2011

I've had a word rumbling

around in my head the last few days.

Telos.

It is a Greek word I learned in seminary.

It means END-

but not just end like tonight is the end of another year and tomorrow we start all over again.

Rather, it is an end with a purpose. It is like the fulfillment of all things, the end of the story, the point of all this, the final answer to all the questions, the strivings, the wonderings of why we walk on this earth, the final fulfillment of all our aches.  And it is bigger than us and our individual stories, but it is not complete without our individual stories.  It is the answer to all the stories.

Christmas in the Big City

Kids Today. Or Was it Yesterday?

"No earthly way of knowing, which direction we are going," squeaks a little six year old voice in her best Gene Wilder imitation. Fortunately, from the back of the minivan, I don't hear the next line of the song "is the grisly reaper rowing?."

"Ok, Mom, now you sing at the same time the Oompa Loompa song and we'll make that spooky song blend with the Oompa Loompas."

I oblige my daughter's attempt at harmony and begin my rendition of "Oompa, Oompa doopity doo" as she adds some extra spook to the scariest song in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.  We end at the same time with me singing, "You will live in HA-PI-NESS too.  Like the Oompa, Loompa, doopedy, doo!."

Why is this suddenly very disturbing to me?  The Oompa Loompa's aren't happy!  They're prisoners of a madman with red faces, green hair, and endless wheelbarrows of chocolate to push.  There is something strangely dark and sinister about this whole minivan ensemble we have going on.  I guess you could say we've watched Charlie and the Chocolate Factory one too many times during this holiday season.

A Gingerbread Caper

For the last week 

Mr. Truman's Third Grade Class 

has been rehearsing hard for...

A GINGERBREAD CAPER!  

Check out our own  little thespian-

 shot live by Jason from his front row seat

 on the cafeteria floor.

Opus

Jude Law is interviewed on Letterman tonight (HERE).  Letterman asks him, "If you could choose film or theater, what would you choose?."  Law answers, “Theater....the relationship with the audience is irreplaceable.”  

Tonight (before watching Letterman) Jason and I are part of an audience.  In another tiny theater, by the Bryn Mawr stop of the Red Line, a play is performed to a sold-out audience of forty people. There is sweat. People jump in their seats. An actor’s final lines are spoken by Jason’s right ear. I stare at an actor standing next to us and wait for him to break out of character in this small space. He doesn't.

One of the things I love about Chicago is the chance, on any random night, to step into a small storefront theater and watch a story unfold.  There are plenty of huge productions from which to choose, but there are also many small theaters where some amazing acting is taking place.  Some shows are definitely better than others.  But for as little as $10 you can catch a show (see what’s playing for cheap in Chicago at hottix).  Hopefully, the longer we live here the more we'll know where to go and what to see, but for now I am enjoying the adventure of exploring and discovering.  

Tonight’s show is Opus.  With a cast of five it tells the story of a string quartet, the ups and downs of their relationships, and the power of music to bind people together.  The climax of the play centers around the quartet performing Beethoven’s Opus 131.  I know so little about classical music, but this play does what any great story does.  It makes me want to learn more.  It makes me want to listen differently.  Have you ever listened to Opus 131? Until tonight I had not (you may have heard it on HBO's Band of Brothers).  Nor did I really care.  But seeing live people on stage wrestle through the challenges of relationship and respond to music as creatures made in the image of God,  I begin to care. I read tonight that Beethoven, when asked which of his quartets he considered the best answered, "Each in its own way, Art demands of us that we should not stand still.”  What is it you might like to explore?  Where might you begin? 

Flyboard

Because getting a mysterious infection

 and spending a few nights in the hospital 

isn't enough to put new wrinkles on my face,

Jason tells me today that he wants 

THIS

A Small Patch of Earth

On this crisp Sunday afternoon, in the last light of a short December day, our family takes a walk.

 It isn't always easy, living in a big, sprawling urban area,

 to get lost in the woods. 

 I am reminded today that it really doesn't take much

 to to get a little nature fix.  

A small patch of woods.

A few sticks.

A semi frozen lake.

And let the games begin.

Ish

I spend a fair amount of time at the grocery store.  Interactions manifesting human nature unedited  often happen in the mundane aisles of our modern temples to food.   Today, while smashed between fifty new flavors of gum and three rows of periodicals claiming to have new tips on everything from sex to crock pot meals, I enter the usual checkout line coma.

“How are you today ma'am?,”  I hear an elderly man ask the cashier as he puts his fifth frozen chicken pot pie on the conveyor belt.

Long black hair, recently refreshed with dye from Aisle 6, flips across the register. 

“Good...ISH, ” replies the cashier drawing out the ISH as if begging to be known by another human being.

Across the man's face deep wrinkles twitch in perplexity as I slide my plastic divider behind his frozen cuisine on the moving belt.

Dropping my bag of lentils precariously close to our plastic border protecting anything that might be HIS from that which will soon become MINE, I bite her hook.  "That's a loaded ISH," I say.

“Well, I lied once to my mother.  It was a lesson of a lifetime."  I notice her red lipstick is starting to creep into the lines of her upper lip.  She reaches for the last pot pie and sweeps it across the scanner. The machine beeps in an obedient reply.

"Something I’ll never forget.  I swore then, I’d never lie again.  So, I’m not gonna lie." She looks at the old man in earnest, "You asked me how I am.  I’m good.  But  I'm only good- ish.  A girl’s got to tell the truth.  So that’s all I got for you.  I’m good, but it’s gonna have an ISH on it today.”

The elderly man gathers his plastic sacks and waits for the bright red nails to rip the receipt churning with a mechanical cluck through tired fingers. 

She turns to me in a final catharsis, "You gotta be real, ya know.  Sometimes it’s all in the ISH.”

Tree's Up

Get Comfy. Read. Maybe Write.

Last week, the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, I attended the last lecture of Introduction to Russian Literature: Tolstoy & Dostoevsky.  Like coming to the final chapter of a good novel,  I both want it to end, for freedom of time and resolution in my mind, and I don’t want it to end because that will mean a loss of something that has been a source of pleasure.  The class was a wonderful experience which I think will continue to surface as I read other books.

Picking up a new novel is difficult.  Nothing seems to satisfy.  So, I decide to pick up a book I’ve started many times and give it another try.  A familiar paperback, one that has stared back at me from many different shelves in our various homes, seems a good transition from the Russians. And so Marilynne Robinson’s book, Housekeeping, finds itself in my hands under a hand knit blanket and with a warm cup of hot tea.  The book is a bit strange.  Reading it feels like entering a dreamlike state.  After watching an interview with Robinson taken at the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop, I understand that this is how she writes. (her whole demeanor reflects a calm, peaceful creativity that will make you want to read a book)

She says in the interview, “When I write fiction I like to be very comfortable, as in prenatal or something!  I like to be in comfortable clothes with no distractions and so on. I like to be in one corner of my house.  When I write nonfiction I sit upright in a chair, and I write on a word processor, or laptop.  And the mood or character of concentration is completely different.  Fiction is much closer to dreaming, a sort of inducing a very strong imagination of something and trying to preserve the integrity-the movement- of it.”