I come from a big red barn,

From newlywed dreams of pigs and beef cattle

And maybe a few cats to keep the mice out of the corncrib.

I come from piles of warm, sleepy kittens,

From puffy tails, shaped like Christmas trees,

And insistent mewing than quiets only

When there is something interesting to chase.

I come from Varnes & Hoover Hardware,

From rows of shiny brass lanterns and sparkling Mason jars,

Where the cheerful Amish gentleman behind the counter

Is just as polite to the girl in the T-shirt that reads, in neon green,

“MY FEET HURT FROM KICKING SO MUCH ASS”

As he is to the woman in the pristinely pressed bonnet.

I come from grilled pork in barbeque,

From salads with sugar and mayonnaise

And overstuffed subs sold by the thousand

To pay a boy’s medical bills.

I come from toasted olive-nut sandwiches

At the Olympia Candy Kitchen,

Where patrons shake their heads and say airily,

“You just can’t find this anywhere else.”

I come from wide-open prairie skies,

Blue and hazy all day, inky black all night,

And in between, a glorious palette of golden-tinged pastels

That demands further investigation,

That demands you stop and gaze.

I come from an old, weathered pier, with flaking white paint,

From crawdads and leeches and seaweed

And the delicate balance between the hot skin of the water’s surface

And the cold, murky, uncertain depths below

That vulnerable toes would rather avoid.

I come from prizewinning eggplants and Merino sheep,

From the Big Pig sleeping on a pile of damp hay

And fluffy, trembling rabbits and feisty draft horses

And gowns with perfect, even seams

Made by tiny, deft fingers

Whose skills I can only dream of, three times older.

I come from lazy, roundabout conversations

About kids and baseball games;

From the pause between catching up and resuming a life lived apart,

From counting rail cars at a crossing,

So fully focused on the moment

That weightier matters slip away; instead,

128 (plus two locomotives) is all that ever mattered

in the whole wide world.

Live an interested life. I cannot put this in bold enough face. You are interpreting the world to your child. Is it fascinating for you? Are you engaged in creating, in thinking, in knowing people? Do you make music, take pictures, cook, teach yourself to sew, hike someplace new, learn to fish, eat at a new restaurant, take the back way into town? Are you reading about the history of mental illness, repairing furniture, learning to oil paint? *Show* your child how interesting the world is, and they will love to learn.

And that is what we’re after, isn’t it?

She was talking about homeschooling (she did it with five of her own) but I think it’s good advice for all parents, and godparents, and teachers too.  I’ve always thought it was just fine if students thought I was weird, as long as they saw I was passionate, because maybe it would inspire them to be more passionate toward the things they love to learn about.

Or, at the very least, they’d get a good laugh at my weirdness.  Which is good for both parties.

Elliot’s all-time favorite trick, and Abby’s all-time favorite Pointy Face.

Blue Steel vs. Head-Squisher.

I asked Billy to define “corkscrew curls.”

Elliot wanted me to get ALL angles of his face.

“Now, take Mary and Colleen.  THEY have lots of flare . . . don’t you want to express yourself?”

She’s doing this.  You probably won’t find it funny unless you’ve seen the episode multiple times.  Maybe not even then.

One normal one.  Look, we got some sun at the hotel pool yesterday!

Back to weirdness . . . here is Tristan singing along to a Motown favorite (anyone?  help!)

Relax, they’re not fighting.  Just singing, um, passionately.  I think Journey was the instigator.

Yes, there was actually a wedding amid all this craziness.  And here’s the beautiful bride, groovin’ to some sweet tunes on the dance floor.

Grandma’s making trouble again.  I don’t know how many times we must have told her to stop lighting things on fire.  Sigh . . .

Obviously, we had a wonderful trip, especially since Katie and Matt were gracious enough to spend lots of time with us, breaking the time-honored tradition in which the bridal party barely gets to see their guests.  We’re blessed with such a great extended family.  I wish we could get married again just to get them all to come back in Baltimore!

And to sustain you through the miles of walking between Italianate Flemish, Brabant Gothic and the rest, just think of all the things to eat for which Belgium is famous.  We came up with ten:

1. Beer. It does SO qualify as a food if you were raised in my family.  Our bishop recently confirmed that fact.  (I’m not joking.  Would I joke about beer?)

2. Endives. Best enjoyed wrapped in ham and under a blanket of au gratin goodness, comme ca:

3. Stoemp, a mashed-potato dish with flecks of root vegetables, herbs and / or bacon.  The above was a very simple version.

4. Chocolate. It was on every corner, made into every shape and color and size.  Its fame is well-deserved.

5. Butter biscuits. Dandoy is the most famous of the biscuiteries, and we went a little crazy in there, buying varieties flavored with ginger, spices, orange zest, almonds and even Earl Grey tea.

6. Mussels. I actually had better mussels in Paris, but these were still quite good, especially the broth flavored with herbs and wine:

7. Frites. These are not just French fries; they are hand-cut, double-fried, crunchy-delicious works of art.  Local custom dictates dipping them in mayonnaise (shudder) but I think just a sprinkle of salt is best.

8. Beer. (We like beer.)  Did I mention that every variety has a special type of glass?  Well, it does.

9. Waffles. Although Rob pointed out that he’s never had a bad Belgian waffle, this was the best I’d ever had by far.  It was made from wheat flour, cooked until delightfully crispy on the outside, and topped with creme chantilly and kriek, a smoky-sweet sour cherry confit.

10. Petits Choux, the sprouts for which the city is famous.  Unfortunately, we didn’t see many places that featured them, so we left Brussels without having eaten Brussels spouts.  Quel dommage! I suppose we’ll just have to go back someday.

Paris was, well, Paris.  Lovely, dreamy, even when it was cold and gray and en greve.

Now we’re back for a couple of days before our next trip.  Today I caught up on e-mail (which I hate) and did laundry (which I love.)  The cat is glued to my side.  Rain is falling, at long last, on my parched patch of earth.

After two weeks of rich French food, it was a pure pleasure to have swiss chard for lunch, with just a drizzle of olive oil and peppery tarragon vinegar for flavor.

Today feels like a huge, deep breath of home.

One of the tenants at my friend Julie’s community garden recently poked fun at people like me:

They come out here in April, and they work so hard getting everything in the ground, and then come July, they go to Cape May for a couple of weeks. They come back and are like, ‘Oh NO, where did all these weeds come from?!’

As I was reading that, I was thinking, yep, that’s me.  We missed the radishes because of final exams and graduations — just forgot they were there, growing tougher and more fibrous with every day.  As we left for Florida I thought, “I wonder if I should pick the peas before we go?  Naaaah.”  When we got back I discovered they were good for nothing but next year’s seed.  And so on. This is to say nothing of the weeds that accumulate in our absence; I often resent our neighbors and housesitter because they get to enjoy the fruits of our labor, in the form of nice, neat beds.  By the time we get back, they’re weedy and overgrown again.

Most heartbreaking to me, however, is our hydrangea bush.  We bought it four years ago, just after it had bloomed; I fell in love with the blue lacecap flowers and variegated leaves.    Every spring, we’d get excited as the buds swelled on the dead-looking branches, but then we’d get a late freeze and no blooms, though the bush continued to grow.

We were beginning to give up hope, but that huge snowstorm seems to have called everything into action.  This year, it’s huge and laden with blooms.  They were just starting to bloom when we left:

Today, I’m willing to bet they’re gorgeous.  I’m also willing to bet they’ll be well past their peak by the time we return in a few days.  Sigh.  I hope the people walking their dogs by our driveway right now will stop to admire them.

This is a good example of what cat ownership is generally like, but it’s turned up considerably whenever we’ve been away.  Poor Maia.  She’s just getting used to our being back, and we leave tonight for two weeks in France, after which time I cringe to think of the damage she’ll do to our legs and couches.

I have some teacher-related posts lined up while we’re gone, but I might surprise you with a photo or two, so stay tuned — and please pray for safe travels and easygoing, responsible students!

. . . from between trips.  We just spent a few days in Miami Beach for the AIA convention; Rob’s parents and a few friends joined us for a little sightseeing and a lot of time in air-conditioned establishments.

Besides the wretched humidity (I thought I’d endured humidity before, but no sir — Florida is a different story) the only thing I really hated about Miami was the obsession with tiny, yappy dogs.  I think taking your pet to dinner is a little weird anyway, but carrying your pet to dinner in 95-degree heat, or walking an animal that looks more like a rodent than a canine, is a step or two beyond that.

But I loved, loved, loved the bright colors of the tropical wildlife.  We visited both Vizcaya and Fairchild (in honor of the new landscape architect in the family) and it was amazing to see the kinds of things that grow outdoors there, things we could never dream of raising in Baltimore.  I guess that’s what makes them so exotic. And they appear everywhere — at the Lincoln Road Mall, an outdoor shopping / dining area, parrots screech overhead and leafy exotics emerge from planters adjacent your table.

Although I am not above a little clumsy tinkering, the following are untouched; the colors are true.  Enjoy.

I still remember the day I discovered that salvation was neither guaranteed nor permanent.  It was one of the most frightening experiences of my life, a little like discovering that you don’t really own the house you just finished paying off.  Only, okay, a much bigger deal.

What helped me to make peace with this tenet of my church’s theology was the realization that ultimately what you believe is only important insofar as it affects what you do.  Take a guy who prays the sinner’s prayer and then goes on to live the rest of his life as — well — a sinner.  He figures he’s okay because he did what he had to do to ensure salvation.  But whether the “sinner’s prayer” phase lasts five minutes or five years, his conversion clearly wasn’t sincere, because it didn’t change him.

Now if you want to split hairs and talk about whether salvation comes from the act of the prayer or from the life that follows it, whether the prayer itself is even necessary or a mere formality that prefaces a much more deep and lasting commitment to a life of spiritual growth, whether the belief is the important thing or the actions that prove it heartfelt — well, fine, I’ll buy you a coffee and we can hash it out.  But ultimately it doesn’t matter.  What we do on this earth matters.  What we do in our hearts, with our neighbors, to our enemies — all of this matters.  All of this determines whether we will be saved.

This is why LOST is the most shockingly meaningful and significant series I have ever seen, the reason I haven’t watched much of anything else since it started, and the reason why I can’t get excited about much else on television.  It’s about the big stuff: about how we live, how the fallen seek and find redemption, how our lives and souls are shaped by those with whom we keep company — for better or worse, by choice or chance.

The trope of the antihero, the conman / prostitute / killer with the heart of gold, can be a morally-ambiguous cliche, implying that actions are meaningless and only “heart” matters.  (Remember Pretty Woman?  We’re supposed to pull for the protagonist because, despite her choice of a deplorable occupation, she has a soft spot for her attractive and wealthy rescuer.)  But in LOST, we see people whose sins are real and damaging: torturers who are haunted by their cruelty, murderers who are always running, children who are paralyzed (literally and figuratively) by their inability to forgive their parents.  They can’t just sweep those crimes off their proverbial slates; they have to reckon with them, to seek closure and possibly judgment, before they can even begin to heal.

Each person comes to the island, as a character says in one of the final episodes, broken.  They all have demons to wrestle, and they do so with nowhere to hide.  They become part of a community, literally in communion with one another; they love and fight with and learn from each other.  In the finale, one of the main characters explains it this way: “The most important time of your life was when you were with with these people.  That’s why you are all here.  No one does it alone.”  The heartbreak, the persecution and violence and pervading confusion that made the show famous — no one fully understood the complex mythology, maybe not even the show’s creators, who are wont to shrug and say, “no, we never intended to explain that” — all of that was simply a means to an end, a way for them to learn how to remember what was important and let go of what wasn’t.

So, ultimately, the hair-splitting is irrelevant.  Sure, I’d like to know the mechanics of the monster, the back stories of some of the minor characters, and the prelude and postlude to the short time frame that’s chronicled in the series.  I’d love to buy you lunch (coffee wouldn’t quite cover this) and debate about that just for argument’s sake.  But kudos to the show’s writers for refusing, in the end, to get caught up in the nit-picky intricacies of plot and setting.  What made the show great was its focus on the universals of death, love, forgiveness and deception — the human experiences and ideals we’ve all lived and suffered through.

And really (okay, stop reading here if you might someday want to be surprised by the ending) it also doesn’t matter whether the alternate reality depicted in the final season is called purgatory, or karmic reincarnation, or heaven.  The point is that each person in that church made a decision to live an honest and selfless life, and they were rewarded with a chance to right the wrongs they had committed, and to enter into the afterlife as purer, more whole human beings — free from the corrupting influence of mankind that extended even to their island paradise.

You know how I know it’s an amazing series?  I can’t wait to watch the whole thing all over again.  Starting tonight.  Who wants a Dharma beer?

But today, on a Groupon adventure, Rob and I found falafel.  Tahina’s is so well-designed and efficient, it looks for all the world like a chain restaurant; Rob dubbed it “the Middle Eastern Subway.”  I would say it’s closer to Chipotle, as the ingredients are all fresh and beautiful. My research, however, turned up an even better scenario: it’s a brand-new venture by a marketing firm who wanted to try out some of their tactics on their own business.  They’re calling it the “first of 300.”  Boy, do I wish I had enough venture capital to be number 2!

Like Chipotle, you choose a centerpiece (beef, chicken, or falafel — and who in their right mind wouldn’t choose falafel?!) and a presentation (pita or salad.)  Then the fun begins.

There are a staggering number of vegetables (crispy fried eggplant rounds, red cabbage, sprouts) and salads (carrot and cilantro, cucumber and tomato, spiced chickpea) and sauces (baba ganoush, hummus, and yes, tahini.)  You can also get slightly inauthentic toppings like pickles, cheese and honey mustard. As many as you want (my salad teetered precariously as I carried it to the table) for about $6 per entree.

The restaurant also sells fries; eggplant and sweet potato options are a nod to the Mediterranean, and a “sauce bar” is meant to evoke Belgium’s frites shops, I think.  After our falafels, we didn’t want anything else.  But we will be back.  And you should join us!