Falling in Love

I have fallen in love once again, this time compliments of my, um, electronic book reader. I refrain from naming the brand, since I haven't fallen in love with any particular features of the device but rather with the library I now carry in my purse. My psyche craves prose, and I have periodically neglected to feed the addiction, a sin of omission that always manages to set me just a bit off kilter and leave me yearning.

In the months since Christmas I have wandered the tunnels underneath Washington D.C. with Dan Brown in The Lost Symbol (a disappointment, I must confess) and followed the Count of Monte Cristo along his path of revenge and redemption (much more satisfying). I found Elizabeth Von Arnin's The Enchanted April simply delicious and Ruth Riechl's autobiography (Tender at the Bone) surprisingly intriguing. David Baldacci kept me turning pages, as he always does, and I sauntered through an unusual juxtaposition of Mark Twain's social commentary and Elizabeth Gilbert's introspective Eat, Pray, Love.

Then, in a nod to the literary studies of my college days, I opened F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise. The other authors gave me much to entertain and even to ponder, but I feast on Fitzgerald as if savoring my first truly satisfying meal after days of snacking on crackers and cheese. I read with a journal at my side and find myself forming essays in my head comparing the sentimental to the romantic or analyzing the development of Amory's character through the mirror of his relationships.

I promise to spare you the bulk of the literary analysis. Suffice it to say that, for me, literature fills an essential block in the food pyramid. "I have to have a soul," says Fitzgerald's Amory. "I can't be rational--and I won't be molecular." While I have my rational moments, now and again, I also have to have a soul. And that soul needs a steady diet of literature, nature, the full spectrum of emotions, a healthy dose of the spiritual, and moments of peace to write and reflect and pull it all together.

Corrective Lenses

While studying the other day, I chanced across the following scripture in the Book of Mormon: "But a seer can know of things which are past, and also of things which are to come, and by them shall all things be revealed, or, rather, shall secret things be made manifest, ... and also things shall be made known by them which otherwise could not be known." (Mosiah 8:17, bold added for clarification)

I have always assumed that "them" in the scripture refers to "seer," and that is probably correct. Grammatically, however, "them" more logically refers to "things which are past" and "things which are to come." Now that set me to musing. Given the seer's role in correctly interpreting the past and future, I don't think my musings are entirely inappropriate. That said, with all due apologies to seers living and dead, I'm not going to chat much about them today. Instead, I have been thinking in more basic and personal terms about the importance of viewing the present through the corrective lenses of the past and the future.

A talk in the LDS General Conference this past weekend reminded me of the story of Aron Ralston. The movie 127 Hours, released last fall, brought Ralston's story to prominence again, seven years after the hiker saved himself by amputating his own arm while solo hiking in a remote canyon in Utah. I knew the general story but had not heard Ralston's account of a vision that he credits with giving him the motivation to proceed with his nearly impossible task. Dying of starvation and thirst, his arm pinned under an 800 pound boulder for five days, Ralston carved his epitaph into the rock, filmed his last words to his family and waited to die. Delirious with the ordeal by this point, he describes the scene:

"I was at peace with the idea of me dying. But then I saw this vision of this little boy and it shifted me, it gave me hope to get out because this is my future son, I could see me interacting with him without my hand at some point many years down the road and I realised if I’m going to have that son then I have to get out of here, I WILL get out of here, it got me through that last night..." (quoted from an interview in 2010)

Aron Ralston's vision of things which are to come changed his view of his present circumstances, pushed him beyond his own natural capabilities. We may never have to saw away at our own arms to save our lives, but we do have opportunities in life to endure daunting trials, or even to relinquish an arm of sin, if you will. Our vision of the future, be it an eternity with loved ones or a more immediate promise of desired blessings, can give us the perspective shift we need to press forward.

Likewise, a thoughtful examination of the past (in contrast with an obsessive dwelling on remembered offenses or triumphs) can also unearth hidden pearls of wisdom applicable to present trials or conundrums. Some time ago, I received what felt like an inspiration or a premonition. It was an odd premonition, and my first inclination led me to discount it. But the feeling persisted, forcing my closer examination. I remembered other instances of inspiration and began to recognize a pattern in how the Lord communicates with me. Those patterns of the past teach me how to respond when the Lord presents me with puzzle pieces, and they guide my hand as I work to find the picture in the pieces.

True to lessons learned in high school English and popular culture, I subscribe to the philosophy of carpe diem.We do need to focus on today and live our present as wisely and as richly as possible. At the same time, our past and our future make that possible, strengthening our hand as we strive to seize the moment for all its glory.

Nuclear Families

On May 19, 1953 the United States detonated a 32-kiloton atomic bomb (later nicknamed "Dirty Harry") at its nuclear testing facility in Nevada. With a blast three times the size of the Hiroshima bomb, Harry sent fallout drifting over a wide area, including Southern Utah. This was just one of over 100 bombs detonated above ground at the Nevada facility between 1951 and 1962 and one of five atomic bombs that had a fallout pattern covering Cedar City, Utah.

Isaac Nelson, a resident of Cedar City, describes taking his wife out to see the first explosion. It was dark, he says, just before daylight, "and we were chattering like chipmunks, so excited! Pretty soon, why, the whole sky just flared up in an orange-red flash, and it was so brilliant that you could easily see the trees ten miles across the valley, and if you had a newspaper you could have easily read it, it was so bright. . . ." Later, he says, town residents stood outside to watch the fallout clouds drifting up through Cedar. Isaac's wife died of brain cancer that developed shortly after one of those evenings spent watching the fallout cloud float by.



Grandma, with Aunt Judy and Mother

 In a way, I grew up in the shadow of a nuclear cloud. A native of Cedar City, my mother was five years old when the nuclear testing began, and she tells stories similar to Mr. Nelson's. Thanks to cancer, she later donated both a breast and her thyroid to the American quest for adequate weaponry. My grandmother died of brain cancer just three years after the explosions began, leaving behind her a husband and six children. Though I have no proof that Harry or any of his atomic friends caused her cancer, medical reports of the period show brain tumors among the classes of cancer occurring in excess in the early period after nuclear testing.

My mother developed breast cancer about the time of my earliest memories, and she often spoke of her own mother's death from cancer. As children tend to color the world based on their own limited set of experiences and family stories, I then logically assumed that everyone contracts cancer at some point and saw that eventuality as a simple, if sad, fact of life. I accepted death with similar logic, aided by a religious perspective that emphasizes eternity. I never quite grew out of those assumptions.

Consequently, when my husband's brain tumor returned from vacation with a vengeance, I recognized a pre-established pattern and quietly began planning for the inevitable. I know to some that view rings fatalistic, even regrettably morbid, and I suppose that if I saw death as an end--to self, to relationships, to progress--I would have to agree. As it happens, I see death more as a transition. With that in mind, our little family, each of us in our own time and fashion, began to plan for life on the other side of the approaching metamorphosis. Our son, just a toddler when his father died, absorbed and reflected his insulated world, blithely oblivious to the shock of innocent bystanders when he announced matter-of-factly that his daddy had died and was now in heaven.

I think of these patterns as the crisis unfolds in Japan. My Asian contemporaries grew up in a more striking nuclear shadow than I did. In August 1945, the United States dropped "Little Boy" and "Fat Man" on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Two generations later, the nuclear pattern renews unexpectedly in the wake of an earthquake, once again fundamentally altering families with the fallout of power run amok.

Sources include:

* Nuclear Testing and the Downwinders (from Utah History on the Go)
* Fallout Effects: Impacts of Radiation from Aboveground Nuclear Tests on Southern Utah (from the Utah Department of Environmental Quality)
* Cancer Incidence in an Area of Radioactive Fallout Downwind From the Nevada Test Site (from the Journal of American Medicine)
* Compensating Life Downwind of Nevada (from National Geographic)
* A Utah Resident Remembers Atomic Testing in 1950s Nevada (from the American Social History Project)
* Radioactive Fallout to St. George, Utah (from Washington Nuclear Museum and Educational Center)

Milestones at the Middle

Devin

Last month, I passed a milestone. It has now been five years and one month since I was last pregnant, a record amount of non-pregnancy time since I first began the motherhood adventure 21 years ago. I will never breastfeed again, never change my own baby's diaper, watch my own toddler take a shaky first step, or send my child to a first playdate. In a few months, my youngest child begins kindergarten. The young mother phase of my life will officially end. Never one to linger in one stage of life when another beckons, I watch its passing with little reluctance. Still, somehow I envisioned a rather more gradual transition from mommyhood to this pause in the shadow of approaching menopause.



Alec

Life travels on, marked milestone by milestone, and I find the changing landscape around me intriguing. I shuffle reading glasses on and off the bridge of my nose, not yet willing to commit to the bifocals I should wear. A once enviable metabolism disappeared long ago, and despite my unwavering commitment to regular exercise, an unflattering muffin top persists in spilling over the belt of my not quite in fashion jeans. My resume, brimming with promise a decade ago, now sports a gigantic hole that would qualify me more for cleaning the office that once boasted my name on the door. I find myself more often in a mentoring role now, and the children I used to babysit have children in shoulder pads or scout uniforms. My own sister recently posted a picture of her fourth grandchild.



Jared



And yet...I have to agree with the old John Denver song that says "it turns me on to think of growing old." I do shudder at the thought of becoming decrepit, but I certainly have noticed an amount of sweetness in this ripening process brought on by a few years of experience. I suppose the fact that my parents have aged so well helps a great deal.

I realized a while back, to my pleasant surprise, that I no longer feel the need to win every race in life. My companions on the road look less like competition and more like inspiration. Their successes lift me up rather than reminding me of my failings, perhaps because life has made me acquainted with myself. While I still challenge myself, still push my comfort zone and reach for my personal best, I have come to understand my own rhythms and how to let those rhythms propel me forward.



Kristina

As I leave toddler dreams behind, I find myself growing with my children. I love mothering older children, watching their personalities emerge and sharing their excitement as the world expands in front of them. I also love contemplating with my husband the not-so-distant-as-it-used-to-be possibility of an expanding world of our own. While this middle phase of life finds me vaguely adrift, searching for a path and just the right answer to the eternal question of "what shall I be when I grow up," I like the view from here, with my fingers trailing in the water and the stars all around. Life holds promise, and I have time.

Power in Weakness

My husband, bless his heart, knows me entirely too well. Despite all his protestations to the contrary, I remain convinced that he occasionally exploits that understanding for his own wicked amusement. Take basketball, for instance. I like to watch basketball occasionally, love the grace and strength, the dazzle of a well-played game. And yes, for all of you fellow Celtics fans, Rajon Rondo is a beautiful man.

I do not, however, play basketball. If I have any grace and strength, those qualities flee when I take a basketball in my hands. Team sports and I never quite connected in a meaningful way. After nearly two decades of marriage, my husband should know this. And yet...a few weeks ago, I opened my email to find the unwelcome announcement from my son's basketball coach that he had scheduled a mother/son basketball game. Did I neglect to mention that my husband coaches my son's team?

For two weeks, I dreaded that game. I pouted, whined and tried to weasel out, but the night of the big game found me glowering in the car on the way to the gym. Far outside my comfort zone, smack in my weak spot, this game held little promise of the great fun my husband gleefully anticipated.

To my credit, I left my pouting courtside and threw myself into the game. I even made a couple of baskets, although I avoided dribbling at all costs. We had a grand time, and I was laughing too hard to slap the smug grin off my husband's face. Drat that man!

In the days leading up the game, I contemplated my aversion to my own weaknesses. I love feeling strong, physically and emotionally. I love to succeed, to work my way to the top of the mountain and breathe in the view. And yet, that annoying voice inside me, the voice that sounds rather like my husband, reminded me of the power of weakness.

Paul, the little apostle of immense courage who stood boldly before kings, proclaimed, "When I am weak, then am I strong." He recognized that the strength of the Lord was made perfect in the weakness of his servants. This same God wrapped His greatest treasure, His most potent force, in the body of a tiny baby and sent that baby to the home of a lowly carpenter. This same God, Paul wrote to the Corinthians, "hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty."

I have not yet reached the point where I readily, like Paul, glory in my weaknesses. But I confess to a fascination with the concept of weakness as power. Ether, the Book of Mormon prophet, quotes the Lord in what is, to me, one of the most hopeful verses in all of scripture: "And if men come unto me I will show unto them their weakness. I give unto men weakness that they may be humble; and my grace is sufficient for all men that humble themselves before me; for if they humble themselves before me, and have faith in me, then will I make weak things become strong unto them."

The strength that I admire, the strength of Paul and Peter and all the truly great men and women, comes only when we acknowledge our weaknesses in humility and exercise the faith necessary to allow the Lord to transform them. God is, after all, the master alchemist. Who am I to let a little fear of failure stand in the way of the treasure God could make of my life? Let's play ball!

Warm Bread, Stolen Cookies, and Other Life Essentials

I have come to the conclusion that there must be a link between the stomach and the pen. Christopher Kimball, editor of Cooks Illustrated magazine, quickly rose to the top of my list of favorite essayists last year. Now, I find myself reading, quite by chance, a memoir of Ruth Reichl, the editor-in-chief of Gourmet Magazine up until its unexpected demise in 2009. Just a few chapters in, I am captivated by Ruth's rich stories (which she readily admits to embellishing, according to the time-honored tradition of her rather eccentric family). Ostensibly about her process of maturing into a full-blown foodie, the memoir reveals a rich understanding of the complexities and humor of human nature. Incidentally, it also includes a host of delicious recipes.

I suppose it makes sense, really, that foodies should have the ability to reach right to the heart of things. After all, isn't food the way to a man's heart? Don't we eat "soul food" and "comfort food"? Food provides a nostalgic link to our past and a hopeful path to our future, as in the cases of dieting or preparing a special meal for someone we desire to impress. We reward and punish with food. We eat or refuse to eat as a form of signalling confederacy or protest. Food figures prominently in our rituals and ceremonies, in our ethnic identity and our social gatherings. What, how, when, and with whom we eat offers a glimpse into our socio-economic status. And, in the end, we simply cannot survive without food.

My daughter had a birthday recently, her fifth. When I asked her for her birthday dinner menu, she responded with "bread and water for everyone...oh, and cake with ice cream." We did, indeed have bread for her birthday dinner: Portuguese sweet bread, fresh out of the oven and slathered with butter and either creamed honey or strawberry freezer jam. The sheer, glorious decadence of the thick slices of fragrant homemade bread differed rather sharply from the crust of bread and water we associate with prison food or even the unleavened bread the Savior portioned to his apostles at the Last Supper (although my daughter does regularly break her bread into small "sacrament" pieces). Isn't it odd how one simple menu can show such vastly different faces?

Though not quite as austere as a bread and water diet, I celebrated my move to Vermont some years ago by going vegetarian for a time. With its love of all things hippie and with a host of animal-friendly options, Vermont makes vegetarianism easy. For me, eating vegetables symbolized embracing my new life and complemented the process of healing after a long period of intense stress. Even the process of chopping copious quantities of squash and carrots for my favorite vegetarian chili grounded me, and the spicy scent of dinner simmering on the stove turned my small apartment into a home.

For many of us, in fact, food and home are practically synonymous. We taste a meatloaf just like Mom used to make or enjoy the liberty of refusing carrot and raisin salad even while fondly envisioning that very salad in its penguin bowl on our childhood dinner table. Like many families, my family builds traditions around special foods: Christmas lobster followed by steak with Bearnaise sauce (Dad makes the lobster and Mom makes the Bearnaise sauce), Irma's Kahlua cake for most birthdays, Devin's coffeecake for a Saturday morning treat, oatmeal bread dripping with swirled cinnamon for our friend Pat, pork fried rice in honor of Grandpa Larsen.

Another family tradition hearkens back to my college summer at a fishing resort on Alaska's Lake Iliamna. The lodge chef kept dozens of special recipe chocolate chip cookies in the walk in freezer. The cookies made up part of the sack lunches for our guests to eat creekside, and employees were strictly forbidden to partake. Of course, we had strict orders against any number of temptations, and we felt unduly persecuted. Consequently, most of us gained a substantial number of pounds on stolen chocolate chip cookies. A laughing chef sent us home with the secret recipe at the end of the summer, and I have made the cookies for the past 20 years.

About the time I began and ended my life of cookie crime, Jeff Henderson decided to spend a portion of his prison sentence working in the kitchen. Incarcerated for drug dealing, he found a passion for cooking that carried him to executive chef positions in Las Vegas, a best-selling memoir, and a chance to give back. I find his story fascinating enough to recommend it (try this NPR interview and this ABC News story for starters). And I echo his philosophy that "food is a celebration of life, . . .that every recipe, every dish has a story behind it." I look forward to finding those stories, one spoonful at a time.

And the Not So Blissful Moments...

I remember the exact point at which I stopped watching the movie Schindler's List. By all accounts, the movie is a masterpiece and the story gripping, but I could not watch it. I have a vague memory, perhaps faulty, of a scene of soldiers moving through the ghetto, spreading violence and fear in their path. Desperate for her child's life, a mother tosses her baby out a window. . .to a waiting soldier who impales the infant on the point of his bayonet. Whenever I need to feel my insides curl into a tight little ball, I remember that scene.

Some time ago, I wrote about bliss moments, scenes etched in my memory because they evoke warm and cozy feelings. I hold quite a store of bliss moments. In another corner of my brain, etched just as powerfully, I have a store of anti-bliss moments, memories of times that stopped a smile dead in its tracks. This set of memories occupies a much smaller and less accessible portion of my psyche, and yet I hold on to these ragged images, feeling somehow that they, too, have something to offer me.

Oddly, outside of movies or novels, scenes of death and classic tragedy rarely figure on my anti-bliss list. Instead, my unhappy moments often tend toward the much more prosaic--flashing lights in my rear view mirror, for instance. In fact, just last week I had to dig into the bottom of my purse and smooth out a badly crumpled traffic ticket before sending it to the court clerk. I confess that I behaved rather badly when the conscientious police officer delivered the ticket, and I let loose a torrent of tears and objectionable vocabulary once he had moved on to his next victim. For days, I could not even talk about the ticket, responding in stony silence to my family's teasing.

Even now, my calm restored, I cannot quite articulate why a simple traffic stop sparked such an intense response. I think perhaps my overactive need for perfection balks at such a blatant reminder of my too human nature.

A rather prominent shelf in my anti-bliss storage closet holds memories of interpersonal conflict, not because I court contention but because those moments bother me more than almost anything else. On the simple end are moments such as the time I unwittingly cut off another driver headed for the same parking spot. Furious, the other driver flashed the international sign of contempt and yelled something rather unintelligible. In my surprise and hurt (I was 20, mind you, and rather naive) I attempted to respond in like manner, but I was shaking too badly to figure out which finger should point to the blue skies above. The incident bothered me for hours, which strikes me now as quite silly. Years later, I discovered that responding with a smile and a wave has the advantage of both disarming my opponent and reducing my own blood pressure quite handily. Beautiful discovery, that.

Less humorous and more striking are those times when discord settles on my doorstep, when misunderstandings wedge their way between me and one of those I love most dearly. When contention comes home, when I perceive a threat to bonds I hold eternal and lack the power or knowledge required to sew up the wound, those are the times I long to inflict on myself some sort of pain to distract me from hurt I cannot either understand or control. Fortunately, those moments occur rarely, and I have learned better how to cope when they do slide under the door.

Happily, I can bring forward few memories that travel beyond the mundane and almost no lingering angst from feeling offended. Whether I lead a charmed life, or whether my naivete simply leaves me blind to offenses, I couldn't say. I do find it intriguing that I seem to fear conflict, embarrassment, and loss of control above just about anything else.

I hope I never have the opportunity to feel the desperation of the Jewish mother in Schindler's List. I hope that I have taught my children to learn from their struggles and to store up blissful moments to give them strength in the darkness. And I hope that my own memory of pain will help me to grow in beautiful ways.