Category Archives: Family

Recuperator

Posted on June 4, 2012 | 1 comment

|riˈkoōpəˌrātər|
noun
a form of heat exchanger in which hot waste gases from a furnace are conducted continuously along a system of flues where they impart heat to incoming air or gaseous fuel.

How weirdly illness changes time and goals–
everything sticky slow and progress ant-sized–
that our bodies heal at all seems miraculous.

Like trying to watch Venus make its crawl
on the sun a day early or while lightning strikes,
how weirdly illness changes time. And goals

become ridiculous. The prayer for normal
bowel movements is such a blow to pride
that our bodies heal. Of all the miracles

I know, I think now of my father’s heart muscle,
its pace currently regulated by an appliance.
How weird. Illness changes time, and goals

conduct themselves along a flue, heating fuel
and air like machines, leaving us febrile,
but our bodies heal sometimes, which seems miraculous

to me now, given how much can go awry
in even this age of advancing medical science.
How weirdly illness changes time and goals
into the age of fucking miracles.

______

Tuesday is my one-week post-gallbladder-removal mark, and Wednesday is my father’s one-week post-tumor-removal mark. My surgery was planned; his was not. We both make slow progress back toward health and normalcy, though I’m closer to home than he is, since my gallbladder wasn’t as big a villain as his tumor, and my surgery nowhere near as violent as his.

I was so pleased with my surgical team–if you read my gallbladder post, you’ll be happy to know I awoke in recovery with four x’s on my right hand. I did question the wisdom of asking for them in permanent marker as they stayed there day after day (but they’re gone now). My parents are pleased with Dad’s surgeon (and I have to say my mother is at a very, very picky place right now when it comes to health care).

What I tried to convey in the villanelle is the weirdness of healing. I told my husband this evening I was officially tired of not feeling well, which I’m sure means I’m just about better.

But progress comes slowly sometimes. This is actually the first villanelle I’ve ever written without having to look up the form–and I’ve written a lot of villanelles. (And then I did look it up just to double-check.)

Looking up recuperation, I found recuperator and I’m really loving the idea of recuperation as a machine–the product of science and reason. But there’s part of me that will always, always, long for and believe in the age of fucking miracles.

(Can you tell I’ve spent time watching the third season of Deadwood as part of my recuperator time?)

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Posted in Family, God Stuff, Poetry, Uncategorized

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The Moan Tax

Posted on April 25, 2012 | 10 comments

I pay for every blessing—don’t think I don’t.
Sure I’ve got a good job, but I work too hard,
And I’m lucky in love, but marriage takes work.
Don’t believe me? Listen to me piss and moan
About the house I have to clean, the food
I have to cook, the garden I have to weed,
My beautiful, rural commute ruined this week
with a spread-manure-fresh-dead-skunk reek.

I might be spoiled but at least I’m not content.

God forbid I should relax or take a break
Or cut back somewhere or say no to anything
Or take the risk of being seen as slacking
Or just enjoy the son I thought I couldn’t conceive.
I fight off jinxes with my constant, low-voltage rant,
Lest all my precious miseries be stripped from me.

_____

This is and isn’t me speaking. Happy Hump Day, everyone!

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Posted in Burnout, Family, Poetry, Work Life

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Playing with Fire, Opdyke-Style

Posted on April 18, 2012 | 9 comments

Two innocent-looking girls take the shade off a bedroom lamp, up-end a coffee can on it, and melt crayons in the shallow tray they’d created. It’s difficult work. The balance is precarious. It’s way too easy for the waxy mess to slop onto the carpet where it will stay, a clump one girl tries to cover with furniture or dirty clothes the rest of her childhood. Neither of them got burned.

But they did catch fire, having their own little moment of alchemy when the gold crayon swirled itself into the other colors.

They will graduate to ruining plastic pitchers with their experiments. What happens when you mix nail polish remover with nail polish? This cleaner with that one?

Both of them owned Easy Bake Ovens. Neither of them owned a chemistry set.

What happens when one of the girls pours just a little nail polish remover in a shower stall and lights it on fire? She had the hand sprayer ready and the water already running, and she watched the wall of blue flame for a count of two, maybe three, before she doused it.

Don’t believe in miracles? How about dumb luck? The fact that I escaped my childhood alive, without massive burn scars, the fact that my childhood home didn’t burn to the ground—-I have to believe in one or the other. Though I will say, in our own pre-adolescent way, my friend and I were methodical in our experiments. The hand sprayer was good to go, after all.

I never set off firecrackers or wired a birdhouse to explode, the way my brother did (birds never moved in, fortunately, smart birds). But my brother and I were both dangerously creative.

We particularly enjoyed burning trash. Out in the country where we grew up, on the edge of a tiny town called Opdyke, there was no trash pickup, so you burned what you could and dumped or buried the rest. Any other chore, we’d fight to weasel out of. Burning trash, we fought to see who got to do it. Our special favorite was finding anything labeled CAUTION, FLAMMABLE, or especially, DO NOT INCINERATE. At least we had the good sense to stand back. Sometimes there was a whoosh of flame or an interesting shade of smoke or if we were really lucky, BAM! An explosion when an aerosol can slammed against the side of the burning barrel.

One of my brother’s friends was badly burned when he used gasoline to burn his family’s trash faster. All we learned from that, apparently, was DON’T USE ACCELERANTS. (Which is actually a really good thing to learn.)

An analysis of this could reveal boredom, misdirected intellectual curiosity, some variety of pathology, or a combination of all three. But we also were being true to our Opdyke heritage and our family heritage, whether we knew it or not.

On our father’s side of the family, we were only one, maybe two generations removed from people who had stills in the hills. My father’s childhood home burned to the ground, twice I think. I have a vague memory that it was my grandfather’s fault, but I’m not sure about that.

On our mother’s side, we had our solidly creative Gran’daddy, who could solve pretty much any intractable problem by sleeping on it. He regularly dreamed the solution. He could also find water by dowsing—I’ve always been afraid to try. I don’t want to know if I have that particular gift.

When it came to fire, Gran’daddy worked as a volunteer firefighter and I remember being part of a crowd watching them set the old one-room schoolhouse on fire so the volunteers had something to practice on. (I also remember one odd little boy flashing his penis to everyone that day. At least we didn’t have that pathology in my family.)

In terms of creativity and fire, I have to think of Gran’daddy’s work with Sparky, a welder and inventor in our little town.

On the main street, which now has a name but didn’t when I lived there, Opdyke had a post office, ½ of a building that also housed an old-fashioned store with a wood-burning stove. We waited for the bus inside on cold days. (At this point my memory blurs with an episode of the Waltons–I can’t believe I was so lucky and that this was the early 70s, not the 30s.) Next building down was a two-story, red-brick garage where Sparky had his shop. That was pretty much all there was, business-wise.

I know Sparky and Gran’daddy worked together to make parts for various farm machines, but I also remember fabulous inventions, like the rotation hot-dog roaster for camp fires.

It never once occurred to me to ask to visit that shop, and no one ever offered.

Had my son’s school existed at that time, in that place, there probably would have been a field trip there, or we’d have had Sparky come to class to demonstrate.

At least I like to think so, and I like to think River Valley Elementary Studio School is in the process of living up to part of its initial purpose, to give kids space to be creative as part of their education.

It’s not just that I want my son to also escape his childhood without burn scars. It’s not just that I want him not to burn our house down.

I want him to be able to play with fire and learn even more from it than I did.

On reflection, I am utterly baffled that I took Chemistry I in high school but not Chemistry II, where the students regularly made explosives behind the teacher’s back. (Well, other than being completely burned out by my senior year and also hitting a very solid three-dimensional brick wall when I tried to imagine molecules in 3-D.)

In my creativity research, I am trying to learn how to encourage and assess students’ creativity. I’m struck by these quotes from Arthur Cropley, in his book, Creativity in Education and Learning: A Guide for Teachers and Educators. He points out that

“Surveys have shown that in theory at least teachers overwhelmingly support creativity as something that should be fostered in the classroom….However, in actual classroom practice they often frown upon traits associated with creativity or even actively dislike characteristics such as boldness, desire for novelty or originality.” I don’t know how much I exhibited those traits in the classroom, but I can definitely see my obsession with fire as a bold “desire for novelty” (something other than another rerun of Gilligan’s Island) and I don’t know of any other children who set their shower stalls on fire, though a lot of people may be like I was until this moment, sensibly keeping things like that a secret. Cropley has a list of things to do to make creativity possible in the classroom, and it’s striking to me how most of those apply to my brother’s and my trash burning processes. Cropley says we should

• “encourage students to learn independently
• have a co-operative, socially integrative style of teaching
• do not neglect mastery of factual knowledge
• tolerate sensible or bold errors
• promote self-evaluation
• take questions seriously
• offer opportunities to work with varied materials under different conditions
• help students learn to cope with frustration and failure
• reward courage as much as being right.”

We did “neglect factual knowledge” for the most part, and I don’t remember much self-evaluation. I don’t remember frustration or failure, but I think the wall of flame in the shower stall scared me enough I went back to burning trash as my main experimental mode, where you could “reward courage” with an occasional but deeply satisfying explosion. We were hell-bent on making our own “opportunities to work with varied materials under different conditions.” My 8th grade demonstration speech involved dripping candle wax into a pie-pan of water. “What’s it for?” the teacher asked when I was done. It hadn’t occurred to me I needed a purpose–it was just really fun to do. But what I said was, “If you use scented candles, these can be put anywhere to make things smell nice.” I don’t remember being punished or rewarded for that project.

I want to officially and publicly and sincerely apologize to my parents who are learning about most of this for the first time along with everyone else reading right now. (I explained and apologized long ago for the mouse bones the repairman found in the dishwasher when it broke down.)

“Sin boldly,” Martin Luther said, which is what I think of when I read “bold errors.” I wonder, as a teacher, if I make any room at all for that in my students.

It scares me to death to imagine what kind of experiments my already creative son will think up. I mostly hope it’s in a classroom with safety goggles and fire extinguishers available, but I think it’s part of my job to let him experiment at home as well.

Because playing with fire? Having a sweet face that will mislead some people into thinking he doesn’t have a dark side? He comes by that naturally. So did I.

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Posted in Creativity, Family, Opdyke, Teaching, Uncategorized

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Happy Easter

Posted on April 7, 2012 | 3 comments

for my cousins

In the story I remember, it was an ax
my uncle carried, chasing his father with it,
and promising as he ran, “If you ever hit
my mother again, you’re dead.” Whatever else Max

was guilty of, I credit him with this.
Now getting to know my cousins and their kids,
after a generation of distance and lack,
I’m learning more what it means to be a Bullock.

It seems to involve self-medicating a lot.
It seems to involve holding in or acting out
the pain that runs like sap in our family tree.

If we’d been in the garden with Jesus, we would’ve fought back,
a crazy, screaming Scots-Irish kind of attack.
It isn’t in the Bible. It’s just a fact.

Some of the Easter eggs I bought for my son have camouflage on them–he’s heavy into all things Star Wars and soldiering. I told him the story tonight about Jesus in the garden, getting arrested, and Peter cutting off the soldier’s ear. That wasn’t how Jesus wanted to handle it, I told him. We talked a little about Aslan and the White Witch, and how she thought she’d won when she hadn’t. I’m often anti-war (because I think it should be a last resort, and I think we should treat our soldiers’ lives with respect and be CAREFUL about where we send them), but I’m nowhere close to being a pacifist. My folks say that they always told my brother not to hit girls, and there were girls who wailed on him. They say they never had a chance to tell me not to hit back, that if someone hit me, I’d come back with everything I had. (Part of this helped me survive as a little sister, of course.)

Long-term, I want to work on understanding, perhaps adapting, the whole realm of “turn the other cheek.” Medium-term, I want to teach my son to honor soldiers and think of war as a last resort. (That’s him in the picture above, holding his Maxwell Smart tulip gun.)

Short-term, don’t mess with me or my cousins.

Happy Easter, Bullocks everywhere!

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Posted in Family, God Stuff

Be There Now (Day of Higher Ed)

Posted on April 2, 2012 | 7 comments

What if my life never changed for the better?

That’s what I thought about driving to work this morning.

I’m a worst-case-scenario kinda gal, so I won’t usually take the time to imagine what if my life never changed for the worse–I spend lots of time imagining variations on bad things & I think a great deal of my happiness in life is attributable to being pleasantly surprised that the worst thing doesn’t always happen.

So this morning’s commute was kind of a a more-upbeat variant on a worst-case-scenario–a status quo scenario. What if things stay pretty much the same instead of all the improvements I’m constantly longing for? What if, instead of healing from my shoulder and foot injuries, I’m just kind of in pain? What if I don’t get in better shape/eat better/lose weight? What if we don’t add a room to the house or build a garage? What if I never figure out how to be a tidy homemaker? What if I continue to teach four sections a semester until I retire? What if I’m not able to retire for a very long time? What if I never publish a book?

Some days, of course, that would have been a formula for depressing myself (some days most formulas accomplish that).  But today, it felt so good, I decided I’m doing it for at least this week, at least when I’m driving. What if?

I actually don’t think my shoulder and foot pain are permanent, but if they were, they’re manageable. If I don’t get any healthier, I’ll be courting cardiac problems in my 60s (or sooner), or diabetes in my 50s (almost there)–those two just based on my genetic history. Whatever role good cardiac health plays in staving off mild cognitive impairment, if I don’t have good cardiac health, it might mean losing access to my best mind sooner, again, given my genetic heritage. And whatever other health problems I end up with, if I don’t start out healthy, I’ll be less likely to heal well.

This is a pretty close transcript to what I was thinking this morning in the car. You know what’s great about it? Absolutely nothing in that paragraph about being fat or losing weight. Same thing in the car–at some point I thought, “Oh, and I guess I’d weigh less if I did get healthier….” This is pretty huge for me (pun not initially intended but then what the hell). I’m lucky–my husband loves me & finds me attractive no matter what size I am. I’m pretty confident in my ability to work a crowd, no matter what size I am. Not to say I don’t care at all–I am an American woman after all. But it turns out not to be very high on the list, which felt great.

I did spend some time thinking about my son. If I’m not active, I’m not teaching him to be active. If I’m not eating right, he’s not learning to eat right. If I’m self-medicating with food, he’ll learn to do that, too. Same with keeping my house a little neater–he’s not learning to pick up after himself if I’m not showing him. So some of the things I’d like to change have to do with parenting well.

Then what about the job thang? I’ve been teaching at UW-Richland for 20 years now, and I am wondering how much longer I want to do that, but in some ways, I don’t see a path away from what I’m doing, which makes me feel trapped (which, according to Martha Beck, is why I eat when I’m not hungry).  But what if this is it?  That’s my task this week–what’s great about this life I’m in? What’s great about this job I have?

Obviously, part of what I’m trying to do is focus on my blessings, and I absolutely understand I have a lot to be thankful for. Sure, I wish I got paid more to do my job (or actually, I’d like to get paid more to do slightly less), but I know I’m lucky to have a job. And here are the parts I love about this job:

I really love students. All kinds. I just love taking them seriously and pushing them gently and watching them learn.

Here’s a brief conversation I had this morning with a student who’d signed up for a one-on-one conference with me later in the week, to go over her rough draft.

Me:  So did you find a source yet?”

Her: No–I’m going to look tonight, but I haven’t found one yet.

Me: Why don’t you send me an email sometime this afternoon & tell me what search terms you’re using, and I can give you some feedback on that first, so when you do sit down to look, it’ll be more productive.

Her: O.k., I’ll do that.

Just a basic pretty boring conversation, but she seemed really pleased at the end, and helping students learn to figure out the right search terms is actually one of my favorite things to do. I talk to them about doing searches in online databases and “going fishing,” where we’re first just trying to figure out what the Library of Congress subject headings would be for any given subject (which I’m now able to explain to students by saying “They’re like hashtags!” This is how I figured out hashtags, btw–“They’re like Library of Congress subject headings!). I confess to students that I can often figure this out by imagining how old white guys in suits would describe something.

Even when they frustrate me, I tend to enjoy students. I love watching them really get into a lecture. I love watching them try to stay awake when the lecture’s not quite doing it for them (if there are more than one or two of those any given lecture, I figure it’s the lecture’s fault).

I love trying to analyze what’s working and what’s not and trying to improve.

I love having a flexible schedule. For example, in honor of Day of Higher Ed, (which responded to an op-ed in The Washington Post that essentially said professors are overpaid and underworked–read Aeron Haynie’s response & others & you’ll know my response) here’s what today looks like:

5:00 out of bed

5:15 reading Walter Isaacson’s bio of Steve Jobs (tons of connections to my creativity research), having coffee, then getting ready for work

7:15 hit the road (a little later than I’m comfortable with!)

7:50 at UW-Richland, heading for class.

10:00 a.m. Approx. 10-15 min. Facebook break (I didn’t keep exact track this morning, although I usually do–I’ll count it as a 20 min break, just to be sure).

10:20 Heading back to class

11:30 Lunch at the Roadrunner Cafe!

12:00 Multi-tasking–a little bit of Facebook, but mostly “Inside Higher Ed” blogs and then writing this blog.

3:20 Back to class

I’ll be working until 5:30 or so, with maybe another 10-20 minute Facebook break in there. (I’ll subtract 30 minutes total as “Facebook Break,” just to make sure, even though some of my time on f.b. is work-related). I don’t count those breaks as work hours, so I’ll end up clocking in at 8:20 (I keep track although no one else does). If I’d worked through lunch and not taken any Facebook breaks, I’d have worked 9 hours and 20 minutes, or thereabouts.

Today’s a very heavy class-time day–225 minutes in class–all four sections–but outside of class, here’s what I’m doing: writing, developing a rubric to use online, on our “course delivery platform,” planning my schedule for the week, answering emails, sending an agenda for a meeting on Wednesday, setting up a blog for the committee that’s meeting on Wednesday, class prep for this afternoon’s class and Wednesday’s classes, posting an online grade update for students in my composition classes and sending an email reminding them the drop deadline is Friday (I’ll do that for my other classes later today or tomorrow), checking email and responding (including emailing my dean and chair about using letters of recommendation they wrote for a sabbatical proposal in my fundraising letter to support my own sabbatical), grading an essay that got turned in two weeks late, meeting with a student to go over his rough draft, and…I’m not sure what else.  I’ll post an update.

I don’t teach at all on Tuesdays or Thursdays, so I use those days for checking email and responding, grading, class prep, writing, reading, committee work, etc. I also volunteer at my son’s school on Tuesday mornings–I figure since I’m not commuting, I have an extra hour and ten minutes, but volunteering counts as discipline-related community service, in any case.  I don’t always get 8 hours of work in on Tuesdays, but I still average at least 40 hours a week during my 9-month pay period (though I might need  to count the hours of the week right before and the week right after to hit the numbers exactly–I don’t necessarily work 40 hour weeks every week of the nine months–I’m keeping track of these hours on Excel this semester for the  first time, so I’ll have LOADS of great stats soon). A lot of Mondays and Wednesdays I clock 9 or 10 hour days, and I regularly work at least four hours Saturdays or Sundays (sometimes both).

Back to the question of what if nothing ever changed–I’m feeling o.k. about where I am in my career right now, not just because I get a good enough salary  (these things are all relative) for working hard on average 40-45 hours a week for 9 months of the year (I’ll post about summers some other time, but let me just say that I don’t get paid in the summer, so as far as I’m concerned, all my hours then are pro bono.)

If nothing ever changes with my job and I’m teaching four sections a semester until I retire or die–it’s a pretty good gig. Everything I spent time on today is fulfilling to me in one way or another.  And then during lunch, a former student told me that she was answering security questions online for some thing or other and the question came up: Favorite teacher? And she said my name is what came to mind.  I told her how cool it was to hear that, given my status-quo-scenario musing.

So in addition to having students I enjoy, I get to eat lunch with a former student who still appreciates what I was able to do a very long time ago, when I wasn’t nearly as good at what I do as I am now. Pretty cool.

UPDATE: Talked to an advisee about whether or not she should drop a class and what she needed to bring on Thursday for her advising appointment to talk about fall classes. Will also be grading a second essay that was turned in two weeks late (they lose 5% per business day it’s late, and two weeks is the absolute cut-off, but some points are better than none).

 

Found & forwarded an old power point lecture & list of sources for a colleague who’s working on a workshop related to civility in the classroom.

LATER UPDATE: The student didn’t email me her search terms. I was actually disappointed.

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Posted in Family, Searching, Teaching, Uncategorized, Work Life

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Small Comfort

Posted on December 21, 2011 | 4 comments

During one of those “oops we’re having an existential conversation” moments, Mom asked me once, “But you do think people are more important than animals, right?” I don’t remember what prompted the question, but I remember saying, “Some people.”

I’m not quite as bad as one of David Sedaris’s sisters, who, according to him, when she sees a car wreck says, “I just hope there wasn’t a dog in there.”

But if I’m honest, I’ll admit that the deaths of animals I’ve loved, in general, hit me harder than people deaths.

I wrote the following last night and this morning. I don’t think in sonnets, but I do process the world in sonnets a fair bit of the time.

SMALL COMFORT

Jack Baptist though I am, I hold out hope
For Heaven. Please don’t tell me if you don’t,
Not right now, not when my Buddy Cat is gone,
And by the time he went, a bag of bones.
Don’t tell me that in all the universe
This dusty planet’s all there is for us.
I live as if there’s nothing more than this.
Or do I mean I live as if there is.
I want my cat restored, purring and fat
With all the other cats and dogs I’ve lost,
And all the people, too. If I can’t have that,
A holy mountain where life is joyful and just,
I’ll settle for love, work for justice, etcetera,
The everbearing blessing of now. Small comfort.

This blog with pictures from dueling-banjo church signs is comforting, though–I particularly love the tone and the end.  Of course,  even as a Jack Baptist (my version of Jack Mormon) , I immediately began hunting for verses that hint at animals in heaven. My faves: Isaiah 11 where the lion and lamb hang out on the holy mountain, and God’s covenant post-flood, which was with Noah & his Mrs. AND all the animals.

This isn’t the stuff of argument for me, though. It’s in the realm of faith & hope  & quantum physics & the changing nature of matter on the nano scale. It’s hard to see what’s there and hard to understand what we do see. Meanwhile, the everbearing blessing of now, however small that comfort is.

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Posted in Family, God Stuff, Uncategorized

LET THERE BE LIGHT AND LESS CAFFEINE

Posted on December 9, 2011 | 7 comments

As I write this right now I’m sitting in the sun. It’s true. 6:11 a.m. in Wisconsin in December, and I’m drinking my coffee, soaking up the rays. Ah….

I am allowed eight more minutes in the sun, at which point I have to turn off the light box on my kitchen table and get on with my day.

We bought the light because in this house the grownups have S.A.D. issues. Though neither of us has the official diagnosis of Seasonal Affective Disorder, it’s clear the issues we have with depression grow worse when the nights grow longer.

There’s an episode of Northern Exposure in which the characters discover these crazy light caps and they want to wear them all the time. I get it now—I have not yet wanted to turn the light off when it’s time. It is intoxicating.

So yes, I’m self-medicating, but this seems more productive than my standard self-meds—caffeine, alcohol, and salty-fatty-sweet-food-of-nearly-any-variety.

[Oops—there. Time’s up. Two minutes over, actually.]

I really identify with (we’re talking seriously resonate with) this quote from Pam Houston, in an essay called “ Breaking the Ice “:
“On September 21 I feel nothing but flat-out panic that we are about to enter the long slide into darkness that feels like an annual survival test. People think June 21 should be a seasonal-affected person’s happiest day, but it’s really joy mixed with trepidation. June 21 may be the beginning of summer, but each day will get a little shorter from then on. March 21 is the only truly joyful day: twelve hours of daylight and nothing but clear sailing ahead.”

But for me, this winter is better already. There may well be a bit of placebo effect going on when I turn on the light, but I don’t care. Even the first day I realized I didn’t feel the need for that second cup of coffee with breakfast (let alone the third or fourth at work), and with less caffeine in my system, I’m sleeping better. My doctor friend Betsy pointed out to me once that caffeine stays in your system 24 hours.

The third day of the light box, I wrote an ode to it:

LIGHT BOX

What Goethe said he wanted, we now have,
My husband emailed me. Not officially
A medical device, and yet I love
It more than Xanax. As if a little box of Italy
Beams up from our table. Just once a day
I sit in front of it, in the morning, first thing.
I never want to turn it off. I want to stay
On the piazza in the sun, emboldening
Myself for normal days of normal strife
And pleasure, days I find so difficult
Sometimes. I’m simply not equipped for life
In winter. Summer makes me gloriously hot
And happy to be alive. When he was about to die,
“More light” is what the poet said. “More light.”

There’s a parallel universe (the one from which Narnia springs) in which I’m a freelance Christian evangelist and author and the title piece of my latest book is Let There Be Light and Less Caffeine. In it I talk about the light box being helpful but my morning devotion ultimately being more helpful. If you live in that parallel universe, please buy that book, because as a freelance evangelist, I depend on the grace of God and the influx of cash from my brothers and sisters in Christ. And buy it from a local bookstore, if you would.

I’m not in that universe, but, even in my current unchurched mode, when I say “light,” I think God. In the Cruden’s Complete Concordance I stole from my Dad years ago (hey—maybe I should buy him a replacement for Christmas—I wonder if they make it for the Kindle….) there are almost 200 references for “light.” When I read the reference

“is a lamp, and the law is l.             Pr 6:23,”

I hear a praise chorus—not sure if it’s something we sang at camp or if it’s from an album—the  Christian pop band Second Chapter of Acts, maybe?

(And here I say a heartfelt thank you Jesus for the blessings of the internets—by the time I figured out that the lead singer for Second Chapter of Acts,  Matthew Ward, looked alarmingly like Riff Raff from the Rocky Horror Picture Show, I wasn’t in touch with anyone who would get both references. There aren’t that many people on the planet who would get both references.)

And of course I think of light when I think of Christmas. Wendell and I will be lighting advent candles on Sunday and talking about Jesus and light. We’ve got our tree up, and lights on  our porch. (A student said, “I saw your lights. They look like they’re falling down.” “That’s how we roll,” I told her.)

Speaking of the second chapter of Acts, it is the second chapter of Luke that we usually use for our Christmas story. It’s what Linus quotes from, for example. But it’s the first chapter of John that I need the most, not just at Christmastime, but year-round. (And not just because one of my favorite Emily Dickinson poems begins “The Word made Flesh is seldom, but tremblingly partook.”)

I cling to John 1: 5 this time of year, and somehow the King James Version sounds better than any,  “And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.” The darkness either didn’t understand the light or couldn’t overcome it, depending on your translation. In the winter up north, either way, that’s good news.

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