Month: April 2008

(Grace’s latest art, inspired by Monet’s Bridge at Giverny … framed for someone special!)

Ran today, very painful after a week off due to the yuck cold. The gods were shuffling my ipod, though, because every song definitely played to where my head already was. A few excerpts below. Make fun of the dreck I run to, go ahead – admittedly it’s a little slow on the bpm front for running … perhaps that’s why I ran at a slow for me 8:05/mile.
Listened to John Denver (“lying beside you, the greatest peace I’ve ever known“), the Indigo Girls (“let it be me“), Rent (“how do you measure a life?”), Eddie Vedder (“I knew all the rules but the rules did not know me”), Alicia Keyes (“a life ain’t perfect if you don’t know what the struggle’s for … my soul has returned so I call it a lesson learned”).

Let’s see what else happened today. A trip to Shreve’s to get an estimate for replacing my diamond stud. Sending the porcelain crocodile Grace made for Grandma and Grandpa as a thank you for her Florida trip to them. Baking some zucchini muffins for the kids with an almost-gone zucchini. Washing lettuce. Picking up Grace’s framed art (above). Wrapping a 3 year old birthday present for this weekend. Reading the CES auction catalog.

I’m feeling quite royally uninspired right now … tired from a wakeful night, and still getting over a nasty cold that knocked me sideways. Trying to be disciplined about blogging and thinking the topic will come to me? So it’s Tuesday night, I’m listening to a new mix I made for a friend and getting ready to try to go to bed early.
Have been listening to Obama’s book The Audacity of Hope while I drive. The man is an elegant writer and an inspired orator. He pleases me by reading his own work. There are few things I’m struck by, listening to this book.
One is how little I know about American history. How astonishing and pathetic is it that I got through AP History at Exeter and did not know that social security began during the Great Depression ? Yowee. I’m ashamed. Tomorrow is my first Spanish class at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education, maybe next up will be an American History class.
Second, Obama writes at length about religion. He speaks about the way that the religious right has tightened its grip on the Republican party, and as I as listening I found myself thinking about the vague unease I feel about evangelical religion. What’s this about? I’ve blogged before about my concurrent envy of people whose faith is a strong backbone in their lives. But as Obama goes on to talk about his own coming to faith, I realized what my concern is. He talks about how science and critical thinking are fundamentally the practice of the possible. And then about how religion is, at its core, adherence to believing in the impossible. He explains how he finally realized he could believe in a higher power, a greater good, God, without abandoning his commitment to the realities of this world. I think this is at the crux of what I struggle with. I am, somehow, suspicious of people who can suspend reality in order to believe – but at the same time, in my core, there is a kernel of stubborn refusal to say that there isn’t a God. I don’t know that I have a real point here (shocker!) but listening to Obama talk about religion helped crystallize some of the contradictory impulses it brings up in me.
In other news, I am reading Love in the Time of Cholera and absolutely adoring it. Marquez’s writing is masterful and I wish I could read it in the original since I know translations inevitably lose something. Somehow I suspect that Spanish 1 tomorrow won’t be enough to get me there!

I have always loved this poem, and on this gray day of endless waiting for Comcast and doctors appointments, it provides some not-completely-understood comfort:

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.

We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.

Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me, so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.

This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.

It is a gloomy gray day, both rainy and cold, not at all April-like. I’m thinking of Lisa, whose birthday it is today, and her assertion that it usually snows on her birthday. It could easily turn to sleet today, that’s the mood of the day for sure.
I have cancelled everything I had scheduled in order to lie in bed and try to fend off this cold I can feel coming on. I haven’t slept well, in part because Grace now likes to get up to pee every few hours, and while she doesn’t actually come in to say hello, she turns lights on and off and slams doors and generally rouses me to full wakefulness. And as you know, returning to sleep from that isn’t easy for me.
I can’t get sick now because baby Jack is being christened on Sunday. Grace and I are doing the daytrip to Bedford to be there. I can’t wait to see Hadley and Charlotte and John and of course my beloved baby boy.
Tomorrow night is my mother’s big event for the Cambridge Center for Adult Education. Am looking forward to it but if I don’t start feeling better I’ll be a last minute cancellation. All energy is now focused on Sunday and the Scully celebrations!

I vaguely recall a dumb TV show about kids saying the darndest (is that even a word?) things. I’ve been thinking lately that actually parenting makes you say things randomer than you ever imagined. I have one example and heard another from Brooke today. Please share the strange sentences you’ve uttered to your progeny in comments. (I just like that elephant, and the pillow on its back suggests a kind of elephants-flying-while-being-ridden absurdity that echoes the kinds of statements I’m thinking of)

me: “Whit, please stop poking me in the back of the neck with that shower head.”

Brooke: “If you put your pants on, I’ll bring the pirate downstairs.”