a large scale. But what about little things? An amazing breakfast or an hour spent browsing in a bookstore generally makes me just as happy as a night out or a weekend away.

Here are a few “little” things that never fail to bring me joy: clean sheets. The smell of tuberose. Afternoon naps. Grilled cheese sandwiches. Looking through old photos. A glass of wine. Waking up early (if I can manage it).

What’s on your list?

How It Began

When I am growing up, my grandmother often prints out thick packets of stories and legends about women who did things and sends them to me in large manila envelopes. After a while I have history and myth all mixed up, but I know more about Sacagawea and Joan of Arc, Jane Austen and the goddess Athena, than any of my friends in Mrs. Smith’s first grade classroom.

Every summer we make the drive to North Carolina to visit my grandparents. This time, I walk into the room where my sister and I always sleep and instead of the familiar stack of printed-out pages there is a small hardback book sitting on the bedside table. The cover shows a collage of train tickets, magazine photographs of the Eiffel Tower, and plastic figurines of women in traditional southern French dress. I like it right away. I have always judged books by their covers.

Postcards from France is a series of articles written back to her American hometown newspaper from a young woman spending a year living in Valence, a small city in the southeast province of Savoie. I finish the book in one day. I read it again the next year, and again, and again. Inside the back cover, in the careful, blocky handwriting of a child just starting to write, I inscribe, “This is a great book!”

From then on, I am completely obsessed with the idea of spending a year in France---of travelling the entire country, becoming fluent in another language, and making unforgettable friends. I will do this, too. And I do, in my own way.

My Story: One of "Those" People

Things were better by the time I graduated from high school. I still had to balance my schedule carefully, and I was still confined to a wheelchair when I went shopping—but I had made great strides from the year before. I could walk up the stairs in my parents’ house without pain. College would be difficult for me, I knew, but I was confident that I could handle it. With care and caution, I knew I could put together a schedule that wasn’t too much for me. At least, I thought, I wouldn’t have to be one of “those people” whose health problems were serious enough to prevent them from higher education.

I packed my bags and drove across the country with my family. I was moving from big-town North Carolina to small-town Idaho; as the trees fell away to plains outside my car window, I could feel the homesickness growing.

My first year of college went smoothly. I took as light a schedule as I could while still being a full-time student. I missed so much class that I had to have a special letter from the office of disabilities giving me extra sick time, but I still managed to make it through my first two semesters with a near-perfect GPA and a journal filled with memories.

Not long after I began my third semester, my health started to decline again. I battled lung infection after lung infection, and my fatigue seemed worse every day. The previous summer, ballroom dancing had become my passion, and I’d spent hours each week dancing. Within a few weeks of the start of the new semester, I had to drop both of my dance classes. I was too out of breath to dance like I had just months before, and the exercise left me exhausted.

Still, I tried hard to live a normal life. I kept up with my classwork, stayed on top of my healthcare regimen so that I could take advantage of the energy I did have, and got a boyfriend. As fall passed into winter—always an early occurrence in southeast Idaho—things between the two of us began to get more serious. By the time I left for Christmas, Mahon had told me that he would like to marry me. By the end of January, we were engaged.

That spring, an outbreak of a particularly nasty strain of the flu went around my hometown. For nearly a month, I stayed in isolation and didn’t see any of my friends, for fear that I’d catch it. Ironically enough, weeks after everyone else had gotten better, I started showing symptoms. I ran a high fever for several weeks, losing fifteen pounds and developing a serious lung infection. I’d already been in the hospital once that year—a fairly routine annual event—but as the first flowers began to bloom in North Carolina, I found myself a hospital patient once more.

It quickly became clear that I wouldn’t be able to travel back to Idaho in the coming weeks, as I’d planned. My recovery was slow; I lay in bed for several weeks, unable to do much more than read light books and try to gain back all the weight I’d lost. Instead of catching a plane to Idaho to spend time with my fiancé—who was still in school—and plan a wedding, I was faced with the necessity of taking a medical deferment from the summer semester that I was supposed to be attending.

Suddenly, I had become one of “those people.” Frightening possibilities crowded through my mind, marching one after another like ants at a picnic. Would I be able to go back to school in the fall? Would I be able to finish school at all? Would I have to withdraw from school to take care of my health? I had always been driven, ambitious; I had spent my life looking forward to my undergraduate education, and I had loved the year and a half of school I had already completed. Each time I thought of the possibility that I might have to eventually withdraw, I felt sick to the pit of my stomach. I spent long afternoons that summer crying, mourning the dreams that I felt were slipping through my fingers.

By the time I got married late in August, I had had three hospital stays in the last six months. I found myself wondering if I would ever manage to crawl back from where I was now; was this the beginning of a decline I’d never be able to pull out of?

I did go back to school that autumn. Within the first two weeks, it was clear that the full-time schedule I had signed up for would be too much for me. I dropped one class, and then another, until I had pared my course load down to only two or three classes. Even then, I found myself missing class often, easily drained by the effort of keeping up with homework while adjusting to married life and a household of my own.

But always, the fear haunted me. I felt hounded by guilt—at taking such a light courseload, at all the times I felt I’d failed as a wife when I had to ask my husband to take care of me yet again, at the nagging feeling that maybe I should be pushing myself harder, be one of the people in inspirational commercials who accomplishes great things despite their setbacks. I was daunted by the prospect: Most days, I considered getting through my classes and getting dinner on the table to be a Herculean effort.

The fear, and the guilt, stayed with me, an insidious voice always present in the back of my mind.

It would be years before I learned how to silence that voice.

In this space, Cindy Baldwin will share her evolution---the ways she has come to accept the circumstances of her life with cystic fibrosis and find great contentment within them. You can read the beginning of her story here and here. 

YWRB: Dare

By Amy Turn Sharp I always pick dare.

Truth or Dare?

I am game. Game on.

Let's do this thing. I will get naked. I will kiss you madly.

I will run through the streets screaming.

Whatever. Why?

I think it is because it is easier than letting you inside of my mind. Inside of all the scary truths I carry like coins.

I think it's important to find your other side of the coin, the people who always pick truth.

They are not weanies. They are powerful totems.

Find them and hold them like lovers.

Teach each other how to be passionately truthful and daring.

Most of us are lacking in one side of the coin.

Truth or Dare.

Hold hands and walk into the future.

Encourage and take a chance.

It's all we've got baby.

The chance of a life well lived.

I dare you.

Conversations with Myself as an Old Woman

By Eliza DeaconKilimanjaro, Tanzania

Gnarled hands that are surprisingly pale, folded in her lap. Capable hands, although she never liked them despite their ability to reach one note over an octave on the piano. She’s always stayed out of the sun, not for vanity, but because she doesn’t like the sun or the heat---funny for someone who has spent the last 60 years of her life in Africa. You can look like leathery old strips of biltong otherwise, the intense heat of mid-day etched deep into crinkles and creases. Nice faces though, lived-in, they look like they belong here.

Here she became the person she never thought she was before---hidden away, in a too-tall lanky body, by insecurities and doubt, never entirely comfortable in the skin she was born with. It wasn’t so simple, but then this continent never is; it tests and challenges, weeds the strong of heart from those who shy from its extremes. It can drive you mad and it’s easy to stumble, the dusty earth is often rock-strewn and rarely flat.

She often used to wonder if this was a place to grow old; she never wanted to feel fear and it’s here sometimes---visits at night with the winds, with shiftas and waizi . . . thieves who come in when the moon is low, skulking around the perimeters in whispers. The dogs bark and the old Maasai askaris keep them at bay, but they’re still out there. And fear is an unwelcome guest, especially when you know your limitations.

She and the man she loves know of nowhere else to go. This place they call home is just that and has claimed them wholly. They have both been spat off the continent before, thrown out of the land they were bound to. For him, because the colour of his skin was deemed wrong, despite having the right passport. For her, because she was told she had just been there too long. But where else to go? Where else do you find the life that offers you the most extraordinary freedom, whilst always with cruel accuracy reminding you that this freedom comes at a price?

At times she wonders at how she can still find the thrill in that particularly African golden light that comes just before dark, that one-hour grace period when everything else is forgotten and the Gods smile down on all. And the moment when walking on the farm, she startles a wild animal and it’s frozen, staring with wide eyes, preserved in that drawn-out moment until neither can bear it any longer and the spell is broken.

She remembers things: bare feet on wet grass, stepping carefully in the darkness, the smell of sweet wild jasmine and night sounds in her soul, feeling giddy with wildness in the shadow of the mountain. And she remembers a dress covered in a thousand sparkling sequins. As they drove down the long farm road towards a moonlit gathering, it filled the inside of the car with colour, like stars that no-one could see but them.She files away all these memories, carries them carefully in a treasure box, revisits them at sunset when, sitting on the veranda with a glass in hand, the world slows down and sinking back into the past is easy and without regret. Old now, but there is so much that is good here. As much as you can ‘belong’, they know that they have been marked, carry the scars as well as the laughter. There is permanence and stability in its indelible stain and it ties them to that dusty African soil, a compass that always points them home.

The End of the Summer

TS Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock’s life was “measured out in coffee spoons.” My life has been measured out in back-to-schools. Every year of my life has featured a significant back-to-school transition. Even before I started kindergarten, my family’s routine shifted when my mother, a professor, went back to school. During the three years of my adult life when I was neither in school nor teaching, my wife was working in college student affairs, where the back-to-school season is strenuous, and feels like a marathon. Some of my most distinct memories are back-to-school related. I remember walking with my mother to my first day of kindergarten, and the very cool bag in which I carried my supplies (it featured an applique pencil).  I remember going to my high school before school started to pick up my schedule and walk through it several times so I could master the cavernous layout of the sixties-era monolith.  I will never forget (and I realize that phrase is overused, but in this case, it’s actually true) watching my parents drive away from my college dorm and feeling the strangest combination of feelings---excitement and fear and an intense sadness.  My first day of student teaching created a confusion of feelings.  Being neither teacher nor student left me in a sort of transitory space, and made the day more difficult to process.

Now, as an adult, one who is entering her eighth year of full-time teaching, I no longer find the back-to-school experience particularly momentous. There’s the change in routine, and a new pack of red pens, and new faces in the classroom, but it feels familiar, almost comforting. What is significant now is the end of the summer. It begins right about now as my teaching friends in southern states go back to work and it continues until I begin again right after Labor Day.

Last summer was a blur of parenting a newborn. I remember little beyond being exhausted and sometimes stopping for ice cream when we put the baby in the car to coax him to sleep through the rhythm of the driving. In a way, it was refreshing to know I could do no more than simply tend to him and my wife. That often meant that a day’s big accomplishment was picking up groceries or cleaning the bathroom.

This summer, however, I had plans. Yet, much like every summer, the season is winding down and I feel as though I have accomplished little of those plans. I’ve read books, but not as many as I’d like. My son and I have gone on many wonderful outings, but there have also been days when weather or timing have prevented us from doing anything memorable. Work, which should have felt far away, has encroached on my leisure through e-mails, the occasional meeting, and the fact that a teacher’s job is never done---there are always lessons to be tweaked or new texts to be considered.

It’s easy to let August turn into a Month of Regret. I ask myself what I could have done differently to feel more accomplished.   I try to carve out moments to satisfy my leisure goals while beginning to prepare things for my classes. I watch women’s Olympic soccer for the sake of both enjoyment and procrastination. Soon, it’s mid-August, and then it’s the end, and the whole month I feel a creeping sense of frustration. In June, the summer feels wide open. It’s freedom!  I know many teachers think of it as a “freedom from.” It’s a break from the early mornings, the capriciousness of young people, the grading, the planning. I try to remember that a teacher’s summer really is a “freedom to.” I want to grab the freedom to do more things than are reasonably possible, and it is that optimism in June that causes regret in August. In a way, it’s no different than how I felt as a child. The summer wanes, and real life presents itself again. It is bittersweet, but it comes with the season, and feels as familiar to me as the changing of the leaves.

What Are You Reading (offline, that is)?

Randon Billings Noble is a creative nonfiction writer living in Washington, DC.  A graduate of NYU’s MFA program and a former teacher of writing at American University, she currently writes the blog From the Hatchery while raising her 17-month-old twins.  Her essays have appeared in the Modern Love column of The New York Times, The Massachusetts Review, Passages North and elsewhere.  You can read more from her at fromthehatchery.com, randonbillingsnoble.com, and on Twitter (@randonnoble).  When I was halfway through my one and only pregnancy, I stopped reading.

Before this I had always read.  I don’t remember a time when I couldn’t read, and I was always a little jealous when I read about others learning to read – when C-A-T became “cat” and leapt off the page and into imagination.  According to my parents, when I was three years old we were driving by a billboard and I read “Rustoleum” right off it.  Rustoleum.  Impressive . . . but it doesn’t exactly leap into imagination.

In high school I tore through the classics assigned by my English teachers as well as the Sweet Valley High series I discovered on my own.  In college I branched out into Women’s Literature and Native American Literature and rooted back into Chaucer and the medievalists.  In graduate school I focused on Renaissance Drama until I defected from my English program into an MFA in Creative Writing.  There I read Proust, Bulgakov, Joan Didion, Andre Aciman . . .

I continued to read when I jumped the desk and became a teacher of writing instead of a student.  I read throughout my courtship with my husband and well into our marriage.  Then I got pregnant.  With twins.

The bigger I got the more immobile I became.  I was never on bed rest, but when your waist more than doubles in size and is heading towards the planetary, it’s tough to move around – even inside your own house.  For a few weeks I mostly just sat in a chair in our living room and read, but then I started to become stupid.  I couldn’t focus, even on the Sookie Stackhouse novels I was burning through on my Kindle.  Later I learned that your brain can shrink up to 8% during pregnancy.  Since I was carrying twins, I imagine my brain shrank 16%.

Finally they were born---each weighing well over seven pounds.  And for the next few months I was completely and happily consumed by them.  But then I started to miss reading.

When the weather got warmer, I began to take the twins out for walks in their fancy double-decker stroller.  One of our first outings was to the library.  Right by the front counter was a shelf of new releases whose breadth of subject matter made me almost giddy---a mystery set at Pride and Prejudice’s Pemberly, the latest installment in the Game of Thrones series, novels about werewolves (one starring Henry VIII no less), a collection of Alexander McQueen’s fashions, a thick volume of illustrated anatomy, a group biography of former North Koreans, a bunch of vegetarian cookbooks, The History of the World in 100 Objects.

I checked out three books that day and read them in less than a week.  My brain swelled like the Grinch’s heart bursting out of its magnifying frame.  I was myself again.  I was reading.

Here are some of my favorite finds:

Mr. Fox by Helen Oyeyemi St. John Fox, a writer, has gotten into the habit of killing off his heroines.  Mary Foxe, his made-up muse, objects.  She challenges him to join her in a series of stories where she, too, has a hand in their creation, and nine divergent fairy tales are the result.  The relationship between the writer and his creation grows more complicated, however, when Mr. Fox’s wife Daphne becomes convinced that he is having an affair and breaks into their narrative.  Will Mr. Fox have to choose between his fantasy muse and his flesh-and-blood wife?  Or will yet another story write itself?

One tale begins:

There was a Yourba woman and there was an English-man, and …

That might sound like the beginning of a joke, but those two were seriously in love.

They tried their best with each other, but it just wasn’t any good.  I don’t know if you know what a Yourba woman can be like sometimes.  Any house they lived in burnt down.  They   fought; their weapons were cakes of soap, suitcases, fists, and hardback encyclopedias.  There were injuries …

One day the woman stamped her foot and wished her man dead.  He died.  (And now you know what a Yourba woman can be like sometimes.)

She had a devil of a time getting him back after that one.

The Silence of Our Friends by Mark Long and Jim Demonakos, illustrated by Nate Powell I was immediately struck by this graphic novel’s cover.  I wanted to know what these two men were looking at, and with such different expressions.  In a way, they’re both looking at the same thing: their hometown in Texas where in 1968 a civil rights protest turns deadly and five black college students are charged with murder.  Larry Thompson is the black activist who leads the protest.  Jack Long (a fictionalized version of the writer Mark Long’s father) is the white reporter who crosses the color line to film it.  Jack invites Larry’s family to his house on the white side of town and eventually testifies – for the accused students – at their trial.  Amid the hatred, violence, and misunderstanding in this story, there are also fishing trips, barbeques, rodeos, realizations, redemption and, ultimately, a sense of unity.

In this scene Larry’s family is at Mark’s house.  The kids are sent outside to play, conversation stumbles and an offer of drinks is refused.  But then Mark puts some music on …

We Others: New and Selected Stories by Steven Millhauser This collection features stories about a mysterious figure who emerges in a commuter town to slap people – hard – before disappearing, about a boy infatuated with a girl whose one white glove hides an unbearable secret, about the creator of clockwork automatons who finds himself in competition with a mysterious rival, about a knife-thrower who marks the people who flock to see him, about a museum whose endless bewildering rooms call people to return again and again …

These stories claim to be about others, but we are more haunted by the way they reflect back on us.

The title story begins:

We others are not like you.  We are more prickly, more jittery, more restless, more reckless, more secretive, more desperate, more cowardly, more bold.  We live at the edges of ourselves, not in the middle places.  We leave that to you.  Did I say: more watchful?  That above all.  We watch you, we follow you, we spy on you, we obsess over you.  We crave your attention.  We hunger for a sign …

The Starboard Sea by Amber Dermont A sad tale of love and loss and the sea, but set at a New England prep school – not aboard the Pequod.  When his best friend and sailing partner commits suicide, Jason Prosper transfers to Bellingham Academy, a second-chance school for the privileged.  But even as he forms new relationships at his new school, he is haunted by his past and threatened by a secret he only slowly unravels.

One of the surprise pleasures of this book was the wordplay between friends.  Despite its rather dark plot, this microcosm of teenagers is full of intimacy, prankishness and wit.   I’ll leave the revelation of the title line, the starboard sea, for you to discover as you read, but this passage gave me a whole new appreciation for the creative usage of SAT vocabulary:

Cal’s mother, Caroline, had once made up a deck of vocabulary flashcards, encouraging us to quiz each other in preparation for the SAT.  Cal’s favorite word was ‘abrasive.’  He’d misuse it every chance he could, inserting it into sentences where it didn’t belong.  ‘This ham and cheese sandwich is mighty abrasive.’  ‘That’s some abrasive foot odor.’  ‘I’m going to get abrasive on this ancient history exam.’

And the book I just picked up this week: Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar by Cheryl Strayed This book is a collection of Dear Sugar advice columns from the online magazine The Rumpus.  Someone commented on Twitter that she was reading it with a highlighter but should have been with a tattoo gun.   As I leafed through its pages I felt the same way.

Every page of this book feels quote-worthy, but I’ll end with a piece of advice that Strayed, in her 40s, wrote to a woman in her 20s – something I wish I had read in that living room chair, trapped under the weight of 15 pounds of baby, feeling time slide away like a tide and wondering if I would ever get some fraction of my brain – my life – back.  Strayed writes:

The useless days will add up to something.  The shitty waitressing jobs.  The hours writing in your journal.  The long meandering walks.  The hours reading poetry and story collections and novels and dead people’s diaries and wondering about sex and God and whether you should shave under your arms or not.  These things are your becoming.

I hope this reading will be part of yours.

On baking bread (and losing track of time)

Baking bread is a deceptively simple task. Not easy, necessarily, but simple. I used to be very intimidated by the entire category of “yeast bread.” It had something to do with the mystery of the process, I think, but I also attributed a sort of aura to that rare category of people who bake bread.

To me, it seemed nothing short of miraculous that flour, water, and yeast could be transformed from an unwieldy, sticky mass into a round, golden foundation for a meal.

Everything changed for me during graduate school, when I lived with a roommate who baked bread on a regular basis in our very own humble kitchen. After over a year of lurking while she baked and feasting on the results, I decided to give it a try.

I was surprised to discover that, in addition to the three basic ingredients, a good loaf of bread is created with two guiding principles: patience and restraint.

Although a recipe may call for an hour and a half of rising time, this estimate is arbitrary. A lump of dough has a mind of its own. It will be ready when it’s ready. My advice is not to set a timer, but rather, after you have whipped up a batch of dough that is not too dry and not too sticky, cover it with a damp tea towel and forget about it.

This is the point at which it is very important to lose track of time. I would urge you to take a very long walk or a very long nap. Or perhaps both. Your dough will be better for it, and your body will thank you.

If, upon returning, that little batch of dough looks quite the same as when you started, resist the urge to poke and prod it and generally do something to it. While your dough is rising, it does not need you. Best to leave it alone and start up a new project. Something terribly all-consuming, like organizing your sock drawer or folding paper cranes, will do just fine. Or perhaps another nap is in order.

Hopefully, you’ll have started your dough sometime in the morning or early afternoon. And if your stomach is beginning to growl for dinner, you can be pretty sure your dough is finally ready for you to get involved again. It is much bigger now, and looser and wobblier, than when you started.

At this point, you may cover your hands in flour, punch down your dough, and turn it out onto a floured surface. This is the moment we’ve all been waiting for—the iconic doing moment in the life of a loaf of bread: kneading. But remember your restraint. Kneading is a transient process, a few moments of turning the dough and folding it back onto itself. Try not to knead the life out of it.

Now that you’ve spent a little time with your dough, I’m sure you’d like to pop it right into the oven. Don’t. Cover it back up with that tea towel and forget about it again. Set to work on the other aspects of dinner, which will hopefully involve sautéed onions and will definitely take a while. Get the oven going at a high temperature, somewhere near 400 degrees, perhaps. When things are beginning to come together and starting to look like the components of a meal, you can finally transfer your dough from counter to oven (minus the towel).

I know, you’re getting really hungry now. Me too. Don’t worry. It’ll only bake for a little while—perhaps twenty minutes or so, depending on the bread and the oven—before it’s golden brown and ready to toss into a basket and onto the table.

Your bread is hot still, so I suppose you’d better start with a glass of wine or a passionate conversation. Or both. Some of the simplest, most wonderful things cannot be rushed. They’ll take all day. It’s worth the wait.

Future Shock

A few weeks ago, I had a conversation with a friend-of-a-friend, in which he essentially said this to me (and I am paraphrasing here): “You know the main reason my wife and I decided not to have children is because I think the world is falling apart at the seams and we, as a species, are doomed.  I didn’t want to saddle another generation with this mess.”   My jaw fell slack and my response was an awkwardly managed and strangely delayed “Oh, MmHmm . . .” Having rather recently procreated, myself, I am, perhaps more sensitive to the insinuation that having children might be a selfish act and one that a reasonable and humane person would sacrifice, based on the state of the planet.  And yet, I was also surprised by my initial instinct which was to reply with, “I totally hear you and I mostly agree!”  Part of the reason for the bungled response was pondering whether the mother of an infant should be concurring that having children is crazy, all things considered.  It should be established that this person works in an industry that bears intimate witness to both the real impact of climate change and the barriers to spurring governments, individuals, and cultures to reverse course.  He also described a feeling more generally that he enjoyed a measure of freedom, loved to travel, etc., but his main thesis really stuck with me.  It got me ruminating about the rationale for having children and where we are as a society—you know, nothing heavy. In some ways, despite clawing my way to motherhood against tough odds and having a singular focus about it for years on end, I can utterly relate to the idea of not wanting children.  Like any haughty adult enjoying the relative ease of life and limitless possibilities that come with a child-free future, I have fantasies of coming home at the end of the day and flitting off to a movie or hopping a plane to Bermuda.  The beginning of the end of my first marriage started with a conversation in which my ex-husband declared he had decided he didn’t want children because, “What if I want to just, like, go to Costa Rica?”  At the time, he had never traveled outside the United States, save a solitary surf trip to Mexico, and he didn’t even have a driver’s license.  But this straw man danced around in my head and the phrase “Costa Rica,” eventually became code to me for “noncommittal.”

The other problem with this, obviously, being: When was I ever a person who was able to come home at the end of the day and flit off anywhere or hop a plane to anywhere?  Let’s face facts: I plan things.  Basic work-life functions and my own overdeveloped sense of responsibility slash free-floating anxiety have basically ruled this kind of behavior out for me a long time ago.  This truly has very little to do with newly caring for a living being.  I have always been more attracted to a cozy evening curled up with magazine, husband, and domestic beast than to painting the town.  I have a knitting phase in my history, I have hosted more than one “game night” at my place . . . you don’t need further elaboration, of this I am sure.

Traveling with children is a bit more intimidating, although I do have the goal of providing as many diverse experiences as possible for my kids.  While I realize that taking a child to a place that is inhospitable, inaccessible, dangerous, etc. is no longer in the cards, (which it never was for me, either, frankly) I don’t think my only option remains a Disney Cruise.  I have lots of examples in my life of people picking up and exploring exotic places with one, two, three (!) kids, even living abroad in somewhat “colorful” circumstances.   And the people I know who have gone down this road range from families with endless resources and major job security to those working with a shoestring and cobbling together freelance gigs to make it work.  So, let’s strike that from the list.

Now on to the issue of the world and how it appears to be unraveling.  There is no denying that we are in crisis with the environment.  But, how do I know that my kid won’t be the person who develops some sensational new technology that quite literally saves the world?  I worry much more about the way our politics, culture, and social norms have degraded.  Here again, I like the idea raising a person who might contribute positively in these areas, even better than we have.  And to experience the children of our friends and family and see what lovely, tiny human beings are all around us, I am increasingly confident that we can tip the scales in the direction of progress.

There is no doubt that some element of child rearing is profoundly narcissistic.  By definition, you are creating and shaping a person and then offering that person to the world in your likeness.  This is true whether or not you have biological children.  Then again, I still submit that if all of us out here---imperfect, but kind and loving (sometimes snarky)---raise children with good hearts and strong minds, there are larger benefits than just how it makes us feel to be loved and see ourselves reflected.

From Berchtesgaden, Germany...

Dearest Clara, When we lived in Vienna, one of our favorite getaways was in the mountains, just across the border in Germany.  We spent so many weekends there---we took you for the first time when you were barely two months old, and we absolutely had to go back during our return trip this summer.  There is something about these mountains that keeps drawing us in, and I suspect we’ll be going back for years to come, even though this wouldn’t be the type of place to top most people’s “places to go list.”  All the better I say, it just leaves more of this gorgeous landscape undisturbed for those of us in the know to enjoy!

Berchtesgaden can be a tricky place.  It’s so beautiful that you want to think it was laying here so peacefully forever, but the truth is that it had its role in a darker side of history.  And visiting there presents somewhat of a quandary about how to reconcile those two things.  For me, what I’ve learned over the years is that will always be your responsibility to know the history of the places you visit.  But be sure to separate the past from the future that any place is trying to build---by being aware of both, you’ll be able to feel out what your assessment is of the present.

In addition, I’ve learned the following from this charming mountain town:

• The view from the top is always worth it: There are no shortage of hills and mountains in this area, some that you have to walk, some you can cheat a little and ride a gondola  to the top.  I think so often we breeze through places like these and just take the time to see the town and move on, but the real treat is what you see from the top of the mountain, not the bottom, so make sure you always plan for a few of these jaunts when you come across elevation.
• Tradition should always have a home: When places are small and not on the beaten path, we are quick to write them off as closed and narrow. But some people work very hard to preserve their traditions.  This time around we stumbled onto a parade of local villages, all with families in their local variations of national costumes . . . all handmade. there are very few places where such craft by hand can survive.  Know when to let people keep their traditions.
• Beef should be expensive: This sounds funny right? But in the hotel that we always stay at, they often have “filet of local heifer” on the menu and the translation has always made us giggle a bit.  And it happens to be the most expensive item on the menu by far.  This is common in many alpine areas, even though the meat is local to the region.  But it takes a lot of time and resource to raise animals that are out on fresh pasture, with space and cleanliness and natural foods.  Of course there are faster and cheaper ways of raising animals, but ultimately, animals are living things and should be respected as such.  I guarantee you it doesn’t taste the same when you take a shortcut.  You won't be able to take the long way as often though.
• Change can come quickly: Much like near the sea, the weather in the mountains can change in what seems like an instant.  Many times we’ve started out in sunshine and watched black clouds roll in, erupting the mountains into flashes of lightning.  A little extra preparation and know-how will protect you in places where change is the constant.
• Protect what’s still clean: Near where we stay there is a beautiful lake which is one of the largest and deepest in the country, but is also the cleanest.  In fact, you can drink water right out of this huge body of water in any place on the lake.  That is a rare gift that this water has been taken care of so well over so many years.  When you find these pockets of clean air . . . water . . . land . . . it is your responsibility to help keep them that way---when you find pockets that have strayed, you still have to do your part.

All my love,

Mom

A Pink Envelope

I spent the weekend with my two best girlfriends.  Aren’t friends great?  Mine are.  We all live in different towns, so we don’t get to see each other as often as we might like.  But every time the three of us hang out I’m reminded how magnificently funny those ladies are.  Then I came back home and developed a less than stellar back spasm. It was not fun and I was cranky for a solid twenty four hours.  So my husband probably wasn’t thrilled either.  Sleeping was a challenge and although the tightness had abated some by Monday morning, I still spent the day propped up in bed.  Three pillows arranged behind me just so, one on my lap to set my computer on, and one under my knees.  It doesn’t make sense, but it was comfortable, sort of.  I had moved past the point of pain and was in the restricted movement phase, but I was still cranky.  I was uncomfortable, I had a crazy busy Monday as far as work was concerned, and I was behind on my writing.  It was just an icky day and I couldn’t wait for it to be over.

And then I checked the mail.

In my mailbox, squeezed between the financial newspaper I never read, the bills to be paid, and the advertisements for appliances I don’t need, was a cheery pink envelope.  My sister had sent me a letter.  I immediately ditched the other mail and carefully sat down in the living room with my pink envelope.

I love writing letters just as much as I love receiving them.  Luckily for me, my sis seems to feel the same way.  So we’re occasional penpals.  We still email, and talk on the phone, and skype, and all that modern stuff, but we supplement with honest-to-goodness letters when the mood strikes. There’s something about opening an envelope and holding a piece of paper in your hand that brings the person a little closer.

So I sat down to read my letter, and then I started laughing.  My letter was a detailed description of a recent misadventure.  I chuckled through five pages of descriptions and anecdotes, and then I started back at the beginning.  Finally, I put the paper aside stood up and went back to my nest of pillows.  My back still hurt, but my mood was drastically improved.

That’s the power of a letter and a laugh.

Sister Pat's Revolution

Long ago, back in my halcyon days of undergraduate bliss, I was a religious studies major. I suppose, looking back on it, that my fascination started at an early age. I'm the product of a mixed marriage---a classic northeastern WASP/Jew mashup---and while my father didn't practice Judaism at all during my childhood, my mother dutifully toted us to the local Episcopal church each weekend for Sunday school and services. Though I never developed a religious zeal, I did develop a zeal for religion. I was fascinated by it, and by what studying it could reveal about the history---and present state---of humanity. I started strong in high school (six classes, including Zen Buddhism, The Holocaust, and The Hebrew Bible), then followed up with a full-on major in college.

My senior thesis was about a late medieval English mystic. You might have heard of her. Her name was Margery Kempe, and she was famous/infamous for (supposedly) crying all the time. My (unsurprisingly feminist) take on her, though, was that she pretty freaking brave. See, Margery's account of her life's story was, to my mind, a pretty provocative piece of writing. (It was also the first autobiography written in English---though she was illiterate, and so dictated it to one of her confessors.) Margery lived in England just as the Reformation began rumbling across the land, taking an awful lot of bodies with it.  And so her depiction of herself---not only a woman, but a lay woman---as having a close, personal, unmonitored relationship with God was downright dangerous, in addition to being subversive and incredibly vital.

Margery's been on my mind a lot these days, thanks to the Catholic Church's latest internal drama. The Leadership Conference of Women Religious, a membership group representing approximately 80% of the nuns in the United States, has found itself directly at odds with the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the group tasked by the Vatican with the oversight of all Catholic doctrine. The nuns, you see, do not take an official stance on things like contraception, abortion or gay marriage, preferring instead to focus their energy and public sway on what they view as the more important Christian duties of caring for the poor, sick and those in need. Sister Pat Farrell, the president of the Leadership Conference, gave some pretty illustrative quotes during her recent Fresh Air interview:

Our works are very much pro-life. We would question, however, any policy that is more pro-fetus than actually pro-life. If the rights of the unborn trump all of the rights of all of those who are already born, that is a distortion, too — if there's such an emphasis on that. However, we have sisters who work in right-to-life issues. We also have many, many ministries that support life. We dedicate to our lives to those on the margins of society, many of whom are considered throwaway people: the impaired, the chronically mentally ill, the elderly, the incarcerated, to the people on death row. We have strongly spoken out against the death penalty, against war, hunger. All of those are right-to-life issues. There's so much being said about abortion that is often phrased in such extreme and such polarizing terms that to choose not to enter into a debate that is so widely covered by other sectors of the Catholic Church---and we have been giving voice to other issues that are less covered but are equally as important...

Like Margery, Pat Farrell is one seriously brave lady. As someone who was raised in a church that ordains women, elevates gay bishops and  is pro-choice, I sometimes look at women like Pat Farrell---and the thousands of female theologians in the Catholic Church---and wonder, "Why don't they just leave?" It's easy, looking from the outside, to think that. It's especially easy for someone whose relationship to religion has always been---even when experiential---quite academic and detached. (I really do go to church for the music, and to observe rituals.)

But while I am puzzled by the determination of female worshipers to change their less-than-feminist religions from the inside out when they could simply leave for a faith that values them, I am even more impressed by the courage and determination it takes to do so. After all, the church will never change if women like Pat Farrell don't lead the charge. And while I don't have a personal stake in her battle, I have to admit I'm cheering for her from the sidelines. It's not easy to leave the church you've spent your life serving, but I think it's probably even harder to stay and fight to make it the place you think it should be.

Good luck, Sister Pat. May you succeed where Margery did not.

Image: CNS photo/Giancarlo Giuliani

The privilege of a return ticket

For reasons I do not quite understand, Barbarossa keeps recurring symbolically in my life in Greece.

I first became familiar with this historical figure when I was about ten years old and a new convert to the Age of Empires strategy game. That Barbarossa was a 12th century Holy Roman Emperor and the particular objective of that game scenario was to claim dominance over other European Duchies. It was apparently still the age not only of empires, but also of prizing dominance over compassion. At 10, I was fascinated by the concept that you could make digital people forage, build homes and fight just by clicking something in a computer.

The break-down of the dominance paradigm began during my encounter with another Barbarossa: operation Barbarossa during World War II, the name for Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union. Every time my favorite history teacher recounted the horrors of that war, I couldn't ignore the memories of the glorification of combat in the first Barbarossa I had known through Age of Empires.

Nearly a decade later, and after I have born witness to the kind of violence you cannot unsee and the kind of compassion you revere over dominance, I was standing in the cave of another Barbarossa. This one was a notorious pirate in the Mediterranean in the late 1400s. The bay in which he used to hide exists to this day and is aptly named Κλέφτικο in Greek: bay of thieves.

Κλέφτικο is a series of cliff formations on the island of Milos, Greece. Behind them, pirates used to hide to observe the shipping route to Crete. Today it is the site of sailboats and snorkels, sea urchins and sunscreen. I have always been intrigued by how history and the passage of time transform places from battlefields into tourist attractions. Two years ago, my love and I had camped in a field overlooking the Horns of Hattin in Israel. Those towering rocks had provided the backdrop for one of the fiercest battles during the Crusades. Now they are the stuff of wheat fields and hiking boots. As we pitched our tent, Elijah noted: "A crusader probably died here."

I am currently in Mexico City and for the first time in a while, there is a TV in my room. At night, I watch images of brutality in Aleppo, Syria parade through my screen. I remember my Aleppo of the car breaking down on the Syrian highway, of the kind man in the tow truck stopping to give us a three-hour ride to safety, of him refusing our money because "you have to help a traveler." I remember leaving at dawn alone for the bus station and being shielded from street harassment by the rest of the women there who glared at any men who dared to make eyes at the foreigner traveling solo.

The tragedy is not that I have lost the ability to return there for now; it is that I am able to leave in the first place. Being a foreigner, even if you are a "conflict specialist", especially if you are a "conflict specialist", gives you a parachute. You arrive at your liberty with a return ticket that you will use when you wish or when the situation necessitates. The Aleppo I saw then came with hotel floors that were less dusty than my own body. The Aleppo I witnessed was a direct reflection of my own privilege. My ability to parachute in and out is an outcome of that same privilege. I am ensconced in another hotel room with clean floors, watching the violence from afar, thinking of those without plane tickets out of it.

Pixar's Brave, Continuing and Subverting the Princess Tradition

I am a Disney princess. I have seven Disney princess Barbies (yes, present tense---they’re still stashed in the childhood shrine of my old home closet). My most treasured memories are of my formerly-yearly trips to Disneyland with my parents. I know the entire Menken/Ashman (and Menken/Rice, and Menken/Schwartz) catalogue by heart. That said, as a grown-ass woman with a social sciences degree, I readily recognize some of the problems inherent in the “Disney princess” idea, and the representations of female heroines in Disney movies from the “Golden Age” to the “Renaissance.” Jasmine’s Orientalist harem fantasy outfit. Ariel’s child-bride status. And the fact that, despite ‘80s- and ‘90s-bred themes of rebelliousness and girl power, each film’s resolution involves a marriage accompanied by a happily-ever-after fulfillment.

In the last decade or so, Disney films have made steps in the right direction. Mulan, for example, is a hardcore soldier who risks death by cross-dressing as a man to take her elderly father’s place, and ends up being better at winning battles than any of her male comrades. Tiana, the first black heroine, has the much more grounded, non-fairy-tale goal of opening her own restaurant, which supersedes romance (until, of course, she meets Prince Naveen).

As far as children’s films go, though, Pixar has indubitably taken up Disney’s mantle as the reigning champ, the benchmark (okay, technically Pixar is owned by Disney, but you know--- whatever). And what’s come up in the past decade or so that Pixar’s been releasing feature length movies is: where are the female protagonists?

Now they finally have one.

Merida, the wild-haired heroine of Pixar’s latest offering Brave---its 13^th full-length animated feature---broke new ground for the very fact that she was female; the 12 previous protagonists, whether man or beast or robot or toy, were all male. So Brave represents a break with tradition, a big step forward, and the bonus of a new, strong role model for all the little girls (and boys) of the world, whose parents take them to see Pixar films and who benefit from Pixar’s better-than-children’s-movies storytelling.

That said, I’m really disappointed to admit that I was disappointed in Brave. I mean, it actually kinda breaks my heart. True, my expectations were beyond sky-high. Finding Nemo and Ratatouille are personal favorites, and I honestly think WALL-E and Up are some of the greatest achievements, not just in children’s movies, but in film history.

As many reviewers have already noted, it was a perfectly acceptable film by the standards of its genre. It was beautifully-animated, it was fun, it was sweet. But I’ve come to expect so much more from Pixar. I expect to be surprised and delighted, to have the conventional plot subverted, to see something that no one else has done before. For example, a story that revolves around a haute-cuisine-obsessed rat's ability to control the physical actions of a human chef by strategically pulling on his hair. Or a story that begins with the end of the world. Or the death of a wife.

The story in Brave is in many ways a conventional princess story, though it succeeds in, slightly, turning it on its head. Merida is a Scottish princess approaching womanhood, and as such is bound by tradition to marry the first-born son of one of the area tribes. The respective sons compete in an athletic game for her hand in marriage---a tradition meant to unite the land and maintain friendly relations between tribes.

Merida, of course, resists this tradition. She doesn’t feel ready for marriage, and it’s clear her options aren’t exactly appealing. (In this, her position is reminiscent of Jasmine’s in Aladdin---lame suitors, stubborn princess.) She butts heads with her mother, a loving but stern woman who values tradition and underscores Merida’s responsibility in keeping the kingdom together by marrying.

In the sense that, unlike Aladdin and other princess predecessors, Merida’s story does not have a conventional marriage ending, we are given a feminist reimagining of the traditional narrative. And in the sense that the film’s central relationship is between two women---the sometimes loving, sometimes brutal battle of wills that is the mother-daughter relationship---it is also admirably woman-centered. (And definitely passes the Bechdel test.)

But despite the steps forward in the woman-as-protagonist direction, Brave feels a little like a missed opportunity. The story is weaker than previous Pixar offerings, and it rests on tried-and-true children's-film conventions instead of exploring new territory. It will not go down in the record books as one of the greatest animated films ever made. It might not even get nominated for an Oscar (or at least, it might not win). For all the credit it gets in having the first female protagonist, to do so it still had to revert to a more conventional fairy-tale narrative---albeit one slightly reimagined for modern sensibilities.

I like Merida. I think she’s a great character. She’s tough---she’s a tomboy---she’s uncomfortable submitting to feminine convention---she’d rather be riding her horse, shooting her bow, and climbing precarious cliffs than playing the princess. She is flawed---her temper and her stubbornness make her brash, inconsiderate. She is naïve; she is rebellious. She is interesting, and she is realistic. Worth noting: Merida's mother is also a fantastic character, a woman with her own strengths and weaknesses different from Merida's.

Where the problem lies is that this story has been done before. And while that would have simply been a disappointment if it was just another Pixar movie, the fact that it was a landmark, first-female-protagonist Pixar movie makes that disappointment especially acute. It could have been better. Let’s hope Pixar’s next female protagonist has a film that befits her. And, maybe she doesn’t have to be a princess, either.

bare feet.

It's a particular feeling, the earth beneath your bare feet. For city folk the experience can be rare indeed. In the summertime, I try my best to find clean-enough looking patches of grass to wriggle my toes in, but I'd be lying if I said that the search always offers a kind reward. In the city, even sandals can pose summertime hazards. Spend an afternoon walking in a pair of flip flops, and you'll realize that city feet are perhaps meant to be kept somewhat better protected. For this city-dweller, the lesson isn't easily learned. Despite all prior experience, I've left the house on many mornings having done little more than slip on a pair of leather flip flops and trade one cotton dress I call a nightgown for another that I call a sundress. When I return home mid-morning, a thin black line of grime has already formed at the edge of my heel. At the front door, I kick off my flip flops and tiptoe across my apartment floor. Standing fully clothed in the bathtub, I attack my heels with soap and a pumice stone, scraping off the city street that's made its way onto my heels. More often than not, the water runs gray.

This week, I'm at my parents' house, just two hours from the city but in a place where I was taught that toughened and callused feet were a virtue. In the summertime growing up, my sisters and I would demonstrate our toughness by the ease with which we could walk across a gravel driveway in bare feet. By the beginning of August, we'd winced our way across the pointy stones enough times that our heels had the balls of our feet had formed their own leathery protraction. We giggled behind our hands at out-of-town cousins who took the grassy way around.

I'm getting in as much bare footed time as I can manage, but if my ten year-old self could see the way I just picked my way across the driveway, she'd be cackling.