Pervert on the Lam

My friend and I were five minutes into our walk when a blue pickup truck pulled off to the side of the road on my left. I was talking so I barely had time to realize what was happening. A guy got out of the truck and said, "Hey check this out." All that registered in my mind in those three to five seconds was that he had blonde hair, why the heck is he talking to us, and "Oh my gosh, what is he doing with his belt?!"

We kept walking, ignoring him, and Heather got out her phone and recorded the blue truck's license plate. I'm glad she was with me because I would have been too confused to even think about getting the license plate, and the idiot guy in the truck drove away before I could get a closer look at it.

We were angry and partially in shock. This had never happened to us before. "It was all hanging out there," she said as she tried to remember the phone number for the police station. Luckily I hadn't seen. Perhaps I have my poor prescription glasses to thank for that. I'll tell you one thing. I am never walking that way again, and I am never going to walk by myself if I can help it.

Materialism, Spirituality, and Jane Goodall

The other day at work, I wrote:

I’ve been thinking about money lately. How our lives, in a way, revolve around it. How it can either trap us or free us. How it seems we can’t do anything without it. We need money to eat, travel, buy the things we want. Sometimes I wish I wasn’t so dependent on money. I wish I could be like Jane Goodall and live among animals in the forest…

I think everyone feels like that from time to time. We want to escape this chaotic structure that doesn’t always seem to make sense. But even Jane had to leave the haven of her forest in Gombe, Africa to go back to England or to teach at Harvard, or as she did in her later years, face the harrowing long weeks where she traveled the world to advocate for animal rights.

If you couldn’t tell, I am nearly finished reading Jane Goodall’s memoir, A Reason for Hope, where she describes her early life, her passion for animals, and how she came to study chimpanzees in Africa, which became her life’s work. It is a good book, very thoughtful and thought-provoking, and in one of the last chapters, in almost perfect timing with my own thoughts, I thought I found an answer (or something close to it) to the Western materialism that invades our lives and, at times, seems to box us in.

Jane aims at where such materialism began. Growing up in England during World War II and witnessing the horrors of Nazi regime, she reflects that the luxuries we now take for granted, were simply unavailable back then. At that time, however, she learned the true value of food, clothing, shelter, and life itself. Often, they did not feel it was their right to own a bicycle, television, dishwasher or other amenities that so many people find necessary for daily life.

She writes, “Of course, I understood why those who had lived through war or economic disasters, and who had built for themselves a good life and a high standard of living, were rightly proud to be able to provide for their children those things which they themselves had not had. And why their children, inevitably, took those things for granted. It meant that new values and new expectations had crept into our societies along with new standards of living. Hence the materialistic and often greedy and selfish lifestyle of so many young people in the Western world, especially in the United States.”

She continues by wondering if such young people were content with such a lifestyle? This is where I fall in sometimes. I have so much, especially compared to many others in less developed countries, but sometimes I find myself wanting more and feeling unsatisfied. When this happens, when I get caught up in money worries, I find myself wishing I could disconnect from all of it, all the concerns for money and jobs and material things I think I need.

Jane says, “Often their behavior suggested that they felt something was missing from their world. Was it, perhaps, a craving for meaning in life which had led to the emergence of the hippies, the flower children of the late 1960s and early 1970s? Was that why so many young people of wealthy parents had left their families to seek new experiences? They had tried living in communes…experimented with drugs, traveled to India in search of gurus. Desperately, or so it seemed to me, they had sought to escape from the soul-numbing materialistic hedonism of their time.”

She also speaks of the newfound or growing interest in Native American cultures and their reverence for the Great Spirit, the Creator, which I have always admired. Sometimes, I find myself wondering what life would be like, what this world would be like, if we had stayed closer to the earth, not defiled nature and instead lived in harmony with it. Of course, I think these thoughts as I am sitting in a small office, facing a computer screen.

So what is the answer? How can we forego the materialistic tendencies of our culture and become in tune with the Great Spirit that is flowing through all life, through all animals, waters, trees, and even humans?

Jane transitions to focusing on our spirits to fill the void. Her insight makes sense and is a new way of understanding “love thy neighbor as thyself.” Afterall, how can we love ourselves and live up to the standards we set for ourselves? She says, “Suddenly it seemed clearer and I thought I understood. The “self” that we had to love was not our ego, not the everyday person who went around behaving thoughtlessly, selfishly, sometimes unkindly, but the flame of pure spirit that is in each and every one of us, that is part of the Creator…That which is loved, I realized, can grow. We had to learn to understand and love this Spirit within in order to find peace within. And only then could we reach out beyond the narrow prison of our own lives, seeking reunion with the Spiritual Power that we call God, or Allah, the Tao, Brahma, the Creator, or whatever our personal belief prescribes. Once we had attained that goal, our power to connect with others so that together we could create a better world, would be immeasurably greater.”

I know that is a lot to quote, but somehow, in the midst of all my worries and musings, those words encouraged me. It put my focus, not on money or materialism, but on the Creator and what money can do to help other people. There are so many good things I could discuss from Jane’s book, (which I may get to later) but for now, I’m going to stop right here.

in and out of the snow

Sometimes I just don't feel like thinking or writing in complete sentences. Today is one of those days. Actually, the past month has felt like that, which is why I've barely posted anything on here. Today, I'm just going to go with it.

Rolled out of bed at 7:20.
Coffee!!! I...need... coffee... to function these days.
Blizzard! Aarghhhh...
7:40. Hope I don't slide into a ditch, as I drive down a country road through blowing snow, one hand on the wheel, guzzling coffee simultaneously. Yes, risky, I know.
Arrive at school and feel a surprising wave of relief that I'm NOT covering for pre-school class today. And all the while I had told myself I didn't mind it...
2nd graders. Ten kids in class. One boy. Poor boy.
Awesome, I tell them to be quiet, and for the most part, they listen. (!)
Very well planned lesson plan.
Ahhh, this is so nice...I can sit by myself in the classroom while kids are at lunch. No more-"Prestin eat your peaches" or " "Sarah stop talking to Lucy and eat."
Let me emphasize once more: Ahhhhh.
Oh my gosh. No more "nap" time either. Ahhhhh.
1:00 Principal: "We're sending you home at 1:30 since you're from out of town and the snow is getting bad. Oh, and you'll still get paid full day."
Thank you proposed 18 inches of snow! Although, another hour and a half here wouldn't have killed me...
Thoughts on today's class: Helping girl to write vocab sentences. Vocab word: "able." Giving her ideas..."You could say, 'My mom is able to make me breakfast.' Does she make you breakfast?" "No. My mom is in jail." "Ohhh...Your dad?"
Later. Same girl. Lying on the floor, crying. Holding envelope of pictures. Her mom and her. Later, I found some letters that she had forgotten, laid out carefully on a table. All from her mom.
"Hello Princess! I am blowing you a kiss. Did you catch it? I miss you very much...Everything will be alright...We will be together again someday...You are a very smart and beautiful girl...I am so proud of you...Stay strong for me...Love, Mommy"
I make it home through the deep blowing snow.
They say 18 inches to fall from the sky.
For now, the roads, sidewalks, and backyards--a smooth, glistening white sea.
How deep, just looking at it, one cannot say.

Lazy Day Pizza

I made homemade pizza last night. I've been wanting to make it for a very long time, but I've been either too busy or too lazy. The recipe I used is actually called Lazy Day Wheat Pizza, and since it was a cold ice and snow day yesterday, I thought it would be the perfect time to finally cook it. I had a lot of fun making it too.

It was the pizza to trump all pizzas. Much better than the soggy stuff we got at Happy Joes the night before last, much more wholesome than anything from Pizza Hut or anywhere else. I told my sister over the phone that I was making pizza for supper and she groaned. "We just had pizza for lunch!" she said. But I was sure that mine would be much better than any cafeteria pizza. I know I will be making this much more often. Here is the recipe:



Pizza crust:
2 c. whole wheat flour
1 packet active yeast
3/4 tsp. salt
1 cup hot water
1 T oil
1 T honey

Pizza sauce:

1 15 oz can of tomato sauce
1 can of tomato paste
1/4 tsp. basil
1/2 tsp. oregano
1/4 tsp. garlic powder
1/8 tsp. pepper

Stir flour, yeast, and salt together. Add water, oil, and honey. Mix well. Cover and let rise for 30 minutes.

Remove from bowl and place dough on greased pizza pan. Spread dough out thin enough to cover bottom of pan and form an edge. Let rise in warm oven for 5 to 10 minutes with a towel placed over the crust. Remove from oven and spread with sauce, toppings, and cheese. Bake for 15 to 20 minutes at 425 degrees.

Enjoy!

And Nothing Was Simple There

Before I started reading A Moveable Feast I didn’t understand Ernest Hemingway. I didn’t care enough to understand him anyway. I didn’t get why everyone made such a big deal about him. Maybe its because the first contact I had with his writing was The Old Man and the Sea in high school where I was too impressionable back then, and although I didn’t complain, everyone else did about what a boring piece of writing they had to read. And so they didn’t. But I did, although I can’t remember if I tried to understand it or not, then.

I picked up A Moveable Feast because someone had made a reference to it in their book, and I wanted to know what they were talking about. It’s the kind of book that one can sit comfortably with, and I’ve made it a ritual to sit with it and a cup of tea in the morning to suddenly find myself in Paris or the Austrian mountains and for once see a clear picture of a person who writes because he has to, not for money which he probably couldn’t stand the thought of, but because it was in his blood. Because everything was a story to him and his best friends were pencil and paper so he could get it all down.

He had a funny way of looking at people, like he didn’t miss a thing and he noticed everything about them on the first meeting. I never really knew that first impressions meant anything until he described a person looking “marked for death” or how a man looked rather nasty, not evil, but nasty, and the way these first impressions made him perceive these people from then on. He always seemed to know what was going on and what people were talking about, even though they didn’t say it directly, and I also found that he had a great capacity for being a friend even if he didn’t enjoy being with a person all that much. On the other hand, he could be an angry, intolerant fiend if the right person came along to press his buttons.

He has a way of describing the every day and the mundane in a way that makes you care, and then at the end he’ll throw a twist in that makes you read the paragraph over to figure out the mystery of it that he won’t say flat out.

He is honest in every observation and thought and word.

“I knew I must write a novel…I would put it off though until I could not help doing it. I was damned if I would write one because it was what I should do if were to eat regularly. When I had to write, then it would be the only thing to do and there would be no choice. Let the pressure build. In the meantime, I would write a long story about whatever I knew best.”

“But Paris was a very old city and we were young and nothing was simple there, not even poverty, nor sudden money, nor the moonlight, nor right and wrong nor the breathing of someone who lay beside you in the moonlight.”

Ocean

Today is an ocean day. I could feel it when the sun glinted through the window and opened up the call of the ocean within me. The ocean has been calling me for some time. I realized yesterday that it has been calling me since I was eight years old and saw it for the first and only time. I stood on the rocky shore of Virginia with the wind against my face and hair and a hurricane brewing in the sky, and I was not afraid.

Every March or April when Spring is just around the bend and the wind blows in both warm and cool at the same time and the trees are bare but beautiful beneath the golden sky, this feeling comes. I can only describe it as an unexplained joy, the kind you feel for no reason at all. It makes you glad to be alive, fully aware of that moment and no other, when your blood is flowing healthfully through your veins and your nerves are conversing calmly with one another. I didn’t know it then, but it was the wind bringing the ocean to me in the only way it could.

That is how I feel in this instant. However, it is in the deep of winter, the cold is unrelenting, and I am inside so I can not feel any wind. But I can see the trees, and the clouds are silver and gold with bits of pale blue appearing gently above the horizon. And when the wind chimes ding softly, I am sure that it is an ocean day.

See-Through Curtains

Memories are foolish, the girl thought. Foolish like the curtains in her room that people on the outside could see through. The girl liked some memories, like when she was little and would ride her bike down the street without a care in the world. And the way she would play with the neighbor kids, but wouldn’t give one thought to whether they were weird or poor or too good for her.

Some memories the girl hated. Like her first kiss, and her first boyfriend (who didn’t give her that first kiss) or the way the halls of her high school made her feel small and unimportant. In some ways, moving back to her hometown felt like living inside a bad memory.

The girl loved and hated some memories at the same time, but in those instances, hate is a different form of love often mistaken for regret or a strange sadness. A man the girl loved had taken a part of her heart. Sometimes she wondered if she really loved him or if she loved the way he made her feel, and was there really a distinction between the two? The man was strong and smart and surprisingly sensitive. Perhaps the most surprising of all was that he looked twice when she walked by. Yes, that was the most unexplainable part.

When he looked at her, his eyes were pages that she could read volumes upon. At other times, his eyes flipped like a trick mirror. One instant, teasing and flippant, the next serious with desire. She saw the desire, and it both scared, confused, and pleased her all at once.

Foolish, really, she informed herself regularly so that she wouldn’t think of him anymore. It never would have worked. Him and me. The curtains lifted with the breeze coming through the window. The girl looked at them in irritation. It is time for new curtains, she thought. Ones dark as a wall this time. But she knew the curtains in her mind would keep letting certain uncomfortable memories through.