The Margins

Today we made a little trip into Portland to escape the Tillamook rain. We enjoyed a spur of the moment lunch date with a dear friend and her son in Northeast Portland, complete with bubbles and mud puddles and dirty, happy kids. After lunch we drove by my old house and through the changing face of MLK and our old hood. Then we met up with Doug’s sister at OMSI but ended up opting instead for a long walk along the river and across the Hawthorne Bridge when the sun made a stunning afternoon appearance.

Portland is a great city for walking and people watching, and the kids loved all the people and dogs and crossing the river on the bridge and watching out as bikes whizzed past around them. We ended our trek with delicious Umpqua ice cream on the waterfront, and the guy who scooped our ice cream got a two dollar tip from Doug for his generosity. I am pretty sure my cone alone could have fed a family of eight.

A sober moment came as we came up from the bridge crossing and walked along the beach. A man emerged from the beachfront holding a big clipboard thing, and he stood there strangely as our family passed. Doug was the last to pass him, and I heard the two of them exchange a few words before Doug caught up to us and said to me: “Get the kids to the other side.”

“Why, are they doing a d-r-u-g b-u-s-t?” I had sensed that the clipboard man might be with the authorities even though he wore no uniform, and there was a shady group of teenagers not far from where he stood that looked like they were dealing.

“No, they are about to bring up a d-e-a-d b-o-d-y.”

We walked quickly urging the small ones along, and as we looked back we saw a team in plain clothes lifting a body wrapped in white plastic from water’s edge.

The kids remained clueless, but Doug, Sarah and I were of course fully aware of what was going on behind us. When we made our way back after ice cream, there were kids playing and people swimming in the spot where the authorities had been.

After dinner at Red Robin, we made the journey back to Tillamook. The boys slept soundly after the day’s adventures while Mercy sat wide-eyed listening to the Wicked soundtrack that Sarah had loaned to us for the drive, clutching the Red Robin balloon Aaron lost in his sleep.

The night before we left for our trip north, we had the amazing privilege of seeing the Los Angeles production of Wicked with our very dear friends. Many people had told us how incredible this show is and we had heard over and over again how we just HAD to go and see it. Of course, nights out at the theater are not the norm for us, so while we had both shared a strong desire to see the show, we did not have any real, concrete expectation that we would.

Well, it surpassed even my highest expectations which felt surprising considering all the hype. The night was magical, and the next morning I just could not help myself from showing a few YouTube scenes to Mercy. The flying monkeys and the big talking Wizard head certainly caught her attention, but her imagination was most captured by the relationship between Glinda and Elfeba as they sang a sad goodbye to one another.

Wicked tells “the untold story of the Witches of Oz”, and the friendship between the two witches really turns the story of the Wizard of Oz on its head. And so it was interesting the other day when Mercy stumbled across the Wizard of Oz book in the van that good friends had loaned to us for our trip. It is a book filled with pictures along with the text, and so she sat in her carseat while we drove, flipping through the story.

At one point, Mercy started asking me questions about the Wizard of Oz story and I was answering them according to the original text. Mercy was growing increasingly agitated in the back seat. Finally she cried out in exasperation: “But Mommy, you are not understanding me!” “Mercy, what am I not understanding?” I asked, genuinely confused. “But Mommy, the witches LOVE each other.”

And then her frustration made sense. She was trying to make sense of the story I was telling her but it was in such clear contradiction to what she knew to be true based on Wicked. And I was stuck. I could not get the one story across without violating the other.

Last night during bath-time, Mercy had me tell her the Wicked story three times. For my daughter, a green-skinned, misunderstood friend has captivated her far more than a little Kansas girl and her dog.

I am sitting in lakeside quiet, loving the peace of such dark stillness. An occasional fish jumping, bugs large and small darting into the screens around me, Doug and my parents discussing the Olympics in the room behind me, a beach fire popping in the distance: I love the soundtrack of nights here. And watching Mercy frolic from morning to night in the water, drinking “coffee” poured by Aaron from the same beach toys I used to make “coffee” for my mom, and doing my best to keep Elijah from eating too many rocks reminds me that I am rich indeed.

After a few very tired first days here, I can feel that soul-altering restoration creeping into my body. And while days start bright and early at 6am, and there is no end to swimming and digging and sunscreen-applying, the day’s end brings such a very different kind of tired.

The other day I spotted a good friend in Fuller’s bookstore: he was browsing among the books and I was ordering a coffee. I walked over to say hello, and we talked about the books on fixed-hour prayer he was considering. Having endured a deep personal loss in the last year, this friend said that he had struggled with the ability to pray and had needed someone else’s words to use during this difficult season. Phyllis Tickle’s fine works had become his companion, and he was looking to expand his collection.

I nodded as he spoke, because I had negotiated a similar landscape: on the heels of what felt like an uncanny string of disappointments and difficulties, I too had struggled to pray. And while he had found that having other people’s words to pray had made all the difference, my grace came in the package of a three-year-old.

I described Mercy’s insistence and persistence in asking me to pray for her all of the time: “My daughter taught me to pray again,” I concluded.

Scripted prayers. Prayers assigned to the hours of the day. Repetition and requirement. Sometimes prayer is not about what we are feeling, believing, understanding. Sometimes prayer is a going through the motions sort of thing that over time carves out the space for living water to finally wash over you again.

“Pray for me, Mommy.” Over, and over, and over again, this question has pulled me back to a place of talking with God. And while the prayers have been short and largely repetitive (”please heal Mercy’s owie”), they have been the immersion that brought that other language back to my brain, heart and lips.

Yesterday I was talking to the kids about how we would be going to Grammy and Pop Pop’s church the next day, and I told them about the other kids who would be there, the toys they could play with, the snack they would have, etc.
Mercy paused after my enthusiastic explanation and asked: “Are we going there to worship?”

While that had been the last thing on my mind as I talked to my young kids, I answered her: “Yes, Mercy. Yes, we are going there to worship.”

I thought back to all of the church-planting training I sat through at various points and realized that the way I went about describing “church” to my kids is a bit like how we were told we should share about our churches in a given community. Upbeat music. Great kids programs. Starbucks coffee.

I remember last summer driving past two churches on the same block and I could not help but notice the stark contrast in their signage. The first was what I have come to expect. Big, colored banners proclaimed: “Come to our Celebration Service at 10am. Contemporary music, relevant teaching, etc….” The second read in simple font: “Weekly Celebration of the Eucharist, 10am”

The first sign, fully of happy fonts and graphics, assured me that I would celebrate, and the word there suggested something like a birthday party with games and cake. The second sign also used the word celebrate, yet with such a different sense as to what that means.

Sitting in the van today at the drive-through counter of our favorite local coffee shop here, Mercy called out from the back seat that the side of her nose hurt. I can’t remember now if she and Aaron collided or if the baby grabbed her or if she ran into something, but she was very clear that the left side of her nose was in pain. As she always does, she asked me to pray for her.

I prayed that God would heal the side of her nose and that the pain would go away quickly. As I was praying, Mercy interrupted me which is unusual:

“No, mommy, not the side of my nose! Pray for my left snozzle.”

Last night was the second time on this trip that a police officer approached us and called us over for the sake of giving the kids little “Junior Deputy” star stickers. The first was at our early morning Starbucks breakfast stop in Fresno, and the second was last night as I was herding the children to the van after a little community track meet. It is just funny how seeing a police car creates anxiety for me, and then to be called over honestly makes me sweat.

As we walked up to the officer’s open passenger window last night, he reached over and handed Mercy a big golden star sticker. Aaron, who had been clutching a very large pine cone he found on the way out of the stadium, reached up and dropped it onto the passenger seat of the police car. I think he thought he was giving the officer a gift.

“Is that your sister?’ the officer asked Mercy, and I confess that my first thought was that he was using that dumb line where you compliment an older woman by placing her in the younger generation, and I thought to myself, “I’m not old enough to need that kind of compliment!!!”

But then I realized that Aaron’s long hair made the officer think he was a girl. Aaron got his sticker and we left, all the while having the officer refer to my son using feminine pronouns. I think it might be time for that haircut.

My kids are bundled in fleece and I am in long pants and a sweatshirt. We left L.A. in time to miss the earthquake and are enjoying some restful and currently chilly days with our Seattle family. Doug left early this morning for Hawaii to host one of Fuller’s DMin courses there, and the kiddos and I are figuring out how our life works at Grammy and Pop Pop’s house. Elijah really wants to go head first down the stairs and eat Laylah’s dog food, Mercy is thrilled with Grammy’s play-house and the sand table outside, and Aaron has located every ball and vehicle in the house.

We did the drive in two days which is the quickest we have ever tried with the small ones, and it actually went quite smoothly. Our usual host families along the way were all out of town, so we stayed our night in Medford, Oregon in a very empty house. Our host usually brings out a box of toys for the kiddos, but because they were gone we did not have those things so the kids did their best to entertain themselves. One of the most coveted items was that Sharper Image toy with a million different nail-like pieces that forms the shape of whatever is pressed against it. Mercy’s Cinderella figurine spent a lot of time in it, as did various animals.

It was moments before we were ready to hop into the van to leave that next morning when there was an “uh-oh” heard over by the fireplace. I looked over and saw Aaron, on the floor, with hundreds of little nail pieces spilling out around him. He had found the screws that held the plates of this toy together and, being Aaron had quickly figured out how to unscrew them.

We had timed our departure perfectly for when the baby’s nap should happen, but now we faced a fairly substantial delay while first Doug and then I sat crouching by the fireplace, inserting what seemed like thousands of little nails one by one into a black plastic plate. We ended up strapping the kiddos all into the van and Doug went to get gas while I finished threading nails in peace and quiet. An hour later, the toy was re-assembled and we were on our way to Starbucks to fill up the thermos for the day’s drive.
Ah, road trips with children.

Addressing Lauren in our dining room last week: “You are like a ripe plum that is ready to eat.”

Apparently Aaron is showing an early aptitude for the fine art of pick-up lines.

Aaron loves playing basketball. Lauren has a little hoop attached to an overhang in her apartment, and it is probably daily that I hear the request from my son to “go to Lauren’s house!” So, the other day I decided to get creative and I cut out the bottom of a Noah’s Bagels’ box that Doug had brought home from work and taped the thing up to the wall. It’s a little bit like the toddler version of kids nailing milk crates up on posts which I saw a lot of in Chicago.

Aaron calls it “the net”.

As I played ball with my son, I was reminded of three boys who also loved basketball and who, like my son, were willing to make do with much less than the ideal.

The kids I worked with through the Big Sister/Big Brother program I led in Chicago were desperate for a safe place to hang out and be kids in those “so easy to get into trouble” hours between school dismissal and dark. My senior year at North Park, we cleared out half of a dorm basement (the other half was stacked with boxes and furniture and junk) and opened a very ghetto drop-in center for junior high kids. We had old, lumpy furniture, a ping pong table that sagged in the middle, and a Foosball table where half of the little guys were missing their legs (yes, this makes for a very challenging game). We had tables for homework or art, a handful of games, and most importantly a crew of college students who would listen and laugh and play. We opened our doors to the community two days a week.

Someone brought in a little Nerf basketball and hoop that could be attached to the wall (much like the one Lauren has in her house), and it hung on a support post near the edge of where the junk began. There were three eighth grade boy, Jonathan, Ivan and Jamar, who came regularly and who always played basketball on our “net”. They were good players and knew how to have fun with our tiny little hoop and ball. Their laughter was contagious as they would very competitively enjoy their “games”.

It was some time in that first week that the Nerf ball got tossed into the junk portion of the room and we could not recover it. A ball of duct tape became the substitute, and this in no way diminished my boys’ delight.

Every time I walk into my kitchen, I see those same three boys smiling at me. There is a picture of them on our refrigerator: Jamar with his arms folded in the middle; Jonathan to the right, head cocked, with his arm on Jamar; Ivan, to the left, sober-faced in his stocking cap, with his hand on Jamar’s shoulder. And behind Jamar, to the left, is a crooked orange basketball hoop with a blue net hanging by a few threads on one side.

Those boys. That broken hoop. A meager attempt at meeting a need. Those days go down in history when I think of who I am today. And as Aaron calls out to me to find the ball that is now lost in our own little junk pile here, I think of Jamar and Ivan and Jonathan and I smile with wet eyes.