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This whole move from Leesburg, Virginia to Lancaster, Pennsylvania got me thinking a lot about life, and what my purpose is.  Our identity as a family, and my own as an individual, felt like it had been broken down to its most basic elements, and I felt like a kid staring at a pile of mismatched Legos, not sure where to begin. 

Seemingly out of no where I was reminded of something that had happened to us the summer before we moved.  And thinking back through this experience, I received a revelation about my own identity.

During the naming of our first three children we had navigated the same waters that every parent experiences when trying to name their child.  Selections that sound angelic to one parent remind the other of some childhood bully or bizarre family member, or that strange neighbor who used to pretend no one was home on Halloween. 

The process for our fourth was predictable:  I would pick a perfectly legitimate name and Maile would roll her eyes and groan and go on for twenty minutes about this girl in high school with the same name that drove her nuts.  Maile would suggest an adorable name but this sudden urge to throw up overcame me as I told her the story of this kid in the third grade who got sick and couldn’t make it to the bathroom. 

Eventually though, for our first three kids, we were able to agree.  When they came screaming into the world the nurse would make the first proclamation:

“It’s a boy!” she had said for our first baby, or “It’s a girl!” she shouted for babies two and three.

Then, after the craziness calmed down, usually the question would come up:

“Do you have a name picked out?”

We’d look at each other, feeling tossed about by emotions, as if we had just been lifted up in a hurricane and set back down on our feet, and then Maile would say the name we had agreed on, announcing it in a firm voice, daring the doctor or nurse or midwife to say something other than “I have been delivering babies for fifty years and that is the most unique, beautiful name I have ever heard.” 

But by the time we were on baby number four Maile was out of names and tired of the process.  We would lie in bed at night and I would ask the question.

“So, think of any names for this one?”

“Ugh, I don’t even want to talk about it.  It just stresses me out,” she’d say just before rolling over and groaning.

“But we have to pick a name.  You do know that, right?  They don’t just come out with nametags like Cabbage Patch Kids.”

“I know,” she said wistfully, as if that sounded like the best idea in the history of childbirth.

But I wanted to talk about names.  I love names and everything that goes along with them.  I thought it was a huge deal, time was passing, and I didn’t want one of our kids to be walking around the house without a name.  I imagined that if you didn’t name a child then pretty much anyone could call them whatever they wanted.

“Hey, you!”

“Hey, blonde-haired kid!”

“Hey, kid that looks like Maile!” (all of our children look just like their mother).

When Maile was about 6 months in, I could hear the tick-tock of time running out, so I asked her the question again.  As usual, it was late at night, and we were in bed.  She was surrounded by a wall of body pillows that helped her gain the optimum sleeping position for a woman with a growing stomach.

“Want to talk about names yet?”

Same response:  a groan of protest and a roll to the side so I couldn’t see her face.  Except this time, after her normal answer, she rolled back over, then sat up straight, emerging up and out from her pillows, a gleam in her eye.

“I’ve got an idea.”

Uh-oh, I thought.

“Why don’t you name this baby?” she said.

“What?”

* * * * *

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I led the way up Route 15.  The 26-foot UHaul I was driving felt like a lunar module bouncing and heaving on the road, and I could hear some of the contents creak and sway in the back.  The headlights threw a beam into the night, and I followed it north.

Then I remembered a quote that Anne Lamott uses in her book Bird By Bird.  It’s actually a quote by another writer, E. L. Doctorow, and it goes something like this:  “writing a novel is like driving a car at night.  You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”

I think something started to shift inside of me on that drive.  I began to realize (just a seed of understanding that had a lot of growing to do) that my perspective on this move would shape my entire life.  I could look at this event as a failure, a disaster, and our move as a sort of retreat from the battles of life . . . OR I could see it as an opportunity to try something that I always wanted to try, an opportunity to live out my identity.

I could try to make my living as a writer.  Maile and I could see this new direction in our life as a chance to scale back, simplify our lives, get rid of debt, get out of the cycle of materialism.  Why not use my limited amount of time on earth to do what I wanted to do!  I didn’t have to jump back on the ladder or the treadmill.  I didn’t have to go back to the grind – use whatever metaphor you want.  I didn’t have to try to use my life to create as much wealth as possible just so that I could live as comfortably as possible.

The more I thought about it, the more sense it made to me: I had spent ten years – TEN YEARS!!! – working as an employee or trying to run my own business, doing things I wasn’t passionate about, and where had it gotten me?  Stressed out, weighed down by debt, enslaved to the system.  If we’re not going to have any money, wouldn’t I at least rather be a writer? 

Anne Lamott’s father once wrote that “a life dedicated to leisure is, in the end, a life oriented to death, the greatest leisure of all.”  What was I dedicating my life to, apart from some pie-in-the-sky retirement when I would have enough money to do what I wanted to do?  Why not do it now?  Why not make it happen, work odd jobs if I had to?

Maile and I talked to each other on our cell phones almost the whole way to Lancaster, and the rain poured down.  We talked about how sad we were to be leaving, how strange it would be to live in Lancaster.  But we also talked about how exciting it would be for me to try to make it as a writer, how great it would be to live in a place so oriented around community and family.  I realized I never would have been able to do this without someone like Maile, someone who supported me and was up for an adventure, someone who didn’t care if we didn’t have loads of money for her to buy new clothes and have a nice vehicle and live in a huge place.  Someone who didn’t mind moving into my parent’s basement for an undetermined amount of time.

I started to see how God had blessed me with this opportunity.  Then I started to see how he blessed us with a business in Virginia that wasn’t doing well enough to support us.  He even blessed us with debt.  Did you know that bad things can be a blessing?  Because without both of these things, we would never have had the courage to make this choice.  He knew that, in this case, he almost had to make the choice an inevitable one for us, or we never would have left Virginia.

I kept driving.  The night was still dark.  God didn’t suddenly have someone call me and say they’d pay me $50,000 to write their book.  I didn’t have a miraculous email from a publisher offering me a 5-book, 6-figure deal. 

The sun didn’t miraculously rise at night.

But my headlights were still lighting up the road. 

And for that night, and that journey, it was enough.  We could make the whole trip that way.

* * * * *

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“Everything within takes place after Jack died and before my mom and I drowned in a burning ferry in the cool tannin-tinted Guaviare River, in East Central Colombia, with forty-two locals we hadn’t yet met.”

They say you can’t judge a book by it’s cover, but that’s not so with the book “You Shall Know Our Velocity” by Dave Eggers.  The first page literally is on the front cover, which isn’t a half bad idea, since I bought the book based on the fact that I read that first page and wanted to keep reading.

YSKOV is about a guy named Will and his friend Hand.  Their friend Jack was recently killed.  And Will inherits a bunch of money he doesn’t even want – it’s not that he has a lot of money.  He’s pretty much broke.  But he doesn’t want a lot of money.  So Will and Hand plan a trip around the world, using the money he’s recently inherited, and whatever money they don’t need for the trip, they’re going to give away to complete strangers.  Here’s an excerpt:

“(The airline tickets) cost $3,000 each, a number out of the reach of people like us under normal circumstances, in rational times, but I had gotten some money in a windfall kind of way, and had been both grateful and constantly confused by it.  And now I would get rid of it, or most of it, and believed purging would provide clarity, and that doing this in a quick global flurry would make it – I actually don’t know why we combined these two ideas . . .”

“This will be good,” said Hand.

“It will,” I said.

“How much are we getting rid of again?”

“I think $38,000.”

“Is that including the tickets?”

“Yeah.”

“So we’re actually giving away, what – $32,000?

“Something like that,” I said.

“How are you going to bring it? Cash?”
“Traveler’s checks.”

“And then we give it to who?”

“I don’t know yet.  I think it’ll be obvious when we get there.”

I’ll warn you – if you don’t like the f-word appearing in print in the books you read, this isn’t the book for you.  But I really enjoyed following these two guys around the world, watching them deal with this dilemma of ridding themselves of $32,000.  In traveler’s checks.  And the way they are grieving over the recent death of their friend Jack is poignant and insightful.

I’m also fascinated with the author, Dave Eggers.  He brought us “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius,” the story of how he took care of his younger brother after their parents died.  And recently he wrote a book in my top ten, “What is the What,” the story of the boy-soldiers in the Sudan. 

If you want to read something a little different, pretty quirky, and very raw, “You Shall Know Our Velocity” might just be your next read.

Sort of like the beginning to all of those great mystery stories . . . it was a dark and stormy night. 

The moving truck was packed.  Maile was out in our mini-van, parked on the street and pointed in the right direction.  The van she was driving, like the moving truck, was stuffed – it looked like the migrant workers’ vehicles from Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, loaded down with food and suitcases and mattresses hanging over the side (minus the dead grandparent in the back). 

We had to shoehorn the four kids into their booster and baby seats.  The rain started to pour down, and the night seemed very, very dark.  Maile’s parents were parked behind her, their headlights illuminating the street, their windshield wipers fighting off the weather.

I waved at Mai to wait and ran back through the garage and into the house.  My wet shoes slipped and screeched on the hardwoods.  The stillness in the house seemed surprised at my entrance.  I walked up through the empty floors – the home to which we had brought Abra and Sam after they were born.  Lucy’s favorite hide-and-seek spot was in that top bedroom closet.  Cade’s first bus stop was just up the road.

What was God trying to do with our lives?  Why had he brought us to Virginia – was it just to straddle us with more financial debt, only to bring us new friends and then uproot us once again?  Why had he, with such seeming felicity, helped us buy this house, only to put us in a position where we had to give it back? 

I just didn’t have the answers.  I locked the front door, put all the keys on the kitchen island, and walked out through the garage, the door coming down behind me. 

It was true what Tolkien wrote in one of his books – adventures seem wonderful in the daylight, when the weather is good for hiking and the wind is at your back.  But at night, when it’s cold and it starts to rain, memories of sitting in your warm house beside the fire can make you homesick.

I climbed up up up into that huge moving van and turned the ignition as the beams of light from the closing garage slid down on to the wet street.  The deisel monster grumbled to life.  We hit the road, and soon we were cruising north on Route 15, roaring towards our new existence. 

Our new adventure.

***

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Now, as promised, Tuesday’s Top Ten:

(drumroll please)

Top Ten Breakfast Cereals

10) Chocolate Chip Wheatabix – unless you’ve lived overseas you’ve probably never heard of this flaky, honey-flavored cereal with real chocolate chips in it.  I don’t know that I ever even took the time to pour them in a bowl and add milk – it was pretty much straight from the box into my laughing-gear.  Go to Trader Joe’s and buy a box.  You’re life will never be the same.

9) Fruity Pebbles – my wife’s favorite cereal.  My 9^th favorite cereal.  We all know who is right.

8)  Cookie Crisp – smaller-than-bitesized cookies floating around in milk?  Are you kidding me?

7) Corn Chex – one of two non-sugar cereals that cracked my top ten.  If you’re looking for corn-flavored crunch, it can’t be beat (and the criss-cross pattern really does lock out milk moisture)

6) Cinnamon Toast Crunch – cinnamon.  cinnamon.  cinnamon.

5) Cheerios – for those of you who know me, you’ll be very surprised that a non-sugar cereal made it into the top five.  I actually considered the case for Cheerios being number one, as I’ve probably consumed more individual Cheerios than any other food on the planet . . . COMBINED.  My mother used to tell me that I was going to turn into a Cheerio.  I didn’t.  Sorry mom.  But I still love Cheerios.

4) Cocoa Puffs – should be illegal as a breakfast cereal, because it’s so good, and so chocolatey.  It’s kind of like eating a Hershey’s Bar for breakfast.  But eating chocolatey goodness for breakfast is not illegal, so it’s number four on my list.  WARNING: high sugar and caffiene content – do not serve to small children anytime after 5:00pm.

3) Apple Jacks – talk about deceptive.  There is nothing Apple about this.  More appropriate names would have been Sugar Jacks or Radioactively Orange Jacks or So-Good-You’ll-Eat-The-Box-In-One-Sitting Jacks

2) Fruit Loops – once again, notice the deception in my top three:  first apples, now a reference to fruit.  Really it’s just pure sugar.

1) Lucky Charms – you just can’t beat a cereal with marshmallows.  You especially can’t beat a cereal when the marshmallow to cereal ratio is 2:1.

Honorable Mentions – Frosted Flakes (awesome while they’re crunchy, which lasts about 10 seconds); Captain Krunch Berries; Trix (before they changed the recipe); Frosted Mini-Wheats

So what favorite cereals did I forget?

Most days in life seem to simply pass.  Wake up, shower, breakfast, work, lunch, home, dinner, kids to bed, read, light out, fall sleep.  Most days come and go and leave only a subtle trace that they have been, and gone, like kids walking across the top of a hard snow drift.

But there are handfuls of days which we will not forget, days when our feet fall through and leave deep craters, days which somehow manage to steer the course of those that follow. 

September 4^th, 2009 was one of those days.

My painting business was struggling.  All year Maile and I had spoken in hushed tones about worst-case scenarios, what it meant, where we were headed.  But on that Friday we suddenly realized we could not pay some huge marketing bills that were closing in.  Our mortgage payment was due.  And while we could pay the things we had to pay (cash flow is not a problem for most painting businesses in September), a huge mound of debt was rising up in the background, it’s shadow falling down all around us.

“Do you think we should move in with your parents?” Maile asked me, eyes filling with tears, not because my parents would be terrible to live with, and not because their basement is a dungeoun filled with devices of torture.  She was sad because we were comfortable in the life we had created, and it would be difficult to leave. 

Whew.  These are the days we do not forget.

Then, two months later, another day.  Another falling through.

I backed the moving truck up to our townhouse’s garage.  It was so large that it swayed precariously as the large tires bounced up over the curb.  I walked around behind it and let down the ramp.  It grated like fingernails on a chalkboard. 

I stared into that empty truck.  Our friends would be arriving soon, folks we had grown very close to during the previous four years:  folks from our small group, my friends, Maile’s mommy friends.  And they would help us load our life into a truck, and we would drive away.

Just then my two oldest kids ran out through the garage, up the ramp and into the huge expanse of loading truck.  They ooooh’d and aaaaah’d over the sheer size of it.  They jumped up and down on the wheel wells, making it sway back and forth.  They laughed as they shouted their names deep into its recesses, and their voices came richocheting back.

“Lucy!”  LUCY, Lucy, lucy . . .

“Cade!”  CADE, Cade, cade . . .

And then I saw.  They didn’t have a real worry in the world – this was an exciting trip back to the place where their daddy grew up, back to where lots of their cousins lived and there were farms and cows and snow in the winter.  Back to where their Mimi and Papa Smucker lived.  Plus, their Mimi and Grampa Silva were there with us, in person, helping with the move. 

They had absolute trust that I would provide shelter for them, and food, and anything else that they needed. 

They were excited, because even they, at 6 and 4 years old, could tell that we were about to embark on our greatest adventure yet.  I didn’t see it then, but, looking back, something makes perfect sense to me.  I understand a little better what Jesus said about children:

“The Kingdom of Heaven belongs to such as these”

***

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