In the West I would undoubtedly have been a ‘writer of dark things’, the kind that sounds the horn of pessimism, predicts the end of Europe, the senselessness of human endeavour and of the whole evolution of our species. Here, in this intellectual and economic wreckage, I blow the trumpet of morality and the meaningfulness of our existence.
[Zygmunt Mycielski]

I told Jim I wanted to have some kind of regular family liturgy, an engagement with faith that went beyond praying at meals (which I am always the one to do, and my prayer is nearly always “Thank you for this food, and these people that I love.”). In response, Jim bought three copies of the Book of Common Prayer for the Armed Services, and we started trying to do morning and evening prayer, which petered out, although we haven’t given up. Then, a few weeks ago, he started reading the Bible to the girls. Not the Jesus Story Bible or a children’s comic — the only concession to their age is that it’s The Message.

The girls are obsessed. Even before Jim sits down to eat, Lucy carries the Bible from the shelf and hands it to him, begging “Daddy, read the Bible!” “Okay,” he says. “Can I eat first?” She slouches angrily. I attempt to give her a kid summary of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. She pauses her pestering until he finishes one carnitas taco, but when he begins assembling a second, she is outraged. “Daddy! You said you would read after you eat ONE BURRITO!”

If there are more than two names in a row, Naomi says “Daddy can you skip da names?” and if it’s a long list, he does, but he doesn’t skip anything else. He took a deep breath before Sodom and Gomorrah, and said, “Okay, so does it sound so far like people in the Bible are mostly making good choices?” “No,” Lucy answers, wide-eyed, shaking her head. “Yeah,” Jim agrees. “Can you say ‘uh-oh’?” “Uh-oh,” both girls say. He begins attempting to prepare them for this story and Lucy interrupts gently. “Daddy, can you not explain so much and let me listen and think and figure out the things myself? And then if I need help I will ask?”

Tonight, one sentence into Exodus, Naomi announces “DADDY! Did you know that JONAH — when he didn’t want to do what God said he swam away and said ‘No! I won’t!’ and God sent a fish to save him?” This is version 2.3 of the Jonah Summary. It always comes one sentence into whatever Jim reads, and sometimes recurs later. Yesterday’s was “DADDY! Did you know that God was busy working when Jonah ran away and then da fish ate him?”

This is Herbert. He lives in the Mariana Trench. He is grumpy not because he is under 16000 psi, but because it is too dark for anyone to see his fantastic colors. He is fluorescent orange and hot pink, with royal blue appendages.

as I walked by carrying laundry from Naomi’s most recent experiment taking off a poopy pull-up herself:

“You wanna be Sleeping Beauty?”
“Ya. Seeping Booty.”

[Lucy]: Mommy, tan I have a ice cube?
[Naomi]: Beez.
[Lucy]: Mommy, tan I have a ice cube pweez?
[Naomi, finger on lips]: Sssss.
[Both, with feeling]: NANANANANA BOO BOO!

Lucy is not quite three, and although she takes after Jim and me in the length department, she is nonetheless dwarfed by her bed now that she upgraded from her crib to the bottom bunk of her twin-sized double-decker bed. (The bunk bed is a statement of hope and purpose: Naomi and Lucy will, God willing, share a room for most or all of their childhood. For now, however, though she is sleeping six or seven hours at a stretch overnight, Naomi is still in her cosleeper bed in the middle of the king mattress in the master bedroom. We’ve demoted her from the top half of the bed to the bottom half, though, so we can hold hands again.)

Because Lucy needs only a tiny corner of her twin mattress to sleep, there is room for many things to be in bed with her. We tuck her in in the dark, and bed-making has not yet made it to onto the list of order-keeping tasks I’m trying to teach her. Her white blanket is oceanically large, full of capacious folds, and she requires only a small corner of it in order to stay warm. If we forget to unplug her light, she gets up after bedtime and tools around her room unsupervised. For all these reasons, it is easy to lose track of just how many objects she has magpied into her bed.

Aside from the usual (pillows, waterproof mattress protector, sheet, blanket), at last count, there were:

– Serus Fots (Serious Fox — she has four identical fox loveys. But over the course of many washings, this one’s fur has matted down over its stitched eyes and mouth in a way that (to Jim and me) looks not only serious, but enraged. Recently Lucy was in bed with one of the other foxes and demanded to sleep with Serus Fots, which my first introduction to the name and was so unexpected and so funny that I went and got him for her without remembering to make her say please.)
– Gray Bear (who used to be as tall as she was and is now only 2/3 her height)
– Winter Bear (from one of Pop-pop’s patients, a bear wearing warm clothing, including a cap with furry earflaps, and with “Belkin” stitched on his vest pocket)
– a hot pink Build-a-Bear from Gigi that plays a recording when she squeezes its paw: “Andrew! Charlie! Gigi! Popop!” in each person’s voice and then “Go Lucy Go! Go Lucy Go go go!” in everyone’s voices, which is a cheer invented for Lucy by Joelle, and was Lucy’s favorite thing to hear for the first year of her life. Its recording had begun to die, and I was going to give it up for lost, but Jim unstitched it and dug out the recording and replaced its not-meant-to-be-replaced battery, which made the recording work again. In the process he and Lucy found the bear’s heart, which Lucy promptly wanted to keep. Then she decided to let the bear have it after all, but once I had stitched up the bear again, she changed her mind and wanted the heart back. So I hand-stitched her a messy small consolation heart stuffed with tissue, from a leftover piece of the fabric my mom and I used to recover my dining room chairs in Durham.
– the dining room chair fabric consolation heart
– Dion (Lion; a lion cub from IKEA)
– Wabbits (two rabbits from IKEA, given by Upup to promote sharing, with the idea that guests can have one and Lucy the other, which has sometimes worked)
– Snoopy (from Jim’s childhood)
– Amy Tatze (Amy Cat, given to us by our Durham neighbor; this one is also called Duke Kitty by Jim for the Duke logo stitched on its rump)
– Awan Titty from Nit and Havwee (Other One Kitty from Nick and Havely, which is yellow, hand-crocheted, comes from Thailand, and has a tiny turquoise bell on a golden thread around its neck that is, amazingly, still attached)
– a green silicon puzzle cube with pieces connected by strings, from the Raleigh Children’s Museum, that Jim bought on his enthusiastic solo trip there (we never did make it with Lucy before moving to Oregon)
– numerous hair ties and clips (“twippies,” which we use whenever we are going to leave the house, to keep the growing-out portion of her bangs off to the side so that she does not look like Ronja the robber’s daughter; at bedtime I ask whether she wants me to take them out so they don’t get tangled and hurt her overnight. She usually says yes, and then when I do take them out, asks “Tan Ducy teep da twippies?” and wants me to give them back to her. I do, and gather the ones from previous evenings when she’s not looking.)
– all the books I have not discovered and confiscated (As of now, there is That’s Not My Kitten!, Bedtime for Frances, the Jesus Story Bible and The Pigeon Needs a Bath Book. If possible she would have every book we own.)
– a scrap of twisted green bubble wrap
– many scraps of a piece of orange tissue paper from one of her Christmas presents
– a translucent orange plastic koi that glows in rainbow colors when you put it in water
– a thick purple piece of rock climbing rope that is hard to bend (neither Jim nor I know how she got this, but I recognize it as one my mom bought a long time ago in Germany because I thought it was pretty)
– a soft, brand-new beach towel printed with bananas on a teal background, given to me by Becky, one of the Bananas, a group of college friends I saw for one evening this past summer on a two-week Mommy-Lucy tour of Minnesota to see friends from St. Olaf whom I hadn’t seen since we graduated
– a nearly-deflated helium balloon shaped like a bear dressed in Christmas clothing (someone promised her a helium balloon as a “yay, you have a little sister!” present, and it took us seven weeks to get out to a place that sold them)
– a full pink metallic heart helium balloon (part of her Christmas present from Auntie Che)
– a tiny string of LED Christmas lights (Jim found this tonight at bedtime and just explained to me that it is not, in the scheme of things, a very big electrical hazard; as he is enormously more cautious than I am and knows more about electrical engineering too, I am not going up right now to remove it)
– wearable reindeer antlers with a broken string of tiny lights
– a red wooden rabbit on wheels with floppy brown leather ears from my childhood
– a tiny red Jeep, the kind you pull back, and then it makes a clicking noise and when you let go, shoots across the floor
– a pair of blue water shoes
– one black slipper
– a two-month-old wrapper from an empty single-serve bag of plain M&Ms, which Lucy has carried with her as though it were pirate gold

This is my first feature in the Portland Monthly — really fun to have it come out right now (when I’m home waiting for baby #2 to make her appearance). It was fantastic working with them; their editorial team is thoughtful, conscientious, kind, creative, and makes changes that actually feel like they make my writing better.

Hawk Krall’s title illustration for the Portland Monthly Earthquake Preparedness Personality Test.

This is just a bitty article, but it’s published in a real live magazine that pays writers!

And thanks to the fantastic editorial staff, it includes a photo of Santa Claus in a plane from the 1930s.

mup/mupping/mig mup — jump, jumping, big jump
muptuck — dumptruck
eat-a-up — eat it up; I ate it up
big Bett — adult bed
teeny Bett — crib
Ohrs — Ohren (ears)
b-b-b-munny — how she practices the “b” at the beginning of “bunny”
munnybabbit — bunnyrabbit
dowel — Löffel (spoon)
beba — selber (myself)
Egga-murm! — Regenwurm! (earthworm; always an exclamative)
Hecky ah! — Heck yeah!
Oh my DOSH — Oh my gosh.
Dats BOL — That’s bold. (first full sentence, repeated after Lauren Greenspan, who was reporting that Will Flowers said it)
Mia — Thea
tocken — trocken (dry)
no all wet — dry; or I want this not to be wet anymore
nen — again
Ducy häv — Lucy have
Mama no häv — …
Ducy Abeit — Lucy work
Daddy Abeit — Daddy, go to work (go in the office)
Daddy out — Get Daddy out of his office

These are a throwback: a couple of years ago, I did commissioned calligraphy pieces for three sonnets that Malcolm Guite wrote as artist in residence at Duke Divinity School. One of the lovely things that happens to my email inbox occasionally is that someone will write, saying they saw them in the hallway outside Divinity Admissions, and enjoyed them.

The images are a little blurry, but I thought I’d post them anyhow. The sonnet for each piece is included below the image.

   

   

“He who has ears to hear let him hear”

How hard to hear the things I think I know,
To peel aside the thin familiar film
That wraps and seals your secret just below:
An undiscovered good, a hidden realm
A kingdom of reversal, where the poor
Are rich in blessing and the tragic rich
Still struggle, trapped in trappings at the door
They never opened, Life just out of reach…

Open the door for me and take me there.
Love, take my hand and lead me like the blind,
Unbandage me, unwrap me from my fear,
Open my eyes, my heart, my soul, my mind.
I struggle with these grave clothes, this dark earth,
But you are calling “Lazarus come forth!”

   
   

   

“I am the door of the sheepfold”

Not one that’s gently hinged or deftly hung,
Not like the ones you planed at Joseph’s place,
Not like the well-oiled openings that swung
So easily for Pilate’s practiced pace,
Not like the ones that closed in Mary’s face
From house to house in brimming Bethlehem,
Not like the one that no man may assail,
The dreadful curtain, the forbidding veil
That waits your breaking in Jerusalem.

Not one you made but one you have become:
Load-bearing, balancing, a weighted beam
To bridge the gap, to bring us within reach
Of your high pasture. Calling us by name,
You lay your body down across the breach,
Yourself the door that opens into home.

   
   

   

“Unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies…”

Oh let me fall as grain to the good earth
And die away from all dry separation,
Die to my sole self, and find new birth
Within that very death, a dark fruition,
Deep in this crowded underground, to learn
The earthy otherness of every other,
To know that nothing is achieved alone
But only where these other fallen gather.

If I bear fruit and break through to bright air,
Then fall upon me with your freeing flail
To shuck this husk and leave me sheer and clear
As heaven-handled Hopkins, that my fall
May be more fruitful and my autumn still
A golden evening where your barns are full.

I wrote a review! I like this book a lot. If you read scholarly books and/or you like Chesterton, it is well worth the time.