ramblings

Yesterday I bought a pair of exercise pants.  They were $31.45, including tax, from the discount store.  Those of you who know me will know that I rarely pay so much for any article of clothing, particularly one that I can’t wear to work.

I bought them for several reasons.  Partly I bought them because I could–having at long last paid off the last of my credit card debt (to which I have been contributing several hundred dollars a month for several years), I suddenly have a little bit more money, and so buying things that seem frivolous is a possibility.  (I bought two CDs the other day, too–used, of course, but new to me.)  Partly I bought them because I am, on occasion, a victim of fashion.  But mostly I bought them because, although it is possible for me to wear my too-small sweatpants or my too-streched-out biker shorts to go run on the elliptical machine at the Rec, it’s not particularly comfortable.  It doesn’t make me think, “Oh, how I long to wear clothing that doesn’t fit me well so I can go burn calories!”  (The too-small sweatpants might, I suppose, be a motivation, but they’re also hot and a little too short even when they’re not too tight.)  The new exercise pants do make me feel that way.

Of course, they also make me feel silly.  I’ve always believed that exercise was something one shouldn’t set out to do–it was simply something one should acquire in the course of the day.  In the days when I walked dogs for three or four hours a day, or when I taught one or two college classes a semester and had many hours to walk everywhere, that wasn’t difficult.  But now that I work eight hours a day in a library, the only real excercise I get during the course of the day is a little bit of lift that barge, tote that bail when we move books and AV materials from one library to another.

I’d love to be one of those people who gets up and goes out for a morning jog, but (aside from my total lack of desire to do anything so strenuous in the morning), I can’t run–it’s too hard on my back.  And walking enough to get real excercise takes hours.  Enter the elliptical machine.  Enter the dark Satanic mills.  Enter the excercise pants.  Enter my seduction by capitalism.  Oh well.

I’ve never much cared for candy, at least not of the sort you get on Halloween (maple sugar candy?–sure, truffles?–lovely, Butterfingers?–entirely missable).  The holiday itself, though, I adored.

My town’s big Halloween event–a chili supper and dessert auction hosted by the FFA–is going on right now.  I’m hoping I get some trick-or-treaters or I’ll feel really irked about having shelled out $10 for candy (a bargain, I realize–we routinely spent several times that when I lived in the ‘burbs).

What I loved about Halloween was partly the costumes, but what I really loved was running around at night.  (I loved running around at night so much that I figured out a way to get paid for it when I was in college, a feat I haven’t managed since).

For four glorious years, from third through sixth grades, I went out and about at night with one or another of my friends, and we roamed through the neighborhood, sizing up the houses, sizing up eachother, sizing up the other groups and gangs of kids out doing the same thing.  Halloween was wonderful not because of the candy, and not even because of the costumes, though I loved the costumes.  It was wonderful because kids were in charge.  We were all over, and we were in control of the night.

Or so it seemed.

Really, of course, we only got that impression because we were fortunate enough to live in a place where our parents believed we could be let out at night, because they knew one another, and new we’d be taken into someone’s kitchen if things went wrong, and that that someone would likely do more or less what they would do.

I hate it when my most treasured memories turn out to be the products of socio-economic privilege, but I suppose that’s part of the price one pays for that ease.  Just for tonight, though, I’m going to try to remember the leaves crunching underfoot and whirling down from the trees, and the darkness that seemed darker that night, despite our flashlights and throwaway luminescent wands, and the way we all looked like ourselves but not quite like ourselves, the way our costumes seemed funny inside but outside began to fit us like a second skin, and the way we ran through the streets and gardens and shortcuts that only kids knew.  I’m going to remember running and spinning and whooping and standoffs that put your average western to shame.  I’m going to remember night, and I’m going to remember freedom.

A great many people today asked me what the date was, which suggest that the many efforts to make sure that we Never Forget are, perhaps, failing in some way.  We seem to do better with Pearl Harbor.  What that difference may say about the difference in rhetorical talents between George W. Bush and Winston Churchill I leave for you to decide.

I myself remember this day all too well, and my mourning, and remembering, are not just for those who died but also for the many hopes and dreams and plans that died that day.  About a month before September 11, 2001, I attended a United Students Against Sweatshops conference in Chicago.  I came back to Iowa pumped up and prepared to get all sorts of balls rolling.  On September 12, 2001, I realized–or believed–that all those balls had to be dropped, because the only thing we could do now was to stop the war, or try to.  That, of course, failed too.

The war is still here (the “first” Gulf War, it should be noted, never did end), and USAS is still around, too, so perhaps we haven’t failed entirely, but it sure seems that way some days–days like today most of all.

The other day my friend Sara and I were discussing camp.  She went to a number of camps; I went to one camp for many, many years.  Neither of us had a particularly good time.

During the first five years of my life, we went to Enosburg Falls, Vermont every summer to stay with my father’s parents. The summer of 1981, though, my grandfather died, and a month later, my father died, and after that we never went back.  The summer of 1982, when I was six, I went to the hippie summer school (a bit different then from what it is now), which, despite the fairly free flowing nature of the Montessori school I’d gone to before that, was too free for me.  It seemed like going to school with an amoeba, never knowing which way it was going to move next, or when it would gather you in and when it would spit you out.  The next summer, I started going to camp in Maine, and for seven weeks every summer (with one exception, when I was seventeen), starting after first grade and ending right before college, I went to that camp, first as a camper and then, the last two years, as a counselor.  And then, just as suddenly, I stopped going.

Today I was reading through Booklist at the library and came across a familiar name in the Cookery section: Phoebe Damrosch was a girl a year or two younger than me who went to the same camp.  We were in a play together, and when I was a junior counselor, she was in my cabin.

It was a bit jarring, because although I think about camp quite often, I almost never see or talk to or even much think of any of the people I knew there.

Wohelo was very big into having its campers make lifelong friends. I learned a lot of things there–swimming, sailing, windsurfing–they even tried to teach me tennis, though with miserable results–but I never made any real friends.  I spent a lot of time there as the odd one out, and though that bothered me, it must never have bothered me very much, because I kept going back.  When I remember things about camp, they rarely involve other people.  I remember the day I passed my windsurfing solo.  I remember sailing idly by myself, often drifting off whatever course I was supposed to be on: I loved to sail, but I was never very good at it, and I finally gave it up after capsizing an MIT Tech Dinghy for the umpteenth time.  I remember swimming miles and miles–we swam, at the older girls’ part of the camp, between two docks far enough apart that it took three round trips to make a quarter of a mile.  I remember walking back from the showers once or twice a week, feeling cleaner than I ever have before or since.  And I remember watching the sun set over the lake every night.  In my first cabin, when I was seven, I had to hold my head up to see out the window.  My last few summers there I climbed out onto the rocks and lay back, nothing but rock below me and water around me, and the reds and golds and pinks and purples of the sunset of the sunset spilling into the water.  At that point, it didn’t seem to matter very much to me that the girls in my cabin had asked me why I brushed my hair funny, or told me I had to say swear words or they’d push me out the fire escape door, or whispered among one another just loud enough for me to hear, or made fun of my underwear.  All those things bothered me while they were happening, but when I was looking out at the lake, they didn’t seem to matter very much.
My mother went to this same camp for one summer, when she was fifteen, and for all the years that I went to camp, she came at the end of the summer and stayed for a week of family camp, where old campers and their families came back to see how very little had changed.  When my mother was there, they still bathed in the lake, but other than the addition of showers, she could find nothing different.

A few years ago I had a dream about a garden that my family and friends had made for me.  The garden was a circle cut into four quarters.  Sara made one quarter into a prairie with tall grasses and wildflowers.  Another friend made one quarter into a southern Utah red rock desert, with juniper and piñon pine.  My grandmother made a third quarter into an English garden, with a crumbling stone wall with roses running over it.  And the last quarter my mother made into a little piece of Maine, with granite boulders and white pine and hemlock and birch. It is, I think, the loveliest dream I have ever had, but it seems notable to me that none of the people who made the garden were in the dream.  I knew they had made it and put it there for me, but the dream was just about the garden itself, and that was enough.

It took me a long time to realize that landscape was the most important thing in the world to me.  The landscapes of the garden are only partly real–I have been to Maine and to southern Utah, and they look, in part, much as my dream garden did.  The English garden comes from Beatrix Potter and The Secret Garden; I have never been to England myself.  And though I grew up in Iowa, I grew up by corn and soybean fields, and in cities and towns.  There are prairie restoration projects in Iowa, but there is no more original prairie: my image of that part of the garden comes entirely from Laura Ingalls Wilder.

It sounds ungrateful to say that the land is more important than the people, but for me it seems to be true.  The people are important, of course.  But when Carole King sings “I always wanted a real home with flowers on the windowsill/But if you want to live in New York City, honey you know I will,” I can’t really get behind her.  I love and want people in my life, but I need land.  I need the dear muddy earth, or the dear dry dust.  I need space, and I need to be able to see the sun set.  I learned that, or much of it, I am sure, at camp, but it took me a long time to understand it.

From last night, posted tonight.  I thought I might expand upon it, but no, this is all there is:

Every now and then, it dawns on me that Garrison Keillor is going to die, and that I will then have to live the rest of my life without Prairie Home Companion.  (I have similar feelings about Gary Trudeau and Doonesbury, but they’re not quite as intense, probably because my acquaintance with them is a decade shorter–I started reading Doonesbury in grade school; PHC I probably heard in utero.)

That Trudeau’s show is not as good as it once was–that it could never be as good as “Snow Home” was when I perhaps four (if, in fact, I heard it live–I could swear that I did, on the old radio that I moved to my office at my first job, on which, for reasons that seem baffling even now, I listened while at said job to all of the Clinton impeachment hearings)–is of little matter.  It may, I suppose, make it easier to say goodbye in the end, but I doubt it.

What follows is partially prompted by a discussion over at the Hermits’ place and partly simply my own muddled musings.

Once to every man and nation, comes the moment to decide,
In the strife of truth with falsehood, for the good or evil side;
Some great cause, some great decision, offering each the bloom or blight,
And the choice goes by forever, ’twixt that darkness and that light.

[full lyrics & music]

I was told not too long ago that this hymn was removed from The Hymnal 1982 not because it refers to “man” (not humans, or souls, or men and women, or what have you) but because of a theological issue: there is no one time in our lives that we must choose between good and evil–we are called to do so constantly.

Of course, I think Lowell’s lyrics acknowledge that: the choice goes by forever, after all. I am not a theologian or an expert on hymns, or much of anything else.

The hymn comes to me at the moment partly because it is a great favorite of mine–we sang it at my camp long ago, and it shows up in The House with a Clock in its Walls, and Martin Luther King Jr. quotes it several times in his speeches and sermons. It comes to me also, though, I think, because I’ve been thinking lately about moments that occur once and moments that occur again and again.

The incidents at Virginia Tech remind most people of the shootings at Columbine High School, which took place eight years ago today. They remind many also, I suspect, of the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, which took place twelve years ago this week. For those of us with a connection to Iowa City and the University of Iowa, the thing that comes most to mind is, I suspect, the physics department shootings in 1991, which, bucking the April trend, took place in November, on All Saints Day. Some may recall the many other school shootings in this country–Red Lake, Minnesota; West Paducah, Kentucky; and on, and on–killings that get less ongoing attention but that were no less devastating for their communities. And any act of sudden violence cannot help but bring to mind the attacks of 9/11. One doesn’t equate these things–one can’t–but they come to mind, and one realizes that evil does not happen simply once.

One also realizes–or some, at least, also realize–that we tend to pay more attention to the tragedies that are sudden as opposed to those that are ongoing. We lose sight of the ongoing killings abroad in favor of the one-off sensations. We barely even register the things that kill more slowly: poverty, homelessness, hunger, addiction, oppression.

It is remarkably easy to write off other people’s suffering. It is equally easy to judge the mourning of others, to believe that the woman who does not cry at her mother’s funeral or the man who does not seem affected by the school shooting that happened in his town are in some way not fully human or humane.

I do not believe that the choice between truth and falsehood is one we make only once, but I do believe that there is for each person one great tragedy–one thing that happens that defines your understanding of sadness. That thing may have already happened to you, or it may yet be coming to you (but make no mistake: it will come). It is one of the great comforts of my life, actually: as a friend once said, the great wheel of tragedy leaves no one untouched. Eventually it swings around to everyone. I try to remember that in a charitable way when someone says something appalling to me, but mostly, I must admit, I remember it in a more gleeful fashion. Oh, just you wait, I think. It’ll happen to you, too.

———–

I started this post a day or two ago but didn’t finish it, and now I’ve forgotten where it was meant to go–if, in fact, it was meant to go anywhere–I call this ramblings for a reason.  Suffice it to say that I am always struck, at moments of great national or international tragedy, by how randomly tragedy strikes us, and how peculiar and personal our reactions to it, or our lack of reaction, must always be.

How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings. Luke 13:34 [partial]

I had thought to do a little blogging of the Lenten study we’re doing at my church (which does not have a website–it doesn’t even have a computer) but hadn’t gotten around to beginning. What follows is only marginally related to our actual Lenten study.

The Hermits have of late been considering biology and humanity, sex and gender, topics which lend themselves to diverse pursuits–scientific inquiry, theological reflection, and, of course, the taking of online quizzes.

The Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion, meanwhile, have been considering similar questions, although in a somewhat graver and larger fashion. (Background via Google or the NYT, if you are so fortunate as to have a subscription).

Today I heard the following opinions expressed:

• gays are sinners and should be punished appropriately
• gays are sinners and need to be saved
• gays are children of God just like the rest of us
• gays choose to be gay
• gays have no choice about being gay (and, in an interesting variation, 3/4 of gays have no choice about being gay)
• gays are gay because of a birth defect

Despite my years of regular church attendance, I am the sort of person that Ann Coulter would doubtless describe as a godless liberal (although I usually tell people I’m a communist–why not go all out, I figure?). In the course of my eastern education and upbringing (remember, anything east of Cheyenne is “back east”), I had never heard the last of these before.

I mentioned that I did not think that gay people were defective. The speaker said they were not defective (what with all being God’s children and all), but they were not perfectly formed in God’s image in the same way that people with birth defects are. I said that it seemed to me that since we are all part of God’s creation, God probably intended for us to come in a variety of configurations and sexual orientations and so on and so forth. I’m not sure how that went over.

It has occurred to me lately, though, that when we say that gay people are gay because they can’t help it, because they have no choice in the matter, we are doing them something of a disservice. Saying “you have no choice” is not quite the same as saying “you have a birth defect” (and, I should note, this whole discussion is probably doing an enormous disservice to people who have birth defects, who are also no less human than the rest of us), but it implies that you are to be pitied, that you are, in some way, a less than perfect example of God’s creation–sort of like saying that if you are female, you are somehow less able to relate to God, since in his human incarnation he was male.

Last week in Lenten study our lesson was Luke 13:31-35. I noted at some point that I thought it was either interesting or nice or both (I can’t recollect which adjective I used) that Jesus chose a feminine image in the bit quoted above–the mother hen gathering in her young.  I have for years–for as long as I have been thinking about it–believed that humanity encompasses male and female and indeterminate and in-between, heterosexual and homosexual and bisexual, and, in general, more things in heaven and earth than we can dream of.  Is there any reason that God should not also encompass all these?

I don’t consider the people whom I listened to today to be intolerant, on the whole.  But sometimes it’s very clear to me that I come from a different place.  We have a gender neutral restroom at our church, but we don’t call it that, and I don’t know that anyone thinks of it that way.  But I may start to think of it as such–to be happy in the knowledge that there’s a place you can go around here where you don’t have to choose a label.

Last month I didn’t have water for a week, and I decided to write something about it for Writers on the Range. Since they don’t seem to want it, I thought I’d post it here. If you find yourself fascinated with my water situation, rather than that of the larger west, you can read more on Vox.

I am happy to report that next weekend, I’m moving to a house, where, I have been told, the pipes never freeze.

——-

“The West begins,” Bernard DeVoto wrote, “where the average annual
rainfall drops below twenty inches.” The Conservation District where I
live recently released its figures for 2006: we got a total rainfall
equivalent of 6.71 inches. We are indeed in the West, going into the
eighth year of a drought.

You know that simply from looking around at the brown fields, the low
muddy reservoir, the dust that blows through your screens in the summer.
But I don’t think you really appreciate it–at least I didn’t–until
you have in some personal way gone without.

During a recent cold snap, my pipes froze, and for the past four days I
have had no water in my house but what I have brought into it. I called
my landlady to tell her about the situation and mentioned that I had, as
she suggested, left a couple of taps dripping. “Not dripping,” she
said. “Dripping won’t do it; you’ve got to leave them running.”

“Well,” I said, “it’s a good thing I don’t pay for water by the gallon.”

Yes–you heard me right–in a place that got fewer than seven inches of
rain last year, I get all the water I want for $35 a month. Granted,
it’s horrible water, much too alkaline to drink. If you water plants
with it, they shrivel up and die. But you can flush toilets with it,
and shower in it, and wash your dishes in it.

I suppose, though, that my water situation is no more ridiculous than
those of Phoenix, Los Angeles, and Las Vegas, cities that owe their
existence to the water they repurpose from western rivers, many of which
start up here in the Rocky Mountains. We know that the desert is not
made to support such a large human population, and that it is only
through the considerable intervention of human beings in the natural
world, mostly the damming of rivers, that so many are able to live there
(and, for that matter, grow lawns there). Even the biggest proponents
of growth in the desert southwest are beginning to admit that it may
face an end. The Christian Science Monitor reported last month that
the Central Arizona Project has said that current water supplies will
serve the nation’s fastest-growing state through 2030 and projected
water supplies through 2045. After that, according to a CAP planning
analyst, growth will depend on “possibly available supplies” and, after
a certain point, “uncertain supplies.”

It is hard to remember when you stand in the cold rushing waters of a
mountain river, nothing like the slow, meandering rivers of my
Midwestern childhood, that you live in a land of little rain. It is
harder still when there is water there, all you want, when you simply
turn on a tap in your home. But of course the plentitude of water is an
illusion, like the mirages you see on the highway on a particularly
sunny day.

In the past few days, I have been thinking about how much we take water
for granted, and about how much water we take for granted. I’ve been
doing dishes in a sink only a few inches full and flushing my toilet
only once a day. I have not wiped down my counter tops or cleaned my
bathroom sink or mopped the kitchen floor. I haven’t made pasta or soup
for dinner. Yesterday I took up a friend’s offer of a shower, and it
felt positively decadent to let all that water run over me and down into
the drain.

I believed when I first moved here that I was becoming more attuned to
my use of water because I had to haul in all the water I wanted to
drink. It was not until my pipes froze, though, that I realized just
how much water I use that I don’t even think about–washing my fingers
off after I’ve cracked an egg, wetting a sponge to wipe off a counter,
rinsing my toothbrush.

In a few more days the temperature is supposed to rise above freezing,
and the water in my pipes will flow again, and I’ll do loads of laundry
and make spaghetti for dinner, and when the temperature dips down again
I’ll leave my faucets running. And I will think, well, it’s not potable
water anyway, and I don’t pay for it by the gallon, but at the same time
I will wonder about water and waste, about human progress and human
fallibility.