Tribute Tuesday: Nina

My awesome cousin Jenny has started a link-up, Tribute Tuesday, which is A) an awesome idea and B) something that's been on my brain a lot lately. I love this concept of taking a few moments to give tribute to someone--not just a thank-you, but a on honorarium, a memorial of their grace, love, sacrifice. And nothing like a little public pressure to actually ensure I do it--whether or not I do it on a Tuesday...

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[Okay, Jenny, I tried to used your amazing linky sticker deal, but all that appears, published or no, is HTML gobblydeegook...]

Tribute to Nina

You would not need to spend much time on this blog of mine to figure out that I love stories: reading them, sharing them, hearing them, passing them along, making them up. When you think of a story--your own, or a favorite--you likely think first of the main characters, the major plot arcs, the larger themes. And this is true of me, but I love, almost as much, the little pieces. The tangents. The minor characters. [Cue English major diatribe. This is why Dickens drives me insane: the man doesn't believe in minor characters. The old woman you bumped into on the street in Chapter 2 is also the bookshop owner in Chapter 17 who ends up being your wealthy grandfather by the book's conclusion. CRAM IT, Charles, real life isn't like that.]

Ahem. Finding the track again...

I find myself understanding a story better for its little tangents and minor characters--minor in number of lines or time spent on the stage, but not necessarily in importance. And every time I find myself telling my story--the central one, the one that matters, the one of how God came and found me and continues to bring me to Himself over and over again--every time, I find that it has to include Nina.

And Nina is a minor character in my story. (I don't think she'll take offense to me saying so.) She was my music teacher when I was very young, and my mother's friend, and I've seen her just once or twice since she moved away when I was 8. But like I said--sometimes the minor characters aren't so minor at all.

I was 4, and my dad had left for reasons no one--maybe not even him--fully understood. My mom tells this part of the story simply: we were in her classroom after school as we always were. Matt was likely doing homework; I would have been knee-deep in Legos. "Kids," Nina says in the story, "Grab your stuff--you're with me tonight. Peggy, I'll have them home before bedtime." And she took us, and allowed my mother a few hours to be something other than a swamped single mom. I don't know what my mom did with those hours--knowing her, she was cruising the bars or getting yet another graphic tattoo.* (Just a moment of comic relief, people. For those who don't know my mother, this is the untruest statement there ever was. Just to set the record straight...)

This is my story, so I can only relate what I've heard from others, and tell what I remember. And what I remember is sitting next to Nina on the hard black bench, pressed as close as I could be without compromising her army's range of motion across the black and white keys, and looking out at a dark room that sang back to me. The choir in the dark knew the words, but they were still new and foreign to me, and have long since fallen from memory. But in those first few Wednesday nights I caught my first glimpse of God, however unaware I was at the time: beautiful and unknown; mysterious, but in a nice way. 

What started as Nina getting us out of our mother's hair for a few hours each week (because from then on, each Wednesday afternoon brought her to our door) molded into something much larger and lasting: my mother's return to the Church after years away, my brother and I growing and finding father figures and extra grandparents, our family learning that what is broken and rebuilt is more beautiful, and certainly more interesting, than the perfect and pristine. By the time Nina moved a few years later--acting as another saving grace in another woman's story--we were ensconced in a fellowship of shared lives. All of us have left that place now, moving hundreds of miles away in different directions--but members of that family remain close, and we have found new fellowship-families in our new places. My mother quilts love and grace into the lives of people, some she doesn't even know; my brother (and sister-in-law) prepare a house for study, reflection, and prayer; I encourage and love and pray with women of all ages and walks of life who come through our doors.

Is this all because a woman stopped by her coworker's classroom and took the kids out for Roy Rogers and children's church? Of course not--thank God, He is weaving too great a masterwork to be dependent on us. But when He calls us to step into someone else's story (even briefly, minorly) and we answer and go, He works simple wonders and small miracles. 

Am I a follower of Jesus Christ, am I a part of a grace community, do I minister to women because of Nina? No. 

But when I sit across from a newly-single mom, two cups of coffee and an ocean of brokenness on the table between us, Nina floats across my mind--not every time, but most. My prayer is always that I would be Jesus to this woman--but having no better face to put to such a prayer, the one I see is Nina's.

5MF: See

Not sure where the energy--physical or creative--is coming from, but I'm riding it... In part, because I think this is how I'll keep tabs on my word count resolution--a week-end tally, after concluding the week with 5-Minute Friday. (And, I'm sorry, what were you mumbling about a timestamp? It's still Friday in Sacramento...)

GO


"We'll see."

Crushing words to a child, tantamount to NO but somehow harder, crueler in their ambiguity--a distinction too hard to describe from your kid-brain, but no less real. The way sarcasm isn't okay but facetiousness is--you know it's wrong, but you lack the words for how.

I hated those words--for years, long into teenagehood and into my twenties, loathed them.

But I start to catch the other side now--the places where the light catches on the curve and the truth of the turn-of-phrase shows itself. Habakkuk's millenia-aged transciption cracks out from the pages: we wouldn't believe Him if He showed us. But by the time we are the us we'll be, we'll be able to stand it, our eyes will be able to process to our still-kid-brains what they're taking in.

We'll see.

I don't know how some things--most things, all things--work, or will work out. If my dreams will turn to life or ashes. If this man I keep waiting for is only in my head. Why children die from diseases their parents helplessly fell to. How there is no end or depth of cruelty we can invent. There are answers I wish I had, and if I search for them in my own hands I only end up frustrated and clawing. But if I glance up, drop my hands--or, better yet, raise them--there is promise and hope and who-knows.

We'll see. One day, somehow, with eyes that aren't yet ours, we'll see.


STOP


(Don't know the deal about 5MF? You should it's awesome. Check this week's out here.)


Jan 4-10: 2,226 bloggy words! WOOH! (Cheating? Certainly, but only by a few hours. We're calling it grace and getting out of here...)

7 Quick Takes: Life-Altering Children's Books

[Drafter's Note: The 7 Quick Takes idea stems from Jen over at conversiondiary.com. I was led to it by my awesome cousin Jenny at Life in the Cookie Jar. But when I went to join up, there was a different set of takes (duh--this caught my attention a few days ago), and when I went to link to Jenny, I realized I had shifted my idea a bit from hers. But the list is made and the images have been found. There's no going back now!]

I, like Jenny, have an exceptionally hard time picking JUST seven, and so, as you'll see, I cheat. But an important distinction (and cutter of some possibilities) was that these are not just favorite or beloved, but Had Some Impact on My Life. I also, just to be fair, had to remove all fairy tales and Greek mythology from the running--that's a different 7 Quick Takes altogether, and I'd still need four of them... But here, in rough order of personal discovery, are seven-ish children's books that had some kind of altering power to the woman you know as Chandra.

Go, Dog, Go!

The book that started it all. While I'm sure this wasn't actually The First Book I Ever Read, that's how I remember it. (I somehow thought, at the time, that it was the first chapter book I'd read. I seem to have been confused on what chapters were...) But this is the book I remember carrying triumphantly to Matt, to my grandmother, to anyone who would sit down for seven minutes: I could read this. Not from familiarity, but from actually putting together the sounds and making them mean something. The first power I ever knew, and it hasn't lost any magic in 25 years... 

The Sweet Smell of Christmas
I like that Amazon calls this a "scented storybook." Nothing will bring me back to my childhood faster than the worn-out, scratched up pages of pine trees and oranges in stockings. It is not Christmas until I have paged through this old tome (yes, my original one, though I bought new copies for godchildren and cousins' kiddos this year). And aside from the olfactory enjoyment, it's a sweet story about the best part of Christmas, as a child: the anticipation. And I think, in its own weird way, it reminds me what it's still about: enjoying and embracing each simple little thing. And making gingerbread. Clearly.

In the Night Kitchen

Narrowly beating out its better-known brother, Where the Wild Things Are, Maurice's tale of Max's dream (?) steals the show for me--somewhat unsurprisingly. It would be hard to overestimate how much of my kitchen mysticism stems from my love of this book. So much collides in it: dreaming, flying, moonlight, and the magic and community of baking. I cannot love this story enough, and just got really annoyed to discover that I don't own it. Must make a trip to Longfellow Books post haste...

Yertle the Turle and Other Stories

This is almost more representative than particular. The distance by which Yertle beats out How the Grinch Stole Christmas, And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street!, and Bartholomew and the Oobleck is infinitesimally small--my love for Theodore Geisel is deep, and I give him a large piece of credit for my love of playing with words. But my love for this one in particular comes down to a solid memory I have of snuggling in the children's area at the Eastham, Mass library. Most other kids on vacation at Cape Cod would have been dragging their parents toward beach-ward cars, but I was perfectly happy on a beanbag with Morris the cat (real) and Yertle (fictional).

Island of the Blue Dolphins / Julie of the Wolves

I was pretty sure I had a rich Alaskan heritage as a kid--I have a clear memory of arguing with kids in Mrs. Fuhrmann's fourth grade class that I was an Eskimo. But I quickly latched on to anything that secured this identity, and Island was at the top of the list. A few years later, Julie of the Wolves would try to take its place, but while I had no frame of reference for tundra, the sea was my second home.  ("Weird," those in the know might be saying. "I thought this took place off the California coast, not Alaska." Fun fact: It does. And I didn't know it until just now when I went to pull the cover. Karana's interactions with Aleuts positioned the book firmly in the Aleutian Islands in my mind, and I never questioned it. Just for that, Julie gets a little also-ran tag here.) Regardless of geography, Karana was my hero for years. Ya know what? She still is.

Westmark Trilogy (Westmark, The Kestrel, The Beggar Queen)

While Lloyd gets a little more press (and terribly-adapted Disney screen time) from his Prydain series (which are also awesome), my heart belongs to Westmark. I don't remember how I stumbled on these--likely pilfering from Matt's bookshelves--but I felt like I had found something I wasn't old enough for, in a good way. A guy DIES in the first chapter, for crying out loud--and not the fairy tale, "her father passed away" poetry--it's intense. The whole series is big and epic and nerve-wracking in a way that I didn't know books could be. (Half a generation later, bajillions of kids my age would have similar feelings about Mr. Potter.) There is a grit and grime to it that was missing from the other YA reading I'd had, and I loved it. It was real, and hard, and I dare you to read it and not cry. Characters were broken, sometimes they let you down, sometimes they died. (This is about where Matt interjects the ridiculousness of reading Where the Red Fern Grows in school around the same time. "Not to be insensitive... But this is a coming-of-age story about a dog dying?!") It was life, in pages, and I loved it.

Say Hello to Zorro!

I suppose every adult comes to this shift: from the children's books they loved as a child to those they loved as an adult. This book (and, surprisingly, its sequel) is sweet and funny and worth buying your young child in its own right, but I will forever love it because the second time I flew out to the west coast to see my cousin and then-18-month-old goddaughter, this was The Book. The one that gets flipped over before you've flattened the last page, accompanied by the "AGAIN!" grunt. And while it's a great book, her parents were more than happy to hand Zorro-reading duty over to me for a couple days. At a rough count, I'd say I read it 20 times in 4 days, but maybe that's memory playing tricks. At any rate, I will love it forever for bringing my Ru-ster to my lap without fail all day every day.

Honorable Mentions:

Where the Sidewalk Ends, and everything else Shel Silverstein wrote. The man's a genius. Repeat Seuss-directed comments (ever-so-slightly quieter, which I don't think Shel would mind at all).

The Phantom Tollbooth. "It's bad enough wasting time without killing it."

The Black Book of Colors, which I found at a conference a few years ago. Gorgeous, ground-breaking, and well-deserving of the many accolades its received.

The Little House on the Prairie series. In terms of epic as a genre, it pales in comparison to Lloyd's stuff, but when looking at volume, Laura Ingalls Wilder prepared me for a lifetime of, "I'm about to start Book Six!" It's hard to imagine tackling (to say nothing of finishing, wolfing down) series by Stephen King, J. K. Rowling, and J. R. R. Tolkien without Laura warming me up.

Acceptably Pretending

The screen door would give you away--that was the secret. Of course, that's the secret all screen doors share, but as a child you don't know these things. You learn the language of the door, the way to press slowly, but only to there; to let it fall free behind you, but nick it with your toe before the hard slap of wood and buzz of spring coil. From there, feet flee across concrete, through another (quieter) door, and then it's around the side of the house, ducking low to avoid detection through the pantry and den windows. Across the grass--a space of half a hundred feet, but by the time your hand is slipping the wire loop over the post and pushing the gate across tall grass, you have crossed to a world free of parents and expectations. You close the gate behind you--one less witness to your whereabouts--and a new world falls out before you, camouflaged in grapevines and apple trees and a hill that slopes down to the sheep pen. This is the second secret: to get to the slope, to where it is impossible to be seen from road or house, and where everything can become what it wanted to be but didn't know how.

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It was easier in Connecticut, of course: there was a dog. A girl can pass through doors without suspicion with a tennis ball in her hand and a golden retriever at her heels. Down the concrete ramp, a few casual throws toward the skunk-cabbagey woods before the dog has found the welcome cool of the swamp, and you are free to slink across the wide yard to the Rockies, the small range towering 8, maybe 10 feet over the prairie of garden and lawn. (Of course, there was a secreter way, but this involved passing were the yellowjackets were. You had been there once, but that was with Gretchen, and somehow the gold-plated buzzards had kept respectful distance from the soft German accent, the smell of potato pancakes providing some sort of cloak with which you could pass them unstung. But without these protections, the overland route was safer.) And up in the altitudes of the unseen, you were no loner awkward and alone, but strong and purposeful, with work to be done.

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"What do you pretend out there?"
You are too old to play pretend, make believe, imagine things. You have tried to squelch the inclination, but it elbows and eeks its way out. This day, it had started as service--walking along the edge of the pond, you had seen how the water was choked in its draining, leaves and branches nearly blocking the paved way. Finding a dry branch, you had cleared the rest, and watched the water pour out and onto other places--how water could be so determined after sitting so still was its own kind of hypnotic and soon the branch had become something else, and you hadn't realized you were skipping and swinging and talking until too late--and across the glaring, blank, exposed water, you see straight through windows, straight into eyes. You had forgotten the secrets, somehow. You try to unskip, unswing--to drop the branch so that it would be forgotten. You wander idly. You feign watching a duck, a jet trail in the sky. You return, slowly, waiting for the watchers to distract themselves. Entering the house, you had been hopeful--food was being set on a table, life was churning again--but the question is posed and none of the secrets help you.

Years later in a college creative writing class you will identify this moment as when you started writing in earnest: because it was the only acceptable way to keep playing pretend.

Irresolved.

[Drafter's Note: Crazy kudos to my equal parts beautiful & inspiring sister-coz Jenny, as she has been blogging nearly daily, in and around mothering three children under 4. She is a rockstar. I--caretaker of one cat--am pathetic by any measure of comparison. Ah, well...]

I have, mayhap, mentioned my sheer loathing mild distaste for New Year's resolutions. And I have, also mayhap, mentioned how I inevitably end up making them, against my idealistic will (and sometimes completely ignorantly--see the last time I signed up for Planet Fitness, having received a special offer in the mail... on January 2...). 

But this year, I've determined to just embrace it. Yes, as I've mentioned before, August 22 is just as good a Day for Change as January 1, but that doesn't mean there's something wrong with a new year bringing on new changes. Sometimes, you just have to suck it up and embrace the cliche. 

So, a few resolutions--and true to form, these aren't glib promises, but pieces of processes. Hopefully that means they'll see me past January 20...

- Getting Better at Getting Fit. My beautiful friend Anna suggested we start going to the gym together back in October, and that was an awesome plan--accountability is a gorgeous thing. We (somewhat predictably) slacked a bit in the last couple weeks between bad weather, holiday/family schedules, aaaaaand occasional "OR we could come back to my house and watch Anchorman...?", but we have jump-started our plan... with a kick. In an effort to A) avoid the resolutionaries who will be slamming PF after work and B) nip excuses in the bud, we're going before work now--which meant a 4:50 alarm this morning. But it also meant starting my day chatting with Anna, getting the body cranked up and going, and cracking up to Mark Driscoll comparing Xerxes to Charlie Sheen. With an increasing bend toward negativity elsewhere in life, this is exactly what I need--the physical exercise is practically a side effect. Practically.

- Writing, Since I'm, Ya Know, a Writer. Between SOLC, 5MF, and a any given Google search for "writing prompts," it's a little ridiculous that I'm averaging a singular blog post a month these days. (This is where I assure you that I write elsewhere and not just here. Umm, yes, but not enough to make the argument stick.) So this is The Thing I'm Going to Start Doing, true resolution style: A thousand words a week--actual writing, sitting down and letting words work. A pittance to any real writer, but a place to start. (Thanks to my awesome buddy Ruth for passing along the #nerdlution word count idea... Though I'm not cool enough to tweet & connect about same...)

- Seeking Out the Plan. God uses weird things to keep me in line, and recently it's been my Bible app on my phone. That baby comes out every morning, first thing, before my feet hit the floor, and come mid-July I'll have read every word in a year. (As opposed to the last effort for same, which took five...) But I've realized in the last couple weeks that in my efforts to blaze through my daily reading, I've neglected my daily time--prayer journaling, being still, waiting, listening. And, as usual, there are some pretty large decisions looming around in my life, and I keep trucking toward them rather than tapping the brakes. So without forsaking the reading, I'm making a renewed effort to tap into the plan--not anything that I'm going to figure out or narrow down, but the real plan: "For I know the plans I have for you,' says the Eternal, 'plans for peace, not evil, to give you a future and hope—never forget that. At that time, you will call out for Me, and I will hear. You will pray, and I will listen. You will look for Me intently, and you will find Me.'" (Jer. 29:11-13, The Voice translation).

So I am, to some degree, resolved. The part of me that grates against New Year's smiles a bit as I realize I cannot end with some pithy comment about Day One, because it's already January 2. 

Cliche, you have been foiled.

The Work of Food

[Drafter's Note: I am all about convenience--really, I am. This girl ate frozen pre-made soup from Trader Joe's tonight. But in general, and certainly ideologically, this is me.]

I score the hard red skin, and slice the top low enough to expose the ruby kernels inside, as I've been instructed in the About.com how-to. The small globe comes apart easily enough in my hands, but it is careful work to pull back clingy membrane and creamy pith, and small reward to hear the tinkle of seed-laden jewels pile onto the favorite orange plate below.

Curled up on the couch and dragging the last rubies from the plate with my lips, I dismiss returning to the kitchen to attack the second half of the fruit. "This is too much work," I mutter to myself. But even before the words have piled on the plate below, I realize that this is part of my love affair with food, with cooking and eating and sharing plates. I love the work of it. I love that it is more than seeing or shoveling in. 

I love the work of Brussels sprouts, neatly cleaning off the withered outer layers and dividing them carefully on the bamboo board: dissected ovals, fading green to a center white on the right side, a rumpled pile of dark leaves on the left. I love the work of grapefruit--the old way, with a knife and my grandmother's toothed spoons, and my new way, segmenting and pulling pulp from membrane with fingertips and tongue, leaving a carcass on the plate. I love the work of bread, the necessity of hands, the way the smooth yeasty ball slides and resists sliding as it has done in every woman's hands for ten thousand years. I love the mirrored work of cinnamon rolls, the way they are the only food of my mother's that I can exactly reproduce--the spread of brown sugar over a canvas of butter, the deft slice of the roll, the prying away layers of still-steaming happiness on a plate. Even Oreos and Reese's cups--there are rituals, patterns that make the food what it is, more than it is. 

I am mistrustful of food that requires no work: microwave-ready potatoes, pre-cut celery, frozen waffles. There is something larger than the portion on the plate, something necessary for me: the pile of skins swept into the disposal, the neat geometry of a chef's knife and a board, starch and dirt to be washed away. It isn't only the ladle into the bowl, but the stemmed tears, neat slices, hard sizzle, and perfect smell of onions in a cast iron pan. We don't just have food--we make it. And that has to be more than opening a bag or pushing a button.

I work at food because it is a language to me, a way of speaking when even my words fail. How would I fully taste from the fork what my hands couldn't remember as a process? How would someone know I loved them if the hands that made the food weren't mine? 

Newsprint and coffee and marble-soft clouds

Happy Thanksgiving, fair blog readers! I've been meaning to post this for a week or so, just haven't had the time/memory... But now, as I wait for the house to wake up and Thanksgiving with the family to commence, here's a bit of free-flow that's come to me in the last couple weeks. Just to prove that when I'm not blogging, it doesn't always mean I'm not writing...

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The marble-soft clouds spread thin and flat like whipped froth on water's surface, and deep below, deep down through miles of clearwater sky, turbulent hills are branded with geometries of highways and farm plots, white-sharp curves of rivers and lonely clusters of small cities. From up here the world is bigger, and smaller--more manageable, less weighty. From this narrow seat, my neck and shoulder at odd angles in order to press forehead to throbbing window, it is imaginable that life could be similarly carved and sectioned into autumnally technicolor forest, mercurial lakes, paint-by-number pastures. In the thrum of jet engines that is its own kind of silence, everything falls into perfect order, nothing is remaindered. 

But a second look, and the froth is all there is to see: squint-requisite whiteness marked occasionally in winter reliefs, and then the hard cut of horizon, even up here: water and air, but more muddled than sea and sky. And this is the life I know: impossible to fathom or arrange, unknowable, a cover for something deeper. I peer harder and harder into the white, longing for the happy geometries of the ocean floor world I know but cannot prove. The white is solid still--still like marble, firm enough to send sun glares back at me. But in minutes, we will fall, we will take a breath and break the little surface tension, feel the weight of water as life surrounds us again in all it's unfathomables and depths, and what were drawings will return to structures, enclosures surrounding and owning us down in the bottom of the sea.

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Listening to a pair of our authors talk about mentor texts--children's book language that plays in deep verbs and hyphenated adjectives--I wonder when it was that I ended the affair.

I remember, still, sitting at the boxy Mac--my mother asleep upstairs, the instant coffee in the tan mug with the apple, the strange silence of midnight burning in my ears. There was work to do--a paper, a report, I don't remember. But I couldn't. A grip to write--not facts and regurgitated opinions but words and sounds that were all mine--had closed over my wrists as sure as rope, and I felt suddenly accompanied by myriad predecessors: mustachioed men and unstylish women who knew what it was to sacrifice small things and big--sleep, jobs, lovers--in the irregular affair we hold with words.

Because that's what it is: a back-and-forth love affair. A hot-and-cold, bruise-your-heart, cry-and-scream-and-go-for-weeks-not-speaking affair with a thesaurus and an empty page. And here I am, years later, the one who got away. The novels I planned to publish remain unfinished, a waiting cursor blinking expectedly, and forgotten. The very definition of my teenage, my college-age self utterly abandoned in the name of those small things and big, and I don't know if the exchange was a worthy one.

Because this old love still so easily circles and swirls into me--I can stand on the bluff, but without trying at all the water can spin around ankles and sink me into sand smiling, grateful, home. I am never, have never been out of love--but like an over-selfish lover, I insist on what my life fails to prove. I assure my old love, my ageless love, not to read into my silence, my too-many-left-blank pages. And like a lover unmatched on earth, she welcomes me back. No where-have-you-been, no if-this-is-going-to-work, no that's-what-you-said-last-time. Just the sound of a page turning, offering the possibility of new. The smell of newsprint and instant coffee. The burning of midnight silence. A waiting cursor.


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