Today I’m posting over at A Deeper Church.
It’s a post called “A Simple Guide On How To Stay Afloat While Drowning.”
Click HERE to check it out.
“No One Brings Dinner When Your Daughter is an Addict,” and Other Notables From This Week
Some things that got my attention on the web this week:
* * * * *
No one brings dinner when your daughter is an addict. (Really proud of my college professor, Larry Lake, for this incredible piece over at Slate Magazine.)
* * * * *
So if others want to write to be known or to make money, let them use their words in that way. I will take my path with the quieter voices – the voice of a Jewish carpenter, the voices of women who have killed for reasons I will never fathom, the voice of a Czech man who knew why a man might become an insect, the voice of an enslaved women writing back to her master about how the children in her slave school are not learning.
* * * * *
I’m right there, too. Because thanking God for all the good things in my life feels right—I grew up believing there was always Someone to receive my thanks—but if He bears the responsibility for the good things, the blessings, does He also not have some responsibility for the bad things?
* * * * *
Regardless of whatever pseudo-religious “calling” you feel, write. Speak. Lead. Stomp your feet and cry. Protest. Fight. Carry the banner. Fall down when you cannot speak anymore and the rest of us will carry you through. We need your voice. We need your safe spaces.
* * * * *
That’s one thing I’m learning about Packing Light. So often I hold onto things (like possessions or friendships or relationships or schedules or to-do lists) because I’m compensating for something.
* * * * *
Bill Cosby Wants to Make a New Family Sitcom Centered Around ‘Warmth and Forgiveness’
* * * * *
If you are a novelist who has yet to be published, remember your first priority: your writing.
* * * * *
When we feel guilty all the time, about all kinds of things we aren’t responsible for, it does more than just beat us down and mess with our self-image. It desensitizes us to feeling remorse in general, and to taking responsibility for the things we should feel guilty about.
* * * * *
What caught your attention this week? If you’re a blogger, which of your recent posts most resonated with people?
The Nature of Breathing
The sound of her coughing comes at me through the fog of sleep. It is a hoarse, barking sound, all too familiar. I roll over and look at the clock. 12:41 am. I take a deep breath and move to a seated position at the edge of the bed.
“You okay, Abra?” I ask our five-year-old, rubbing my eyes, then staring in the direction of the blankets on the floor. “Can you breathe okay?”
All I hear is a long, wheezing inhale. The exhale is a series of whimpers and cries and more coughing, the dry kind that doesn’t sound like it’s moving anything.
“It’s okay, honey. I’m coming,” I say. I stand up and walk over and scoop her up, laying her across my arms. I carry her downstairs. She’s awake now and on the verge of panic.
“It’s okay,” I say over and over again, words that turn into a sort of lullaby.
“I can’t breathe,” she manages to say.
“We’ll get you outside. You’ll be able to breathe out there.”
I somehow open the door to the deck, even with my arms full of her, and I try not to bang her head on the frame as we go out. I pull the door closed behind us with my foot. It’s freezing cold, in the 30s, and the air shocks me awake. I prop her up against the house and run inside for the warmest blanket we have. I sit on the wooden deck and she sits on my lap and I wrap us in the blanket. We are in a cocoon of warmth, my breath escaping in cloudy bursts.
Her ratchety breathing smooths out. Soon she sleeps, her head against my chest. I only have sweatpants on, and my feet, sticking out at the end of the blanket are freezing, but every other part of me is warm. Two miles away, down by the river, I hear the train whistle, long and sad.
God seems close in that moment. Everything seems so present, pressed up to the front of reality by the cold air biting my face.
* * * * *
Her cough wakes me again. 2:40am. I sigh and find my sweatshirt on the floor.
“You okay, Abra?” I ask her. “Can you breathe okay?”
“No,” she manages to scratch out between coughs and long, slow draws of breath.
“It’s okay, honey,” I say. I stand up and walk over and scoop her up, lay her across my arms again, carry her downstairs again. I talk to her all the way down. This time we have the blanket when we go with us. I sit her down on the wooden boards, go find one of our patio chairs, and then sit there with her on my lap.
Her breathing calms. She falls back to sleep. I stare at her eyelashes resting on her cheek. I could fall asleep if I could get my arm comfortable, but that’s not going to happen. I consider going inside and finding the air mattress so we can sleep outside. I can’t remember how long it takes to inflate. This fact seems very important, the way trivial things can seem so crucial in dreams.
I hear the steps of a medium-sized animal walking through dry leaves on the ground just beyond the deck. Too small for a deer. Probably a possum. Or a raccoon. The animal pauses. The night is still and dark. I hear another train whistle.
I sit with her as long as I can, but my back starts to ache. I carry her back up to the bedroom floor and lay her down, wondering if that shot of cold air will be enough to get her through until morning.
* * * * *
It doesn’t. 4:52am. I carry her outside again and this time I have a pillow for my arm and we sit there in that glorious cold and I listen to the sound of her breathing slow down, turn into sleep once again. She melts up against me, pulling her feet away from the edge of the covers. We sit there in that freezing cold and there is something beautiful about a moment, just before sunrise, when everyone is breathing easy, when two jets of steaming breath get ready for the dawn.
There is something that makes me feel God-with-us. Maybe it’s because in that moment I’m thankful for something as simple as another breath. Maybe it’s what happens when I stop and listen, when I move away from everything else – shelter, food, warmth – and simply exist.
I’m not sure why God feels so close in that moment, but I fall asleep there, in the dark, breathing in that beautiful air, the kind of air that’s only ever available just before the sunrise.
NaNoWriMo: “The ‘Finish Line’ Metaphor is Telling”
We’re almost halfway through National Novel Writing Month, better known as NaNoWriMo. It’s that wonderful time of year when people commit to writing 50,000 words of a novel in 30 days. Most people seem to like the concept, to think it’s generally a positive phenomenon.
But not everyone has such a glowing opinion, such as the writer of this article, “Why I Hate National Novel Writing Month, and Why You Should, Too”:
I’m not sure why someone “scared away by the time and effort involved” in novel writing would instead want to put themselves through the wringer of doing a whole novel in a month, but the “finish line” metaphor is telling; to the NaNoWriMo people, writing a novel is like running a marathon, something difficult and strenuous that you do only so you can say you did it before you died.
Then there are the slightly cynical:
The idea of NaNo, really, is not just the doing of it, but the saying of the doing of it. The web site will connect you to other people in your area who are holding “write-ins,” group meetings to sit and work on your book…It’s a time when people commit to a set of completely arbitrary rules — you can have an outline ahead of time, but no writing done; you can “win” with 50,000 words even if your novel isn’t finished; you are at the mercy of NaNo’s word counter, no matter what yours may say — in return for having an excuse to do what they want to do anyway.
It seems a rather hard-hearted person who would look for a reason to disparage something that gets hundreds of thousands of people writing. Creating.
But what do you think about NaNoWriMo? Stupid idea? Incredible idea? Have you participated in the past? Are you doing it this year?
Most importantly, for those of you who have participated, how did it go?
(In case you were wondering, here are Eight Bestsellers Started During National Novel Writing Month.)
Finding All of My 13,475 Days
Yesterday I took Lucy to the dentist. It’s the same dentist I went to when I was her age – eight years old – so it always feels like walking into some kind of time capsule when I take her there. The same dentist, the same receptionist, the same terrifying smell.
This is how things operate in our area, for the most part: they stay the same. Change comes slowly, if at all. Every so often a road is widened or a new development springs up in an unlikely valley, but Gap Diner is still at the corner of 30 and 41, there’s a town clock at the top of the hill, and everyone wonders how the owner of Pizza Box can make a living because the parking lot is almost always empty, as it has been for the last 30 years.
After Lucy’s cleaning I talked and laughed with the receptionist. She is my parents’ age. She shook her head and her eyes got watery when she told Lucy that I used to come walking through those doors, looking every bit as nervous as she did. I remember those visits: the frantic brushing of the teeth, the unfamiliar plucking of floss, the smell of bubble gum fluoride. The pulling of unnecessary molars. The tightening of braces. The haze of laughing gas.
No cavities, so I took Lucy to an ice cream place to celebrate. What is it about the official pronouncement of no cavities that leads me to reward my children with sweets? As she munched on M&Ms smothered in vanilla ice cream and whipped cream, we talked about when I was a kid.
“Did you know this is the town where I grew up?” I asked her.
She shook her head, no.
“Is that why you know all the old people here?” she asked.
I laughed.
“Yeah, I guess so.”
I stared through the large glass window at the traffic coming down the hill to the light. I remembered when that was the only light in town, when Pizza Box, the Gap Diner, and the Hungry Man Truck Stop were about all you had to choose from.
Our waitress kept calling Lucy “honey” and me simply “hon.” This annoyed me, although I’m not sure why. But Lucy just smiled when the waitress walked away.
“People who work in restaurants are so nice,” she whispered, laughing, showing off the space one of her teeth had recently vacated.
I almost mumbled, It’s just because of the tip, but then I decided not to say anything. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with thinking that people are being nice simply because they’re nice. Even if they’re not. And who knows? Maybe she was just being nice. She probably was.
Lucy cleared her throat, took a drink of water, then looked at me with wide eyes.
“So you used to go to that dentist twenty years ago?” she asked, taking another bite of ice cream.
“Actually, more like thirty,” I said, staring back out the window, watching the traffic again. And for one bright instant I saw with clarity the many days of my life, lined up like note cards. All 13,475 of them.
Blank days too early for me to remember and blurry days that passed without me even noticing. Good days full of celebration: Florida vacations and my 16th birthday and the birth of our son. There were painful days, too, shredded around the edges, days where someone had tried to erase the writing but had instead worn through the paper.
What stood out to me the most about all of those days is that most had come and gone without anything extraordinary happening. And I thought, That’s what makes a life, this unpredictable concoction of a few poignant moments mixed in with an endless stream of normal days. I was reminded of Annie Dillard’s words, that “routines are nets for catching days.”
I looked back at Lucy. She had finished her ice cream, and she sat there quietly, drinking water through a clear, blue plastic straw. I paid the bill with a twenty.
“You ready to go?” I asked.
She nodded. So we walked out into that cold November day. When she holds my hand it makes me feel both old and new, tired and hopeful, small and yet responsible for oh so much.
All the days of my life swirled around me like snow.
How many days old are you? (You can calculate it HERE.) What do you have to say about that?
The Note I Sent Downstream (or, Why I’m Blogging Again)
Being nine years old, and intent on getting my message out into the great, wide world, I wrote a note in cursive, the clumsy curling script I had decided I would dedicate my life to learning. I tore a piece of paper from one of those notebooks that only releases a page after blessing it with a thousand, ragged edges.
I rooted a pencil from The Drawer. We called it simply, The Drawer, with capital letters. It was like the Room of Requirement, only drawer-size. But it was more like the opposite of the Room of Requirement because it usually held lots and lots of things I would never need – the wrong size batteries, a compass for drawing circles, a calculator with a malfunctioning number nine.
I scribbled out a note on the paper, a message to the wild beyond. It was an important message, a world-changing message. Then, because I was nine years old, I went out to the ramshackle shed in the side yard and found some scrap two-by-fours (no longer than my hand) and a few only-slightly-bent nails. I bashed together a squarish thing that would float and secured the note to the outside of the wooden vessel with endless layers of clear tape.
From there I wandered down the long farm lane, past the apple tree I would fall out of the following year, past the garden and the tall, gangly stalks of sweet corn. I walked through the church parking lot, past the hide-and-seek cemetery, and then I slid down the bank to the field beside the stream.
I stared at that message in my hands and I wondered if it would hold up under the rigorous whitewater of the Pequea Creek. I wondered if I had put enough tape on it. I wondered who would find it, because in my mind that wasn’t even a question. Someone would find it. But who?
I threw that clunky block of wood into the swiftly moving current, and it floated away. Past the small dam we had built. Past the Amish schoolhouse. Down the long straightaway, around the bend, and out of my life forever. I turned and walked back up to the house, speechless with awe at a world where a little boy like me, barely nine years old, could send a message out into the world.
Twenty-seven years later, I’m still amazed.
* * * * *
It’s been almost a year since I last wrote a blog post here. It’s been a busy year, one I can’t wait to tell you about. It’s also been a silent year, in the best ways possible. A few people have asked me why I decided to start blogging again. Why am I returning to the blogosphere? The thought of coming back brings me a little anxiety, a little hesitation – one of the main reasons I stopped blogging was because I felt like I was standing in a crowd, screaming, trying to get as much attention as I could with whatever post would drive the most traffic. I hope I don’t go back to that place. I’ve never been much of a shouter.
While I don’t yet know how to articulate the various facets of why I’m blogging again, this story from my childhood came to mind. I guess I still feel like an eager little boy, nailing these clunky vessels together, hoping they will somehow carry a message – with all its ragged edges – downstream.