Some things for which I'm grateful...

1. Miracles. Our friend, on a lung transplant list, went for a regular checkup this past week. In the most sobering and yet beautiful example of the circle of life (the real circle, not the Disney version) I can imagine, while she was there two healthy lungs became available. So, on the day before Thanksgiving, she had a double lung transplant. She may well be the only genuinely optimistic person I know, and she’s a necessary spark of light in our community, so we are all walking around with happy idiot grins over this amazing turn of events, which our friend absolutely trusted would come.

2. Food. I have a lifelong love/hate/love-too-much relationship with food. I forget that it’s only fuel and more often think of it as reward, comfort, confidant, friend. And on holidays, I can’t help but think of it as bounty, too—when the table is spread and the candles are lit, some prehistoric part of my brain sends the message that we’ll survive until the next dinosaur kill, which makes happy-to-be-alive endorphins kick in, which reinforces my twisted relationship with food. It’s a vicious cycle, one I’ll gladly analyze over another bowl of my Mom’s corn and macaroni casserole.

3. Dancing. On the night after Thanksgiving, we gathered at Our Lady of Perpetual Dancing Bar & Grille, where Ray’s band was playing their traditional post-turkey gig. We had a large contingent of family & friends, good dark beer, exceptional music that included a friend from the Hills sitting in with the band, and much freakish, loose-jointed, sweaty dancing. It’s quite purging, really, to dance with wild abandon. Women at Our Lady don’t wait around for men to ask us to dance; we just head for the floor, alone or in gaggles. Some of the dancers—me, maybe—look a lot like that Seinfeld episode where Elaine tried to dance, but it’s such a comfortable hometown scene that no one cares. And I think I threw out a hip at some point, but it’s nothing Advil and a walk around the pasture can’t whip back into shape. Well worth it.

4. Dogs. We had six at our house for Thanksgiving, three puppies and three adults. They established a pack order right away. We had one minor skirmish between the big older Aussie and the Chessie pup, but order was quickly restored. The peacocks, not as grateful for dogs as I am, disappeared into the grove almost as soon as company started arriving, and they didn’t come back into the yard until late Friday.

5. Coffee. The older I get, the harder it is to get moving after a night of song & dance. So bless the goatherder who first noticed his goats gaily frolicking after eating coffee cherries. And bless the Turkish nomads who thought to roast the beans over a desert fire until they were dark & greasy.

6. Time off work. I’m sure there’s an algebraic formula for how long it takes me to recover from festive holiday celebrating: something like X/Y=Z, where X is my current age, Y is the number of hours I spend celebrating, and Z is the number of days it will take me to feel human again. Today it’s snowing and grey, the peacocks are tucked up against the greenhouse windows, and the leftover turkey will soon be turkey noodle soup. So, what’s one to do but watch the Lord of the Rings trilogy and doze under a fuzzy blankie with a dog in one's lap?

7. Family. We had twelve people from four states for Thanksgiving dinner. In spite of individual quirks and mutual dysfunctions, I love family gatherings. If you pay attention, you can see how well kids are growing up, how relationships bend & shift, how bonds deepen, how life paradoxically moves us forward together, but along divergent paths. And, if you’re really lucky, you can wing your little brother with a Nerf dart in retribution for the day in 1971 when he found and bit the head off of the chocolate Easter bunny (your friend & confidant) you had stashed in Grandpa’s red toolbox on the back porch. Bullseye...life is good. Happy Thanksgiving.

A clean home, shaken, not stirred...

I have these brass hooks made for displaying decorative plates. They were my grandmother’s. They’re dangling from a wire shelf in my laundry room because, well, you never know when you’ll get the urge to hang a decorative plate. So one day, I was hanging underwear on these brass plate hooks so our delicates could air dry, when it hit me like a bolt of Thor’s own lightning: prairie people are ingenious. My revelation was soon affirmed by Ray.

There are some domestic chores I’ve sworn off for life, and vacuuming is one of them. So in our household, Ray does all the vacuuming. He doesn’t like it, but he does it because he knows I won’t. For my part, I know to steer clear of him when he gets out the Rainbow. He curses cords that pull out of the wall, kicks half-chewed dog biscuits under the computer desk, and mutters as he sucks up the fine layer of dog hair and bird dander that settles on everything in our house. So I stay out of sight, where I won’t have to witness the soft-spoken We Are the World pre-vacuum man I love, morphing into maniacal, wall-crashing, spitting, fuming VACUUM MAN. But today, in a flash of pure prairie ingenuity, Ray discovered the secret to keeping Mr. Hyde hidden—gin martinis.

That’s right. Gin martinis. He vacuumed for FOUR hours, upstairs and down, while sipping gin & olive martinis. He was patient, amused by the cobwebs in the bathroom doorway, and I thought I heard him whistling once. I actually walked through the room just to test. He didn’t glare. He didn’t swear. He smiled at me. If he’d been wearing a tuxedo and cocked an eyebrow once or twice, my knees would have buckled, I would have swooned—I’d have been in James Bond Meets Hazel heaven (you gotta be my age to get that one).

This flash of brilliance on Ray’s part is especially ingenious because Ray does not drink. Even when the band plays in smoky dive bars, Ray drinks Mountain Dew, and he never hunkers down in his Lazy Boy in the evening with a cold brewski. So for him to put these two disparate elements together—martinis and vacuuming—somehow intuiting that the combo would make for a productive and peaceful afternoon, was every bit as practical and ingenious as sorting nails and screws by size into Mason jelly jars, or putting a brooder lamp in the loafing shed rafters to keep the peacocks thawed on January nights.

Thanks to Ray, I’m feeling a surge of prairie pride & inspiration. I’m gonna tear up old stained dishtowels and holey socks, and piece together a quilt commemorating indigenous grasses of the Plains. But first, I think I’ll see if Ray will mix me up a martini…

Road Trip Reverie

It’s a grey, lazy Sunday at Uncannery Row. We got a couple inches of snow Friday night, but it’s in the 30’s today and melting, a good day to load some Little Feat and Tom Waits into my iPod, catch up on laundry, cut through a layer or two of dust, and think about Thanksgiving dinner.

I can’t begin to name the things for which I’m grateful this year—the list is too long—but just today, I’m especially thankful for one thing in particular: road trips.

Ray and I went to Alejandro MN Friday night so he could play a gig with Small Howard, a band of brothers from Ray’s 20’s. The boys all lived together in an old farmhouse, and they gather every few months or years to do what we all know they really love (in spite of pledges to wives, spouse-equivalents, children, or home fires). I’ve SEEN that look of adoration for a 1970’s Gibson electric—puts stars in a man’s eyes. The boys love each other, too, but talk about it only in private to wives and spouse-equivalents. Women, even prairie women, will tell each other how much they need & enjoy each others’ company. But for men, maybe especially for prairie men, the most they can muster to each other is “good to see you” or “nice licks.”

In spite of a little Norlander stoicism, we had a great time. The boys smiled in and out of moments where the music clicked so perfectly, they were simultaneously in the Alejandro wine bar AND sitting around the living room of the Small Howard House 30 years ago, pushing their long hair out of their eyes and jamming in their holey bell bottoms.

Penelope, Artemis, and I had just as much fun. We sipped wine or Belgian beers, sampled chocolate genache-filled pastry, sang along, and laughed. We celebrated the happy news that Artemis and Byron will dive into the mysterious marital abyss next spring or summer. And we all kept room in our hearts for Betsy, Arnold’s wife, who is home battling cancer. No one said anything, but we were all feeling her absence and aware of the delicacy of our days, somewhere in these middle years where we begin to see the horizon at both ends of life. We did our best to surround Arnold with joy, warm friendship, and music, filling him to overflowing so he could take the extra home to Betsy.

Maybe it’s just a stray drop or two of gypsy blood on my father’s Czech side, a little mongrel wanderlust stirring somewhere, but there’s something about a road trip that restores my spiritual center, re-aligns my emotional compass. Seeing newly harvested fields roll by in black & white striped blurs, or beyond those fields, snow hanging like mist over river bluffs, or beyond the bluffs, the curve of the earth at the edge of my vision, makes me realize not just how small I am, but also that the bigness of the world is a good thing. It puts my puny fears, complaints, and troubles in their proper place, at least temporarily. So today, while I’m worrying that a new green bean recipe (sans the crunchy fake onions) might be a kind of sacrilege, or while I’m coming unhinged because I can’t find the little pilgrim salt & pepper shakers, the prairie will be resting peacefully, healing the necessary brutality of farming, highway traffic, and human need under her brief, beautiful blanket of winter.

Going All Prairie Girl

I grew up in the Omaha, spent 20-some years in a city I never had to leave and couldn’t possibly get to know. There was noise, 24-hour light, fast-moving everything, busy people everywhere. When we were tired of our own neighborhood, north Omaha, we wandered into South O, snuck downtown, or cruised out to West O. When that wasn’t exotic enough, we crossed a bridge into Council Bluffs and there we were, in the foreign land of Iowa, without once leaving the city lights.

It was perpetual motion, constant stimulation. If we wanted a cool light show, we parked just outside Eppley airfield fence, spread blankets on the hoods of our cars, laid back and braced ourselves, then waited for our bones to rattle around in our skinny little bodies as jets took off overhead. Sometimes we played chicken on the train trestle over 30th Street. Sometimes we jumped the fence at the Water Works and played balance beam on the rims of cement holding tanks. We ate Chinese at King Fong’s, where the tables were inlaid with mother-of-pearl and we had to point at pictures on the menu to order. We shared pancakes and bottomless pots of coffee at Village Inn at 2 in the morning, to watch the post-bar folks drift (or stagger) in. We hung out in the Greyhound depot in the middle of the night and smoked cigarettes, imagining peoples’ stories as they got on and off the buses.

So when I moved from the city to a little farmhouse in South Dakota, ten miles from the nearest dinky town, I felt Dorothy’s pain—lions and tigers and bears…oh my. I couldn’t imagine a more complete desolation, except maybe on the surface of Mars. I wasn’t sure how people survived the dark, the quiet, the oceans of corn. And it was summer. I hadn’t been through a South Dakota winter yet.

I have almost three decades under my prairie belt now. I’ve spent some of it in the country, some in small towns, some in smaller towns, and now back in the country. Once I knew I wouldn’t be eaten by roving wolves, I started to like the slower pace. When my friend Paul from New York came to visit and asked, on the drive from the airport to my house, “Are those real cows?” I rolled my eyes. You don’t get it, my rolled eyeballs said.

I knew I’d gone Prairie Girl all the way, knew I’d never go back to the city, when I came up over a country hill one morning at sunrise. A perfectly illuminated Maxfield Parrish landscape stretched out as far as I could see, and I actually wept, it was so beautiful.

I don’t have the lights at Eppley any more, but I can walk 30 feet out my front door on a moonless night, spread a blanket on the ground, and watch the Milky Way. And I may have to pawn a guitar amp or two for the gas it takes to get to decent Chinese food, but just out my east windows tonight is the moon, breaking over the trees in a cloudy sky. She’s half in light, half in shadow, a grinning wài pó or a bright yin yang, reminding me again why I’m out here in the dark, in the quiet, on the prairie--BALANCE.

A Good Day for Snowetry

The first real, sticky snow is falling on Uncannery Row today. It looks like a Currier & Ives calendar. It makes me want to wrap presents. Mull cider. String cranberries. Sing carols. I can’t help it—I’m a hopeless, really hopeless, romantic.

We lost Snowflake, our wild barn kitty, last week after the first hard freeze. She’d always been a little wobbly, so I suspect a generally weak constitution. It’s sad, though, and I’ll admit I cried a little even though she’d never let me get closer than 5 feet to her. I haven’t seen much of her mom, Snowball, since, but she's eating the food I put out for her in the pyramid. There’s a black cat, too, we call him Spook, but I haven’t seen him for a while, either.

The flock is fine, though, still 15 strong, and this year’s babies are getting hard to pick out from the adults. They’re all roosting in the communal Tree in the yard at night, and there’s prolonged fussing & whining at night as they jockey for spots. Fifteen is a lot of big birds for one small ash tree.

I got to attend a reception in the Big City last weekend for poets and artists who collaborated on paired works of poems with paintings, drawings, or photos. The poem I selected for the exhibit is St. John of God, printed below. I wrote it when my friend Dave died alone and miserable after years of alcoholism. I wondered how the outcome might have changed—how everyone’s life would change— if we knew (& believed) how loved we’ve really been, all along.

Many good friends were at the reception, Ray, my daughter and her paramour, a friend who designed a poetry book I put together, my midlife lifelines, some of the Wild Women. These people are gifted poets themselves or amazingly talented artists in other mediums—words, counsel, hospitality, building materials & power tools, food, graphic deisgn, humor. So as this gorgeous snow drifts down, I’m grateful for every delicate flake, and for the beautiful, creative people around me. Told ya. Hopeless romantic.

ST. JOHN OF GOD
for the dead

What if there is no dreaming, no dancing,
no opalescent mist in which we float
suddenly weightless or winged,
what if trumpets don’t sound
and in no distant fog
do chords come clean from harps,
what if there never were seraphim
swallowed in flames of love
so radiant we turn our heads.

What if there is only a pause
a mirrored moment in which we see,
most of us for the first time,
our selves, and in that moment know
with certainty that we have been bathed
in love since the beginning
that all along while we wept and prayed
saved unanswered letters
left the receiver on the hook

we were pure love twisted into human shapes
so, like impulse and receptor cell
we fit, and could only spark together,
blood and bone going up in a flash of love
so radiant people turned their heads.
What if that moment is all we have,
one gauzy white curtain drawn quickly
over a small dim window
then out, out, into the long night.

St. John, was it looking out
too soon that drove you mad?
Or could you bless me with that moment now,
walk me past the mirror now,
with the window still wide open,
curtain billowing like a sail
until I know love, love, love,
that sea of flame and beautiful sorrow
so radiant I turn my head?

(Amen.)

Sage Advice, Anyone?

It’s advising time at UP (University of the Prairie), that twice-yearly time for faculty to advise students about classes they should enroll in for next semester, any gaps in their degree programs, and how best to accomplish their academic goals. I always feel a little pschizo during these times: part teacher, part counselor, part mother, part aimless sojourner myself. I sometimes want to blurt out advice that would be totally inappropriate. Shhh...don’t tell...I’m letting you in on some of this alternate advice—stuff that swirls around in my addled brain while students sit in my office considering their course options...

· Slow down. It only FEELS like you’re sick of all this. Trust me, after ten years on the job, any job, you’ll be desperately scheming to come BACK…a new major…another degree…philosophy maybe, bat husbandry, intramural sports administration…anything.

· I know you THINK those double-knit yellow hotpants are stunning with your Ugg boots and red UP hoodie, but trust me, the outfit isn’t as sharp as you imagine.

· Get your hair out of your eyes.

· You might have better luck raising your GPA if you go to class occasionally and stay awake while you’re there.

· Go back to your dorm, and don’t return until you’ve slept, put on clean clothes, and brushed your teeth.

· Employers won’t really look at that double French and Bio major or your Honor’s thesis on rural solid waste management and the life cycle of the aporrectodea turgida; they’ll be checking out your outfit. Maybe double-knit yellow hot pants and a pair of Uggs…

· Don’t let anyone kid you; fast food service is a noble profession.

· “Who’s on the train?” and “Where did Katie get those stilettos?” will never be correct answers for math story problems.

· Sit up straight.

· Quit school NOW. Party for a year or two. Hitch to Oregon with your boy/girlfriend and live on love for year until s/he leaves you for a forest ranger. Write poetry on the Greyhound as you make your way back home. Work like a dog for the next five or ten years at a job you despise. Marry an insurance agent. Have a couple of kids. Pay a mortgage. Don’t come back until you want a college degree more than anything else on the planet, and you’ll do whatever it takes to get it.

· Call your mother.

All-American Soup

There are emails circulating that suggest Obama has made slips-of-the-tongue that hint at his secret Muslimness—ignoring the fact that his father WAS a Muslim, that he lived for a time in a Muslim community, that he’s an intelligent, well-educated man who bothered to LEARN about Islam, or that there are between 4-6 million Muslim Americans, most of whom are citizens. Americans.

Some of the rumors, innuendo, whispers, and nervous talk are from well-meaning folks who are truly FEARFUL. I get it. I remember when my Presbyterian confirmation buddy Sherry told me her Uncle Kyle told her that Catholics eat Protestants. But we’ve all heard the adage: we FEAR what we don’t UNDERSTAND.

When Colin Powell recently endorsed Obama, he was asked to comment on the chatter about Obama’s rumored Muslim ties. Finally, finally…someone said to the national media, right out loud, what I’ve been thinking all this time. Here’s an excerpt of Powell’s remarks:

I'm also troubled by, not what Senator McCain says, but what members of the [Republican] party say. And it is permitted to be said such things as, “Well, you know that Mr. Obama is a Muslim.” Well, the correct answer is, he is not a Muslim; he’s a Christian. He’s always been a Christian. But the really right answer is, “What if he is?” Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer’s no, that’s not America. Is there something wrong with some seven-year-old Muslim-American kid believing that he or she could be president? Yet, I have heard senior members of my own party drop the suggestion, “He’s a Muslim and he might be associated [with] terrorists.” This is not the way we should be doing it in America.

Bravo!! Still, and pardon the cheesy metaphor, I think the current administration has very successfully plunked a kettle on the stove of the American psyche, in which they’ve stirred together Islam, Muslim, Arab, Middle East, terrorism, and maybe oil and economic ruin, until many Americans see it as one big nasty soup. So while folks are right to be afraid of terrorism, buying into this general fearmongering is like avoiding an amazing Minestrone because you don’t like bay leaves, and there might be ONE in the pot.

Since I’m ignorant myself when it comes to Islamic tradition, I thought I’d check out the main tenets of the faith. Devout Muslims believe in:

1. A profession of faith – the Shehada is the Muslim creed, that there is only one god, Allah, and Mohammed is His prophet.
2. Prayer – Salat – Muslims pray 3-5 times a day and practice both private and public prayer.
3. Ablutions – Wudu – this is ritual cleansing with water or, when none is available, clean, fine sand, before prayer.
4. Almsgiving – Zakat – Muslims are expected to give a portion of their earnings to the poor.
5. Fasting – Siyam – Muslims fast from dawn to dusk, abstaining from food, drink, and sex, during the 29 days of Ramadan. It’s considered pious to fast at other times of the year, but these fasts must not last longer than 3 days.
6. Pilgrimage – Hajj – every Muslim is expected to make a pilgrimage to the shrine of Ka’ba in Mecca at least once in her or his lifetime.

There is much more, of course, and there ARE extremists who bend EVERY religious tradition to their personal, social, or political agendas—consider the Inquisition, the European “burning time” and Salem witch trials, Jonestown. But take out the Arabic words and names above, change Mecca to Israel in #6, and we could be talking about Christianity or Judaism. I’ve always maintained that the world’s enduring religions are ALL fundamentally true & good—it’s the dogma and garbage we pile on over the years that causes trouble in Paradise. And when it comes to people of other faiths becoming president of a free nation, well, we've had plenty of Christian presidents who've stirred up their own nasty soups for us over the years, so I'm not sure that's a sure-fire qualification...

Enough of my ranting. Here’s the rest of Powell’s reply about what it means to be Muslim in America, which kind of goes to the heart of democracy:

I feel strongly about this particular point because of a picture I saw in a magazine. It was a photo essay about troops who are serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. And one picture at the tail end of this photo essay was of a mother in Arlington Cemetery, and she had her head on the headstone of her son's grave. And as the picture focused in, you could see the writing on the headstone. And it gave his awards—Purple Heart, Bronze Star—showed that he died in Iraq, gave his date of birth, date of death. He was 20 years old. And then, at the very top of the headstone, it didn't have a Christian cross, it didn't have the Star of David, it had a crescent and star of the Islamic faith. And his name was Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan, and he was an American.