Iowadrift

Catch-Up

Have you noticed that this blog is tending toward the lame and skimpy recently?  Yeah, me too.  Apologies.  I do have a few more substantial posts simmering, and it's not that I'm going jaded on the blogosphere or anything; it's just that I'm trying to dial back the busyness of me, which means I'm on the computer a lot less these days.  That,combined with a perennially sick Urplet (poor little thing went from that tummy bug to a cold, and now to a miserable, sleepless virus which has him croaking like a frog) and The Holidays, has led to many Cute Kiddie Vignette posts and a tendency toward anecdote over reflection.  And now, I'm descending even further into the mire: I'm falling back on bullet points. 

• We are going East for Christmas, to my parents' house north of Boston.  This is a matter for rejoicing, or would be if it didn't involve flying through O'Hare on December 22nd.  Pray for us.
• TTD has at least one interview while we're out there, with two other places planning to fly him out in January if they can't swing an interview during Christmas week. 
• Regarding that: I am fighting an urge to be tense and controlling (I know this comes as a shock to those of you who know me in real life), and mostly succeeding.  I always want things to happen faster than is realistic: I was like that with my divorce, and I'm like that with my writing, and I'll be like that, I'm sure, when I'm planning my funeral and wondering why I haven't hurried up and died already.  But in this case, I know that there's no rush to leave Iowa, and we actually don't want to until we find a really good set-up, so I just need to calm down and let the interviewing begin, I guess.
• And regarding that: our set-up now is so good it's silly.  TTD works in the clinic Mon-Wed, all day, and Thurs morning.  Then he's off until the next Monday, though he does paperwork the rest of the day Thursday.  I work Thursday from 1-11pm, and I fill in other days as needed, which isn't much.  Sometimes we wonder how we can even think about leaving here, esp. since TTD has almost no call, and only about 6 weekends a year when he has to round in the hospital.  Cushy, cushy, cushy.
• On the other hand, cushy isn't everything.  So if we can find a set-up we like fairly well--i.e. one which lets us balance two part-time jobs, though realistically the best TTD can hope for is one day off a week, probably--we're still going to go for it.
• Because, you know, grandparents are good.  Oceans and mountains are good.  Uncles and cousins are good.  Boston is good (as long as you're not driving).  Change is good. 
• And I just drove halfway across Iowa today and I'm sorry, IT"S A BORING STATE.   Or, let me rephrase that more delicately, it's not exactly a geographer's dream.
• I drove across the state for a meeting, and the meeting--dum dum dum!--was to plan an upcoming trip to Mali!  Yes, I'm going to Mali for two weeks in January!  Hooray!
• I'm going with a few other people to visit a health project we work with near Kayes, which is..oh, get out a globe, I don't know how to describe where it is.  Anyway, I've been involved with the project for a few years, but have never been there, and now I get to go.
• Which in some ways will be awful, because we'll be the Dreadful American Visiting Dignitaries, than which there is nothing worse (to entertain OR to be).  But on the other hand--gift horses, mouths, etc.  Plus, the idea is that we stay with the project for a decade or so, if it works out, and that means in a few years I can bring the boys, all three of them, and hooray.  Especially hooray because Indielou, the nurse who runs the project, has two kids almost exactly our boys' ages.
• TTD has already been, once, and I have a great picture of him brushing his teeth in the Sahara.
• In other news, we went to the mall and got a Christmas photo taken at one of those chain photo shops where they pose you in front of a backdrop patterned with brushstrokes, or Victorian roses, or woodland mist, then print up everything from wallet photos to eight by tens, all instantly recognizable as The Family Portrait In Which You Look Like You're Wearing Matching Reindeer Sweaters Even If You Aren't.  The Christmas cards have a particular loopy, schoolmarmy script and tend to say, "Merry Christmas from The Whoever Family."  The eight by tens can be done with blurred edges, if you so desire. 
• We did not so desire.  We got this done for TTD's parents, and we went for the straightforward color glossy with no bells and whistles.  But I have to say, it's unnerving to see that any family can become an Olan Mills family if posed and lit correctly.  I, for instance, look like I just graduated from Oral Roberts University in this picture.
• In the spring we are doing proper black-and-whites of the kids, outdoors. 
• But in the meantime, yes, we did get Christmas cards of the Iowa Family Mall-inson photo, so if you receive one, please do not instantly conclude that I have gone completely native.  I'm just lazy...there they were, all these convenient family portraits...and now our Christmas cards are truly frightening.
• But, you know, Merry Christmas anyway!

And Then We Have This...

Just in case you had to visit the dentist after the candy-fest of that last post, I offer the following exchange, verbatim.

Rabbit: I like teasing girls.  I'm going to tease all the girls at recess.

Me: Do you think they like that?  Or do you think teasing makes them unhappy.

Rabbit: I WANT to make them unhappy!

Me: Hey, I'm a girl.  Do you want to make ME unhappy?

Rabbit: No.

Me: How would you feel if you saw someone teasing me and making me unhappy?

Rabbit: I don't want anyone to tease you!

Me: Well, all those girls you tease?  Are going to be grown-ups some day, and maybe mamas.  Just like me.

Rabbit:  I guess I'd better kill them quick before they grown up, then.

Losing My Tiny Mind

Hoo, boy.  I just read over my last few posts, and discovered that the entry entitled, "Surprise!" is even more surprising than I thought, since I didn't write about the surprise which engendered the title.  You following?  If you are, you're doing better than I am.  But here: here's what I was trying to write about.

When I got home after those lousy rotten four days of work over Thanksgiving, I found the Christmas lights lit on our house.  Now, we leave them up all year (I know, I know, but it's one string, hidden by the vines, so what the hell), so turning them on isn't that big a deal, but still, I was delighted.  Then, when I got inside, I found a stool in the middle of the kitchen draped with balloons and streamers and bearing a paper birthday plate with two candle-bedecked cookies and some chocolates.  A note from TTD explained: "SURPRISE!  This is a surprise party for Mama, organized entirely by Rabbit.  He dreamed up the whole thing, so you'd have "a nice surprise when you got home from work," and insisted on lights, and candles, and "surprise party plates," and goodies and balloons and streamers.  It was all arranged with great glee and love by two little boys."

I'll admit: I cried and cried.

I did manage not to cry yesterday, though, when the babysitter told me she'd been drawing shapes for Urplet and asking him to identify them, because that's one of his favorite pastimes these days.  He got circle right, then square and triangle.  Then she pointed to a heart and said, "What's this?"  And Urp said, "Mama."

Good and Faithful Servant

Wow.  Another phone call.  The Jesuit priest who married TTD and me, a man who worked on the Reservation for twenty years, who was my confessor, who received me and many others into the Catholic Church, a man who in himself was a place of strength and hope for many people in the darkness of the Rez....he died suddenly, with no warning: just had a massive heart attack as he got ready to go for his daily run.  He was in his fifties.

This blog is turning into one long eulogy, but this man, this man, oh, he deserves the best, because he was the best.  He was one of those people who performed years of long, hard service not only without complaint, but with incandescent joy.  He was a source of great and compassionate wisdom for me and many people, yet just as quirky and human and cackling-with-laughter as he could be.  When I went to confession, he would walk with me through the whole scalding process, always finishing with a blessing, then stand up and say, "Now...how about a root beer float?"  Then we'd go along to the kitchen in the Jesuit residence across from the church (this was at a hundred-year-old mission on the Rez) and make, yes, a proper ice-cream float.  He nourished the body and soul of his charges; he knew how to bring the times for dancing and weeping together.

There used to be--I'm sure there still are--a lot of bad car wrecks on the Rez, and we would get the victims in the hospital ER, usually three or four of them.  Literally hundreds of people would follow sometimes: huge extended families driving up behind the ambulance and milling rabidly around the halls and entrances while the medical staff, called away from the day's scheduled work, struggled to triage and stabilize patients for transport by ground and helicopter to the big hospital two hours away in Rapid City.  TTD was always there, and so was this priest--who's name, eerily, was Bill.  I remember several times looking up from my own panicked chaos as I worked on a patient and seeing Father Bill's face across the ER, and knowing that peace was out there, somewhere, even if it wasn't available to me.  Back when I used to live on a commune (what, I haven't told you about that?) my hippy friends used to talk about, "holding the space" for someone in distress.  Father Bill held the space of peace and hope for us on the Rez.

But not in a sanctimonious way, oh no.  I remember once, after a horrible summer of accidents and suicides and drownings and tribal infighting, I asked him how he and the other priests did it: wake after wake, funeral after funeral, and hardly ever a wedding or baptism.  "Well," he said, "you do all the usual things.  You pray, and say Mass, and run, and read, and talk to your friends, and try to get away from here sometimes."  He paused, considering.  "And," he added, "you do have to remember that this place is just fucked."

Well, he's not there anymore.  He's not here.  And while I will miss him--how my heart breaks that he never got to meet my kids!--I am delighted to know that for him, school got out a little early; for him, Christmas is here, and Easter with it.  And I'm not being maudlin, just honest, because I really believe this.  The grief he leaves behind him is real, but so is the hope.

And because he loved poetry, I'll end with this, by Gerard Manley Hopkins--also, incidentally, a Jesuit.

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed.  Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things'
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs--
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
world broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.