everyday life

Cathedral

Cathedral, by Auguste Rodin

I absolutely adore this sculpture.  I found this photograph on a beautiful blog called A Year With Rilke.  Every day the blog shares a passage from Rilke, paired with a piece of art.  Rilke’s words alone are bone-chillingly gorgeous, and the juxtapositions with the pieces of art make them even more powerful.

This particular sculpture has been in my head ever since I saw it last week.  There’s something stunning about the angle of the hands, something animate in between them.  The title invokes the holiness manifest in human hands and in the space between.

The most mundane of things, our very own life-scarred hands, are equally as transcendent as the most ornate and soaring cathedral.  There is as much power and as much wonder in the simple human hand as in a grandiose cathedral.  And just as the empty space in a cathedral can be charged with meaning, with import, with grace itself, so can the spaces of our ordinary lives.

Several people have noted that kaleidoscopes are an image I return to, again and again.  It occurs to me as I write this post that cathedrals are, likewise, an important trope for me.  I spent my childhood visiting cathedral upon cathedral with my father, Hilary and I rolling our eyes at ADC (another damn cathedral) as we entered.  Yesterday I re-read Raymond Carver’s ever-powerful short story, Cathedral.  And I have an unpublished blog post from last summer about the light and shadow in the Harvard stadium as I ran up and down it, referring to a personal cathedral.  Cathedrals.  Alternately inspiring and intimidating to me, cathedrals are places where faith, and the willingness to leap into it, is palpable.

This week has felt like an awful lot of hard practice, and less like poetry.  But looking at this image, thinking about the cathedrals, literal and figurative, that I’ve known in my life, I feel chagrined, and ready to recommit to wonder.

May I enter the cathedral of every day with a heart open to awe.

Everyday life is a practice and a poem

Everyday life is a practice and a poem.

These words came to me on Friday in a yoga class.  My first yoga class in more months than I can count.  My body remembered the poses like some deeply known but forgotten language.  My mind ran and ran, occasionally settling into a thought, and this one came back, over and over: every day life is both practice and poem.

A practice and a poem.

Dinner with two old, dear friends.  Drive home in the icy darkness.  Say goodbye to Matt as he leaves for a weekend with his father and brothers.  Refill three heavy humidifiers, lug them up flights of stairs, watch the steady stream of moisture puffing into the darkness of the childrens’ rooms.

Kiss Grace and Whit good night.  Linger over my newly-minted six year old, his face more chiseled and boy-like every day, all traces of babyhood now gone.

Saturday morning, get the children dressed, go to Starbucks, the drycleaner, the grocery store.  Drop the groceries off at home.  Slip on the icy snow bank that lines the sidewalk as I try to bring bags of groceries into the house, the kids still in the car, the exhaust pipe billowing white into the crystalline, cold air.  Stop.  Breathe.

Drive to Whit’s birthday party.  Unload drinks, birthday cake, camera.  Several trips from car to Jump On In.  Grace whines because she wants a chocolate bar from the vending machine and I say no.  One of the other boys at the party’s father buys him a chocolate bar.  I still say no.  She threatens tears, crosses her arms across her chest, glares at me, stomps her foot.  I shake my head.  Stop.  Breathe.

25 boys run wild in a paradise of indoor blow-up jumpy castles.  Grace’s finger gets slammed and she cries, this time for real.  We awkwardly wrap and ice pack around it and watch the finger swell.  I wonder if the afternoon will hold another ER visit.  Stop.  Breathe.

Grace asks me to go down the tallest blow up slide with her.  I agree and climb up, clumsy on the unsteady inflated steps.  Grace holds her ice pack in one hand and my hand in the other.  We fly to the bottom, laughing, laughing.

Drive home.  The sky, which was cornflower blue when we arrived at the birthday party, is beginning to fade to pale gray, that winter whiteness that holds everything and nothing in its color.

I carry several loads of bags of presents into the house.  Do I ever arrive anywhere without a car trunk full of things that need unloading, unpacking, putting-into-place?  Whit pounces on the pile of presents and begins to rip into one.  I raise my voice, “Stop!  Wait for me to get in here!” He slinks into the couch to sit and wait, chastised.  Finally, with pad of paper and pen in hand to record the gifts for thank you notes, I let him loose on the bright pile of boxes.

I fill the recycling bin with wrapping paper, wondering how I will fit in all of the boxes and plastic that the toys will shed once actually opened.  When I open the lid of the recycling bin a cascade of snow falls down my front, and my wrists are suddenly freezing.  I’m wearing a pair of Matt’s sneakers, untied, because they were by the door, and I can feel cold wetness around my heels.  The children are shouting about something just inside the door.  I close my eyes for a minute, inhale, my foot poised above the top step.  Sometimes the work of this life is so daunting.  Breathe.

The children watch the Nancy Drew movie.  I put in a load of laundry and sit down at my desk to upload the pictures from the party.  After several minutes I look in on them, sitting close to each other on the couch, and feel a tidal wave of love break over me.  They both sense me staring and look at me, and two faces split into happy smiles.  I return a smile, through tears.

A practice and a poem.

Tucking in a 5 year old for the last time

I just tucked this guy in for the last time as a five year old.  I came upstairs for goodnight to see that he’d accessorized his pajamas with this sweatband (which has been a favorite for a long time).  That’s his monkey that he sleeps with every single night, who is (creatively) named Beloved Monkey.  He allowed me to hug him in his bed, because “snuggling is usually better in the bed,” before moving to a sleeping bag on the floor, which is how he prefers to sleep these days.  He also sleeps naked most of the time.  But that headband?  Tonight, he kept it on.

It’s hard to cry, which is my instinct on a night like this, when he makes me laugh so hard.

Goodbye, five year olds.

xo

What a wonderful world

Last week Whit was home with strep for a couple of days.  At one point he and I were at the grocery store and he was sitting quietly in the cart in line, his pajama-ed legs sticking through the holes in the cart, his scar still fresh on his forehead.  I smiled at the cashier as she began to ring me up.  Suddenly we both heard Whit singing softly to himself, “I see skies of blue … clouds of white … and I think to myself, what a wonderful world.”

The cashier caught my eye and I saw that hers were shiny with tears.  I leaned down and kissed Whit’s blond head and whispered to him, “I love you.”  In the car I asked him why he was singing that, and he told me that kindergarten was singing it in the school’s Martin Luther King assembly on Friday.

And it is, in fact, of course, a wonderful world.  I hear that the parents of the 9 year old who was tragically killed in Tucson donated her organs, and my heart swells with gladness (organ donation?  an important cause to me).  But then I read Jo’s post and am struck by how much work we still have to do.

Last year I posted these excerpts from MLK’s famous speech, which I make a practice of reading in full on this day every year.  I recommend you do too: his words remain immensely powerful to this day.

…I say to you today, my friends, so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream….

…one day right there in Alabama, little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers….

…This will be the day when all of God’s children will be able to sing with a new meaning, “My country, ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrim’s pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring.”

Martin Luther King, August 28, 1963

Nine stitches, antibiotics, skate tracks, and Santa Paws

This was the last day of winter break.  Whit’s stitches were healing nicely and both kids were having some “screen time” with various Apple products.  For some reason I find it charming that Whit’s favorite place to curl up with the ipad is his sister’s bed.  Over and over again, left to their own devices, she will pull the beanbag into a corner behind the chair in the family room, and he’ll hop into her bed.

On Thursday, Grace, Whit and I went to the doctor to have his steri-strips removed and to have his scar checked out.  Apparently it’s healing great.  All I can think is wow that new freckle on his temple shows that I am a little lax about sunscreen.  And, frankly, doesn’t it seem medieval that we still fix skin by stitching it together with a needle and thread?  And, also, at the same time, miraculous?

Friday afternoon, I had the bags all packed with helmets, skates, snowpants, hats, and gloves, preparing to take Grace, her friend Caroline, and Whit skating after school.  Pickup is at 3:00.  At 2:30 the phone rang, and I recognized the school number.  Never a good thing.  I picked up.  “Hello?”  “Lindsey,” the school nurse’s voice was animated.  “Everything’s okay!  But I have Whit here, and there was a group of them in the assembly hall, and, well, his scar has split open.”  “Um, what?” “Well, do you mind coming to get him?  He’s bleeding.”

Bleeding he was, and forlorn, too, when I picked him up.  I teased Nurse K about the fact that she always says, “Everything’s okay!” because, well, if she’s calling me during school hours, pretty much something is not okay.  Right back to our favorite place, the ER.  (aside: thank God for friends I can call and say, hey, do you mind if we skip that whole lovely skating idea and you pick up my daughter instead of the other way around?)

He kind of looks at home there, no?  He watched TV – this time in English – while he waited for the numbing cream to set in.  Two more stitches, right over the scar line of the first seven.

Visual aid.  Again, medieval and miraculous, at the same time.

Sunday morning we finally had our skate.  We were the first people at the club when it opened.  This is a tennis club in the summer and in the winter they flood the courts and open for outside skating whenever it is cold enough.  That’s not that often, actually.  Saturday it had snowed on and off all day and during the night too, so there was a light layer of snow on the ice.

Each of us made tracks and I, of course, photographed them.

Monday morning Whit woke up complaining of a sore throat.  Assuming he was angling to stay home, and that his throat hurt from the dry air, I took him to school.  At 10:30, that same old number on the phone.  I picked up.  “Hi, Lindsey,” Nurse K said brightly, “I won’t even say everything’s okay.”  I laughed.  “It’s not.  Whit just threw up several times.  He has a fever.”  I got in the car, grateful yet again that we live a mile from school.  When I arrived he was more than forlorn.  He was curled up on the bench in Nurse K’s office and looked miserable.  We went home and he lay on the couch and fell asleep while I moved all of my afternoon meetings to conference calls and made an appointment with the doctor.  Intermittently he woke up to run to the bathroom to throw up, and his fever ran up to 102.

At 1:20 we arrived and while we waited to see the nurse practitioner, Whit fell asleep on the paper-covered examining table.  This is definitely a first.  He has a raging case of strep and we went straight to CVS to fill his prescription.  As we waited in line at the pharmacy he tugged on my sleeve and said, “do you have a bag?”  He’d been throwing up into plastic bags in the backseat of the car.  I didn’t.  We rushed out to the parking lot and I helped him curl over the big public trashcan to throw up.  As his little body convulsed in my arms, the cold air raking both of our hair, I wept.  My poor little guy.  He was in such pain, and in such a public way.  What a trooper he was though.  We filled his prescription and headed home.

As we drove home I told him I’d cancel my plans to go out to dinner with some friends to celebrate a birthday.  “Would you like that, Whit?” I asked, looking back at him clutching the empty CVS plastic bag to his chin.  “Well, Mummy,” he answered slowly, “Do you really want to go out?”  I caught his eye in the mirror.  “Well, if you want me to stay home I’d be happy to do that.”  “Well, I’d really like it if you put me to bed tonight,” I saw that he closed his eyes and leaned his head back in his carseat.  Of course, little man.  Of course.  A moment later I asked, “Whit, why did you ask me if I really wanted to go out to dinner?”  His eyes opened and he looked at mine in the mirror.  “I didn’t want you to be disappointed.”  Cue the tears.  Again.

He spent the rest of the afternoon sacked out on the couch.  That stuffed Santa dog (dubbed Santa Paws by Grace) was given to him at the ER on Christmas Eve and has become a favorite (even coming to the pediatrician’s office).  For some reason his little bare legs slay me.

He was already feeling better by bedtime, back to his hilarious wise-cracking self.  I must admit, there’s a sweetness to him when sick that I don’t altogether dislike.  Still, I wouldn’t mind if we stayed out of the doctor’s office for a while now (though we have to go back on Thursday to have the stitches removed and next week for his 6 year old appointment).