patriarch

My paternal grandfather Park was a patriarch. I did not know him well; just childhood memories. We visited at Christmas. One time, for example, I had to go to the bathroom. I knocked on the white frame of the door. Tap tap. "Who’s there?" I heard him say. "It's me!" I squeaked, "I need to go to the bathroom." His voice came back through the frame. "Do you have to do number one or number two?" I had no idea what he meant, and said so. He repeated himself, this time his voice taking on an unmistakable playfulness. "I don't have a number," I said, exasperated. "I have to go to the bathroom!" This went back and forth a bit longer, until finally he, chuckling, explained the whole arrangement and that was that. The subject of our exchange is not why I remember. We could have been talking about furniture or the weather. It was the unexpected mirth, the sense of play behind what he said. It startled me. I hadn't expected it. My grandparents weren't exactly the get-down-on-the-floor with you type. If things had been different, if his health hadn't declined, if my parent's divorce hadn't come in like Hurricane Katrina and obscured the day-to-day building of an emotional landscape, perhaps that moment of humor would have been more than something. And yet, Park is as much a patriarch to me as Abraham.

Before Park there wasn't much, just working-class white Mississippi lumbermen-turned-sharecroppers: farm manners and farm equipment, harvest and hard work, all baked together in the humid heat of the American South. The horizon wasn't any further than the few miles you could see across the delta cotton. That farmhouse. That silo. That rusting plow. That copse of trees. All thrusting up through a green pinstripe laid across the dark earth. But something happened to this young man. No one knows what it was--a spark from somewhere: "But who is there that calls upon Thee without knowing Thee? For he that knows Thee not may call upon Thee as other than Thou art. Or perhaps we call on Thee that we may know Thee. “But how shall they call on Him in whom they have not believed? or how shall they believe without a preacher?” (Rom. 10.14) Augustine didn't know either. But somehow Park looked a little further over the flat horizon, and that makes him a patriarch.

Park had a good voice, at least that's what my dad has told me. It contributed to the religious seriousness went deep into this man. Park was a faithful Southern Baptist, active in church, fervent about religion. Religion was a place he could have status, that's what my step-mom Karen theorizes. Being a center of the church in the South gave social recognition in the community that was unavailable otherwise to the working-class. My Dad tells stories of driving his father in a swelteringly hot, black Lincoln to gospel sings all over the Delta; Southern fundamentalism was pillar and post in Park's mind, but Christ was mixed too deeply in the narrow ridges of Southern religion. A Judeo-Christian ethic, steeped in premillennial Darbyian dispensationalism, kept Park out of drink and the whorehouses; but Southern religiosity added law to Christian freedom and hardened opinion and tradition into prejudices and protectionism. Each of his three sons have since struggled to find their own way between their father's Christian faith and the blue-collar fundamentalism that came with it.

Park had a real awareness of the class structure of American society, of where he was on it, and of what it took to move upwards: education. This to me is the most unexplainable part of his personality. Plenty of country people are religious, and deeply so, but few are class ambitious. How was it that this man decided not only to amend his ethics but turn his face upward toward the middle class? Park married a cosmopolitan girl; not a Yankee, but a Southerner whose father worked the railroad. They were from Tennessee, a border state, and her father's job took them all over the South, wherever the railroad went. (It should be remembered that railroads stretch beyond the horizon, and mathematically, the parallel tracks upon which so much may go will never meet.) Their marriage was sociable enough--it is hard to gather data from my distance. Nevertheless, class consciousness figures in his choice of a wife. Park had a study. I remember it well enough, a man's room, full of hats from all over and an atmosphere that was about as Indiana Jones as Indianola MS can get. Kitsch, yes, but a kitsch that bespoke awareness of something larger than itself. His books--and their house had books. I mentioned the Lincoln. He even did genealogical research, tracing the family line all the way back to the Isle of Kent (or so he said. He didn't know to document and footnote his discovery process. Rather, I'm told he set it down as a poem.) Over the course of his life, Park collected what trappings of a better class as he could. He never freed himself from them, they were never his, but they were at least present.

I'm not sure how conscious he was of any of this, but I'd like to think he understood at some level that he himself could never transcend his own origins. As he aged, as his sons grew up, there is a despair, even a desperation, that tells in things if you look at them hard enough. He was a spendthrift who liked to dress well, meaning that he played, irresponsibly, at visions of a different life. Money was always his enemy and never his friend. Money, that constant barometer of class, of position in American society. Class ambition makes a man money-stupid; especially a man who, through music and religious faith, displayed an imagination given to constantly leap beyond himself, tempted always to phantasie, to live within an unreal life. The cracks in his personality became dividing lines between his sons, and like any patriarch, he was sometimes foolish about his boys. Each went on to play out their parts, just as sons of Abraham's always do.

What Park wasn't able to do, they did--mostly. A doctor and a deacon, an executive in healthcare information, a lawyer and playwright, each son inherited his father's class ambition. Each married according to that ambition. Their religious faith, too, bears his stamp, and at least one has had a very difficult time picking his way between faith and fundamentalism. What remained, economic security and the achievement of a Christian family culture, with the corresponding ability to make independent and free class decisions, they have partially achieved. Each of them moved out of Indianola. Each went on to college and some to postgraduate education. And mammon has also written its story into them, at times an unhappy story.

My generation lives from the margins of Park's patriarchal shadow. We almost have the freedom of self-determination. But if we're honest, we see that same ambition, that same struggle with faith and with economics, that was there in the beginning. And as for religion, most of the grandchildren attend church, though some of us have made choices outside the circle of the Southern Baptist Convention. One of us--the eldest son of one brother--is Greek Orthodox. Two others, including myself, are Episcopalian. What we are today and the questions that still pull at the edges of our lives: so many of these we did not create. We are living in the shadow of a patriarch, whether we like it or not--and some don't.

As Kara turns six tomorrow, I wonder how it will be for her and for Caleb. Will they finally find the freedom to write truly different stories, their own stories? Have I found solutions to the questions passed on to me so that these same questions will not, then, go on to them? Frankly, I'm unsure. Now that I am in the middle of what is now a multi-generational process, I cannot see into the future. I cannot tell whether more is required, or what might exist outside of a patriarch's demands.

No one really knows why Pater (his family nickname, but telling in its Latin) saw something, something in his surroundings and in himself, that was further out than he could see. But he did. So he "took his wife and all his possessions and set forth" (Gen. 12:5) and thus became a patriarch.

New sport...

Mom Rodeo. Are you a mom with a bucking bronco under the age of two in your house? Do you wrestle your little one to the ground multiple times a day in a timed event? Then we're looking for you! Welcome to mom rodeo!

Big Top event - The Timed Diaper Change - only truly bucking broncos need apply! Your little one must be able to flip himself or herself over in less than .05 seconds and be able to crawl completely out of reach in the time it takes you to grab the forgotten diaper ointment.

Secondary events

- Jammy Time - For this event you must be able to get your child out of snap-up day clothes and into snap-up jammies WITH a full diaper change by the completion of his or her favorite children's song.

- Feed Me Mommy - This event takes both skill and precision. To add some challenge, we're looking primarily for 7-8month old babies who have just discovered how to blow raspberries!

Come one come all! to the First Ever Mom Rodeo -- coming to a home near you!

On top of "IT"

I was thinking this morning, as I was folding a small load of laundry and putting the sheets in the wash about the expression staying "on top of it." As a mom/homemaker, that's the ever-present issue. If I don't stay "on top of" the laundry, then I find myself washing a mountain of it. If I don't stay "on top of" the groceries and meal planning, I see the rising cost of convenience meals. If I don't stay "on top of" the dusting, I think we actually get sick more often with chest colds and sinus issues. If I don't stay "on top of" organizing this or that thing around the house, things spin out of control and piles and messes and cluttered closets start to take over.

Therefore, each day I do a bit of the overall work and that's how I stay "on top of it." Now, truth be told, this is a fairly new revelation for me. As little as one year ago, I was most certainly not "on top of it" - just ask Thom or our friend who was staying with us and you will find out all the hidden secrets of how not "on top of it" I really was. A mountain of laundry seemed normal to me at the time. And years earlier a mountain of dishes seemed ordinary, but not anymore. Staying on top of it is the new me. Dividing the work throughout the work-week breaks the routine needs down into manageable pieces and leaves space for the incidental projects - like painting Caleb's furniture or Kara's bedroom or keeping up with scrapbooking. In the past, this was done instead of staying "on top of it." Projects have always been fun for me - sort of playing hard rather than working hard. Or maybe, playing hard rather than working smart. But now, the new me, the mother-of-two with a husband who loves his job and whose parents live across town... this new me, I stay "on top of it."

But as I was thinking this morning about the little load of laundry I was folding and the specifics of my day today... I got to wondering what "it" I was staying on top of. Out there beyond motherhood and housework or even the daily-grind at a desk job - where does this staying "on top of it" expression come from. The two thoughts that came to mind were surfing and rodeos.

So, with that in mind -- some days life's a wave, others it's a bucking bronco!

Tortilla Chip Nation

Tortilla chips: I simply can't control myself. Whenever I'm at one of those restaurant's that provide unlimited amounts of chips, I can't stop eating them. I compulsively crunch crunch crunch along through the before- during- and after-parts of the meal like a man driven by the Mexican hounds of hell. Heaven help me if I'm ever in such a situation without some kind of limiting factor, like a lunch hour or someone else's schedule. The situation would be permanent and probably fatal. Upon retirement, I must beware the terminal situation because, like a goldfish, I'd probably sit at one of those tables and request more chips until the inevitable explosion--to the, no doubt, enthusiastic applause of the harassed waitstaff. They might break out into song: You finally died of corn chips / We're happy that you did / Because you cost us hundreds / In supplemental tips. (At least I'm not the only one.)

Right under the armpits

One thing you can say about living in Nashville, whenever there's music, it is usually good. That was certainly the case at the craft fair in Franklin this last weekend. We met L's parents there amid a sea of people and, in a just a block or so, heard Country, Bluegrass, Southern Rock and California Jazz. I pulled Kara aside for the jazz band, explaining what the band was doing and why. She was nearly spent by then, though. See, there was a kid's area. These giant, inflatable rooms for kids. Two tickets and she was away in one called "Jurassic" with giant teeth and a climbable volcano, kids jumping around, throwing themselves against each other, sliding into each other. Pandemonium. One resembled a giant dog's head. You entered under the ear and came out (via an interior slide) the nose. Inside, whooshes of air kept a bunch of balloons swirling and bouncing around. Parents clustered about transparent plastic portholes, watching our little darlings bounce around like crazy human electrons. My favorite is "pass the balloon in your mouth" meaning that your kid puts a balloon in their mouth and then passes it to another kid who does the same thing. I also like the "too old to be here" kid who keeps ducking out of the nose to tell on a sibling and then ducking back in. The food was expensive, though there were deals to be had: I snagged a decent egg role for $1.75. Franklin's downtown is a sidewalk-shop odyssey. Lots of art stores, galleries, chocolate shops and antiques. It also looks a great deal like New England, which, we are learning, is a must-have on everyone's architectural wish list. What used to be the corner store now becomes the purvue of resort and high-society locations. Caleb had a great time just looking around. There was one point where, taking two balloons in hand, I belted him about the ears with them. This urned a happy bit of piglet grunting from him, along with an expectorant wave of hands and curl of tongue. He is so funny when he gets excited. I love throwing him in the air a few times and listening to him laugh, though it brings back some painful memories of my Dad throwing me about a zillion miles up into the air and catching me again and again right under the armpits (ouch!)

Bits of Easter going and coming

So a few weeks ago, the family went to an easter egg hunt. It was a nice day on the whole, and the hunt was located in an expansive yard to the side of some acquaintances from church. The host and hostess fenced in large squares of grass, and placed multicolored eggs throughout. Kara and L. went to join the other little girls, bucket in hand. Caleb and I moseyed over to the babies square. I set Caleb down right beside a big orange egg, and adjusted his hat. Beautiful area, really. Standing, I looked up at the surrounding green hills. The lawn was long and flat, curing up toward the base of the nearest hill and falling away into a steep brook. I looked up at the clear sky, thinking about the dark clouds and the tornado that had screamed through this very landscape only a few days before. Caleb had discovered the egg. He lifted and turned it, trying to nibble on first its narrow and then its fat ends. "Is that egg tasty?" I asked him, crouching. He put it down in frustration, and glanced around. A purple egg was just a few feet away. He was on the move. Ah, another Dad. I stood. We talked about work. He told me all about working 150 feet up on cable towers and we talked about a group of American Indians that builds all the skyscrapers in New York. Caleb was munching. "Is that grass tasty?" I said, indulgent. He ignored me, hands lifted as if to say "there's so much to munch here, who can choose?" The Dad and I kept talking, this time about the tornado. It was on everyone's mind. No, he didn't know anyone who had been hurt. Caleb leaned out to grab a yellow egg, and then sat back hard against my foot. He studied it, looking for any strategic weakness. A few clouds had drifted above us. The Dad and I were making a joke about heights. His baby girl was losing patience from her shoulder perch. I looked down. Caleb had given up on the yellow egg. Instead a little bit of green grass went in and out as he sucked, uncaring, and pulled at the lawn. "Let me get that for you," I said, "It's a little disgusting." I grabbed the bit of grass and pulled, and out came an ENTIRE DANDELION!! He'd been sucking on the whole thing, from yellow flower to green stem.

L. and I sat down with our rector today, and we are joining an Episcopal church in Nashville. Many, I’m sure, believe we've lost our minds--or worse--but I couldn’t be happier about it. If the news media are to be believed, the Episcopal Church in the United States is as corrupted and lost as they come, and, frankly, that is probably true. Nevertheless, our new home confesses Christ as Lord and displays a fidelity to Scripture and a love for neighbor that is unmistakably orthodox. The preaching is straight from the text, its service is evident and the liturgy stays true to Cranmer’s prayer book without innovation. it is also aligned openly with the Anglican Communion Network, a reform movement within the Anglican communion.

Still, explaining this seemingly-from-nowhere change is difficult. I wish I had the thinking done on the matter; I'm wrestling with the draft of a personal statement to explain it as much to myself as to others. In the meantime, here's a story:

Palm Sunday. We faithful file out of our chairs and line up in the sunny open air, where we are given real palm fronds (not sheets of construction paper cut into leaves). Then, the rector and the other leaders file everyone in, all of us singing a hymn together. As we go, Kara looks up at L. and I and asks, "What's going on?" and I smiled an inner, ecstatic, wickedly wonderful smile. And, as I reminded her about Jesus' triumphal entry, I thought to myself: "What's going on? Why, catechesis, my dear, catechesis."

This and that

So, if you've been checking here for the last week and dissapointed that it kept on being the "sound I heard last night" story of the 10th day -- here's something new for you.

Let's see... Caleb is getting his top teeth. He's looking very cute with nearly four teeth now and thinks he can eat anything... including dandelions and sticks from the yard. He is loving the toys he got for Christmas and enjoys playing with them every day. His current favorite is an activity table from his Aunt and Uncle. It's by LeapFrog and plays lots of music and does ABCs and 123s and he laughs and dances while standing and holding onto it. He's getting so big. He's about ready for his 9 month checkup and I'm guessing he's about 22lbs and 30 inches. We'll see how close I guessed in a couple of weeks.

As for Kara, she is trying her best to overcome some struggles at school and being very sweet around the house. At school they are reading and writing sentences and she's not quite up to speed with the rest of her class, likely because of the move this year, but she's catching up. In the last two weeks we have seen a lot of progress in her reading and writing and we just wish she would feel more confident in school. Believe it or not she's actually having trouble with shyness and being too introverted. Crazy sounding isn't it?! Thom and I are still reading up on sensory integration issues for her and trying to help understand her in every way. We are very happy that there are two families with kids that live in the next building over and there is a lovely grassy lawn between the two buildings. It's a great place to sit on a blanket with Caleb and watch the kids. It's just outside Caleb's window, too, so really I could even be out there with Kara while Caleb naps if I open is window a bit. The other two families are both new to Tennessee, too and one is a pastor's family, so it feels familiar after being at seminary for so long!

Let's see, what else -- it's been full make-over treatment for me lately -- Lynn-nore, not Thom. It started with a bit of outlet shopping while we were on vacation in Gatlinburg. I picked up some new summer clothes and church clothes. Then my mom encouraged me to lighten my hair. Evidently, after Caleb was born my hair did some funky things including thinning out and coming back in darker, so, after much persuading my mom convinced me to lighten it some., it turned out a little more reddish-brown than we expected - but it's fun. So, to add to the dye-job, my mom offered me a visit to her salon and I got a new cut! So, new clothes, new hair, and to finish it off mom took me out for a manicure and pedicure yesterday. So, I'm a new woman!

As for Thom, he is still loving his job in every way and looking dashing wearing a shirt and tie to work everday. Thanks to all of you who gave him shirts and ties for Christmas!

Well, Caleb is presently resisting naptime, and he and I are scheduled to have lunch with Thom and the pastor of the church we've been attending, so I'd better wrap this up. Hope you all are doing well. Keep in touch!
}

What I heard last night

They may as well have been playing basketball upstairs with as much thumping and thudding, heavy footfalls running here and there, shouts and collisions. The couple (are they a couple) that live upstairs are in their early 20's, with all the lifestyle up-late's of that age, and we've become used to a general awareness. But this was something else. This was a hurricane of pounding and wrenching and leaping around. "I'm going to have to go up there," I said to myself, remote in hand. The rest of the family was in bed, whereas I'd stayed up to watch some of the "real Jesus" oxymoronic pseudo-science a-news-ualities on the National Geographic Channel. "I'm going to have to go up there and ask them to stop before they wake the kids." I grumbled and they tramped.

Then it went up a notch. A dog started howling. "I didn't know they had a dog upstairs?" I chafed. They were a symphony. Their instruments, by wind and strike, the percussive membrane of ceiling and floor, wall and window. "Woof! Woof! Woo-oof!" went the dog. "Thump, bam, bada-da-da-da-d-ad-ad-a-da-daadaaa, thud!" went the neighbors.

Then it got bad. Suddenly, for no reason, the barking dog suddenly began screaming. Its howl was one of terrible agony. Primal, bloody, almost a woman's scream, it writhed vocally so loud the room itself seemed to take it up. It was everywhere, even in my head. I stood straight up in socked feet. "What is that?" I asked it the way a man asks when he doesn't want to know. 10 seconds. 20 seconds, screaming, screaming, screaming. I stumbled into the hallway and out the door, turning in the open hallway and rushing out under the sky to look up at the windows of the apartment above. The screaming came from everywhere, an open, terrible scream. I struggled to stay, to go up and nock, and could I even tell--did the scream come from upstairs? It seemed to bleed from every window, every car, every tree. "Maybe I'm an idiot for even going up there?" I said. I went back inside. L. was awake. "It woke me up," she said. "What is it?" "A dog, I think--from upstairs." "The people on the other corner have a dog," she said. "I'm going to go back outside" I started, "I should probably call the police." Images of police vehicles, burly men and women asking questions, knocking on doors, wheeling lights biting into every cornea, every window.

And then it stopped. The screaming stopped. The noise upstairs--the gallop of an hour--stopped. Nothing.

Now, I did nothing about this. For all I know, there are bodies upstairs right now. For all I know, there had been plans to murder that dog, if it had been a dog. Would I have interrupted some scene of nightmares if I'd gone upstairs? Perhaps pulled into a struggle for life? All I can say is the scream--that scream--no living thing should ever make a sound like that.

Does Kara suffer from SMD?

Sensory Modulation Disorder (SMD), a sub-set of the larger category Sensory Processing Disorder, is at the top of the learning curve today given recent conversations with Kara's kingergarten teachers. Both of them describe a child unable to focus her mind or body, a condition that used to only be challenging for her teachers but now increasingly results in alienation from her peers. Indeed, as L. and I review our Kara in all of her contexts, it is becoming clear that something is going on, something out of the bell curve for her age group. That something is most likely SMD. For more information, visit my more technical post Decoding the Out-of-Sync Girl. Related websites are listed there.

Quick take on Friday

Thank you to all those who have called or written. We made it okay through the storm last Friday, though not without much anxiety. I was stuck in downtown Nashville; L. and kids were at home. An F3 touched down about two radial miles from the apartment, and cut a 10-mile-long swath up to the West and further north, stopping in the town just north of us and killing 12 people. The stories are slowly starting to slip out: a sick woman stays home from work and falls asleep in her bed only to wake up later lying in her front yard with the remains of her house all around her; two children who were thrown into the twister as their home was ripped apart, taken up into the funnel and deposited, alive, in a field; a mother and her son cowering in a closet are sucked out and thrown 100 feet in different directions--she dies; a church with 40 pre-schoolers is hit head-on by the tornado, the sanctuary is demolished but the nursery is untouched, one of the children asks his teacher, "Are we going to heaven today?" Lynn-nore and I were pretty freaked, watching cell after cell come up from Arkansas, each one putting a tornado or two down; unfamiliar streets and counties constantly being cited on the radio: "A touchdown has been recorded in X-ner county"; "Residents north of Sullivan Farms need to take cover now"; "If you live south of Dixon, you should be aware of high winds in your area between 1:45 and 2:30 which could spawn a tornado," etc. The worst was that the highway connected Nashville with home was a parking lot. Thus, if I went home, I ran the risk of sitting trapped on the highway with cell after cell rushing overhead. I finally made a break for it about 6:30 and made it with no difficulties (a story in itself). I started to leave work earlier, at 2pm, but, while pumping gas, saw a dark, monstrous cloud come up over the horizon, like an upturned mountain of broiling black ashes hanging in mid-air. I went back to work, and learned later that there were three linked tornadoes in that cloud, none of which, thankfully, ever touched down.

I got a digital key-chain camera from Grandma last week. Here are some pictures I took of tornado damage.

Metro Baptist Church

 

 

 

 

 

My right eye

 

My Baby Brother!

 

Flubbed up

Well, the official weigh-in was this morning, and I, with others, lost to Alypius. What's worse, of all the participants, I lost the least, just a pound less than three months ago: a single pound! It is depressing. I'm sad about it. Not that I didn't win--though the money would have been nice--but that of everyone I weighed the most to begin with and lost the least. What happened to the initial determination and discipline of January? Fizzled out in the hurly burly of March, that's what. I wonder if I'll ever be anything near a healthy weight again; if only I'd not gained so much in seminary; too much reading, not enough walking! Worse, I'm hungry now. I skipped breakfast and I'm hungry. Food has me by the gut, and I'm too fat, too undisciplined, and too lazy to do anything about it.