A Walker in the Suburbs

Yesterday was All Saints Day; today is All Souls Day. Of the two, I’ve always been partial to the latter. For one thing, it never required a visit to church, not being a “holy day of obligation.” (There’s a phrase and a practice that’s on the way out!) For another, I figure that I know more souls than saints. Today is democratic: we pray for all those who have died.

But, expanding the meaning a bit, today can be a day of contemplation for the souls of all of us, the living, too, for the part of us that ripples beneath conscious thought, for our essence. “The soul is often hungrier than the body, and no shops can sell it food,” said the abolitionist and clergyman Henry Ward Beecher. Today, for me, will be about feeding the soul.

A word about today’s gathering on the National Mall, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert’s “Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear.” It’s clever and it’s funny and lots of people I know are going, but I don’t want my daughter to be one of them.

She’s young enough that I’d like her first experience of such an event to be an actual and not an ironic one. It would take much more than a single blog post to describe how I feel about kids and irony. In short, I think it’s an attitude toward life best developed slowly and with experience. Best to at least start off life with some sense of purpose. There will be plenty of time later to become jaded.

I was heartened to read an op-ed in the Washington Post last week on this topic. In “A Like-In for Generation I,” Alexandra Petri, a self- described member of the Millenial generation, says, “To Generation I [that’s “I for irony, iPhones and the Internet,” she writes], for whom life exists so we can put as many things as possible in quotes, this ‘rally’ is the closest we will ever get to a love-in. It’s a ‘like-in.'”

At the risk of sounding earnest and old-fashioned and absolutely square — give me a love-in every time.

I have a theory about inanimate objects; I believe that sometimes they fix themselves. This belief has been roundly ridiculed by my family. But I write about it today because it has happened once again. My trusty Kodak Easy Share camera broke over the weekend, took odd wavy pink-tinted photos (see above). And today, now that I’m no longer in scenic Holmes County with a buggy in every parking lot, it is once again snapping fully tinted photos.

This — or something like it — has happened with radios, CD players, iPods, toasters and more than one computer. It has happened enough that I’ve begun to think these objects have minds of their own. They are like balky wayward children who when left alone will finally come to their senses. They want to be good. But as the parenting books say, they need to develop their own autonomy.

Just as the nonbeliever can always find a scientific explanation for miracles, so too can the skeptic poke holes in my theory. I realize that beneath this personification are loose circuits, faulty wires, software glitches. But I hold fast to my theory. I wait a day before calling for repairs. I believe that there is much about this world that we do not understand.

The birth of a first child is also the birth of a family. So today, as we celebrate Suzanne’s birthday with her, I think about all the places our family has taken us. Not just the states and the countries we have traveled to but the kind of people we have become because of each other.

Suzanne loves to run, and yesterday we stood on a crisp, windy course and watched as she and her teammates raced across the green grass, through the yellowing trees, and up an agonizingly long hill.

The wonderful thing about cross-country is that even the spectators participate. To see the race properly you must trot from one vantage point to another. So at the end of the race the runners aren’t the only ones who are exhilarated. Everyone is.

It’s kind of like a family.

Yesterday I met a 98-year-old man who is still practicing law, the fifth generation of his family to do so in his North Carolina hometown. He and his (slightly) younger wife had driven five hours to attend a reunion, and after a luncheon for 50-year (and 50-year-plus!) graduates, the man took the microphone and sang the Georgetown fight song in a strong, clear baritone.

As it turns out, the man is the great grandson of Stephen A. Douglas, of Lincoln-Douglas debate fame. My recall on this being a bit shaky, I just read the Wikipedia entry on these debates. There were seven of them, held in various towns in Illinois, as Lincoln challenged the incumbent Douglas for the U.S. senate seat. The debates covered big topics, especially slavery, of course, and they were so important that newspapers sent stenographers to take down every word the men said. But the newspapers that were for Douglas edited his words and left Lincoln’s in rough form — and vice versa for the newspapers that supported Lincoln. After he lost the election, Lincoln cleaned up all the text of the debates and published it in a book. The book’s popularity helped lead to Lincoln’s nomination as Republican candidate for president of the United States.

And just to think, I learned all this because of a little old man at a luncheon.

Six years ago today I went to work in an office again after a 17-year freelance career. It was 2004, the girls were all in school (grades, 4, 8 and 10) and I needed a change. Some people can spin stories out of their imaginations and never need the rough and tumble of the world to push them along. I do. Plus, the steady income was a definite lure with college tuition looming on the horizon. So when I heard about a writing job for a university alumni publication, I signed on.

Some days I know I did the right thing; other days I’m not so sure. It would take more than a single blog post to explain how much I’ve analyzed this decision and its impact on our family and my career. In moments when I’m ruminating about this a little too much, I call to mind the last lines of that famous poem by Robert Frost:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I–
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Dr. James Ferguson of Hanover College, my favorite professor of all time, said it is the dash that makes the poem great. The dash, which stands for the hesitation, for all the decisions of life when we do not know, cannot know, if we did the right thing.

Today I celebrate the dash.

Yesterday we went to an Oktoberfest celebration at Reston Town Center, where I tried (with very little success) to photograph the bubbles that were flowing out of a bubble machine at one of the booths. In the process a security guard stopped me. “You’re not allowed to photograph the buildings,” he said. I told him I wasn’t shooting the buildings but the bubbles. He didn’t care. The bubbles were in front of the buildings. That’s all that mattered to him.

Bubbles are difficult to capture for other reasons, too. They flow and float and, worst of all, they pop! They are winsome and ephemeral and fickle. Photographing them is perhaps best left to the experts. But I had fun trying.

I’ve been thinking lately about falls. Not falls as in autumn or as in water (despite the photo). But falls as in tumbles, collapses, sudden drops from vertical to horizontal. A sign at the hospital yesterday: “Let’s be fall free on 3B.” Something I seldom think about at all, strolling down a corridor or stepping off a curb, is quite an achievement for others.

It is a gift, this upright posture, these legs that can stride and arms that can swing. The simplest motions of the day are the product of countless neural firings, of muscles expanding and contracting — a complicated calculus of movement and balance. Of defying gravity.

I grew up hearing the term — they live at the old “homeplace,” meaning a country home that had housed several generations of the same family. It might have been ramshackle and heavily mortgaged, but it had a history.

Split up that compound, though, into home and place. That’s what I’ve been wondering lately. Are certain places more likely to be “home” than others. Such a complicated question. It requires definitions and qualifications of all terms. All I know is that in some deep and improbable way, Kentucky is a place that still feels like home to me.

Sure, we’ve had it all summer, but today’s sunlight is different. It’s slanting in from a different angle and hasn’t yet reached the deck. There’s a chill to it. It is both bright and thin. It is the beginning of autumn, of a new relationship to our closest star. No longer our enemy, now our friend.