The Chicken Connection

March 8, 2012

At preschool this morning we had green eggs and ham.   Its classic Seuss, silliness with a lesson, “You do not like them, so you say.  Try them, try them and you may.  Try them and you may I say!”  I always love doing my Sam-I-am bit, and this year it was even better because the eggs came from chickens who are like family, the ones who live in my very own sister’s back yard.

Now, I never imagined my sister as the farm girl type, but she rescued these nearly homeless chickens from a friend who was moving, and perhaps out of gratitude the little sweeties settled in and started laying eggs, even though their new home is not exactly on a farm.  And because they were so busy laying eggs, there were plenty for our scrambled green eggs extravaganza.  I couldn’t have been more delighted.  Until my sister came in this evening with her sad farm girl face. 

Okay, to be more honest it was more like her highly irritated business manager face, because it’s hard to look like a farm girl when you’re dressed in your professional girl clothes and have just left an office full of responsibilities, and come home to find a notice on your door from City Hall giving you a few days to do something about your chickens.  It seems they had wandered into a neighbor’s yard, prompting a complaint to the City.

I said the chickens’ new home wasn’t exactly a farm, but it’s pretty darn close.  Our “city” has a population of 600ish.  My sister’s lawn is separated from a cornfield by one house and a narrow excuse for a road.  So what I don’t understand about this situation is why, oh why the neighbor couldn’t have knocked on the door and said, “Hi.  I met your chickens.  Could you please make sure they stay out of my yard?”

If the neighbors had done that, they would have found an apologetic new chicken keeper very willing to come up with a better way to keep her feathered family closer to the coop, and as a neighborly bonus they would have gone back home with at least a dozen cute little eggs, yummy in green but probably equally tasty in their natural color.  What they may not have known is just how important those chickens are, but sometimes what you don’t know should make all the difference.

You see, my 12 year old niece has gone through a difficult time over the past year, to the point of being medicated for depression, which sadly runs in our family.  It’s very frightening for a parent to face the brick wall of depression standing between you and your baby.  When you find something that puts a window in the wall, you buy curtains and let it stay.  That’s what the chickens had become for my niece, sunshine through a window.  My sister isn’t a farm girl, but she gave chicken-keeping the old Dr. Seuss try because she’s a mother and she cares so much.  

Caring is the connection I’m getting to here.  It’s interesting to me how seemingly unrelated parts of a day can be so clearly connected, and this whole chickens-green eggs-neighbor thing pointed straight to an article that appeared in my email inbox earlier in the day called The Caring Toolbox.  The article was from the website of former diplomat turned author John Graham, where he shares “practical tips for people who are creating change in their communities and beyond.”  He says caring is:  appreciating others’ feelings and needs, minding all the little interactions, being personal, listening, taking time.  My sister’s neighbor, like so many of us on an ordinary busy crazy day, didn’t take time to ask “Hmm, I wonder why my neighbors have decided to adopt chickens?”  He didn’t even take time to have a “little interaction,” opting instead to call City Hall. 

My own neighbors have chickens.   And they have turkeys and several other species of birds. In fact I woke up one morning to a whole flock of some unidentified feathered guys and gals walking around in my flower bed.  On Saturday mornings I will admit their rooster is a tad irritating.  I have always just considered it part of living in a small rural town, and after today, I will definitely not be calling City Hall about it.  I have no idea why my neighbors have so many birds but I’m pretty sure City Hall doesn’t either, so if I wanted to “create change in my community” I guess I’d have to “take the time” to find out.  I don’t have to allow the birds regular access to my flowerbed, but if I asked their people to keep them home, and I asked politely and with a certain amount of understanding, I have confidence that they would be kept home as well as their family of humans could manage it.    

I believe John Graham has the right idea but maybe his suggestions could be summed up more simply if I just invited the town to green eggs and ham day at preschool.  My sister’s neighbors could sit on the Circle Time carpet next to my beautiful niece and benefit from a bit of Seuss:  “You don’t like to care, so you say.  Try it, try it and you may.  Try it and you may I say.”

http://johngrahamspeaker.org/coachs-corner

5 Things I Learned From Basketball

March 4, 2012

I’ve heard it said that small towns have nothing going for them but school sports.  I’m also fond of the saying “bloom where you are planted.”  And where I’m planted, it’s been raining basketballs.  If that’s what we have going for us, we can learn from it as well as from any other experience.  So here are 5 things I learned from basketball:

1.       Natural talent is nice; Dedication and hard work is better.  If small towns have sports, they also have a limited number of players to play them.  They may not be tall, they may not be fast, they may not show up to practice jumping high and shooting strong.  But if they show up because they want to play, and a good coach believes in them, they will end the season stronger, higher, faster, and if not actually taller, then standing taller just the same.

2.       It takes only one negative person in the bleachers to bring down an entire crowd and dampen the spirits of an entire team, but it takes a whole set of bleachers filled with cheering fans to make an equally positive impact.  However, once the cheering begins the energy is instant and it spills out of the gym and into the classroom, the Post Office and the gas station and, this being 2012, onto facebook.  It gives the old guy across the street, who very likely played for the same team, a reason to appreciate his young neighbor even if he does have a loud truck and rowdy friends. 

3.      Despite the abuse folks yell from the sidelines (things like, “get your glasses checked, Ref,” and “did the other team pay you for that call?”), referees are people too.  My son didn’t like a call against him during the emotion-charged district championship game this season, and he was a little too visual about it on the court, resulting in a technical foul.  He was so ashamed of himself that he asked his coach to get him the email addresses of the referees and sent them apologies.  (No, I’m not making that up, and neither his parents nor his coach asked him to do it.) 
     He got prompt replies from both.  One of them wrote “…making split second decisions about fouls is not always an easy job, and sometimes we just plain make bad calls. In my 12 years of refereeing high school basketball this is the first time I've ever received something like this and I truly appreciate it.”  Not only do referees have a difficult job and take much abuse on a regular basis, they also love the game and care about the kids who play it, care enough to spend time writing to my son to praise the “step towards adulthood” he took when he wrote to them.  That’s a step some grown-ups in the stands have yet to take.

4.      Many foods go well with basketball:  frozen pizza (though you must remember to have on hand an entire pizza per player who will be hanging-out in your kitchen), Subway sandwiches (with extra, extra napkins if the 3 year old will be eating one in the truck in the dark when you’re late for the game), BBQ pork hoagies (if you are feeling generous enough to support the fundraising efforts of the opposing school even though they are loud and obnoxious and beating your team when you deserve to win more), and Carmel Apple Suckers (when you’ve been at a jr. high tournament all-the-live-long-day and thought you’d run out of cash until you found that life-saving 46 cents in your coat pocket)

5.      The definition of the word perspective is “the state of one's ideas, the facts known to one in having meaningful interrelationships."  I looked it up because my son’s coach talked with his team for a long time in the locker room when they lost a game in the State basketball tournament by 1 point in the final seconds.  When my son came out of the locker room, he carried with him that one word, perspective. 
       This lost game, now forever out of their reach, had been the focus of countless hours, in fact for the seniors on the team it had been the focus of four year’s-worth of hours.  This game was the reason each time they stepped onto the court they began in a tight huddle chanting passionately “One Team, One Dream!”  In an exhausted locker room filled with sweat and tears, Coach told them if they live their lives with as much drive and dedication, give it as much effort, as they have given basketball then they will always be champions.  He reminded them they would emerge from the locker room to find parents, girlfriends, classmates, teachers who had stood by them and were proud of them.  He taught them to put basketball into perspective as a part of the “interrelationships” of their lives.

I don’t believe for a minute that school sports is all we have going for us here in our small town, but if indeed they are and we work at playing them well, they just may be all we need.

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!

Most Likely to Succeed

     Under my photo in the high school yearbook is the caption “Most Likely to Succeed.”  With a title like that to live up to, you may expect I would be a bit anxious about my 25 year reunion.  Given the dictionary definition of the word success, “the prosperous termination of endeavors; the attainment of wealth or position,” I’m well aware that I’m not successful.  And I’m not going to pretty up the definition by interpreting it to mean I’m prosperous in the emotional rewards of my career or wealthy in the love of my family, both of which are true but cheating;  We all know the yearbook meant success just like the dictionary states it.
     So why wasn’t I compelled to polish up my life for show-and-tell?  It didn’t occur to me because I love those people.  I mean my classmates, I just love them!  I enjoyed every moment (well, okay there was one moment…but I’ll get to that) of our reunion.  And the best part was that I didn’t merely get to step back in time for the usual remember-whens, but I also had a here-and-now opportunity to learn three important lessons.
     First, the strands that weave your life together with your classmates’ lives, through the hours and the days, the work and the play, the laughter and the tears of that growing and learning time we call school can, believe it or not, be stretched over 25 years without breaking.  One of my classmates recalled lying on a bench sobbing after our graduation ceremony, not for fear of what was ahead but for loss of the blanket of friendship we had knit, which couldn’t wrap us together anymore.  She remembers another classmate hugging her, telling her “Don’t cry, we’ll always be close.” 
     He was wrong, and he was so right. We went in different directions because we had grown-up life to do.  But we all headed out to do it from the same starting point, with shared experiences standing strong behind us.  When we came back to the starting point together it felt like a comfortable place to talk about the world for a safe little while with people we belong to.  And so Reunion Lesson Number One:  If we take a moment to tighten the strands of the connections we are given throughout life, they make good places to rest along the way.
     Reunion Lesson Number Two involved the above mentioned moment I didn’t enjoy.  I do love my classmates, all 16 of them.  I’m able to love them because love has so many degrees of depth and meaning.  Some of them I love because I know them and they’re among the very best people I know, and some of them I love for things I see they’ve become, that I would like to know more about. Some of them I simply love nostalgically, because of our shared memories. 
     I share a lot of memories with the classmate others would say was my best friend, but if she and I each told you the same memory, it would sound like two different stories.  We never did see things the same way.  The others would say we didn’t disagree often, and that would be because I wasn’t good at expressing my opinion, while she did it quite loudly and well. If it was an issue I was emotional about, I would eventually have a heated and inarticulate outburst followed by tears, then we would be distant for a couple days at the most, and things would drift back to normal.  I still wouldn’t agree, definitely wouldn’t understand, but I wanted peace.
     Near the end of our reunion the conversation drifted to a topic about which she and I have made opposite choices.  Since it seems some things never change, she was able to express her opinion boldly and clearly, with everyone around us knowing full well that I, sitting next to her, was miles away from agreeing.  Her certainty made it sound as though I had made an uninformed and incomprehensible decision.  She turned to me and said “no offense,” and because some things never change, I was completely silent, which just punctuated her statements. 
     On the way home I cried, saying aloud to the empty dark truck all the things I might have said to her.   Then through my anger it occurred to me I was forgetting something I strive for in my adult life, open-mindedness and empathy.  I made the right choice for my family; But given the circumstances and people involved, she probably made the right decision for her family as well.  And so lesson two:  Some things never change.  Unless you change them; To be true friends with someone you don’t repress opinions and ignore differences, you share opinions and respect difference.
     The third lesson was more like a gift.  After a pre-reunion dinner with close friends, we talked quietly into the evening about our lives.  “If I could change it,” said one with clear-eyed certainty, “I wouldn’t.”  He blessed me with this statement shortly after a very bad day during which I questioned everything that led me to where I was.  I was feeling sorry for myself, disappointed in myself, discontent with my life.  The beauty of his words lies in the fact that he hasn’t had a charmed life either. Each of us made decisions that caused us to struggled and soar, feel panic and calm, grieve and rejoice to degrees much higher than we could have imagined in school.  And not a moment of it can we go back and change, and yet we ask the question, “What would I have done differently?”  If you know without a doubt that the answer is “Nothing,” what a great relief that is! 
     That’s not to say we should just stop trying for improvement.  My wise friend works with juveniles and is raising a new baby, and using what he’s lived rather than wishing he could change it.  I said I wasn’t successful.  To rectify that, I need the “prosperous termination” of an “endeavor,” and I don’t think I knew before what exactly to try for. I do now, it’s Reunion Lesson Number Three:  Endeavor to be content with your life to this point, knowing each experience has given you something to make use of in shaping the future.  
     It made me feel good, all those years ago, to have a vote of my classmates endow me with the Most Likely to Succeed title.  What I didn’t realize was that in order to succeed, I needed them.  I needed the time we spent learning together, I needed the time apart, and most of all I needed a reunion.