On the Border-Line

From the sublime to the ridiculous - yesterday I offered you a lovely poem by Mary Oliver. Today, I offer you this revolting headline from the Huffington Post:

CHICAGO SCHOOL BANS HOME PACKED LUNCHES

Yes indeed, the long arm of school regulation has now reached into your kitchen and grabbed the brown bag PB&J sandwich right out of your child's little hand.

If you haven't got the stomach to read the whole article, here's the gist of it.   The principal of Little Village Academy decided to ban parents from packing their children's lunches when she observed that many of the children were coming to school with "bottles of soda and flaming hot chips."  She deemed it would be better for the children to eat in the school cafeteria rather than suffer the effects of their parents nutritionally poor choices.  "Nutrition wise, it is better for the children to eat at the school," Principal Elsa Carmona said. "It's about the nutrition and the excellent quality food that they are able to serve (in the lunchroom). It's milk versus a Coke."

Aside from the fact that the home packed school lunch is almost a sacred part of any American childhood, I'm downright offended that a school can attempt to force feed children what it decides is right.  What's next?  Will the school choose which pediatrician they should go to?  Will the principal go door to door and make sure that each child is brushing their teeth at night using the correct type of toothpaste?

It's all fine and good for schools to teach children and their families about proper nutrition.  Have all the videos and presentations and worksheets you want.  But do not presume to tell me that I can't pack my child's lunch because it might not meet the school's nutritional standards.

In case you were wondering, Little Village Academy is part of the Chicago Public School system. "While there is no formal policy, principals use common sense judgment based on their individual school environments," CPS spokeswoman Monique Bond told the Tribune. "In this case, this principal is encouraging the healthier choices and attempting to make an impact that extends beyond the classroom."  In looking at the school's website, the demographics of the school appear to be heavily Hispanic, where culturally the favorite foods might be considered higher in fats and carbohydrates.  I wager that after a "healthy" lunch of salad and plain turkey sandwiches, those children probably head for the nearest bodega on the way home for something that tastes really good - like soda and flaming hot chips.

Oh I know, kids need to eat better.  But kids are kids, and the more you "force" them to do what's good for them, the more enticing you make what's bad for them seem to be.

And this habit of intruding official-dom of one sort or another into the private lives of the American people has got to stop.

Or I'll be making a run for the border myself.

Spring Has Sprung

Ah, spring.  At last there are some faint signs of hope.  The tired brown grass has suddenly turned bright green, sprouts of green are poking up through the soil in my flower beds and around the shrubs, and if you look very hard, you can see teeny tiny buds along the scrawny limbs of my cherry tree and Japanese red maple. While I'm happy to see these hopeful portents, I'm less happy at the thought of spring cleaning.  I'll admit it - I'm no fan of housekeeping.  You probably won't find me renting a steam cleaner and going at my carpets and rugs. Best leave that to the top rated carpet cleaning companies, I say.

And as much as I love my two furry rug rats, they are indeed hard on the flooring and furniture.  Between muddy paws and the occasional potty accident which leaves a very unfortunate urine odor,  my household furnishings take quite a beating.  Since between them they only weight about 25 pounds, I can't even imagine what it's like to have a big dog running the house - or two, or even three like some folks I know.

At this point, I'm trying to decide whether to call the carpet cleaners or just have it all ripped off the floor and go au natural, with the addition of some beautiful Turkish rugs.

But you know what?  It's such a nice day, I think I'll just go hang around outside and worry about it tomorrow.

How about you?  What are your biggest spring cleaning challenges?

Come to the Pond

Mornings at Blackwater

~Mary Oliver

For years, every morning, I drank

from Blackwater Pond. It was flavored with oak leaves and also, no doubt,

the feet of ducks.

And always it assuaged me

from the dry bowl of the very far past.

What I want to say is

that the past is the past, and the present is what your life is,

and you are capable

of choosing what that will be,

darling citizen.

So come to the pond,

or the river of your imagination,

or the harbor of your longing,

and put your lips to the world.

And live

your life.

from Red Bird: Poems by Mary Oliver (Boston: Beacon Press, 2008), p.57.

~With a nod to Third Story Window where I read this poem in my blog wanderings this morning.  It fed my soul, so I'm sharing it with you in honor of April and National Poetry Month.

And now I'm going out on this warm afternoon in search of a pond.

Soul Sustenance

Lots of stuff going on over here, and because I've come to think of you all as friends of a sort, even though I've never laid eyes on most of you (with the exception of two or three), I feel like I want to tell you all about it.  Isn't that how it goes with friends?  When stuff happens in your life, your thoughts immediately turn to those people who help support you, hold you up when the crappy things happen and lift you even higher in those moments of triumph? Right now, two of my BFF's are out of touch one on vacation in the Desert, the other taking up residence in the Far East. So as the circumference of my real world network narrows, I feel even more drawn to all of you in the virtual world. Here's the deal - yesterday, I resigned from my job.

For those of you who know how much I hate fear change, you'll appreciate the kind of cataclysmic event this is. My 10 year anniversary at this company will occur next week, so for the past 10 years I've been working in the same small office.  I started out at the very bottom rung of an (admittedly) very small ladder, but have worked my way to a nice, upper management spot within this quite successful and growing company.   It's a good job, as part-time jobs go, and the people I work with are amazing - there aren't a more supportive group of women anywhere.

So why leave?

The 10 year thing is key for me, I think.  It was 10 years into my job at the high school that I began to get the itch to move on, that "been there done that" feeling that made every day, every rehearsal, every concert, a struggle.  If I'm honest, I've been feeling that way  here for more than a year or so.  I started out in this job as a medical technical writer (of sorts) but have since become "head of the department" which really means I do a lot more paper shuffling than writing.  I've been able to handle it mostly because it was routine and easy and I could get it all done with a minimal effort.  And because when my husband lost his job in 2009, we really needed every bit of extra income we could get.

But in the last six months, business has taken a decided upswing.  And that's all great - we've put some significant time into creating new marketing materials and a website, which I was really excited to be involved in.  The effort has paid off, and the business is growing by leaps and bounds.

Which means I have LOTS more paper to shuffle.

Recently, I turned 55 years of age.   I don't want to shuffle paper anymore.

Many years ago, every Wednesday night, I would trip down the basement stairs at my piano teacher's house.  I'd take my seat at her Baldwin grand piano, and she would settle into the dining room chair placed just slightly to my left.  She would lean back against the chair, close her eyes, smile, and say "alright."

Then I would start to play. Perhaps it was Beethoven (the Piano Sonata #3 in C Major) or Chopin (Fantasie Impromptu or Waltz Brillante in E-flat).  Once, for a very long period of time, I was working on the Brahms Rhapsody in D minor (a bear of a piece for a tiny girl with short, stubby fingers!)

When I finished, if I was very lucky and if I had practiced very hard, she would sigh deeply and say, "That feeds my soul."

Feeding the soul.

Perhaps it's selfish and unrealistic in today's world to hope that your job will also feed your soul.  How lucky am I to work where I'm not only paid well, but respected and valued?  How happy do I really expect to be?  It's a JOB, after all - shouldn't I just suck it up and look elsewhere for soul feeding?

Well, maybe.  But then again, I'm 55 years old.  How much time do I have left for soul feeding?

So I took the leap, hoping and trusting that the universe will provide me with the right opportunity, as it has done so generously in the past.

My dear husband wrote me a very nice note today.  In it, he said he was proud of me for taking this step, and he encouraged me to take some time to think about what I wanted to do, knowing that he would support me in whatever decision I made.

Friends, those words fed my soul.

For it is with the grace of God - and the people who love us and stand by us- that we move forward in life, and do those brave and daring things that give us sustenance, that allow us to grow and change for the better.

Thank you all for listening -it was good talking with you.

Recipe Book

When you bake a cake you have ingredients: sugar, flour, butter, baking soda, eggs, milk.  You put them in a bowl and mix them up.  But this does not make a cake.  This makes goop. Writing Down the Bones, Natalie Goldberg

In the small notebook I carry around, I often scribble down ideas for personal essays or blog posts, perhaps a word or phrase, maybe a reference to a magazine or newspaper article.  Sometimes in the local cafe or coffee shop,  another patron sparks my interest - perhaps their appearance, or their manner intrigues me, and so I make note of that, thinking they might appear in a story or poem sometime down the road ( when I have time to "really write").

This collection of ideas and thoughts become like a recipe book for my writing.  Combined with structure and grammar, they are the ingredients for the stories I'd like to tell. But putting them all together into an edible product is not as simple as methodically placing them onto the page.  They need what a cook might call a binding agent, something that links them together -  the focal point of what you're trying to say.

Your writing recipe also requires flavor, something to spice up the goop of ingredients you've stirred up.  Spice comes from the details - saying your father liked cars is bland and ordinary.  Saying that he spent every Sunday afternoon washing and waxing his powder blue '57 Chevy, rubbing it tenderly with soft, worn out cotton t-shirts, creates a much tastier sentence.

Look through your writers notebook (of course you have one by now, right?) and make a list of all the ingredients you've jotted down.  Is there anything that binds them together, a common thread which you might use to link some of these ideas into a coherent piece of writing?  Are there ways you can add more details to spice up your ideas?