Friday, May 27th, 2011
Common Roots Cafe
Minneapolis

Last Sunday, May 22nd, a tornado dropped from the sky into our backyard.

As I sit here in this cafe on a day not unlike last Sunday, I don’t know how to string the words together to convey what is in me right now, what is sitting in my solar plexus, what is blurring my vision with tears as I try to write what I don’t know how to express.

I have always believed in angels, in both human and spirit form.  But last Sunday, before, during and after the tornado, I am certain we were and have been blessed with a fleet of them.  I write this mindful of the people and families and community of Joplin who have had to endure the loss and devastation of the same tornado hours later.  It is a tragic mystery that butts up against my own experience, a mystery which makes my fingers pause above these keys of my laptop, not knowing how to proceed.

Sunday, May 22nd.
T-minus 30 minutes: Paul and I were itching with cabin fever, imploring the kids to come on a walk with us through our back woods, which, a half hour later, had collapsed into itself, a tangle of great, fallen 100 year-old trees.  Oliver and Lucy would not budge from the basement where they were playing.  So Paul and I went into our backyard to poke around, pull weeds, and admire the pagoda dogwood that we had planted from our 5th anniversary.  We decided since the kids would not walk with us, Paul would run up to Home Depot in St. Louis Park, where the tornado began its rampage, to get mulch.  He took Oliver with him while Lucy and I hung out around home.

T-minus 20 minutes: Lucy is serving me “banana tea” in her little pretend kitchen in our basement while I am crawling with the desire to be outside.  “C’mon Luc!” I begged. “Let’s go outside.”

T-minus 10 minutes: “Ok, but first can I see those bunny slippers I wore when I was a baby?” she asked.  There is a dresser in the deepest part of the basement where I keep all of the clothes that I have kept from when Oliver and Lucy were babies.  Exercising patience, I agreed and together we pulled out tiny dresses and shoes, Lucy delighted by the slippers that barely fit over her now four year-old toes.

T-minus 5 minutes: “C’mon Luc!  We are going outside.” I said, and stuffed the baby clothes back into their dresser.  “Ok,” she said, “But first can I have a bowl of cereal?”  I groaned and reluctantly headed upstairs to get her a bowl of cereal, telling her to wait downstairs so she could eat it on the back porch.

T-minus 2 minutes: Lucy and the bowl of cereal on the back porch, looking out at the swingset in the back yard, Percy the cat snoozing on the chair next to her.  “Stay here Lucy.  I’ll be right back,” I told her as I headed back into the basement to get our rain boots.

Sometime in there, a memory which remains fuzzy and loud, something exploded above, like the top of our house blowing off, like a plane crashing on our roof–”BOOM!” Lucy came toward me (Was she running?  Where exactly was I when I heard it?  Did I run toward her? Did I scream?), I scooped her up and headed through the basement toward the mudroom door.  I thought our house had blown up and my instinct was to get out.  But when I got to the mudroom and looked through the window, I knew I should not go out.  This was the work of a primal instinct.  Shock and confusion reigned supreme over my rational mind.  Even as I held my daughter in the basement, the house smashing, crashing, booming, creaking on its hinges around us, I did not know what was going on.

Then silence.

We emerged and I went to walk upstairs.  Glass shattered everywhere.  I needed to find my shoes. “IneedmyshoesIneedmyshoesIneedmyshoes,” I chanted as I held Lucy.  Found them.  Crunched up the stairs.

It was when I looked out our living room window and saw it was blocked by the tall white pine that I realized it was a tornado.  All at once, not knowing how big a swath it cut, knowing Paul and Oliver would have been on their way home, in a state of primordial terror that is granted to us in motherhood, I held Lucy and maniacally made her repeat after me, “Daddy and Oliver are ok.  Daddy and Oliver are ok.  Lucy!  Say it with me, ‘Daddy and Oliver are ok,’”  Together, as I searched for my cell phone, we repeated together, “Daddy and Oliver are ok, Daddy and Oliver are ok.”

We walked through the frame of our door, over the broken glass, past Mr. Kramer’s roof atop the once-towering pine in front of our house.  I screamed, “IS ANYONE OUT THERE!?!”  My neighbor JR: “I’M OK!  I’M OK!”

Then, slowly, dazed and bewildered, people began to come out of their homes.  My neighbors Kaija and Chris coming toward me holding Lucy.  Panic, terror, that still, five days later, reverberates up and down my spine, “WHERE ARE OLIVER AND PAUL!  WHERE ARE THEY?!” I screamed to them.  They took Lucy from my arms.  I think.  Somehow she ended up in their basement.

Mass confusion.  The tornado sirens began.  My neighbors shouting for me to get back inside.  Terrified, screaming Paul’s name, sure he and my baby boy were under a tree or blown up into the heavens, I ran down the street, Kaija screaming after me, “Get the f$%^& back here!  The power lines!”

I had to get to Paul and Oliver. I could not hear reason.

Running down Plymouth Avenue, over trees and downed power lines, screaming Paul’s name, I saw the top of a white truck cresting the bridge into our neighborhood, into the destruction. Our truck.  Paul.  Oliver.  Knees buckling.

As Paul tells it, he had just seen the gaping hole of our back yard when he heard my voice above the mayhem.

Neighbors knocking on doors, “Is anyone in there?!” they asked.  Trying to figure out who is here, who is missing, is everyone ok.  No cars can get through. Massive trees blocking all of the streets.  Sirens, sirens sounding everywhere.

Our neighbor Rob, cigarette in his mouth, chainsaw in his hand, smiling.  His home destroyed.  He’s smiling, mobilizing, helping.  He is in his element.  “Well, at least we’re all here,”  he grinned, his robin hood hat reliably on his head.

Our beloved angel Rob. God, we will miss him.

I brought Oliver to another neighbor’s house that hadn’t been hit.  On my way back, Molly is running and screaming, “Rob is down!  Rob is down,” but the emergency vehicles cannot yet get through.  It has been 30 minutes since the tornado.

Molly’s husband is administering CPR.  Middle of the street, middle of mayhem, our beloved friend and neighbor, the heart and soul of our neighborhood, Rob had a massive heart attack.  His wife standing, moaning, watching, hoping, in the midst of a nightmare within a nightmare.

Rob left us with a gaping hole of his presence.  He gets carried onto the gurney.  We turn back toward the devastation that is our neighborhood.  We begin the overwhelming process of clearing.  We don’t know what else to do.

This story got away from me.  It was about angels.  It is about angels.  Angels that coached Oliver and Lucy to keep us out of our woods.  Angels in the form of great big trees that laid down their lives to protect our homes.  Angels in the form of people that came flooding into our neighborhood from other neighborhoods in Minneapolis with chain saws and bottles of water and hugs and work gloves, picking up the debris, clearing.  Angels with food and drink to share with the angels that were helping us get through this mess.  Angels teaching us how to be angels.

In the midst of utter disaster and trauma, nothing is more clear than this fact to me.  We are here on Earth to be angels for each other.  Like a flower emerging from a the cracks of concrete in a vacant lot, its beauty illuminated by the ugliness, the actions of our friends and neighbors and strangers are the beauty of the heavens, pushing up through destruction.

This is a story of tragedy, the biggest of tragedies being the loss of our friend Rob.  While our neighborhood will be pieced back together, the hole that our friend left will never be filled.

This is a story of angels.  A story of the comfort and fellowship unique to these traumatic incidences, when all of the bullshit of our hectic daily lives ceases to be, when we look into each other’s eyes and see only the vulnerability and humanity that lies within each of us, always.

God, thank you for these angels, in Heaven and on Earth.  May we remember the lessons these moments teach.  Amen.

May 13th, 2011
Common Roots Cafe
Minneapolis

If you read my previous post, you would have learned of my desperation and lack of inspiration last week.  I went home that day and cried to Paul, “I am a writer with no readers!”  Well, the few of you who do read my writing can someday say, “I used to read her writing before she became a Writer,” capital “W” meaning I make a sustainable living from my writing.  For now, I’ll continue to write because I can’t help it, because I love it, because God gave me this desire I can’t shake, and because (from a quote I read on the wall in my class at South this morning):

“Our greatest weakness lies in giving up.  The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time.” -Thomas A. Edison

I’m not giving up.

But that’s not what I was going to write about anyway.

My pal Tony gave me a gift for my birthday that, for all I’m concerned, is worth a thousand dollars because it gave me the juice, that inspiration, I was so lacking.  It’s one of those books that make me, as a writer, realize that it’s ok if I don’t write like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, that it’s ok if I just write like me.  There is a place for us stream-of-conscious writers that like to talk about the ordinary, because we know the secret (all that is extraordinary lies in the ordinary.  Shhhhhh.  Don’t tell anybody.  This is just a secret for you, my select few readers).

The book is called, “Where did you go?” “Out” “What did you do?” “Nothing.” It was published in 1957, and yet, its sentiment echoes throughout today’s parenting culture.  The book is a memoir of the author’s childhood memories juxtaposed with the childhood culture of his children.  Again, this is 1957.  He writes:

It is summer, and there are the long evenings under the street lamps to talk to girls, to watch the big kids talking to girls, to tease the big kids talking to girls, to be hit by the big kids talking to girls, to play Red Rover…It is summer and it is time to get a jelly glass and fill it full of lightening bugs and tie a piece of gauze over the top and take it to your room, and very late at night to see that you finger, where you touched the lightning bug, is glowing too.  But not in our town.  The kids are at camp, because, for Heaven’s sake, what are the kids going to do with themselves all summer?  Well, it would be nice, I think, if they spent an afternoon kicking a can.  It might be a good thing if they dug a hole.  No, no, no.  Not a foundation, or a well, or a mother symbol.  Just a hole.  For no reason.

I’ve been thinking about this very thing lately, during this time of sign-ups for summer activities for the kids.  In this great city, there are roughly one billion enriching and awesome things for kids to do, and instead of feelings expansive while I’m activity shopping, I feel like I’m choking.  Too many options–Dancing Dinos theater camp, T-ball, artsy-fartsy, golf, tennis, soccer, swimming lessons, and Camp This or That–all sound so fun and good.

Yet.

All of these great options clash against what I know, deep down, and which is so oddly difficult to implement–Camp Boredom.

Our beautiful children need to be bored, for it is within boredom that we become inventive.  Creativity is not exercised or possible under adult-led enrichment.  The riches of childhood lie along the banks of creeks, in the sound of frogs in a pond, in a Dixie cup of tadpoles.  The music of childhood is in the breeze through the trees, in that long, high buzz of the invisible beetle, in the rambling pretend dialogue between a dirty plastic dinosaur and a doll whose hair has recently been chopped off by the kitchen scissors that our kids aren’t supposed to play with.  The magic of childhood can be found by pushing over a log to find “roly poly bugs” and centipedes and worms.

I think part of the problem is that in our current culture, spaces of time are something that need to be filled.  We are so used to constantly be doing something that we have forgotten how to simply be.  To lay on the grass and stare up at the shape-shifting clouds and find an animal.  Or to sit down in the middle of a mess in the living room and read the damn paper and drink a cup of tea.

And we are unwittingly handing this problem to our kids, along with their packed lunches, as we drop them off at their next organized activity.  It’s not that organized activities are bad.  It’s just that they are squeezing out that most important activity for children–unstructured play.  Idling, moodling, inventive, creative, meditative play.  The landscape of their imaginations is so vast, so rich and full, but we no longer trust it.  Is it because we, ourselves, don’t know what to do with downtime, so we assume our children don’t?  Or are we teaching them the madness that has become our lives, where we rush off, across town, to get to our mediation classes so we can feel justified to sit down and do nothing.  But even then, most of the time we are just concerned we aren’t even doing that right.  We ask our gurus, “So, do I just sit and breath?  What happens if a thought enters my mind?“

“Children have a knack for simply living that adults can never regain.”
Christina Schwarz, The Atlantic, April 2011

I’ve resisted signing up for Dancing Dinos, T-ball, and soccer (two nights a week for an almost-first grader seems like overkill) even though they sound really fun.  Sometimes I suck in my breath thinking about the vast amount of time we will have for them to ask me if they can please, please, please watch PBS or play lego dot com, to field their cries of, “What can we do Mama?  We’re so bored?!” as if it is an affliction.

During those times, I will invite them to Camp Boredom, where they will eventually give up asking me about TV, sulk out the back door, and swing on the swingset out back until their toes touch the branches high up in the tree; where they will see two butterflies dancing and remember the milkweed plant in the front yard and go pick off a leaf; where they will find themselves an hour later sitting by an anthill and poking a stick in the little hole at the top to see if the ants crawl aboard.

Sounds like the perfect summer camp to me.  And it’s free.

May 6,2011
Common Roots Cafe
Minneapolis
Sitting outside
Ginger tea
quilted sky
warm

My well done run dry.  This may be a monthly thing.  My husband would bet the farm on that, if we had one. Either way, these times are not easy.  I am used to running on the winds of aspiration and inspiration.  But right now?  Nothing.

Affect? Flat.  Confidence?  Low.

I’m in that place where I feel like my creative well echoes with emptiness.  My dreams seem like a joke. I will never write well again.

Yet, who am I to bitch about not feeling inspired?  After all, I am safe, I am healthy, I have a family I adore and two children who are healthy and happy, I have a home, a bike, a great city in which to ride it, and enough money for tea and an egg and cheese bagel.

I would rather keep all of this crap to myself, but this is a site about writing and life, and this is part of life.

A friend once said to me:

“You know how a heart monitor goes up and down?  Well, that’s the way it is with life–those ups and downs? That’s how you know you’re alive.”

My friend Kirstin just got back from a weekend of transformation at the Donna Karan’s urban institute of health and healing in New York City.  Standing in her office this morning talking with her, I was struck by the subtle, yet unmistakable change–she looked different–she stood straighter, her smile was broader, and warm laughter lit up her eyes.

It was the physical effect of inspiration, of Life breathing into her life.  And it stood stark in the face of my lack thereof.

“Kirstin, I’m having a hard time not being jealous of you,” I said.

So here’s what I’m going to do about it.  I’m going to feel this springtime sun on my back.  I’m going to read a magazine and enjoy my tea, enjoy my freedom from abuse and persecution.  I’m going to write about and focus on all that is simple and beautiful. I’m going to go home to my children and dig for worms and eat popsicles.

And I’m gonna fill this well back up so it can overflow and I can once again give to others.