Summer Then, Summer Now

A year ago I'd be getting ready to head over to the VA hospital for my first day of CPE, Clinical Pastoral Education.  I blogged about it during my first week, then it was brought up in a group meeting that I was blogging my positive observations, that VA officials higher up the chain were monitoring.  I was writing on my own computer, during my off hours, so I decided to be even more careful.  I didn't use the VA computers for anything other than entering patient notes and checking VA e-mail.

So, for future scholars, reading last summer's blog posts, wondering why I wasn't writing more, there's the story.  I did some offline journaling during the summer, but for the most part, I was too exhausted by being a VA Hospital chaplain to do too much in the way of writing at all.

I'm still not sure why this kind of training is seen as essential for ordination in the ELCA version of the Lutheran church.  Chaplaincy is VERY different from visiting parishioners in the hospital.  Throughout last summer, I kept thinking, what, exactly, am I supposed to be learning here?

While I liked all of the people I met during my CPE experience, I have not kept in touch with any of them.  It's strange, in a way--we do have a lot in common, even outside of our shared CPE summer.  But I am old enough now that I can't keep in touch with friends in the deep way I would like--there's just too many people to call every week or to see once a month.  So I'm rarely adding more.

CPE made for a strange summer, and it came crashing to an unexpected close when my mom got very sick with pneumonia; she was much closer to dying than we knew at the time.

This summer is very different, and I'm grateful.  I'm teaching more online classes, so I'm not having a complete summer off.  We've got a house that needs attention, 2 houses really.  But even with the pivots and plotting that a fixer-upper requires, there's still more down time.  I don't need to be at a hospital for 9 hours a day.  I have time for other interests, time to see friends, for example.  I'm still feeling overwhelmed at times, but I'd rather be overwhelmed by home repair timelines than by patients with life threatening issues.

The Morning After the Tony Awards

I have just spent a delightful smidge of time reading about the Tony awards.  Once I wouldn't have had to read newspaper accounts; once, in long ago teenage years, I would have stayed up late to watch the awards show.

I don't remember a time when I wasn't interested in drama as a genre (as opposed to drama as a lifestyle?).  I was in plays throughout elementary school, and I was that strange kid that also wrote plays--and performed them.  I loved making puppets and putting on puppet shows.  For Christmas one year, I got a puppet theatre, which was three boards with hinges and a square opening--and a curtain!

So perhaps it seems inevitable that at some point, I'd think about becoming an actress as a career plan.  I first decided this in 7th grade, and in 9th grade, my best friend and I planned to go to NYC as roommates when we graduated from college.  She had recently moved from New Jersey to Charlottesville, Virginia, and was homesick.  I had recently moved and was impatient for grown up life to start.

I read every play I could get my hands on (often out loud, in my room, choosing one character and reading only those parts out loud) and bought the soundtracks to Tony nominated musicals.  Occasionally, I went to see plays--during most of my childhood, we lived in places with community theatre or university drama department offerings.  In those days, seeing Broadway traveling shows meant a trip to larger cities like Atlanta or Washington D.C., which we did occasionally.

This year, unlike other years, I read about last night's Tony awards, and most of the names of the plays are familiar to me.  In part, it's because many of the nominees are revivals or shows based on earlier works, some dramas or musicals (like Cats), some not (like The Lost Boys, based on the movie from 1987).  I also worry that we're in a thin period for theatre, where fewer shows make it to the stage or stay there long, so it means that people like me have less to keep track of from a distance, if we try to keep track through the years.

I am happy that I didn't try to make my childhood love into a grown up career--Broadway has not been kind to women, particularly older women.  I am happy that this childhood love of drama continues to make me happy, even as I don't always go to see live theatre or even read plays.  I do want to make a mid-year intention to read more plays, beginning with Bess Wohl, who won last night for Liberation.

Short Story Inspirations and "Mrs. Dalloway"

On Friday, I headed to Columbia to see my grad school friend who had a catastrophic stroke 2 years ago and now lives in a skilled nursing unit.  After that visit, I went to a different grad school friend, my upstairs neighbor in long-ago grad school days.  We are both writers, both college English teachers, both on life paths similar and different.

Lately she's been attending a Shut Up and Write group, which has been working for her in all sorts of ways.  I keep thinking I might go with her on a Friday when her group meets.  I'm also thinking it might make an interesting experiment for my own writing classes that I teach.

As I've been driving these past few days, I had an idea for my idea that I had a year ago on the 100 year anniversary of the publication of Mrs. Dalloway.  I wrote about it in this blog post:  "Now I am thinking of new projects, a new narrative that might weave the voice of an older woman in seminary, a younger woman teaching section after section of freshman comp in a community college, a middle aged woman struggling to write poems around the edges of her administrator job--and yes, they would all be me."

Throughout the past year, this idea has bubbled back up periodically and then simmered right back down.  I have not had the time or focus to write a novel.

And then, on Friday, I thought, why not write linked short stories?  Write a short story for each year of my past 30 years and then choose the best.  I would probably not play with time; I would probably organize the stories chronologically.  So the fact that the characters in the blog post description are the same would not be a surprise.

I immediately felt tired at the amount of short stories if I had to write one per year--so I immediately decided that I didn't have to do each year.  I did wonder about perspective--if I'm writing a story set in 1995, can I use knowledge that doesn't come for another 20 years?

On my drive yesterday, I thought about a different approach.  I could write stories by way of subject.  I wrote one such story as a requirement for a seminary class, which I wrote about at the end of this blog post.  That story used fairy tales as a jumping off point to talk about beauty and self image and other stories, like the Little House books, that girls often read, along with boiling water in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene.  

Some subjects I thought about:

--shoes:  hiking boots and camouflage high tops

--the habit of buying fixer-uppers

--tea practices

--various books could serve as jumping off points, the ones we read in grad school or in childhood and the surprising intersections

--journaling and blogging and the types of writing that aren't always valued by grad school professors

--the oat bran muffins I made in grad school, the muffins sold in the coffee shop in the basement of the humanities office building

--all sorts of baking

--nutrition developments through the years

--a wide variety of religious/theological issues

--and then there's all the music

--yearning for graduate studies even after getting a PhD

I love the idea of short stories instead of a work that has a long narrative arc across 200-300 pages. It's an idea that's much more manageable with my current commitments.  Maybe in retirement I'll return to to writing traditional novels. 

Annual Dinner with Camp Counselors

Last night, we had dinner with the Lutheridge and Lutherock camp counselors.  We've done it before, and I always come away impressed.  The neighborhood community who lives in the residential section of Lutheridge brings a variety of desserts, and the camp provides burgers and hot dogs, chips and beverages.

We sat with a guy who's finishing the fall semester and then headed to Duke Divinity school and another senior staffer who hopes to come back for another summer or two before he said he probably should find a regular job.  I said, "Or you could continue working in outdoor ministries year round."

Happily, no one was there to point out the shrinking job opportunities in that field.  I will never understand why the larger church doesn't do more to help/commit to campus and outdoor ministries.  The counselors I spoke to last night are full of hope for all the ways their futures might unfold.  I've found that my SMC students are similarly optimistic.  It's refreshing.

Before the dinner, I spent the day trying to fix my course shell for my online class at Spartanburg Methodist College.  The book has changed editions (again--sigh), so the references to the book page numbers that students find in the assignments and discussion posts are wrong.  Ugh.  I'm teaching someone else's course, and so it's not intuitive to me, the way I would have if I had created it all--it takes more time to diagnose problems and fix them.

I also did some baking--I decided to bring a gluten free, dairy free dessert.  It worked beautifully.  It's an almond-coconut concoction, and I want to record it here:

1 C. sugar

3 eggs

1 1/2 C. almond flour (or grind up a lot of almonds into as fine a powder as possible)

1 1/2 C. coconut (I used sweetened and unsweetened in 2 different experiments--no difference)

Whip the sugar and eggs until tripled in volume or until tired of the noise of the mixer.  Fold in the almond flour and the coconut.  Pour in a 9 inch cake pan lined with parchment paper and greased or in cupcake pan.  Bake at 350 for 25ish minutes.  You can only tell if it's done by color--a golden, light brown color.  It will be sticky and delicious.  It keeps at room temperature for days, although the crispiness of the crust declines.

The Tiredness of Being Grounded

I woke up feeling tired--and why?  We spent much of yesterday at our Spartanburg fixer-upper, but we weren't doing the hard-on-the-body work of home remodel.  We were there for experts to come and evaluate various systems.

Yes, most people do this before buying a property, but we had a sense of what would be needed without needing a home inspector to tell us.  Now it's time to figure out a timeline.  So yesterday we had a plumbing team and an HVAC guy and an electrician come to the house.  It was a lot of waiting.

This morning, I thought, yes, it's been a long time since I had to be in a physical location for 9 hours.  The visits between experts were spaced out, which was great, since we could give our individual attention to each system under analysis.  It was exhausting in the unique way that waiting for home repair specialists is exhausting.

Before I went to bed, I took some ibuprofen.  Why were my arthritic feet so achy?  I have no idea, but they were.  They are not as achy today.

Now it is time to get on with the tasks of each week which don't involve a fixer-upper:  sermon writing, online teacher tasks, food prep.  Let me get my walk in before inertia takes over.

Memory Whisps from Last Week's Travel to the High Country of NC

Before we get too far away from our travels of last week, let me record some memories that I don't want to slip away.  We went to a different part of the North Carolina mountains, near Boone.  We were there for the wedding of my spouse's sister's oldest child.  The wedding was beautiful, of course, but there were other beautiful moments:

--On Monday night, we went to Parallel Brewing in Boone for a rehearsal dinner/party.  Do they brew beer?  I don't know.  Did I taste it?  No.  I wanted wine to go with the pizza.  Was any of the wine memorable enough to make note of what it was?  No.

--I was much more interested in Huzzah Books, which shares the building with Parallel Brewing.  We could go back and forth, which made the party better--more space.

--I also loved lingering among the books, which seemed to be used books from decades when publishers were more serious about publishing.  I found a book of "best new poetry" published in 1960 or so.  The names were fairly familiar and all male, except for Adrienne Rich.

--One of our younger family members (21 or so) was thrilled to find a book by Jane Kenyon.  I was thrilled that she was thrilled.

--We didn't do more in Boone.  We spent most of our time visiting with family members on the front porches of our cabins.  If it had been clearer weather, we'd have had a glorious view.

--I did love seeing the fog/mist move across the land, only to vanish.  Once again, I thought about how humans might come to believe in ghosts.

--I was disappointed that we didn't have a clear view of the night sky.  I wanted that non-light polluted view.  But we did have lovely nights on the porch, watching the mist, listening to frogs and insects.  And we saw fireflies, which I associate with much later in the summer.

--I'm not usually awake much past 8:30 or 9 these days, but for two evenings last week, I had normal-ish adult bedtimes.

--It was great to have a get away that was much closer.  We were home after a 2.5 hour drive.

Songs and Other American Experiments

It's Tuesday, and I began as I almost always do on a Tuesday, reading Dave Bonta's Poetry Blog Digest, which almost always takes me in interesting directions.  This morning, it's been a bit of a trip down memory lane, courtesy of Shawna LeMay's blog post which mentioned Bruce Springsteen's "Downbound Train."

She quoted lyrics, which I didn't remember from the song:

"Now I work down at the car wash
Where all it ever does is rain
Don't you feel like you're a rider
On a downbound train?"

So of course, I went in search of the song, which instantly catapulted me back to the fall of 1984, when the album Born in the USA came out.  I bought it at Wal-Mart, along with a fan for my dorm room.  A few weeks later, my boyfriend went back to Memphis where his mom needed him.  He'd been wearing my DC101 (a rock radio station) jacket that my sister had won somehow and given to me.  That jacket smelled of sweat and the Players cigarettes that he smoked, and I wore it all fall, feeling sad as my smells replaced his.

It was a different time, the results of a different election, daylight in America, brutal regimes across the globe, and when people wonder why I'm not as hopeless in 2026 as I might be, it's because I remember past time when I couldn't imagine how humanity would survive--and here we are, surviving this history that is not repeating but rhyming, a slant rhyme, to be sure, or maybe just a history so full of allusions that it's hard to read.

I wrote so many letters in the fall of 1984, actual letters on paper, back when long distance phone calls were expensive, and the only phone I had was the one at the end of my dorm hallway, where those of us with long distance relationships talked to distant loves.  My half of the correspondence filled a dresser drawer.  My boyfriend's letters took up a shoe box.

I married him anyway.  And now, here we are, decades later.  On Sunday we watched some PBS presentation on the American experiment, featuring Ken Burns talking about his documentaries.  It was fairly recent with the focus on the Revolution in 1776, and my spouse bleakly said, "It's all over."  I think he meant the grand experiment of freedom, and I said, "No, it's not."  I was talking about the American experiment of revolution and self-governance, with piercing awareness of all the ways that the foundational documents of the USA have not borne fruit--and all the ways they have.

We were well into the second bottle of wine on Sunday, so we didn't discuss further.  But it's a conversation we've been having since 1983 when we first met, so we didn't really need words.

This morning, some lines came to me, as I've been reading and writing:

We are half drunk with disappointment,
fueled by sundrenched picnics and longing,
and you declare the great experiment
dead, and I say no.

Schooled on Springsteen
and Woody Guthrie,
and the songs of enslaved people,
I know that times have always been hard.

I've begun the poem, but I don't know where it leads--like so many elements in my life.  The YouTube algorithm has given me delightful songs from the Springsteen starting point.  It's been a delightful morning, as Tuesdays so often are, rooted in the words (and rabbit holes) of others.