Three hundred words

Three hundred words a day. Every day.

This is what makes you a writer. Writing.

It's what the books say, what writers say (disciplined ones), what experience shows. It's like exercise. You have to do it repeatedly to get in shape, to get those muscles flexible and strong. And the first minutes out of the gate are often a bit slow.

(Sixty-one, sixty-two, sixty-three . . .

Soliloquoy

To bake, or not to bake, that is the question:
Whether tis nobler in the kitch'n to mix up
The bread and cookies of tradition's Christmas
Or to forego the effort and sea of dishes
And by giving up, gain time? To rest; to nap;
To nap, perchance to dream; ay, there's the rub
For in that sleep of December what dreams
May come: Trees naked, packages unwrapped,
Music unrehearsed and presents unpurchased.
For who would bear the whips and scorns of those
Whose Christmas is perfect, year after year,
When she herself might perfection achieve
With a little more organization.
Thus Christmas does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native warmth of the season
Is sicklied o'er with the vain pursuit of cheer;
And appreciation of Christmas's
Meaning and simplicity turns awry
Because we're just too tired. Soft you now!
I'm taking a nap.

November hymn

For those who mourn

At the harvest, in the autumn, at the waning of the year
As we come to count our blessings, we confront the ancient fear:
Is there enough? The bushels laid up—will they last until the spring?
Can we truly count on God for enough of everything?

In the winter, in the stillness, in a barren, cold new year
As we wait and watch, we worry if the springtime will appear:
Where is the light, the voice that called us from the dim light of the womb?
Will God come to lead the way through the darkness and the gloom?

When the buds along the tree branch remain brown and tightly furled
When the waters from the rainstorms rise and flood familiar worlds
When the summer's heat overtakes us, when our souls are parched and dry--
Oh, where is the God who answers when his children ask him why?

We may rage and we may sorrow, feel new grief each time we wake.
The friends we love may leave us, we may live with hearts that ache.
Yet Christ is here. He walks beside us, knows our anger and our pain
And his dying and his rising join us all to his reign.

Anxious souls, oh, trust your Maker, through whatever comes your way
Even when the night is darkest, God creates another day.
Things we cannot understand may yet surround us with despair
But we can bear the burdens we give over to God's care.

For the God with power to save us is a God of boundless grace
And his tender love shines on us from his bright and radiant face
Love unchanging, love eternal, love immediate and strong
Love that reaches into human hearts and heals what is wrong.


Copyright 2009 Gwen Gotsch
Please do not reprint without my permission.

I don't want to write this, and yet I must. My older son's friend and former housemate, a young man just graduated from college, died on Friday night. He took his own life. 

If only there were a way to take the night back, to undo those awful moments. It should not be, and yet it is, and these young men who knew him and loved him mourn in shocked disbelief. How could he do it? What was happening inside him that they did not know, or could not know, or could not help? And what must his mother feel? Dear God, be at her side. 

Rest eternal grant him, O Lord. May light perpetual shine on him. In your kingdom keep him safe  Give him peace. Comfort those who mourn. Help them to carry him in their hearts, warm and sad, in the years to come.

For their deeds follow them

It was, like, All Saints Week last week. Extended All Hallows' Eve. The Day of the Dead times seven. This first week of November was--not haunted--peopled, happily, with Saints Gone Before.

Item: I went back to my old high school on November 1 to see a production of "Arsenic and Old Lace." A friend's daughter, my daughter's friend, was playing Aunt Abby, the role I played long ago in high school. I was in this show again when I was 24, playing the other old lady, Aunt Martha. I met my husband, Lon, in this production. He had also been in the show in high school. Both times, he was Teddy Brewster--the quintessential Teddy Brewster, the nephew who thinks he's Teddy Roosevelt. It wasn't just Lon's mustache that made the role, it was his enthusiasm, and the crazed look in his eye. Here we are, with Patte Shaughnessy on the left as Aunt Abby.



As I watched the play, the lines came back to me. I recalled where I had entered from, and that Karl Sorenson, at rest in Christ, had played the opening scene with me and Patte. When the young man playing Teddy entered the scene at the high school, all I could hear was Lon (also at rest in Christ). I didn't watch. I just listened. Those weeks of rehearsal long ago, the eleven (?) performances had left tracks in my brain easily found and followed. Lon's character was onstage; was he himself backstage, behind the scenery, in the corner? Things happened back there. Life-altering moments.

Item: There was a funeral at church last week, for a woman--wife, mother, grandmother, piano teacher, friend--known to all, who had spent the last year battling a brain tumor, a tumor that was going to win in the end--like the brain tumor that claimed the life of Ted Kennedy a few months ago, like the tumor that took my dad's life 25 years ago. Marj died a few days before her 70th birthday, her last year an abrupt end to a cheerful, busy life. She had been the woman who coordinated funeral luncheons, who always worked on the annual Fall Sale, and who delighted in the friends and acquaintances who worked alongside her. Her funeral was on Wednesday, and it was followed by a luncheon. The big sale was on Friday, with all the ladies, young and old, at their booths of crafts and bakery and pasta sauces. Another luncheon. Marj's spirit, at rest in Christ, was somehow also part of the energy in the air at the sale.

Item: My son Kurt's science class assignment was to make a musical instrument that could play an eight-note scale, out of materials you have at home. Lucky for him, objects in our home include a clavichord my father built for me when I was 18. The instrument needs work. Lots of broken strings. We twisted these out of the tuning pins and strung them across an old wooden bread box. If you tuned the thing right before you played it, you could indeed play a recognizable tune by plucking the string, or even better, by striking it firmly with your fingertip, like the tangent on the end of the clavichord keys. I do not often get involved in Kurt's homework. (He's a high school junior; he doesn't want my help.) I was glad to be allowed to be part of this project. It brought my dad back to me. Maybe in some way, it brought my dad, Herb Gotsch, to Kurt, one of the seven grandchildren he, at rest in Christ, never got a chance to meet.

"And I heard a voice from heaven saying, 'Write this: Blessed are the dead who from now on die in the Lord.' 'Yes,' says the Spirit, 'they will rest from their labors, for their deeds follow them.'" (Revelation 14:13)

I'm not exactly sure what that's supposed to mean in the context of the Revelation of John, but it sure felt like those deeds were following me around last week.

Saints in heaven, saints on earth, resting in, relying on Christ.

Lincoln

Columbus Day. No school. But all I've done all day is read and write and manipulate words. That must be my hobby, my favorite recreational pursuit. Well. Maybe.

The project I laid out for myself this weekend was to finish the two-volume, 1600-page biography of Abraham Lincoln that I have been reading since early August. It's by Michael Burlingame, a Lincoln scholar who has edited the diaries and papers of John Hay, John Nicolay, William Stoddard, and Noah Brooks. The first three were Lincoln's White House secretaries. Brooks was a journalist who was close to the 16th president. The biography is exhaustive (and exhausting) in its quotations from Lincoln's contemporaries, but it's not particularly readable. For every action or presidential speech, letter or paper, Burlingame writes several paragraphs of who said what in support of Lincoln, followed by who said what in opposition--lots and lots of good old American political and journalistic spin. It begins to feel like flipping back and forth between MSNBC and Fox. The rhetoric isn't all that different.

Burlingame's Lincoln is a remarkably mature, magnanimous, forgiving man, even-tempered, tender-hearted, but rather crude at times. It's hard to imagine the statuesque Lincoln of the Lincoln Memorial telling a joke with "he can kiss my ass" as the punch line. But the Memorial was built at a time when the Lincoln myth had grown huge and quasi-religious. Nowadays we want to know about the dirt under the fingernails, the flares of temper, the back-room political deals. Lincoln's greatness survives twenty-first century tell-alls. Lincoln is a man who grew to meet the challenges he faced. Who knew he could do it and who could let go of the pettiness that obscures the right path for most of us, at least part of the time. Great challenges help you focus on what's important.

I finished the book this morning before getting out of bed. Volume two goes back to the library tomorrow. This is probably the end of my bicentennial gorge on Lincoln biography. (Probably. Have to see what's on the shelf at the library.) I have been reading Lincoln books since I discovered the children's biography section at the library when I was six or seven. I'm sure part of the fascination comes from living in Illinois, from multiple trips to Springfield and New Salem, from an interest in American history that was fed by the Bruce Catton books my father bought and read during the Civil War centennial. But I also feel a kinship with Lincoln. Sounds like a high-falutin' claim, or a fatuous one. But I can't be alone in this feeling. Lincoln fascinates lots of people. Only Shakespeare and Jesus have had more books written about them. I guess I want to know what it was like to be him--and how much different is that--apart from the obvious--from being me?

Cicadas in my head

I've had this persistent ringing in my ear for months now.

It's nothing serious. It seems to be related to stuffy sinuses, plugged up tubes somewhere, some fluid in the ear. It got better during the summer. It faded away to a sound that was barely there. But it's back now, like cicadas inside my head, made bold by the coming of fall, or by too much time spent among hidden allergens in my office at school.

I believe the ringing to be at a specific pitch, with prominent overtones--D, to be exact, with the octave and the fifth. Or perhaps it's almost but not quite D. Whatever it is, music in the key of D major and other related sharp keys bothers me, especially when it's loud and reverberating all over the rehearsal room.

I am subjecting this problem to all this analysis because explaining it helps me deal with it. Certain sounds seem to produce beats when they clash with the sound in my ear. (Beats: a sort of wah-wah effect created when sound waves that are not quite at the same frequency bump into one another. More or less.) When this happens my ear-brain-voice-ear feedback loop short circuits. I become a very frustrated singer.

When I have trouble singing, it spills over into the rest of my life. Long ago a voice teacher quoted Birgit Nilsson to me: "The bird who is not happy does not sing." The Gwen Gotsch corollary is: "The bird who is not singing well is not happy."

The reading in chapel this morning: "We are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life." The speaker illustrated this, and the "by grace you have been saved" part before it, with flower pots, dirty and broken, then clean and restored, and then brought out a big pot filled with a blooming pink geranium.

I tried to think of myself as that pink geranium all day, somehow showing forth God's goodness to others. But it was the kind of day where the feedback loop didn't work well. Spent too much of the day alone, getting tired from focusing on the computer screen. All I could hear was the ringing in my ear and the buzzing in my brain, the kind that says the work is never done, no one appreciates me, and I'm not good at anything anyway. (There may be distortions here that I should analyze.)

I don't like to whine on my blog. I prefer to sing (soundlessly here, in prose), or think differently, or at least think productively. Those cicadas in my brain have to get out of the way.