Of life's turns, small and great

It's been a couple of weeks without posting while we continue to plod through January, each busy with the routine. Tom has preached, visited sick people in the hospital, seen a basketball game at an inspiring school for special needs children, and nearly helped preside at a bar mitzvah. (Never let it be said that this minister is inflexible about worship styles!) I've graded a stack of exams proving that college students are better trained to meet expectations than to think critically, while preparing syllabi for a semester in which I hope to make critical thinking itself the expectation. Meanwhile I've spent the week between semesters in the company of other non-tenure-track faculty and post-enrolled graduate students who are crunched for writing time, revising an article for publication. It's a return to the other side of academia that prompted a full-scale anxiety dream, complete with public humiliation, temporal distortion, panicked flight, and ultimate surrender to the seminary shuttle bus driver, sent by the police to hunt me down. ("Well, if you had to surrender, wouldn't you want to surrender to Cliff?" asks Tom.) Actually working on the article has been much less traumatic and more rewarding than the dream, such that now my anxieties are focused on the looming spring semester load. Please send energy and good vibes. The fall semester's obligations seemed like about the maximum this family could handle; spring adds to my plate senior theses and a set of new junior paper advisees. Plus Tom and I will be taking Swahili every morning. May seems very far away.

The girls, however, live wholly in the present and are flourishing. Alice is fully ambulatory now and as pleased as she can be with her new freedom. She is more adventurous than Edith was at this age, meaning we might actually have to do some childproofing one of these days. Yet even as she is getting into cabinets, stacking objects to climb onto her sister's bed, or swinging on the edge of the bathroom sink, she also is observing everything, but everything, that the big people around here do. When she pulls tissues out of the box, she pauses to hold each one to her nose and rub. She wiggles a toothbrush back and forth in her mouth diligently and runs combs over her head. When she gets her hands on anything with a strap, whether a purse, diaper bag, or pair of swim goggles, she drapes the strap over her forearm, then turns and announces "bye-bye" before toddling out of the room. And in a childhood-first that astonished as much as it delighted me, the other day I held her up so she could put her hands under the water from the bathroom sink, and she proceeded to rub them together, hold a hand under the soap dispenser, then rub the soap all over both hands, rinse, and reach for a towel.

Edith meanwhile still needs prompting through every step in toilet use, dressing, and basic hygiene but has recently shown a wonderful new capacity for empathy. The words "I understand how you feel" have issued from her lips several times in the last few weeks--as when Sunday School friend Leanne was cross that her older brother and friends were not including her in a game of catch, and Edith leaned in toward Leanne sympathetically and said, "I understand how you feel: Sometimes Alice won't play with me either, and it hurts my feelings."

For the most part Alice is only too ready to play with Edith these days, and it's unclear whose takes greater pleasure in these sisterly interactions--kids or parents.


There are of course times when Edith would prefer that Alice keep her distance, such as when she is at work on her new illustrated edition of the Odyssey. I'll have to take pictures of the drawings on my bulletin board at work, which include a magnificent Circe with flowers on her shoes and wings to carry her up to Mt. Olympus, as well as Odysseus guarding the trough of blood in the Land of the Dead while Tiresias, the blind prophet, predicts his chance of getting home to Ithaca. Sensing market potential, Edith is also introducing some original adventures for Odysseus, such as the war of Oma ("the cousin city of Troy"), at which all the soldiers get terrible sunburns.

Not quite the Virgin Mary's effortless mastery of life with two kids (rear), but fun all the same

So even with winter colds, the novice toddler's bumps and bruises, continued interruptions of nighttime sleep, endless nagging about socks and shoes, and the perpetual stresses of managing the work-family balance, we try to enjoy every day. We're certainly thankful for each one.

***

That's something we remember especially today, a quiet gray day that Tom says felt filled with death. Today we give thanks for a series of lives recently ended, each known to us to different degrees, each a great gift:

-J.D. Salinger (b. 1918), not known to us personally but in whose literature multiple generations found exquisitely mirrored their own quiet sense of alienation, loneliness, or anger at the world's obtuseness and hypocrisy. However frustrating Salinger's reclusivness may have been for his fans, in the era of hyperconnectivity and megacelebrity he at least provided a model of one who resisted all that noise and insisted on keeping his life his own.

-Howard Zinn (b. 1922), whom I had the pleasure of meeting several times while living in Boston and whose gentle, kind, scholar's humaneness (and heavy brow) reminded me of my grandfather. Once when Tom and I were discussing books we liked shortly after we met, I spent a few minutes expressing my surprise at this full-blooded, twenty-something, American male so fond of an E.M. Forster romance, before clarifying that Tom in fact cared not a whit for Howard's End but was quite taken with A People's History of the United States. Perhaps the opposite of Salinger in his earnest, vocal engagement with society and its ills up until the end, Zinn was one of the sort we sorely continue to need. Even when his politics were too uncompromisingly left for many to swallow, he always helped us imagine a fuller range of political possibilities, pushing the envelope and reminding us never to be complacent.

-Lars Anderson (b. 1965), a member of our church at whose funeral Tom co-presided today. Having fought esphogeal cancer for two years, Lars was on the upswing when he was killed in a car accident last weekend. At his funeral his friends and family recalled a man who lived large and tackled life head-on. His wife asked if the organist possibly could play some Guns-n-Roses in the service.

-Ethan Williams (b. 2001), Tom's cousin's stepson, a sweet, wryly funny boy who loved baseball and who we had the pleasure of getting to know at family gatherings in recent years. He bravely fought a fourteen-month battle against diffuse pontine glioma, a deadly tumor in the brainstem, that ended this evening. All prayers for Ethan and his family.