A Dr. Seuss Mermaid

February 28, 2012

“I would be a mermaid,” says Makiah.  That’s what she answered when I asked the preschool class to fill in the blank:  If I were a fish___________________________.  We were making a class book to go along with our story of the week, Dr. Seuss’ One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish.  They had to fill in the blank and then illustrate their page.  I got everyone started and then took a moment to enjoy my granddaughter.  Kiah was swishing big purple strokes along her paper, a mermaid’s tail in the water.  Long after the others had finished and drifted away to listen to Grandma Donna reading a story in the library, Kiah was still adding details to her underwater world.  When I place the pages in the finished book tomorrow, there will be a pink fish blowing blue bubbles, a fish playing basketball, a girl and her brother pretending to be fish, and one beautiful purple mermaid.  How can your day be bad when you get to read the incomparable creativity of Dr. Seuss aloud and giggle with along with your wiggly audience, and then watch them transform their young energy into creativity of their own?

Cheerleaders and Honor's English 111

February 27, 2012

Yay for cheerleaders!  I was one, once upon a long time ago.  And an even bigger cheer for small towns, because I would never (ever, ever, ever) have been a cheerleader anywhere but in small town USA.  And ironically, considering the perky but brainless stereotype, it was my time as a high school cheerleader that got me through my first day of college.


Why am I thinking about cheerleaders?  Because today’s happy thing happily happened when my daughter, now the Cheer Coach at the same small school where I proudly pumped my poms, came in with this season’s colorful catalogue of cheer couture.  It so happens my sister was here at the same time.  She was a cheerleader too!  And it gets better!  Her daughter was also here and she is now, this very day, a cheerleader, under the direction of my daughter, about to pick a uniform from said catalogue.  Squeal!

So we chattered and debated, bent side-by-side-by-side-by-side over the catalogue, laughing at the page boldly labeled “Vintage Styles,” where there was a picture of the very same 8-pleated skirt I wore, complete with knee socks.  When I packed those socks away in a box and went to college, thank God I didn’t pack away the perky persona, at least not completely.  It never quite fit me, but at a small school everybody gets to take on multiple rolls in order to build the whole experience.  So your yearbook bio might read “National Honor Society, Rodeo Club, Business Professionals of America, Cheerleader.”   That I was able to summon just the tiniest bit of that loud-in-front-of-a-crowd cheerleader attitude is the only thing that saved me.

In the very first class of my very first day of college, I was completely unsure I was in the right room.  I was supposed to be in Honors English 111, but apparently it is not necessary for a professor to introduce herself or tell you if you are in the right place before she begins to call role.  And apparently she is within her rights to demand that you tell perfect strangers something about yourself when she calls your name (assuming you are in the right class and she will indeed find your name).  I couldn’t decide which would be worse, having her call my name which would force me to speak, or having her not call my name, forcing me to get up and leave. 

I had absolutely no choice.  Either way it went, I had to be a cheerleader.  If she didn’t call my name, I would get up in front of everyone, give a charming smile and a perky wave and bounce out of the room.  If she did call my name, I would introduce myself with spirit (“Who are, who are, who are we?  We are, we are, we are thee  pea-eye-rrr-aaa-ttt-eee-sss, pirates are the very best!”). 

Turns out she did call my name, and while inside I was cheering, outside I was able to introduce myself with a minimum of words and a small shaky smile.  My very first essay for that class was about my small hometown, and the professor wrote comments in the margins that stay with me still, and she asked me to enter it in the university President’s Essay Contest.  Yay for small town cheerleaders!

To Begin Again

I watched a video recently by a motivational speaker.  His topic was happiness, and he challenged the idea that being successful will make us happy, contending instead that being happy will make us successful.  At the end he listed four simple things we can do to promote our own happiness, and one of them stood out to me as the answer to a prayer:  keep a journal, and write about one positive thing that happens to you every day. 

I used to be a journal-keeping fool.  As a teenager becoming a young-adult, it was how I worked through things, and often how I got to enjoy the best of those things again and again.  Somewhere along my way, I began to over-think my writing, and I lost the ability to just write.  Since I began Scenes from a Snow Globe, I’ve been looking for ways to give it boundaries, because it seems the most successful bloggers have a theme, and because I went to college and in my writing classes I slowly accepted the idea that you must “narrow your topic!” 

I know I want to capture the everyday, ordinary-extraordinary moments of small town life, but still I struggle to let my thoughts flow;  I tend to want to assign too much meaning to the entries, to over-stuff them with emotion instead of letting them speak for themselves.  What I realized when the speaker suggested his journal idea, was that the moments I really want to remember are the ones that make me slow down and smile.  If there are moments of pain or anger or melancholy, I want to balance them, surround them, wrap them up in beauty.  It’s exactly those happy things floating around, lingering in the air, that can make my world a snow globe in the first place.  So today I begin again, Scenes from a Snowglobe…

February 26, 2012

I love people!  I’m a people-watcher, a kind-spirited eaves-dropper.  People amuse me, amaze me, make me think.  In my mind, I give out high-fives and hugs to strangers all the time.  But what I don’t do is actually talk to or touch people.  My husband is my hero in that regard.  He’s a talker-toucher.  He holds doors, makes jokes, gives out compliments.  While I hear and see more little details about the people all around me than he does, he interacts with the people right in front of him far better than I.  So I’m trying to learn from him, and today my efforts paid off by giving me my “one positive thing” to journal.

In line in front of me at the grocery store today was an elderly man all alone.  I shop in a big warehouse style store where you bag your own groceries.  He was getting out money to pay the cashier in that slow and careful way the elderly do things, with a patient determination to do the things that they’ve done with ease for many years, but which now present a challenge for them.  Everything from his baseball cap to his worn and tidy wallet reminded me of the years when taking my grandpa shopping was a regular part of my life.  I could imagine him changing from denim overalls to his “waist pants,” like my grandpa used to do when we “went to town.”

Normally that would be all there was to it.  I would notice those little details and I would get a nice memory and a smile out of them.  But today, while he was slowly paying, I quickly bagged his groceries, which meant I was going to have to explain myself to him in a real, live interaction.  So when he looked up, I placed his bags in his cart and said, in what I hoped was a bright and cheerful voice, “I got them for you.”

“Well, I’ll give you a hug for that!” he glowed, as he proceeded to do just that.  For one quick, warm moment in the grocery store, I got so much more than just a smile, I got my grandpa back.

There Was This Catholic Priest and This Orothodox Jew...

I seem to be experiencing a  L   O   N  G  stretch of time where the only writing I feel inspired enough to complete is a status update on facebook.  I wanted to add something to my blog, so I borrowed this from the blog on my dusty myspace, dated May 31, 2009

 There Was This Catholic Priest and This Orthodox Jew...

I attended Mass at a different parish than usual today, rather on impulse, and I heard a homily I found quite worthy of sharing. My home parish has a very traditional priest, an intelligent man and a gifted speaker, but not someone too many of us feel like we could just hang out with. On the other hand, this parish has Father Len.  I think I could drink beer in a lawn chair with Father Len. 

Father Len told us today about a Starbuck’s he used to frequent, in Beverly Hills where he spent a short portion of his priesthood. One day, crazy as it sounds, he bought his coffee and followed an irresistible urge to take it to the table of an Orthodox Jew, complete with twisted curls, and ask to join him. He said he knew without a doubt that he was meant to be friends with this man. And the closest of friends they became and remain to this day.

He made us laugh with his honest description of two people who disagree about everything; politics, religion, and everything in between. He made me cry with his unshakeable belief that God’s spirit moves people, and that we are meant to embrace one another despite our differences, and thus God can make a difference for others through us.

You see, his Jewish friend had been wrestling with an emotional personal question in his life for quite some time. And one day, out of respect and friendship, he attended Mass. Not something an Orthodox Jew does. To put it mildly, they do not appreciate Catholics. However, in the second reading at that Sunday’s Mass, he found the answer to his question. Out of this most unlikely of friendships, one Father Len initiated because he allowed the Spirit to move him, came a life-changing moment for his friend.

They remain a Catholic priest and an Orthodox Jew. Father Len says that at least once a year the Pope does something to “piss off” his friend and he gets an earful over the phone. Why does their friendship survive? Father Len says Pentecost is why. The Jewish Pentecost celebrates God speaking to the people to give them the Ten Commandments. In the Jewish tradition, there was complete silence on the Earth, not even a bird chirping, as God spoke to the people.

The Christian Pentecost marks the moment when God began to speak not to the people, but through them. In the Christian tradition, tongues of fire from the sky rested upon the Disciples, God’s Spirit entered them, and they could speak so that they were understood in the many different languages of the people gathered around them. The Spirit of Love, wherever we may believe it comes from, lives within us, giving us the ability to understand one another beyond our differences if we only let it move us.  I think my desire to attend mass with Father Len today was more than just an impulse, it was a reminder that when the Spirit is trying to move you, you should go ahead and move!