Twelve Weeks: Endurance

It's sinking in with a heavier weight than ever before.

The Lovely Daughter is in the air somewhere, coming home for Thanksgiving only because her oldest brother is not.

Last year, he did come home, with The Elegant Girlfriend. And for the several years before that, we joined him in Chicago.

Thanksgiving has come to mean the snow falling in front of Marshall Fields' windows, the view from the top of the Sears Tower, the narrow streets of Hyde Park, and the University of Chicago's gargoyles. It has meant hope, as our family's young adult children reunited, reconfiguring relationships and bringing new partners into the fold on the cusp of the much greater hope of Advent.

Now it means endurance.

*******

Late this afternoon I went to the Carmelite monastery, because a Montessori mom of long ago was having the Mass said for Chicago Son. Just as the prayers began and his name was read, another Montessori mom -- and the Lovely Daughter's first and second grade teacher --tramped in from the slush. She had never been to the Carmelites' before, but today for no reason at all she chose to arrive just in time to wrap me in her arms. I had thought that I would be all right, but I wasn't. Thank God for her decision tonight.

Afterward, a few people offered what they thought were words of comfort.

Endurance.

********

I look around town and around the blogosphere and I see that, ready or not, the holidays are upon us. Thirty-eight days until January 2. Seems like a long time until this season comes to an end. I thought that maybe I would try to write my way through Advent, but now I think not. The metaphors that come to mind to describe my outlook are too raw for public consumption.

Lent cannot come soon enough for me.

Endurance.

********

And finally, for those of us for whom Advent this year will be a constant reminder of the hope that we long to find in its fullest meaning, I offer this, picked up on The Mercy Blog:

Give me your failure; he says I will make life out of it. Give me your broken, disfigured, rejected, betrayed body, like the body you see hanging on the cross, and I will make life out of it. It is the divine pattern of transformation, and it never seems to change.

We'll still be handicapped and terribly aware of our wound, but as St. Augustine says, "In my deepest wound I see your glory and it dazzles me." Our wound is our way through. Or as Julian (of Norwich) also put it, at the risk of shocking us, "God sees the wounds, and sees them not as scars but as honours… For he holds sin as a sorrow and pain to his lovers. He does not blame us for them." (Chapter 39, Showing 13, Revelations of Divine Love) We might eventually thank God for our wounds, but usually not until the second half of life.

Richard Rohr, from Everything Belongs

Hard to Know

I am delighted with the outcome of the Presidential election, insofar as delight remains a vocabulary word for me.

But oh, it was so hard, sitting here and watching the images of Grant Park fill the television screen for all those hours. The last time we were there was for a summer evening orchestra concert with Chicago Son.

It is so hard to know, from minute to minute, which loss to grieve. There are always more than there were a minute earlier.

Christmas ~ from the Stained Glass Museum on Chicago's Navy Pier

More Life Is Good

We spent the evening having a picnic with friends whose own Lovely Daughter leaves for her junior year abroad later this week. Three of the four Montessori friends were there, each of them in the process of turning twenty this summer.

"We are SO PROUD of you girls," I told them. "How many people have said to me, "Your daughter goes to college in Oregon ? ~ but that's so far! And next year the three of you will be in Singapore, France, and Prague!" They are such wonderful girls: confident, articulate, and good-humored, but also gentle and unassuming. We are indeed all so proud of them.

And I have some more Chicago photos: The Young Adults (including Chicago Son's Girlfriend) in black and white, since The Lovely Daughter would no doubt notice the bruised sheen on her face left over from the Wisdom Teeth Escapade; a four-masted ship docked at Navy Pier; and more from the Stained Glass Museum: a Tiffany window portraying an angel guide, and a window from Chicago's Temple Emmanuel, c. 1908 or 1917.

Birthday Week-end (Click to Enlarge!)

Chicago Botanic Garden: Rose Garden and Carillon on Evening Island

Navy Pier: Ferris Wheel and Stained Glass Museum. The window is from the drum portion of the central lantern and dome of St. Paul's Univeralist Church in Chicago, designed in 1887 and destroyed in 1964.

Chicago Calls

Sunday's my birthday!

And we're spending the week-end in Chicago with ALL of our children!

Life is very good right at this moment.

**********

And....it's the Friday Five:

1. Have you experienced living through an extreme weather event- what was it and how did you cope?

Well, there was Katrina . . . I was the one at home while everyone else was stranded in Baton Rouge after unloading The Lovely Daughter's stuff at Tulane; I was the one yelling into the phone, "I know you can't see the weather channel, but I CAN!!! And it is very very very VERY big!"

2. How important is it that we wake up to issues such as global warming?

Pretty much.

3. The Christian message needs to include stewardship of the earths resources agree/ disagree?

100% agree.

And because it is summer- on a brighter note....

4. What is your favourite season and why?

October is my favorite season. There is nothing at all like October in Williamstown, Massachusetts. Or October anywhere else.

5. Describe your perfect vacation weather....

Crisp, clear, 65 F at night and 85 F during the day. The weather is not complete, of course, without the ocean.

But Lake Michigan will do!

Springtime in Hyde Park

General Honors B.A.

The University of Chicago

March 2007

Congratulations!

Just a Few Observations

We're in the middle of state graduation testing for our tenth graders. I'm in charge of it. Makes for long and tedious days. (Today I asked one of the gentlemen to move to the other side of the room, since he had plopped himself down in the area carefully set aside for kids who need extra time and space in testing situations. For reasons unclear to me, he thought I expected him to take the table with him. He broke it.)

I'm also the yearbook advisor. For the first time in my four years on that job, the kids have oversold ad space. There were a couple of days there when I thought the seniors would come to blows. Now we are reorganizing the book. I wish the kids in charge of the theme pages would work half as hard as the kids in charge of the business end. We may have the first ever 100%-ads-0%-photos yearbook. Yep. Long and tedious days.

I've been invited to preach in April. Way cool. Long but not tedious days ahead.

Seems like a couple of months ago that a little tow-headed boy dragged chairs and hangars and blocks and who knows what else into a corner of the library and piled them all up and announced that he had created a Machine for Talking to the Stars.

Tonight he is nearly 6' tall and has a fuzzy red beard and spends his time with a beautiful-Phi-Bete-ballerina-archaeology-grad-student-to-be and is emailing me photos of apartments and condos in the Windy City. Apartments and condos he is considering renting. I hope he finds a place where he can see the stars, even though he isn't making communication technology anymore.

Hired!

We have some really, really good news around here. Several days ago our eldest son (yes, even with twins, one is older then the other) received a much desired job offer. For a real job. The kind where you get up every day and go to work doing some kind of adult thing with computers and you get paid and have benefits and a Future with the Company. The kind that required two interviews and, prior to those, the purchase of a suit and overcoat and dress shoes.

I keep thinking about the little blond boy who used to spend entire afternoons on construction projects in the backyard sandbox, running into the kitchen ocasionally to advise me on his progress or ask about the finer details of engineering.

He didn't reveal nearly as much about his job search. It's such a grueling process, especially for someone whose natural inclination is to shy away from self-promotion and group interaction. Occasionally he would ask us questions, revealing that naivete about the work of work that we all experience as we leave school, and reminding me how many mistakes I made in what now seems like another lifetime. Luckily for him, he is already a far more deliberate and thoughtful person than I could ever be.

One of the most delightful aspects of the whole situation for me is to see our faith in the value of a liberal arts education vindicated. Several people have asked whether our son has majored in business or computer science. We live in a world in which people increasingly seem to see college as a trade school, with certain majors as a necessary foundation for specific areas of employment, but in this household we tend to embrace the luxurious vision of learning for its own sake, with the confidence that having learned to learn is the most important product of an academic education.

Of course, there are some specifics one should learn. One should, for instance, learn where to look. In a University of Chicago newspaper I picked up over Thanksgiving, a professor noted that it might have been of benefit to us all had the current President been familiar with Thucydides' Melian debate before he embroiled us in war in Iraq. At Chicago, discussion of Thucydides is considered an essential of the first-year core experience, and my ninth grade world history students receive at least the most minute of introductions to his work. Yes, we are elitists around here. It would be better for the world if Mr. Bush shared a touch of that tendency in the form of curiosity and rigor of learning.

When we were visiting colleges, this son gave serious consideration to Davidson in North Carolina. Our tour guide mentioned that one of the major banks in the South was particularly enamoured of Davidson art history graduates, with one of its executives having concluded that they could teach anything at all about banking to a young person who had survived the Davidson art history curriculum.

My husband, who has spent thirty years in computer architecture and commercial management, takes a similar approach. These days, almost every technological skill is obsolete as soon as you have mastered it. The critical skill is to be able to master a new one.

For the record, the newly-employed-almost-graduate has taken plenty of higher math along with his endless sequences of courses in philosophy and civilizations. He does know how to learn across a wide spectrum of fields, despite his major in the History, Philosophy, and Social Studies of Science and Medicine. So it's a pleasure to see that the company for which he will go to work lists among the majors of its new hires fields like Greek, Dance, English. . . and pretty much everything else. I hope that list means that he has found a good niche.

As for his mother, she is still working on learning how to pick up the books that represent that insistence upon the luxury of learning. They are EVERYWHERE.

Lions and Tigers and Bears

I'm not sure I will ever again be capable of stringing more than two words into any sequential sense. I am that tired.

Our Chicago accomodations were rather, um, spartan, given the cost. We had to wait half an hour on the dinner reservations so carefully made and confirmed. Our Ohio State Son succumbed to the effects of the previous week-end's partying and slept for two days. I stayed behind in Chicago Son's apartment Saturday night where the word "spartan" hardly does justice to what I encountered. As far as I can recall, we did send all of our children off to college with a full complement of towels, bedding, and other life basics, of which one graying towel seems to be all that remains.

On the plus side, we met Chicago Son's charming girlfriend and on Friday we went to the Shedd Aquarium and on Saturday Chicago Son and I made the seven-or-or-so mile walk from Hyde Park to downtown (something I have wanted to do since my first look at that path along Lake Michigan on my first trip to Hyde Park a few years ago) and on Sunday we found a fabulous Italian restuarant for dinner.

I spent Monday visiting Windy City Seminary, and came home somewhat overwhelmed by the combined sense of what a spectacular privilege it would be to spend three years immersed in life at either of the two seminaries I have visited and what a daunting task it would be to reorganize my existence to embrace that new life.

My mixed feelings of elation and apprehension merged into complete exhaustion on the flight home. I can't claim to have been revived by the discovery that, with exactly four weeks to go before Christmas and absolutely nothing done in preparation and nary a vacation day ahead of me and a house in desperate need of a thorough top-to-bottom scrub with a Brillo pad, my husband had decided to use his free time on Sunday to rip off the wallpaper and knock out the damaged plaster from an entire corner of the dining room. Down to the studs. Wallpaper that was damaged by a leak oh...maybe a decade ago. In a room where thirty or forty people will gather in EXACTLY TWENTY-SEVEN DAYS.

My husband does not know how to plaster. Neither do I.

I am dealing with my complete disorientation, and with the fact that in a little while I have to prepare and teach four classes, by playing with my new images from Chicago. The one above was taken near the Bond Chapel on the University campus. There is something about those twisty arches and sharp points and the stark backlighting that exactly reflects my mood at this precise moment.

Guess Where I've Been?

Hyde Park Bed and Breakfast,

University of Chicago,

Orchestra Concert in Millenium Park

(Most of the images enlarge with a click.)

Sccrreeeeeeekkkkk!

The View From Above

(Chicago from the Hancock Tower)

I have no idea what sounds a gannet makes. I am guessing that the title hereof works, though, as a sound of triumph: my final exam is done!

What would you like to know about Ignatian spirituality? Just ask. No jokes about Dominicans in lieu of will be entertained.

We have written about 80 pages for this class this past semester. That's a lot of pages -- five or six pages a week which, when you think that each page represents two or three hours of work -- well, that's a lot of reading and thinking and writing for people who have actual lives outside the classroom. All behind me now, though, so I feel quite sanguine about the whole enterprise.

And actually kind of bubbly -- no, not my usual MO -- but now I can think about Christmas! One of my friends "did" her house last week-end -- cleaned for two days and then put up the tree -- and commented how she didn't mind the work at all because it all looks and smells so wonderful. Well, I will miss out on the smells, since I am lacking that sense (makes having pets so much more tolerable) but I am for sure looking forward to how things will look. And just in time to enjoy, since son numero uno arrives from Chicago tonight, if he remembers to get on his plane which, if you know anything about University of Chicago students, you understand is not guaranteed.

And yes, feeling a little sad and troubled, too. When is there NOT sadness in the air? The news out of Tulane University, my daughter's erstwhile and we hope continuing college, yesterday was all bad, in the short-run sense -- undergraduate college reorganization, faculty terminations, the med school closed for the rest of the year, several majors and Ph.D. programs getting the axe. I retain the utmost respect for Scott Cowen, the indefatiguably optimistic and driven president of the university, but he and his board have had to make some tough, tough decisions that have left many young people reeling yet again.

I happened to be on a parents' message board yesterday when another mom mentioned that her daughter was down there and IN my daughter's dorm as we were posting. I had high hopes that she might be able to take a peek and see whether the lovely daughter's possessions are still there, but in the end she couldn't make any headway; the first floor of the dorm is completely torn up. Not the most comforting news for a mother whose child will be moving in in 32 days.

Most of the country has no idea what is and is not going on in New Orleans. The President and Congress have turned their backs; it is up to the private sector and the individuals who want to make something happen to see that it does. We will be trying, however unexpectedly, to do our part, when we settle our tiny, self-possessed, and determined offspring into her dorm on what we hope is high ground above Lake Ponchetrain. The Tulane student population will increase the population of NOLA by twenty percent; I have a feeling some people down there will be happy to see those kids return.

First, however, I will be glad to see one of them back here in another week.

Chicago - In Front of the Field's Windows - Thanksgiving 2005

The thing about community is -- it creates itself. When there's a reason for folks to go somewhere and a space for them to to be who they are -- they do.

(The Fairy Godmother Delivers Cinderella's Coach)

(The Baffled Prince Holding The Slipper After The Ball)














(The Slipper Fits The Lady)

When I turned on the television in our Chicago hotel room Friday morning, a local station was doing a story on the Marshall Field's Department Store holiday windows. The eleven windows of the State Street store develop a fantastical story every holiday season, complete with elaborate design and animated figures.

The exquisite detail and charm of the windows would warrant a news story each year entirely of their own accord. The interviewer spoke with the chief designer, and showed us the storage space housing decades of costumes and sets -- all interesting stuff. But the story has a different twist this year, since Field's has been bought by Macy's and the future of the windows is uncertain. People are unhappy about the acquisition of a local landmark store by a national retailer -- as we were out and about later in the day, I overheard one young woman telling the story to a companion and planning her own boycott of Macy's.

Why do these things matter so much? What difference does it make whether we shop at Macy's or Field's, at a Home Depot or a local hardware store, at a Walmart or a neighborhood retailer? What's good for business is good for America, right?

Oops -- that speaker was discredited over 70 years ago. Good business is good for America, and the world -- but what is good business?

We've obviously had a chance to reflect upon that over the past week or so in AOL Journal Land. And I think we all know that one of the things good business does is build community, or create a climate in which community builds itself. Certainly some of the apprehension felt by Field's customers has to do with their fears concerning the destruction of community.

The folks at Marshall Field's never had to create those display windows on State Street. They didn't have to continue thetradition decade after decade. People would still do their holiday shopping there, even if the windows were full of nothing more imaginative than plasma television screens and the latest in X-Box technology.

But the windows became a gift to Chicago, a gift that built community. Whether they are "consistent with Field's objectives" remains unstated -- but my guess is that they are. Community, good feelings, loyalty -- they are all precious business commodities as well as personal treasures. They are created by a business that cares enough about its customers to welcome them to its premises, year after year after year, and to treat them like royalty once they arrive.

Frozen

We're in the Windy City for a couple of days, hanging out with our college junior sons while college freshman daughter spends the holiday with her roommate's family in southern Oregon.

We had a fabulous dinner last night at the Chicago Firehouse Restaurant, and have otherwise thrown all outdoor plans to the winds (literally) -- it was a rousing 13 degrees not counting wind chill when I got up this morning. So we've been to the Museum of Science and Industry and the top of the Hancock Building and the Field Museum. We left the Field tonight as the snow showered down and took off for the Marshall Fields' windows (Cinderella this year -- the last that the windows will appear under the Fields' moniker, as the stores have been bought by Macy's) and, quite by accident, the downtown holiday tree lighting.

I have lots of photos to share when I return, although many tonight were taken under less than optimal conditions: a huge and jostling crowd in a white Christmas snowstorm. But it's been fun.