Birdsong

I opened the front door this morning to check for Amazon packages. I wasn't looking for anything specific, but in 2018 you never know what you may have ordered 3 or 4 days ago and forgotten about.

Anyway.

I opened the front door about 7:15 this morning, felt the cold air on my face, saw the eastern sky still streaked with bright clouds from rising sun. And heard birds singing. I thought of the carol--the Catalonian "Carol of the Birds"--my little choir sang in the Christmas concert on Sunday:

En veure despuntar El major illuminar En la nit mes joiosa;
Els ocellettes cantant a festejarlo van, Amb sa veu melindrosa. 

In midst of darkest night a lovely star shines bright And sends the darkness fleeing.
The birds awake in song and singing all night long They voice our hearts rejoicing.

It's a minor-key carol with an exotic sound (exotic, at least, in a neo-gothic Lutheran church). The language is Catalan, French-inflected Spanish. The setting by Joan Varner has a few parallel fourths in the harmony and a flute, fluttering and singing above and around the treble choir and piano.

It was the hardest of the set of three carols we sang, with a slow, sustained melody, strange words, odd vowels. So it was late in the rehearsal process before I gave much thought to the words in the English text. Even now, I don't really have the images straight in my mind. Logically, it's the star that sends the darkness fleeing, but the unarticulated image linked to the music in my brain is the birdsong breaking through the darkness, as light chasing the darkness away. In a painting the star would shine over everything, revealing the birds awake in the trees on the night of Jesus' birth. But in music, in this carol--it's the sound of the flute, the bird bouncing from branch to branch, that tells of the rejoicing.

The birds sing every morning. I have heard them at 4 a.m., when I'm awake and fretting. They're still singing outside my window now, as I'm finishing up here and turning my mind towards the day's work.

Rejoicing in the Lord. At Christmas. Always.

Wounded hearts

I’ve seen two mothers, two families lose children—daughters—this month. One daughter died after years of ALS, leaving behind a husband and her own daughter. The other, a daughter with a developmental disability, died today at the age of 15. 

“You’re in my prayers,” I say, I type on Facebook, I write in a note card. But really what it is, is —“You’re in my heart.” In my wounded and broken heart. 

Driving home from work today, listening to the news, I heard more grief: parents of the two women killed at Chicago’s Mercy Hospital yesterday, talking about their daughters and about their loss. I keep thinking it’s a dream and I’ll wake up, said the mother. She knew God, she was a praying woman, said the parents. 

Things fall apart. We share the broken pieces and fall apart together, as much as we dare, and keep going, doing what needs to be done. 

There is anger, grief, struggle, and an ache inside that we hope won’t be there in the morning, but it’s still there in the dark night, still there at dawn. Even very old wounds break open when hearts around us are breaking. It’s a kind of sympathetic vibration, like music, but in beats and pulses unique to human hearts.  

Monday of Thanksgiving week (not a meditation on gratitude)

Working backwards from Thursday:

Wednesday is for pies, apple in the late afternoon, pumpkin after choir rehearsal in the evening, as well as for putting leaves in tables, patting down the wrinkles in tablecloths, counting heads and counting chairs and chopping onions and celery for stuffing. 

Tuesday is for shopping, unless I get it done today, in which case Tuesday is for cleaning, which I really don't need to do much of since I cleaned for guests last weekend and that's good enough, thank you, especially for family. Though now that I check the weather I see that Thanksgiving Day is supposed to be bright and sunny which means dust will show on the bookshelves in the back room, as will streaks on the refrigerator in the kitchen because both rooms face west. 

Monday is for menu planning, which I seem to be avoiding by writing this post, but the turkey's thawing in the refrigerator and I've done this all before, like, for more than twenty years and beyond the turkey and the gravy (which I've got down, the secret is browning the turkey neck and the giblets before you turn them into broth, the broth being an excuse to open a bottle of Merlot) — beyond that nothing matters too much except the ten pounds of mashed potatoes, which my niece will peel (hope you're reading this, Gerianne), and of course the stuffing or the dressing, which is what Grandma Masch called it and into which you can throw just about anything -- at least it seemed like that's what she did. 

Thanksgiving Dinner is logistics as much as it is cooking. Two decades of experience hosting family members at my house on this day means that everyone knows their part and they're all increasingly capable of helping out. Nieces know where to stand at the counter. When Uncle Joe was not there to carve the turkey his daughter Lauren took over. Kurt finds chairs; this year he may have to bring some back from his house, because he took them there last summer when he moved in. 

Questions to be settled today: what vegetable dish will I make to serve beside the traditional carrots brought by my sister? Will I made something everyone likes--green beans with something or another (NOT mushroom soup)? Or something the picky eaters won't touch: butternut squash and roasted onions, Brussel sprouts (which even I am ambivalent about), cauliflower au gratin, so rich there's nothing not too like because it's all butter and cheese. And will I make sweet potatoes? Probably I will, because they're cheap and I like them a lot. 

As usual, I thought briefly that I would skip the cranberry sauce this year, because only my mother really likes it and the leftovers eventually have to be extracted from the back of my refrigerator and thrown out in January. But there they were, the cranberries, at the grocery store on Saturday, two bags for $4 and so I plopped them into my cart. The second bag will get used for cranberry bread in December and hey, I really can't imagine my personal Thanksgiving plate without that glob of red next to the mashed potatoes, turning everything on my plate just a little pink.

There will be cornbread. Actually, corn sticks, baked at the last minute in the cast iron molds that came from Aunt Clara, heated in the oven, brushed with butter, sizzling hot, with the timer set to make sure we don't forget the second batch as we settle down for dinner. There are never any leftover corn sticks. 

Sometime today I need to draw the mental picture of the oven, with the turkey in it and the picture of where everything goes in that last half hour when the turkey is out and the kitchen is one giant scramble of last-minute cooking. What can we reheat in the microwave? What garnishes what" (What bits of chopped parsley or orange zest get left behind?) When can we eat?

This, my friends, is Thanksgiving Day. Dinner is at 1:00. (Church is at 10--which makes dinner at 1:00 quite the trick.) 

I'd better get started. 

Thankfulness? My full heart moves me forward.

Monday after

I read the New York Times story on the victims of the Tree of Life synagogue shooting this morning. There are photos of many of them—often snapshots, gathered from family or friends. Their photos are a little blurred, as cropping and enlargement focuses on what was just one face in a community of people. 

I didn’t need the photographs to picture them. I just think of their counterparts at the synagogues near my own church, on a tree-lined street near Chicago, of their counterparts at my own church—the ones who come early, the ones who greet visitors, the ones who change lightbulbs, who are known to all, the ones with the forty-year history in the congregation. The ones whose lives of good works are known and acknowledged, but are nothing all that special with this community, because they are part of lives of quiet, faithful service to God, part of a wide, inclusive understanding of God’s goodness. 

To make this comparison is not to take away the victim's identity as Jews, nor to deflect attention from the unique evil of anti-semitism. I don’t want to do that. Lutherans celebrated Reformation Sunday yesterday and even as we embrace the truth and freedom of the gospel, we dare not forget the darker, anti-semitic vitriol in Luther’s writing. We dare not forget it because of its role in centuries of hate and violence towards Jews. 

When I opened Twitter yesterday morning, there was a tweet from pastor and writer Nadia Bolz-Weber at the top: "Twitter - help me find a prayer for the martyrs of Pittsburgh?" She was getting ready for a speaking engagement later in the day. I looked at the replies to her tweet. Kaddish was at the top. Then this:

And many more prayers, some sourced, some original. Some for comfort, many for an end to gun violence and hateful rhetoric. So I prayed. That grounding in community held me for many hours yesterday.

I am, like many people, disgusted by a president of the United States and a political party backing him that play on hate and fear to hold onto power. There are many who would argue that you can't hold these leaders responsible for the deeds of a madman, and our American creed of individualism and individual responsibility would support that. 

But there are better ways to be together, better ways to live our lives together. You see it in the community of people who gather in a synagogue on a Saturday morning, in a community of prayer and mourning on Twitter, in Christian churches on Sunday mornings.

May you see it somewhere today--on a Monday morning in fall. May it be a blessing to you! 

Saints and poets

It's been a day, a full day. Not a productive day.

I spent time in the world of Franz Schubert today, the early-19th century composer who lived, in the lecturer's words, "a short life of romantic intensity." I did some singing, too--Schubert's "An die Musik"--which is about beauty and emotion and the capacity of music and language to move us into a deeper connection with our lives, ourselves, and big things that are hard to understand.

"Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it? — every, every minute?" says Emily Webb in Thornton Wilder's "Our Town." 

Not really, replies the Stage Manage. "Saints and poets, maybe" 

Composers, too.

There was sad news coming in from many directions today. Nothing that affects me personally, but still--one needs to reflect and take it all in and figure out where this new grief fits in the world I will wake up to tomorrow. It's a world in which death is ever present, but we keep going.

Over at the Yarn Harlot, Stephanie Pearl McPhee, who lost her mother a year ago, described grief this way:

It’s like moving through mud (which is a big improvement from trying to move through cement, which is what it was like in the beginning.)

That's exactly what's it like. Thankfully we've got music and poetry—and knitting—to help us keep moving.

September

I just saw a monarch butterfly drift across the backyard early this morning. It rose out of the weeds and grapevine, sank for a moment, rose again and was caught by the wind. I haven't read beyond the headlines about monarch migration and fears of monarch demise. From what little I know I'm either awed that this vulnerable creature is about to make a journey of many thousands of miles or skeptical that this particular butterfly is going to make it much past southern Illinois, or even down to the south suburbs.

Last night I sat in the same backyard, scrolling through my Twitter feed. Same chair, same overcast sky. It was the sound of the wind that drew me out there in the cool almost-dark, a whispering sound that I hoped would wash away the scrapes and cares of the day. That same September wind kept trees and shrubbery in motion this morning and closer to the ground, explored the weeds and straggling gone-to-seed stems of dill in the garden.

Cue Jessye Norman singing Richard Strauss's song "September." It's a German poem by Hermann Hesse.

Der Garten trauert,
kühl sinkt in die Blumen der Regen... 

The garden mourns,
Cool rain sinks into the flowers...

There's plenty more elegiac poetry and music in the rest of the Four Last Songs cycle. Hardly the stuff of a busy Saturday in early fall. Behind my back, out on the street, a huge piece of machinery arrived noisily at about 8:30am on a flatbed truck, I'm guessing for next week's street paving operation in the block north of my home. 

Adrift on Twitter last night, I watched as so many sad things flipped by under my scrolling thumb. A black man shot in his own apartment in Texas, the continued laments for children still separated from their families at the U.S. border, ALS patients monitoring research, justly and usefully angry at the disease, hopeful that something soon will help not just in the future, but in their future. Broken politics, abuses of power. 

Much to mourn, to pray for. Trauern.

I went inside. Ate breakfast. Started my day. Basil is flourishing in my weedy garden. There will be pesto in the freezer soon. I think there's a bulb of fennel to be dug out; I don't know what to do with it.

And that Monarch is on her way. 

White coat

Eliza and I were Kurt's guests this morning at his White Coat Ceremony, marking the beginning of four years of medical school training. He is officially a student doctor, class of 2022, with a patch on the sleeve of his jacket that identifies him as a member of the community at Loyola University's Stritch School of Medicine.

The program took place in the atrium of the medical school building. Students and much of the audience sat in the open area on the first floor. Eliza and I found seats behind the rail on the second level. We stood up at the rail when it was Kurt's turn to be "coated" and even at that distance could see his warm smile, beaming under his mop of summer-bleached blonde hair. We've got photos. Eliza will have them on Facebook shortly, and we're so proud.

That second-level thing, above the main crowd--it felt like the right place to be. Not at ground level, hemmed in by rows and rows of parents and friends, but looking out instead into a great vertical space. I could see the speakers if I sat just the right way but could also follow my thoughts wherever they led (or wherever Eliza led them). I was sitting on a white chair, somewhere between earth and heaven. I looked into the future, I held the past in my heart.

With Eliza's memories and mine, we gathered our family. We remembered Lon, who died 12 years ago, and of course, thought of Kris. If he had lived to see this day, he'd have been strutting around that atrium (even if it had been in a power wheelchair), so proud, so fond of his younger brother.

Loyola's marketing motto these days is "We also treat the human spirit." It takes full-fledged humans to do that, and I hold deep admiration in my heart for Kurt as he devotes his life to caring for others. He's powered in part by Kris's example of compassion, courage, and care, but even more so by his own thoughtfulness, self-knowledge, determination and spirituality.

God is good.

Les Turner 5K 2018

Yesterday evening Eliza and I met up with other Gronk's Grace team members at the Les Turner Strike Out ALS 5k and 1 Mile Run, Walk and Roll at Sox Park (officially, Guaranteed Rate Field, because, um, why?).

It was our fourth year at this fundraiser and rallying point for all things ALS: research, patients, patient support, families. We had crossed over -- many of us were now wearing the "forever in our hearts" edition of the Gronk's Grace shirt.

The Les Turner 5K was the first big ALS event for which Kris, my son, put out the call for troops. It was 2014, about a year after his initial diagnosis with ALS. He presided in his power wheelchair, the center of a crowd of friends and fellow teachers from Prairie Oak School in Berwyn. His colleague Amanda Callahan had come up with the idea for the tee shirts. I met new babies, chatted with guys Kris had gone to grade school with and their wives. We walked the walk--there was only a 5K option that year, but I figured out how to cut--not just corners, but most of the middle of the route with Eliza, who was a less-willing participant then than she is now.

The last stretch is inside the ballpark, on the field, all the way around the warning track. Stay on the clay, they tell, don't even touch the grass, and but do look up and around and catch the thrill of being on the field in a huge Major League ball park. You take pictures, with the scoreboard or the home team dugout or some giant Sox insignia somewhere in the background. Afterward you can hang out at the White Sox bar and grill and watch the All-Star game, though Eliza and I departed for home that first year long before Kris and friends called it a night.

(It was just a few weeks later, I think, that Kris and company had their amazing day at the park celebrating the tenth anniversary of the White Sox 2005 World Series victory. Video here.)

Kris made it to the next year's walk, in 2016, where he hung out with ALS celebrity Pat Quinn. By then he'd had a year of being the enthusiastic top fundraiser at the ALS Association Rockford Walk. He was also a whole year deeper into ALS, newly retired from teaching, unable to do things he'd done the year before. Last year, in 2017, Eliza and I participated in the walk with our friends Tim and Tara Dull, Amanda, Jeni Pierce and many others -- though Kris could not be there. Two weeks later, on July 24, he died.

You go to these walks and you see all these family and friends fundraising groups. Some groups are wearing the walk shirt that you get for registering. Some, like Gronk's Grace, are branded with names, logos and slogans on matching tee shirts, which help us recognize each other and give us a shared identity. They say we are strong, even in the face of devastating loss, whether we gather around an ALS patient with us at the walk, or hold someone in memory.

Last night was a beautiful evening, with a cool Lake Michigan breeze blowing in across the White Sox parking lots, and a clear blue sky overhead, stretching west to the city and suburbs and east to the lake shore. I found myself wishing we could all settle in as the sun set and gather around a fire, to lift a glass and share a story.

But that may have been too much to bear and, the inevitable accumulation of sadness may have been all wrong for the evening. Because what was in the air was joy. Just inside the ballpark I watched three girls gather around their mom in a wheelchair for a picture, joined eventually by their dad. The kids pressed comfortably against the chairs that was now part of everyday life at their house. I fought back tears, thinking about how brave they had to be, now and heading into the future. The kids, however, just grinned and the youngest made fish faces as they posed for one picture after another from the phones and cameras of friends and relatives. They were flushed with exercise, excited by the crowd and the location. They themselves were ground-zero for love and joy and smiling grace.

Yeah, it's a crap disease that brings pain, suffering and anger and an early end to people we love. Watching an ALS patient, another mom, struggle to cross the finish line on her own two feet, supported by two friends and a walker, I caught the eye of an older woman, who had just finished her run. She looked away quickly, her face set against the tears--which is what she must have seen in my face as well.

Mike Carmody, Eliza's pal and Executive Director of Opportunity Knocks, a program she attends, has run the 5K race here--all four years, I think. There's the good cause and the memory of Kris, but for him, a lifelong Sox fan, it's also the field. This year he didn't just run around the field once. He kept circling, three, four, five times--as long they'd let him. Stay in the moment and make the joy last. It's a good feeling. It's what you learn at the Les Turner ALS 5K and Walk.

Me, Eliza and Mike

Hard grace

Anniversaries are hard.

It's July. We're creeping up on the first anniversary of Kris's death on July 24, 2017. Kris, my oldest  child, who died from ALS last summer at the age of 30.

It feels scary to think about walking through July days once again. Like the moment before you step barefoot on hot flagstone pavers or pick your way through shards of glass. Grief and pain that I've let in only by littles in the past year, because that's all I can handle, is rushing at me, like a big wave coming way too far up the beach.

Brace for it? Yield? What will see me through?

Kris's smile in photos Michelle* posted earlier this month on Instagram. His grin at last year's Fourth of July party. He cooked up the idea, invited friends, sat up for it--though not for long. "He didn't eat, drink or barely talk," wrote Michelle. But he wanted to see people. It was the last time those friends would see him. Always up for a playdate, was Kris.

What matters to me as I remember Kris? Caring for people, especially the ones he cared for. Not in the try-to-fix-their-lives style that leaves me overwhelmed and frustrated, but in the standing-by-to-encourage-and-befriend way that was Kris--with the occasional knocking of sense into people--friends, siblings, and, um, mom.

There's the project of finding a cure for ALS and supporting the people who have it, something Kris was passionately engaged in right up to his death. It's an awful disease and if his Gronk's Grace fundraising team can help to bring hope to others, well, that's important and meaningful. It brought hope to him. Eliza* and I and other friends will be at the Les Turner Strike Out ALS Run/Walk on Tuesday, July 17, at Guaranteed Rate Field (really? that's a name for baseball park?). We'll be wearing our Gronk's Grace shirts, keeping up the good fight, remembering Kris's love for events like these and for all the folks who turn out. And yeah, we'll also be remembering Kris's love of the walk on the actual field.

Also this month I'm thinking of the hope and determination, the hard work, the insight, the dedication of Kurt*, getting ready to start medical school. Who knows where that will take him, who he will help, with the memory of his older brother always in his heart?

There's Eliza who says Google in a way that only Kris could imitate. He loved her quirks and worked to make her better at big things, like letting go of boyfriend problems, and little ones, like how to say hard words.

And there's grace in the world. It's hard to find in the headlines, but it's there. Sometimes you have to be in tough straits to see it and know how precious it is. Because it is God's grace, it may be different from what you expect, transformative, yes, but also challenging, hard.

Something to reflect on in this anniversary month.



* Family members: Michelle, Kris's wife; Kurt, younger brother; Eliza, younger sister, who has Down syndrome.

Father's Day, 2018

Michelle texted me a Father's Day greeting this morning, "Kris gets to share Father's Day with Lon today. How wonderful that must be!" I smiled and texted back a little later. But meanwhile, I tried to picture what that might mean, Kris and Lon together in heaven. What that might look like.

Just a few minutes earlier I'd run a computer search on "Lon," looking for a photo to post on Facebook. I got distracted from the photo project, but not before noting that much of what turned up in the search for files with "Lon" in the name were notes I had made about his behavior in the early days of his dementia, when something was going on but nobody seemed to know what. I was trying to document what that something was, so there are a lot of these little files. Perhaps I'll do something with them someday. But today, I thought, I'll open just one, just one and that's it.

So I did, and it was a paragraph about a tricky situation, a parent-teen softball game at church. Kris was planning to go, but he did not want Lon there, for fear of a scene. Lon, however, had read about it in the church bulletin and was making plans--because, hey, he loved softball, he was a great softball player. He was walking around with Kurt's glove and Eliza tried to take it from him. He threatened her with a fist, she had a meltdown, and then he turned into a kind parent explaining condescendingly to her that she should do what big people tell her. She was ten or eleven, and she knew that she was right and he was wrong, but she had not yet learned sometimes we had to let Dad be. And poor Kris, trying to figure out how to manage all this, appealing to me for help. He did not want Lon to be around his friends and their parents, with his craziness and misreadings exposed to others. He was afraid Lon would get angry, would look stupid, that everyone would end up deeply embarrassed.

I remember the day, but I don't remember what finally happened. Whether we outsmarted Lon and kept him from the game (which sounds mean and cowardly, but trust me, you do what you gotta do when you can't reason with people). Or if he actually went and the worst didn't happen--I'm thinking maybe he just watched the game, choosing to sit on the sidelines, aware and afraid that it was all too complicated, too bewildering. Better he should fake it on the sidelines.

So when it came time to imagine Kris and Lon together on the other side--wow. I could picture a six-year-old Kris "wrestling" with Lon on the bed. Or the 12-year-old baseball player whom Lon was so proud of. And then a lot of hard times, a lot of stuff to be angry about, to grieve, and a lot of responsibility that should have been a father's that was shouldered by the oldest son.

Eliza is celebrating Father's Day by watching the Barney tapes that Dad brought home for her when they arrived as preview tapes at the paper in the days when he was a TV critic. Barney and The Brady Bunch are concrete things her dad gave her. Kurt is moving into a new place today, where he will live as he studies to become a physician.

Me? I fled the Barney tapes and tried reading in the back yard. But it's too hot. Came back in and I'm playing music in the living room, louder than "She'll Be Coming Around the Mountain" that's playing in Eliza's room. I'm listening to Van Morrison--Lon's favorite artist, but a 2018 album.

Past, present, future for Eliza, me and Kurt. And Lon and Kris living in God's new creation, loved and reconciled and healed.

Mr. Rasmussen

I went upstairs thinking I'd find my high school yearbook from senior year on the shelf on the landing by the attic. It's not there. One of the annual shiftings and migrations of the household book collection must have moved it to a box in the attic. I'm sure it's there — but too many layers down to look for in the fading daylight.

I wanted the yearbook so that I could read the dedication page again--the one where we dedicated the book to Mr. Rasmussen—Wayne Rasmussen, who died on Sunday after a long career as teacher, coach, pastor and general all-around inspirational figure.

The photo on that page (which I remember well, because as editor I exerted a strong voice in its selection) is a photo of him in the front of his classroom, a man in action, knees bent, arms extended--more like the alert, defensive stance of a basketball player than the posture of a world history lecturer. But that was the thing — you never knew when the ball — er, the question — was coming to you. Whether it was the date for William the Conqueror's conquest of England (1066) or the Glorious Revolution (1688) or the democratic uprisings in Europe (1848), he made sure that you left his class knowing these important events, and not just the dates, but what they meant for western Christendom. Maybe even what you thought about them. And certainly something about how power works in the world — a lesson reinforced by several class periods spent building armies and attacking across frontiers in games of Risk. (Please know, that while these dates are indeed engraved upon my memory, I did Google them all just now, just to be sure, so as not to disrespect Mr. Rasmussen's memory.)

Mr. Rasmussen taught world history, Latin and religion at Walther High School in Melrose Park during the years I was there (1968-72) and several years before and after. People took Latin just to have him as a teacher (though not me--destined as a musician to study German). I think I also had him for comparative religion, a subject that would also have been steeped in world history. I had a sense that he was thoroughly, probably conservatively, grounded in Lutheran theology, but what I remember most was being asked to think. Something stronger than just being asked--jolted, startled, awakened. The kind of thinking that makes growing up exciting.

He signed my yearbook —- on that dedication page, sending me off from high school breathless with an affirmation of my abilities and of God's goodness and power in my life — in Gwen's very specific life. And I am but one of many who he encouraged and fired up. Their names have been showing up in Facebook comments all day.

The Facebook page for the church Rasmussen served reports:

Pastor Rasmussen selected Ephesians 2:9 - 10 as the verses he wished to be used for his funeral: "For by grace you have been saved not a result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are God's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them." (ESV)

Grace. Of course. That explains everything.

Churching

Yesterday was a long, teary day. I'm not sure what set it off--though oddly, perhaps, it may have been urged along by having not quite enough to do, moment to moment on a busy Sunday. There was a lot of emotion on display, here, there, and everywhere, and insufficient distraction.

Or maybe it was something I read and thought and talked over with myself before leaving for church. I'm reading "Birthing Hope: Giving Fear to the Light," by Rachel Marie Stone, and inevitably it's led me back to retelling birth stories--stories of my children's births--sometimes to others, more often, to the couch and the easy chair across the living room.

I won't start in on the stories here, though they are stories worth telling--well-crafted by this point, inflected to serve as prophecies for the people those babies have become, or became: Kris, the longed-for, with the long labor; Eliza, the smart and beautiful daughter, diagnosed with Down syndrome; Kurt, the thoughtful and self-contained philosopher, even at birth.

What I was remembering, I think, early yesterday was the dark place one goes to in labor, the powerful rushes of contractions, the painful sensations of the uterus opening, the powerful mechanics of a baby moving down the birth canal and under the pelvic bone and out onto the breasts of a delirious mother.

Probably I should not go to church in that state. Every little thing that follows can hurt when you're in a state like that, and Western liturgy was not designed to affirm female life experience. I don't wish to debate that right now, because debating in and of itself is part of the problem.

Skip to the end of my church day--which was the Carl Schalk descant to "O Day Full of Grace." Vowels and consonants, I told myself, my strategy-of-choice for emotional spots in music. Just sing the sounds, not the words. But my mind snapped back to my son Kris's death last summer already as  I sang "When we on that final journey go," and the gut-it-out low notes that followed for "We'll gather in song, our hearts aglow," were the end of me.

Powerful feelings. Powerlessness. Was the Spirit present?

I pray she was.

May evening

I'm sitting in my backyard typing up a cheat sheet for junior high students performing Finian's Rainbow. It's a cool show, with singable, stylish songs originally from 1947, but it's not one of those shows where the story is thoroughly integrated into the songs. So it takes a little studying to know what comes next. The kids won't know it, but putting together the cheat sheet about who has to be where is as much for my benefit (I'm the director) as for theirs.

It's almost dark and the birds are singing good night. It's only my second night outside this spring. People walk their dogs. Just watched a man in a dress shirt use the flashlight on his phone to help pick up dog poop. High tech, low tech--we're all these things these days. If this were a fancier, newly remodeled backyard, I'd probably have a charging station coming up out of the ground underneath my patio umbrella. Alas, I don't, so this will be a short post.

I think I hear a rotary, push mower going a couple yards over, speaking of low tech, or low-tech nostalgia. I tried one of those for a summer, then bought a new electric mower.

It's good to be out in the spring air. With sounds. the occasional neighbor walking by, soft, quiet darkness.

It was a long winter. It is a much-longed-for spring.

No words?

It seems to be a thing these days to say, "There are no words" and then to trail off, or shake one's head, mouth slightly open, but with nothing to say.

If it is a thing, a catch-all polite phrase from the second decade of the 21st century, I reject it. And yet a few days ago I found myself starting to type "There are no words ... " in a Facebook message, replying to someone telling me about a mother and father who had recently joined the "I've Lost a Child" club--the club of which I, too, am a member. (No officers, no seniority rankings, no membership records, no secret handshake. Just this one awful shared fact.)

"There are no words," I typed, slowly and deliberately. I had no useful advice about getting through life's dark moments, no sure-fire scripture that comforts me. And I don't like rants about grieving, or truisms about carrying love for this child in your heart for the rest of your life.

But "no words" was not a satisfactory choice either. And a Facebook message was too small a box in which to draft an alternative. I clicked on the bookmark for The Perverse Lutheran and the link to start a new post and faced a much bigger space with no words.  The trouble was not so much with finding them, but with liking the ones I found and leaving them alone once I had typed them on the screen. This post sat as a draft for more than a week.

There must be words. What are we without them? What else can we balance on, walk with, reach toward, but explanations that use words?

Words help. Years ago when my husband wandered off into dementia, my kids and I talked about Dad's delusions and about how we felt--angry, helpless, sad, frustrated, resigned, spooked. We put words to things as best we could. Words made uncomfortable feelings into things of substance.

Random on a Tuesday, #1–7

Random thoughts in search of perverse (Lutheran) connections.

1. Things I learned by going to Adult Ed on Sunday morning. Who was the first person in the Bible to name God? Not Adam, not Abraham. It was Hagar, the slave who was made pregnant by Abraham and then treated harshly by Sarah. She ran away and encountered God who told her to go back and submit to her mistress, but who also promised that her offspring would become a great nation.

She gave this name to the LORD who spoke to her: "You are the God who sees me," for she said, "I have now seen the One who sees me."Genesis 16:13

Had I ever heard that before? I suspect it has come up in one biblical feminist context or another, but it was heard anew last Sunday, and with pleased surprise. It's way simpler than all the floundering around I do on my own. It's a resting point. Where is God? Looking at me.

2. My day began with reading The Ethical Case for Having a Baby With Down Syndrome in the NY Times. I liked the simplicity of its conclusion:

If you value acceptance, empathy and unconditional love, you, too, should welcome a child with Down syndrome into your life.

Then I scanned the comment section and came away horrified. One person after another stated, more or less, that they should not be expected to cope with what life throws at them--that there was no value in this. This isn't exactly what they said. Their disapproval was couched in statements about it being "unethical to bring a child into the world who wouldn't have a happy life." Smug able-ist bastards--so certain they can define a happy, worthwhile life in terms of intellect and physical appearance. Of course, I'm a deluded (and aging) (and angry) parent.

3. Another heavy topic: I ran into a blog post from someone who runs a network of parents of children who have died, at any age. It was a long, long thing, explaining how a parent never gets over the loss of a child. I don't disagree, but it was not helpful to read. Besides, it's not the loss of a child you never get over. It's the loss of this child, this person, this young man, my Kris.

4. Here's my answer to #3--or at least an ideal answer I hope to live into. I have loved "Lucinda Matlock" from Spoon River Anthology since long before I had any claim to living a long life, but now I hear her upbraiding me:

What is this I hear of sorrow and weariness,
Anger, discontent and drooping hopes?
Degenerate sons and daughters,
Life is too strong for you —
It takes life to love Life. 

5.  Kris would agree with the sentiment of #4, and probably like the plain-spoken poem, too.

6. My goal was seven random thoughts, and in a list of seven, somewhere around #5 or #6 should be something amazing. But what I'm remembering right now is how the sewer backed up in the basement this morning--the sewer drain that was rodded out in November and again in January. The only amazing thing here is the size of the check that I will write to the plumber tomorrow morning for cleaning out the drain and sending a camera in there to see what's going on. I am trying not to be anxious or angry about this. Can't choose home ownership and expect nothing but contentment and happiness.

7. "You are the God who sees me." Who smells the stinky basement, breathes with me doing yoga, tastes my tears, softens the air around me, and hears the singing coming from my daughter with Down syndrome's bedroom.

Still winter

In C. S. Lewis's land of Narnia it's always winter and never Christmas. Here in northern Illinois we've already had Easter, but it's still winter.

Is this a weather report? Or a metaphor?

Whichever it is, there's a new, wet layer of it this morning. The evergreens outside my front windows  look like someone has plopped sodden balls of synthetic fluff on every upward-facing surface. The snow is mostly not sticking to streets and sidewalks, but it's covering every bit of anything that has been making an effort to turn green since Easter Sunday. You could call the snow pretty, except that it's April and I'm darn sick of snow. I want to see the daffodils I planted last fall. I want the kind of warm spring sun that makes the early tulips grow two inches from morning to night. I want color in the landscape. I want to sit outside in the backyard after supper.

But it's still winter.

I'm finishing up work on a warm, cabled sweater, the kind that would have been great to wear on St. Patrick's Day a few weeks back.

Macoun at Twist Collective

I still need to sew on the buttons and block the collar. Blocking involves soaking or washing the sweater in water and then pulling and poking, bunching and stretching until the knitted fabric is the shape you want it to be. Then you leave it on the dining room table to dry, which takes less than a day in dry winter weather.

Wool is malleable. When you block your knitting the stitches open up and even out. The fabric becomes softer and more cohesive as the little scales on the sides of the wool fibers make friends with their neighbors. The pieces to this sweater have already been blocked, but the shawl collar needs shaping. It will be stretched out horizontally and shaped around a folded towel to hold it in place. After it's dry, the wool will remember where to roll, where to fold over, following the knitted-in shape.

There is a lot of knitting in that collar--and it's knit 2, purl 2 ribbing, which is a bit tedious. (Knit 1, purl 1 ribbing is worse.) My carpal-tunnel-compromised fingers are tingly this morning after last night's determination to finish. But the collar makes the sweater and you do what you have to do, because, well, craft.

Still winter.

I take to the couch when it feels wintry in my soul, with knitting in my lap or a book, or both. Awaiting a passive sort of healing. The broken and sad parts inside knit themselves back together somehow, with bits and pieces from all over--the wisdom of authors, friends, family, my own past--brushing up against each other, making a new coherent whole.

Under the surface, under the snow--Easter's there, somewhere.

That time, early in the morning, when you wander, still warm in your covers, between waking and sleeping, between dreams and what the day will demand.

I spent too much time there this morning, trying to recreate and understand scenes that had made so much sense in my not-quite-conscious moments earlier. The reality of certain knowledge dissolved like vanilla extract dropped off the teaspoon into custard, or like warm water at one end of the bath tub.

I was studying playwriting, but not going to class. I was called back for a part, but didn't return for the next stage of auditions. The teacher had a political consulting business. Her husband ran a dry cleaners next door. I talked about pregnancy and how having children was the heavy, most important thing. She was a big woman, heavy — pregnant?

Surely, I thought, there is a clue here for me about me. But I could not grasp it. Head in the pillow, I worked my way through to Tuesday and what happens on Tuesday. Things more truthful floated by, but they would not stay.

It took me a long time to get dressed. One thing I put on didn't go with another, and I ended up in the wrong tee-shirt,  wearing big clunky earrings all day. Heavy again.

I started a new book for Holy Week with my coffee. But it's Tuesday already and it's the same book I started last year and like last year, I won't get through it.

The vague, creeping edge of gray-green anxiety crept through me, like tasting something that's a bit off.  I did not shake it all day long. Not when wandering off to look at yarn and sweater patterns on the internet. Not while wandering the back aisles at Target looking at lampshades. Came home with Easter candy instead, then jammed it into a bag and tucked it out of sight on the dining room buffet. I googled "Easter brunch menus" and my browser slows to a stop as I click through photos of 53 eggs-for-Easter recipes.

And now I'm drifting off to sleep again, still not sure I am who I am and that whoever I am has a clue.

Kurt writes

Sharing a poem from my son.


Death in the digital age
by Kurt Grahnke


Whenever I send emails to myself as I so often do,
Recapitulating articles, which I may never read again,
Shipping docs through e-space to be given physical form
Through a printer I haven’t learned to sync up with yet,
Your name pops up right below mine, with a picture too,
Like email doesn’t know you’re dead.
Not too many G-R-A-H-N-s out there anymore.

Sometimes I think about sending you something,
As if that gesture might symbolize anything important.
It might manifest my lack of comprehension
Of what it means to be erased.
I can’t control Z your absence,
But the computer doesn’t know that,
So if I send you a message,
Do you get it?
Of course not.

But can’t these metaphors
Be strong enough to bring you back into existence?
Is our shared Netflix account, your facebook, our text history
Enough to make an argument for your continued presence in this world?
Are we all immortalized through our gadgets and data we leave behind?
If google suggests an advertisement for me about a baseball game that only came about because of all the things you once sent me,
Are you still talking to me?
It’s hard to say…
I love you so much
That I realize you aren’t.
But I’ll still go to the game
And wish you were there.

Broken, scattered, holy

I'm sitting in my aunt's sunroom, reading while regularly looking out at the birds on the bird feeders. A few minutes ago they were everywhere, clustered on the feeders, hanging upside down to get the suet in the netting, on the bench that serves as a rail for the deck. And then I shifted in my seat, ten--maybe twelve--feet behind the glass patio doors, and they all flew away. Shazam.

One of those fellows is now atop a pine tree at the edge of the lawn, a visible sentry, while the flocks of I-don't-know-what-they're-all-called return.

I'm out in the country and there are way more birds than can be found even on an active June morning in my urban back yard. I've seen a bright red, rather regal cardinal, a blue jay, a red-wing blackbird, and a lot of grey-brown winged things of all sizes that I do not have the eyes or expertise to tell apart. Their wings are sometimes fluttering hard to accomplish a landing near the food. I can see the wind they're fighting in the direction of the blowing snow.

Soon the people will be up in this house--with their age-old ways of bumping together, breakfasting, chatting, remembering, some fighting new battles with canes and walkers and hearing aids. Mostly loving one another, but with the occasional sandpapery brush-up.

Gregory Boyle (of Homeboy Industries fame) writes in "Barking to the Choir" (my morning reading), that God/the Holy appears in all kinds of unexpected, small things. He watches for them with the attitude of the Buddhist who held the whole glass and declared it "already broken."

The birds are here. the birds have already scattered. They've done so several times as I type this.

God/the Holy remains.

Cardinal call

I've been hearing the cardinal again in my neighborhood, though I've heard him far more often than I've seen him. This is probably my fault--he and his mate and their extended family are probably hanging out in backyards with well-stocked bird feeders and sunflower seeds. Nutritional pickings are slim in the tangle of forsythia bushes and grapevines around my house. But that cardinal call is welcome, loud and insistent from the bare trees, up where the blue sky of late-winter sunshiny days offers clear and bracing relief from February's fog.

I went back and re-read some Perverse Lutheran blog posts this morning. I do this from time to time, honestly to assure myself that I can indeed write something that I don't cringe at later.

I often fault my writing for reverting to the "up-twist at the end," as a way to get out of the mess I've written myself into, a way to back away from the computer keyboard that is my shield and my defense. I don't often feel that those "up-twists" are indeed true. ("Is this most certainly true?" remains the guiding question of this pervy Lutheran.)

The odd thing this morning is that I found my blog posts from last summer and fall comforting, even uplifting--to me--after a long stretch of grey February days and things to do that fell well short of being fun. A big part of that was all the recollections of Kris that I read, which came with reminders to pay attention to people and relationships, to strive to do better and to keep moving toward goals, even the ones that stay well in front of you as you reach for them.

That cardinal I'm hearing in the trees these days--was it the one watching the fledgling on the ground last July? Did that little bird, not quite ready to fly up into the mulberry tree by the back fence, much less the tree tops--did he (or she) make it?

"I'll fly away," says the old hymn. "When I die, hallelujah by and by, I'll fly away." There's freedom in those tree tops, up near the blue of sky, above this weary world. There's freedom and grace in leaving this world, but there's also freedom and grace when you stay behind.

That cardinal I'm hearing every morning is not about to leave the neighborhood. The call seeks his mate--the same dull-brown hard-working nest-building female of last summer. The pair will be at it again in the months ahead, doing the good work of this earth.

I've been sitting in my favorite chair, feet braced against the ottoman, looking at Twitter and Facebook and knitting blogs for the past hour and a half. I just drank the last swallow of hot chocolate from the coffee mug. It was cold and icky sweet, thick with the dark brown syrup in the bottom of the cup made of Swiss Miss that did not quite dissolve in the hot milk an hour ago.

It's 10:29 and I never, ever go to bed before 11. I'm stressed and tired and can't seem to let go. There are remnants of today's work, or the work I hoped to complete today, scattered around my chair. My knitting is on the other side of the room. I can't even hook up with the yarn and cable needle that would help ease me into the end of the day.

Lent starts tomorrow, the forty days of repenting and remembering that life is suffering and none of us gets out alive. People tell me they love Lent, they revel in Lent. Not me. I've never liked Lent. You could go back through all 12 years of this blog and every year, somewhere in February or March, you'll find me sniping at Lent in one post or another—the hymns, the Wednesday night church services, the ashes, the purple, the gloom.

It feels like the dark cloud between me and a better world. A season of dirty snow and winter jackets stiff with four months' steady use, jackets standing up by themselves and begging to be washed and put away in the back of the closet.

And yet.

Lent says what's wrong. Lent seeks forgiveness. Lent waits patiently on the Lord.

So here we go.

Still February

Finally got outside to shovel snow last night just after dark, and did a damn fine job of it. Woke up slowly this morning, gradually becoming aware of stiff and tired muscles. Made coffee and looked out the window expecting to see sidewalks and driveway scraped clean.

Nothing but white. A couple inches of white.

February.

Hard, plodding work brightened only by a couple of silly Valentines with their gaudy colors and fake cheer. (Okay, if you're a fan of Valentines--brightened by a few sweet cards, pink and heartfelt in an otherwise grey month.)

I have never been a fan of life's long grey stretches. They're like the sidewalk along the north side of my house that stretches from the driveway and the alley all the way to the street corner. There's a point when you're shoveling that sidewalk where you stop and lean on your shovel and despair of ever finishing.

But you gotta keep going.

February

February.

We're still in the single digits and already it feels like a long month. Six days down, twenty-two to go, and these early days are shrouded in snow.

I used my fingers to count syllables in that last sentence, in the hope that "go" and "snow" were at the end of ten-syllable clauses--making an inadvertent rhyming couplet, ala William Shakespeare. Alas, not. I'm a few syllables short and the da-DAH, da-DAH rhythm of iambic pentameter is not there at all. "Shrouded in snow" waltzes instead of two-steps.

The high and the low of Shakespeare are on my mind this morning. I'm singing in a concert this weekend whose centerpiece is a setting of four Shakespeare sonnets for brass and choir, with an actor thrown in for good measure. All I've heard so far is the choral end, and there are a lot of notes on the page for brass. The first sonnet in the group is "No longer mourn for me," which I am finding incredibly sad. "Let your love even with my life decay," says the speaker of the sonnet--as if that were possible. As if you could protect those who love you from the grief of losing you.

You can't. Mortality's a bitch.

The low end of Shakespeare on my mind this morning is "The Comedy of Errors," an early play full of clowning, physical comedy and word play based on mistaken identity. I've got fifth and sixth graders working on scenes from this play, cut by necessity to the bare bones farcical elements of the plot. Most roles are triple-cast--a new actor in each of three sections of material. Given that all the fun stuff in the play is based on two sets of twins, unknown to each other but being mistaken for one another--well, do the math. In rehearsal yesterday pretty much no one was called by their correct character name -- at least not by the director (me). You truly do need a scorecard to tell the players.

What's fun is how enthusiastically the kids pitch into the work. Acting is fun! Acting frustrated and and angry and put-upon comes naturally. And we can enjoy all that frustration because it is a comedy of errors--we know that all will come right in the end. (In the end--when I've got a dozen kids onstage, plus another twenty in a watching crowd of citizens, each of whom, I hope, gets it.)

February. High tragedy, low comedy. Stay tuned.