"Land Is the Only Thing that Matters, Katie Scarlett"

I have been recently reminded of the Robert Frost Poem "Mending Wall." The speaker and his taciturn neighbor meet for the purpose of mending the wall that divides their property. The old neighbor keeps repeating the phrase "good fences make good neighbors" while the poem's speaker wonders if that is truly the case.

Frost's question and my often affectionate feelings for small town life have recently been put to the test. The first test came with our new next-door-neighbors' moving boxes. The house had been on the market for over a year. Not a McMansion or a grand Victorian, the house is cute but small and our neighborhood is nice but hardly posh. Relief at seeing a quiet-looking elderly couple move next-door soon began to melt away a bit at the husband's revelation to Andy that their grandson, also named Andy, would be out of prison soon.

What worries Andy, however, is not his prison doppelganger, but the piles of junk accumulating in their backyard that includes tools, Christmas decorations, many lawn chairs and coolers of various sizes, a box of faucets, and a microwave oven. Some of this junk is covered in blue tarps, the rest is not, and it is all left in the yard, in the rain. My mother says that they are elderly, and it is probably just taking them a longer time than it would for us younger folks to get organized.

I didn't tell mom about the grandson with the prison record.

Then a week after they moved in, my husband calls me at work to tell me that the neighbors are cutting down a tree on our fence line, and he thinks they may have damaged the fence. "Our new neighbors?!" I ask. "You're kidding!"

"No not the new ones. Different neighbors," he tells me.

Seriously? What is this? An invasion?

"I heard the power saws and went out to the back of our lot and asked them what they were up to and this guy said to me, 'cutting down a damn tree!'"

That ended Andy's exchange.

When I came home we both went into the back portion of our property. No sound of power saws, but our back corner had been cleared, like little redneck elves had come and butchered the underbrush in the back corner. Granted it needed it; clearing the small triangle-shaped portion of our property was on our to-do list. In the meantime because this part of our yard is intersected by three other lots, the underbrush had been a privacy shield until we decided what to plant. None of this underbrush was on our neighbors' property, so it befuddled us why Tree-cutter Snopes & Company had A) been in our yard, and B) why they cut all this out . . . without asking us!

As we stood there amazed, checking out our bent fence, the Tree-Cutter returned, driving his red pick-up right to the fence line. Seeing us, and probably thinking we were less than pleased, he sat behind the wheel of his truck a good two minutes, staring at us and talking on his cell before getting out.

I asked Tree-Cutter if he lived at this house. I had to ask him twice. "Naw. I wuz hired to cut this tree," he finally said. "It wuz overhanging that there shed;" and he pointed to our other neighbor's yard behind us. "He wanted it cut down. So I did," he said with a fair amount of hostility.

Apparently we had not been part of the small town Klan meeting that made this decision. For reasons still unclear to us, while on his tree-cutting mission Snopes & Company crawled over our fence, into our yard, and whacked out the underbrush in the back corner of our property. "Why did you do that?" I asked. He threw at us the names of the people that lived in these surrounding houses, invoking local genealogy, "Well that's Mr. So-an-so's mother-in-law!"and other southern non sequiturs, but he never answered our questions. Finally he cocked his head and looked at us with a glare straight out of Deliverance and spat at us, " Where are y'all from?!"

"What does that matter?" my husband calmly replied. To wit, Snopes threw up his hands and walked away.

Snopes had played a Southern card. The translation of his question was "Where are you from, you crazy Yankee liberals?" (To which ironically he was have only been about a quarter right.)

Once Andy and I had both cooled off, he pointed out that in England there were no private property laws; people could freely cross each others' land. Of course if we lived in England, I'd be happy and wouldn't care.

I added that I supposed they did do us a service for free. "The cops here might think us nuts if we reported him," I said. But I felt that my own "southernness" had been violated. After all, "Land is the only thing that matters, Katie Scarlett O'Hara!" I thought. But this Snopes had the look of a man who would burn barns, so we had wisely backed off. Crazy is the trump card any day, no matter where you are.

It doesn't, however, change the facts that we are now further exposed to another neighbor's lawn equipment and a huge shaggy horse-sized dog who has a clear view of our yard and our cats. I heard his stomach rumbling as he stared at Byron winding around my legs.

My mother said that the shrubs we recently planted will grow quickly, unfortunately not, however, over-night. In the meantime I struggle to "love my neighbor" . . . in a distant and abstract manner, all the while dreaming of fences!

Damascus Discoveries

This weekend the baby finches that were nesting on our front porch took flight. I hadn't noticed their mother building the nest or when they took flight, only that she was there one day on her nest, suddenly she had babies, and then they were gone.

Life has been like that recently: beautiful surprises in unexpected places. Maybe it began with the transformation of our lean-to into a garden. A major step on this newly trodden path occurred this past weekend.

I went to a conference for graduate students in English. I was speaking on a panel about the profession. I was the weird one. I said it's OK to stop at the Masters degree and that maybe they should consider if they really want to commit to the academic life before going into a PhD program. I said that maybe they don't have to take every job interview if they can't see themselves living in a certain place and they have other options. I said teaching first-year students wasn't that bad. For what it was worth, ultimately they had to turn inward and know and trust themselves.

But then a high-level administrator from another college said, "interview everywhere," lie if you have to, or at least stretch the truth about how you fit into the job exactly. Along with him was a non-tenure instructor, a full-time well-published professor, and the head of a writing-tutoring program, all talking, and most complaining, while the job-hungry grad students hung on every word.

When I left the session, I realized this: my job is a good one, and my stresses are not that monumental, if I only shift my perspective in viewing them. I may not have planned to be where I am, but what a wonderful place it is, even beyond the job.

Way beyond the job.

Conversations online and over coffee, the way the sunsets paint the skyline of our otherwise unexceptional little Georgia town, a sermon that quietly surprises by building on a tiny verse, new visitations and discoveries of things I just have not been able to notice, all of these are wonders and signs. Through trust, slowing down, and really looking for and listening to the still small voice, I am re-discovering a world of beauty.

For the world online and in the news, Susan Boyle has become the embodiment of surprise, beauty in unexpected places but why? What do we expect to hear when she walks out on stage? How does she change for us and how does she change us?

At work and in life, stress and societal expectations blind us. I know they have me. It is only by stopping and connecting with what is beautiful and outsides of ourselves that the scales can fall from our eyes, and we can truly see.

Our Walden Experiment

"You will get very little from Walden if you read it hunting for contradictions, if you make a great fuss over the fact that he had dinner in town with friends sometimes. There is much to dispute with Thoreau, but the useful disagreements lie in the essentials, not the details."
--- Bill McKibben, from an annotation for Walden.


In the opening chapter of Walden, Economy, Henry David Thoreau writes about buying an old cabin from James Collins and tearing it down, salvaging the pieces, and re-using them to build his house. Preservation and recycling, I tell my students that these ideas for many people in the twenty-first century are radial. Imagine what people thought of Thoreau in the nineteenth century!

My husband and I, while hardly card-carrying members of the Simplicity movement like several of our much-greener, less-materialistic friends, [See Striving for Happiness], The Cult of Home Ownership demands constant sacrifice, so we are trying to do more with less as the cliche and our checkbooks demand. Hence a flower and vegetable garden, beauty and function.

As I am currently teaching Thoreau, I see that we had followed his path in reclaiming something old for our new purpose.

The previous owners of our late-fifties/early sixties ranch house were definitely good, but apparently eccentric people who did wonderful things like knocking down interior walls to open up space, and weird things like trying to seal pipes of different materials with concrete (!) and producing a fuse box that is in a mysterious code.

The "lean-to" connected to our backyard storage shed was typical of the aesthetic and work ethic of the previous owners. By the time we got the house and a year more had passed, the lean-to had become a structure that looked tentative at best from the front, and actually looked more like an assertively shabby crack den from the side.

A few weeks ago we finally tore the lean-to down. 

Once the lean-to was demolished and most of the leavings were hauled away (I had raised a post-feminist hand and stepped in to the sweaty labor), we were left with usable bricks, several good wood beams, and a "patio" shaped like one of those not-so-square-shaped Midwestern states. Odd but useful things.

In the not-so-useful category, we also dug up wire, glass, concrete blocks, metal pieces of some lost functions, and batteries, to name just a few of our "treasures." Andy said that turning this spot into a garden had become for him a humanitarian project. I, in turn, quoting Star Wars, alternated in calling it our "mercy mission" and "a damned fool idealistic crusade" in which we were armed with only gardening books, a debit card, and enthusiasm with which to fight.

Our "mission" was to use as much of the leavings from the lean-to that we could to incorporate into our garden--our little Walden. We cleaned off the patio, Andy lined it with bricks, set down the wood ties; we planted flowers and put in small-to-start beds--herbs in the front bed, vegetables in the back.

As you can see I think it turned out to be a quite beautiful little spot. At the end of the day when we admired our work arm-and-arm, I thought, this is what life is about: making something beautiful with someone you love that you have faith will last.

A Serenity Prayer

On my way to work this morning, running late, I was backing out of my driveway, trying not to hit my husband's car parked behind me when I destroyed our St. Francis icon in our garden. Considering my morning (OK my year), it is more than ironic that the icon had The Serenity Prayer written on the back:

"God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference. "

While my car is untouched, the icon, is in pieces on my driveway. What a weird synchronicity, a tangle of metaphors for the way my life has been the last few weeks.

As you can see, Dear Reader, from my more recent post(s), my faith has, of late, been dinked up a bit.

As I said in my previous post, so much is out of our control--the economy, the college budget, others' attitudes, all things I have let affect my faith. I have been running through my mental habitrail of worst case scenarios: what if we lose our jobs, get cancer, my friends abandon us, our parents get sick, does that mean God does not care? What does it mean that God never gives us more than we can handle? Job certainly got it heaped upon him. If I had an eighteenth of what he experienced, I'd probably be somewhere in a corner, in a fetal position, rocking back and forth, counting down ten minutes to Wapner.

Driving home from dinner Friday, I told my husband about a friend I had lunch with that day who seemed, unlike me, strangely unworried about the changes at work and in the economy. She has a real possibility that her position could be cut as a result of the pressing re-structuring going on in our college. She didn't say, "God will provide," but I know her well as a sincere person of strong faith, so I know that is the source of her ongoing strength.

"Is she crazy?" I wondered, while feeling this nagging tickle that maybe she wasn't. I told him I felt ashamed that I lacked her calm, her faith. He said, "Well, God is not supposed to give us more than we can handle."

Now let me be clear than my rational husband is no bible-thumper, yet I wanted to protest with a litany of terrible examples, some real, some hypothetical. He then added that he didn't think that meant we'd be sheltered from all harm.

Well duh, I thought.

"It means God helps us to be strong during the hard times," he said.

Oh.

Right.

Faith--what I've been lacking.

Well then what is faith?

Is it, as Thomas Paine argues in "The Age of Reason," hooey, a belief in hearsay.

Is it as Joel Olstein thinks, if we have faith, God will give us a house, a Hummer, and happiness? (http://emotter.wordpress.com/2008/02/09/22/)

Is it Job-like resolve, in the face of cosmic horrible, that we can still hold fast to God?

Is it the ability to delude ourselves?

Is it faith in other people to act as God's angels?

Whatever it is, unlike Job, most people (of faith and otherwise) lead pretty mundane lives, with the day-to-day trivialities, to paraphrase Chekhov, making us crazy, testing our faith.

Most of us don't face off juntas. Rather we run through our own little mental habitrails convinced that every turn is a plot against us by some cosmic force, or worse other people.

Maybe that's why we are in need of Lent, a time to sacrifice, give up those habits that, whether they feel good or bad, are comfortable because they are what we know.

So this year I'm going to try to give up and live for 40-days free from negativity, cynicism, stress, and judgment. Those are the things I'm at least trying to give up.

That and vehicular manslaughter of saints.

My Star Wars Nerdness Epiphany, #42

This past weekend while waiting for a meeting to begin, my husband and I were sitting in the lobby continuing a conversation that had begun in the car--what drives us crazy about the latest movie installments in the Star Wars franchise.

This is a reoccurring conversation we have. This particular one, began on the way back from breakfast--Mace Windu: Lamest Jedi of All--and became a discussion of why Lucas has a fetish for cutting off his characters' hands.

OK, I know: the dangerous possibility of the dehumanization of the Jedi, the breakdown of the barriers between Man and Machine. Alright. Um, so Anakin? I get it. Luke, I get it; Darth Again, I get it, "symphonic motifs" (as Lucas likes to say). But how exactly does this motif fit with Mace or Dooku (who BTW has one of the *worst* names in the franchise)?

"Is it that Lucas had just run out of ideas?" I said.

Exasperatedly said, I might add, for Star Wars was the religion of my childhood. So much so that at 30, I kept trying to convince myself that The Phantom Menace was a good movie by seeing it many times, even though my father kept saying, "Wow. Lucas sure did shit in his nest with that one."

"Lucas can't be that . . . lame, Andy."

He laughed. "How is it that it just never gets old talking about why these later films are such a disappointment?"

"But isn't it sad we aren't talking about what makes these movies great?"

We sat in the lobby in silence. Perhaps both of us thinking about our action-figure populated childhoods, and how Lucas betrayed those childhood storylines we both wished for while playing with our x-wings and Darth Vaders. Yet he is George Lucas! He did give the world the Star Wars universe. Isn't that enough to warrant a little continued respect?

Then out of my sadness for what Lucas did came forth my epiphany in the lobby, one I had to share:

"I love that I can talk with you about how much I hate these last three movies and you understand. . . . It's just one more reason why I love you."

This morning on PostSecrets someone's Valentine postcard of regret had a message scrawled across a picture postcard of young Luke: "I broke up with my Star Wars nerd boyfriend 9 years ago. I still miss him, love him. . ." I thought about how unfortunate she was to let her love, as Leia would say, "slip through her fingers." I am sad for her, but happy for me and all my nerd friends who held on. Tightly.

Happy Belated Nerd Valentine's Day!

The Nerds' Secret

I am not sure if this above PostSecret post is pathetic or touching. I lean to the latter.

I too played D&D in high school, college, graduate school, and still do, but the D & D party that formed my senior year and stretched through college had some of my favorite characters and moments—our medieval characters traveling through portals to hell or Manhattan, our wizard ripping apart time-and-space, at least twice, our Barbarian warrior beheading almost everyone she met, our assassin becoming a Princess in Hell only to be redeemed as a holy cleric, our Drow thief, an outcast, becoming a Baroness and a Pirate Queen, and me, assassin-turned-guildmaster-back-stabbing a dragon & killing him . . . while we were in flight . . . several hundred feet in the air—these were some of the best gaming campaigns for their camaraderie, creativity, and their weird parallels with and their escapes from the Real World.

Perhaps the narratives and worlds were not as complex as they later became; that fact doesn't change the social magic of senior year when the Cosmic Game Master of Unknown Forces (looking probably much like John Hughes) brought me together, over dice, with three who became my high school best friends: two sorority girls, one brainy (the Cleric & Drow), one a social jock (the Barbarian), and Genius Holden Caulfield-in-the-closet (our Wizard).

Now I am only close with one of my gaming friends from high school. The Drow-and-Cleric is now a college professor, like me, and has become my More-than-Sister.

The others? I don't know where they are. Holden, the Wizard, lives somewhere in California, a brilliant free-lance writer and a Buddhist priest, and Helen, the Barbarian, is dead.

However, I imagine them both as they were in our minds, in-game: Holden, gray robes blowing in the wind, spell book in hand, and Helen, barbarian ax glinting in the fires of hell, besting those demons that killed her in the Real World.

And me? I still sometimes think like an assassin in committee meetings, while my More-than-Sister certainly continues to support and heal those around her, as her cleric would.

So seeing this PostSecret card tonight, I am reminded that in high school we may have defied the gaming-nerd stereotypes by outside social camouflaging, but we were more kindred to those with thick glasses and short pants than we would’ve admitted. We shared the nerds’ secret: In-game we could be who we were on the inside, and who we wanted to be on the outside.

Now how is that really different from what most thoughtful people want?