Getting Away

Is been ages since I've been away from my kids for more than a few hours. Eleven years, actually, when Jonathan's best friend got married and Joseph was just starting to try out walking. With Jonathan's new job (6 months, as of last weekend, so he's permanent now) he also gets to go on business trips. This year's Congress for New Urbanism annual meeting is in Savannah Georgia and he asked if I wanted to come along.

I remember my mom tagging along on some of my dad's trips. I think the first may have been the last minute meetup in Amsterdam. She came to my school and pulled me out of class to explain that she was going to Europe that afternoon to meet Dad and Nate was going to be in charge of us for the next week. She loved the whole thing so much she went on several more over the years. I even went with them twice. Those trips cemented my love of old things and unplanned adventure.

So here I am, in Savannah. We're staying in the old downtown and its gorgeous. The buildings are all the same shape but with a wealth of variety in details and complexity. Our bed and breakfast is actually a collection of row houses (not necessarily contiguous, either) rather than an individual property, in a solid middle-class area and there's mansions just two blocks away. Many are still residences and many have been converted to other uses. I like that the service areas on the ground floors are often converted to shops while the homes above are largely intact. There are mid-block squares with thick tree canopies covered in Spanish moss and ferns that the large north-south streets have to divert around. Churches dot the architectural landscape. There are fascinating things to look at every twenty feet, from the gates on alleys to the wares in a hatter's window. I've seen three book sellers, two fabric shops, and a yarn shop. And no, we dont have a car.

The whole reason they choose this city, this neighborhood--and it is a neighborhood--is that this is what cities used to be and what they're driving cities to be again. And so, with that, we wanted to experience the city as a resident. So we live in a row house, shop and eat at local shops, Jonathan goes to work at one of the big hotels, attending meetings and lectures and presentations, and I have a part-time job. (Passes to the conference are $400-600, but if you work as a volunteer your pass is just $85.) It's a beautiful life. Even if it's just for a week.

Patronage

I like slow living.  I knead my bread by hand instead of in a mixer and refuse to own a bread machine even though I like the idea of waking up to fresh bread. I knit my own socks, knowing full well that I can buy some at Target. I can even spin my own yarn starting with wool fresh off the sheep, if it comes down to it. I prefer paper for books that I buy, though electronic works well for library books, mostly because they're available at midnight and it's impossible for them to be past due. I hate audio books. It's impossible to get the pacing right and the tone is always so neutral and bland that it kills whatever mood there might have been. I like to walk when I can, instead of driving, and am actively lobbying for a bicycle so that I can go even further without having to deal with my car.

That said, I do have a smart phone (Jonathan doesn't and when he had occasion to prove such to his co-workers his office-mate leaned over and said, "I thought you were Mormon, not Amish.") and I even have a couple podcasts I listen to, mostly Two Guys On Your Head. I like the psychology discussions and it's really quite educational. I went looking for some new ones, recently, to maybe branch out, or something. There were knitting ones and trivia ones and cooking ones and history ones. I picked up a few but just haven't gotten into them. I'd have to carve out time for that and I don't feel like making the effort, most days. One really got to me, though. It's called LDS Perspectives and I listened to three or four episodes the first day. The second episode, they were talking to Brad Wilcox about his His Grace is Sufficient talk at BYU. It's amazing.

In discussing the delicate interplay between Grace and Works (see 2Nephi 25:23, James 2:20), he brings up Steven Robinson's Parable of the Bicycle, where we will never have enough but that's OK because the difference will be made up. This is so hard, though, because too many say that we've messed up too many times or we're obviously not doing our best, so what's the point? So he introduces his Parable of the Piano Lesson, in that Grace is where our mother has already paid for the lessons--for the teacher, the books and the piano--but it is up to us to practice.  My mind leapt one step further. Christ's Grace is a Patronage.

Long ago, in professions with guilds, it was common for a person with means to sponsor a youth who showed promise to an apprenticeship within a guild. Tuition was paid, often housing and meals were provided, and a career set forth. The apprentice had to study under the guidance of master craftsmen, usually for years, to become competent, then skilled, then a master himself. It was often a life's work.

To put this in more modern terms, our life is a university. We applied in the pre-mortal world, were accepted, and enrolled at birth.  We're not here on scholarship, though. Nor are we working our way through with a part- or full-time job. Christ has paid our tuition, in full, for whatever our course load, line of study, or number of degrees may be, including books, supplies, library time, a new laptop, access to the gym, room and board, and anything else you could need. Because it's already paid, we don't have to worry about minor infractions costing us our scholarship. We don't have to worry about losing hours at work because we were studying or sick and not having enough money to cover books and food. He even offers tutoring. Because Christ's Grace is like Elder Robbin's physics professor. As long as you keep coming back, keep trying, keep studying, keep retaking the test, you'll get there eventually.

And that is the beauty of patronage, of Grace. It lets us fail. It lets us fail over and over again. Christ gives us a safe place to test our skills, to learn and grow. As we look at our failures, and there are many, we can pull them apart, study them, see where we may have gone awry, and try again a different way. And maybe that second, thirtieth or four hundredth try isn't quite right, either, but we keep learning.

For it is by patronage we earn our degree, after all we have studied.

Coping With History

One of my brothers is a nerd... Ok, they're all nerds, but he flaunts it more. Anyway, he reads this webcomic called XKCD and sometimes it's beyond me. The writer used to work at NASA and plays with physics for fun. Most of the time, though, I get the joke  and its the sort of funny that gets you thinking. Wednesday's was especially timely.

It makes me wonder about what sort of celebrity gossip got swapped and dissected over fast food in the Roman Empire, or what forgotten tragedies shaped generations of Suomi. What did sibling rivalry look like in pre-colombian America? How did kimono get to be a Thing?

For me,  I'm sad for the stories that aren't here.  I could have told you about teenagers and middle school, or the end of our diapering era. There was choir concerts and trumpet shopping, the discovery of a local Christmas festival, our first big road trip and our budding flag magnet collection. I started going to an annual yarn convention and learned how to use a drop spindle. Elena grew at least six inches in the last year. Eli was added to the family. James was discharged from speech therapy but started occupational therapy, and is now getting discharged from that. Lucy has a vast array of invisible friends. Joseph has deep thoughts and a mind that is probably more broken than mine. Jonathan got a job with his dream employer. Pretty much all of us have ADD, apparently.

And I didn't write any of it here. So much history. So many stories. Write it. Write it in detail. And put your soul into it.

Hello?

It's been nearly five years. I meant to come back after just a few months. And then I had something huge and internal I was struggling with for at least a year. And then I felt like I couldn't come back unless I explained that, but I couldn't. At least, not then. And certainly not all of it. Some of you know. Fewer know all, because I usually leave out a key aspect because that takes even more explanation and that explanation is almost no one's business.

And time went by.

My heart healed as I came to terms with what I had, then broke again when my mom died. My children--five now--grew, and their problems did, too. My husband finally had a proper career, one he wanted, and that allowed us to move away from our hometown, but close enough to still visit frequently. We fell in love with our new home and were even able to finally buy a house, though the means to do so came at the cost of both my parents and the last of my grandparents. Some days, I wonder if it's worth it and say I would happily be an eternal renter if it just meant I could get answers to a few questions I have for my mom. And really, I'm not entirely sure home ownership is all it's cracked up to be. Sure, you can paint the walls and hang whatever you want on them, but you also have to deal with the roof after windstorms or the mouse in the garage. We deal with what we have, though. We got a cat. And a dog. And another cat. Then lost the dog. I'm glad we were able to give her a home in her old age but I now firmly believe that we're just not dog people. I lost another pregnancy, too. That was a triple blow--the loss itself, not having Mom to help me, and because, while it was a surprise, it was also our last. Like being handed a free cookie on the way out of the store and then a bird immediately sweeps down and snatches it out of your hand. You certainly aren't going to go back in and buy a new one, but it was still your cookie and you were planning on enjoying that.

And so we move on.

It's time for a new phase of life, now, and that brings a new set of thoughts. It's time to be back.