A Commonplace Book

So intellectual snobbery aside, I accept a collective “I told you so” from all of the LOST fans out there. Lesson learned… a closed mind, not matter how educated, is still closed and therefore somewhat late in realizing what others have already seen. That’s where I am, a little late and a lot LOST.

Yesterday at 8:30 a.m., even though all of the local schools were closed due to dangerous wind chills and the local news stations were advising residents to stay at home and inside, unless heading out was absolutely necessary, I bundled up the girls and took them to the Y. When I dropped Gwennie off at the Y’s child watch, I was chastised by the older [than me] woman who was working there when I observed that there weren’t, at that point, any other kids there. She said, “It’s only one degree outside, far too cold to take children out.” Fair enough, although, as I pointed out, my kids walked about 10 feet from a warm house to a warm car.

Admittedly, there is something more than a little crazy about NEEDING to get the hell out of the house on a day when the frigid temperatures caused the ATM at my bank to freeze. And it made think about why? What is it, exactly, about me that craves momentum, forward motion, nearly all of the time. Even when it goes against good advice or common sense? Even when I’m bone-tired.

I thought back to the words of Anne Lamott in Grace (Eventually). If you haven’t read Anne Lamott, you’re missing a real treat. She’s my favorite spiritual writer because she fully owns being deeply spiritually and personally flawed and constantly struggling (and she reminds me of myself).

Lamott describes a day in church when she just wasn’t feeling it but stayed for the service anyway:  “…you have to be somewhere: better here, … than, … home alone, orbiting my own mind. And it’s good to be out where others can see you, so you can’t be your ghastly, spoiled self. If forces you to act slightly more elegantly, and this improves your thoughts, and thereby, the world.”

I thought about the times when I “orbit my own mind”, and in these times, my thoughts and feelings spin and whirl, intersecting and splitting so that I connect events and behaviors that might not be connected, and I become very, very dramatic and unreasonable, at least in my own mind. I misjudge people; I over-judge them, or sometimes, I come to a place where I can accurately judge them, which is often the worst because then I allow someone, usually someone undeserving, to dwell, rent free, in my brain for the day/week/month. In any case, this pattern usually continues until I find someone who loves me to talk me down from this crazy floating place.

When I spend too much time in my own space, I become the “ghastly,” “spoiled” person that Lamott describes. I imagine that my feelings are the top priority–not others, not community, not the greater good, but ME. It’s obscene, really. It’s fortunate that most of the time, I can anticipate and cut short these [insane] tendencies.

There is something about momentum, too, on a day like yesterday. The getting going just to get going that is a thing of beauty in itself. And I’m the better for it. And the thing is, my girls are better for it too. Yesterday morning, and for several weeks, really, my girls have been bickering non-stop about ridiculous things like Lego pieces and Barbie shoes. Their ghastly and spoiled selves are out in full force at home, but in public, my girls are usually the most well-behaved kids in the room.

The real magic is that when we got home, the girls and I were all quite peaceful. We rolled, cut, baked, and decorated lovely heart-shaped cookies to surprise Reg when he got home from work. Mira and I studied second grade science while Gwennie turned the whole house into a pet shop (we have THAT many stuffed animals) We read three chapters of Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, multiple Curious George stories, and all in all, we truly enjoyed just being together.

And I’m not sure it would have been possible if we hadn’t gotten up, gone out, and reminded ourselves that we are, in fact, social creatures. That we’re just better people when we interact with others and remember that how we interact with the outside is what strengthens the inside. That it’s good to let go of our inward perceptions and redirect our energies into interacting. We can’t always be whole and reasonable people in the often cockeyed and lopsided spaces of our individual egos.

Today is both Mardi Gras, literally “fat Tuesday” marking a time of feast before lent, and Super Tuesday, the day when 20 plus states hold primaries and the 2008 presidential election begins to take shape. It seems to me only fitting that these two significant cultural events line up to mark the beginning of the end of President Bush’s term in office. (If you’d like, pause here to bask in the beauty of the phrase “the end of President Bush’s term in office.”)

For a long time, when we thought of New Orleans we thought of drunkenness, revelry, voodoo, and jazz. Thanks to Jelly Roll, Louis Armstrong, Mickey Rourke, Harry Connick Jr., and Anne Rice, our collective idea of the Big Easy was that it was a place to go to be a little bad, a little dark, a lot drunk, and a lot soulful.

For most of my adult life, these were my images of New Orleans. Every Mardi Gras I’d ache to get back to the city, but the time was never right (or the money was never enough). Still, when I thought of N’awlins, I saw that smiling girl in the sketch and felt the steady rhythmic jazz thumpings bouncing from the clubs out into the streets.

We all know, of course, when our collective images of New Orleans peeled away to reveal an ugly, ugly reality. Hurricane Katrina, and New Orleans itself, came to represent the moment when all or most of America fully realized that President Bush simply wasn’t ever qualified for his position. Even those who had supported his decisions to invade Afghanistan and Iraq were having a hard time justifying this one. Katrina brought us the stark and disturbing images of starving babies and people wading through human and chemical filth begging for help from our government. I fell in love with Anderson Cooper and Kanye West for foregoing the safe dialogue of news reports and benefit concerts and speaking raw truths about politicians and institutionalized racism. I also fell a little in love with Sean Penn in his rowboat.

The safe distance of the television screen filtered, mercifully, some of the jarring reality many of us. But still, I asked “Is this my country? Is this really happening in America?” And I know I wasn’t alone. So to me, it seems fitting that on Mardi Gras we start, for many of us, the long-awaited process of voting the president out of office. It’s important that we begin this process, that we all are poised to take action now to truly begin to rebuild the image of America, which has become more than a little tattered, hurricane battered, and war torn over the past eight years. It’s not necessarily a happy Super Fat Tuesday, but it is a day, thankfully, of a growing national resolve to live a little better.