Five Things I Can See

from where I'm sitting in our family room:

• Muddy handprints on the door to the backyard.
• A dining room table covered with Lego creations.
• A coffee table covered with folded paper boats made from blue, pink and yellow scratch paper full of long division problems from fourth grade math class.
• A toy chest overflowing with light sabers, foam swords, Jedi robes and Indiana Jones hats.
• A ten-year-old boy at the computer desk in the kitchen. Can you believe he's ten?! We're sure glad he's part of our family. Happy (belated) birthday, Jack!

Five Things I Can See

from where I'm sitting in our living room:

• The red leather couch that Roger and I bought on a whim one Valentine's Day from one of our favorite furniture stores, Copenhagen West. It was marked several hundred dollars off, which made the whim much easier to rationalize.
• A small beautiful quilt that my friend Linda made in commemoration of a trip we took to San Francisco to see an exhibit of Gees Bend quilts. We keep it slung over the back of the rocking chair we used to feed Jack in the middle of the night when he was a baby. Linda put so much thought into the fabric selection and design, trying to capture her sense of who I am in pattern and color. It's a treasure on many levels.
• Glass jars of rocks and shells gathered during various family trips, the most recent a collection of smooth speckled rocks from our trip to Carlsbad and the beach last weekend. (Disclaimer: we stole this idea from our good friends Brad and Virlie.)
• A shelf full of books written by friends and family including a limited edition book written, illustrated, letterpress printed and hand bound by my friend Sally called True Turkey and Cat Stories. Warning: Some of the stories might turn your stomach. But the presentation is excellent.
• A series of three black and white photographs taken by Roger, our resident and fabulous photographer, at Lake Geneva: Dad sailing the MC, Jack climbing up on the raft, and Dad's cousins Jean and Jody--two of the matriarchs of the family--chatting on the pier.

Five Fun Things about Our Neighborhood

Here's a list of five fun things to celebrate a beautiful day in the neighborhood. All of these are within easy walking distance of our house.

• Diamond's Green House - a nursery two blocks away. Sometimes we walk there with our red wagon and fill it up with fun things to plant in pots on our front porch.
• Otis and his friends - Otis is an ornery donkey who lives in a pasture by the greenhouse with a bunch of mules. The other day Jack and I biked over to feed Otis and his friends five pounds of carrots. Sometimes Otis brays loud and long in the middle of the night. We sit up in bed thinking someone might be getting murdered, and then we remember Otis.
• Cul-de-sac of Fire - we live just next to a cul-de-sac where for many years neighbors gathered on the Fourth of July to pool fireworks. The past few years city ordinances haven't allowed us to set off fireworks in our neighborhood (drought). But we're hopeful we can do it again one day. In the meantime, we drag our lawn chairs down to the cul-de-sac for a perfect view of the firework display the city puts on every June for Art City Days.
• The Arts Park - just down the hill from us there is a city park with an open air stage. The city hosts all sorts of events there throughout the summer. Our favorite so far? A They Might Be Giants concert. How cool is that! A Little Birdhouse in Your Soul and Particle Man practically in our yard!
• A couple of blocks away we can pick up the bike trail that heads up Hobble Creek Canyon (which is just over a mile away). After church last Sunday, we drove up to see how fast the river is flowing with spring run-off (fast!) and how full the catch basin is (full!). I ended up walking home. Perfect.

In honor of Mother's Day, here's a They Might Be Giants video from last Mother's Day. It includes one of my favorite songs, The Alphabet of Nations. Because, really, I like to think the whole world is my neighborhood!

A Different Time

I've starting reading parts of my grandmother's memoir to Jack at night before bed. Grandma Jan had a most unusual childhood as the daughter of a Presbyterian missionary and his wife in Mexico.  

The memoir starts out with the story of how her parents met. Her father Will spent a month as a visiting minister at her mother Mary's congregation in Minnesota before leaving for Mexico. Mary had long dreamed of being a missionary herself. Will went off to Mexico, and Mary prepared for her missionary work in China. She got all the way to San Francisco and was ready to get on the boat to China when she got a telegram from Will asking her to come to Mexico and marry her instead.

I love the stories that made Jack laugh out loud. Like the story of Will and Mary's first breakfast together. Mary put bread in to toast while Will said grace, and Will thanked the Lord for so many things that the toast caught fire. Years later Will, dressed as Santa, leaned too close to the Christmas tree and his beard caught fire on a candle. My Grandma Jan, five years old at the time, remembers her mother shrieking, "Will! Your Beard!" as she yanked it off, revealing her father, not Santa. Grandma was sick with disappointment. 

(Apparently stories that end with things catching on fire are especially funny to a nine-year-old boy.)

We also laughed at the story of Mary waking up really early one morning while she and Will were traveling to take a bath in the lake before anyone else was awake. "How lovely to slip in the water stark naked, soap thoroughly, and then float on her back watching the sun come up over the hills! When she turned to swim ashore, there, in silent rows, were all of the people of the village watching her with intense curiosity."

Will actually followed in the footsteps of his father, who was a missionary in Colombia. When Will was in Minnesota, he shared Sunday dinners with Mary's family, and while they ate he shared stories about his family's adventures. Here's one of our favorites, which is, despite reflecting a conflict we continue to struggle with in our world today, definitely from a different time!

"Once, when we were resting overnight at the coffee plantation of a Colombian, the foreman came in to tell us that guerrillas were in the neighborhood and might try to steal some horses and food."

"What were they fighting about?" asked Mary's mother, who had steeped herself in the stories of the clan fights of her Scottish forebears, but knew nothing of South America's guerrillas.

"Oh, the same thing they've been fighting about for over the last forty years. The government and the Catholic Church are conservative, rich, and powerful and against any political reform movements that might upset the status quo. The Liberal Party is trying to get control in order to reform the whole system in the interest of the voiceless poor, to spread the wealth and power more evenly amongst all Colombians. No one ever wants to give up his privileges or wealth voluntarily, so the fighting grows fiercer and fiercer. Thousands have been killed over the years."

"Did the guerrillas attack you?" asked Sid [Mary's brother], not really interested in the politics of it all.

"Yes. At one of our plantation stops, they swept in on horseback, stole horses from the stable and food from the kitchen, but strangely returned our horses and baggage, very courteously begging our pardon, saying they had not known we were extranjeros (foreigners). We were not their political enemies. We were guests in their country, to be treated with customary hospitality."

Go figure! A civil war that was actually conducted with some measure of civility!

Before I Get Too Deep

Bear with me. There's a bright spot at the end of this blog entry.

My blog title, which comes from an Edie Brickell song, has turned out to reflect my relationship with my blog in a far deeper way than I realized. Subconscious rules!

The full line from the song is "Shove me in the shallow water before I get to deep." Every once in a while I feel compelled to write about more serious topics that I've been thinking about - you know, there's a lot going on in the world these days! - but when I do, I feel a bit uncomfortable and can't wait to get back into shallow water.

I haven't been blogging a lot lately because I've spent too much time wallowing in serious things, to the point of not being very healthy (read: must stop paying attention to comments people make in response to newspaper articles online, especially local papers). I'm sure I'll lighten up now that spring is here!

In the meantime . . .

I'm so frustrated with the divisive for-or-against, either-or spin so much of our media treats us to. Case in point: the ridiculous coverage of the tea parties by both the left and the right. People have legitimate concerns and a constitutionally guaranteed right to express those concerns. And they get laughed at relentlessly? Like that's going to move us forward? On the other hand, tea party organizers need to own the fact that while their tea parties turned out many thoughtful people who wanted to voice their concerns about government spending, they also turned out many people who just wanted to hate on Obama. Really, really hate.

Honestly, I think the way we reduce the complexity of the world to meaningless oversimplifications ("no matter what Obama does it's wrong and even if it isn't wrong we're going to spin it to make it look wrong" - and feel free to substitute Bush in that statement this time last year) is so counterproductive. It does not remotely resemble the healthy, productive debate we need to actually dig ourselves out of all of the holes we are in.

People keep shouting out their opinions (yes, I really must stop reading online comments) without having the full picture. Though in their defense, it's not so easy to get the full picture with all of the spin going on!

In honor of earth day, here's another example of an oversimplified, politically charged and over spun issue: oil. I think we citizens are actually all pretty much in agreement that we want the U.S. to be energy independent. Where we differ is how to get there, and, with very few exceptions, we all have oversimplified ideas about that. How many of us really understand the energy economy? Especially in relation to the free market economy that we also universally value (to varying regulatory degrees)? Contrast, for example, cries for new drilling with the market reality that people are losing jobs because oil companies have been cutting back existing operations (between August and February, rig count in Utah dropped 50%!).

My contribution to combatting all of the sound bite ideology these past months has been made in the classroom. I teach writing. Sure we talk about comma placement, but more importantly we talk about critical thinking. Even if we know everything about sentence construction and spelling, we can't be good writers if we don't have anything to say (a result of superficial thinking). My mantra in class is to dig deeper, to work on understanding the complexity of issues before crafting theses.

Today it paid off. My students each spent a few minutes in class today sharing something interesting they discovered in their research process for their final paper.

The very last student shared this (in so many words): "Starting out I had very strong opinions about gun control. But I realized that I couldn't actually carry on a discussion about it because I really didn't know anything. Through my research I educated myself on the topic. And I realized that if more people were educated on the topic we wouldn't have people reacting so dramatically to unsubstantiated hearsay. We might even be able to come up with solutions that work."

Can't think of a better message as I send my students on their way.

A New Season

I took the background snow showers off my blog thinking that may be the reason we've continued to have snow here in Springville. And now the sun is shining here. Ah, it feels good to have so much power!

The birth of a new season.

Time to crawl out from under all of the bad habits I've cultivated over the winter. Back to getting outdoors and exercising! Back to eating more healthfully! Time to stop hunkering down and look outward again! Time to stop wearing tights and shave my legs!

Good for a Laugh

This is the kind of skit I fast forward through SNL for. Hang in through the ad at the start (consider it your contribution to helping the economy). Dwayne Johnson (aka "The Rock") does a great job!

Coming Out

Ha! Couldn't resist the title after my last post. 

But really, I'm just changing my blog name from Mel (my initials) to Margy, my real first name (pronounced with a hard "g" in case you don't know me personally). 

I suppose I originally came up with Mel to have just the slightest bit of anonymity. But then I call my husband, son and other people by their first names on my blog, so how fair is that?

Even though I've been blogging under the name Mel for several years, it's never really grown on me.

So hi, my name is Margy!

Digging Deep

[Cartoon by Pat Bagley of the Salt Lake Tribune. Buttars is one of our infamous state senators who has been thrust into the national spotlight more than once. Side note: I've been a Pat Bagley fan for many years. He also illustrates children's books and we included one of his pieces in the Springville Museum of Art exhibition I put together last fall.] 

I'm trying something new this semester in the Utah Valley University writing class I teach. We've selected a group topic that we will dig into as we explore various aspects of doing research, evaluating rhetoric, etc. 

My students came up with a dozen or so topics and ultimately voted on the separation of church and state. Gay marriage was a very close second, so from time to time we've gotten into the areas where the two topics overlap. 

This past Friday I had my students summarize and respond to an editorial in the New York Times proposing a possible compromise on the issue of same sex marriage that would address the key issues of civil rights for same sex couples on the one hand and protection of religious conscience and practice on the other. It's an intriguing idea that could buy us some time to dig deeper into the issue of "redefining" marriage.

It's been painfully interesting to be here in Utah and to be a member of the LDS church with all of the fallout from California's Proposition 8 and, most recently, with the limelight on Senator Buttars and his comments about gays being a bigger threat to the U.S. than Muslim terrorists.

I know where I personally stand on the issue of same sex marriage as a matter of public policy and civil law. I also know that at the end of the day my church leaders (at least the ones at the top) would support me and my conscience. 

The painful part for me lies in the tangled web of misunderstanding, hurt, anger and fear and knowing that people I dearly love fall at opposite ends of the political spectrum on this issue. Ironically, I'm at risk of being labeled both a heretic and a mindless sheep, but in my mind I am neither. It's a surreal place to exist. Especially when my opinions are rooted in the ideas of freedom and love for my fellow beings, something that paradoxically we pretty much all value.

Seeing the issue through the lens of a college writing class has equipped me with some tools to at least begin to sort through the mess. For example, a few weeks ago we talked about the importance of understanding the assumptions we bring to the table. 

Here's just one example:

One of the assumptions many proponents of Prop 8 made was that same sex couples in California already have all of the rights and protections that married heterosexual couples have. This idea was reinforced by a widely circulated youtube video. Just over two minutes in the narrator says, "if this isn't about rights and equality, what is it about?"

But opponents of Prop 8 were pretty clear in their understanding that at best same sex couples only have some of the rights, protections and benefits afforded married couples, and that they have to jump through multiple legal hoops to ensure them. They were pretty clear that the debate was all about rights and equality.

If we fail to dig deep and see the complexity in issues like this, we are bound to reduce our views to sound bites like "hate" and "tyranny of the minority."

And what good does that do? We just end up digging ourselves into a hole.

Something New to Dream About

A cycle would be fun, but what I'm going to dream about tonight is the slider I ate for lunch today at Marley's, the restaurant at the new(ish) Harley-Davidson dealer just off I-15 in Lindon. Oh man, a burger with grilled onions, cheese and buffalo sauce on the most amazing bun ever.

It's a cool place to visit--not only because it's the biggest Harley-Davidson dealer in the world, but because the building is made from all sorts of cool metal work salvaged from Geneva Steel.

And my personal brush with fame: Guy Francis, the artist who created the image of Marley, was one of the artists in the children's book illustration exhibition last fall.

Happy Valentine's Day

Remember how fun Valentine's Day always was in elementary school? Making post boxes, making valentines, distributing them to classmates? 

Roger and Jack cooked up this fabulous post box for Jack to take to school tomorrow.

Want a hug?

25 Random Things

I got tagged on facebook to write 25 random things about myself. I thought I'd post it here to, since Mom and Dad don't have facebook pages.

1. Dark chocolate, hands down.
2. I used to dream that I could swim underwater without needing to come up for air. I wish I still had that dream.
3. One of my biggest regrets is not going out for the high school swim team.
4. One thing I will never regret is taking a typing class in high school.
5. I love to travel! I am very happy when I have an airline ticket and am anticipating a trip.
   
6. I want to live in another country and immerse myself enough to really learn another language.
   
7. I am not a morning person. But I so wish I was.
   
8. Seeing the ocean at least once a year is a need, not a want. Seriously. It's a soul thing.
   
9. I wish our house had a substantial, welcoming front porch.
   
10. The summer after my freshmen year of college I walked the banks of the Seine in Paris, heartbroken because I missed my boyfriend who I wouldn't see for more than a year. Too bad my angst did not produce anything profound.
11. After Roger finished his first grad program, I quit my computer industry job and we ran away from home for a year. In our little red Jeep Wrangler, we drove all over the country, up into Canada to Alaska and down into Mexico.
12. I really, really, really miss our bookstore, which seemed to give me a hug every time I walked through the front door. It enabled us to meet so many interesting people and contribute to our community in so many fun ways . . . 
    
13.  . . . Like hosting live music! We had more than a hundred concerts at our store and one of my favorite projects was producing a CD of some of the performances. 
    
14. I was very relieved when Jack showed signs of developing a good sense of humor at an early age.
    
15. I started reading novels to Jack when he was three (The Mouse and the Motorcyle), and we've read almost every single night since then. One of the best decisions I ever made!
    
16. I took up yoga once and it did amazing things for me. So why don't I practice yoga these days?
    
17. It never fails that when the movie Joe vs. the Volcano comes on tv, I get sucked in--even though we own the DVD and we can watch it any time.
    
18. I love teaching my college class, but I don't love grading papers.
    
19. Once I got a professional pedicure and I thought, "I actually have nice toes!" I need to get another pedicure one day.
    
20. I play too much spider solitaire. But only when I'm listening to informative, thought-provoking podcasts.
21. I have an irrational dislike of Indian food. I think it may somehow be connected to bad behavior in a previous life.
22. I love seeing inside people's houses as I drive by at night. I don't want to see the people, but I do want to see their houses. I'm an architecture and design junky.
    
23. One of my favorite times of day is when Roger, Jack and I are all hanging out in bed together in the evening--reading, talking, laughing, and surfing the internet. It's nice. I love those guys!
    
24. Roger is watching a Flight of the Conchords video as I type this. They make me laugh.
    
25. I have had so much fun connecting with old and new friends and far flung relatives on facebook!
    

This One Always Makes Me Cry Just a Little Bit (In a Good Way)

This video has been around for a while, but for those of you who haven't seen it, it's so worth watching. Every once in a while, I watch it just to make me happy.

Believe

When we owned our bookstore, we thought it would be fun for the store to be in a movie. Loki, a musician who played several times at our store, wrote and directed a mockumentary called Believe (click here for more info). Lucky for us, he needed to shoot a scene in a bookstore. 

Loki and his crew were there for six or seven hours one evening to get the glorious eleven seconds that appears in this clip (spoiler alert!).

Five Interesting Conversations

I've had lots of conversations with people over the holidays, getting together with family and friends, working at the museum, etc. But I've chosen the five most unusual ones for this post.

• I met a bookseller and his wife visiting from Norway. We had a fine time talking about finding treasures in the book world. I told them I was convinced of genetic memory when I went to Norway and felt completely, utterly connected to the land, the people, the aesthetics, the whole feeling there.
  
• I met an elementary school art teacher who also teaches art classes at Utah Valley University. I told him about the new writing assignment sequence for English 1010 there (the course I've been teaching), and how it is designed primarily to develop critical thinking skills. One of the goals is to break students of the habit of deciding their thesis before doing any research and then simply finding quotes to support it. In fact, they don't write a full blown research paper. Instead their final paper is an exploratory research paper in which they write about their experience engaging with the content of their research. I was excited about it. He was excited about it. He even gave me his email address so I can send him more information (which I still need to do). Kindred geeks.
  
• I went with five friends to see Doubt, a movie about a nun (Meryl Streep, amazing) who believes a priest is abusing boys in her school. We had an energetic conversation all the way home. How can you really be certain about anything? And yet we are. I felt bad that they dropped me off first. 
  
• A sales rep at a store we visited recently shared wildly personal information with us. It started with a comment he made about his fifth grandchild being born, and when we expressed disbelief that he could have five at his age, he confessed that he became a grandfather at 36 because he became a father at 18. He then regaled us with stories of subsequent marriages to women and partnerships with men, some of whom had various troubles with various licit and illicit substances. But he seemed nice enough. We'd have bought something from him if we could have rationalized it.
  
• The last one isn't technically a conversation, but I thought it was an interesting encounter. And talking was involved. Whenever I stop by the art museum, I'm never quite sure what I might end up doing. The other day Roger and I stopped by to check on a couple of things and the director turned up with a huge bronze moose statue on a cart. He needed our help getting it off the cart and onto a pedestal. Crazy!

Out with the Old

I am totally overwhelmed by how much "stuff" we have and how disorganized it all is. We are hardly big shoppers, but we haven't dealt with everything that came home with us when we closed the bookstore. And the other two members of my family are collectors (and I sure love them!).

My new year's resolution is to get rid of at least one thing every day (throw away, give away, return to proper owner, or sell). I promised Roger and Jack that I wouldn't get rid of anything they own (at least not without their permission).

So far I'm on track! Of course, we're only four days in . . .

Five Quirks

Our Jack is a blessed addition to our family. And we sure love his quirks.

• He always has to have a toy in his pocket. This has been true since he was very, very young.
• We ask him if he's hungry and he says "no." Then not two minutes later, when he's done working on whatever project he's been focused on he says, "I'm hungry."
• He lives his life with a soundtrack. Literally. If he doesn't have music on (usually the Star Wars soundtrack), he makes his own. At this very moment I hear him playing Legos in the other room with a friend and loudly humming The Twelve Days of Christmas.
• He often falls asleep just as the plane is landing.
• He often falls asleep when we've got just two pages of the novel left. (This just happened last night. We'll be finishing Island of the Blue Dolphins tonight.)

A Brookside Christmas

Last Friday Roger and I enjoyed the PTA Christmas program at Brookside Elementary. Yep, we happily live in a school district that allows that sort of thing (purely secular though--Santa, reindeer, front teeth and all that). More than 700 kids, teachers and lots of parents packed into the gym. Jack is right in the middle in the green striped shirt. 

My very favorite part of the program is when the 12 Days of Christmas are divvied up among the grades (Jack and the other fourth graders sang four French hens and ten lords a-leaping). The kids sing faster and louder on each verse until they're practically shouting on top of each other by the end. Sort of like watching an ice hockey game. Good times.

It's Not in My Head (But It Is)

My doctor called with the results from my ct scan this morning. The past couple of months of dragging through my days may soon be over! Apparently there are multiple, highly evident problems with my sinuses. 

Not that this is something to brag about (and have I done something wrong to cause this mess?). But it means there's an actual problem that I can work on fixing (and that the $75 copayment I made for the ct scan this morning wasn't for naught). It's not all in my head. 

Here's hoping extra strong antibiotics will cure me and I won't have to have surgery.

Five Things I Am Thankful For

• I am thankful for a husband who loves me and supports me despite my often selfish and erratic ways. And I love him.
• I am thankful that I get to be Jack's mom. What a funny, smart, creative, tenderhearted boy he is! I sure don't want him to grow up too fast, but I am so curious about the man he will become.
• I am thankful to know so many amazing people--family and friends--who teach me so much. I am so often truly inspired by you all!
• I am thankful that the challenges in my life are rooted in abundance rather than scarcity. My prayer is to turn the temptation to eat too much, to revel too much in the comforts of my life and to feel overwhelmed by all of the stuff we own into fuel to feed a generous, giving spirit.
• I am thankful that my parents set me on a spiritual path that keeps me committed to wrestling with faith, hope and charity.