Churning Churches

I want to go to the church I went to when I was 8, or the one I attended when I was 16.  But where do I find those churches in this crazy new-fangled world?

My church in El Cerrito took a little field trip up to a “new” kind of church in Sacramento.  It had all the eh-things about my church without any of the good things I like to balance it out.  Like the big non-denominational churches some friends attended in high school and college, this church was all about doing things a new way, with drum sets and solo singers and that sort of stuff.  Different, new, exciting, yadda, yadda, yadda.  “Church attendance is down, we have to do things different.”  “People are looking for something new.”  “Church has to be exciting.” Bah humbug.

I want organs and choirs in robes; acolytes with long wick holders, preachers draped with stoles, Bible passages read from a giant Bible on a pulpit, hymnals and people in their Sunday best.  I want my favorite hymns that I can only hear in church.  Not electric guitars and drum sets and one singer with a mic, not overheads and jeans, not songs I hear on the radio.

But somehow, for some reason, church can’t mean these things anymore; it has to mean the opposite.  And before you know it, there’s nothing special, nothing about church you can’t get anywhere else.  Before you know it, there’s no reason to go.

While the easy-going churches lighten up even more to fight dwindling attendance, the Catholic church up the road fills 5 services a week. 

Sometimes it’s not a need for less structure and more change, but a need for more structure and less change that we need. 

Adventures from Home: the Zoo

Way back when, now about 6 months ago, I was frolicking around Milwaukee with my delightful and adorable younger sisters.  We have a bit of a tradition amongst ourselves that whenever we are all home we go to a Milwaukee field trip or tourist destination.  Most often, since we are most often all home together around the Christmas holidays, we go to the Milwaukee Public Museum [link].  This time, however, we thought we’d take advantage of being home together in the middle of summer, and we head off to the Milwaukee County Zoo.

Like the museum, we’ve been going to the zoo pretty much our whole lives, on school field trips and random adventures with friends.  When I first started college at Carroll, the school had a day outing to the zoo where we could meet our future roommates.  Being long-familiar with the exhibits and offerings of the zoo, we all have our favorite spots.  My personal favorite is the petting zoo and, for some reason, the very steep valley that goes under the zoo-train tracks on one of the main walking paths.

At the museum, we like to imitate the exhibits.  We tried to do this at the zoo.  It did not work as well; the animals keep moving!

We found being the topiary, signs and statues a much easier task.

 

Since we don’t come to the zoo very often, we decided to have an extra special treat and take a ride on the zoo train!  We all remembered liking the zoo train.  We did not remember it being so small!  Even Munchkinhead’s knees were up to her chest.   We had excellent timing for as soon as we boarded the train, a light drizzle started.

Rain continued on and off the rest of the afternoon, culminating in a fierce thunderstorm that made us feel like we were in Jurassic Park, all the more so for the scary dinosaur topiary with beady yellow eyes.

Standing in the foyer of the conference room building watching the wind toss around heavy tree branches, lightening momentarily sending spooky shadows everywhere, we decided to make a run for it.  To the aviary building.  Our umbrellas protected us from things worse than rain.

Adventures from Home: Hanging out with Daddy

When Alfred and I were little girls, our grandma would watch us while Mommy and Daddy were at work.  We’d spend our summer days running a muck around Grandma and Grandpa’s old Victorian home.  Playing tag around the outside of the house, swinging on the wooden swing on the front porch, imagining what it might be like to slide down the banister, jump over the railing from the floor above or do other crazy things our Uncle Steven had done has a kid.  (Though I don’t think we ever imagined launching ourselves through the plate glass front window.)

Grandma and Grandpa’s house was like a giant castle to us, full of games, toys, surprises and spooks.  The basement terrified us.  A trap door into a damp and murky 100+ year-old place is creepy enough, but those added psychedelic paintings my aunts put on the bricks in the 1960s were even more frightening.  The servant stairs also scared us a bit, but they were still one of our favorite places to play.  And of course, there were the piles and piles of books, the dollhouse with its adorable pink appliances and the puzzles Grandma was always doing.

Being at Grandma and Grandpa’s was great in itself, but there some adventures on which Grandma would take us that beat any fun we could have inside.  On really, really special days, we’d get to go visit Grandpa and Daddy at work!

The office was just a few blocks from Grandma and Grandpa’s house.  We’d go out the backdoor, through the laundry room that always smelled like a mix of dryer vent and fresh air, down the cement steps, past the iron water pump, to the back corner of the yard.  Here, there was a magical hidden gate that only Grandma and Grandpa could find.  (Probably because Alfred and I were too short to see it among the vines.)  Grandma would open the gate and help us down the steep stone steps into the alley.   We’d head down the alley to the main street, turn up the street, pass the large cemetery where my namesake is buried and head to the busy street of the Office.

The Office was built by my great-grandpa many years ago, along with several of the buildings surrounding it; including the house where he lived and my great-aunt still resides.  With it’s regal red brick, white painted shutters, high columns and green ivy wrapping around the corners, it always look steady, important, classic, and just like the doll house at Grandma’s.  All things that made me love it.

We’d have to be very quite going into the Office, in case Grandpa or Daddy or one of the other lawyers in the building were meeting with clients.  As soon as we knew the coast was clear, we’d go bounding into their offices.  Daddy’d say “hi”, wiggle his moustache, sit back with his feet up on his desk.  Across the hall, Grandpa’d reach into his secret drawer and pull out treats for us, packs of oyster crackers and breadsticks that he’d saved from the restaurants he visited.

If we got to stay for awhile, we’d photocopy our hands on the giant Xerox machine behind the counter.  Grandpa would pull out his automobile accident reconstruction stamp collection and we would make pictures of auto accident scenes to our hearts’ content.  We’d get multi-colored paper from the cabinet and write our own stories, illustrated in highlighter and felt pen.  We always had a lot of fun and felt very special to be “behind the scenes” in the Office.

The Office is still a special place to go. Grandpa’s no longer there to share his breadsticks.  But the paintings he used to hold us up to see still hang on the walls and I imagine him asking the same questions, “what do you think is at the end of that road?”

Daddy still says “hi” and puts his feet up on the desk, but now he also says, “There’s this thing going on with these people and we need to figure out this. Can you help?”  Now there are new reasons to visit Daddy at the Office.  And they’re even more special.

Daddy and me at the office.

My First Knitting Project

Some people say, “when life hands you lemons, make lemonade.”  I say, “when life hands you a ridiculously long commute, make a new wardrobe.”

One of the first things I did when my office moved several months back was map out the many different possible ways to get there and calculate the time for each.  The next thing I did was ask one of the ladies at church who I always see knitting if she could teach me how to knit.  She was delighted to teach me and we began a wonderful nearly-weekly knitting gathering at her house.

My knitting teacher is fabulous, and not just because she’s from Wisconsin (which I didn’t realize until after we began knitting together).  She’s always got several different projects going on.  That reminds me a bit of myself with my sewing.  And she often wears her creations on Sundays, beautiful shawls and skirts and scarves.   She’s sure that someday sooner than I think I’ll be making my own dresses.   I love sweater dresses, and sweaters.  No matter how much my body size fluctuates, they fit, and they’re so soft and cozy.

But, skirts and sweaters and the thigh-high stockings I can’t wait to make are still a ways off.  So far, I’ve done two starter projects and am working on a third, all in preparation for winter – or the part of my commute that feels like winter: a scarf, a hat and gloves.  The gloves I’m just starting.

I love them.  Especially the scarf.  It’s so soft and supple, reminds me of blankey.  It’s nice and warm, and, the extra special bonus that makes it so me, it’s sparkly!

I’ll let you know when the gloves are done.  (If I don’t poke my eye out with one of these 5 double-pointed knitting needles sticking out of the project.)

10 years and 2000 miles later

On the 10th Anniversary, it seems obligatory to do a blog post about 9/11/01.  But my memories related to September 11th do not start that morning. 

My thoughts start two weeks before that day, when I finished reading Angles and Demons.  For those unfamiliar with the book, a very devoted Catholic stages an attack on the Church in order to revitalize the Church community and support for the church.  I remember finishing that book and thinking, “America needs something like that.”  Tired of people being ashamed of our country, of flags being uncool and patriotism being dead – and this was before I moved out to the Bay – it seemed that the last time our country had been supported by its people was World War II.  We need a cause to rally behind.  I didn’t expect us to get one, and I certainly didn’t expect it to be so dramatic.

The morning of September 11th, I was trying to sort out some credit card bills.  I called the customer service line.  The lady on the other end was all distracted.  “I’m sorry,” she said, “we just heard about the World Trade Center.”  “But that was years ok,” I thought, thinking of the parking garage bombing.  Then my roommate came rushing into the room, let out of her 8am class early.  “Did you hear?!”  “Hear what?”  She turned on the small tv atop our dressers.  Every channel, every single one, was showing the same thing, the clip of the second plane hitting.

There was lots of excitement, people running down the halls, exclaiming any news they’d gotten that others might not have yet.  Candlelight vigils on the campus’s Main Lawn.  Alan Jackson’s “Where Were You (When the World Stopped Turning)” moved even those that hated country music.  American flags everywhere, not just cool again but practically required.  It was a cause to rally behind, and for most of us at my small Midwestern school, that’s all it was.

Ten years ago, I hadn’t been to New York.  I didn’t know anyone in New York.  I didn’t know anyone who would be on an international flight.  New York was like Harvard, a place that only existed on tv and in the movies.  It wasn’t until this week that I learned the plane that crashed in a Pennsylvania field was bound for SFO.  Even if I had known, it wouldn’t have mattered.  As a Midwesterner, I scorned those people on the coasts who flew from one side to the other, treating real Americans like they didn’t exist, “fly-over-country” nonsense.

Ten years later, I’ve been to New York.  I’ve seen the World Trade Center hole, and not because I went there to see it, but because it’s down the street from my friend’s dad’s office.  I know people there.  I know people who are frequently on international flights, including friends and family, and me.  I know some of the “coastal people,” heck, I’m even friends with them.  And while I still disdain the fly-over-country mentality, I don’t hate them.  Ten years later, the events are more real than they could have been to a sheltered twenty year-old.  And sadly, ten years later, the flags are mostly gone again.

I liked that patriotism; I’d like to see it back.  But I don’t expect it anytime soon.  It’s impossible to be both an apologetic and a patriot, and the loudest voices in our society are still demanding we be the first.

September 11th, 2001 may have given us a rallying cry on which to rebuild our patriotism.  But the events of the next 9 years destroyed it all again.  John Yoo said we’re safer and freer now than we were ten years ago.  He’s a good speaker, but I disagree.  When I feel trapped in my city because transportation out of it is either too long or too anxiety-filled due to the “heightened security measures” – not the risks, the measures – I do not feel safe or free.  I never feared the terrorists; I fear TSA.

They won. We have lost both our patriotism and our freedom.