Places we have been: A photo retrospective of the summer

Last Thursday my kids started school. More about that eventually. During the hours in which they were learning their teachers' and classmates' names and rules, I uploaded photos and then spent in inordinate amount of time organizing them.  Then I misused Facebook by posting too many at once to share with the siblings and cousins.

But I still have more to share!

So I'm posting an incomplete photo essay of our summer. As I organize photos and think about getting on Shutterfly to make a photobook, I realize there are a lot of holes in the story I'm attempting to tell through photojournalism. For instance, I'm a little sorry I didn't take any pictures of the little apartment we lived in for our first month in California. That will be a chapter in our family history we won't forget. I'm not posting many photos from our week in Oklahoma City with my husband's family because they all have people in them, and I'm not sure the aunts and uncles want their kids on my blog.  And perhaps I should have taken pictures of our moving in. But the kids don't do cute things with boxes anymore because they are too big. (Although they did use a box for a spray paint protector not too long ago.)  I don't think about the photo album when I'm taking the photos.  Maybe in the future, I will be more forward thinking. Or not.

Without more ado, here are some mostly people-less shots I didn't post on Facebook.

The sunset at the last party at Gabgab in Guam. This was our favorite
place to gather and swim and snorkel. The roped off area designated
a safe place for the kids to swim, the currents weren't strong, the reef
was always colorful and turtles and sharks lurked near the drop-off. When
you talk to people who lived in Guam 10, 20 or even 30 years ago, they
mention swimming at Gabgab.

Goodbye, NBG. How many times a day did I pass through the gate?
It's funny how something that seems so irritating the first few months
becomes something you feel nostalgic about later.

From Guam we flew to LA and then on to Indiana to see the fam on the farm. I never tire of admiring the ever changing beauty of my home state, especially the rural area where my parents live, even though I was so anxious to leave it as a teenager. Have I told the story about how I wanted to go out of state to a big city college but my parents STRONGLY encouraged me to apply to one in-state school, which is where I ended up attending? The irony: I married a young man obligated to serve the Navy for at least five years and here we are 17 years later still living the Navy vagabond life. I have loved every place we have lived, but I still feel like I am coming home when we drive past cornfields.

I've always thought this was wild phlox, but the four petals mean it
is actually Dame's Rocket.

The fruit of a tree perhaps planted by Johnny Appleseed, who
traversed the midwest. Now my parents have a slowly maturing
apple orchard with multiple varieties just beginning to ripen.

The girls

The mock orange, one time favorite of spring brides, was in glorious bloom in early June.

The rickety playfort was finally burned down out of safety concerns.

My mom's pretty front porch

A hike to Clifty Falls. Love the spring woods. Not so in love with
many warning signs to stay on the trail, something we didn't miss in Guam.

 
We took 31 people, most of them under 4 feet tall, to the restaurant at the top of this building for my in-laws' fiftieth wedding anniversary: A grand celebration of life, love, and family.

The drive across West Texas. Long and lonely.

The mesa of Arizona

Crossing the Colorado River. Maybe one day we'll detour to the Hoover Dam, miracle of modern engineering.

Not what the Joads saw upon arriving.

The one shot of the poor dog having to live on the hotel porch.

A family portrait following the change of command ceremony

My husband's in a museum.

The seal for my husband's command. I like that it is a book.

An early trip to the California beach. The grey skies are a byproduct of the marine layer that hovers for months here.

Checking out the sites of our new home.

I hope this is just the first of many visits to the missions of Saint Junipero Serra.
My fourth grader will be learning the history of California and will have to make a model mission.
I hope to learn along with him. 

This was the day I took my kids to the county fair and refused to spend
any money on food or rides. Torture or training in discipline? We went
to see the animals and the 4-H displays.

Who cares about elephant ears when you can watch piglets nursing?
The runt on the left was the crowd pleaser, although his crying was pitiful.

My old hobby: a shortlived 4-H career showing rabbits.

Lavender, rosemary and white sage, I think, in my front garden.

The 7 yr old decided she'd rather use her car seat as a garden chair than as a safety device.

Fresh squeezed OJ in its potential form. These oranges
are almost too juicy to eat but make great juice.

The lemon tree - a somewhat sweet variety. Or I'm picking them too late.
When I made lemon bars they tasted much less tart.

Still waiting to make guacamole. These guys haven't ripened up yet.

Good morning, California

Can you see the dolphins?

Harbor seals basking near where we camped one night.

Ice plant.

Kids acting like seals

Our campground.

Taking lots of sunset pictures to remind myself that it is beautiful here, too.
Still in that awkward outsider phase. Need another four or five months before
we start feeling at home.

A visit with friends to an LA science museum.

In the tornado tube.

The kids were excited to see the Hollywood sign, barely visible to the left of the exit sign.

Walking the foggy beach near sunset.

I think the cat got the bird.

My 2 cents

The moment to jump into the conversation about the immorality of pants has come and gone, but can I still add a p.s. to the discussion? I know I can’t come close to being as funny as Mrs. Fischer or the Darwins or my sister, but I keep replaying the argument (and I guess Mrs. F did too, because she wrote 3 entries...). So now I want to say something even though while I was busy doing other things everyone else got over it.


When I first encountered the pants vs. skirts debate several years ago, I knew you weren’t supposed to wear shorts to churches in Rome, or clothes that revealed your underwear, and on Sundays you tried to dress your best, but who thought about clothes as a moral issue? My mother let us wear tube tops and tube socks. I ran around in short shorts and singlets in high school and college because that’s what runners wear, like swimmers wear swimsuits and ballerinas wear leotards.


Although for a short time I was into wearing clothes as an identity statement, I was never as fashion conscious as my sister Betty.  I had to be reminded to brush my hair and at least to try to match my shirts and socks. And I needed help with my makeup. But I did join my sister in pouring over Vogue magazine, mostly looking for good models to draw rather than clothes to wear. I don’t remember being shocked by it; it was Seventeen magazine that was scandalous for its tutorials on French kissing and how to get the boy from math class to notice you.

Last spring when my mom and sister came to visit, they toted recent issue of Vogue; I took my turn browsing it, too. When my mom held up a photo of two lightly clad femmes on the beach with their arms draping over each other, she held it up and said “Isn’t this awful?” but I had seen the same photo and thought, “Oh, look, looks like me and Betty almost!”

But back to the story: a few years ago, a friend gave me a copy of Dressing With Dignity. The author, Colleen Hammond, makes a powerful argument for skirts, but all I could think was, “She’s from TEXAS! She never has to wear panty hose or tights!” I had recently moved from the north of Chicago hinterlands where I had suffered every Sunday from September to May about what to wear to Church. I like wearing skirts, but tights are like ancient torture devices. But we had moved to Virginia, so I bought a few skirts and practiced wearing them during the week. I felt pretty and flirty and impractical. Wrong effect.

Shortly thereafter, on a camping trip with some different friends who knew the book, we had a great conversation around the fire. Vogue got slammed by the blog criticizing professor, but his sister-in-law, 7 months pregnant and looking fabulous clad in a long black belly hugging dress – too fabulous for a campout – made the great point that the way you dress is something of a calling. Some people are called to live in the world, while others are called to be more withdrawn, more contemplative, even if they aren’t called to the religious life. They have their own domestic monasteries. And for them long skirts are appropriate. But for most of us, dressing according to cultural norms is no moral issue. If we were African natives of a certain tribe, we’d go topless. If we were Muslim, we’d wear Burqhas; if we were Inuit, we’d wear parkas. But since we are Americans, pants are acceptable tribal wear.

That said, modesty is a real issue, and wearing clothes that let your muffin belly hang out or show your undergarments is immodest and just plain unattractive. And to a certain extent modesty depends on where you live and your body shape. I let my little girls wear sleeveless sundresses to church because they look cute and don't have hairy armpits. I wear v-neck shirts without feeling immodest because even four finger-widths below my neckbone you’re not going to encounter any cleavage. Someone else might need a different shirt. It’s one thing to dress nicely, and it’s another to dress like you’re working in Vegas.


But all that history and reasoning weren’t really what I wanted to say. What I meant to get around to is a thought project I’ve toyed with before, and that’s the issue of how much time and attention and resources should we give to fashion anyway. Unlike my mother, I don’t like to spend hours shopping and when I do, I get frustrated and irritable (although I’m happy enough to waste time on the computer). Having an attractive home fits into this topic, too: I’m tempted to spend more money on home décor than fashion, so I’ve thought about the argument in terms of how to make a house look pretty and homey while being fiscally prudent and without getting obsessed about the house and the stuff so that you walk around yelling at the kids when they touch it. How much time and money can you invest in looking pretty or having pretty things before they become distraction? How detached should we be from material beauty?


I think you could make the argument that the desire to be attractive and to have attractive things is, to a certain extent, a theological issue. Beautiful things make us happy, they lift our spirits and hearts, and can lead us toward praise of God, if we’re disciplined enough to not turn the objects into the ends.



And then there is the issue of intent. If you don’t intend to attract a lover or make the other ladies glower with envy over your fine figure and stylish life, but rather just want to look tidy or professional or like a person someone else would like to be friends with or you just feel innately attracted to that particular sweater or whatever, and someone else looks at you with lust, that’s their sin. Calling pants immoral is a little like demonizing alcohol. Certainly, alcohol can be used improperly, but the sin is in the user not the object. I had a friend whose church not only forbid the ladies to wear pants and make-up to church, but it also refused to have musical instruments in their service because they believed the Bible instructed us to praise with the voice. (They weren’t supposed to dance or watch movies like Footloose, either.) And of course there were no statues or stained glass in their little brick building. But those objects are supposed to lead our thoughts to God, both in their content and in their form.



Anyway, it’s a fun topic to debate because when you come down to it, there’s no formulaic answer to the question of what constitutes modest wear, or what amount of money is too much to spend on adornments, or what will provoke admiration and pleasure versus what will provoke envy and lust. The human heart is too gloriously various.

Youth Serum

There is nothing for shaving 20 years off your age like sharing a bed with your sister. I finally had someone to put my ice cold feet on. Last night my visiting sister and I lay in my bed and whispered and giggled like we used to when we were afraid our mother would rap on the wall and tell us to quiet down. And maybe in the back of my mind, the little girl me was half afraid her half-awake mother, hair tousled into horns by sleep, was going to appear at the doorway and demand what in the world we were thinking. But we kept talking anyway until we became incoherent.



My sister and I look like two different sides of the family. If we were going to the Oscars, I would wear one of those simple, sleek column gowns like Gwyneth Paltrow. She’d wear something with a little décolleté and feminine curves like Kate Winslet. But we often think alike: while flipping through one of her fashion magazines while we were talking with my mom, who came along to visit too, I paused at an ad that showed two bronzed beauties in expensive clothes at the beach with their arms draped over each other, one looking directly at the camera, the other staring off into the horizon. “Look, it’s you and me!” I said.



She laughed. Apparently on the drive down here, my mom was looking at the same magazine and held up that ad with a disgusted, “Look at this.” And my sister said, “It looks like me and Emily.” Of course, the magazine is trying to suggest the eroticism that my mom picked up on, not sisterly love, although the two models do look alike. And if my sister and I hung around the beach like that, I’m sure we would get some stares because we don’t look alike. But we have often lamented that the sisters in Jane Austen’s day were allowed to be much more affectionate without suspicion.



Not that suspicion has deterred my sister from harassing me with irritating shoulder squeezes. She does not mind attracting attention. But then she has always been the beauty and I the brains in our sisterly partnership. (Not that she’s not brilliant, too, of course.) As teenagers, she read fashion magazines, and I read our grandfather’s scholarly magazines. Two nights ago we stayed up late detailing some of our differences: she’s afraid of getting old and ugly; I’m afraid of getting old and senile. And our mother, who is the most youthful mother of 30somethings I know, assured us we were both wonderful. But, motherly affirmations aside, we shared our struggles with coming to terms with being nearly middle-aged and having such a long way to go in our spiritual lives, although we are happy to point out each other’s root sins.



This visit is going to be a short one. We are off to New Orleans today, with two carloads of children in tow, so we are going to eat beignets and window shop in the French Quarter, peek into churches and then play at the park. Meanwhile, my sister and I are plotting our return to the fabled city on Thursday, if we can figure out the logistics of leaving our mother with the 11 cousins, so that we can sit in on the Tennessee Williams Literary Festival and learn the failproof method of writing a novel in six months.  If we had planned ahead at all, she should have used one of her free vouchers to fly down here just for that.

Footnotes

Sometimes in footnotes you find things like this:

From H. Urs von Balthasar, Herrlichkeit: Eine theologishe Ästhetik, I: Schau der Gestalt, 1961:

"Beauty is the word that shall be our first. Beauty is the last thing which the thinking intellect dares to approach, since only it dances as an uncontained splendour around the double constellation of the true and the good and their inseparable relation to one another. Beauty is the disinterested one, without which the ancient world refused to understand itself, a word which both imperceptibly and yet unmistakably has bid farewell to our new world, a world of interests, leaving it to its own avarice and sadness. No longer loved or fostered by religion, beauty is lifted from its face as a mask, and its absence exposes features on that face which threaten to become incomprehensible to man. … We can be sure that whoever sneers at her name as if she were the ornament of a bourgeois past—whether he admits it or not—can no longer pray and soon will no longer be able to love. … In a world without beauty—even if people cannot dispense with the word and constantly have it on the tip of their tongues in order to abuse it—in a world which is perhaps not wholly without beauty, but which can no longer see it or reckon with it: in such a world the good also loses its attractiveness, the self-evidence of why it must be carried out. … In a world that no longer has enough confidence in itself to affirm the beautiful, the proofs of the truth have lost their cogency."

English translation taken from The Glory of the Lord, A Theological Aesthetics, I. Seeing the Form,Edinburgh 1982, pp. 18-19.

This is a footnote to the 2009 document by the Pontifical Council for Culture, Via Pulchritudinis, Privileged Pathway for Evangelization and Dialogue. I can't remember who recommended this, but thank you.

Visiting New Orleans

I’d like to say we did something Monday to celebrate the life of Dr. Martin Luther King. And in a way, perhaps we did: we visited New Orleans for the first time, site of a once flourishing slave trade, but also of prosperous free people of color - gens de couleur libres they said in Louisiana. We actually didn’t visit any relevant sites, but we did see the baptistery where slave and free were all baptized since the mid 1700’s at the old Basilica of St. Louis. I wonder if babies baptized in such an old font have a special connection to the communion of saints?

We went as a day trip, a short drive under 2 hours, but we felt like we were stepping onto another continent as we drove down the streets of the French Quarter before pulling into a cramped parking garage that seemed identical to one where we parked in Spain two years ago. A stark contrast to the drive through the desert of urban blight on the eastern outskirts of the city. Remnants of Katrina’s destruction still linger.


I suppose everyone who has been to the city has been transported in a similar way. The narrow streets, the tiles on the walls, the wrought iron balconies and columns on the buildings all make you feel you’ve crossed the Atlantic. We peeked into an old hotel that had once been a convent, the doorman telling us to check out the ballroom. The kids tramped up the curving staircase in their jeans and tennis shoes, but surely weren’t we all in our finest under the crystal chandeliers? Peeking out the shuttered balcony, we could see across the street evidence that this wasn’t all maintained as a tourist destination. Someone actually lived in those garrets…not Sara Crewe, but someone with raggedy curtains and a window air conditioner. Had to be hot, even malarial, in the summer.

Gearing up for Mardi Gras

After consuming beignets and café au lait, we spent the morning walking up and down the streets. Watched the fortune tellers set up in front of the basilica, peeked in shops, hunted out the little building that now houses Faulkner House Books, which about hundred years ago, once housed William Faulkner and a friend while Faulkner wrote his first book, Soldiers’ Pay. It’s a narrow little building, and you can only enter the front room and part of a hallway, which are now lined floor to ceiling with book cases. The hallway houses faded first editions of Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor, Tennessee Williams, Walker Percy, Robert Penn Warren. Look but don’t touch. Even though the space was tiny, hours could easily have been whiled away browsing.

Faulkner House Books

            With the fortune tellers in front of St. Louis

Same thing with the many antique stores. We stopped to stare in one that had elephant leg stools, and noticed a beautiful wooden pieta, paint flecking off, on a pedestal surrounded by other statuary. I went inside to peek at the tag to see how old and how much: 1550s, $95,000.

I wonder who will buy that. A church? A collector? Someone who just wants something pretty in their house? What cost beauty?

Too often I’m too cheap to buy pretty things. A house with 6 kids is not a place for 500 year old statues, even if I had a spare hundred thousand. But I wonder if I lived somewhere like the French Quarter, a place that begged for décor, if I’d spend more time and money trying to make my home as pretty on the inside as it is on the outside. Interior decorating is not one of my talents, but every once in a while I see something that would look nice in our house. I’m not one to buy something that we don’t need, except books - and ice cream – but I wonder sometimes if I shouldn’t be more generous with beauty. I’m grateful when someone else was, in these churches and parks and buildings of New Orleans.

Basilica of St. Louis