Still in a food coma...

I know I am getting older because I could only eat four small slivers of delicious pies before my body said YUCK, NO MORE SUGAR PLEASE. YOU ARE DONE GROWING. YOU DIDN'T STOP FOR A LONG TIME BUT NOW YOU ARE DONE. THERE ARE NO MORE GROWTH SPURTS TO FUEL.

This Thanksgiving, I am thankful (among other things) for a responsive body, and also for many previous years of gluttony. :)

South of the Border

We made it to Virginia! Praise be! On our way from Atlanta to Richmond, we crossed paths in Greensboro, NC with Josh's parents who were on their way from Franklin to Raleigh. Fortuitous timing! We had a joyous reunion at the Taco Bell. We are eating Thanksgiving with my family this year so it was a fun surprise to get to see them too. Now to sleep and dream of turkey and pumpkin pie...

Belief, Revisited

(The title is a reference to my facetious post from NaBloPoMo, Day 2)

I had choir practice last night, which gets me nostalgic for all my past choir days. Do you ever get the sense when you're in the middle of something that "This is amazing. This is going to change me and stay with me forever but it's not going to last long so I need to savor it!" I feel that way now about lots of moments of motherhood, but I also felt it frequently in choir at BYU. I knew it was a singular experience at the time, but the years since I've been out of school have thrown that truth even more into relief. So much of that music made an impression on me - the harmonies and the lyrics - at a formative time in my life, and those impressions constitute much of what I consider my limited knowledge of God. In other areas of my life God has felt somewhat distant or abstract at times, but music has always been one of my primary means of intuiting God's existence. I've had in mind the past couple nights a song I sung back at BYU, a choral setting of a Robert Frost poem, "Choose Something Like a Star". Here is the poem for your devouring: 

Robert Frost (1874-1963)

Choose Something Like a Star 
O Star (the fairest one in sight),
We grant your loftiness the right
To some obscurity of cloud --
It will not do to say of night,
Since dark is what brings out your light.
Some mystery becomes the proud.
But to be wholly taciturn
In your reserve is not allowed.
Say something to us we can learn
By heart and when alone repeat.
Say something! And it says "I burn."
But say with what degree of heat.
Talk Fahrenheit, talk Centigrade.
Use language we can comprehend.
Tell us what elements you blend.
It gives us strangely little aid,
But does tell something in the end.
And steadfast as Keats' Eremite,
Not even stooping from its sphere,
It asks a little of us here.
It asks of us a certain height,
So when at times the mob is swayed
To carry praise or blame too far,
We may choose something like a star
To stay our minds on and be staid.

And here is a good clip of the choral setting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWnKkMd8zY8 

(And now I will awkwardly attempt to wax eloquent and philosophical, with probably too many rhetorical flourishes and not enough clarity or editing. Please forgive the attempt.) 

In this poem, I see man and his longing to understand the universe. It's funny, because from one perspective I can see this poem having great appeal to an atheist. In the absence of God, choose something like a star. But as a believer, I also see a parallel to man and his longing to understand God. Here is my rambling vision, prompted in part by this poem: There is so much in the physical world and in the spiritual calculus of the universe that we want to know, but we don't. How things work, why bad things happen to innocent people, etc. We can't even know how much we don't know. And yet we sense that things have explanations, have meanings even when it's impossible for us to comprehend them. We are meaning-making creatures - we try so hard to explain everything - but our reach exceeds our grasp. We grow frustrated - we overcompensate - we embellish what little we know - we talk up our certainty of what little we do. We see the stars burning silent and distant and we can't leave them alone to burn - we sense, we insist that they have something to say. We are part of the universe and we feel entitled to comprehend it all, to know it's deepest corners, to resonate with it and hear it speak to us.

But we forget that we are children. We demand to know, we demand because demanding is the bulk of our skill set, and I imagine God as empathetic towards our flailings and lashing out. I also imagine His attempts to speak to us as not dissimilar to my attempts to speak to my pre-verbal children. Each one, I have spoken to from birth in a daily ritual, watching their eyes as I touch my face and say "Mama", then put my hand on their bellies and repeat their own name. Over and over. I want them to know me and to know themselves in relation to me. There is a cloudiness in their eyes, but also such concentration! So much attentiveness as they study my face and see my lips move and hear my words. As months and more months pass the cloudiness recedes, but even as their recognition grows they have no language to articulate what they recognize - only noise.

When I try to conceive of God, I imagine Him in my place and myself as the neonate. When I imagine my soul in communication with God I see my infant whining and wailing, and I see those times in my life when I believe He was communicating back to me His existence - always simply - no angelic voices, no bright lights or specific instructions for me - but like Frost's star, "I burn" - "I am here" - "I exist". Nothing more, but nothing less either. A sense of warmth from a faraway burning. "It gives us strangely little aid, but does tell us something in the end." I could dismiss that sensation of warmth, of mercy, as emotionalism, as a mere cocktail of hormones gifted to me by evolutionary biology, and that picture's not wrong, but incomplete, I think. Just as a star is a giant ball of gas millions of miles away, and yet something more than that, the science behind my emotional responses to music (and literature and art and scripture) is insufficient to me in explaining their significance.

As I've mulled over this poem the past couple nights, I've also been reminded of an essay I read a few months back by one of my favorite Mormon writers, Rosalynde Welch, titled Disenchanted Mormonism: Practicing a Rooted Religion, that offers an alternative narrative to the common one of "faith, faith crisis, then faith resolution or abandonment":

"My experience has not been one of conventional religious doubt, an agonizing knife-edge demanding resolution through insight or decision, but rather one of puzzlement. Puzzlement is a gentler and more sustainable state of mind. It entails patience, an internal stillness, and an acknowledgement of my own failure to wring answers from an inscrutable world. Puzzlement implies humility. If provisional doubt must be mastered by individual judgment and choice, then puzzlement marks the limits of our intellectual and moral mastery. 

Moreover, the notion of puzzlement allows us to uncouple belief from faith, and faith from choice, in the troubling but inescapable logic of doubt. Puzzlement allows us to think of faith not as a moral victory over uncertainty but rather as an encounter with uncertainty itself, which is to say an encounter with the limits of our own capacity to comprehend or control the world. When we encounter church doctrines or practices that we fail to understand or can’t justify, or when we taste suffering in our own lives or the lives of those we love, we find ourselves puzzled by God’s will. These moments of hesitation become the personal occasions of faith. They originate not in our capacity to choose, in our strength of will, but on the contrary in our own limitations of mind, in our insufficiency to comprehend or our present inability to decide. Faith begins at the moment we say “I don’t understand.” Faith here is not a choice to believe but choice’s opposite, born in a moment of spiritual hesitation or aporia; not first a triumph of the moral mind, but its fortunate failure."

I find myself in a state of puzzlement all the time. Similar to the author, my natural bent is not to see God in every little lucky coincidence or mishap. Elsewhere in the article she talks about a spiritual otherworld visible to some believers, where every boon and bane confirms His existence - I don't know that world. What I do have is puzzlement about why things are the way they are, why I am the way that I am, and in the face of that confusion, a quiet "I burn" communicated through others by kindness, by music, by compassion, by art. It stays my mind, and asks of me a certain height, and I'm certain that I am not reaching it, but I am reaching.

(I am not sure if or how to end now, but)

THE END

Mush

I was working on a thoughtful post, but it's late and my brain has turned to mush so I'll have to hash out the rest of my thoughts over there tomorrow..ish.

Here instead is a picture of George sleeping, which is what I should have given up and done hours ago.

My First Date

I am pretty awesome at being a wife, if I say so myself, but I was a terrible girlfriend, and before that, terrible at dating. I had this idea to do a post of some of the bad dates I went on, but upon reflection I decided that it was probably ME that was the bad date in many of those instances! In any case, here's the story of my very first one (awww). 

I got asked on my first date shortly after arriving at BYU. That's right, I never went on a single date in high school. To be fair, I didn't turn 16 until June of my junior year so there was only a year's worth of opportunity. But I was a babe, check me out! Note the glasses and braces: 

[Incidentally I look exactly the same today, just with less metal on my teeth.] Why were the boys not lining up? That's what I want to know. Dummies!! Actually, it was for the best - I was glad to begin my dating life far, far away from the uncomfortable interrogations of my parents, so I had no regrets on that score. (Hi Mom! Hi Dad! Love you!)

Anyhow, my first week or so at BYU I got asked on a date and it basically made my life up to that point. He was a little nerdy, but super nice, and TALL!! Taller than me! I could not have been more thrilled. I don't remember at all what we did, maybe got ice cream and walked around? It was a warm night and I was hanging out with a tall boy who kind of liked me! I mean, not really, since he didn't know me at all yet, but he thought I was cute enough to ask on a date at least! Heaven was a place on earth and that place was PROVO, UTAH. (Are you laughing yet?) I don't think we had a ton in common but the small talk came easily enough so my armpits were only mildly sweaty instead of profusely sweaty - winning!

Everything was going swimmingly until the topic of conversation meandered to the Very Serious Issue of "Who Was the Coolest Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle." Now. Obviously. And clearly. And indisputably, as decreed by the heavens, the answer to this question is Michaelangelo. Before my date brought it up it had not occurred to me that this was an issue of any contention. MICHAELANGELO! He was hands down the funniest! And he had the coolest weapon, the nunchucks! He was the one that said "Cowabunga" all the time!! That's it. Case closed, he wins. My sister Courtney and I were such fans in elementary school that we may even have kissed the screen on occasion when he was on it. That's normal, to have a childhood crush on a cartoon reptile, right? (I had to google whether a turtle was a reptile or an amphibian just now...surprise, it's a reptile! I guessed wrong.)

Knowing my convictions, then, you can imagine what a shock it was to me when he confessed that his favorite Turtle was Donatello. Donatello??? The most forgettable one in the bunch? In my rankings, Donatello was dead last. He was boring, and nerdy, and his weapon was just a big stick wrapped in some tape. Michaelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael, Donatello, in that order. Wikipedia tells me that "In all media, he is depicted as the smartest, quick-witted, and most intelligent of the four turtles, often speaking in technobabble with a natural aptitude for science and technology" and I seem to recall that maybe my date was going into engineering? Don't ask me his name, but I think I remember that. So in retrospect it makes perfect sense that he would have gravitated toward that turtle, but at the time I did not comprehend it at all. All I knew was that I had been having a pleasant evening getting to know this person, when all of a sudden this Donatello thing came out of left field and it was a DEALBREAKER. A sure sign of our incompatibility and conflicting worldviews.

We laughed off our differences and moved on to other subjects, but secretly, I think we both knew it was a dealbreaker. We ran into each other on occasion afterward but he never asked me out again. I wasn't particularly disappointed.

THE END

Jamie Louise

Once upon a time four and half years ago I joined Twitter. I tweeted about twenty times and then stopped. HOWEVER, I remembered today that among those tweets were a couple of real gems of quotes from my grandmother/namesake, Jamie Louise Collins Powers, a lady of class and spunk (whose mind has taken a precipitous turn south in the last year or two, sadly) who was unintentionally hilarious (to me, at least) on these few occasions.

Grandma, on staying overnight at the Days Inn in Carlisle, PA: "Oh, it was LUXURY!"
— Jaime Alley (@jetame) July 21, 2009

Grandma was born in 1919 and grew up on a farm during the Depression, and then raised seven children on a budget of pennies and smiles. Even though she managed to see some of the world later in life (Israel, Egpyt, Rome, Ireland, Russia) and she was very proud of the mink stole she found at a Goodwill in Swarthmore, PA, her "luxury-o-meter" was always modest in scale. I love that she was so impressed by a Days Inn in the middle of nowhere. I imagine her thinking, "Does it have hot water? An indoor toilet? A TV with a clicker? I do declare, this must be the Ritz-Carlton!"

Grandma on eating dinner at the Chinese buffet: "Oh, the variety is just WONDERFUL!"
— Jaime Alley (@jetame) April 29, 2009

My attitude at a Chinese buffet: skepticism about how long each dish has been sitting out
My grandma's attitude at a Chinese buffet: wide-eyed amazement. I love that. And she is right! So much bounty! So much choice! And for so cheap! The modern world is amazing. For proof, just go to a Chinese buffet.

Grandma on meeting Grandpa for the first time: "He wasn't a very good dancer. Well, he was a good dancer, I just couldn't follow him."
— Jaime Alley (@jetame) April 29, 2009

Grandma has always been a talker. (I have wondered sometimes if my sweet Chatty Cathy Tessa-lou is actually related to me, her taciturn mother, but really there's no mystery that her loquacity comes straight from her Great-Grandma Jamie. The talkative gene is hiding on a recessive allele somewhere in my DNA, but in my daughter it decided to EXPRESS ITSELF *jazz fingers*.) Grandma is also one of those people who was born without whatever mechanism that is between brain and mouth that stops you from saying just anything. With Grandma, you always know exactly what she's thinking because she will tell you, for better or for worse. :) No filter at all. Sometimes, like in this particular quote, this leads to saying things that just make no sense. :) I love the stream-of-consciousness of her correcting herself, and her obliviousness to what this says about her own dancing. LOL

My sweet Grandma always had a little more spice than sugar, and was not much of a cookie-baking kind of Grandma, at least in my memory (though she was famous for her whole wheat bread, made with wheat she ground into flour herself...now that I think about it, practical, nourishing, unsweetened, no-nonsense whole wheat bread is a pretty good metaphor for what kind of grandma she was). She expected me to get up early, not be sassy, and turn off the lights when I left a room. I grew up in her home until age 11 so maybe other grandchildren have a rosier memory of her grandmotherliness, but they possibly never knew her talent with a switch, either. :) (Maybe? I dunno.) I have used the past tense a lot in writing this because even though she's still around, she's not all there. I get to go home to see her this Thanksgiving and Christmas, and I'm so thankful, because I don't know how many more she's got in her.

She may not have been an indulgent Grandma, but I know she loved/loves me and her influence in my life has been indelible. I have watched her strike up conversations with complete strangers in thrift stores that led to new bosom friendships and the discovery of mutual pals. I am naturally shy but I'm not as nervous to meet new people as I used to be and I do pretty well at small talk now - smile, joke, ask questions, look for commonalities. That's how Grandma does it. Her work ethic is famous, and while my natural tendency is to sloth, I am finding myself more and more as I get older thinking of my Grandma, wanting to hit the ground running in the morning on my days off (well, once I drag myself out of bed...natural sloth, you see), push against my natural laziness and do, do, do, no, don't sit down b/c you'll never get up, ugh you checked your phone and now half an hour is gone STOP THAT, pick up that sock, that toy, that paper, put away that dirty dish, wash that load of colors, fold that pile of laundry. "What would Grandma do?" I'm still nowhere near her productivity - I don't vacuum near as much, I don't hang my clothes to dry, I don't fill paper grocery bags with the sweet gum balls I've picked up in my yard, I don't have to haul buckets of dirty wash water outside to dump after doing laundry (her laundry setup was wacko...I still don't understand it), I don't spend evenings shelling beans - but I think of her and can aim a little higher. Maybe, by the end of my life, I'll be a little more deserving of her namesake.

THE END

Friday movie night

Kids are in bed and Josh and I are starting a new Friday "classic" movie night tradition. My film literacy is woefully lacking. I grew up "in" the 80's, but not "of" the 80's, you could say. (Mormon joke.) Anyway, there are a lot of movies I haven't seen, and I'm closing in on 30 so it's about time to remedy that. I am using the term "classic" loosely - could be from any decade in the 20th century, really. There are a lot of "classics" that I've seen parts of, or I'm familiar with from pop culture references, but haven't actually watched the whole thing.

We are starting tonight with Groundhog Day. Never seen it! Also on my list from the 80's are E.T. and Ghostbusters. Never seen 'em! Any other recommendations? You name it...I probably haven't seen it.