Thursday, September 22, 2011

One to Watch

Here is my female candidate for President in 2016:



I heard an interview with her several months ago about her frustration with the inability of Congress to create a Consumer Protection Agency that had some teeth. This pictured quote is what I have been trying to articulate for a long time.

What do we think? Is there some unspoken underlying social contract? What obligations to our country and fellowmen come with being a free citizen?

Wednesday, September 14, 2011

One Bright Spot

Okay, there are really a lot. But the sweetest might be that my little Youngling learned to ride his bike this week. Training wheels, of course, but it is still just so cute.

On the downside, I didn't even know it was possible to be this tired. A new calling has thrown a monkey wrench into so many carefully laid plans. Though, in all fairness, maybe this IS the plan.

Friday, September 09, 2011

Have Your Forgotten?

No doubt there will be plenty of blog posts in the next several days about THAT DAY. I'll just add mine to the list. Eight months pregnant with my first baby. I wasn't under teaching contract that year, just subbing, and I had chosen not to work that day. I took the morning to walk (waddle) at the park near the Houston on Champion Forest Drive. I was wearing hideous and uncomfortable maternity work-out clothes. I headed to Wal-Mart. There was a teaser on NPR that a story related to education that was coming up. Then there was a break in the coverage. My first selfish thought was to wonder if this meant the education story (which sounded interesting) would be delayed or not done. Information at the moment was unclear and the official line was still "accident." I went in to Wal-Mart where strangers were asking one another, "did you hear?" By the time I got back to the car, the second attack had occurred. And the third. Then a fourth plane went down. I drove to the temple, where Plantboy was working. We watched the towers fall down on live television, stunned and horrified.

Like you.

I felt my dear boy squirm and kick inside me and I wondered just what kind of world I had brought my child into.

Ten years later, and now I know. As in any time, it is a world of sorrow and joy. Of good and evil. Of contradiction. Of growth. Of learning to seek out and hang on to what is best and pure. I hope I have taught that baby those things. For even though nobody he would have known died that day, he is a child of September 11th too. Who will these post-9/11 kids become? This thing that has come to define their generation has left them in a world filled with war and contention and conflict. In the immediate aftermath, even two and three years later, those tower images would frequently fill the TV. With his still-baby voice Jedi Knight would ask about it. I would tell him. Now I sometimes hear my history-loving boy talk about that day as if he has a memory of it. Does he? Or does he just carry the archetypal image in his head somewhere? Did those images burn so horribly into his mind even as a young child that he is part of our collective consciousness too?

October 2001 wasn't just a game changer in our family--two weeks to the day before my son was born, The US army invaded Afghanistan, where it has stayed and fought the longest war in our history. The day he was born the iPod was announced in a press conference. His will be the generation of war and information--two things that can bring people together or disconnect them entirely. I hope he will be a man who builds bridges, who is filled with compassion for others, and will learn the lessons of THAT DAY even though he had not yet entered the world.




Saturday, September 03, 2011

What a Week!

Grad school started. Last minute things to get ready for school. Back to School Night. Squeezing more fun things out of summer. Getting our Cub Scout Program up and running. A broken dryer. Picking up more working hours. A new calling (without releases from my other two--though the first order of business in the new calling was finding my replacements) in the Primary Presidency with an unwritten program coming up in six weeks and all the stuff that comes from keeping Primary chugging along.

I think next week will be better. I'm getting on top of a few things. The schedule is tight, but I think it will be doable. It has to be. I'm not sure what to let go of at this point. Okay, I suppose I do know: reading for leisure, writing, scrapbooks, cooking for pleasure . . . .so many of the things that make me feel human. I guess that is what all those breaks built into the college schedule are for. Though I am blogging and did make cookies with the kids tonight, and Plantboy and I did get a date yesterday. (Mexican food and Captain America--highly recommended.) Maybe it won't be as impossible as it seems.

Aggies and Ducks both lost today. Not a grand start to the coming week, but I'm sure that Fast Sunday will help restore the balance. Balance. Balance. Balance. I think this will be the new mantra.