Tomorrow morning Kate will be running in Hood to Coast, at 197 miles the longest relay race in the world. More than 12,000 runners are expected to participate. Kate and her eleven teammates will start the race at Mt. Hood and end on the beach in Seaside. I don’t understand running, and I especially don’t understand running upwards of 20 miles in 36 hours. Undertaking this race is one of the craziest things Kate has ever done – but I am immensely proud of her.
Kate, I wish I could write an ode to your run, but W.H. Auden beat me to it again:
The camera’s eye
Does not lie
But it cannot show
The life within,
The life of a runner,
Of yours or mine,
That race which is neither
Fast nor slow,
For nothing can ever
Happen twice,
That story which moves
Like music when
Begotten notes
New notes beget
Making the flowing
Of time a growing
Till what it could be
At last it is,
Where Fate is Freedom,
Grace and Surprise.(from “Runner”)
I can’t wait to see you cross that finish line on Saturday.
Filed under: This Week in Listening, This Week in Watching | Tags: Dancing, Flight of the Conchords, Kate, Libby, Molly, YouTube
Sitting in Starbucks this morning I watched a man outside the window briefly dance his heart out with the little one year-old boy he was babysitting. It was dazzling: he was black and spoke with an accent I couldn’t place; the little boy was wide-eyed and red-headed. They stomped their feet and threw up their hands and laughed and had great fun, and all as cars whizzed by on NE Glisan and nosey coffee patrons started writing blog posts in their heads.
Libby posted a couple great dance videos on her blog yesterday, both set to “Lisztomania” by Phoenix. The first video, which you can watch below, is a Brat Pack mash-up. The second, which you can watch here, is an updated version by a group of friends calling themselves the Brooklyn Brat Pack.
And I suppose this post is as good an excuse as any to post a video of my favorite scene from “Flight of the Conchords.”
Now, dancing around the living room with Molly is one of the great joys of my life. She’s going through a pop phase. Her favorite song right now is “Lost+” (featuring Jay-Z) from the Coldplay EP “Prospekt’s March.” Her favorite line is from Jay-Z’s third verse:
So it’s tough being Bobby Brown
To be Bobby then, you have to be Bobby now
And the question is, is to have had and lost,
Better than not having at all?
Time was I could cut quite the rug. But I don’t dance in public anymore. The picture at the top of the post is from my trip to Malawi last year. At a party a couple weeks ago some of my friends tripped the light fantastic. Kate was in there mixing it up too – the party was for her. I stayed on the margins smoking the rare cigarette and watching with amusement.
Watching these videos, and then seeing the man and kid dance this morning outside my window, it occurred to me that I need one good dance party like a thirsty man needs water. My style of dancing involves some of this and some of this and a lot of this. Next time the conditions are right – that is to say, next time I am around friends who tolerate (or even encourage) this kind of foolishness – I hope I go for it.
Filed under: Food, Home | Tags: Agrarianism, Ellen F. Davis, Family, Food, Gardening, Health, Kate, Molly, The Bible
Some scholars find the poetic description in Proverbs 31:10-31 of the so-called “Proverbs 31 woman” demeaning to women. Joseph Blenkinsopp says the biblical passage is “the petit bourgeois portrait of the ideal wife…, or perhaps…an unattainable, male fantasy of the perfect spouse, who does her husband proud and brings up a clutch of perfectly adorable children while engaged in a daunting range of managerial tasks.” But I don’t think it’s the description in Proverbs that is demeaning; the problem is the ultra-conservative interpretation of it used so often by Christian men to enforce control in the home.
Ellen F. Davis, a professor of Bible and practical theology at Duke Divinity School, helped me see this. Davis has in her book “Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture” a great essay that profoundly reinterprets Proverbs 31 through an agrarian lens. Proverbs 31, writes Davis, set an ideal “before a whole people living on the edge of subsistence: women householders deprived of the benefit of adult male labor, perhaps for months; men conscripted for [military] service away from home.” The Proverbs 31 woman possesses an “intelligence bred through generations of work done in particular places, with particular materials, in response to concrete and immediate problems.” These practical skills are protective of the life of the community. They are also deeply subversive of the claims of the imperial economy, which dominated Israel in the post-exilic period and dominate our society today. Thus the “capable wife” of my conservative upbringing becomes the “valorous woman” (a more accurate translation) undermining empire and the economic status quo.
My own beloved embodies this tradition. “She plans a field and takes it; by the fruit of her palms she plants a vineyard.”
While Kate and Libby were away last week – Kate in Denver, Libby in L.A. – I spent some time with Molly in the garden. We’ve expanded the garden this year; it now extends along the entire western side of the house. We planted lettuce, broccoli, carrots, beets, radishes, cucumbers, tomatoes, peppers, and some other herbs and things I can’t remember because it’s getting late. We worked with our landlord to construct a pea trellis that is at least three times the size of last year. (We also moved the peas across the driveway. They were too close to the house last year. They were hard to reach and we think the heat radiating from the brick walls reduced the quality and quantity of the harvest.) The squash we planted in front, and we have twelve strawberry plants blossoming beneath the fir trees out back.
Walking with Molly through the garden, spraying her with the hose as I watered the plants, watching her smell all twenty marigolds and tweak the nose of the gargoyle our landlord installed in the garden for good luck, watching the peas wrap their tendrils around the trellis as if in real time – I thanked God for the sun and rain, the air and the wind and the bee. I sang with St. Francis, “Be praised, my Lord, through our sister Mother Earth, who feeds us and rules us, and produces various fruits with colored flowers and herbs.”
I thanked God also for Kate who helped transform concrete and Oregon clay into a prosperous patch of life. Kate has put the most time, energy, and creativity into the garden. Earlier this year she recycled an old bookshelf and an antique window to create a cold frame so we could prepare our own starters. She planted most of the garden while I was on a business trip. She is out there most every day weeding, watering, and some days I think just playing in the dirt like she is seven years old again and back on her parents’ Northern California homestead.
Kate is equipped with the skills of practical and sustainable living. (My talents are more cerebral and, let’s face it, less useful.) If we ever have a chance to escape urban life, Kate will really thrive. We’ll all thrive. When Kate was in the garden with Molly today, Molly reached out and picked a bunch of broccoli, which is just beginning to flower, and she ate it. Later in the evening, the three of us sat down to dinner, a salad made from lettuce that had been growing on the stalk just minutes before. Molly looked skeptically at the lettuce. We told her it was fresh from the garden. She ate it then and she loved it.
Filed under: Family | Tags: Garrison Keillor, Holidays, Kate, Molly, Mother's Day, Poetry, The Writer's Almanac, Wendell Berry
If Mother’s Day is a holiday created by the unholy trinity of the greeting card companies, florists, and multinational confectionary conglomerates, good for them. They have unwittingly used their powers for good. It is right for a man to set aside time (ideally more than once a year) to reflect on and respond to the great acts of love shown to him by his mother and by the mother of his child, and also to give his child some extra special attention, because she kind of made this day possible.
Later today, I hope to post something about Kate specifically. In the meantime, here is a poem by Wendell Berry entitled “To My Mother.” The poem was featured on yesterday’s episode of The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor.
To My Mother
I was your rebellious son,
do you remember? Sometimes
I wonder if you do remember,
so complete has your forgiveness been.So complete has your forgiveness been
I wonder sometimes if it did not
precede my wrong, and I erred,
safe found, within your love,prepared ahead of me, the way home,
or my bed at night, so that almost
I should forgive you, who perhaps
foresaw the worst that I might do,and forgave before I could act,
causing me to smile now, looking back,
to see how paltry was my worst,
compared to your forgiveness of italready given. And this, then,
is the vision of that Heaven of which
we have heard, where those who love
each other have forgiven each other,where, for that, the leaves are green,
the light a music in the air,
and all is unentangled,
and all is undismayed.
To make a life in Portland – that is, to settle in here, to give yourself over fully to the place – you have to submit to the weather. You have to make peace with the 222 cloudy days each year, and find a kind of pensive beauty in the nine months of rain. You must adapt to the rhythms and eccentricities of the weather, and learn that the rhythms of temperature and cloud-cover and precipitation are themselves eccentric – like the way the sun comes out at 3 p.m. nearly every day, but only for an hour.
These things are not easy to do. Business Week recently named Portland the “unhappiest city” in America due to its high rates of depression, divorce, and suicide (respectively ranked 1, 4, and 12 nationally). According to the magazine, the high levels of unhappiness are due at least in part to “lousy weather.”
I happen to love the weather here. As a kid, I was convinced that all great adventures begin in the rain. And so Portland awakens youthful dreams of thrilling deeds (mostly laid away in books), while satisfying my grown-up conception of rain as a metaphor for renewal (itself a great adventure) and serving as the set and soundtrack for my carefully-cultivated melancholy.
Kate, on the other hand, has a harder time of it. The rain and the clouds, the cold, hail, ice, and snowstorms are personal affronts against her. The lack of sunshine inflames her eczema (and Molly’s too). Raised in the Sierra Nevada foothills of Northern California, she grew up tromping through the forests; given a choice, she might prefer to live in a tent and cook over an open fire. The last 18 months have been especially gloomy in Portland, and Kate has been kept too much inside.
To thrive in Portland, you also learn that weather like we’ve had since last Sunday – sunny skies, temperatures fifteen degrees above average – is an absolute gift. I’ve spent the last few days riding my bike and walking, driving with the windows down, making the transition from jeans and hoodies to shorts, t-shirts, and flip-flops. Kate, who hurt her foot running last week, has been homebound, but she spends hours each day in the garden, or playing with Molly in the front yard, or reading on the lawn chair. The weather returns to normal tomorrow, with a twenty degree drop in temperature, clouds, and even rain on Thursday. But at this moment, this morning, the sunrise through my living room window is a revelation, and the sky is so blue it must be received like a blessing.
