Tag Archives: America

For Love of America

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Over spring break a friend and I went on a road trip through the American midwest and my mom gave me a portable sundial to take along. This country has a huge number of paths and byways—roads and porches and on-ramps and off-ramps and faces peering through windows. It was nine days and eight nights of good weather and three different rental cars and many different friendly faces and nine different states. The first evening we ate a Hawaiian pizza off the hood of a flashy white Genesis in a parking lot in Atchison, Kansas, the origin point for the Santa Fe railroad line and stayed the night in Leavenworth, down the road from a clean, symmetrical Neoclassical federal prison. 

The next morning I sat on that Kansas balcony just past dawn and thought about spring—the cruel aching of its becoming. The day before we had seen fields and fields of purple where later in the year, wheat will grow. At first I thought it was clover, but a little research let me know that it was a lowly little weed called henbit. The midwest has been lodged somewhere beneath my breastbone since birth, but I’ve rarely—if ever—seen it in the springtime, so the unexpectedness of that constant purple in my periphery gave me fresh eyes for everything.

My main quiet goal of the Missouri day was to see the house that used to be my grandparents’ and to go by their graves. In my eagerness to get there, I kept trying to turn off of US-35 too early and having to embarrassingly reverse course. Everything looked like Highway F to me, like the road that would take me home, but eventually, as always happens, the right road was the right road. We saw the lake, which had risen all the way to the top of the spillway, and then we walked up to the cemetery on a hill.

Car trouble sent us out of our way to St Louis and we eventually crossed the Mississippi at eleven pm near Alton, Illinois, north of the city. The river was only a yawning black expanse at that hour, but we wound along beside it for a while anyway. And there was good morning light the next day at our AirBnB in the heartland of Illinois for writing and for filming (though I found myself baffled by the sundial, for the time being.)

And then Chicago was a quick succession of glassy, shining Navy Pier, families of Hasidic Jews lining up to ride the ferris wheel, turning in a lost iphone found mysteriously on the ground, and then Lou Malnati’s for dinner. The next morning I bathed in a family friend’s apartment in her deep, square bathtub with water the psychedelic color of ancient minerals. Chicago runs its roots deep.

At midday we left and drove up to Madison where my insides turned all to mush. That year I lived there was hard and I was unhappy, but the place itself—the people and Dunn’s Marsh and even the strange traffic patterns to merge onto the beltline—were all kind to me, soft when I was not always able to be. This was my first time back since I moved away, and I missed my client Bonnie who died in spring of 2023. She was Madison to me—she was its parks, its newspapers, its hospitals, its markets, its lakes—and now she is gone. The city itself misses her, even in spring.

The next morning we left before eight and drove north, slowly, through country, to a two-day-a-week mechanic and lawnmower shop and along two lane roads where Amish buggies occasionally rattled past us, then up further north of that, where most of the signs advertised upcoming shops with the simple statement, “CHEESE.”

The Upper Peninsula reaching out over Lake Michigan was grey and open and quiet, as if it knew it was April, but wasn’t ready to talk about it just yet. Shunted backward in time and season, we wandered on a beach in the chill. I flew for a moment on a metal swingset that sang shrilly in the wind and followed two geese out across the sandbar. Spring had arrived on other shores, full of blooms and thawing laughter, but not here, not yet. The only thing that place could do was trust the earth in its turning. That night we stayed in a warm cabin with a Mennonite family down the way. The garbage man waved to me in the morning.

Good Friday brought us to Detroit where my uncle’s tenant let us into his house and we loaded up my grandma’s big table from which I ate so many summer Sunday dinners growing up, and then I sat on the dining room floor and crumpled old Parade magazines to pack bubble glass into boxes. I wrote about Detroit here almost a decade ago and the city has sat up and stuck its chin out since I was there last. It’s dusted off its shoulders and smiled and you can feel it. I stayed in that evening, but Tze went into the city and made friends every which way—on parking decks and sidewalks and in restaurant kitchens. The next morning, Saturday, his friend and her husband walked us through the open air Eastern Market with its thick carpets of flowers laid out in plastic flats, waiting to be planted in earth.

At midday we drove down through the plains to Defiance, Ohio and Abby met us there to putter around a Goodwill. She and I looked for sparkling things, like shoes and dresses, and also for tops because I was running out of clothes. From there we headed straight on to my friend Laura’s family outside Cleveland, and when her six-year-old shrewdly asked me if this was our “first stop with kids” I realized that it sure enough was. So there were books to read aloud and treasure discovered in the backyard dirt pile to admire, because children bring spring in with them from the outdoors. 

And then came Easter Sunday morning, so we drove though idyllic green valleys, where the homes nodded politely to each other all interspersed with churches, to hear a sermon about John chapter twenty, when Mary doesn’t recognize her risen Lord until he speaks her name. He knows her, and through his knowing she knows him: “Rabboni!” she says. After cinnamon rolls and omelets and watching blonde children chase down plastic eggs we drove south through wavering, warming hills on roads nestled into their sides, and found the World’s Largest Cuckoo Clock in a very quiet Sunday town.

Our last night we stayed on Main Street in Charleston, West Virginia. At fifty thousand people, it’s the biggest city in an achingly mountainous and forested and impoverished state. The porches on those neighborhood blocks were full of people who glanced at us with quiet suspicion—girls still in their Easter dresses and boys lingering barefoot along the curbs and folks crouched on stoops and a big sign on a bedsheet that said, “Welcome Home, Old Man!”

On our last day, just south of Charleston, our route crossed New River Gorge again and again. It’s a huge, old seam in the earth’s crust that busted open so many eons ago and has managed, with time, to heal itself over with spit and sweat and gumption and growing things, into a great, green scar. As we wound down through the mountains of Virginia towards Greensboro, I thought of resurrection and again, of Christ stepping out of his tomb, and then, merely by speaking her name, calling Mary out of hers.

All these places we had passed through in this shaken, stubborn country I had been before, and yet seeing them in their states of spring—expecting and tender and face-up-to-the-light and Hopkins’ “dearest freshness deep down things”—I understood how much I did not know about hope.  I see it running in veins through the treetops and the concrete and the backs of people’s hands. There is a mystery that abides. We will not know, not really know, the glory of the resurrected Son until he calls us by name, face to face. Until then, like Mary, we usually only see a gardener and a garden. That will have to do for now.

In Defense of Confidence

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Two nights before I left Vancouver I sat on the beach with friends, and one of them posed a question: what did each of us feel absolutely confident in? What ability or sphere did we not worry about, did we firmly believe was a strength? It’s actually a weirdly vulnerable question to answer in front of others (because what if they think your confidence is misplaced?!?) but sitting on the sand, in the cradle of sea and mountain and city, we did it. I, perhaps embarrassingly, knew my answers immediately. I am confident that I can write, and I am confident that I can dress myself well.

Over the last couple of weeks, though, confidence has not been on my mind. I’ve felt bogged down. Since I’ve been at the cabin here at Tahoe I’ve been back at revising the novel, though it feels like more of a chore than it did before. I’ve wondered if shaping my life for the next year or so around the possibility of getting it published is foolish, if people are looking at me and thinking my confidence is misplaced, if there’s any room for me in the already over-saturated literary industry, if what I’m doing is more a game of chance than a game of talent. I’ve had conversations in the last few days with family and friends in which I’ve explained every bit of the issue, willing them to understand the Rubik’s cube of my anxieties, willing them to say the right thing, the magic words that will make me feel better. But no one has, and I’m beginning to think that this fear over the risks I’m taking is simply the Rubicon I have to cross at the moment, and solid ground will appear in the distance again if I’m patient. But still. I must ford it for now, and it’s unpleasant.

And then last night, after a good cleansing cry, the likes of which I hadn’t had in a long, long time, I found myself thinking back to one of my earliest moments of confidence in my writing. I was thirteen years old and after a science test I pulled out a small journal, while others slept or whispered or continued to struggle over multiple choice questions. I found a pencil and began to describe the scene around me and an immense wave of satisfaction washed over me, because the sentences I had written were clever—they were right. I’d done good. I’d want an audience very soon, but in that moment, even with my plain brown eyes and the awkward hands I was embarrassed of, I did not need anyone to tell me that I’d bundled real life into a few biting words on the page. I knew it for myself. No one, I was gloriously certain as I looked down at that yellow and brown notebook, could do what I had just done.

Writing looks much different now. I watch the world around me more humbly than I used to. I wait for revelation, for light. I gather pieces of it like pebbles to see if once I sit down with them, and hold them in my hand, I can scrabble up the words to do justice to their beauty and their oddity. In the past week, I have collected the glitter of sand in the water as it comes up to the lake shore in gentle waves, a young couple with dreads, looking as if they’ve been hitchhiking for days, sitting exhausted against the back of Whole Foods, two stellar’s jays with tall black crests, the evening light on the long row of old wine corks on the kitchen windowsill, and a man at Fallen Leaf Lake today, asleep in his golf cart on his property, feet propped up by the steering wheel.

But none of this would have been possible without that girl in the science classroom and her supreme sense of confidence over a fifty word journal entry scrawled in a pencil that needed sharpening. She was and is the one, more than any outside voice, who reminds me that yes, of course I can do something with all these tiny gifts, of course I can write. Why would I assume for a second that I couldn’t? Writing is joy.

But writing is different from publishing. And there I have no native confidence that an agent scanning with an eye for saleability will immediately see the value of what I am trying to do, no confidence that I can instinctively make the right decisions about where and how to settle for now, about how long to wait for a bite on the manuscript, about what job to take in the meantime, about which creature comforts to sacrifice and which to cling to. The route I’m taking seems ridiculous, untried, and uncertain.

And yet. Last night I guess I thought about my thirteen-year-old self a lot. Because I also for some reason remembered the time I wore denim-on-denim to play practice. After school I’d changed from my uniform with much deliberation into jeans and a pale denim jacket (which I’d always zip to the exact same point to make me look like I had a figure that I definitely didn’t—and still don’t—have). I can still see myself walking down the deck outside the modulars toward the drama room with my heart in my throat. I can’t entirely tell you why I wore it, even today. The outfit was a simultaneously conscious and nerve-wracking choice. Certainly no one else would be wearing anything like it. In fact, I wasn’t entirely sure if I liked something so matchy, if it looked good, and none of my friends were in the play so I’d have no safe camaraderie to run to once I arrived. I’d be on my own, looking unusual. But I knew that if I didn’t try, I’d never know—what if me walking into the room in shoulder-to-toe denim would be the most beautiful thing the world had ever seen? So, without consulting anyone, I chose confidence, because that was the only way further up and further in. Funnily, I don’t remember what happened when I did walk in. It must not have been very important.

So perhaps I learned everything I’ll ever need to know about confidence back in 2005. Even then, I knew that confidence was not so much ego as it was trust. It was utter trust in a gift, trust that it was not some cosmic mistake that something had fallen into my lap, but instead that Someone had placed it there on purpose and I ought to follow the urge in my gut to hold it up to the late afternoon light and laugh over it with words. And strangely enough, even back then I knew confidence had to admit an element of risk, a willingness to fail. I knew that the things which are the most good and the most beautiful and the most true all ultimately happen and become themselves in places where there is no cover from enemy fire—in open meadows and out on the western plains.

The Ties that Bind

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I flew back into Canada last Wednesday and since then I’ve been tucked up in a little AirBnB in Chilliwack for my two-week quarantine. I have a bed and a bathtub and a sink and a tiny desk and a hot plate and five windows and a pillow that says “cozy” on it.

It feels like my own little world, like it has no address, cannot be found on a map, as if I’ve fallen into a quiet crack in-between. The days here are mine to dispose of. I was, in all honesty, excited about these two weeks, and I don’t think I was wrong to be. I’ve been content.

And yet. Though I’m not lonely, though the days have gone by pretty fast, though I’m happy just looking at the stacks of books I brought with me to this nook in the middle of nowhere, I’ve never been more aware of my connections to others, to the people I love, to the places I love, to my family and my country.

As I’ve moved further into adulthood, gotten used to the idea that I’m a grown-up now, I’ve increasingly framed these relationships in terms of responsibility. I’ve spent plenty of time in recent months agonizing over the difference between responsibility to others and responsibility for them. I’ve worried over my choices, over the right and wrong of it all. At times the thing has seemed like a landmine.

But as I’ve sat on this well-comfortred bed and talked to friends on the phone and listened to rain on the roof and read softly powerful novels like News of the World and Remains of the Day, I’ve begun to suspect that all this introspective agonizing was time slightly misspent. Our connections to those around us are not choice, they are fact. We’re bound to each other, bound by threads which can seem gossamer, almost invisible, but are in reality stronger than anything. 

These threads tie us irrevocably to each other’s goodness, to each other’s badness, to each other’s peace, war, rejoicing, mourning, wisdom, foolishness. I have felt them this week. They exist in our families, in our communities, in our countries, and in our world, and I ignore their existence to my own detriment. Doing so means I will not get beyond cheap hope, brittle faith, shallow love. Ask not for whom the bell tolls seems like a hackneyed line to repeat at this point, but Donne was right and I need to hear it.

All my complicated inner dialogues trying to gauge my own responsibility in any given situation have in many ways been a method of avoidance, a narrative by which I have control, can mark for myself an escape hatch from the potential pain or intensity. If I frame the relationship in terms of my own responsibility, I convince myself I can enforce certain limits or sever ties that bind as if they never existed. 

Then rioters crawl over the walls of the U.S. Capitol building or a friend’s mother stops speaking to her or Stevens at last sits and talks to a stranger on the beach at the end of the novel, and though I lie on my bed in my postage-stamp room in the in-between, not having seen another embodied human face for days, I find that my escape tactics have been for nought. I am so bound to others that I ache.

I do not mean to say that my solitude has been anything but good for me, but that one of the ways it has been good is in reminding me how unshakeable these ties are, that being human means being born with strings attached, strings which can both carry and anchor me. This little room has given me much time to think about over the last few days.

Then this morning I logged on for Regent’s weekly chapel service, which has been on Zoom for nearly a year now, and within the first ten minutes or so my shell of quarantine-contentment crumbled. All the individual anxious faces on their pixelated screens, far from family, tired to begin yet another semester online, overwhelmed me. I logged off in the middle of “In Christ Alone” in protest of the sadness I felt. Then I sat in the gentleness of my pale yellow room with my half-drunk mug of tea and thought about things. And I logged back on. Not because I was responsible to, but because today I wanted to claim this grief, this place, this people to whom I am bound.

Storing Up Montana

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Last week was reading week and I went to Montana.

At five on a Sunday morning four of us piled into my silver Kia and drove down towards the border. I sat curled in the back with a blanket a dear friend gave me years ago. The sun rose. We stopped at diners and Walmarts, made arguably too many puns about Spokane and country music, and discussed the eerie beauty of distant crowds of white windmills scattered across sharp brown hills. We crossed range after range of mountains and we crossed the Columbia, which is so blue and so wide and shadowed by walls of crumpled red rock. I breathed in America.

The whole week had both a sense of home and away to it. There was an easiness in the proximity of the friends I was with. My friend Becky is staying in a big house in Missoula, so we filled in her extra bedrooms, and spread out our school work on various couches and tables and desks, positioning ourselves so that wherever we sat, we could see the sunny blanket of snow and mountain gazing back at us through the paned windows. We went out cross-country skiing for a couple days in the middle of the week, and stayed in a picturesque little cabin that night, but beyond that there were no real plans. In the evenings, we cooked big dinners, drank wine gradually, and sprawled ourselves on the enormous sectional couch of the house’s basement. As is often true when I’m in a group, I was nearly always the quietest, but for the first time in a long time, this didn’t make me feel self-conscious or left-behind. I realized I was sitting in the midst of real—if hard-won—contentment.

Often, both in my life while I was teaching and in my life at Regent, I have found myself shuttling back and forth at record speed between two modes of being: relational and informational overload, in which I am busy doing and being all things for all people, or, when I leave that for any extended period, total solitude, in which I enter entirely into the lively twists and turns of the world within my own head. These spaces are not bad in their own right, but neither are exactly peaceful. Yet this past week was something else entirely, a space I think I’ve rarely inhabited, and which is probably more healthy than we know. It had finite limits of people and time and place, but we were aware that what we had provided for ourselves, what our God had provided for us, was abundant and, more than that, good. The trip gained its own patterns and jokes and worn footprints of house and food and snow and car and we shambled along in them.

Also worth noting: while we were in Montana, I skied. (Just cross-country, don’t get excited.) Anyone who knows me knows that I essentially never try new things, especially not physical skills. I knew this was out of my ordinary and was surprised at myself for even being willing to try, but I didn’t think much more about it than that. And then we got there and I did it, and it was massively uncomfortable. I still have bruises because I am very, very good at falling down—it feels more natural to me to fall than to stay upright—but that’s not, as you may have guessed, the sort of discomfort I mean. I am not graceful in learning, I am not graceful in being taught, I am not graceful in growth. Yet despite some pretty public frustration, I did learn, I was taught, and perhaps I began to grow. At the very least another new hole was knocked in my crusty, defensive shell, and fresh winter air came rushing in.

And now, a week later, with a bit of distance and a bit of thought, I think that was pretty good progress. Eventually, sometime the second morning of skiing, the bright cold sun, the weight of the snow on pine boughs, and the rhythmic click of my boots fastened into my skis all took over and I forgot to fall so much. So that’s something to file away, something to save, something to settle back in the attic of my mind.

I’m grateful, is all. I’m grateful for a week for the seeing of things and the breathing of things. On Wednesday morning it was very cold and very sunny. I was walking back from the washrooms to our cabin with dirty hair in loud snow pants, and a little bit of snow sifted down from the trees just ahead of me. The air caught it like glitter and it shone like anything. I couldn’t stop smiling.