Cement Girl

"Sometimes a kind of glory lights up the mind of a man. It happens to nearly everyone. You can feel it growing or preparing like a fuse burning toward dynamite. It is a feeling in the stomach, a delight of the nerves, of the forearms. The skin tastes the air, and every deep-drawn breath is sweet. Its beginning has the pleasure of a great stretching yawn; it flashes in the brain and the whole world glows outside your eyes. A man may have lived all of his life in the gray, and the land and trees of him dark and somber. The events, even the important ones may have trooped by faceless and pale. And then-the glory- so that a cricket song sweetens his ears, the smell of the earth rises chanting to his nose, and the dapping light under a tree blesses his eyes. Then a man pours outward, a torrent of him, and yet he is not diminished. And I guess a man's importance in the world can be measured by the quality and number of his glories. It is a lonely thing but it relates us to the world. It is the mother of all creativeness, and it sets each man separate from all other men.

I don't know how it will be in the years to come. There are monstrous changes taking place in the world, forces shaping a future shose face we do not know. Some of these forces seem evil to us, perhaps not in themselves but because their tendency is to eliminate other things we hold good. It is true that two men can lift a bigger stone than one man. A group can build automobiles quicker and better than one man, and bread from a huge factory is cheaper and more uniform. When our food and clothing and housing all are born in the complication of mass production, mass method is bound to get into our thinking and to eliminate other thinking. In our time mass or collective production has entered our economics, our politics, and even our religion, so that some nations have substituted the idea collective for the idea God. This in my time is the danger. There is great tension in the world, tension toward a breaking point and men are unhappy and confused.

At such a time it seems natural and good to me to ask myself these questions. What do I believe in? What must I fight for and what must I fight against?"

-East of Eden, by John Steinbeck, 1952

I read this over and over and over again last night.

This is from Wednesday:



some days are better than others

last night I told Stephanie when we retreated to our bedrooms that if I should ever oversleep or should my alarm not go off, could she please wake me up when she got up? Well, I jinxed myself because this morning I awoke to Stephanie saying 'Meghan? Meghan?"

"What time is it?'
"It's 6:17"
"holy mother!" and I jumped out of bed.

Thus started my morning. So I ran around like a chicken with its head cut off, ironing pants and eating breakfast and making lunch and definitely not taking a shower. I was so proud of myself when I was ready to go by 6:50. Except then I couldn't find my keys. And after searching frantically for ten minutes (with it being 7am, the time I'm supposed to be at my school) I called my dad who was just coming to work here, and who has my extra key. Lucky me.

I got to school and realized there was mud all over the bottom of one of my pant legs. So it goes, huh? The rest of the school day was fine, but boy, was that an awful first hour to my day.

I came home, entertained myself for a little bit with my accordion, and then headed to class. went to dinner, and went to church, and I just got home. I'm tired.

We're reading Celebration of Discipline by Richard Foster for church, and this week's reading was about prayer, a subject that I'm very uncomfortable with because I'm utterly confused by it, I don't know that I want to pray, and I don't know what praying does, and I guess I'm okay with answers like "well, it opens you up to communication with God", but I still struggle with the whole idea of it. Alright. Truth=I'm not okay with answers like that.

Of course this was following our group prayer time in which I prayed out loud about Iraq and hostages civilians on both sides and people I know whose husbands are being sent there, and just asking that our servicemen act with integrity and with actions bent toward peace. And I cried it front of everyone.

It's all so confused in my head. All of it. Teaching fifth graders, discussing Iraq, trying to figure out prayer. They all fit together somehow even though most of the time they seem like completely different and remote things. It's just one of those days.

"Sixteen military wives
thirty-two softly focused brightly colored eyes.
Staring at the natural tan
of thirty-two gently clenching wrinkled little hands.
Seventeen company men
out of which only twelve will make it back again.
Sergeant sends a letter to five
military wives as tears drip from ten little eyes.

Cheer them on to their rivals,
'cause America can, and America can't say no.
And America does if America says it's so, it's so!
And the anchorperson on TV goes
"La-di-da-di-da."

Fifteen celebrity minds,
leading their fifteen sordid wretched checkered lives.
Will they find the solution in time,
using their fifteen pristine moderate liberal minds?
Eighteen Academy Chairs,
out of which only seven really even care,
doling out the garland to five
celebrity minds, they're humbly taken by surprise.

Cheer them on to their rivals,
'cause America can, and America can't so no.
And America does, if America says it's so, it's so!
And the anchorperson on TV goes
"La-di-da-di-da-di-diddy-diddy-da.
La-di-da-di-da-di-diddy-diddy-daaaa."

Fourteen cannibal kings
wondering brightly what the dinner bell will bring.
Fifteen celebrity minds,
served in a leafy bed of sixteen military wives.

Cheer them on to their rivals,
'cause America can, and America can't say no.
And America does if America says it's so, it's so!
And the anchorperson on TV goes,
"La-di-da-di-da-di-diddy-diddy-da." -the decemberists

America is so weird.

the summer of 2002 i worked for my cousin in Long Beach, Washington. he runs a deli there at the beach. i stayed in his house with his family, sleeping in until 9:30, getting up, and working from 11 until 8 at night, 7 days a week. sometimes i had the afternoons off and i would make trips to the peninsula library. i would get ice cream, walk around shopping, and take my small cousins to the playground to bask in what little warm sun graces that sea hugging land. one day when a refrigerator malfunction caused us to close on a sunday I spent the whole day in Astoria by myself, turning in pictures at Fred Meyer, shopping at a hippie store, and seeing a movie by myself (don't ever rent U-571). that summer i made big decisions, broke a heart, had my heart broken, and rebuilt everything. somehow i became a little more independent. the friend i saw the most was Natalie, which was a total of 2 times over the summer. i discovered two of my favorite books that summer (to kill a mockingbird and poisonwood bible). i discovered new music that made a soundtrack to hazy, breezy, alone days, and dark, cold, solitude nights. i drove my volvo, willis, to kingdom come it seemed, with all the miles I put on him. i began to know i-5 and hwy 30 like the back of my hand. that summer after my freshman year of college i had my own real college experience, learning from life lessons, and living away from my family.

that summer i walked into a small Long Beach jewelry shop and picked out a toe ring. Three and a half years ago I put that toe ring on and never took it off.

this morning in the shower it broke in two. i was dismayed. I threw it in the bathroom trash like a used tissue.

somehow it seems that i should have given it a funeral of sorts. maybe this is it.