1) It’s Friday night, and I can already tell you what the weekend will hold: A) plowing through piles of grading; and B) fighting my everlasting cold. Humph. It’s hard to imagine any circumstance, short of winning the lottery or having a visitation from Mary, that could make this weekend top last weekend. But that’s life, right? Sometimes you have a nice romantic date with your honey, and sometimes you have an extended dull date with your schoolwork. The variety keeps us on our toes.
2) I’m a big fan of grandparents. Sometimes, I forget that Jesus had them, too. My latest Busted Halo Question Box answer dives into the question of who Mary’s parents were, and what we know about them, and how we know it.
3) They say you can tell a lot about a person by the books she reads. I’ll go one step further and say that you can tell even more about a person by the books she RE-reads. And the one series I’ve re-read more than any other in my life are the Betsy-Tacy books by Maud Hart Lovelace. Never heard of them? Aww, you’re in for a treat. You can read all about them in my latest column at CatholicMom.com.
After many Winter Olympics, I’ve realized this: I much prefer ice dancing to figure skating. I love how ice dancing gives so much room for creativity in choreography and costuming. And for me, ice dancing is more relaxing than figure skating. Every time a figure skater does a triple lutz, my heart stops until she lands on her feet (assuming she does). In ice dancing, it’s just not an issue.
So I stayed up way too late the other night to watch the free dance. It was worth it to see the gorgeous fluid elegance of Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir. (Incidentally, my husband’s name is Scott Moyer — same pronunciation. Imagine hearing an Olympic commentator say, “Now on the ice, [your husband's name].” I was doing double-takes all night.) They were beautiful and flawless and I look forward to many more exquisite routines from my husband’s Canadian counterpart.
But there is one ice dancing routine that reigns supreme for me. I saw it eighteen years ago, and I’ve never forgotten it. In 1992, real-life spouses Marina Klimova and Sergei Ponomarenko won gold for their routine “A Man and a Woman” at the Albertville Olympics. It is absolutely, positively, goosebump-inducingly GORGEOUS. The choreography, the music (two very recognizable pieces by Bach), the costumes, the mind-blowing talent of the skaters… it’s pure passion on ice. I had an old VHS tape of this that I thought was lost forever, but, through the miracle of YouTube, I have found it again.
Do you have five minutes to spare? Watch this. It’s easily the most romantic ice-dancing routine I’ve ever seen.
No, what am I saying? It’s easily the most romantic anything I’ve ever seen.
So you know how Valentine’s Day is supposed to be the day when you celebrate romance, love, and that special someone?
Well, we bumped it back a week.
Saturday morning, Scott and I left the boys with my folks and headed for England … or what felt like England, anyhow. We went to stay at this inn in Muir Beach, just minutes from the Golden Gate Bridge:
At this point, if you are a fellow Anglophile, you are probably salivating like a St. Bernard. Honestly, this is the most fabulous place. It makes you feel like you’re in a Daphne Du Maurier novel. It was built in the 1970s by an English expat, who lovingly designed it to make it look just like an old inn across the pond. I think he did a darn good job.
Take, for instance, our room, which looks like something Moll Flanders would have slept in:
Here was the view out of our leaded windows:
There were great old framed prints on the wall. This one clearly depicts a time long before PETA:
(Yes, that guy is trailing a dead deer by one foot.)
Oh, and this was our shower curtain, with knights, dragons, fair damsels, and castles galore:
Best of all, the inn is a short walk to the beach. It was a cloudy, gray day; the water looked metallic and was unbelievably loud as it crashed to the shore. It was the kind of beach I love. It made me think about Star of the Sea, one of my very favorite titles for Mary. (I admit it; I’m a geek.)
“Do you think you would be a more spiritual person if you lived overlooking the ocean?” I asked Scott, as we sat on a bench on the bluff.
“I think you’d have to be,” he said. We watched the waves together, looking at the splash of sunlight reflected on one little section of the waves, soaking in the loud thunderous crash of it all. There is something so soothing about looking out at that line of the horizon. It sounds cliched, but it made everything else sort of recede for a time … everything, of course, but the great guy sharing the bench with me and keeping me warm. In fact, the entire weekend brought him — actually, us – into a nice sharp focus.
Three minutes after school started yesterday morning, the power went off. It stayed off … all day. Turns out it was a citywide outage due to a small plane crashing into some powerlines (three people died, tragically, in the crash).
We couldn’t send the kids home without first notifying the parents, and we couldn’t notify the parents without power. So what did we do? We all taught in the dark. Blinds were pulled all the way up, doors were propped open, and I wrote in foot-high letters on the whiteboard. It was like being a Londoner during the Blitz (except for, you know, the Luftwaffe). I just kept calm and carried on. Miraculously, I got through about 75% of my lesson plans. It is amazing what you can adapt on the fly. It’s all the more amazing considering that I was doing it on an almost- empty tank: you know, that Ash Wednesday fast thing.
After school, I had a chunk of time before picking the boys up from my folks, so I took advantage of the unseasonably warm day and went for a jog/hike in the foothills. It was a glorious afternoon. The sky was blue and the hills were green, with that bright spring green of new grass. Where the trail was in sun, it was perfectly dry; further along the path, under the oaks, the ground was tacky with old mud, but smelled fresh and deliciously earthy. I paused at the top of a hill and watched the gentle almost-spring sun slide along the slopes, and it was quiet enough to hear the breeze in my ear: a beautiful, soft, intimate sound.
And I thought about the day: a day of darkness and light, of fasting and celebration. It was neither one thing nor the other. Everything was mixed, ashes and sunshine together. And I thought about how life is like that sometimes: everything all at once, a dizzying mix, a wild ride — and a memorable one.
Yes, I did plenty of cutting and pasting as a kid, and I do enjoy a little browse through Michael’s every now and then. Still, craftiness (in the non-devious sense of the word) is not one of my gifts.** Give me a hank of raffia, and I am likely to put it in an animal’s cage. I do not trust myself to use a hot glue gun without inadvertently affixing my hand to the table.
That’s why I am still pretty proud of these Valentine’s decorations that I made, out of my little old imagination, about four years ago.
I’d bought a darling book of 1940’s era valentines at the local Borders (I’m a sucker for anything retro), and I wanted to do something to display them. Somehow, in a rare flash of artistic inspiration, I got the idea to buy thick red ribbon and staple the valentines to it. I know this concept is somewhere on the level of Remedial Arts and Crafts, but I have to say, I think these look pretty darn cute.
Today is the feast of Our Lady of Lourdes. I don’t feel inspired to blog on every Marian feast day — a good thing, otherwise I’d never stop blogging — but Lourdes is special to me.
For one thing, I’ve a bit of an affinity for France. And, unlike most Marian apparition sites, I’ve actually visited Lourdes. In a very indirect and surprising way, that visit changed my life. It was in Lourdes that the first little inkling of a “new Mary” entered my mind. Thanks to Lourdes, I could start to see her as more than just the glacially perfect woman in the statues. I started to see her as a woman who actually lived.
The Lourdes story is about Mary in the middle of the rock and grit, finding what’s beautiful. I love how Mary appeared to the little shepherdess, a person no one ever thought was holy or special enough to have such a visitor. Mary’s coming revealed that there was more to Bernadette than anyone suspected, including Bernadette herself. Mary’s coming also tapped into the latent faith of the people of Lourdes, just as Bernadette tapped into the healing waters of the spring. In a way, one could say that the Lourdes story is really about venturing below the surface, finding the beautiful depths that exist there, and harnessing them for good.
When I was a kid, I always identified with Snow White as a character. Maybe it’s the fact that she was one of the few brunette heroines in the fairytale book, so I instinctively related to her on that level (my blonde sister, on the other hand, could claim a kinship with Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland, Sleeping Beauty … proof that when it comes to fairytales, blondes DO have more fun).
It’s just started to rain here. I can hear it on the skylight above me: nice. There’s the cozy smell of pot roast in the slow cooker. Matthew is playing with his train table and Lukey is still in his crib, about to get up. Life is good.
Nine years ago today, Scott and I went on our first date. Nine years ago, I couldn’t have imagined being where I am today, on a rainy evening, sharing a life with my one big guy and my two little guys. Or could I? I did know that there was something different and real there, that very first dinner Scott and I had together. There were many years of dating despair, and then — suddenly, in the space of one restaurant dinner — a page had turned. The new chapter was an exhilirating one, but it was also oddly peaceful. That’s how we knew it was right.
And so I say: Thank you, God. Thank you for that day, and all the days that followed it.
I'm a formerly lapsed Catholic who likes to write about faith, real life, and how the two intersect. Oh, and I love Mary -- check out my book Mary and Me below!
