Exactly Luthien

June 25, 2009 — 7 Comments
Luthien took this photo of herself last summer

Luthien took this photo of herself last summer

My girl is extreme, expressive, exhausting, exciting, exasperating, exuberant, extraordinary. Every moment, to her, is a canvas waiting for color; a page waiting for poetry; a reel of tape waiting for a symphony.

Each day she leaves a trail of artifacts marking the twisting turning path of her imagination. At the foot of her bed, hastily-discarded pajamas and underwear. A few steps away near the dresser and closet, a shallow sea of rejected wardrobe ideas. Scattered over the living room floor, a stuffed dog with a rope tied around its neck (its leash), surrounded by wooden blocks (its food); rubberbands and wadded-up, tape-wrapped newspaper balls (her bow and arrows); a stool pushed up against the window (to close the curtains because she’s camping and it’s nighttime); the piano bench pushed up near the bird cage (to let the bird out); paper and markers spread out on the table (where she was making storyboards for the movie she wants to direct); a small pile of awkwardly-folded laundry (where she was briefly in the mood to help with the housework); library books scattered around a throw pillow (she is working on learning to read); a few dolls wrapped up in blankets and napping on the couch.

In the bathroom, an open bottle of essential oil, a tube of lip balm knocked over in her haste to flee the scene of the crime when she heard the owner of these items approaching. In the kitchen, a stepstool pushed up to the counter, a cabinet left open, exposing a raided snack cupboard. In the back yard, a bowl of walnuts picked up from the yard, crushed and mixed with water (homemade perfume); a small boulder on the patio (where she enlisted a friend’s help to drag it so she could crush said walnuts); a wagon tied to a bicycle with a jumprope (car and trailer); a table spread with cups, a pitcher of water, and eight little metal bowls filled with raisins (a snack stand for the neighbors); a pair of sandals in the driveway; a beach towel wadded up under the walnut tree; ponytail holders and barrettes discarded on the picnic table.

Washing hands in a public restroom involves at least three squirts of soap from the dispenser, a roaring cascade of water from the sink, and as many paper towels as she can get her hands on before she is interrupted by a reprimand or a more interesting distraction.

This is my girl, unlike any other. Dancer, scholar, beauty, artist, lover, fighter, cook, bicyclist, inventor, problem-solver, preacher, scientist, singer, fairy, dreamer. And then some. She thrills me, annoys me, inspires me, exhausts me, entertains me, loves me, ignores me, kisses me, confuses me. She expands my horizons, reminding me of what I already knew – that this world is bigger than me – and surprising me with the hardly-believable truth that this world is also bigger than her – as she pushes ever forward with every fiber of her hard-headed wild-hearted starry-eyed iron-willed being.

My lover and I had a dream once, to sail the world together. On the brink of turning the dream to reality, we discovered this girl would be expanding our family. I thought we traded our dream of sailing the world for the mundane experience of parenting, but Luthien has proved me wrong. We are right on course, exploring new territory, fighting stormy gales, sleeping under the stars, going stir-crazy in confined spaces, and learning to lay aside our schedules and expectations to work with the unpredictable wind that pushes and pummels the colorful sail we named Luthien.

Pillsbury Presently Past

June 13, 2009 — 10 Comments
1995 Graduation Day at Pillsbury College

Amilee, my mom Becki, Ginger, and me in front of Old Main

This morning I ran past my old college, which was also my dad’s workplace during my junior high and high school years. It closed last year, and beside the sign that proudly bore its name for fifty years is another white one with red letters proclaiming, “For Sale.” My grieving process about this is complicated. Some days I feel like doing as Jenny did to her childhood house in Forrest Gump, and throwing rocks at the buildings. This morning I just felt melancholy, nostalgic, in the perfect mood to write a poem.

Pillsbury Presently Past
by Julia Tindall Bloom, June 13, 2009

come my college compatriots
let’s wander the sidewalks of our old campus
silent sidewalks, stretching sleepily
vaguely remembering the sound and motion
of glory days.

come my college classmates
let’s head to class
once-modern Pillsbury Hall
still smells, looks, feels like the seventies
i prefer the creaky floors
the cracked chalkboards
the clunky doors and windows
of ageless Old Main.

come my college teammates
let’s set up the volleyball net
in the machine-shed gym
it never looked like much
we never won much
but we got sweaty enough
the crowds were moved enough
we had our shining moments.

come my college roommate
time heals wounds
i wonder what it’s done to our old dorm room?
maybe not completely erased the canned-tuna odor
maybe a few sound waves from late-night talks
are still bouncing off those concrete blocks.

come my college sweetheart
let’s sit at that library table
where two child-adults fell in love
(dust is spreading there
over the remains of that flirtatious conversation)
then we could move to the stone bench by the flagpoles
where we fell out again
and gaze across the vacant campus
where we faded apart

years ago
a lone pianist in Kelly Hall
sent practice notes out the window
onto the breeze
some caught in branches of the old enormous trees
some floated up to Old Main’s bell tower
where they rest quietly now
along with the hollers and cheers of a hundred football games,
the ringing “Amens” of a thousand chapel services,
and every last whisper and sigh
breathed in this place.

rain still falls on these gracious lawns
water patiently drips from battered downspouts
life courses through this world
but not like it used to.

Emmylou

June 10, 2009 — 1 Comment

We have this amazing music and book collection not too far from our living room – just a few hundred yards down the tree-lined corridor to the west. We don’t mind sharing it with everybody else – it’s a community thing, and that’s the way we like it.

So Nathan and I were there at the library the other day – on his birthday – and he brought home a 2003 Emmylou Harris recording called “Stumble Into Grace.” I first got into her when I bought “Red Dirt Girl” – which became an all-time favorite of mine – eight or ten years ago.

We’ve been listening to it, and I really really like it. That’s the simple truth, and I just had to tell somebody.

Good Girl, Humanized

June 2, 2009 — 7 Comments

I’m a pastor’s kid, AND . . . (I learned about the power of ‘and’ from my friend Cindy, who recently said labels too often keep us stuck. She said, for example, that although she is often impatient, she likes to say it like this – “I am impatient, AND I am learning to wait”).

So, I’m a pastor’s kid, AND I am learning to live boldly in spite of people’s opinions of me.

I was born to a Bible college student, and my younger brother was born to a seminarian. Our mother was a Bible college student’s wife, and then a seminarian’s wife, AND . . . although she wasn’t much encouraged to imagine the other side of the AND.

Officially I became a pastor’s kid (PK) when I was four and we moved to a tiny town in Rhode Island where my father became the pastor of a proportionally tiny church just about as old as America, with real steeple bells that the big boys got to ring every Sunday morning.

Two memories of our time at that church stand out to me. One morning, sitting in the front row with my mother and brother and a friend, I entertained myself and my friend during my father’s sermon by copying his gestures (with a bit of extra animation). Another Sunday, as my mother stood and sang in the choir, my three-year-old brother, terrified by a spider crawling on the pew beside him, ran to her and jumped in her arms.

After each of those services, I and my brother were respectively reprimanded for our antics. It may not have been spoken, but somehow we got the message that everyone was watching us, that we must behave well and not reflect poorly on our family.

It’s a lesson I learned early and well. Pastors’ kids, as people have over-generalized, are either angels or demons. I, proving the generalization, was a good girl in every way imaginable. Stepping into any new place when I was a child, my first concern was what the rules were, to make sure I kept them. As I grew into adolescence, so did the good girl. She was smart but quiet, pretty but safe in her always-modest dresses, passionate but only daring to hint at those passions through her handy talents of singing and writing.

Over the years my father went on his own journey of self-discovery and admitted that pastoring was something his mother had pushed on him more than he had desired. For a while I was a Bible college professor’s kid, at other times a salesman’s kid, a freelance writer’s kid, an unemployed man’s kid.

This past year I once again became a pastor’s kid, now with kids of my own. I’ve moved a long way from the good girl of my youth, not to rebel daughter, but to more confident, willingly weak, hungry, less-afraid, question-asking human. Very human. Repenting of the “we-they” “saved-lost” country club mentality from which I have operated most of my life growing up a pastor’s kid in church. The suitable-for-framing theology of my youth now looks to me just about as quaint and useless as my senior pictures.

This pastor’s kid wears shorts, drinks alcohol, plays rock music, goes to movies, and often votes Democrat. She also leads worship music in local churches, and regularly prays and reads her Bible. And she’s learned that abstaining from or exercising any of these things is a poor indicator of anyone’s faith.

The pastor whose kid I am has also changed. Now, when we meet on a Sunday evening after a morning when he was preaching and I was lounging in the back yard with my family and a cup of coffee, we smile and hug and talk about the past week, and the thought of what people might be thinking is as far away and irrelevant as the choir robe my mother wore that Sunday in Rhode Island.