In Which My Dreams Turn to the U.N.

This has been one of the quarters at work where I find myself thinking of other careers.  Like being a U.N. relief worker.  I daydream of taking crates of food to Africa to bring relief to famine victims.

Sure, I'd have to deal with evil dictators and corrupt militaries.  And I'd probably get sick with strange diseases.  So, maybe not a good idea.

Still, I dream of bringing high nutrient nut paste to the mouths of children.  I find myself thinking of my college friend with whom I used to argue over what form of social justice was most important.  I remember one conversation where she said she could support feeding starving babies because they were truly deserving.

But I'd be happy to bring high nutrient nut paste to starving stomachs anywhere.  At the end of the day, I'd know I saved some lives.

Of course, it isn't that simple.  I may have saved a person's life one day, but it's still band-aid work.  I still won't have solved the larger issue of hunger and starvation.  I won't have changed the social system that leads to it, and I certainly can't change the weather systems that are going to subject us all to ever more extreme weather.

Some day we'll look back on this summer's droughts and we'll laugh at the way we thought they were severe.  That's what scares me.

In the meantime, I have my own band-aid work to be doing.  I'd like to change the larger structure of post-high-school education here in the U.S., but on a daily basis, I've got a department to try to help keep running smoothly.  There are students who need classes and teachers who need students.  It's time to create the schedule for Winter quarter and for our Fall midquarter classes.  The dance continues, and I'll try to keep my Zen teahouse calm (see yesterday's post to understand that concept more fully).

Tuesday Tidbits with Trout and Teahouses

--Overheard last night at the gym:  "Because I'm not psychotic like your bridesmaids.  I can make a rational decision about a dress."  Imagine this said by an athletic, tall, blond, well-muscled but not overmuscled guy in workout clothes.  It struck me as both very funny, very post-modern in terms of overturning gender expectations, and a great writing prompt (who's this guy talking to?  Could it be that he'll be wearing a dress?  is he the groom?  friend of the bride?  former lover of the bride?  oh the possibilities from an overheard tidbit!).

--a reader writes to ask me why I don't have descriptions of what my books are about on my website and blogsites.  Hmm.  The honest answer:  it never occurred to me.  Maybe I'll spend some time this Labor Day week-end thinking about doing a bit of redesign.  I started my blogs and website with several purposes in mind, but one of them is to give information to readers and to inspire interest in my work.  How could I have overlooked something so basic?

--I will also spend this week-end thinking about literary festivals and arranging readings, both local and out of town.

--I will also write a poem before Labor Day Monday is over.  I will write a complete poem.  I will.

--My nephew started kindergarten yesterday.  This morning, I got pictures of him and his new backpack and his brave smiles and his first day coloring in his classroom.  He had a great day yesterday and can't wait to go back today.  I felt this stab of envy and longing.  I remember a time when the classroom was fun, before the accountants and the bean counters and the assessors took over.

--Yup, I will admit the dark humor in that last sentence.  Careful readers of this blog know that I have become one of the bean counters.  I rarely teach in the traditional sense these days.  I am an administrator, and many days, my job consists of wrangling e-mails, most of which weren't important when they were written and almost all will not be important a few months later, when I have to sort through them to keep my e-mail system from shutting down completely.  There are days that I feel I do important work and solve important problems, but not as many of those days as when I taught.  Still, I'm good at administration, and while the world, my world at least, is full of talented teachers, we have far fewer people who are good at administration.

--For those of you who want an insight into the day of an administrator, see this post and scroll down, where I imagine live blogging my day as an administrator who tries to make time for poetry too.

--It's interesting to me that I feel that I only feel I'm doing meaningful work if I'm making an important difference each and every day.  And if I'm being honest, I want it to be an important difference like the kind that Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks made, the kind of difference where future generations will be better off because I walked the planet (and yes, I realize this could sound like monstrous ego, but it's also fueled by a fierce yearning for social justice).  Did Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King feel that they made a difference each and every day?  Probably not.  It's only in retrospect that it's clear.

--I'd like to move towards the Buddhist teahouse approach of meaningful work.  In an interview with Bill Moyers, Jane Hirshfield explains, "Teahouse practice means that you don't explicitly talk about Zen.  It refers to leading your life as if you were an old woman who has a teahouse by the side of the road.  Nobody knows why they like to go there, they just feel good drinking her tea.  She's not known as a Buddhist teacher, she doesn't say, "This is the Zen teahouse."  All she does is simply serve tea--but still, her decades of attentiveness are part of the way she does it.  No one knows about her faithful attention to the practice, it's just there, in the serving of the tea, and the way she cleans the counters and washes the cups" (Fooling with Words:  A Celebration of Poets and Their Craft, page 112).

--You can read a great interview with Jane Hirshfield here.

--If you've got access to trout, here's a fabulous recipe.  The recipe may only be available for one more week, so go download it now.  You won't be sorry.  My spouse made it last night, and it was hard to stop eating it.  He served it with Yukon Gold potatoes that tasted like they had been soaked in butter, but he swears he used no butter.  He likely used the full amount of the sauce, even though we had about half the amount of fish called for.  Yum.  He thinks it would be better with fresh blueberries; he used frozen.  We had a well-chilled Sauvignon Blanc, and I can't imagine a better way to end the day. 

--In fact, it was so tasty, that I'm tempted to begin the day with it, by eating the leftovers.  I suppose I'll be practical and stick to my yogurt-berry smoothie.

My Own Private River Phoenix Sunday

I'm probably the last person in America who hasn't seen Stand by Me, so on Wednesday, when I saw it at the public library, I grabbed it.  Yesterday, I watched it.  Then I wanted to see River Phoenix a bit more grown up, so I watched Running on Empty.

Both films hold up well.  I remember showing Running on Empty to students a few years ago, and being a bit shocked at how much history I had to explain to them.  I paired the movie with the documentary Weather Underground, and I wanted them to write about which one worked better, a true-story documentary or a made up story based on truth.  The assignment should have worked, but it really didn't, in part, I suspect because I was more interested in the subject matter than they'll ever be.  Or maybe I should have tried it again.

It was interesting to see all those various actors at much younger points in their lives, including a very young Keifer Sutherland, before he became a vampire in Lost Boys and later a special agent in 24.  It was interesting to see how the themes wove their ways throughout the films.  And of course, that theme of love and loss, who you can count on and who you can't, that theme was even more bittersweet considering that River Phoenix would be dead of a drug overdose not that many years later.

Sure, we could have gone outside and been more active.  But I feel like I've been going and going and going this summer.  It was nice to take an afternoon, do some cooking and settle down for some movies.

And let me just sing the value of the public library, which I've sung before and which I will again.  When we thought we might be stuck inside for awhile because of hurricane Irene, my spouse and I headed over and checked out an armful of books and DVDs.  Since we were at a smaller branch, we couldn't check out other things that we could have at larger branches, like artwork or music (both the recorded and the sheet music kind).  Linda Holmes writes eloquently about the value of libraries here, and I couldn't agree with her more.

I won't be watching My Own Private Idaho, despite the title of my blog post.  I watched it once, and that was more than enough.  It's time for my River Phoenix festival to end, time to head back to work and regular life.  Regular life--what is that exactly?  Each week at work since July has brought more surprises than the next, and some of them have been unpleasant, to the point that I'm a bit wary.  Regular life--yes, I'd like to be back to a regular life that's free of bad news about numbers and cancellations and impending storms of doom and other catastrophic weather.  Yes, regular boring life--that sounds good to me right now.

Safety Saturday Slivers

Yesterday was a day when I spent a lot of time thinking about safety:

--Those of you who have been reading this blog know that I've been somewhat obsessed with Hurricane Irene and earthquakes and other signs of impending doom.  Let us not forget the drought in Texas, as many parts of Texas shattered heat and drought records in the past week.  People complain about the heat in South Florida, but our record breaking highs are 94-96 degrees, not 114 degrees.

And then there's the catastrophe in Africa, both the one going on now, and the ones in the past.  For part of the day, I listened to a story on a program broadcast on my public radio station about a mother in the wrong place at the wrong time in Rwanda in 1994, and her desperate attempt to make it to Zaire.  Yikes.

--We got news of the death of Stetson Kennedy, who took great risks to his personal safety to expose the evil of the Klan.  He was 94 years old and had lived a good life.  Still thinking about his life and the ways that our society is better because of people like him leads me to wonder if I'm too concerned about my own safety (health insurance!  a steady income!).  How would our society be better if more of us started thinking of the common good?

I'm lucky because I got to meet Stetson Kennedy a few years ago; go here for my photo essay about that encounter.

--I spent the better part of the morning crafting a safe space policy for our church.  We're switching insurers, and we need to have an official policy:  spelling out abusive behavior that isn't allowed, a process that will be followed should abuse occur, a screening process for volunteers and employees, ways we'll try to avoid leaving ourselves open to abuse and liability.

In the process, I looked over a lot of these documents from other church bodies, and felt my emotions shutting down at the thought of all the risks we face, particularly if we're minors.  How I wish we didn't have to think about these things.  How I wish we lived in a world where people didn't prey on little children.

I know that documents like the one I'm creating make that world closer to reality.  I know that churches of my childhood never considered that abuse could occur, and that left a lot of us vulnerable.  I'm lucky in that I never experienced abuse at church--but I can't close my eyes to all the people who did.

--Needing to take a break from crafting a safety statement, I went out to buy a car booster seat for my not-so-little nephew who will be visiting soon.  For the past few years, we've had a car seat for him that we kept down here.  For awhile, I kept it in the car, for reasons that weren't quite clear to me.  Did I like being reminded of him every time I came to the car?  Was it a pain in the butt to install in the car?  Did I like being seen as a woman young enough to have a small child?  Was it easier to store it in the car than the house?

Yes.

So, I contacted a woman on Craig's List and agreed to meet her in the Lowe's parking lot.  In some ways, you could see that as a risk, but it felt safe to me.  She wasn't likely to show up with a gun and rob me in broad daylight.

And I worried that I wasn't exactly sure what I was buying, but I decided to trust the box.  When I got home, it did appear to have been unopened.

--And then, of course, my spouse and I had a bit of a laugh at the memory of the cars of our young childhoods, where our parents just had us clamber in the back seats, back seats that often had no seat belts.  For years, my parents had a 67 VW bug, an unsafe car if ever there was one.  Yet we survived just fine.

Still, I don't want to go back to those less safe days.  Let there be safety statements in our nation's churches, let there be car safety seats for our infants.  Let there be brave writers who go undercover to expose evil.  Let there be brave mothers who walk across a country to save their babies and then are brave enough to tell the tale.  Let there be emergency preparedness that we may never fully need.

On this day, decades ago, Martin Luther King delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech.  It's a good day to think about our own dreams, both for our little children and for our larger society.  We change the planet just by existing upon it, so we might as well try to change it for the better.

Hunker Down in Solidarity!

We have a sunny, hot day in store--very different from what the rest of the East Coast will be experiencing.

I feel an odd envy, similar to what I feel when a big blizzard sweeps through the north.  Even though I know that lots of people will not be having fun as trees crash to the ground and power goes off, I miss that feeling of having to relax and stay in the house.

On a similar note, I love being up very early in the morning.  People ask me, "How can you stand to wake up at 3 or 4 in the morning?"  There's a peacefulness to that early hour.  Most stores are closed, and no one will be calling me.  The world is sound asleep, but I'm blazing with energy--and there's nothing to distract me from my writing desk.  I can't do the grocery shopping, and I don't want to disturb my sleeping spouse by doing household chores.

Maybe I'll have a pretend hurricane day.  It's a strange time when my sister in inland Maryland is facing a worse hurricane than I am--not to mention New York City being under hurricane warning.

My sister plans to make pizza and watch movies--at least until the power goes out.

So, in solidarity with her, I, too, will make pizza and watch movies.  I've gotten some writing tasks done, and perhaps I'll do more.  Maybe I'll read.  Maybe I'll take a nap.  Maybe 2 naps!

Since I'm not really facing a hurricane, I won't fill up the bathtub with water.  If you're hunkering down for real, don't forget to fill up your bathtub and any empty container you've got.  You may think you won't lose water, but as trees come crashing down, the roots can rip out water lines as they come up.  If you lose water, you will need more water than you think you will.

If you do nothing else, get out your flashlights and candles before the power goes out.  Most of us keep our storm supplies in closets, closets which will be dark when the power goes out.

Yes, it's a good day to hunker down.  The week-end before Labor Day--a good time to think about Autumn, and all we hope to accomplish.  Make a list so you'll remember.  It's a good time to sort through closets.  Go ahead and get rid of all those clothes you haven't worn in the past few years.

Or maybe that's too energetic for you.  It's a good day to hibernate, to store up our energies for what's to come.  I've been feeling peaked this week.  In a way, it makes sense.  I've spent the summer working out very hard.  It's been a tough time at work.  The heat is getting to me now.  I have that scratchy throat feeling that's telling me that germs are trying to establish a foothold.

Listening to my body or listening to my laziness?  Hunkering down or rejuvenating? 

Here's hoping that Irene is not as bad as we expect.  Here's hoping that we all emerge blinking into Monday sunlight, saying, "I needed that rest."

Creative Responses to Awe(Terror?)-Inspiring Storms

We have dodged a bullet, as they say, down here at the tip of the U.S.  I spent the day marvelling that a category 3 hurricane was just to our east, and yet, our weather wasn't too terrible.  We had a few periods of intense, wind-driven rain, but we've had worse in thunderstorms.

I fear the rest of the East Coast will not be so lucky.  What a terrifying storm.

As a poet/writer/artist, I've always found these storms inspirational.  I know that I'm not the only one.  We had a local quilt show once, and after our disastrous hurricane season of 2005, the quilt show challenge was to create a quilt with hurricanes as theme.  We were given two swatches of material that we had to use, along with a variety of requirements (I seem to remember being required to use two buttons).

At the quilt show, I marvelled at the variety of responses.  Clearly our losses had not dampened our creativity.

I used to write more poems with hurricanes as the central image.  Lately, hurricanes aren't showing up in my poems as much.  Is that because I've used up all my ideas about them?  Have I exhausted their symbolic potential?  Or is it because I have other subjects on the brain?

For those of you wanting/needing a theological treatment, feel free to migrate to this post on my theology blog, where I wrestle with the question of praying for deliverance from hurricanes.

For those of you on the East Coast who aren't used to preparing for hurricanes, here's my advice for you:  should you lose water, you will need more water than you think you will.  You may be thinking of canned goods, but you probably have enough food, and besides, if you lose power, you'll need to eat all the stuff in the fridge and freezer.  No, you'll need water.  Fill the bathtub(s), and if you have doubt about the quality of your bathtub stopper, wrap it in plumber's tape.  Fill every container you've got.  If you lose water, conserve, conserve, conserve.  Flush only once or twice a day.  Let the kids and the males pee in the yard. 

For those of you saying, "Yuck, now she's really crossed the line with this talk of urinating on the lawn," let's turn our attention to poetry.  Here's a poem to remind you that even if you suffer in the hurricane aftermath, you may have happy memories in the end.  It appears in my new chapbook, I Stand Here Shredding Documents.


Land of the Lost


Several decades ago, we bought
backpacking equipment with an eye
towards future years and yeastier finances
when we could afford to hike for weeks.

Post-graduate jobs and family and houses swamped
those plans. We used to love
to sleep under the stars. Now we only see
the stars when a major storm
extinguishes the electricity.
The boots bought to protect
our feet as we traversed a continent
now shield our soles as we clear
away downed trees.

We eat our campstove-cooked
meals around a table lit with candles.
We eat the last of our defrosted
meats salvaged from our dripping freezer.
The children view this event as a treat, a holiday,
a taste of a world lost to them.
The girls pretend they’re pioneers on a prairie,
while their brother declares himself an Indian brave.

And our family, who had become so fragmented
that our only time to eat together was in the car,
we sit and eat and talk about nothing consequential.
With electronics silenced, we listen to the birds signal
their readiness for sleep. We watch
the sun sink towards the sea. The children,
who usually must be coerced to load the dishwasher,
fight over who gets to wash
the dishes in the grill-warmed water.

Swirls in the Atmosphere; Meteorologist Dreams

It's very strange to have a category 3 hurricane so close to us, yet no watches or warnings, and not even very much rain yet.  I think some of the outermost band is over us.

I just got back from the beach, where I did a jog/walk/lean kind of exercise.  My skin should be very soft, since I've had a spa-like sand abrasion.

I can see the atmosphere swirling as I look to the sky--a literal swirling.  The only time I felt fear this morning was as a band of dark clouds moved over me, and I felt a current of very cold air, as if someone had left the door to the refrigerator open.  I thought, I may have miscalculated this morning's weather.

But I made it back to the car with very little rain falling on me.  Again, very strange to have such a huge storm nearby with so little rain making it to us.

I feel a thrill, watching weather as it happens.  This morning, I thought, maybe I should be a meteorologist!  But that's probably a bum dream too--lots of budget cuts there.  And I would need many years of school.  No, I'll continue with the family trade of amateur meteorology.  My grandmother has always watched the weather religiously, as do her children, and this grandchild.  I've always wondered if that trait comes out of her farming background, where those swirls in the atmosphere spelled success or doom for the family finances.

Not surprisingly, weather finds its way into my poems.  If you find yourself writing about weather, check out Leslie's post where she tells us about some journals planning issues based on weather.

I remember our first hurricane watch down here, where I watched the clouds curling through the sky.  I've lived near the coast before, in Charleston, SC, but I never saw the atmosphere snaking around itself in quite the same way.

That was a year of many storms (1998):  Georges and Mitch seemed most ominous.  We got free tickets to a Marlins game because one of my spouse's coworkers had season tickets, but when one of the hurricane watches changed to a warning, they decided to stay home and board up the windows instead.  We had great seats, seats we never would have afforded on our own.  We sat near a woman from Houston who couldn't decide whether or not to worry about the storm.  We told her not to worry.  When I caught one of the baseballs, I gave it to her.

I say caught, but the baseball really just fell on me.  It's not like I have any skill in catching baseballs.

In a much earlier year, we were in Jacksonville for the Jazz Festival when a hurricane threatening North Carolina sent magnificent waves our way.  We battled the surf for about an hour before calling it quits.

More people die during U.S. hurricanes from drowning because of rip tides than any other reason.  It's foolish to go into the surf.  Back then, we were young and stupid.  Now, I stay out of the water.

One year (1999 or 2000), we had a category 1 storm blow up out of nowhere.  It developed so quickly it didn't even get a name.  We lost a tree to that one.  We spent the night hearing the branches go thunk, thunk, thunk.  The head of the tree removal crew had "I AM BECOME DEATH" tatooed across the top of his back.  On that same day, from the gay guys' apartment complex on the next street, I could hear disco music, The Village People and Donna Summer, in an endless loop, interrupted by the buzzing chain saws from the tree crew.  Very surreal.

Hurricanes make normal life a bit surreal.  In some ways, that's why I like a weather disruption--it takes me out of my normal routine.  I don't regularly spend a lot of time staring at the sky.  Hurricanes remind me of why I like to do that and why I should do it more often, even if I'm not a meteorologist. 

I much prefer hurricanes that only wink at us as they hurry on by.  I'm glad we're not dealing with impact.  But even the aftermath of a hurricane, with all its disruptions, makes me cherish regular life again.  After our disastrous hurricane season of 2005, I savored my coffee each and every morning.  Even more, I felt intense gratitude for the ability to heat up that cooled cup of coffee in the microwave.

If you're further up the coast, good luck with the storm prep.  Add extra lines to the boat.  You're going to need them.  Start making ice.  Get the fridge good and cold now.  Fill up the gas tanks.  Do it now, before the spirit of chaos takes over.

(a nod to Sandy, who inspired part of the title of this post, with this post of hers)