And love and thought and joy

Post by J

Last night, R and I watched St. Vincent, a movie with Melissa McCarthy and Bill Murray. In it, Melissa's son attends a Catholic school and is given the assignment of finding and writing about a "living saint."

I was fascinated by this idea, and started to think of all the people I know who might qualify, bringing them to mind one by one. And one by one discarding them as possibilities. Wait - that sounds harsh. I know I have many, many really good people in my life. But to measure up to sainthood?

And now it's the next day and I'm still thinking about potential candidates. I just can't seem to come up with a single person who measures up to my narrow, internal, very personal definition of a living saint. The only person I can think of is no longer living.

My mom had a difficult life. She was born into a dysfunctional family; her father was an alcoholic who died at age 54 and her mother was a classic enabler. She married my dad when she was just 18 and had three children by the time she was 23. She struggled to find her way in the world.

She wasn't perfect and she made a lot of mistakes. She had a rough time when she and my dad were divorced and she made some bad decisions. She drank too much when I was in high school.

She didn't read to me. She didn't take me to museums. She didn't teach me to sew.

But.

She loved people and people loved her. She genuinely cared about others. She was compassionate and she was kind. She was funny and she was silly and told the same stupid jokes over and over. She baked amazing cookies and even more amazing loaves of bread.

Maybe it's just because she was my mother and I have the advantage of hindsight but, in retrospect, she did so many things right. For better or worse she shaped who I am today.

She taught me to work hard, but to enjoy life. She taught me that it's okay to fail.

She believed in me and encouraged nearly every hare-brained idea that I ever had ... after I explained why it was important to me. I knew that if everything in my life went south I would still have a place to fall and that she would take me in.

She suffered, but she rose above it. She had the kind of faith that, if heaven had contributed just 1% of the solution, she would have brought the other 99% to solve the world's problems. She was that sincere and that devout.

And with all of her contradictions and all of her faults, she was the most holy person I think I will ever know. She was truly a living saint for me.

My mother passed away exactly 12 years ago today at the age of 63. I will always miss her.

She gave me eyes, she gave me ears;
And humble care, and delicate fears;
A heart, the fountain of sweet tears;
And love, and thought, and joy.

The Sparrow's Nest

William Wordsworth

Snow Day

Post by J

Today in Washington, D.C., our nation's capital, the federal government closed down and locked its doors tight against a snowstorm. The announcement came around 10:00 last night, due in large part, I think, to the prediction that we were to get - gasp - six to ten inches of that fluffy, marshmallowy, beautifully-serene-if-you-don't-have-to-drive-in-it, snow that kids with impending history tests only dream of.

Oh, yeah.

I grew up in Wyoming. As a kid I loved Snow Days - unexpected free time to laze around in my pajamas, read books, watch soap operas for which I didn't understand the melodramatic plot, eat cereal for lunch and consume a mid-afternoon snack of hot chocolate and toast, and just revel in getting a windfall of time to just do nothing. So important were these rare occurrences that they warranted capitalization.  Snow Day. It was almost like I felt guilty for taking pleasure in doing nothing, but it was a delicious guilty feeling, let me tell you.

As an adult, prior to joining the Foreign Service, I worked in Wyoming for 12+ years. For nine of those twelve years, I drove to a community college in Riverton for work - a distance of 25 miles (just as an aside, it took precisely 25 minutes to drive those 25 miles because, other than antelope, there wasn't much traffic on the road). While the annual average snowfall in any given city in the U.S. is 25 inches, the average in my hometown of Lander is 101. During the last twelve years, I had a Snow Day exactly - drum roll, please - once. And I think that was because it was a heavy spring snow that broke power lines.

The reason for the lack of Snow Days, of course, is that Wyoming and its people know a thing or two about snow. They are the stalwart type who know that if they stop because of snow nothing will get done. Wyoming is full of ranchers who have animals that depend on them; if they don't feed the animals because of a snow storm, the animals starve. Not only is this inhumane, it seriously impacts their investment and their bottom-line. This is a mentality that started with the pioneers over 175 years ago, and anyone in Wyoming will tell you it's hard to buck tradition.

Don't get me wrong. I love Wyoming. I love tradition. I love self-reliance and the idea of a "by-your-bootstraps" kind of society. But, oh, I love a Snow Day, too.

What makes today's Snow Day in Washington, D.C. particularly lovely is the simmering knowledge that once I get to the Dominican Republic, I am guaranteed to get exactly zero Snow Days. Cry me a river, I know. But there's something nostalgic about an unexpected free day, something that reminds me of home, and my childhood, and warmth against the storm. I can't help but love that.

Overnight in D.C. we received a disappointing total of about three inches. Wyomingites would scoff, and justifiably so. But I enjoyed about an hour of cozy laziness looking out the window at the bright blue sky. And then, as an adult, I realized I had obligations to fulfill. What did I do with my free day? Studied Spanish, of course.

The Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel

Post by J

Sometimes, you just have to get out of town.

R and I met in the waning years of the Cold War at the Defense Language Institute while studying Eastern European languages. I was fresh out of basic training, while R was a seasoned soldier by then.

The day after our first "date" we were having brunch at Fifi's Cafe in Monterey, California. We didn't know each other very well, but we were really hitting it off. The conversation went something like this:

Me: So you grew up in New Jersey - that must have been interesting.

Him: Not really.

Me: I grew up in Wyoming, out in the country. It got boring there, too, but unlike Monterey at least we had four seasons.

Him: Do you ever miss the snow?

Me: Sometimes, I guess.

Him: Monterey's great and all, but this constant 68 degree weather is kind of getting to me. We should drive to the mountains to see the snow!

Me: ...

Him: Well, I have a truck, so we wouldn't worry about getting stuck. I can do all the driving because it's a stick shift.

Me: Um, did you hear me say I grew up in Wyoming? I've been driving a stick shift since I was 13.

Personally, I think this tidbit of information is what prompted R to fall in love with me.

And did we drive to Nevada, hundreds of miles away, just to see the snow after dating for less than 24 hours? Yes. Yes we did.

Lately our lives have been consumed with studying, and yesterday we finally decided we needed a day off.  No computer, no Spanish textbooks, no laundry or grocery shopping.

Back when R was growing up, his family would travel to Florida in the summer to visit his grandparents. They'd stop and visit interesting places along the way, and yesterday he remembered he'd been impressed as an 8-year-old with the newly constructed Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel. According to Wikipedia, "The Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel is a 23-mile fixed link crossing at the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay in the U.S. state of Virginia. It connects the Delmarva Peninsula with Virginia Beach and the Hampton Roads metropolitan area." That's pretty much all the encouragement I needed.

Keep in mind it's over 200 miles to get to the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel from here, and that's if you head down I-95 and connect to I-64 outside of Richmond. Once we had crossed the Bridge Tunnel and arrived on the Delmarva Peninsula, we typed our address into the GPS for the return trip, and the GPS promptly told us to make a U-turn and go back the way we came, because it was going to be a long haul back home if we continued on State Highway 13. We laughed, of course, and kept driving. For what seemed like a bazillion miles. We finally made it back home around 10:00 p.m. - about 11 hours after we began.

Read about the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel here.

Entering a portion of the bridge.

Tankers. The Bridge/Tunnel was created in order to allow vessels to travel unimpeded in and out of Chesapeake Bay.

Entering the first tunnel.

I see the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel!

These are parts of the bridge. The space in between allows vessels to continue their journeys; the tunnel through which cars travel is underneath the water. 

I actually like seagulls. Look at how cold they seem to be, tucking their heads back for shelter. Of course, Bob Seger's Against the Wind was stuck in my head for the rest of the day.

On the Delmarva (Delaware-Maryland-Virginia) Peninsula. I'd love to go back in the summer.

Virginia Beach (on the Delmarva side).

Sunset.

Yes, it was a long day. But it was so great to get out of town.