Kathleen M. Basi's Blog, page 41

In Which Julianna Finally Succeeds In Hijacking The Eucharist

The real key to Michael Mayhem’s success is the innocent look he has perfected.

It was a bad day in choir.

The big boys were out until 10 p.m. the night before for baseball, so of course, Nicholas was falling to pieces long before we finished choir warmup. I’ve been waking at 4:30 for several days, so my patience was stretched pretty thin.

And Michael? I don’t know what his deal was, but he was a disaster during Mass. Michael Mayhem in all his glory, only he’s more devious at 3 than he ever was as a toddler. Eyeing the slides on the sound board (sorry, kid, you’ve caused deafening feedback one too many times; I’m onto you on that one). Stealing my choir hymnal (well, I know “Amazing Grace” by heart, anyway). Fiddling with the microphone cord connecting the sound board to the floor jack. I had debated which jack to use before Mass, trying to decide which one was the least likely to be kicked by a wild child during Mass, but clearly I underestimated Michael Mayhem.

It was Communion, and we had just started the first refrain to “On Eagle’s Wings” when, with a deafening CRACK, every microphone in the music area went dead. I looked over, and sure enough, Michael had unplugged the cord.

Normally we kill the entire church sound system when we need to deal with microphone cables, because of that noise. Plugging back in is much worse than unplugging.

But it takes 15 seconds for our sound system to cycle down and another 15 to cycle back up, and we were in the middle of a Communion song. So I gritted my teeth and shoved the cord back in the jack. (CRACK.) Then I hoisted Michael into a chair beside me and tried to keep calm and carry on singing while out of breath from exertion and temper.

And that was the moment when Julianna hijacked the Eucharist.

(I think she and Michael planned it together Saturday night. After I put them in bed. When they were supposed to be sleeping.)

You cannot possibly yell at me. Don’t I spend my car rides reading the text from the assembly box of “Up From The Earth”? I have a direct line to God. I have divine immunity.

She’s been showing greater and greater interest in what’s going on at church, and I’ve been whispering to her about bread and wine, body and blood, trying to unpack the Eucharistic Prayer for her. “Next year, that will be you,” I’ve told her as she watches girls and boys receive their First Communion. “Oh, look!” she will cry as the priest holds up the cup. “Eet—iss, Blood!” I took her out of summer school last week to send her to a church program focused on the sacraments, because let’s face it, the girl does not conceptualize at all. She needs as much exposure as she can get, especially since she doesn’t have daily religion class in school.

She wanted so badly to receive Communion last fall, I questioned the decision to have her repeat first grade religious ed along with first grade at school. But after a while, she settled down, going up with her arms crossed, docile as you please.

Little did I know she was biding her time.

When Christian shot the look at me from the piano, shaking his head and laughing, I thought he was reacting to Michael’s sound system exploits. We sang one of my songs post-Communion–ironically, one I wrote as a way to deal with my grief after Julianna’s birth.

Quiet, quiet, quiet my soul

Like a child at rest

Like a child at rest.

I was just starting to internalize this message when the song ended and Christian came over. “Julianna took Communion. I saw her coming back shoving something into her mouth and going, chomp, chomp, chomp.”

The stinker didn’t even deny it. “Did you take Communion?” I asked her.

“Yes, I deed!” She turned to one of our neighbors, who was there with her kids. “Guess what? Guess what? I, I, I, I, I take–I take–I take BWEAD!”

Proof that at least Mom and Dad went through the official preparation process for *their* First Communion.

Christian was hilarious. He called his parents for Father’s Day and said nonchalantly, “Oh, by the way, Julianna had her first Communion today.”

A beat, while the phone squawked horror and outrage.

“What?” Christian said. “You mean you didn’t know she was going to?” Another beat. “Oh, well, that’s okay. We didn’t know, either.”

Funny guy, my hubby.

When I’m Not Feeling Particularly Profound…

When I’m not feeling particularly profound, I use my blog space to say things like:

(And they decapitate Barbies, too.)

Is it all children, or just mine, who see all peace and quiet as a blank space longing to be filled by shouts of, WE’RE HOME! I HAD IT FIRST! MOMMY I WANT! ?

Or:

Am I the only person who pulls a minivan into the garage, cleverly avoiding the tipped over bicycles and not-put-away baseballs, and has a surreal flashback to being a new driver? I keep thinking about something I wrote in my Journal when I was sixteen, graduating from driving lessons on the loader tractor (which had a clutch and a throttle, but not a gas pedal) to the little white Escort (AM radio only). I wrote about “hurtling down the gravel road at 25 mph.” When I think of that and contrast it to the intricacies of the obstacle course that constitutes pulling in and out of my garage, I feel all grown up.

Speaking of Journals (and yes, “Journals” is capitalized, always):

Bathroom closet in the basement, with two lifetimes worth of letters in boxes and all my Journals, from 7th grade on, taking up two shelves.

The purging of the basement closet continues in fits and starts. This week I discovered every single parish bulletin published during my tenure as music & liturgy director. Why? Because when I was an aspiring writer, the conventional wisdom was that if you have no publishing credits, use things you’ve written for parish bulletins.

In case you’re wondering, I threw virtually all of them in the recycling. I think I can safely rest on my real publishing credits now.

However, this underscores something else I realized this week. You see, my parents are also involved in a great purge, because they’re getting ready for a foundation replacement. Our basement, growing up, was entirely unique. It was built by my grandfather and his boys of brick–yes, brick–with little rooms framed in by whatever boards were left from the house across the driveway, which they had torn down. These two rooms were called the “clothes storage” and the “cold storage” rooms in my childhood, and man, I wish I had a picture of those dusty shelves full of Ball jars of vegetables and fruits. Because it’s all gone now.

The remains of the clothes storage room. I remember it being much bigger.

The wall to the left was all shelves full of canned produce.

My older sister unearthed a jar of “beef tallow” in that room, labeled “2006” in my grandmother’s handwriting. I don’t even know what that is, let alone why you’d save it. Was she planning to make candles? She hadn’t even lived on the farm for 25 years at that point!

And then there was the “boot hole,” which was tucked into the edge of the cold storage room and was the repository for all the stinky work boots (we had hogs and cattle) as well as the rain boots and of course, the moon boots.

The boot hole is gone now, too (although clearly, not all the boots.)

I’d forgotten about these boots.

I’m very sad about this. My parents don’t seem to be.

That night, back at home, I finally got the shoeboxes full of old letters organized. And guess what I found?

That box on the right holds all the letters I saved from 1991 to 1997. The one on the left? Christian’s. 1991 to 1993.

So I guess I take after my parents when it comes to purging.

In other news, I sent my flute off to be worked on. They told me it really needs a repad, and that what I’m unhappy about with the touch is a result of worn pads. But they also quoted me the price for a repad. It’s going to have to wait a year. Anyway, I was without my flute for a week, and since it arrived home, I have only been able to practice in my usual 20-40 minute bursts. Yesterday, as I put it away and flew out the door to piano and baseball, I realized that 20 minutes is only long enough for me and the flute to feel like we like each other. Not enough to be satisfying by a long shot.

But my hands are flaring up, so even if I had four hours a day to practice like I did in college, I still couldn’t.

Well, I thought I had nothing at all to say, and now I have to stop before I tell my breastfeeding story. Ah well. Another time.

Adventures In Sex Ed…Again

(Warning: if you are squeamish about breastfeeding and related anatomy…DO.NOT.READ.)

It began with the words, “Mommy can you s-nugga me?”

“Of course I can snuggle you, Julianna. C’mere.”

Julianna cuddled up under my arm as we settled in for bedtime prayers. The younger boys were being pokey, as usual. Julianna rested her head against me for a minute and then raised her hand to point to a particular part of my anatomy. “Mommy, what, are, these?”

“We’ve talked about this before, Julianna. Those are my breasts.”

“Oh, yoh bwest?”

“Yes, you’ll have them someday, too.”

“What are, they for?”

“That’s how I fed all of you when you were babies. That’s how mommies give milk to their babies.”

Alex, up on the top bunk, emerged from the depths of the Deathly Hallows. “I always liked watching you with that milking machine.”

Image by sarahelizamoody, via Flickr

“That would be called a ‘breast pump,’” I said, wincing.

“No, the milking machine. I liked watching the drops fall in the bottle, and then you poured it all in those plastic bags and put it in the freezer.”

“When are you gonna use the milking machine again?” This from Nicholas. And at that point, it was clearly time to pray and send kids off to dreamland.

Eighteen hours later, I gave Nicholas a job: “Here. Take this and put it under the chair in my room. You know, the chair in the corner by the window?”

Blank, then a sudden clearing of expression. “Ohhhhhh!” he shouted. “The MILKING CHAIR!”

Well…it did used to be my nursing chair, yes…but now it’s my writing chair. And I suppose there’s a certain parallel between the nurturing of human babies and the nurturing of word babies.

But we clearly have some work to do to differentiate between Mommy…

and dairy animal.

Photo by fishhawk, via Flickr

I Need A Date Night With God

It’s been hard to blog lately. Hard to motivate myself. Hard to feel inspired. I feel like I’ve said it all before. And I wonder if I’m not being true to my identity. In the past nine months I’ve been really focusing on fiction, and I’ve gradually been focusing less on matters of faith and more on connecting with people who read secular fiction. Obviously those two audiences are not mutually exclusive, so it took a while for me to recognize what was happening in my heart and my head.

You know that phrase, “Where your treasure is, there also your heart shall be”? In recent months I haven’t been spending as much time pondering matters of faith…and I feel unsettled. Nervous. Like something’s off-kilter, something’s missing. Like I’m forgetting something.

It’s not like I’ve been without spiritual connection. I’ve been praying. Listening to the daily Scriptures and reflections. But I haven’t been taking time to process. To sit in stillness.

A lot of people look forward to summer as a time without commitments. With the kids’ end-of-year events, May was insane, and I really did expect life would feel less crazed once school let out. But it doesn’t. In some ways, it’s worse, because everyone is home more and getting under each other’s skin. Baseball, swim, summer school, camps—it’s a rich life, but it’s very…very…crazed.

I was wise enough not to schedule heavy deadlines, but I still feel a sense of frustration, and—outside of the novel—an overpowering, scary barrenness of creativity. I’m pretty sure all I need is the to take time to sit down at the piano and focus, and the gears will grind into motion again. Most of all, what I need is to be still and quiet my mind. I know the Spirit is still there. I’m aware of it…I’m just not in touch.

I need a date night with God.

Where Have The Fireflies Gone?

Photo by jamelah, via Flickr

I miss fireflies.

When I was little, the fireflies were everywhere. I remember trekking through the tall grass north of the house to the pond with my cousin and catching one to bring back and put in a jar, where we watched it all night. Apparently as a child I wasn’t as creeped out by the prospect of ticks as I am now, because I’m pretty sure I was wearing shorts. Maybe the vividness of that memory comes from the fact that this cousin was my first-ever best friend and since she lived on the west coast, seeing her was a once-every-other-year occasion.

In the past decade or so, I had thought that my memory of the fireflies was skewed by time and by the tendency of a fanciful child to enlarge all enchanting things. But there was a night, a few years ago, when Christian and I stood on the deck looking down over the lawn and the deep, dark places in the woods, at the profusion of silent lights blinking lazily. I said, “This is what I remember. Why isn’t it like this all the time?”

Not long after, I found out that there really aren’t as many fireflies as there used to be. Mostly it has to do with the destruction of habitat and the uptick in light pollution. There’s also some speculation that the “fogging” done by cities to discourage mosquitoes also discourages fireflies. But it hasn’t been studied a whole lot yet, as best I can tell.

It’s hard for me to accept the thoughtlessness I see unfolding around me in people’s interactions with the world. It’s much bigger than the fireflies; they’re just an example that comes to mind at this time of year. I don’t think the people who sit with their cars and air conditioners running for half an hour in the parking lot while their kids take swim lessons or piano have hostile intentions toward the world. I think they just don’t want to put up with any discomfort. I don’t think the people who dump huge amounts of recyclables in trash bags bound for the landfill are hell-bent on squandering the resources and the space that make this precious world so beautiful. I think they just don’t think it through and live intentionally.

And that’s really the key. We’re so used to our comfort, our convenience, that we aren’t intentional about how we use things. We get so caught up in our TV shows and our social media and whatever other “strange gods,” as Elizabeth Scalia put it, that it doesn’t occur to us that every single action we take, or don’t take, has a ripple effect on the world.

Nothing we do is without consequence.

Pope Francis is due to release an encyclical next week on climate change. I’m really looking forward to seeing what he has to say, and I’m praying that it makes a difference.

What We’re Doing This Summer

What we’re doing lately:

Swim lessons. The little boys started yesterday. Nicholas amazed me. I don’t think he lost anything over the last year. Michael refused to go in the water. Fortunately, the inimitable founder of the swim school, who’s been teaching kids to swim for decades, was in the pool with another class and diverted to take on my three-year-old, who wailed and cried for a while and then stopped when he realized it was hopeless. “This is ‘stubborn’ meets ‘stubborn,’” she said. “Nice to meetcha.”

At this moment: eating cereal with two spoons. Because apparently it’s better that way.

Reading. Alex is finishing the last two Harry Potter books. He devoured #6 in two days last week. This book is going more slowly, because of….

Summer school. Julianna goes every year, of course, but this is Alex’s first year. He’s not doing regular school, but the EEE (gifted) program. Day one he found less than thrilling. Day two was better. We’ll see how day three goes.

Not keeping up with the outdoor work. I tried to issue weeding as a chore yesterday but the sad fact is that Nicholas is not good at it and Michael won’t do it at all, and with the glut of work projects backing up behind me, I don’t have the time to teach/force the issue right now. So I did a couple of beds yesterday and hopefully soon I’ll get to another couple, and…and… We also had to put the tomato cages on yesterday, which should have been done a week ago, because I mutilated my plants trying to get them on. They shot up all of a sudden.

Fighting, of course. Lots of fighting. Lots of mess making.

Picking cherries at a friend’s house. Tart cherries, oh Heavenly!

Playing my flute duets with my college flute teacher at a local Chinese restaurant, and then listening to him play trios with another friend and a third flutist who I only just met in the last year. While Michael played air guitar and meticulously imitated the shuffling of the adults’ music. Then heading over to church to sing and play for my pastor’s 50th anniversary of the priesthood. It was a beautiful Mass.

Golf camp. Nicholas loves it, and it’s free. No complaints from me.

Moving into travel writing, thanks to a friend/critique partner.

Life is busy. We always want more. More, more, more. But life is good.

Age, Wisdom, and The Tradeoff

Climbing inside the roof of the St. Louis City Museum, 2014

Even in high school, I thought people were insane when they said, “These are the best days of your life.” If this is as good as it gets, I thought, I might as well just give up right now.

Now, don’t get me wrong. Three of four years of high school I enjoyed very much. But college was much better, the immersion in music and in a community of people who were as music-geeky as I was. And then I met Christian and discovered my calling in liturgical music, and found another community of people, even more in tune with my outlook on the world. (I get to go hang out with all of them in a few weeks.) Even grad school, for all the emotional turmoil I experienced those two years, was a deeply enriching experience as I got to discover a new and exquisitely beautiful locale and meet people who remain near and dear to my heart to this day.

Factor in marriage, and children, and, well, life is way, way better at forty than it was at sixteen. I always say you couldn’t pay me enough to go back to high school. I’m finally comfortable in my own skin, with more self-confidence than I ever thought I’d develop.

But man, the body.

I know I have readers older than me, so to say things like what I want to say today is inviting trouble. But the fact is, I can really feel the effects of age.

I had a sweet spot that lasted about eighteen months, where I was regularly active and on my way to/holding on to a healthy weight for the first time in my life. (See, in high school I couldn’t even run a mile without stopping to walk in the middle.) I’ve discovered that I really love being active. It feels good. And equally important, I love to eat, so I need to be active. Very active.

But in October my feet started to hurt. The doctor called it plantar fasciitis. My massage therapist, who is fast becoming my go-to person for all physical problems, said it’s a mimic condition but not the same thing. He dug into my calves at incredible discomfort…and after about six weeks, the pain receded. Soon to be replaced by pain in my knees, caused by tension in my quads. I was just beginning to recover from that when the sun screen fell off the camera while I was running to capture a photo, and landed just right under my right ankle, causing me to sprain it.

And now, before the sprain is even fully recovered, the knees are back in play.

My one real regret is the fact that I squandered so much of my body’s prime active years insisting I was not cut out for exercise, that I was incapable of losing weight, and generally not recognizing my own laziness and how much I was giving up in order to hang onto it. I’m gradually coming to terms–not a sense of peace, yet, but ground level acceptance–with the realization that for the rest of my life I will have to pay close attention to knees, ankles, shoulders, feet, to stretch and massage and rub Tiger Balm into myself, not to feel better, but simply to be able to keep moving at all. And knowing that at forty, I’m still close to the top of that hill, that there’s really only one direction to go from here, and it’s not the direction I want to go.

I guess the reality is that you need all the wisdom of increasing age to deal with the physicality of increasing age. Can I get an amen?

Things You Might Find Going Through Old Boxes of Letters

Earlier this week I told you I’ve started going through old letters and cards in the basement closet. I thought it would be a simple thing: pitch or keep. But I keep having “whaaa?” moments at things I discover in the boxes. Like:

ONE

Rejection letters from high-end music conservatories.

TWO

The invoice for my flute.

THREE

More than one reference, in a letter, to the dawn of the email age. It makes me smile to see the awkward way we all talked about this new-fangled thing, and treated it like a fun little fad. Like a letter–as in, sent with postage–that said, “Our email address is ____. Please mail me your email address.” (Because phone calls still cost more than a stamp in 1998!)

FOUR

Letters from my youngest sister that fill–and I mean fill–the front and back of three notebook pages and do not appear to include a paragraph break or margin anywhere.

FIVE

One of Christian’s black dress socks.

SIX

This:

And to those who said when I shared this on Facebook, “Just be glad it wasn’t a check!” I can only say….um….I found one of those last night, too. Tucked in a wedding card. To the tune of (mumble mumble ninety dollars mumble mumble). I had to make a very embarrassed phone call to my uncle last night.

SEVEN

But I also found a note from another uncle on the occasion of my grad school graduation, and his words resonated with where I am right now, the things I’m wrestling with, so I want to share a couple sentences that seem to speak to me right now:

Try to calm your “self” and maintain a spirit of humility and gratitude in all things. This can be very difficult for motivated individuals. We tend to fall into self-reliance and push God to the side. That’s when life gets chaotic.

Wise words for a work-at-home mom at the end of the first week of summer break.

(Joining up with Seven Quick Takes today…come on over!)

Hoarding And Purging

Photo by Julie Edgley, via Flickr

My grandmother once told me that she and my grandfather wrote many letters to each other before they got married. He was in the military, stationed in California, and she lived with her family in mid-Missouri.

Being very interested both in stories and in family history, I perked up. “What happened to those letters?” I asked. “Can we read them?”

“Oh, I don’t have them anymore,” she told me. “They got thrown away in some move over the years.”

I’m sure I gave her a dazed look. I couldn’t understand how something so obviously precious could be put in the discard pile, no matter how many times you moved (I’ll grant you, my grandmother and her ten kids moved a lot of times).

I didn’t understand until yesterday.

You see, yesterday I began plowing through the accumulated saved mail of two forty-year-olds’ lifetimes. Let me introduce you to our catch-all closet:

Look, I have a red ribbon around my letters too. Or, well, a piece of yarn. Don’t you see it?

Over the years, Christian and I have both gone through the memorabilia and ditched about half of it. But neither of us have ever had the energy to tackle all those shoeboxes full of cards and letters. (Letters. Remember those?)

Until now.

You see, I have to clean out half of this closet. Julianna, at 8 1/2, needs to quit sharing a room with her brother, who is no longer a baby. But if Michael has to move in with Nicholas, then Alex has to move downstairs.

So I’m purging. As I sifted through the box containing the first two years of our marriage, I found Christmas cards from random parishioners, invitations to ordinations, and birthday cards with neither date nor personal message written on them. And I realized:

For most of my life I have been a hoarder.

But no more.

These days, I am ruthless. When you have four kids, especially little ones who bring home half a ream of paper crafts a week, you have to be. If I was a hoarder these days, every time we opened the front door, it would look like Hogwarts invitations coming out of the Dursleys’ fireplace.

As I was tossing birthday cards with no notes, only signatures, I had a moment of self-doubt. That’s my grandmother’s signature. She’s not going to be around forever. Shouldn’t I keep that?

No, I decided. No, no, no! I have letters in her handwriting. I do not need every card she ever sent me! Into the recycling with you!

Then I opened another card containing only a signature. The signature of my other grandmother, the staple of my childhood, who died two and a half years ago. And I instantly started crying. Not much. Not for long. Just long enough to give me pause, and make me pull back a bit.

I suppose the reality is that in this, as in everything else in life, balance is a moving point somewhere south of preservation and north of progress. It’s a tension that informs writing, as well. Not every note I write, every word that comes forth from the mouth of cough-cough-genius-cough-cough, actually deserves to be heard. But sure as I hit “delete,” I want it later. So my poor editor got a music file a couple of weeks ago entitled “This Joyful Is A Mess,” with a note to ignore those last twenty measures, because I just wanted to hang onto them in case I needed them later.

And as for the basement closet, well, I figure, if I purge even a third of that mess, it’s going to make a huge difference!

Time To Breathe

I don’t take enough time off.

Which is more than a bit ironic, given how much I twit my husband about checking email and working from home.

The great thing about writing from home is that I can do it anywhere, any time, in the cracks of regular life.

That’s also the worst thing about it. Because I start trying to fill every crack with productive time. Even my down time is spent folding clothes or scrapbooking–I never allow myself TV time unless I am doing something productive.

This weekend we went camping overnight, and I left my computer at home. It was harder to make that decision than I would like to admit. Early morning is my best time, and to be camped beside the river, in the quiet, with only the tree frogs and the insects for company? I knew I was giving up a precious commodity.

But I also knew I needed a break. The thrill of writing a new manuscript has settled into a rhythm of high motivation and determination, but I also feel an unsettling certainty that I’ve got all my eggs in one basket right now, and I need to be writing music and essays and nonfiction pieces. Things that, yanno. Pay. Not to mention promoting the things I already have out there. But all that nibbles at the edge of my enjoyment, and this week, as I’ve been fighting off a cold, I realized I was teetering on the edge of burnout.

So I left the computer at home.

And I had trouble getting to sleep, so in the chill of a fifty-degree morning beside the Missouri River, I stayed in my sleeping bag until the kids got us up at, well, (cough-cough-six-thirty).

I didn’t miss a moment of our first real campout as a family, and for that I’m very grateful.