goodbye Hyde Park

As I write, I'm surrounded by half-packed boxes of books and the chaos of our dismantled home. Where there were photos, there are only empty nails. Friends come through the house, sizing up our furniture to see what will fit in their home. Freda has been adopted out, half-used medicines left in a plastic bag outside my neighbor's door. Each time a friend comes to take something else off our hands, I am both relieved and grieved--I want all that we have to be used and loved, and yet it feels so strange that it won't be used by us. As friends struggle out the door with our sofa and bookshelves I want to call after them, "We're not dead yet."

And yet this does feel so like dying. But the death now creates a way to the new life to come. It is as inescapable as the meal-less flight and the luggage and the juggling of children and shoes and laptops at the airport security checkpoints. None of this is pleasant, yet all of it is leading toward something good.

Being back in Hyde Park has been more emotional than I expected. When I was in Kona, I could barely feel anything for this place that we'd lived for five years. I could scarcely convince myself that a place so different actually existed. When Chicago friends would send photos of the snow-covered fire escapes I would look out my own window at the blue Pacific and waving palm trees and try to remember what it was like to nest in for the winter, the hum of the radiators, sipping coffee in the glider before my icons as the snow fell outside, the windows rattling against the howling wind.

It is strange being here in all sorts of ways I could not have anticipated. First comes the realization of what we had here, as I walk with my kids and bump into friends at every turn. Dare I generalize and say that most everyone is Hyde Park is interesting? A friend here shows me her husband's office, his photos of Mars and the blue light of a nuclear reaction. She gestures casually at the blue photo, saying, "If you're familiar with Nuclear Physics, you'll know what that is."

And it was, ultimately, the engaging conversations and friendships here that kept us afloat through the challenges of the early part of John's Ph.D. program. It was a gift, also, to mother my children in this context, and coming back I realize that so many of my early memories of Anna only become available as I meander along the sidewalk here.

Yesterday Anna begged to ride her scooter to the botany pond on the University of Chicago campus. There, so many memories surfaced. We came here for a summer when I was pregnant with her, and then moved here when she was less than a year. I can see her tottering down these streets here, stopping to examine every discarded bottle top and candy wrapper, forcing me to see the world in a whole new way.

When my friend Ser was here the other week, she said something that expressed some of what I felt on my bittersweet return to Hyde Park. She said, "It was here that we were birthed into motherhood." Hyde Park was a place of so many beginnings for me, as a mom, as a writer, as the wife of a new priest. Some of it was so painful, so far from what I expected or imagined, and yet now I see clearly--it was all gift, all of it.

And the other day, at Bonjour bakery, while munching on a chocolate-covered strawberry, Anna lost her second tooth. None of this seemed accidental, especially as I contemplate all the pieces of her childhood spent here. How right that she lost her first in Kona, her second in Hyde Park.

There will always be a little bit of the child Anna in both places. So on our last night together in Hyde Park John and I snuck out and buried that second tooth in the back yard. As we buried it we thanked God for all that had come to pass in this place and asked for all good things for our neighbors and for our years ahead in Kona, and we thanked God for this tooth, and for our beginnings as parents which will always be buried here.

that was then . . . this is now

One of Anna's best friends from Chicago came to visit. Anna and Haru haven't seen each other since they were three, but they've known each other since before they could walk. Although both are intense in their own way, they got on beautifully, as they did when they were tiny.

Haru still talks about the day they went sledding and laughed so hard that he began to cry, and both reminisce about the strange event that marked Haru's departure from Chicago--a huge rainbow over Midway airport, something I had never seen before and have never seen since.

When we met Haru and his parents at the airport, I was shocked by how old and lean he had become, by his changed voice and the way he expressed himself, casually mentioning his ex-girlfriends, for example. Anna and Haru refused to look at each other for the first five minutes at the luggage claim, but then, in the back of our rented minivan, they started to exchange suspicious glances. Anna broke the ice when she showed Haru the Praying Mantus she'd brought in her bug box.

From that point forward, the two were giggling and playing as if three years had not elapsed since their last encounter. They shared a bed in the loft both nights, and the first night, after they'd slipped under the blanket I asked Haru if he sleeps with a stuffed animal. "I collect them, but I don't usually sleep with them." he said, "But, I could use one tonight," he said.

"They still relate like an old married couple," Nobu (Haru's mom) said. And they did, each tolerant of (most) of the other's foibles, each thinking the other person's jokes were hilarious, and also scheming together against the rest of the world, in this case, against us grown-ups.

When we hiked to the lava tube, they even managed to share a hiking stick, at least until Haru was able to convince Anna that there are some things you just can't share. To be fair, there was one blow-up over a cocoa bean pod and Anna's attempt to appropriate it from Haru, but otherwise, they were like two peas in a pod.

We took Haru, Nobu and Alexi to see the flowing lava. When we finally arrived at the viewing area after our perilous walk over the lava fields, Anna glanced into the view finder on her camera, and then I heard a loud sigh. "My batteries are all used up," she said, her voice rising to a teary whine. "I need new batteries. Now." I looked around at the black lava on all sides, the streams of red flowing into the ocean and said, as calmly as I could, "You know, they don't actually sell batteries here."

But there was no stopping Anna's trajectory. She wanted photos and she wanted them badly. I tried to focus on the red rivers flowing into the ocean, the furious waves lapping the lava up, the sparks and shifting light and bright lava ridges. But Anna relentlessly tugged at my leg. "I need batteries," she reminded me. Haru unzipped his camera case, "Anna, you could use my extra ones," he said, handing his to her. And sure enough he had two extras, exactly the right size, which we slipped into Anna's camera, one more disaster averted.

But then Haru started getting agitated as he gazed through his camera. "How do you take a picture of lava?" he said. "All I can see are red dots. Just red dots." I wanted to take the two kids and shake them by the shoulders and say, "Have you ever considered just LOOKING at it? When did you two become the lava paparatizi?" But no matter. As I tried to focus on the site before me, Haru's frustration continued to mount as he rotated the camera for a better view. Finally, he sighed, "I'll just have to take them with my mind."

On the way back to the car, Haru held Anna's hand. And then he turned to me. "Gosh, Anna has changed so much," he said. He studied her in the gathering darkness. "Her hair is much longer, and her voice is different. And she's . . . taller." I glanced over at Anna who shook her head slowly, taking care to swing her long locks, clearly pleased that her old buddy had noticed. "Haru, you've changed much more than I have," she said, smiling shyly back at him.

so it flows

My mom said it best, "For Natalie," she said, "Life is a bowl of cherries." Natalie continues to explore life with great eagerness and enthusiasm, if not grace. These days, every time I turn around she has climbed onto the kitchen table, and is standing there with a marker in one hand and paper in the other. She can now "draw" for long stretches and I take great comfort in the fact that she relishes at least one quiet activity.

Last week we went to see the lava flowing. Natalie was on my back, and Anna and Hayden and Amy and I had to carefully walk over cool, crusty jagged lava for about 100 yards. It was a harrowing walk, as lava is made of 50% silica and it really, really hurts when you fall. We arrived at dusk, so we had to trust our flashlights and follow a makeshift trail of orange dashes to get to the ocean.

Once there, we watched a river of orange pour into the water, hitting with great force and hissing. The lava was constantly changing and swirling in unexpected ways. It had already consumed a subdivision and forest before we got here, and it was contently munching on the road when we arrived.

As we walked back to the car we looked back and there was a curving trail of white flashlights as others made their perilous way over the lava to get to the viewing area. It struck me that these onlookers looked like they were in a paschal procession, headed toward the lava, toward a glimpse of creation.

On the way home we listened to one of my favorite CDs, a Hawaiian singer named IZ. Before one of his songs he talked about how he doesn't really fear for his own death because "In Hawaii, we live in both worlds, we live on both sides." And watching that river of red flowing into the sea against the inky, smoke filled sky, I think I had a feel for what he meant.

Life here does feel fragile, precious, perilous. The earth is literally shifting and recreating itself beneath our feet. There are small tremors every night, which I never feel, but I accept the reality that nothing is quite as stable as I imagined, that creation and destruction come together sometimes, and that even the dark, gloomy lava breaks down into fertile soil over time, that what appears as death ultimately disintegrates into life, lush and surprising and fragrant. This is not a bad thing to see and feel beneath my feet, not bad at all, as we head into lent, on this perilous journey through death to life.

errands

Photo by Amber--I'm with Natalie, my fearless traveling companion, on a black sand beach. You can't see it in the photo, but there is huge sea turtle lounging on the sand just behind me.

I keep going back to an article in The Sun Magazine (December, 2007)by Heather Sellers, reflecting on her writing mentor, English professor Jerry Stern, who used to send her out on "errands," such as picking up a visiting writer from the airport or a book at the library. According to Jerry, these mundane tasks were an opportunity for awakening if you pay attention.

"He sent me on errands, and when I returned, he wanted to know, he needed to know: 'What did you notice? What was interesting?' He taught me that all writers are essentially travel writers. The trip hadn't really taken place until you'd found a story in it and told it. Only after shaping the trip into a narrative could you honestly say 'I'm back.'"

I love the idea of "errands" especially here in my new context, where I feel that thousands of stones remain unturned. And how I relish the project of turning them!

Heather Sellers also has some wonderful words about teaching and writing and living, which made me think of my friend Rachel, an amazing teacher in her own right.

"This is what we forget as teachers: how close the poor student often is to doing good work, and how great the distance feels to her between who she is and who she could be. We forget how painful it is to be between selves; how all of us, always, are between selves, and it is in that desolate gap that everything true and useful is happening."

What a hopeful idea. And I think it is hope, ultimately, that Jerry Stern offered his students. He offered them a reason to keep going deeper into the experience, with heart and eyes wide open. And it was this idea, especially, that helped Heather Sellers survive her first major depression:

"Burrow into what's interesting--in you, and in everyone else. Every moment on the planet has juice to yield. Everything is interesting if you truly want to know about it. Staying awake to that was the key to staying alive."