My weekend in pictures

A trip to Shawnee National Forest with my girl scout junior/cadette troop. Nine girls in attendance, three adults. We went to Garden of the Gods, Cave-in-Rock, the Iron Furnace, and Dixon Springs. Ended the night at my mother-in-law's house for a great dinner and a costume parade in my sister-in-law's old dance costumes. It was a good weekend getting to know one of the new moms, telling stories, and watching our girls, our urban girls, play in nature. No curriculum. No badge to earn. Just play and see what nature teaches all by itself without my help. Nobody complained of boredom. Nobody wanted to move on to the next thing before it was time. Not even much whining about bugs or tiredness or weather (it was gorgeous but brisk at first). It was a good trip.

Rainy Night in Georgia Repost

Lord, I believe it's rainin' all over the world

I was the basketball statistician. It's all about the math for me. I did full stats--shot position, assists, fouls, score--and called them into the local paper when it was said and done. I might have been dating the wrong center, but the guys always wanted to check their math against my stats to see if we matched. It was a fun little job.

Except the night we went to Lumber City. White trash white flight school if there ever was one. Like I said before, we were the only integrated private school in our district, and Lumber City was just on the outskirts. There's an egg processing factory there--if you buy eggs in bulk, I mean in BULK, they might have a Lumber City address. And that was about it when we pulled into town in our chartered bus to play their basketball team.

Our coach was black. About half the team, or more, was too. Half the cheerleaders. And this was the night every year everyone worried about. Playing the snotty schools back in town, they pretty much ignored the race issue. But down here, it was the only issue. Across the court in the home-side bleachers sat 30 or 40 men in camouflage, paper bags over their heads. They chanted and stomped their feet and were terrifying. I could see Coach down on the floor sweating. Never mind the boyfriend and even those little "southern gentlemen" on our team who had their pecking order back at home, but out here in the wild, we were all in the same damned boat--those men in the bleachers weren't wearing white robes and hoods but probably only because their wives didn't know how to sew.

We beat their team. I remember the score--102 to 81. It was the first time that year we'd broken 100. Coach didn't even have the players change clothes. We left the gym en masse and got on the bus. We were "escorted" out of town by honkies in pick up trucks yelling racial slurs at us.

The year? 1990.

Midnight train to georgia repost

I'd rather live in his world
Than live without him in mine.

He was my first high school boyfriend. After I moved to Georgia, I realized pretty quickly that my choices were smooth terrible frat boys in training, weird outcasts, and the other half of the population that white girls like me weren't supposed to date.

We were the first interracial couple at our high school. A private Catholic girls boarding school with day students--and the only desegregated private school in town. But that still didn't make it ok, really. I wore his letter jacket with his last name displayed across my back, and it was made very clear that once we broke up--since that was inevitable--there was no white boy who would touch me. They'd see to that.

Yeah.

He's married. He and his beautiful wife have two little girls. He's a football coach at the same high school we attended. I wonder if it's any easier. I wonder if he has any good advice for the sophomore football player thinking of asking out that little yankee transplant in his geometry class.

Ramona Averted

You say you're clearing out, the devil's in your eyes
No time to walk, no time to talk, no time for long goodbyes.
The ticket's in your hand, you've made that final call,
The hard words flying by like punches in a barroom brawl

We've made a mess of things,
It makes no difference now
let's chalk it all up to the blues.
Little girl, think it over one time
Before you break in your walking shoes.



It was a strange moment. I sat here at the computer composing an email. It was several paragraphs long and I kept going back and forth through it trying to make it more concise, less emotional. I got it honed down to what I thought it needed to be and then there was this voice.

Not a voice out of the heavens, not a Saul Saul why do you persecute me kind of voice. But it was this feeling that said, "wait."

I highlighted all the text (I do so want to say "highlit" even though I know it's not the way to say that word). I hit the delete key.

And then I wrote one paragraph, including a frustrated run-on sentence, and sent that. It summed up the disappointment and worry without digging myself into a hole that I would not be able to return from.

Because there are things I am angry and frustrated about. And the person I was writing to is almost the right person to say them to. In some ways yes. But you know email. As opposed to the written word on lined paper, or a phone call, or a face to face discussion, it is a cold hard "I AM UPSET AT YOU STOP THERE IS NOTHING YOU CAN DO STOP" modern telegram.

I know this. I've used it because of that fact in some situations, to help me maintain a distance from a situation or person that I in no way wanted to get more involved with. But I'm in a relationship with this person I almost emailed (not in the Facebook sense of in a relationship). And it would have damaged that relationship.

Wait.

I sent the single paragraph instead.

And like magic, the phone rang.

It's not all better, but the part that I wouldn't have been able to fix had I sent that email is better. I got off the phone and sat in my big broken in leather chair in the living room listening to the silence.

It's been a really crappy week, no, two or three weeks, waiting for my cat to die (who was the color of pumpkins, orange and those spooky white ones? and we have a few sitting in our front hall and out of the corner of my eye there he is. Again and again and it's just pumpkins). It's been a long beginning of the school year and I wonder what it all means. It has been two weeks of our own doctor and dentist visits and my doctor told me the lovely news: "I can see it on your face that I need to increase your thyroid medication." It's been apraxia and my own talking too much. It's been my hands shaking as I tell another person I'm in relationship with not the Facebook way no matter what those idiots think who I am and where I am and that I can do what is needed if I know what it is. It's hugging that woman in the parking garage of Target. It's my oblate director stepping down because her rheumatoid arthritis has gotten the best of her. It's pinkeye and a potential root canal and it was my damned birthday on Sunday.

But I did not squeeze all the toothpaste into the sink this time and then stand there wondering how I would hide it.

Lean on Me Repost

I'll be your friend
I'll help you carry on

Spring Break 1987. Sonia had moved at Christmas. This was devastating to the rest of my classmates, but since I tended to move every two years, it didn't seem like any big thing to me. She was back visiting, staying with my best friend, which made it very clear to me where I ranked with both of them. I would never replace Sonia. Especially for Muriel's mom.

It was her spring break, but ours wasn't until Easter week, so she came to school every day with us and everyone, including the teachers, pretended she was still just a part of our class. It infuriated me in ways it shouldn't. Jealousy, immaturity, an overdeveloped sense of justice--probably some of all those things. My mother suggested I have the girls over for a slumber party that Saturday night. Having this all hammered out relaxed my social standing anxiety, and so the party Friday night didn't seem so unfair. The science teacher was throwing a party at his house for Sonia's triumphant return home, and everyone was invited. This science teacher would later betray my friend Jane in unspeakable ways, but before that, I already had a grudge against him because he never asked me to babysit his kids even though he had just about every other seventh grade girl do so. When I was around him, it was like a cone of silence surrounded me. He could not hear my voice. But he loved Sonia and so he threw her a party.

Jane and I went together, my dad dropped us off. We went into the backyard and stood around with the other kids in our class, jockeying for position with Sonia and with some of the boys. The science teacher got up and gave a speech about Sonia and how wonderful it was to have her in town, in class again. The literature teacher said he'd never met a better writer so young. The art teacher--you can see how this was going. The only one who didn't get up and say anything was our theology teacher, a Benedictine monk, who stood silently against the wall in his black habit.

But after all the speechifying, the science teacher's wife turned the records on. She told us to put down our drinks and to clear the chairs. Dancing? No, worse. Before anyone could see it coming, she had us in rows, all 22 of us. Plus some of the adults. She put on Lean on Me. And she made us line dance.

Talk about adults not having a clue. Sonia was still making fun of that party in her honor months later after I'd moved to Dallas and, free of all that bizarre hero worship, we became friends.

Easier done than said

It was so easy. Really. The week building up to taking Bleys in to have him put down was worse than the actual going. Yes, I cried as I checked in at the front desk and wrote a check. I laughed through my tears at some of the pet memorial cremation statue options. The nurses were sympathetic and normal. Dr. Kurka was good. Perhaps he's done this before. He did not belabor any points. He explained what would happen, asked if I wanted to stay for the first part, which I did. I seriously think the first shot did it. Maybe not. But it's a two injection process and I couldn't feel his heartbeat or detect breathing after about 5 minutes after the first injection.

Big sigh on my part. I've been on pause for about 2 months. I've been cleaning up bodily functions and trying out every stinky canned cat food on the market. In the end, he lapped up about a teaspoon of rediwip (yes, the stuff in the can, he loved it) this morning. He went and hid on the bottom shelf here in the computer room/library. And that was it. He knew. I knew. Dr. Kurka said sometimes it's a little gray when people bring pets in, that maybe there are some healthy months ahead of a cat, but not this time.

Way easier done than decided. Mary said it would be--Pheobe was dying of kidney failure and the lead up was so much worse.

I'll miss him, but really? I've been missing him for 6 months while he dragged himself around the house in an increasing stupor. I should have done it last week. But either way, it's done now. I'm headed out to my own doctor to get bloodwork done to keep my prescription medication valid for another year. Whee.

And then I get to break the news to the girls. It won't be a surprise but it will be hard.

Life is Short

Especially when you're a cat, a gorgeous stray cat, definitely a Norwegian Forest Cat descendant of some kind, orange and white with a mustache and goatee. You're 15 years old and it's been a good 14 1/2 years. The last 6 months have kind of sucked. You have some kind of abdominal cancer. There's some internal bleeding. Vomiting. It's been a decline, that's for sure. You've gone from 10 1/2 pounds down to a wraith-like 5 pounds this morning at the vet.
You and she have been partners for your whole lives, adopted the same day from the Humane Society. You are the same age, but she's always been stronger, bigger, healthier. Always. You've always been a bit fragile, and now more than ever. She and the young upstart, the big fat brown tabby not appearing in this thought process, have started to withdraw, but last night she walked over you on the couch and gave you a little pity lick on your forehead, the little M between your eyes that says "yes, I'm a bit of a tabby here."

It's days now, not months, all of a sudden you are sick and yet you still jump on the counter, you still follow me upstairs. But it won't last. You ate up the baby food puree at first but the spoonful I put on your plate this morning is still sitting there untouched.

Selfishly, I want you to make up your mind. I don't want to have to handle the girls and deal with the decision of bringing you to the vet for that last time. The vet was realistic: "You'll probably wake up soon and he'll be gone." And I want that so badly. I thought you would die in my arms last Saturday night and yet here you still are. But you look comfortable, your eyes aren't desperate like they were a week ago. And yet you've lost another pound in that time. So I hope you can go peacefully here at your own house. But we'll see as the weekend goes by.

You are as old as my marriage, brought home the weekend school started and I didn't have a job yet (I would by the end of the week). It was a two-for-one deal. We named you after a character in a Roger Zelazny book. And it was fitting.

But now it's coming to an end and it's going to be ok. Sad but ok. It's too short but we knew that going in. And it's been so so good.

What was that about it always being something?

My To-Do List for today:

*Coffee with Ann and Janet (and Lisa, although I didn't know she'd be there)
*Practical Life at Liz's room
*Find a dress for the wedding (part III--I have failed 2 days in a row)
*Repair any animal amulets that need work
*Art class at Liz's room
*Post-mortum meeting for the trivia night
*Pick up at the CSA
*Meeting at my house about girl scout cadette summer trip
*dinner??
*Strategic planning meeting at school
*Daisy goes to dance class
*repair any other animal amulets for Thursday's art class
*online class exam and "discussion" question
*scrub kitchen floor, clean bathroom, fold laundry
*Shop for Jake's family's dinner tomorrow night (to continue the pseudonyms, I would suppose they'd be the other Kennedy Brothers).

So this morning, which was "Wear Red for the Cardinals" day at school, the girls got up and got dressed and came downstairs to investigate breakfast options. I had lunches made and everything ready to go and Daisy says "Mom, what does it mean when you can't open your eye in the morning because all of it is crusty and stuff?"

Doom. It means doom, Daisy. Utter doom.

It means...at least half my list just got shot to hell. But that's ok, because not being able to buy a dress or teach art or practical life means I have more time to scrub the kitchen floor and clean the bathroom. And there will be a trip to Target pharmacy so at least I'll get a few things I need for the dinner tomorrow night.

Sigh.

But the weird thing? We went to Target (where I also got a flu shot, so, whee) and parked in the garage. I was talking to the pharmacist on the phone and out of the corner of my eye noticed someone was standing next to me. It was the annoying woman from the school board I publicly called names last May. The one I kept running into and she was still so angry. And so was I. I got off the phone with the pharmacist.

And she apologized. She said it was all so stupid what we were doing, always at school together and avoiding each other and still so mad. Could we talk sometime?

I said yes. "Then let's start from now," she suggested, making a move to hug me. And she did. And it was good. It was good to know that for the next decade (or less, depending on what she winds up doing with her kids) I can sit in PTA meetings and bake sales and art class near her or her kids or her husband and nobody needs to be uncomfortable. I told her I let my emotions take over last May. And that I said things I shouldn't have. And that was that.

It may be a big play. It may be some sort of power thing. But I'm going to believe it was sincere and just go forward from here.

We got Maeve's antibiotic for her eye ($87) and came back home for lunch and NPR pledge drive in the kitchen and no cat vomit (or dead cat) on the floor.

It is always something. And sometimes being Ramona works out.

Ten on Tuesday: 10 ways to enjoy pumpkin

Mmm. Fall food. I am so ready. Sunday night we had deer and homemade mashed potatoes and brussels sprouts. A glass of milk and a glass of red wine. Sleep for 12 hours.

We eat pumpkin. I've been venturing into pumpkin ever since our first halloween in this house when I stared at those decorations and thought, "I think we're supposed to eat them." My parents have used pumpkin--seeds especially, but also a pumpkin cookie that I remember from childhood. So here are some ideas:

1. Chopped fine with cauliflower and other fall vegetables and made into a curry. This is how Fiona had pumpkin last Friday at school. Our culinary arts teacher is hitting them hard with in-season food and I'm thrilled. Fiona's verdict: "If you made pumpkin like that, I would eat it."

2. Hidden in mashed potatoes. Then I broke it to Fiona that the mashed potatoes she was about to have 3rds of at dinner had about a half cup of pureed pumpkin (well, butternut squash, but it's a pumpkin) in them. She looked at it on her plate and the conflict was obvious. "You could do that again," she admitted.

3. Baked and shredded and served with butter and salt. I could eat it this way all the time. It would make my kids gag and fall on the floor writhing in pain.

4. Pumpkin cookies. These are a brown sugar cookie with pumpkin puree as one of the liquids. I don't have the recipe in front of me. They make a glossy cookie, a brownie consistency, full of fall spices. Perfect with icing and a glass of milk.

5. Pumpkin cupcakes with cream cheese frosting. My sister-in-law is in her, what, 7th month? of baking and selling cupcakes under the name "Farm Fresh Cupcakes". It is my opinion that her quick bread recipes (meaning, the cupcakes with sweet potato or pumpkin or zucchini or banana) are the best. And her icing is amazingly amazing.

6. Chopped fine, again, and roasted with onions, garlic, beets, turnips, carrots, whatever fall vegetables (but definitely onions and garlic). Olive oil, thyme.

7. Pumpkin pie. I used to only like these artificially orange canned pumpkin variety but I have been brought around by a parishioner who makes them for our meals for the homebound. Oh so good.

8. Pureed and made into a curry soup with coconut milk.

9. Pumpkin seeds roasted with salt, or alternatively, with brown sugar and cinnamon (I prefer the salted).

10. Sliced thin, par-baked, and then roasted on the grill with a seasoning mix from Penzeys we use called "Ozark". (ingredients: salt, black pepper, sage, garlic, thyme, papika, regular mustard, ancho chili, celery seed, cayenne, dillweed, dillseed, caraway seed, allspice, ginger, cardamom, bay leaves, mace, china cinnamon, savory & cloves). These are amazing. I would put them on bread with pickles and onions and barbecue sauce and eat them as a sandwich.

Mmm. Ready for November.

It's always something

There is always something.

We had a trivia night this past Saturday and there was a couple of moments when I realized I was one of the 3 people who sit in front (two emcees, and then me. I write the questions and answers and run a power point of slides with the Q&A) and that we were doomed.

We weren't doomed. But we started 20 minutes late due to something that I am sure will be tagged and remembered as "technical difficulties" but in reality was "somebody dropped the ball." And even though I didn't drop the ball, and no one sitting next to me did, it would still be viewed as our responsibility. In the end everything was fine. But it was another one of those Ramona moments that makes me wonder what it is about me.

There was a big part of me that wanted to crawl all over the person who dropped the ball. To call this person out at a strategic planning meeting. To Rage. But there was a bigger part that said no.

Now, I'm not afraid of confrontation and this person will know how he dropped the ball and how it could have been averted and how stressful he made this event (as opposed to last year when we did it all as volunteers and didn't have help from a staff member). We're having a post-mortum meeting tomorrow and I'll be vocal there, to him. But that will be it. I cannot continue to be That Girl. I need to let the organization take care of itself and clean house if need be and keep in mind that my goals at school? They have nothing to do with this guy. Write trivia. Lead girl scouts. Teach art.

I need to take the long view. Billy hasn't started preschool yet. I need this school to continue to exist and thrive for at least 11 more years. I need to think about stability here. I am here for 11 more years as a parent. I am here for a long time. By the time Billy is in 8th grade, I will be (I think) the only parent left who has been there from the beginning, unless of course our current executive director is still in that position. But I will be the institutional memory for this place. I will have spent 16 years involved in this place. I need to stop sprinting. And I definitely need to stop taking aim. Some things will take care of themselves. The ones that won't will still be there to handle later. Write trivia, lead girl scouts, teach art.

Go to speech therapy. Teach Fiona how to spell. Clean house. Handle pets and cars and a 106 year old house. Drink coffee. Cross fingers. Go to the dentist. Maintain relationships. Maybe read a book or two. Knit and sew and cook and camp and chat. It will always be something.

Food: Blog Action Day

That's Jake's dad. In Canada, killing someone else's native species for a change. I would dislike this except that we actually do eat the stuff he hunts. I'm almost out of deer meat in the freezer, in fact, and I hope Jake gets a deer in the first hunting season in Illinois so he doesn't have to go back for second season. And also hoping that the guy who hunts with them just to hunt, not for food, gets a deer too, since Jake always brings home some of that.

Travis and his wife bought a pig--not a live pig, but the butchered parts--raised by a friend of a friend in 4H. He borrowed our coolers to go pick up the bounty, and on his return brought us a tub of lard. Literally. Laughing about it, I let Jake handle it. He opened it--it was far more processed than he usually uses when he and his dad make deer burger and sausage. Usually we get chunks of fat from Hinkebein's down near Cape Girardeau. In fact, we still have some hunks of fat in our freezer that were unmarked in a freezer bag and I started to thaw one day thinking it was fish. Fish that his dad caught.

I was talking to Zelda, who is my complete foodie friend. She teaches culinary arts at a local school and is so knowledgeable about everything having to do with local food, good food, bad food, Big Food. We talked about deer and how her son Noah mentioned one day that besides anything Travis puts on the smoker, Jake's deer sausage is his favorite meat. We started into a discussion of wild game and how I sometimes worried about consuming so much red meat (deer is the meat we eat in our house--deer and whatever bits we get from our CSA), especially red meat that I technically do not know where it comes from. Yeah, it comes from Massac County, but what did it eat? Zelda corrected me in my worry. Wild game, she said, was one of the best meats you could eat, from what she'd read and learned. If you ate meat, wild game was the way to go because it was so lean. Toxins are stored in fat cells for the most part and deer, trust me, has very little fat.

That's why we add fat to it, in fact, to make ground deer that will stick together. Jake and his dad process the deer themselves. They add beef fat (from Hinkebein's, which is primarily a pork farm, the cleanest nicest pork farm I have ever visited, and wow is their bacon amazing) to make burger and they add Hinkebein's pork fat and spices to make breakfast sausage.

It takes some getting used to, as a cook and as a diner. Jake's parents would give us some each year and I didn't use it well. I didn't like it and I didn't understand how to cook it. It was always tough and "gamey" which was a term I didn't fully grasp until eating deer meat.

But over the years, and especially after Jake started hunting, we got better at it. I learned the fine art of braising. I learned how to use the crock pot. And when we started using Hinkebein's fat, there was a noticeable difference in flavor. Deer could be grilled without tasting odd to me. I didn't have to hide deer burger in chili (although I often still do). And the little pieces of deer steak became the base of some of the best winter stews I've ever made.

Why am I telling you this? Today is Blog Action Day, a project I've participated in for 3 years now. This year's theme is Food. No other guidelines. Write something about food. I thought of all the ways I've changed my mind about food. I thought about the psychology of food, becoming an avid reader of labels, joining a CSA and learning how to eat beets. But the biggest change for us in the past 10 years or so is bringing deer into our diet. Besides the deer, like I said, we eat a scant amount of meat from our CSA. An occasional chicken or a pound of this or that in our weekly share. A few times a year we will get some good salmon and grill it. But otherwise, if we eat meat, it's deer. I never buy ground beef. I never worry about those e.coli scares (the meat ones, I mean--the cantaloupe and lettuce still worry me).

And eating deer has changed me. I have conversations about pork fat, for instance. I no longer view a dinner as "meat plus veggie plus carb" but instead only eat meat a few times a week and when I do, it is handled quite differently. Even other meats--when I used to get a chicken from the CSA I would roast it with vegetables and make it the focus of dinner. Therefore, it was almost entirely gone in one day except for the bones and gristle for stock. Now I nearly always boil the chicken and pick it for chicken and dumplings, soup, and enchiladas or chicken salad. What once was just a 1 day chicken is now a 3 day chicken (plus stock). I guess I no longer take meat for granted.

We are almost out of deer in the freezer downstairs. I have two quart freezer bags of hindquarter and 3 or 4 ground (probably sausage). But deer season is about a month away and so before Christmas rolls around, we will have a stocked freezer again.

The boxer repost

In the clearing stands a boxer
And a fighter by his trade

Phone rings. I pick up. "Mrs. Wissinger? This is Troy." He's all right, he wants me to know. Starting high school next month, a freshman. His mom got them back--she left Larry after all--and now she has a new boyfriend, lives just west of us. He's a really good guy, he tells me. She's probably going to marry him.

I can't figure out what I'm supposed to say. I tell him I'm really surprised to hear from him. "Yeah, I found my hat," he says sheepishly. "The one with your phone number in the brim. I thought I'd call, you know, just to see if you were still there."

I tell him about Sophia, about not teaching anymore. Then I worry that I've said too much--does my having my own child make me less available to help him? Does he even need help? The phone call is too quickly over--you don't get to rehearse these things beforehand.

"I worry sometimes about Larry, but I think things will be ok," is his last statement to me. "I'm a lot bigger guy now. I can protect myself better. Than before."

And he carries the reminders
Of every glove that laid him down
Or cut him till he cried out
In his anger and his shame
"I am leaving, I am leaving"
But the fighter still remains

Haven't heard from him since--nine years--and he still doesn't know what a role he played in my own growing up to be the adult I am now.

I hope I get to tell him someday. But maybe it's enough just for me to know.

Dentistry Neighborliness

Dawn and Judd live next door with Jay and Kestrel. Kestrel is relatively new and Dawn is still adjusting to life with 2. She's also been sick a lot since the baby came so it's been hard. I've been chatting with her (as a former LLL leader and as a mom of three). Information and sympathy, not too much of the former all at once but trying to help her get healthy. Augmentin helped too.

Judd is a dentist, actually, an endodontist, which in my world means root canal guy. I am certain they do other things but that has been my contact with endodontists. I have had 3 root canals. One of them took for friggin ever and I was exhausted by the time it was over but didn't understand why everyone dreaded them so much. It was the best thing ever--I had been in a lot of pain. The second and third were done by a different endodontist and I swear the first one took 15 minutes once I was numb. Crazy. The last one I had was also quick, but it was a lower molar and the endodontist did some deep sighing as he looked at my x-ray.

Can I just say that's never a good sign? He broke the news to me. My roots were deep and curved and I had too many in that tooth. OF COURSE I DID. Too many vertebrae, too many roots in my molars. WHAT STUPID KIND OF SUPERPOWER IS THIS? He told me that he might not be able to get me all the way numb. Wha? I could feel my head start to spin. I'd had pain come through during a filling before. I couldn't wrap my mind around what this would wind up being like. Just pull the dang thing, I thought to myself. But I took a deep breath, nodded, and hoped for the best. In the end, it was fine. 13 shots of novacaine later and a hangover from that for days, I swear. But it was done and I trusted him to do anything at that point. Book my hotel rooms, take family portraits, remove my appendix, defend me in a murder case. Anything.

Anyway, the point is that I have a tooth going bad. I thought I'd lost a filling, one of those white fillings, in an upper tooth. Turns out it was the tooth structure itself crumbling away underneath a silver filling. Oh crap. I didn't know this until the afternoon I saw the dentist, though.

First, I came home with Leo around 11 and found Dawn and Judd's front door standing open. I called up to them, but I knew their cars were gone. No answer. I called the police and then Valerie and I walked to try to find either of them, to no avail. The police found nothing amiss and went on their way. Dawn came home and I told her what had happened. Baby brain, most likely. It was no big deal--nothing was wrong and Valerie and I had stood chatting in front in case the door was closed but unlocked.

So then that afternoon I went to the dentist and got the good news about my crumbling tooth and how close it was to the root and how she just wasn't sure about it. "Maybe it would be a good candidate for a crown," she ruminated.

"Does that ever work, a crown before a root canal?" I asked.

"Not in your mouth," she admitted. But she can't just have a bunch of root canals done all willy-nilly. I understood. I went home with my newly filled tooth we were going to "watch" which I knew meant "it'll be fine until it's 2 in the morning and IT ISN'T FINE ANYMORE."

I walked into my kitchen at home, shaky from the local anesthesia. I walked right through to the backyard where Jake was working on the treehouse.

"I can't figure out anything to make for dinner," I announced. And about that moment there was a knock at the door.

Judd was standing there with a big container of soup. "Thanks for saving us today," he told me, handing me the soup.

"Did you hear me just now talking in the backyard?" I asked him, and relayed my day's story to him. He had some advice. I took the soup. Jake heated it up and I managed to build something for dinner around it.

And then I went to bed. I woke up once in pain but ibuprofen kicked it. The next day I felt like I got hit in the jaw, but today I'm ok. I think it might be ok. We'll see.

Born in the USA repost

The first kick I took was when I hit the ground
You end up like a dog that's been beat too much
'Til you spend half your life just covering up

March. Veronica comes through for us. She's the new social worker who lands the case, and she comes to school. Interviews the boys, who are coming to a point where they just want to sleep at night without dying before morning. Nolan takes his shirt off and shows her the burn marks, the bruises. Troy doesn't show her what I know he's hiding. He just watches her like my cat might, looking for an escape route as well as whatever she might have to offer.

"Well," she says, closing the file folder. "You're not going home to him tonight, and frankly, you're probably never going home to him again."

The police are there in a nanosecond. Taking the boys to juvenile court. Linda's going too, and I have to stay and do my job. Damn it. I walk out in the hall and see Sr. Joan crying. Nolan's teacher.

"Joan, what's wrong?" I ask. Joan is a hard-as-nails school sister of Notre Dame who never laughs. Her children learn and do not disobey. Crying in the hall over Nolan actually does not sound likely. But she puts her hand on my shoulder and tells me.

"Nolan came into the room to gather his things, the officer was waiting outside, and Nolan said to me, 'do you know where I'm going?; and I said, no, and he looked me straight in the eye and said, 'Well, this is why I'm not so good at school.' Why didn't somebody tell me?"

For a long moment, I envy her.

If it weren't for reposts you'd never hear from me

Seriously. Where have I gone?

It's been a busy 6 weeks at our house. In my life. In my head. The school year started off tricky. Daisy is a hard kid sometimes. Fiona, of course, glided right back into everything like there'd been no summer break. I managed to step quite deeply into it and then spent a month digging myself back out. I felt like I was constantly in a defensive stance with my fists up. It was no fun.

Plus in the middle of it we went to girl scout camp.


Which was good. But still busy. At one point I looked at my calendar, which mercifully is on my phone and therefore shows me only one day at a time, but flipping through it realized I didn't have a single free weekend from the end of August until, well, this past weekend.

As September waned and the weather finally started to change, things looked better, but then of course Billy was semi-diagnosed with apraxia, which is kind of a big deal. And a surprise since I'd never heard of it before.

Fiona quit Irish dance, which was easier in the end than I thought, but also harder. If we'd quit in August, I wouldn't have batted an eye, but she quit after we'd already agreed to go to the Oireachtas with her team. But the more I thought about that whole thing, the more it seemed like the best move for our family. For instance: two teams of 8 girls in under-10 and under-11, but only 15 girls total. No alternates and one girl was dancing on two teams. No alternates. A sensation of doom started to settle into my soul. All that money, time, energy, sunk into one dance and if one girl twists an ankle, then what? Eh. Fiona still danced at our parish barbecue (which was another instance of arms up, defensive stance as a fellow parishioner chewed me out because I haven't been to meetings I didn't know existed. Seriously). I made her a little costume.
And she danced. I have a video of her dancing, the only one I have, in fact, which I will post later. It's on Jake's phone.

And more school: I'm teaching 3 classes of art as a volunteer with the great hope that they might hire me part time in the future. Not all my eggs are in that basket but several of them are. I know the head of school would hire me in a moment. It always comes down to money, doesn't it? I'm also volunteering in the growing elementary classroom (Montessori classrooms are grouped in 3 year bunches, and elementary is 1st-3rd. We will have 3 1st-3rd grade classrooms when it is all said and done but right now we have 2 1st-3rds and 1 1st-only, which next year will have second, and then will be a full class after that). The teacher, according to state law, is certified, but is not Montessori-trained. I am, sort of. I have Catechesis of the Good Shepherd training, and while I'm not going to bring in the story of the Annunciation, we also did a great deal of what is called "Practical Life". The weird Montessori stuff: cutting flowers, cutting vegetables, pouring rice from a pitcher. Using pincers and eyedroppers. Walking on a line. Spreading a mat. Rolling a mat. And so forth. That classroom has 4 new kids (out of 13) who have no Montessori experience. So I'm going in 3 mornings a week for a half hour or so to cover some bases. In fact, that's where I'm headed here in just a moment.

And I'm taking an online class for dummies. It's a junior college course to reactivate my teaching certificate. It's making me a little crazy. The teacher runs "discussions" on an online discussion board, but really, she just wants us to copy straight from the book to prove we've read and "synthesized" the material. So my discussion of my own experiences in the classroom, drawing from the material in the book and truly synthesizing it? Bad. But the woman; who wrote like this; seriously with the semi-colons? She was given the "thank you for your clear and concise response" response from the professor. I even emailed her to check. Just to check. And yes. I wasn't supposed to be discussing until I'd proven that I could copy from the book. I'm not exaggerating. She didn't; mention; how best to use semi-colons.

So it's busy. And being busy is the equivalent of writer's block for me. If my hands are busy, I don't have that hypergraphic NEED to write.

Off to roll a mat.

Arms of the angels repost

Spend all your time waiting for that second chance
For the break that will make it OK
There's always some reason to feel not good enough
And it's hard at the end of the day

One week before the end, February, right after Martin's funeral, Troy comes to see me during library class. It really isn't a class--it's a study hall--and it's my free block. But I have no freedom this semester, and he shows up. He was one of the few witnesses to Martin's accident, which happened after basketball practice--his stepfather ironically ran out and stopped traffic right after it happened. This has made Larry a sort of weird hero at Pius. I look at him and want to throw up, of course--the epilogue of that story, when not abridged for general audiences, involves Larry getting home from that accident and laying his wife across the kitchen table. This is all intertwined with my bad luck drawing the short straw to teach 6th grade sex ed. As the vocabulary builds, the stories start to spill over. This has led to heated arguments in Linda's office about why the heck we haven't called DFS.

Except that I already have, of course. They just didn't do anything. The tired pregnant social worker told Troy she was going to tell his mother everything he said, and he actually stood up and said, "this interview is over." Like on a crime show. Even after we explained the process that his mother was going to have to know eventually, it was too late because Nolan had to lie like a bad rug once he saw Troy get up from the table. The social worker symbolically closed her file and tottered out of our building. Didn't even make a home visit. I wanted to call again, but Linda said we needed to wait, get physical evidence in hand and get Nolan's trust because she had lost Troy's. I still had it, though.

Troy sits down next to me and stares at the papers I'm grading. I ask him how it's going.

"Tony took my bed."

"Who the heck is Tony?"

"Larry's cousin. He was doing cocaine and his wife kicked him out. So now I'm sleeping in Nolan's bed. Which is good because I want to keep Nolan safe." Great. Because it wasn't already traumatic enough.

"But Nolan wakes up a lot at night crying. I don't know if it's about Martin or what. But I think we're running out of time." He says these things, like we're peers, he's 25 like me, talking about a student. But he's eleven, in need of a haircut, a good dentist, and someone to give him that second chance.

Alive repost

Is something wrong, she said
Well of course there is
You're still alive, she said
Oh, and do I deserve to be?
Is that the question?
And if so, who answers, who answers?

January 2000. Liturgical music practice, dark church. I keep looking over at him, because the past two days, something has changed. I sit behind him and ask him what's going on. He shrugs but whispers, it hurts me to remember what it's like. Do you want to talk to Linda, Troy? There is a part of me that wants to be the confidante, but a larger more sensible part of me wants to run and let the woman with the experience and education handle it. But she's not here until Monday, and I need to tell someone today because we're moving back in with him this weekend and I can't do it. The second grade is filing past us to their pews and we're not anything like anonymous, so I walk to the back Utah Vestibule with him.

My mom and I had this big fight last summer and I told her I felt like I was in danger, like I was being abused. She told me I didn't even know the meaning of the word. And Larry was in the living room, at my grandparents' house, and she yelled out to him, telling him what I've just said. Well, he knew better than to hit me in front of them, and so he laughed and says let's go take a ride. I'm leaning against the Sacred Heart statue trying to get on his eye level in the dingy vestibule. He won't look at me, he stands in front of me like he's been asked to recite spelling words he forgot to study.

He takes me to this construction site where he was working. He started hitting me, so much that I wound up on the floor. When I couldn't get back up anymore, Larry found this pipe. I start thinking of tobacco smoke, warm memories of family around the table. But the scene changes, my internal thesaurus catches up, and I realize he means cold copper plumbing. But Troy doesn't fill in the blanks for me any further. He just shakes his head and brushes tears away. My mom said I was lucky to be alive, I was lucky Larry was still around, cause we need a man.

I will do everything in my power to get you out of there as soon as possible, I promise him, recklessly. I have not a clue what my method will be, but I do say this next: nobody needs a man like that. Linda and I will take care of it.

I keep my word.

Shadowboxer repost

You made me a shadowboxer, baby.
I wanna be ready for what you do.
I been swinging all around me.
cause I don't know when you're gonna make your move.

Just when I think I've got it figured out with that kid, he blindsides me. Tells me things I shouldn't have to hear because I'm not his counselor, I'm his math teacher. MATH. No essays, no journal entries, no heart-wrenching tales to share: that's why I teach math. He does have a counselor in the school, Linda, but we share this burden because we figure two heads are better than one--she's only there two days a week. I'm the lifeline when she's gone.

It all seems so black and white to me. Call the state. Have them take the kids. But it's not that easy to have your kids taken away, all you bad parents in Missouri, you can rest easy. Linda knows how to hit and make it count. I just sit at my desk frustrated and angry. (Eventually, I won't be able to balance it all in my head. I go down in the fourth round, but I come back up and make it to the end). But right now, we're still early in this fight. Linda wants to meet with Larry about the younger brother, and she seems to know how to handle nasty people better than I do, so I let her take the lead. She asks Troy how she'll know which car is his, and he says, "you'll know, beer cans will fall out when he opens the door." Troy makes those sorts of comments all the time.

So a beat up white sedan with a rusted top pulls up and Troy and Nolan (the younger) get in the passenger side. Linda taps on the glass of the driver side. Out steps Larry. Five beer cans fall out on the ground, and he scrambles to pick them up and throws them into the car. He has a wooden spoon in his hand, and I know he doesn't have a pot of soup for the boys in the passenger seat. I look away, trying to not detach myself from this, trying to stay here, for Troy. I wanna be ready for what you do. Larry is over six feet tall, over 200 pounds, he has a ponytail and a leather jacket on. He looks like one of my uncles. Walking talking stereotype. He's completely cordial with Linda and says that yes, his wife would like to be in on the conference and he'll work that out for next Wednesday. They drive away.

Troy has a broken front tooth on Monday.

Benedictine Sunday

My monastery is a mother house for a number of smaller monasteries. There used to be one here in St. Louis, in fact, just about 15 minutes south of where I live, which annoys me sometimes because the one I'm an oblate with is about 5 1/2 hours from where I live.

But this past Sunday, the sisters who were part of the St. Louis community who currently live at Clyde came for a visit to the church that is in place where their monastery once was. Being in St. Louis, I got an invitation to come by and go to 11:30 mass and stay for a reception and talk afterward. Jake worked this weekend, so I just went to the mass and part of the reception while Fiona stayed home with the other two.

Catholicism is a big tent and I know that I go to my church for lots of reasons, and only one of them is geography. It fits me best. But many other places I can at least go to church and be a part of things. I visit friends and go to mass in other cities. I go to baptisms and weddings and so forth. The parish that used to be the monastery is a merging of a few south county parishes and would not have been on my short list of places to spend a Sunday morning, but for the most part, mass is ok wherever you are and that's that.

And I'm thinking here about my mother-in-law's parish and the years before the current pastor. The parish is dying, literally, but the priest who served there was so good and blended in with the community and was the right man for the job. I would go to mass with them and it was fine. It wasn't until the current pastor really started screwing things up that I stopped going to church when I was down there. Even before now, however, I wouldn't have made that church my home, just because it wasn't me. But it worked. It made sense, the music, the homilies, the people in the pews.

Yesterday didn't make sense. The church has been reworked so that it faces sideways, which is interesting and somewhat forward thinking. The pews made a kind of semi-circle around the altar. I walked in and someone, who later turned out to be the choir director/guitar player, greeted me. I found a seat but the noise was so distracting throughout the church. Everyone was chatting. We chat at Pius, too, but this was loud. It surprised me.

The music was standard 1985 guitar mass. The choir members were earnest and loud, too, because they had microphones. Two guitars. Cheesy but, like I said, earnest. It struck me as odd as the mass went on and they announced every single song, including the psalm, but whatever. I can't complain too much about folks who volunteer their time and were trying to get the completely silent crowd to do something besides stand there.

But what was bad was the priest. Bad. There was no time for silence between anything. Opening prayer ran into readings ran into (announced) psalm. After the homily he didn't even leave the ambo, just went straight into the Nicene Creed. This is always so disconcerting for me. I like silence. The homily was bad. And maybe it was an off-day, but really? I don't think so. As opposed to some bad priests who just get up and wing it, though, at least he'd written something down, and then read it to us. I am a bad public speaker. I get shaky and stumble and so I can't be too critical but come on. This is your job, dude. He rehashed the gospel for us. As if we'd never heard it. As if we don't hear it again and again over our lifetime as Catholics. The only thing I brought away from it was that the workers in the vineyard who kill the owner's son? They aren't us. They are the pharisees.

But the worst of it? Ok, so these nuns have come to visit. They've reserved one of the meeting rooms and plan to give a talk and welcome folks and see people they don't get to see every day. So after communion, he says, "I have one announcement. These ladies here in the first pew are Benedictines--you're Benedictines, right? And they're here visiting and used to be here, you know, back when the place was a mess. Not like it is now. Look at it now."

And he wasn't being funny.

The rest of the time there was lovely. We retired to a side room. The sisters I spoke with remembered me. I met a few oblates I hadn't met before. I talked with "the other young oblate" whose son is dyslexic and we traded information. She's at a school that is treating her, and him, just terribly. And her younger son? He has apraxia. Ha! So funny. So it was so good to be there. But I wish the parish had been more welcoming. I wish they had, you know, considered being nice. Because those ladies in the front pew brought along about 40 visitors who live in St. Louis and whose impression matched mine. I asked one of the people I met if this was her parish, and she burst out laughing. Seriously.

We wonder why people leave the church and then you visit a place like this and why do you have to wonder any more?

Oh, but one last thing. My monastery, you may remember, makes soap (and gluten-free communion bread, but that's usually not interesting unless you are a Catholic with celiac disease). And now one of the connected communities is making popcorn. We got to try it. I was seriously impressed.