Hurricane Depletion

I had started the summer off feeling flat and dipping toward hopelessness. If you know me, hope is something I have in spades. I am generally optimistic about how things will play out, whether or not I am in control. I am a risk-taker. People ask me what I am worried about and I say, "Not enough." I am not wired to fear that things will go terribly wrong; I am only wired to blithely make the first move and see if this batter I am whipping up makes a good enough birthday cake. The strangest thing about my early summer hopelessness was that I couldn't pinpoint the source. There were no health issues or looming bills we couldn't pay; no one close to me had died and I didn't even have to teach. This was summer, that rosy-cheeked girl that lives for poolside lemonade.

Still, I woke up every day thinking, This is all there is? Why even try? Why not just go back and take a nap.

*** I am at Nerd Camp now and it is on the campus of a Benedictine university. Last night we went to evening prayer with the monks. We have been assigned Brother John who will give us a tour of the Abbey afterward. Brother John  sits next to me and I can tell he is irritated that I don't follow numbered pages well. I like Brother John, and I like that our group has its own monk. Our monk. Prayer begins and it is clear I am a poor candidate for the Benedictine monastery. The contemplative prayer, the reciting of verses slowly--I have to pull from my deep-think reserves to abide this. But as we sit, I start to invent pictures in my head of what is being said in the Psalms we are reciting. I start to welcome the silence less as a threat and more as a space to breathe.

*** I ask my colleague Andy to promise me he won't keep sending me freelance work through his colleagues. I say, "You know I can't say 'no' to these pastors! It's like saying 'no' to Jesus!"

Andy says, "No. Jesus says, 'Come and rest awhile.' Also, I have no problem saying 'no' to them :)'"

*** I sit on the amazing couch and I tell the therapist that the hopelessness has been fading little by little and that I think I know what it was all about. It had blown in with the hurricane of finishing the semester and having to move and then having all kinds of new work to do. I was just tired. My faith was strong but my body was just.so.tired.

***

"Why am I soft in the middle
The rest of my life is so hard"

- Paul Simon, "You Can Call Me Al"

*** The therapist tells me I should give the end of the semester times a name, like we name hurricanes. That way, I can recognize the storm when it appears on my radar and I can anticipate it and batten down the hatches and know what is happening, because it's about to flatten me and leave me scrounging for resources as I rebuild.

So I have named this time Hurricane Depletion. And right now, at Nerd Camp, I am glad to be out of its path.

A new age of injustice: Chutes and Ladders

I know that Chutes and Ladders has had to make some serious reparations over the years. People (who enjoy counting) figured out that past iterations of the game rewarded the behaviors exhibited by boy characters on the board more than girls. I am sure we could stack a great many other racist, sexist, and ageist allegations against C&L, but for $5 at Tarjay, I was thinking this was just a really solid investment. Plus, if you lose the game pieces, you can just replace them with gummi bears, which does not appear to be the case with, say, Wii Disney Princess Enchanted Castle. Little Man really took to C&L and we spent a good 30 minutes or so navigating the acts of service and moral falls of our two game pieces: Punk Rock Asian Girl and Toe-Head Crewcuts Boy. I was impressed that Little Man really got the concept of direct consequences for certain actions, because he kept landing on spaces where he was "just thinking" at the end of a chute. There are many ponderous faces on the playing board of C&L -- I guess pre-schoolers these days are just emo, yo. We had several good chats about how one did not just land at the movies, one actually has to work to earn a living so she can pay for her movie ticket, and also for that of her son. This did not compel my 4 year-old counterpart to go get a job, so I guess I am still stuck with a high-maintenance movie buddy. Whatevs. It was good bonding time.

Then I really examined the actual crimes and punishments illustrated on the board and I have to say...the government of Chutes and Ladders Land is operating as one really wack meritocracy.

Take for example the longest chute on the board, demoting a game piece a good seven rows for the high crime of reaching for the oft-desired cookie jar.

And yet, the shattered pottery seems to be the worst outcome of precariously perching oneself to get the illicit cookie. It's not the consequence of possibly breaking a bone or being sneaky instead of asking. We're taking chutes to our disgrace because the totally replaceable clay pot we bought on clearance Homegoods is in humpty dumpty pieces.

Then there's the happy-go-lucky lad who rides evil knevil on his two-wheeler, showing off sans helmet. He rides that bike down a measly little one-row chute, and lands with a busted looking eye and only a wheel for a souvenir. Hmm. I'm going to call bologna on the judge here, because if this brazen chap doesn't have a concussion, he should really be doing some hard time. He could have caused a crash and nothing tears down pride of folly more than a long ride down a long chute.

Then, here's a juxtaposition of chute and ladder that seems to have turned the scales of justice upside-down. Yay for baking a cake for your birthday. Yay for eating it all by yourself. Yay for child obesity! As long as you're not spending your idle time reading. Yeegads! Down with literacy. Take that chute on down to where the reader losers go. Only, how can you follow that cake recipe if you can't read I wonder? Ah, that Justice, no wonder she's a blind one.

Oh, and finally we're back with another blondie who also can't seem to keep a steady step. She's trying to balance too many plates at once. We once again revisit C&L's fixation with shattering pottery because blondie rides another long chute to the punitive pit of plateware in pieces. I wish kids would just learn not to unload the dishwasher and not put dishes away, but rather just go eat some cake?

Remembrance: St. Raphael Church

My great grandparents, Edward and Katherine Stanton, helped to secure the land for St. Raphael Church; my grandparents, Robert and Eleanor Stanton, donated desks to the school. My family was a part of a larger family that dreamed about this institution in Bay Village, Ohio, much as parents anticipate the birth of a baby and look forward with equal parts joy and trepidation in raising it to maturity.

My father and my uncles served as altar boys, flung themselves off of the bygone merry-go-round on the playground behind the school.  In his eighth grade year, my father faced his father's coffin, the words of Father Zwilling still echo in his head, trying to offer a young man comfort on a day that brought so much pain.

My parents moved us back to Bay Village in my sixth year. I launched into first grade mid-semester, sporting the polyester pleats, sitting at a too-big desk in the same building where my father and his brothers made mischief just beyond the gaze of Sr. Concetta and Sr. Mary John.  My father still praises the nuns and lay teachers whose longsuffering, underpaid service taught hundreds of thousands of children to read and write and genuflect before a Cross.

In that building and in the shadows of its mellow orange brick, it seems I learned all the things that I could ever learn in a lifetime: how to circumnavigate a bully, how to shoot a basketball, how to comfort a friend whose parents were divorcing, how to play four-square.

I learned in that church how to marvel at Jesus, His sacrifice.  The most anguish-inducing Crucifix hung at the front of St. Raphael's. No punches have been pulled from the suffering on the Cross and it was at a young and impressionable age that this imprint was made on my heart, that sin was responsible for all of that, and that I was a part of it. I pondered this and went back to singing "Color the world with gladness/color the world with joy..." reading lyrics off a pastel song sheet, sitting elbow to elbow, packed like sardines into school mass during Lent.

I made my first communion in that church, I confessed to treating my sister terribly, I confirmed that I wanted to become a Catholic for life. My mother met her husband there; they were married in the convent chapel with their families all around.

The summer after I graduated from high school, my sister and I were in a musical of "Godspell" that our youth ministry performed in that church. My counterparts have gone on to earn Tony nominations and write plays and edit comic books for major publishers. But at the time, we were all still a ball of hormones and wobbling voices and we loved every moment together. We encountered discipleship there in the pews where we practiced and we felt a Spirit move us in ways that are hard to explain among all the other feels you are feeling when you are 17.  None of us was old enough to vote but we felt, many of us for the first time, that maybe our wobbling voices did matter in this church, that we did have a stake in its future. It was one of the best things I did, not only in high school, but ever.

What I didn't know at the time of trying to belt out "Day by Day" and "All Good Things" on a makeshift stage at the front of St. Raphael's, wearing too much makeup when performing "Godspell" in 1998 was that I was actually saying good-bye to that place. I have since visited St. Raph's for Christmas mass and for my uncle and my grandmother's funerals. My faith has evolved to one that suits me better, though, and I am no longer a member of the Catholic church. My faith is forever informed, though, by what I learned in that church and in that school, a place that held me and grew me and blessed me.

As the wrecking balls take to the framework of St. Raphael's, I know that a church is not a building but a group of people, doing their level best to worship and serve together. The building that rises up in its wake--bigger, better, more modern, more inclusive--does not replace the history but continues it in a different space that will hold new sounds, new tears from eighth graders, convinced they will never see one another again. Little do those eighth graders know that 20 years later, they will meet at a bar down the road from where they threw spitballs at the ceiling of their classrooms, and they will hug and laugh and take pictures and see how the wrecking balls of life haven't felled them yet, how construction crews can disassemble a building or knock down a brick wall, but they can never steamroll our memories which are, it turns out, stronger and 20 years as sweet.