all I ask is a great tall ship...

I must go down to the sea again, to the lonely sea and sky...

If there's one thing that Myrtle Beach at Memorial day is not, it's lonely. Every year at Memorial day and again at the 4th of July, we go down to the beach house that Adam's late grandfather built, which now belongs to Adam and his cousins. House-wise, it definitely conforms to the "not so big" philosophy, being both stylistically and functionally..ah...rustic. (I'll try to take a picture of it next time so you can see what I mean). It's a two-story cinder-block house with few stylistic pretentions of any sort. However, it's survived many hurricanes with nary a scratch or penny laid out in insurance premiums--perhaps the two are karmically linked. If we had paid for insurance, perhaps the whole thing would have been levelled by a freak tornado or earthquake.

When it was originally built 52 years ago on what was then "Roach Beach," it was surrounded by tree-filled lots and the occasional modest bungalow. Since the tidal wave of development began slamming the east coast in the 80s, it's been increasingly dwarfed by four-story pastel timeshares with haphazard names like "Pat-a-Cake" or "Serendipity." (The family's beach house is lovingly referred to as "The Lost Finger," as Adam's granddad, a brick mason, cut off his finger while building it. I think it has a dashingly piratical--if literal--quality to it.)

Anyway, going to the beach is kind of the inverse experience of staying out in the woods, socially speaking. It's actually not fun to get in the water alone. It's one of those times when more is, in fact, more. (Always Ginny's motto, whatever the occasion.) Hotter n' hell? Fine--the water feels better. One more trip to the buffet line? Sign me up. Should I really wear the two-piece? Whatever--there are too many people people who already look sluttier than me, so who cares? (Although maybe not the two-piece after the buffet.)

As I've gotten older, the mundane things about going to the beach seem to stick with me, are more endearing, than the sandcastle building or body surfing. Squirting off my feet with icy cold water from the garden hose, before going back in the house. Picking sandspurs out from between my toes when my flip-flop falls off. Eating Aunt Sharon's fried squash straight out of the pan, so hot that the roof of my mouth will later flake off, in protest. A small person dropping her chocolate ice cream, bought at the pier, on her pink shirt, never to be fully Shouted Out. These are the existential moments for me, nowadays.

But perhaps my three-year-old asks the most profound question of all--"Daddy, why can't we stay?"

I must go down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life,
To the gull's way and the whale's way, where the wind's like
a whetted knife;
And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover,
And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick's over.
--John Masefield



Free Counter

what would Ayn Rand do?

Today I heard, curiously enough, a caller on an NPR show reference Ayn Rand. Her comment was "What has happened to the true conservatives, the people who believe in self-sufficiency? What happened to Ayn Rand?" I say it was curious, because I've been rereading Ayn Rand lately (Atlas Shrugged), and I found the comment interesting.

In case it's been awhile, here's my impression of Ayn Rand:

Cagny looked up from the blueprints of the railroad track that she had been designing, her own personal symbol of the thrust of mankind's potential into the trembling waste of the lowly natural world. Her first view of Sven confirmed that he was the one she had been waiting for; the angular planes of his bronzed godlike face reflected back all her despair and ambition, and the arrogant stance of his shoulders mirrored his existential triumph over the forces arrayed against those who live for profit. She loved him instantly, violently. He tore her transparent shirt from her fragile shoulder, her will rising up to meet his in a viciously tender clash of bodies that betrayed the oneness of their ragingly independent spirits. Her joy, the climax of her suffering, revealed an indomitable will to live, to triumph. At last, an eminently competent man. "Oh Sven," she moaned, "I love you like..." She tried to think of something deeply rational. "...Like a motor." Sven slapped her face with a resounding crack. The bead of blood at the corner of her mouth tasted of her own salvation. "No," he said, "you love me like money."

Perhaps my son made the best commentary on Ayn Rand today when he ripped the cover off Atlas Shrugged and attempted to eat it while I was putting in my contact lenses in the bathroom this morning. She always claimed that she owned no philosophical debt to anyone but Aristotle. Yeah, riiiight. The 1084 pages that she took to say "a) rich people deserve to be rich b) there ain't no free lunch and c) step off lesser mortal" were really unnecessary. Since she was a big fan of efficiency, it would have helped the trees of the world out quite a bit, while fulfilling her worldview if she'd just said "go read Nietzsche. And oh yeah, go on a diet."

I mean, as someone who had ties to Eastern Europeans during WWII/the holocaust, she's definitely justified in thinking: big government--bad. Still, you'll notice that all of her (good) characters are simply bursting with youth and vitality. Nobody ever gets old, nobody ever gets sick. If that's the way you see the world, then I guess a belief in rugged individualism makes sense. She's the kind of woman that Thoreau might have courted, until he decided that she's probably insane. Of course, the family pencil factory might have benefitted from her business model--it's hard to know.


Anyway, I don't think that Ayn Rand ever had any children. I don't mean that you can't lead a full life without them, but they do interject a certain element of chaos into your worldview, as well as a desperate need to believe in the orderliness of creation, the redeemability of the human spirit. All of these things, I think, are missing in Rand's fiction. She didn't need to have children personally, but a few months as my daughter's preschool teacher could have shaken up those beliefs she had about supermen and the will to power. Show me a three-year-old at bedtime, and I'll show YOU a will to power.

Anyway, it's interesting to think about Rand as a advocate of laissez-faire capitalism, as she most certainly was. I wonder what she'd think about how Chevron bought the patent for an efficient electric car and then deep-sixed it. Or about the current gas crisis. Or about pharmeceutical companies advertising unnecessary drugs on tv. Hmmm. Then again, I suppose she would have just told us to take mass transit--after all, railroads are more efficient and, apparently, sexier. And oh yeah, we should all go on diets...

Gentleman farmers...

As William Byrd reflected back in 1733,

Surely there is no place in the world where the inhabitants live with less labour than in North Carolina. It approaches nearer to the description of Lubberland than any other, by the great felicity of the climate, the easiness of raising provisions, and the slothfulness of the people...When the weather is mild, they stand leaning with both their arms upon the corn-field fence, and gravely consider whether they had best go and take a small heat at the hoe: but generally find reasons to put it off till another time. Thus they loiter away their lives, like Solomon's sluggard, with their arms across, and at the winding up of the year scarcely have bread to eat. To speak the truth, it is a thorough aversion to labor that makes people file off to North Carolina, where plenty and a warm sun confirm them in their disposition to laziness for their whole lives...

Now, you must know that Byrd was a Virginian, a member of a notoriously hoity-toity bunch. Moreover, being one of the largest landowners (re: slaveowners) in the whole colony, he probably shouldn't have been casting too many stones about living in Lubberland, since I imagine his own personal heats at the hoe were few and far between. Being a native North Carolinian, I have to caution you to take Byrd with a large shakerful of salt.

That said, he wasn't too far off the mark, as least as far as our family goes. Last week, we FINALLY got our garden in. It's not much of a garden. (My husband calls it downright embarassing.) However, compared to the mattress-sized patch we used to have at our house in Raleigh, it's a definite step up. We might not actually be gentleman farmers, but we're heading that way. It's my personal ambition to stand with my arms hanging across the corn-field fence, loitering the day away, in manner of lubberly colonist. Only a few things (e.g., mortgage, lack of actual gardening skills) stand in our way....

I guess the idealization of a pastoral lifestyle is something that goes hand in hand with a critique of contemporary values; the more decadent the values of the current generation, the more its critics look back to the previous age with yearning and nostalgia. But as Adam's late grandfather (once a subsistence farmer in the VA mountains before becoming a plant manager for Broyhill furniture) always maintained--life is so much easier now than it used to be. It took a lot of work to covert an acre of land into something that could be eaten or sold. Whether it's good for the soul for life to be so easy is another question, I suppose. But given the choice, I suspect that most of us would choose to live with degraded souls than to give up the opportunity to buy cilantro from the Piggly Wiggly.

L'enfer, c'est les autres...

You have to wonder, sometimes--what was Thoreau thinking? What was his problem? Why did he decide to pull away from the world and hide out in the woods? Was it a failed love affair? Was it his failure to find financial success? Was it a way of one-upping his mentor Emerson, who was both happily married and financially successful?

Jean-Paul Sartre once said that "Hell is other people." I tend to agree, and I'm sure Thoreau would too.

I have to say that, as lonely as it is out here in the woods, the society of other people does make you feel contaminated sometimes--it's hard to know who to trust, who to believe in, who to doubt, and who to avoid. I'm a basically trusting person, a quasi-Pollyanna type, and sometimes my faith in people gets smacked around. It's nice to hole up in my sylvan retreat sometimes, and pretend, as Thoreau pretended, that other people just aren't necessary.

But of course they are, and to pretend otherwise just doesn't work. Even Thoreau admitted as much, when he said that he left the woods in the end because he "had other lives to lead." What I hope to do, though, is to do a better job at finding out how to make and keep friends, how to keep untrustworthy people at a distance, and, finally, how to discover within myself those qualities that are both worth keeping, those that need improvement, and those that need to be discarded. Our lives are our only real DIY projects, the only ones that really matter. We have to be vigilant about finding the lives that we are supposed to be leading, and equally vigilant about keeping out those influences--et les autres--that eat up all our peace of mind.

However, the sign, I must add, does add a certain level personal satisfaction to my day, every single time I pass it coming in and out of the property. I only hope it doesn't scare the UPS guy too much.

How I lived and what I lived for

I started reading a long time ago, when nobody was looking.

My mom said that she found out I could read at the age of three when I pointed out that a road sign said "Bread." Maw, my maternal grandmother, says that she knew I could read when I started reading the fine print on a television ad--she heard me as she was folding laundry in another room, spelling out "mail check to Colorado Springs, Colorado..." When I was a kid, and on into college, I fantasized about a job that would let me do all the reading I wanted. I guess I still fantasize about that job--true, I do get to do a lot of reading, but very little of it is anything that I actually want to read, as nobody in their right mind really wants to read scholarly journals or other people's dissertations and such. One of the best things, incidentally, about being a parent is that you get to reread all your favorite books again, and experience them through your child's eyes. (Always a startling experience with Ginny, who tends to focus on previously unseen details - like why doesn't their Mommy read Big Steve to Ramona instead of making Beezus do it?) Anyway, it seems that the only reading I do for pleasure happens at night, usually in the bath. It seems I'm still reading when nobody's looking.

My friend Bethany, a book club devotee and fount of endless energy, inspires me to try to keep up with my reading, to keep me looking for new things to read, as opposed to going back to my favorites time and again. I read every chance I get, but frankly, I don't read much contemporary fiction--or nonfiction, for that matter. In fact, I don't read much except 19th century novels (or historical novels that evoke the style of authors I already like). I know nearly every English teacher and professor I've had would be horrified, but I really don't need literature to provoke me or challenge me. I need it to help me stop thinking about myself and my own life for a bit. I need it to provide an escapist outlet, while not insulting my intelligence. This disqualifies most nonfiction, but also wide swathes of fantasy and science fiction.

However, this weekend I bought Dreams From My Father, Barack Obama's memoir (yes, bought, not checked out from the library, those of you who are keeping tabs on how deliberately I'm living--back off, will you! You can't read a library book in the bathtub). Anyway, I have to say--watch out Thoreau--this cat is taking your place in my writerly rankings.

You couldn't find two people who are more different--we'd probably describe Thoreau as a libertarian, while Obama obviously comes from a more leftist perspective. One moved out to the woods to discover himself and get away from the world, the other has spent most of his life in a desperate self-conscious fight to fit in. But I think they'd have enjoyed one another's company, nonetheless. I think they would have admired the realness, the authenticity, that jumps from the page of each's work. And I think they would have been interested in one another's solutions for the problems of modernity and the question of the individual's role in society. Not to say that they would have agreed. But I'd like to see how they might have faced off.

Thoreau spent a lot of time trying to get to the bottom of things--to get down to a bedrock level of essential truth about the world, and I hear his voice echoed in what Obama is saying when he talks about trying to parse the stories about his family that he was told as a child, stories that he had to evaluate for himself as an adult:

I had spent much of my life trying to rewrite these stories, plugging up holes in the narrative, accommodating unwholesome details projecting individual choices against the blind sweep of history, all in the hope of extracting some granite slab of truth upon which my unborn children can firmly stand.

I think Thoreau could get behind that.

Anyway, hopefully Obama will win, and more people will buy his book--not because he needs the money, but because we need his ideas, I think. Ok, all right, check it out of the library. Just don't read it in the bathtub. (Somebody might be looking...)

fruit of our labor...

I kind of turned a corner in my life recently. I have been considering the possibility of leaving my job to stay home with Daniel. Even though I really enjoy the work I do, and value my colleagues tremendously, our research agenda is going to get very complicated in the fall (more travel, more project schools, basically more work), and it's already difficult to cover those days when I have to do site visits, as it is, in terms of getting the kids to and from daycare without leaving them in for extended periods of time.

It's not a clear or easy decision for me. I have really wrestled with it, mostly because my identity is really wrapped up in the job (I just noticed that I put my job first in my personal profile, for example). I don't make a ton of money, but the income definitely helps. (Ok, compared to the other jobs I've done, it IS a lot of money.) Plus, I get to work from home, which provides wonderful flexibility. Plus, I find the work fulfilling in many ways, in the sense that I get to write, read, and apply myself to various different types of problems.

I also think that the job provides a lot of continuity for me--anybody who has made it all the way through graduate school has something seriously wrong with them. (I have a whole theory about universities as nutjob repositories--I'll have to post about that one sometime). Anyway, I get a lot of validation about being able to spout my job title and describe the work I do (more, maybe than the amount of validation that I get from actually DOING the job, which is probably not good).

But with Dan turning 1 and Ginny growing like a weed, I've come to realize that there's one thing they can't make more of: time. We can get by on Adam's salary, for awhile. And then I heard a sermon at church the other week, based on Isaiah 55:1-3:

Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread and your labor for that which does not satisfy? Listen carefully to me, and eat what is good, and delight yourselves in rich food. Incline your ear, and come to me, listen, so that you may live. I will make with you an everlasting covenant, my steadfast, sure love for David.

You know how you sometimes crack open the Bible at random and put your finger on a verse, semi-hoping for the answer to a problem? Yeah, I know, it's self-serving and sort of an occult way to do business with the Lord, but everybody has done it. Well, listening to that sermon was kind of like that, except that I really did feel like the pastor's words were meant for me--at least, they were meant for me to consider. And I have. So here goes....

raising beezelbub

As my friend and colleague Roy said recently about this blog: "Yet another experiment in the woods? Oh Lord...."

I did a Google search for other blogs named "living deliberately," and turned up a depressingly large number--depressing, that is, if you're into originality. So I guess the concept isn't that original, which isn't all that surprising. Thoreau is still required reading for most of us, sandwiched somewhere between Native American hymns to the Great Overspirit and Tupac's lyrics. Thoreau is one of the more instantly dig-able writers that we read in school. I mean, how can you argue with the idea that most of us lead lives of quiet desperation? And how attractive is the implication that, recognizing this idea, WE as his attentive audience are not part of the mass of men? And then again, Thoreau himself wasn't all that original--most of his ideas are pretty derivative, even if they are provocative. So his point of view is something that we get, I think, even if we don't totally agree.

But even if it's not original, I do stand by my basic argument--that there are things in life that are worth your time to to do, and there are things that are worth your time to avoid. Even if the doing (or the avoidance) is largely symbolic, it's good to make a stand sometimes, even if it's in a small and essentially self-serving kind of way. After all, Thoreau's time in the woods stands as a thing of beauty and inspiration, even if it did serve the secondary purpose of getting him out of the family pencil factory. As Thoreau himself says (paraphrasing J.C., of course--very unintentionally postmodern of him) "Not till we are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations." Anyway, you get the idea.

One of the main reasons we decided to move out of the suburban environment where we were living was the fact that we thought it would be good for the kids. I guess that realistically there are trade-offs. We may be trading the dope-smoking in the park for dope-growing in the woods, and gang-banging at the mall for meth-making in the trailer. But hope springs eternal.

After you have kids, you begin to realize that your potential for leaving an imprint in the world has just increased exponentially. Like those signs that say "leave no trace" at a campsite, some days, the best you pray for is just that your kid doesn't turn out to be the next Dylan Klebold.

Since it's Sunday, here are some recent thoughts on religious issues from my three-year-old Ginny, Beelzebub in training:

On the Noah's ark story:

Why won't God wash away the world again? He really ought to, because there are a lot of bad people around...

On the story of Mary Magdelene washing Jesus' feet with her hair:

She's going to need a lot of conditioner to get out those tangles.

On the Last Supper:

All they got was bread and juice? Had they been bad?

On the story of Moses:

Would Baby Daniel fit in a basket?

And my personal favorite--on the story of the Crucifixion (or as she says "when the bad guys got Jesus"):

So why did Judas sell Jesus for thirty pieces of silver? I would have asked for forty...

So I guess parenting and all that comes with it is just a roll of the dice, and our prayers are sent up to improve the odds. Some days I like the odds better than others! But really, I guess all life is an experiment. An experiment without a control group--a case study, if you will. And the experiment, for us, would be happening whether we'd chosen to move out to the woods or not...

You're gonna miss this...

Ok Trace Adkins, we get it.

I should probably get this out of the way right now: I am not one of your country-blue gals, not a woman who would tote her Bible to church (although I do go to church) in a zippered quilted cover. I am not someone who would watch the CMAs, though I would like to go to Merlefest, and I am going to vote for Barack Obama (holla), and am glad that Huckabee is simply not going to be an option for anyone, come November.

Ok, that said--I do listen to country music some. Part of it comes with the territory. I live in the country, and driving around listening to country music once in a while seems appropriate. I am kind of apologetic about it in part because I held popular country music in low estimation in my young years (sorry Garth), and then I also got irritated by the whole gentrification of bluegrass in the 1990s (while not the same genre, it's related), which makes me sort of scorn the whole thing.

However, today I found myself pulling over to the side of the road, crying like a baby, trying desperately to find some sort of nose-blower in my glove box, as a result of the new Trace Atkins song. With Dan turning 1 this week and Adam's grandmother passing away, I guess I'm in the right place in my life to be able to swallow the bait so effortlessly--but I have to say that he's right.

Our memories might be nine-tenths nostalgia, but how important it is to make them, and to remember that these ARE the good times, because tomorrow you won't be as young as you are today, and the cone of possibilities continues to descend with every passing day. When you have kids, the pressure to make every day a good one, and to make each moment count is crushing--sheesh, as if we needed more of an existential load to carry. But in a way, it's good and maybe necessary to know that we're not the only keepers of the memories--and that, for them, these are some good times too.

http://www.cmt.com/videos/trace-adkins/217378/youre-gonna-miss-this.jhtml

Check it out...

The not-so-big life

Sarah Susanka, author and architect, has written a series of books about the Not So Big House. The premise of her books (which are based, incidentally, on A Pattern Language) is that we don't design for the way we actually live. In other words, the spaces that we create for ourselves should be spaces that we really use. Kind of like the philosophy of the Golden Corral Buffet: take what you'll eat, and eat what you take. In other words, we don't need pretentious McMansions with formal dining and living rooms, game rooms, bonus rooms, etc, etc--because most of us don't really have lifestyles that make those spaces functional. The house that Susanka advocates for is the "not so big" house, a house that unites form and function in a meaningful way.

Sooooo....that's what we've tried to do with our house, which my husband designed. Because I was pregnant and then totally overwhelmed with a 2 year old and a newborn while we were building it, I can't claim much responsibility for the end product. (I literally picked out three things: the tile for the bathroom, the upstairs carpet, and the interior doorknobs.)

I'm hoping, though, that the house will serve as a kind of symbol, or maybe a kind of gateway. The house, such as it is, is mostly finished--but I'm hoping that in completing it and moving into it, we have ushered in a new way of living (new, that is, to us). As Adam's 97-year old grandmother always used to say, "Life is serious business." And I've come to see that she's right. In a larger sense, we are trying, I think, to live the "not so big" life, a life in which the meaningless stuff has been stripped away, while the essentials remain. I'm not claiming that we're successful--I guess some days are better than others. But we're trying.

Into the woods

Ok, so here's the deal:

Last year, my husband Adam and I decided to move from Raleigh to the Charlotte area, in order to be nearer our families. We bought some land (15 acres), sold our house, built a new one, and had a baby (#2), all in the same year. The result...well...we have a house in the woods and two cute kids. And...a house in the woods. A house that eats up our money and sucks up a great deal of our time. A house at the end of a long gravel road, from which we can see: birds, trees, grass, coyotes--not bad. From which we can't see: neighbors, neighbors' assorted trashy stuff (and neither can they see our stuff--also not bad).

The idea was that we would try to give our kids the kind of upbringing that we had as children, that we'd get out of the burbs and away from all the Playstations and malls and Starbucks and such. That we would become the kind of people who check out books from the library, and play Trivial Pursuit after supper, instead of the kind of people who eat dinner hunched over a TV tray, staring at Law and Order. Basically, our goal was (is?) to try to suck out the marrow of life and all that jazz. So this is a blog about how this process is going for us, what's going right and what's going...well, not quite as right.


I'll keep you posted!