Midlife Meditation

A note from a fourth grader. It's my favorite moment in one of my favorite movies: her work completed, the Banks family restored, Mary Poppins is just about to take off when the parrot head on her magic umbrella calls her out, chiding her for not acknowledging her own feelings, particularly jealousy of the father the children love more than their nanny. She responds that that's as it should be, and that "practically perfect people never permit sentiment to muddle their thinking." I don't consider myself perfect, or even practically perfect. The most Methodist thing about me is my fundamental awareness of just how flawed I am. I've spent the last year having this driven home to me again and again as I've struggled to hang onto a job that was rejecting me. This was most true in my work with an especially recalcitrant bunch of fifth grade boys whose collective goal in music class was to get me to explode. I tried strategy after strategy, and none of ...

The only one not having a good time at my own party--or am I? No, I'm not. The question was rhetorical. If you guessed I wasn't enjoying myself, you guessed right--but you had an equal chance of guessing wrong. As I've been pointing out in my recents posts, it can be very hard to know what I'm thinking or feeling from the stoic expression on my face. I don't wear my feelings on my sleeve, or anywhere else on my body. That doesn't make them any less real, though. In fact, in this photo, it's not that I was having a bad time, despite the best efforts of my parents and brothers. (That cake would've been my favorite, angel food with seven-minute frosting, and there's a good chance those candles were the joke candles that were hard to blow out--my parents had a thing for them in the early 1980s.) The truth is--and I remember this very well--that I was grieving a relationship that was never going to be what I wanted it to be. Just a few days...

Quick, where's the Kleenex box? It was a hard week. It began, as so many hard weeks have in this chaotic era, with a news story: a white nationalist, the kind who are the most rabid believers in the Trump agenda, only this one was even more extreme than they are, took his Trump-empowered bigotry and part of his NRA-empowered gun collection into a synagogue in Pittsburgh and killed eleven people. I saw that in my news feed Friday after school, and coupled with the other horrible things that no-longer fringy conservative white men had done that week (pipe bombs, shooting elderly African-American grocery shoppers when a prayer meeting proved inaccessible), I started the weekend in a bad place. All these crimes hit close to home one way or another: the bombs being sent to people of any prominence at all who'd been critical of Trump (making me thankful my blog reaches dozens, rather than thousands, of people); the attempted assault on a church much like the one where I pl...

Hawkeye loses it. Aw geez. There I go again. I was listening to NPR's Up First  podcast, a ten-minute early morning rundown of the top three stories of the day, and I found myself tearing up. It wasn't the latest example of the Trump regime exemplifying its ABE motto (Always Be Evil) that did me in this time, though that has happened in the past--forced parent-child separations? American citizens, born in this country, denied a passport because of their Mexican ancestry and their birthplace being south Texas? And there I go again...[sniff] No, this time it was two stories about the funerals of great Americans: John McCain and Aretha Franklin. Earlier this week, I listened to a Fresh Air that played interviews with McCain from 2000 and 2005, and hearing the sincere, idealistic voice of this wounded warrior, even as he explained policy positions I vehemently oppose, had my eyes misting up. And don't get me started on Aretha: I've had her music on a constant loo...

An-di-fan, soon to be someone else's house of tranquility. I never had a home town, but I always had this house. My grandmother moved into the house on Baker Street in 1945. She'd been widowed for a year, and had decided to return to McMinnville to teach at Linfield College, where her husband had been president in the 1930s. Now, at the age of 54 (my age now), and for the first time in her adult life, she needed a house that was not provided by my grandfather's employment. The house on Baker Street had been built forty years earlier, and had been the home of a botanist. It stood on a double lot, the huge back garden filled with mature flora that he had planted. It had, the realtor told her, a good hearth, and this was important to her as she entered this new phase of her life. She named it "An-di-fan," after the name she and my grandfather took as missionaries in Shanghai. It was something of a pun on our Swedish family name of "Anderson," a...

My father's ashes, along with flowers thrown by his grandchildren, sink into the Pacific. 3  For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: 2  a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted; 3  a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; 4  a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; 5  a time to throw away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; 6  a time to seek, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to throw away; 7  a time to tear, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; 8  a time to love, and a time to hate; a time for war, and a time for peace (Ecclesiastes 3:1-8) It's the time for casting away. When my father died December 29, he set in motion a chain of events that will be pl...

Just stay in this circle, and everything will be fine. "Okay, we get it, divorce hurts. Now can't you please cheer up for a change?" That's the message that finally drove me out of the ministry. As I've written more times in this space than I can remember, I never really belonged there in the first place. But I'd invested so much of my self--so much "blood and treasure," to borrow from language about the Iraq War--that I stubbornly refused to leave. Thanks to ministry, at the age of 38, I was now twice divorced, had no close friends, was always teetering on the brink of too much debt, and could only see my children by appointment. At least, I kept telling myself, I was working with people who cared, people who felt called to serve, to lift up the downtrodden, liberate the oppressed, blah de blah de blah. And then my senior pastor told me people were getting impatient with me for being sad. That's when I knew it was time to leave, and w...

I felt the first warning signs at 10:45 yesterday morning: a slight gumminess in my throat, a huskiness in my voice. By 1:30, I was practically inaudible. And I still had to teach a kindergarten class. I catch a lot of colds. It's one of the less glamorous parts of my profession: teaching music to 500 children, most of whom are infrequent hand washers, I'm exposed to every virus that enters the school. Once I feel one coming on, I can usually tough it out for a day or two, sometimes even a week, but inevitably, just as I think I'm past the worst of it, it moves down into my throat. My cough worsens, deepens, becomes more frequent, and simultaneously, my voice starts to fade. It usually takes longer than yesterday to completely vanish, but then, this cold has been moving more quickly than most through my system. If I'm lucky, my voice will be back before the end of the week, and I'll be back in my classroom wrapping up my hip hop unit. I teach with my voi...

The one who's not smiling is me. The date was March 24, 1982. It was my 21st birthday. I was home from Willamette University for Spring Break (my birthday has always coincided with Oregon's Spring Break week), and gathered around me was my entire family. Mom had prepared my favorite cake: angle food with seven minute frosting. There were balloons, gifts, iced tea, and enough goofiness to life anyone's spirits--except mine. The reason? Just a few days earlier, I had awkwardly confessed my love to a classmate, who had gently told me that, as much as she valued my friendship, that was all we would ever have. Heartbreak and disappointment are hell for a young adult. I don't remember crying much over this particular blow--in fact, I may have just stoically soldiered on, even as I was internally bottoming out. In fact, I don't remember crying for most of my 20s, except on three occasions: the deaths of my grandfather, aunt, and grandmother. I cried more whe...

America has a grief problem. Thank you, Bill Evans, for drawing my attention to this essay by Will Leitch  in which he takes on the Robin Williams grief train so many are jumping on. If you're on Twitter, Facebook, or any other social media site, you've seen the steady stream of tributes and remembrances adding up to a virtual canonization of an actor/comedian with a spotty filmography and few quotable bits. Certainly he projected warmth and compassion as few entertainers can, and his basic humanity shone through his manic standup performances; but as Leitch observes, had anyone, on Monday morning, waxed rapturous over Patch Adams, Jumanji , or Night in the Museum , it would've been a short train indeed. Once his suicide became public, though, it was as if there was not a false note in his career, and everything he did was but a piece in the larger masterwork of his soon-to-be-sainted life. I will admit to being one small part of this phenomenon: I posted a piece on ...