Brenda currently lives in Stoneham MA, but grew up in Mineral WA. She is surrounded by men, with two sons, one husband and two boy cats. She plays trumpet at church, cans farmshare produce and works in software.
White Mountain Hotel – taken in fading light. Not in black and white.
I will never ski again. This is not a mournful expression, but a promise to myself to ease my anxiety even looking at the slopes. Skiing, which I have only done once, and only for half a run, cost me great pain and brought me no pleasure. But I am raising New Englanders, and we love the mountains of New Hampshire, so… here I am, close to the shadow of Chocorua, in the snow.
For the second year we are staying at the
White Mountain Hotel. It’s a grand old inn, nestled between a state park containing a truly impressive thousand foot granite cliff, and a state park containing a picturesque mountain lake. It has a gazebo, a pool heated to 90+ degrees where my children swim in the driving snow, a grand entryway with a roaring fireplace, and an elegant dining room with an unparalleled view of the mountains around Conway.
It is charming, comfortable and soothes my heart with the glimpses of mountain majesty through every window. From the warm couch in my comfortable room, I’ve all day watched a line of cold-looking people wait their turn in 17 degree weather to scale White Horse Ledge. That sounds hard enough in good weather!
This grand hotel is also just that level of worn that makes you think of ghosts. I polled through the histories of the region, to see if I could find the provenance of this grand old lady on the hill. It has the feel of history to it. One book I found (thank you Google Books!) had descriptions of hotels and I wondered if it might be this one, under a different name.
My favorite line there is from another ad, which speaks of “the beautiful views of weird Chocorua”. Mount Chocorua haunts me. I once tried to climb it and failed, and have been thwarted in climbing it ever since. (It’s too long and risky to go alone. My children cannot yet tackle it. And I can’t go with my husband because who would watch the children? And so I watch it and it taunts me in its loveliness. Someday!)
Chocorua is the peak to the right in this picture of White Lake
I began to wonder why the hotel didn’t boast of it’s history anywhere I could see. Where was the “built in 18XX”, or the faded picture on the wall to give it that great sense of gravitas that so rightly belonged to it? Although I scanned the histories and advertisements, I found nothing that boasted of this spot between cliff and lake. I pondered the scandal that might cause them to try to blot out all prior histories. A murder perhaps? Was this hotel featured in some haunting book? Like, oh, The Shining?
Finally, I looked up specifically when this hotel was built. 1990. So much for that romantic fancy! And so much for my quiet afternoon – time to pick up my skiiers!
Like 175,000 other people, I spent much of my Saturday in the middle of Boston, cheek to jowl with other people, wearing a pink hat and holding a sign.
My signs
It was an incredible experience for me. I’ve never marched in a protest before. I dislike crowds, and I don’t seek danger. I think that everyone who read through the advice before the march had to think seriously about whether this was safe. It was full of things like Don’t wear makeup, since it traps tear gas and Write your lawyer’s name on your arm in sharpie. I took the precaution of marching with a lawyer, and went anyway.
I never made it in to the Common – we hung out at the starting line
My first experience with marching included a lot of standing and not-quite-hearing what the speakers were saying. I guess that somehow they didn’t expect 175k people to turn out, and didn’t have the sound system extending that far. Fair enough. But it also included being surrounded by a panoply of different people. Latinxs, grandmas, veterans, construction workers, middle-aged mamas, kiddos, teen boys climbing trees. It seemed like every walk of life was there, every age, every color. And it seemed like all of them were cheerful, determined and patient. And wearing ridiculous pink hats. (Even the construction workers!) The unions were in force, as the volunteers who helped people figure out where to go and how to move. People moved slowly be necessity, and took in the signs, t-shirts, posters and aprons of their fellow-marchers.
I kept trying to take VR photos to show the magnitude of the crowd
As we walked (at a snail’s pace!) along the march route, the bystanders would often kick us off into a call. We’d walk in and out of the chant. One of the persistent ones was a call-and-response:
Call: Show me what democracy looks like!
Reponse: This is what democracy looks like.
This is what democracy looks like
It was an emotional and powerful affirmation to realize that yes. This is what a democracy looks like. I savored it. (And for the record, the Boston Police agree that it was an astonishingly peaceful event.
Jesus is a radical
I ran into two folks I knew in the course of the march (which – I probably knew 80 people there in total, based on my friends checking in on Facebook!). Both of them were people I’d met in the church. One was Pastor Rob Mark from a fellow Presbyterian Church. Two were folks I’d gone to church with for years – whose daughter had been in my confirmation class. We caught up and chatted as we walked. My signs – my reason for marching – were very much rooted in my faith. One of the scriptures I find most meaningful is Matthew 25:31-46 – a quick summary of which is here:
Matthew 25:34 “Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’
“Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’
“The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’
Part of my posse
I realized as I walked though that very few of the signs I saw had a scripture on them. The church on the corner played the great hymns of the civil rights movement (We Shall Overcome!). My friends showed their faith. But the word pussy outnumbered the word Jesus by many multiples. And that showed me where we’re falling down, friends. I don’t mind the pussy-posters at all. But I’m saddened that Christians were not very visible to point out that the call to help the poor and welcome immigrants comes at Jesus’ own command.
Teen Vogue, the new voice of responsible journalism in America (I’m not even kidding!), ran a thoughtful piece on how one of the civic changes we’ve experienced over the last generation is a decrease in participation in non-governmental democratic organizations. People aren’t practicing democracy on the small, local scale like they used to. They aren’t running for office in the Elk’s Club, taking leadership roles in the Masons or signing up with the Kiwanas on the same scale they did in prior generations. When’s the last time you voted on something – a real binding vote – that wasn’t governmental?
Well, the last time I did was today. It was the day of my Presbyterian Church’s annual meeting. We convened with Robert’s Rules of Order as our (generally) guiding principal. We made motions and didn’t argue about them until there was a second. We elected officials to represent not our own will, but the will of God as they see it. We read through our budget line by line, asked detailed questions, and got answers. We practiced our democratic skills.
This is also what democracy looks like
It was a very democratic weekend, and an inspirational one. There is still so much to be done. There are people who have great fear right now: the dark skinned, the immigrant/stranger, the sick, those in prison, the hungry, the poor. But this Sunday I stand in hope that we will come together and protect and serve God through serving his needy people. So let’s turn the energy of this march into the deep-rooted and faithful work that needs to be done.
I finished my march before some marchers could start
“I tell my students that they’re going to be able to tell their children, ‘I remember when it used to snow in Boston,’ ” said Ray Bradley, an author of the study and director of the Climate System Research Center at the University of Massachusetts. “We’ll have occasional snow, but we won’t have weeks and weeks of snow on the ground.”
I’ve wrestled a lot lately with how – and why – people can vehemently believe something is true when the facts and evidence point to the opposite conclusion. The science has been saying for 30 years that our planet is warming. Walking around in a fifty degree January – the second year that’s been possible. Last year we had 11 straight months of “the hottest year on record”. This graph shows just how fast the change has been occurring, compared to geological normal shifts in temperature. It’s hard to look at these facts and understand how you can reasonably deny that the world is warming. Even if you find it in your heart to say this is totally a coincidence and has nothing to do with human causes (also a real stretch), we can *see* how the climate is changing. It’s literally cracking apart the Antarctic ice shelf. But even people in a position to know otherwise, such as our president-elect, claim that this shift isn’t taking place.
Why? If you don’t realize what’s coming, you can’t plan for it. If you pretend this isn’t happening, and oh, build huge buildings whose foundations are likely to be under water in 20 years, you may lose a lot of money. I get that it may be very expensive to cut CO2 levels, and that some current economic powerhouses will suffer. But it’s another thing altogether to decide not to plan for the inevitable outcome of that decision.
The vehemence with which people *don’t believe this* confuses me. I was thinking about it, and I realized I was missing a critical element. People think that what you believe changes the truth. I wonder if there’s some unspoken conviction that if we all BELIEVE the world isn’t warming, then in fact the world will not be warming. From that perspective, the persistent voices of climate scientists saying otherwise is a threat. They’re disrupting the concerted belief required to make global warming untrue. By disrupting the belief, they’re actually making global warming happen. If we just all believed together it wasn’t happening, it wouldn’t happen.
This explains both the solution they have (prevent global warming by believing it isn’t happening with the assumption that what is believed is true) and why they’re so vitriolic to opposing voices.
As a Christian, I think I understand where this mind set might come from. Christianity is rife with the power of belief. In the Gospel of Mark chapter 9, the very mindset I lay out above is preached:
23 Jesus said to him, “If you can believe, all things are possible to him who believes.”
24 Immediately the father of the child cried out and said with tears, “Lord, I believe; help my unbelief!”
Mark is at it again in Chapter 11:
22“Have faith in God,” Jesus answered. 23 “Truly I tell you, if anyone says to this mountain, ‘Go, throw yourself into the sea,’ and does not doubt in their heart but believes that what they say will happen, it will be done for them. 24 Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.”
Let’s not forget walking on water. Peter does the impossible because of the strength of his belief.
But there are some things are, or are not, regardless of your belief in them. God does not require our belief in order to exist (and therefore unbelievers aren’t a threat to God – would you really want to believe in a God who needed us to exist?). This universe does not need to be believed in to keep spinning in its glorious order and chaos. Gravity operated unobserved for millions of years before we believed in it. Believing really hard will not make false things true. And failing to believe – even the most willful denial – will not make unwanted things go away. We need to be more careful in our thinking about where belief matters, and where the world is uncaring about what we believe to be true.
I was about ready to stop my thinking there, when Martin Luther King Day happened. My son came home with a copy of Dr. King’s famous “I have a dream” speech. Was this iconic, inspiring speech the exact same thing, only on the other side of the belief divide? I read it carefully for the word “belief”. And I discovered something remarkable – the difference I would invite you to embrace. What Dr. King believed was that it was possible for this post-racial environment to exist. He dreamed of a day when his four little children would live in a nation where they would not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. He did not believe we lived in that world already, or that such a world was an inevitable one. He only dreamed that it was possible.
And that difference – between believing that what you want is possible, and believing that wanting it will make it true.
So, let’s believe that it’s possible for us to decide whether to make the sacrifices necessary to not warm our planet any further … or to plan for living in a much warmer planet. But whenever you get angry at someone for not believing the way you do, ask where your anger comes from. If it comes from a conviction that belief will change the outcome, ask yourself if that is really true.
Thoughts? Where are some of the other places in our society where the belief itself is important? What are some things that really do change based on whether you believe? What am I misunderstanding here?
I had a very productive close to the year – lots of important work got done on both the home front and the work front. But I didn’t get around to writing my “Christmas letter” blog before the calendar flipped over to a prime number. So in this last day before the real world whirs back up to it’s usual frenetic pace, here’s a look back at the year I had.
2016 was a hard, hard year for many people around me. The loss of seminal artists to our generation was heavy and unrelenting. The division along political lines was hurtful and scary to many. The sense that we’re all in this together fractured. It may never have been true, but it now certainly does not feel true. The future feels unusually unknown and uncertain. Some of the tragedies felt extra close to home to me. Our pastor died of brain cancer. A firefighter was killed on my street when he and a buddy were goofing off with a gun. I watched the ambulances and fire trucks pass. A colleague of mine was brutally murdered. The killer remains at large.
But most of the sorrows and tragedies of the world happened outside my home, my friends, my family. And many of them are tragedies in potentia (obviously not all). It’s fear, not yet fact. So we’ll work to prevent those fears from coming true. And on the whole, 2016 was a good year for me and for my family.
Johnstones in Yosemite
The first big milestone of the year came in February, when my grandmother died after a long and loved life. My family has an odd (and I think healthy) attitude towards death. While we miss grandma, her time had come. If ever anyone had the hope of the resurrection in God’s time, she would. I’ve known very few people of such faith as she was. So when we came together for her funeral, we didn’t mourn as much as we celebrated. I was reminded what a neat family I’m so lucky to have. Does everyone have a blast at a funeral? I sure did! I also got to sneak in my “West Coast Mountain” fix. I had a conference in LA the same week, and got to spend some time in Yosemite with my family, take a weekend to myself in Sequoia (a new one for me!). It was pretty glorious.
Adam had a big year. When I was pregnant with Thane, he started a new job. (I remember particularly because he renovated “the nursery” in his 2 weeks off between the jobs.) Thane is in second grade, and Adam just switched to a company. (The company is curing cancer. He’s writing internal systems for it. I’m trying to convince him that basically means he’s curing cancer!) This has had a huge impact on our family. The work is much faster-paced and intense, and he’s learning a lot. On the personal front, he’s been doing a lot more with wood-working. Ask him about the joint-cutting work he’s doing! For someone who works mostly with their mind, producing something you can feel and touch is intensely satisfying!
Adam and I celebrated our 16th wedding anniversary this year. It also marks 20 years that we’ve been “an item”. We celebrated by going to Ashland Oregon and catching the Shakespeare Festival. Highlights included Timon of Athens and the Japanese Spa.
Crazy, and awesome
The boys are crazy. And awesome. Or maybe crazy awesome. Something like that. Grey started Middle School this year. (I KNOW. HOW DOES THIS HAPPEN!) He’s doing very well, although still working on the concept of just how badly a 0 for not turning in your homework affects your GPA. (I totally support learning this lesson in 5th grade, when it really does feel like just practice.) The Middle School transition has gone more easily than I expected, frankly!
Thane is in Second Grade and doing a good job there. He’s funny and independent and incredibly loving. Also, his penmanship has improved remarkably. He still enjoys math, although he’s declined to take extra classes to learn more. He reads a lot (mostly at school when he’s supposed to do other things). He’s revisited some prior loves – namely Legos and Scooby Doo.
My kid in a nutshell
We’ve switched up our childcare situation. After YEARS of going to the Stoneham Y, we switched to a different afterschool situation. The kids have a little more autonomy there, and it’s awesome, but it’s also a lot less controlled. It’s been going really well so far! It feels like a huge deal in the daily life of the family, and like a marker in the “wow, they’re really growing up aren’t they?” page. One change is that childcare isn’t available for the break weeks – like winter break, Feb break and April break. We just worked from home this last week (or took the kids into the office!). We’ll ship them out to Washington in February, and import Meme for the April break!
Christmas Eve Congregation
This was a huge and hard year in the life of my church. Last Christmas Eve was the last time our Interim Minister worshiped with us. We’re coming up on the 1 year anniversary of his diagnosis with glioblastoma. He was gone by Easter. We scrambled to keep things running, and I’m proud of how well we have stuck together. We finished the Mission Study (a process I ran). We finally have started the Pastor Nominating Committee (which I’m chairing). I’m also on Session (our leadership board) right now. Adam is chairing Trustees (the “let’s keep the building and finances in one piece” group). It’s a lot of work in a hard time for the congregation. But it’s meaningful work, and it’s with people I care deeply about.
Still a very serious person
For me, this was a good year. I am still obnoxiously happy with my job. I got to travel all over the place this year (which actually gets pretty tiring after a while). I went to Madrid, Chicago, Houston and LA. I am pretty sure I went more places, but I can’t remember them. I’ve continued my faithful once-a-week updating of this blog (although the readership has declined prodigiously, which makes me sad). A new thing for me this year was running. I started running in April, and have gone on 44 runs since then totaling 113 miles. I generally run about a 5k on my runs. I’m slow, but it’s one small fight against entropy.
We have continued many of the rich and wonderful things we usually do. We went camping 3 times this year. We hosted Piemas and Mocksgiving, and added in Flynns Fiery Feast as the third event of the year. We played tons of board games at 9 pm when the kids were finally in bed. We went on hikes. We watched movies. We took trips and had adventures. We visited Quebec City in April, spent Thanksgiving hitting museums in DC, and took the boys to their first gaming convention. We played Pokemon Go. We spent time with our neighbors, fund-raised for a service dog, and stuffed Easter Eggs together around the fireplace. We learned we loved roller coasters and that the kids have absolutely 0 fear of heights.
It was a joyful year. I can only hope that 2017 is also a joyful year – not just for my family, but for yours. May our worst fears evaporate and our greatest hopes come to pass. May the next year find us more peaceful, more joyful and with a bounty of love and sufficiency spread across all humanity!
The picture which made it on the Christmas Cards this year
Christmas Cards are a big deal to me. The process starts in the summer with the question: should I get a professional to take our pictures? Every four years it’s a no-brainer. We have a professional picture taken ever four years for our family portrait wall (usually by Coe). This year was one of the four. The pictures came out fantastically!
Sometime around Thanksgiving, often Thanksgiving proper, I go onto Shutterfly and craft my cards. (Their site is annoying, but improving, and their production values are excellent.) I usually make a calendar for the grandparent-set at the same time, so it’s a lovingly laborious process of going through all the pictures I’ve taken all year, spotting the highlights, uploading them, fixing them, etc. I place the order, and curse myself for not doing this two weeks ago so I could WRITE the cards during Thanksgiving, because I won’t end up having enough time to do them justice. (Please note: this happens EVERY YEAR.) Fall is my busiest time, so I really don’t have time to do this two weeks earlier, to my regret.
So there I am, on the 9th of December, with 100 cards and envelopes staring me in the face. And I begin.
I have two sets of addresses – my personal address list and the church list. The first list is about 60 addresses long, and then I send out all the remaining to my church brothers and sisters. This process probably takes me 20 – 30 hours over the coming weeks. I spend big amounts of time on weekends, and nearly every free weeknight. It takes me far more time than baking, shopping or decorating do.
Why do I do it? And why does it take so long?
Happily, the act of writing all these cards gives me a lengthy chance to think on that investment. And year after year I have come to the same conclusion: this time is not only worthwhile, but precious.
You see, I address the outside of the envelope, and then I write to the person I care about. Some people actually get a full sized letter in their Christmas card. There are a couple correspondents I have where our only communication is annually, at Christmas. For example, one of my college classmates died of Muscular Dystrophy a few years after graduation. We had been good friends in college, and I’d known his mother who had moved heaven and earth to give him a “normal college experience” even though he was very motion constrained. So I wrote his mother a sympathy card, letting her know what he’d meant to me. She asked me to keep in touch, saying it was nice to follow what his life might have been like if he’d been healthy. So, every year I send her a Christmas Card with an update on my life. (And of course, every year I remember my friend in doing so.) And every year she writes back with an update on hers. So the updates are huge – a baby born, a wedding, a big job shift, a move, a death in the family.
And that shows what’s precious to me about this whole laborious process. I take time to really think about the people who matter to me. I stop from my busy day and try to tell them how I really feel about them. Almost every year, there’s a name I take off my list. This year, I didn’t send a card to Grandma Jones because she is gone where no Christmas Card can reach. This sorrowful moment is also a reminder that I have no guarantees that this isn’t the last Christmas card I’ll ever send to the friend in question.
So, if this was the last card I ever send to this person, what would I want to say? If this was my last chance to tell them what they mean to me, how would the card be different? And then I try to write THAT card. (Note – this isn’t perfect. Sometimes inspiration fails, and sometimes I just get tired.)
Christmas is a time of counting blessings. We get and receive gifts. We connect to family and friends we don’t see as often. We lay down our busy lives and pick up our slower ones. We think about the year behind and plan for the year ahead. We think of what is meaningful to us.
There is nothing more meaningful, more precious to me, than you my friends. There’s no gift under the Christmas tree more dear to me than the ones that fill my mailbox this time of year.
Merry Christmas to you, my friends, and a joyful new year.
When I was 9, I had a hideout. It was under the stairs in the garage downstairs – a place no one came because no one had any reason to. It was cold and concrete and entirely mine. Tragically, my parents converted that hideaway to a bedroom for my sister (some tripe about her not wanting to live in a drafty room entirely made up of windows). I’ve had many “places of my own” through life. There was the concrete bunker by the river. The abandoned tree house. The best of them was my dorm room in college. Since I married straight out of college, that was the only time in my life I’ve been the single occupant of my residence.
Now I own a house. It’s a nice house, with 4 bedrooms and practically all new appliances. (Latest update – the battery in our car died while we were pumping gas yesterday. I’m debating whether that counts or not.) You would think that this house I own is really “a space of my own” from basement to attic. I mean, I bought the couch. I organized the glassware. I water the plants. It should be the ultimate fulfillment of that impulse, right?
After putting our attic renovation plans on hold (due to being twice as expensive as I reckoned + needing a new furnace), we had to reconstruct our living space up there. The attic as it is has four spaces: a landing, a completely unheated bedroom (no closet, so just a bonus room) with the best view in the house, a partially climate controlled room with a sink (I know – weird) and an unfinished storage area with particularly lethal looking nails.
In our previous iteration, the small room was our guest room (or Chez Gospel when he was living here). The bigger partially heated room was our office. This came from a period in time, now lost to the fog of history, when computers were stationary and couldn’t be moved around easily. I know this sounds crazy now, but you needed a room where you could leave them set up all the time, and they took a significant amount of space. So when we moved in, we prioritized that space (which we’d used constantly in our prior house) and deprioritized the guest space. In her October visit, my mother in law had… ideas on how this could be improved upon.
So I decided to make the larger/warmer room with the sink our guest bedroom, and turn the (coldly) beautiful room with the view into an office. Since we do still intend to eventually do the attic project, one doesn’t want to buy much in order to do this. For the guest bedroom, we will need a new bed, my brother having taken his with him. But the office had everything I needed.
Over the course of a day or so, I put it together. And it scratched an itch that I’d had so long, I hadn’t even realized it was an itch. It was like taking off boots I’d worn for a long hike. It felt… amazing to have my own room again. And although my family is welcome there and Adam also works there, it feels very much like my own secret spot. It’s made me unreasonably happier than it should.
The view as you walk in
The new best reading spot in the houseMy favorite view in the houseThe workdesk – primarily for computing but also for scrapbooking/stampingThe music alcove – the first time I’ve had all my instruments and music in one spot
What about you? Do you have a place that is just yours? Is it something you long for?
Today is the second Sunday in Advent. The four advent candles, for the four Sundays leading up to Christmas, stand for hope, peace, joy and love. Every week in this season of waiting we light another candle. The world gets a little brighter and we think on these things: what it is to hope, what a hope of peace looks like, how it is to feel joy, and the great love we believe God showed us in becoming human to be one of us.
Candles & LEDS – the oldest and newest light sources
This weekend my family prepared ourselves for Christmas. We selected the tree. We brought down the boxes of ornaments. We hung one advent calendar and filled a second one with Hershey’s Kisses. We played The Kingston Trio’s “Last Month of the Year” and Roger Whittaker’s Christmas Album. We told the children the stories of the ornaments as we hung them: the sad stories, the funny stories, the happy stories. We discussed optimal ornament hanging strategies, and enjoyed the new LED lights we got with purple instead of pink making the tree significantly less orangy this year than last year. We watched Scooby Doo in a fit of nostalgia brought on by Thane’s Scooby Doo ornament, and the children were shocked to discover that it is actually pretty good.
Decorator and decoratee
Our halls decked, Adam and I decamped to my holiday Christmas party where I got to sing on the stage at the House of Blues, which was something I didn’t know was on my bucket list until I was standing under the bright lights singing.
All dressed up with somewhere to go
I love this time of year so much. And I think what I love most about it is that it’s a joyous contradiction. It’s the season of lights, but instead of bright 100 watt bulbs we light our homes with, with have tiny 13 lumen candleflames. It’s the season of warmth as we turn up collars and look to the first snow-commute-disaster of the year. (Tomorrow, according to one report I read!) It’s a time busy with parties and cookies and cards and caroling and…. but it’s also a time of year when we slow down a little. We sit a little and look at the lights. This year I’m feeling the magic of the season in full force. Perhaps it’s because this year for the first time my children are full collaborators in the creation and appreciation of the time apart. We shall see.
Peace is a rare commodity in this world. The world keeps throwing up sorrows. Just this week, one of my friends was dead for two hours when his heart stopped Thanksgiving night. And blocks from my work, in the blink of an eye sixty people became homeless as their Christmas trees went up in a grand conflagration. In Aleppo, the last voices of the crushed citizens are going silent. Where is the peace? And if I find it in the walls of my own house, with my family and my tree and my Christmas music, well… should I? What right do I have to peace when so many live without it?
But then we come back to that first candle. I still cannot believe that despite two hours without a pulse, my friend was saved. (He just posted a hilarious status update “In my defense, I was dead at the time.”) Through a miracle past knowing, no one was killed or seriously injured in a fire that called firefighters from 20 neighboring towns. There’s no silver lining for Aleppo, but there is a sliver of hope at Standing Rock, where the Army Corps has decided to find a safer route.
The peace we have comes from the hope, not from the existing perfection. And we look forward to joy – the rarest of emotions – and to love, the foundation stone for our lives.
Train ride to Washington – the glow of the screens compels you
I’ve always admired those people who seem to know exactly who they and their families are right from the get-go. I’ve discovered that my family identity isn’t a matter just of me deciding what it is, but more of discovery. For example, are we roller coaster people? Do we like roadtrips? When traveling, do we want a night to dress up fancy? Do the kids like museums as much as their parents do?
That latter point is one of great interest to me. The kids are approaching the peak age for really cool travel opportunities – able to keep up with the grownups and still interested in doing so. I’d really like to take them to see some of the great sights of the world in the next decade or so. (Yikes! Grey will be graduating from college in just over a decade!!!) But the question “are we museum people” must be answered – affirmatively – before I’ll do such a thing.
And so we snuck away for a week in DC this Thanksgiving.
Looking one wayLooking the other
We took the train to our nation’s capital. I drove five years ago, and it was a long drive. (I got my first ever speeding ticket that trip!) Plus, parking was an expensive problem in the city. It wasn’t useful to have a car. Air travel is necessary most of the time, but it’s not an enjoyable way to travel. In a train, there’s enough room to move around, but you don’t have to drive. Perfect.
The kids were so excited, I’m pretty sure they were expecting the Hogwarts or Orient Express – not the Amtrak Regional.
Exhibits
We stayed at the Embassy Suites. I’ve stayed there for business, and thought that it would be perfect with both the living and sleeping areas well separated. We could stay up after the kids went to bed, and there was room to hang out. It worked perfectly. Everyone brought their screens this trip (we all enjoy video games!). There was room enough for all of them – plus a table big enough for puzzles! There was a pool and a hot tub, and a tiny kitchenette good enough for heating and cooling things. It was pretty perfect!
On our trip we saw the Spy Museum (our favorite) and we walked the Mall. We spent Thanksgiving at the National Museum of the American Indian where we had a great native lunch for our main Thanksgiving meal. (The museum itself was not massively impressive, although I loved the native dancers!) We also snuck over to the Air and Space Museum while the crowds were low. We did the Museum of Natural History, watched Moana in the theaters (very fun!). We closed up our trip with a lovely walk to the Archives, where we saw the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
Delicious Thanksgiving meal of native foods
We played a lot of video games, too. And went swimming. And played Pokemon Go. And read books. And slept in. It was awesome.
Raise your hand if you’ve read this Facebook status update some time in the last few weeks:
Hey folks, for my own personal mental health I’m logging off Facebook for a while. I love you all – be kind to each other!
I’ve read a lot of them. (Heck, I’ve posted one or two of them.) In the last few months Facebook has stopped being a guilty pleasure and started being a painful habit. I’m not sure why that is. Is it that the algorithms have started condensing the things we see to pound us with one emotion – and that emotion right now for so many of my friends is fear and anger and pain? Is that all we’re posting to Facebook because it seems if we don’t post our fear and anger and pain we’ll seem unsympathetic or uncaring? Is the Facebook algorithm just showing that, in favor of our usual diet of cat pictures and travel selfies?
I don’t know. But I can feel the community I’ve had in Facebook breaking apart. I know what it feels and looks like, because it’s happened before.
When I first left college, my social collection was a mailing list. There were about eight or nine of us, all friends from college, who were on it. We emailed each other ALL THE TIME. We probably exchanged one or two hundred emails a day. (We mostly worked from home on computers.) We knew everything about each others lives!
Then we all started getting LiveJournal accounts. That was probably the greatest flowering of “internet friends” for me. It was all psuedonymous (eg. we only knew each other by username, not by actual name. There are still some people who think of me as Oriana, so strong was that connection and identity.) It lasted a long time – maybe 6 or 7 years – and we had extremely strong relationships with each other in these intertwining dialogues. I called 911 for LJ friends who needed medical intervention (which is extra challenging when you don’t know their real name or where they lived – I solved that by knowing who they knew In Real Life and reaching out to those people). I invited LJ friends to my home, and many remain dear and beloved friends.
But at some point around 2010, the LJ community fell apart. It stopped working, people wrote their goodbyes or just drifted off. Where my friends used to post about 100 posts a day, that same list now rarely has more than one or two posts a day – and most of those are syndicated from other sources like blogs. It was frankly a huge loss. I still miss it, although I was one of the drifters. I got a job that didn’t allow for massive amounts of dinking around online and switched my focus to a long form blog that I updated less often but more intentionally. (This one!) “My Truant Pen” is lot less interactive and dialoguey than Livejournal. But according to my stats, not that many people read this blog any more either.
Now I think Facebook is dying, but unlike when LJ died I don’t know where they’re going. Are we digitally disconnecting? There are upsides and downsides to that. Spending less time glued to screens is no bad thing, especially when replaced with coffee dates and quality time. But taking away that community and filling the void with isolation is a bad thing. For me, I want a group of friends in lively online community that I can know and be known by, who share and care about each other. Ideally this has a big overlap with my group of proximate friends I can hang out with.
I’ve propose G+ (look me up at https://plus.google.com/u/0/+BrendaFlynn) as a place to connect. Somehow that has not been met with universal approbation. So I’m genuinely curious – what are you doing? Have you completely unplugged from social media? Did you switch platforms for connection – and if so to what? Do you miss the connection? Do you think after the dust settles people will go back, or is this a permanent migration. Where can I go to be with you?
My playlist has kept pointing me to a particular song in the last few days. It’s the Mitchell Trio’s “Phoenix Bird“. I went to go look it up to see what history (and Youtube) had to say about it. I found… absolutely nothing. Not a single Youtube video exists of it. You can’t find it on Amazon, or Google music. It’s lost. There’s no tale of the context or history. I can only tell you what the words say.
But I’m finding it meaningful lately. The Mitchell Trio were social justice warriors fifty years ago, the last time we seriously fought the fight between those who think some people are worth less than others, and those who believe all people are created equal. Their other songs ranged from tongue in cheek to weep-worthy. (See In the Summer of His Years for that.) The Phoenix Bird talks about fighting this good fight again and again. It reminds me that brave people paid prices in blood for making courageous stands against bigotry. These singers are folk of their era, so they talk about “men”, and how men will continue to arise as needed to fight for freedom. But the call goes out to all of us.
I’m not sure it’s entirely encouraging, this cyclical fight that we have fought over generations since we first kidnapped and enslaved and forever exiled from their homes entire nations of people. But I am encouraged to arise and fight – for freedom.
Phoenix Bird Mitchell Trio – from “The Violets of Dawn”
The story’s told
Of the days of old,
And the fabled bird, the phoenix.
The bird was killed,
And its wings were stilled
In a fire that burned with fury.
The flames grew cold
And then bird of gold
Then arose from the burned out ashes –
Rose to the sky,
There to circle high
Forever and ever after.
So the story’s told
Of those days of old
And that fabled bird, the phoenix.
And now once again,
Oh yes once again,
Once again that fabled story.
For freedom’s pride
Men are crucified
On a burning cross of hatred.
The flames may kill
Yet more men will arise! Arise!
For freedom.
