Every day Mother's Day

A group of gifted writers has gathered together at a new website that celebrates and gives voice to moms of all varieties. MakesYouMom.com publishes something new every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. At the helm of this new online publishing venture is my friend Laura Lynn Brown, author of Everything That Makes You Mom: A Bouquet of Memories, a book my siblings and I used to create a Mother's Day gift for our mother two years ago. Since Mother's Day comes every year, I thought I'd share this idea at the same time I pointed you to Laura's new site.

Everything That Makes You Mom is a gift book in which Laura has written memories and reflections about her mother as launch points for questions you can answer about your own mother. My sister and I started the process of filling out this book for our mother by meeting at a restaurant and going through the book, writing answers to its questions on a pad of paper. We took turns reflecting on the different questions and adding our memories. We ate a lot and wrote a lot. We laughed a ton. We continued on by emailing and texting about answers to more questions and sent my out-of-town brother a list of questions for his input. We didn't use all the questions Laura included, and we took liberties at adapting some questions to better fit our particular mother and sets of memories, but all her questions formed a wonderful place to start even if we didn't use all of them exactly as written. It shouldn't be surprising - but it often was - that the three of us didn't always have the same memories or the same answers to the questions.

We gathered up all our answers into one big typed document so that we could distribute them to grandchildren, and then we wrote the answers into the book pages. If we hadn't been collating all the siblings' responses together or if we'd all been in the same place at the same time, we wouldn't have gone through these multiple steps, but in the end we created a valuable document that tells a lot about our wonderful mother and our years of growing up together. More importantly, it tells my mother we saw her. This is what Laura's new website, MakesYouMom.com, is all about: seeing the mother you've had, seeing the other women in your life who have been like second mothers to you, seeing the mothers all around you, even the one inside yourself.

~~~

[Photo: taken of a page from the book my siblings and I filled out for our mother.]

Almost a book: April 15 is not just tax day

The new book is going to the printer any day now. I spent a good chunk of the weekend going over final edits. The very gifted book designer, Valerie Anne Bost, and editor, Jessica Snell, are putting on all the final touches, including laying out the blurbs from generous endorsers (I'll be saying more about them later on this blog so stay tuned) and the back cover copy. I'm so grateful to these two publishing professionals and the rest of the team at Kalos Press for all they have done and are doing to make this manuscript a book and to send it out into the world. I'm also grateful in advance for all the readers who are lining up to essentially say, "I'll take it from here." After all, it's the readers who, by the very act of reading, finish the process of making a book a book.

April 15: It's not just tax day; it's book release day.

Clothes and Books, Ethics and Passion, Poetry and Prayer, High Standards and Low

Dress Shopping

The last couple weeks I had reason to shop for a new dress. I had an idea what I wanted: a wardrobe staple, nothing fancy but a little classy, neutral color, something that would last more than a year or two. I had this list of criteria in my head, but since reading Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashiona couple months ago, I also had another list in my head. In Overdressed, author Elizabeth L. Cline surveys the clothing industry and what she finds make you think twice about picking up the latest fashion steal at the nearby mall or discount store.

Her premise is that our growing desire for more and more clothes and our unwillingness to pay a reasonable price for them or to keep them for more than a season is driving the industry to produce ever greater volumes of ever cheaper clothes with ever poorer wages to the sewers. And Cline is very clear, there are actual sewers (as in sew-ers), real people, in this chain of production who need their wages to live and raise families.

 Here are some images the book will leave you with:

• Holes in the floors of production plants so that sewers don’t have to leave their stations to go to the bathroom or the dorms where sewers live
• Garments made of such cheap materials they fall apart after one washing
• Charity resale stores, like Goodwill or Salvation Army, being deluged with clothes of such poor quality even they can’t sell them but yet are left to sort and dispose of them at significant cost
• Tons and tons of discarded tank tops and t-shirts and plastic shoes on their way to landfills
• Closets crammed with more clothes than any one person could possible wear
• Stores switching out complete inventories every 2 weeks to not only meet demand but to create demand

Her key suggestions include to shop for labels known to pay their sewers living wages and provide good work conditions, and to buy less, investing in pieces that will last for a long time. Cost of course is a stumbling block there. Manufacturers who pay living wages are more likely to make expensive clothes (comparatively speaking). She suggests buying better clothes but on sale or at consignment or thrift stores, and to forego the multitude of cheap pieces in lieu of one or two that will last. She suggests learning to sew or at least learning to alter your clothes (or hire someone) so that they fit well or so that you can update them to last longer. Check out Cline’s website for more suggestions and resources.

I found a dress, one that should last and that was marked way down at end-of-season clearance. At its original price I would have had to pass it by. For those of you who know me, you’ll probably see me in it for years to come.

The Lost Art of Making Things

There’s a great little sewing store not from where I live, Sewtropolis. When it first opened, I met the owner, Nikol, and asked her about why she went into business. To help reintroduce people to the lost art of sewing, she said. Her business is doing well, now in a bigger and better location from its original site. Sewtropolis has a fun blog, unique fabrics, sewing machines onsite for your use, and tons of classes that let you walk away with a finished garment.

One of my intentions for this year is to sew more. Sewing anything would be sewing more. So far, I’ve bought a pattern. But the year is still young. The last time I sewed anything was a couple summers ago. I had taken the week off work to make progress on my manuscript. After scratching and scribbling for a couple days and to no great effect, I realized what I really needed was to be quiet for a while, to stop the flow of words, and so I sewed a sundress. The last time before that was probably a maternity dress (and my sons are now in their twenties).

In high school and college I sewed many of my clothes, but a friend of mine took sewing to a much higher level. When we went shopping, instead of buying she would sketch the clothes she loved while in the dressing room, converting her sketches to patterns at home. If she’d followed her passion as the experts suggest, correctly or incorrectly, she could just as easily have taken the path to fashion designer as she did the path to physician. (That little story raises interesting questions about giftedness and vocation, doesn’t it?)

Lenten Poems

Lent started last Wednesday. I try to mark it with a practice, although I often fail to be consistent. A few years ago during Lent I listened to and prayed along with the Pray-As-You-Go Jesuit devotional, which I’ve written about before on this blog. Every day I wrote some notes or reflection in response to the devotional on an index card. It turned out to be a good thing. I liked flipping through the cards to review what I’d been thinking about, and even now I like that those cards are held tight with a binder clip.

This year I’m again listening to the Jesuits, but this time I’m trying to write a small poem in response to the daily reading. Writing a poem is a good way to break routine linear thinking and enter into a prayer or text in a new way, particularly if it’s a text, or reading, you’ve heard multiple times before. Let me be the first to say, these are not good poems, but they will help me think in new ways and be markers of something.

I’ve been reading Early Morning, Kim Stafford’s biography of his father, William Stafford, one of America’s greatest and most prolific contemporary poets. Stafford published more than 60 books via his practice of getting up every morning long before dawn, making himself a piece of toast and cup of instant coffee, and laying down on the couch with a sheet of paper, getting up only when his daily poem was written. When asked how he could write a poem every day, he answered that it was only by lowering his standards. I’m adopting that stance also in this daily practice--the goal not being to produce anything of literary value but to let the Word produce something in me.

Reading Stack: Punching In

A review in the Onion pointed me to Punching In: One Man's Undercover Adventures on the Front Lines of America's Best-Known Companies by Alex Frankel, although the review wasn’t complementary, giving it only a C+. I give it an A-.

Frankel is on a mission to explore the culture of workplaces and how new front-line employees are indoctrinated and made to manifest that culture, particularly in the short time allotted by the typical training period. Like Ehrenreich in her well-known Nickle and Dimed Frankel goes native, posing as a grad student and taking a false name. Unlike Ehrenreich, Frankel’s mission feels more gentle, to explore rather than expose, although to be fair, the stakes were higher for Ehrenreich, linking her daily survival to her ability to find and keep a job as she did. Frankel got hired at UPS, Starbucks, Gap, Enterprise, and Apple Store. He also tried but failed to get hired at The Container Store and Whole Foods. 

Halfway through the journey, I came across a statement that captured the spirit of the project quite well. In the formative years of UPS, its founder, James Casey, was known to repeat a basic phrase: 'Anybody can deliver packages.' It was both modest and profound, with clear implications: Anybody can deliver packages, so we had better be the best at it…It's the same sentiment, really, at any leading company. Anybody can pour a cup of coffee, rent out cars, sell pairs of jeans. Except, of course, they can't. The places, it seemed to me, that are the best at these things take 'anybodies' off the street and make them their own 'somebodies.' This completely intangible transformation of individuals is something increasingly critical to the success of companies. By organizing and running a small, yearlong experiment with myself as the subject, I would see and feel this transition in process. The journey would be this: I would walk in as an anybody and depart as a somebody. Or at least that was the idea.

I thought back to my early part-time jobs and wished I’d been more attentive to the forces behind the training and the philosophy of the places where I worked. Read this and you’ll look at the man or woman handing you a latte or folding jeans behind you at Gap with some empathy and even admiration. As with everything in life, there is so much more going on than we can see on the surface.

(If you’re curious, UPS comes out looking good.)

 ~~~

 Thanks for reading and enjoy your weekend! If you want, share with me what you’re doing for Lent, or if you've found a bargain on a garment that will last forever or made anything fun lately or are on your way to becoming a somebody at your job.

A breakfast of gratitude

The post that follows below (after the dividing line) is a repeat post from 2004, the first year of this blog. I'm repeating it here primarily because I want to add something to it. The tradition below still survives, but because sons grow up the table isn't always set for four anymore, nor is the table always the one in our home. What I want to add is that this year, while I'm thankful for many things, I'm so thankful for a very specific thing. Not a thing, but a person. A future daughter-in-law. Before Thanksgiving 2011 rolls around this lovely young woman and my oldest son will be married, and I couldn't be happier. That's what I'll say on my first turn around the table this year.

-----

My favorite Thanksgiving meal is not the dinner with turkey and stuffing. My favorite Thanksgiving meal is  breakfast. When my children were little we started the practice of having a formal breakfast on Thanksgiving morning. The table is set with our good china and goblets. Candles. Fire in the fireplace. The menu varies and has included items such as waffles, Swedish pancakes, French toast, or some variation of a baked egg breakfast casserole. There is always juice and coffee with cream and sugar (for this meal, only sugar cubes will do). Over the years there have been broken goblets and spilled juice and the timing for the preparation of this meal has interfered with getting the potatoes peeled on time for the "real" Thanksgiving meal. But this is the meal I wouldn't trade for any other. The value of the meal isn't in the food of course. The value is in the ritual of thankfulness that takes place while we eat the meal. As we eat, we go around and around the table, each of us taking repeated turns to name things for which we are grateful. Many declarations of thankfulness follow a similar pattern from year to year: thanks for each other, for members of our extended family, for friends, for special people in our lives, for health and safety, for employment, for our church, for our schools, for a miraculous recovery, for various kinds of rescue, for the love and presence of God in our lives. Some declarations of thankfulness are specific to the year. This year there will be thanks for...and 'round and 'round the table we'll go.  

In honor of my neighbor

On Memorial Day eve, a dear neighbor died. He was a World War II vet, the anchor of this neighborhood, and a consummate gardener. In his honor, I'm posting a short piece I wrote several years ago during Holy Week.

Grace

The man next door to where I live is kneeling on the ground from which hostas will emerge alongside his house, clearing out the clutter that the melted snow revealed. A retired electrician, Bob wears jeans and a gray t-shirt as he works. He is tan and fit. His appearance has changed little in the fourteen years we’ve been neighbors. Handful by handful he removes the dead leaves and debris and places it in a plastic bag; its top ripples in the breeze. Bob is 84 years old, yet he rises and kneels again before a spirea bush, repeating the cleansing ritual, like a man half his age.

Now Bob stands alongside his row of weigela bushes. Their fuchsia flowers are still weeks from bursting; the green buds new last week. He fertilized them on schedule and so their springtime resurrection proceeds. With shovel in hand, he aims at the ground around each base, places a foot and steps down. The roots need space and fresh air. The blade pierces the ground. He pushes on the shovel’s handle to lift the dirt and turn it over. He repeats down the row, topping with mulch.

When Bob wants a break, he sits in his lawn chair of white and brown woven webbing on a foldable aluminum frame. He sits in the shade in his driveway or next to the bush or plant he is tending. Sometimes his wife, Leatrice, joins him and they sit together in matching lawn chairs. I’ve seen him bring the chair out for her, unfold it, and set it on the ground with an extra jiggle and push to make sure it’s grounded before she sits. Once, sitting with them at their kitchen table, she told me that they are as happy together now—even happier—than on their wedding day over fifty years ago.

Bob’s attention will soon turn to his roses and day lilies. The two trellises of violet clementis. The hyacinth and lilacs. The peonies. When the maple tree launches its whirlybird seeds later this season, he will patiently pluck them up one by one, again on his knees. Sometimes he sits on the lawn chair and reaches down to remove them with a vacuum. The whirlybirds that cross our yard line get no such special treatment but take their chances with the breeze, the thatch, and the lawn mower. The lawn he sees across from his own—ours—has bare spots, residual effects of a dog and two boys. “Don’t worry,” he once told my husband, “the kids are more important.” He has no view here of trellises wrapped in violet bouquets, and our uncultivated ground offers no hope of return on the tomatoes and cucumbers he grows and leaves at our back door.

One day several summers ago, along the fence at the back of my yard, a yellow day lily bloomed where there had been no bloom before. It caught my eye through the window. In secret, Bob had knelt on his grass, dug into his soil, and lifted the lily by its roots. He rose and crossed the yard line. In secret, he knelt on our grass, dug into our soil, and laid the roots back down. Springtime is only three weeks old and the perennial blossoms are not yet splashed across the back fence. The green base waits, however, ready and full. When the yellow blooms come, they will be new every morning.

Happy New Year x 2

On a reflective note: Back in 2004 I wrote a post that continues to get a large number of hits every New Year. That post, Lost Quote Has Royal History, includes a poem by Minnie Louise Haskins called "The Gate of the Year." It was a follow-up to an earlier post called Safe in the Dark, which was about trust while on an unknown path and something my grandfather said to me on my wedding day.

On a more buoyant note: My sister alerted me to this New Year song recorded by ABBA in Stockholm. Thirty years have passed, but it is still fun to watch.

A wedding to remember

Just before the wedding party started their walk down the aisle, the singer/guitarist sang “I Want You to Be My Love” by Over the Rhine. That alone made me happy to be a guest yesterday at the wedding of a friend of my son’s. But there was more. There was the look of joy and eagerness on the face of the bride as she took her first few steps down the aisle and then stopped and looked back, realizing she had left her father behind, their arms unlinked. No matter, his face spoke understanding as he caught up. There was the serenade the groom sang for his bride--to her surprise--self-accompanied via ukelele. There was the love song--which I can’t now identify--sung by a friend with accompaniment by the best man with restrained accordian, lending a French promenade sort of romance. There were the vows, which were written by the couple but had the ring of wisdom beyond the years of these 22/23-year-olds. Here’s a funny thing: Although they had written their vows, they hadn’t memorized them, which turned out to be a mistake as they forgot to bring their written out copies. Fortunately, the best man realized this early on and using sign language discreetly signed to his wife in the congregation to find the laptop that held an electronic version of the vows. With stealth, she left her seat, exited the sanctuary, and scurried to find the laptop. Just when the vows were to be exchanged, she floated out from a door behind the minister--as if this had all been planned--holding open laptop and set it down on--was it the kneeling bar?--for the couple’s reference. The couple laughed. The congregation laughed, we liked this spontaneity, this resourcefulness rather than panic and consternation in response to imperfection and oversight. The groom went first, speaking a couple lines before bending down to find his place and keep going, vowing more and more of himself to her. Here’s something to pay attention to: The line he spoke after straightening up from one of his laptop glances was, “ I will never divorce you.” Because the groom bent down and looked at what he was about to say and stood back up again he had time to reconsider. But he didn’t reconsider; he said it, and she said it also when it came time for her vows, and I admired this intentional and public statement of will against the elephant in the room of till-death-do-we-part marriage. Here’s something else: They washed each other’s feet. This I’ve never seen at a wedding. While a reader read the Gospel passage of Christ washing the feet of his disciples, the bride sat down and the groom removed her sandals and proceeded to wash her feet with water in a silver bowl. The bride then rose and the groom sat. She removed his shoes and socks and returned the washing. I’ll admit this made me uncomfortable. Was it that it was such a breech from a traditional ceremony? Was it that I just didn’t want the bride to have bare feet under her white empire-waist dress or the groom to have bare feet under his charcoal gray suit? Was it that this young couple was modeling a humility to serve and be served, a vulnerability that can’t help but bring discomfort to those of us dressed in our wedding best thinking that we’ve got this marriage thing mastered? With the washing done, they knelt--with bare feet--while someone sang the great hymn, “Great Is Thy Faithfulness.” The soloist sang the first two stanzas alone. Somewhere toward the beginning of the third stanza, some voices from the congregation started quietly singing along. More voices pitched in. The voices got louder and before more than a line or so from that last stanza had passed, the whole room was singing in unison. No words had been printed out. No motion for the congregation to join in had been given. It just happened and it was a beautiful thing: “...thine own dear presence to cheer and to guide; strength for today and bright hope for tomorrow--blessings all mine, with ten thousand beside! Great is thy faithfulness, great is thy faithfulness, morning by morning new mercies I see; all I have needed thy hand hath provided--great is thy faithfulness, Lord, unto me!” With laughter and clean feet, this young man and woman exchanged rings, kissed, were introduced as Mr. and Mrs., and headed off to reception, honeymoon, and life beyond.