Christmas trees hold such a presence in a house. Somehow the mood of the place alters after we haphazardly squeeze it through the door and anchor it in our living room.
There is something strange about the fact that we bring a tree inside our house every year. But the tree is never imposing, never inconvenient, never obnoxious. On the contrary, it seems to be the hospitable one--welcoming us into our own home. Somehow, its arrival simultaneously always fills me a with an ants-under-your-skin thrill and a deep, soaking peace.
My dad set up our tree the other day. The rest of us were all doing work around the house, running around--and then all of the sudden, there it was. We all had to stop.
My dad worked to get the tree straight, and carefully wove the multicolored lights around its taut branches. He had to wind and rewind, loop and untangle. It was a bit like watching a parent try to dress an ornery child.
But he soon fitted the tree, and stood back to make sure the gaps were filled. He turned off the downstairs lights, and the computer lights, and we all stood and looked at it. It pulsed brightly with the slow, silent aura of expectancy.
A glowing Christmas tree in a dark, quiet room is one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen.
But there are few things more sacred than creeping downstairs late at night after everyone has gone to bed--after the strings of lights have been turned off--and standing under the still tree the dark living room for a few moments.
revin: (n.) a body wax that competitive swimmers slather on before a race. Supposed to make your skin perfectly slippery.
"Unable to lower his time any more during practice, Raul knew that the only way he could beat Victor in the freestyle was if he covered himself with a double-layer of Revin--and if the refs didn't catch him doing it..." placsecc: (adj.) the position many sleeping people acquire when stuck in the backseat of a car between two people--hands in lap, head slightly back and to the left, neck strained with tendons visibly protruding.
"Not wanting to send the wrong message by leaning on either Joey or Jim's shoulders, Kelsey was forced to sleep placsecc for an entire hour in the youth group van."
crega: (n.) the little rim of your inner eyelid which you accidentally scrape eyeliner across sometimes.
"Margery may have gotten permission to wear a strapless dress to prom, but she realized she was still just a girl when she accidentally smudged purple eyeliner in her crega."
Over the past week, endless rains have loosened the dirt that makes up this mountain. This morning, the dirt behind the chapel loosened so much that it let go of a giant boulder, which tumbled down the side of an embankment. It brought with it a small avalanche of sludge and trees and rocks. The mysterious vascular system of gas and water lines beneath our school took a few blows, too.
Worried about exposed gas lines, the powers-that-be called for the evacuation of two buildings. My French class was in one of them. Monsieur Shaw hadn’t even started assigning the daily devoir before the étudiants started traipsing out the door—vainly inhaling deep breaths to see if they could detect gas. Those odd, faint pangs of disaster-lust we have...
The rest of my classes canceled for the day, I put my boots on and trudged down to Scenic Highway. Bright brown mud was slathered all over the pavement, and the corpses of trees and bushes were lying askew in the muck. Yellow trucks and backhoes were rumbling around. Men in orange vests were hacking the mess of branches with chainsaws.
The giant boulder that had just finished its short ride was now hesitantly settled on a lower part of the bank, catching its breath. In its pause it looked half proud and half scared, like the little kid who—determined to run away—has just reached the bottom of his driveway.
I asked one of the workers if they thought the mudslide would happen again anytime soon.
“There’s no telling,” said one orange-vested man. “That rock has probably been in that spot for a couple hundred years. It might wait right at that spot for a couple hundred more. Or it could tip in five minutes.”
Suddenly I had visions of all the ancient, colossal boulders of Lookout Mountain, free and hurtling down the sides of the mountains into unsuspecting St. Elmo kitchens and bathrooms.
“That’s why we’re going to try to get it out of here,” the orange-vested man finished.
We surveyed the muddy bank. The backhoe was now pawing at the boulder, trying to coax it into its bucket.
I had to leave before they hoisted it into their truck and drove it away. I do not know where misbehaved boulders go, but I’m wondering if it is laying awake now, breathing in the new air of new dirt and new permanence.
I wonder if it feels it was worth it—if it will dream about its fifty-foot run of freedom tonight, and sigh.
There are always those days, those evenings that epitomize a season. I had that evening a few nights ago. My parents and I ate under the covered porch while a summer thunderstorm moved in. There are few things I love more than that, but tonight it was a disappointment because my dad and I had been trying to find an evening to go golfing for a while.
When the thunder backed down and the rain slowed a bit, we decided we should still head out to the course. There was only a light drizzle and a few stubborn golfers out on the course when we got there. Dad showed me some putting techniques, and we worked our way around the practice green.
The best way to teach, of course, is by example. What an example then, for my dad to sink a perfect putt 40 feet from the hole. I couldn't even see the hole from where I stood.
The rain quickened again, so we headed to Best Buy because my dad wanted to buy Stevie Wonder's new "Definitive Collection."
We got back in the car and soon 12-year-old Stevie's 1964 hit "Fingertips" came blaring over the speakers.
I don't think I can explain what it did to me. You probably just have to hear it yourself. On full volume.
If this doesn't make your blood pump and your booty shake in your office chair and make you want to cartwheel into a pool --well--take some human lessons.
NPR has been having a regular special where they ask someone they are interviewing what their quintessential summer song is. Selections have included Paul Simon's "Kodachrome," The English Beat's "Save it for Later," Looking Glass's "Brandy (You're a Fine Girl)," and The Osmonds' "One Bad Apple."
For the most part, the people said they picked these because the songs were deeply attached to memories of sun, sunscreen, grilling, baseball games, and JOY.
That is what "Fingertips" sounds like to me--pure, undiluted summer joy.
Yesterday, when writing about Amelia Earhart, I mentioned that one of the things I admired about her was that she insistently wore pants (not to mention sweet leather jackets) in the age of the A-line skirt.
It took an amount of stubbornness and guts for Amelia to do that, since she might have been somewhat stigmatized by society--but she never faced 40 lashes for it.
Lubna Hussein is.
Hussein is a Sudanese journalist who works in the media department of the U.N. Mission in Sudan. Early in July she was among 13 women arrested a raid by members of the public order police force on a Khartoum. Their crime: wearing pants. A strict interpretation of Islamic law (which the Islamic regime of Sudan abides by) determines that pants are indecent for women.
The AP reports that all but 3 of the women arrested were flogged at the police station as part of their punishment.
The three other women--including Hussein--decided to take the issue to court. And Hussein, using her connections, has made sure that diplomats, human rights workers, and journalists will be there to see it.
Their presence gives the women added confidence to their defiance. Some of Hussein's women friends ever showed up in court wearing trousers for support.
What's devastating, however, is that most women arrested for breaking dress codes in this regime do not have these connections, and thus the added protection. Hundreds of women are flogged without question.
And to think I complained about detention for breaking dress code in high school. "I should have some kind of freedom of expression!" I would rail, insisting I should be allowed to wear multicolored stripe tights with my navy/white/& maroon uniform.
This is about more than freedom of expression. This is, as Hussein has put it, way more than about pants.
"This is not a case about me wearing pants. This is a case about annulling the article that addresses women's dress code, under the title of indecent acts. This is my battle. This article is against the constitution and even against Islamic law itself."
This woman is daring to go "against even Islamic law itself" ??? THAT is guts for you. Today I am wearing pants, and it means something. Not just freedom of fashion, freedom of expression--freedom. Find more here.
When we were in second grade, Amelia Fletcher and I were determined WE were going to solve one of the greatest mysteries of the 20th century: what had happened to Amelia Earhart when she disappeared over the Pacific Ocean in 1937.
I'm not sure what sparked it. The name probably had a lot to do with it, to be honest. That year we were assigned book reports on famous Americans, and Amelia and I both picked our people on a purely egotistical basis. Me and Wikipedia are probably the only two beings in the world who know who the heck Katherine Lee Bates is: (her ->)
She wrote "America the Beautiful," but I didn't choose her because of that. I picked her biography off the shelf solely because her name was KATHERINE. And Amelia chose Amelia Earhart because, well, duh.
Amelia Earhart, of course, made for a much more fascinating book report than Katherine Lee Bates. Soon, with Amelia F.'s coaxing, I was reading the Young Americans biography on Amelia E.--and then checking out every book on her I could find in the library.
She was our heroine. She was a daredevil, a limit-smasher. She wore pants. She learned how to fly a plane when many women weren't even driving cars. She wasn't satisfied to cross the Atlantic--she wanted to circle the world. She was the one who said, "The most effective way to do it, is to do it." She had guts, as we kept saying to ourselves.
But her mysterious disappearance--and assumed death--probably captivated us just as much as her life did. We couldn't get enough of the search stories, the hypotheses, the conspiracy theories. We kept a notebook of all the possibilities:
Went down in the Pacific (too easy. too boring. too likely)
Went down in the Pacific BUT swam to Gardner Island, where she and her navigator Fred Noonan set up camp. Where they hung out...indefinitely...
Crashed on Saipan. Held hostage by the Japanese under the impression that she's a spy. Executed there. (Dramatic, yes...but we still wanted her to end up ALIVE. So we scratched that one).
Crashed on Saipan. Held hostage by the Japanese under the impression that she's a spy. Actually still lives there on a mysterious mountain, the locals calling her the Flying Witch or something like that.
Crashed on Saipan. Held hostage by the Japanese under the impression she's a spy. Actually WAS a spy, and the U.S. got her out secretly. And now she lives in New Jersy under the name Irene Bolam. Don't know why Irene Bolam, but that's what the book said. (I remember so vividly us saying things like "But what if we could just get Irene to meet with us? She would maybe tell us." "If we could figure out where Irene gets her groceries and we could follow her." "Yeah she'd be old but 101 isn't TOO old!!!!")
We mulled endlessly over her last words to come over the radio transmission: "We are running on line north and south." What could that MEAN!!!!!!!!!!???????? We would get together, setting up shop in the woods with the sole purpose of poring over our "research." It was before either of us had any conception of the internet, but we exhausted our libraries, evening venturing up to the ADULT SECTIONS to find more.
Notebooks, lists, pictures--we were determined it would somehow be enough to solve it all. It was merely a puzzle, waiting for our solving.
Over ten years later, investigators and scientists believe that it likely is just a puzzle, on the brink of being solved.
According to this piece by ABC, The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery has announced that they are returning to Gardner Island, armed with DNA samples, forensic investigators, and a slew of 21st century whizzabanggadgets to search for DNA evidence of Earhart there. And they actually have some strong leads to start with. They have already recovered artifacts (like glass from a compact mirror), found on in the island on a 2007 TIGHAR expedition.
Amelia's story is gripping--absolutely intriguing. It has captured the minds and millions of dollars of scientists and historians from all over the world.
But dawned on me when reading this article how strange the search is at this point. Why do we need to know so bad? She is more than likely dead at this point, no matter where she ended up. Most of the people who were close to her are now dead. What is driving the people who will people never rest until she is found? They do not miss her. They have no debt to pay.
The weird truth, as TIGHAR's Executive Director Ric Gillespie put it, is that it's not really about Amelia at all.
"The volunteers are really bright people who are just fascinated by this mystery, and we are all motivated by the same thing ... and it is not to honor the memory of Amelia Earhart...We are investigation junkies. We love the thrill of the search and scientific process."
Ego-trip, anybody?
The confidence that comes with technology is vaulting. What were once the deep, dark, unfathomable mysteries now only require a little time, a little poking around to be revealed. "Time is one our side and technology is on our side. It'll be found," Gillespie said of Earhart's plane.
New York Times writer Donald G. McNeil, Jr. touches on the development of this attitude when writing about the relatively quick search and discovery of Air France 447 earlier this summer off the coast of Brazil:
If anything looked fated for a cliche Bermuda Triangle ending, with the deep refusing to yield up its secrets, this was it. But this was 2009, not 1937, and after just one false alarm over some errant flotsam, the Brazilian Navy had a verifiable piece of the jetliner and more than 40 bodies. Not to deny the sadness of so many lives lost, but the abyss suddenly looked more like a subway grating — you might or might not be able to reach the silvery gleam below, but you knew what it was.
At one point in the article, McNeil asks, "Doesn't anyone just vanish at sea anymore?"
Not that vanishing at sea is something we should be nostalgic about--just like no one goes around lamenting, "Hey remember when people used to die of polio?" The science and technology we have to probe the depths of the galaxies, the seas, our bodies--is a gift.
And I, along with everyone else, am still secretly obsessive about wanting to know where Amelia ended up. I want them to find her plane. And then I want them to determine that it WAS tricksy Irene Bolam all alone.
But I don't want this to be all about us. Us showing up the mysteries and the strange forces of nature, putting it all on a grid, making demands, getting some fix off it all.
I honestly don't know why I say it, but I want the deep to remain deep.
And yet I take one more look at Amelia. It's funny--she actually sounds a lot like Gillespie at times. She never claimed to have some noble reason for her pioneering the skies. "I do it for the thrill of it," she said.
So is there a place where respect for the mystery and majesty and the absolute human thrill of pioneering meet? I hope so.
To close out--another rediscovery of Amelia Earhart will be taking place later this year--on the silver screen. Hilary Swank is starring as the Lady Lindy herself, in the upcoming film "Amelia." The trailer is enough to make my gut turn with, well, the thrill of it.
PS: If anyone knows how to resize videos to fit blogs, please throw me some pointers!
in her own mind (as well as she could, for the hot day made her feel very sleepy and stupid), whether the pleasure of making a daisy-chain would be worth the trouble of getting up and picking the daisies, when suddenly a White Rabbit with pink eyes ran close by her."
