283. International Festival

The view from the inside. Well, from the just outside the inside.

Sunday afternoon, after Melinda left with new knowledge about canning, I walked over to Zelda's house. She keeps sitting on her front porch reading a book and I keep interrupting her to chat. And chat we did. One question I need to ponder more: what makes converts tick? I mean, why do people convert, how do they make the switch in their brains? In their hearts? We weren't talking about subtle interdenominational conversions like Methodist to Catholic to Lutheran to non-denominational Christian. We were talking about major moves. Shifting without the clutch engaged.

But that's for later because I don't have it formulated in my head yet even.

We sat on her porch and watched the sightseers. Our park has several festivals throughout the summer. I call it the park of outcasts--the pagans have a festival, the gay pride fest is there, and then the international festival. Religious fringe, gays, immigrants. And I love that I live here and these things happen. I love that people come to our park and celebrate. People from all around come into the city and spend time (and money) enjoying themselves. It is lovely.

But we wish they would learn how to parallel park.

The international festival is, I would guess based on the parking situation, the biggest of the three summer gatherings. Of course Pridefest is skewed for me because my street gets blocked off for the parade and therefore no one can park on it until after the parade (and frankly, everyone is already here by then). But this weekend made parking tricky.

To begin with, a neighbor who lives near the corner is dying. The family has never been a part of the social life of our block. They've lived here a long time and know Henry and Liv, and Len, but unlike those folks, they never really responded to overtures to join us at barbecues and block parties. That's fine. People have lives centered where they need them to be. But anyway, she's dying and relatives have come in to be there. Be here.

Secondly, Henry and Liv, who are probably in their mid-70s, have eleventy-billion descendants. I think half of them spend the night any given weekend, and then there's a son or a grandson who is living there full-time. He has at least two cars. So we already were a bit crowded.

And then you take folks looking for the absolutely closest space to the park festivities and have them troll up and down our block (we have a one-way street, so this involves illegal wrong way driving, or sometimes just reversing all the way up to the top again) and it's really quite entertaining. People double park. Someone tries to figure out where Big Ed lives because obviously they know him from something, hoping they can park in his garage (where he is parked, of course, because there's nowhere to park on the street).

A woman in an SUV trying to park in a spot that maybe Jake's little Saturn could fit in--and having her teenaged daughter get out to try to guide her in. She eventually gave up. My thought? You're going to walk all over the park. What's three more blocks? Henry and his grandson/son agreed with that and spent the day orchestrating the parking situation, spreading cars out so no one could park, somehow parking a motorcycle so inconveniently that it took up 2 spaces.

I parked in back. Zelda later moved her car to the garage and I took her spot so Jake could park in back post-camping.

We never actually made it over to the festival this year. Fiona wasn't dancing (she was camping) and it was nice to simply stay home. Plus there was the show right outside.

282. My Church

We sat talking on Travis and Zelda's porch. They even went in for a while and said good night to their kids before joining me and Gretchen again outside on the concrete steps. They even offered us wine, but neither of us was interested tonight.

Gretchen was going through a plot of a movie she'd seen and why it was important to her, but kept making me laugh because she referred to the characters by their actors' names and all I could imagine were those people having conversations and doing things, but not in character.

We were talking about schools and churches. Besides our families and our places of work, we all have these two major influences in our lives. Bree just started at St. Fidelis, which seems to be going well. Eliza is still at the same place, and Fiona and Daisy, of course, are at Oak Grove, one in a new classroom and one in the same (they are multi-aged rooms). Gretchen and I asked how Bree was doing, and Zelda described her reaction to their first mass. Fidelis is Catholic; the family is not. But Fidelis is probably the best Catholic school in the city to attend if you aren't Catholic, frankly. No matter what that one nutty girl scout mom said to me. But that wasn't tonight. And Zelda already knows all about her from our talk in person.

Churches is always a topic I like to discuss with these two families because we really are the most alike philosophically but we are not the same denominations. The other Catholics on the block, while definitely my friends, are not as close as these two families. As my pastor has said to me in the past, Catholic is a big tent. Gretchen's friend says it's like being American. You move to Canada, you're still American. You get annoyed at the president, you're still American. You hate the politics or the opinions of the senators, but you're still American. Yes, people leave the Catholic church all the time. But when non-Catholics ask me why I stay, this comes closest to explaining it for me. I'm Catholic. It's what fits me best. It's what I am. Here I am.

Gretchen started talking a bit about her church. Zelda had a couple of things to say about theirs. Mine is an episcopal hierarchy. Zelda's is completely congregational. Gretchen's seems to have the worst of both those worlds, frankly. We talked about youth groups. We talked about service/mass times. We just chatted.

And Gretchen said that she was talking with Nick about church in general, and that the conversation ended thus: "Our church, Nick? Our church is this block."

Gretchen's been saying a lot of true things of late. And this was one of them. We all belong to different parishes and different denominations but if St. Paul were still writing letters, there might be one addressed to between the sycamores. We do what churches do. We take care of older people and youngest people. We make meals when you're sick or just had a baby or somebody died. We have discussions about faith and our place in the world and how we live it out. Nobody puts the bible down on the table and opens to chapter and verse, but Zelda sent me two proverbs in an email this week after we'd talked in her living room. "These were the two I was thinking of," she starts. And she was right to be thinking of them.

I'm not leaving the Utah Vestibule behind. My church fulfills needs in my soul that can't be met in a neighborhood--mostly the need for ritual and order to my faith. But when it comes to my daily living of faith, this is where it happens. I am a far better Christian, a far better community member, now that I live here, than ever before, and it's not just that I'm older. I am better here. It is my monastery, frankly. Stability starts at home. So does conversion of heart, and don't get me started on obedience. And no murmuring allowed.

281. New Baby

Baby #29 arrived last week. Not that they're all babies, nor were they all born here, but there are 29 kids between the sycamores now. #30 is due in the fall. I'm fuzzy on the stats, though. There might be a #31 as well.

#29 was big, about a week post-due, 10 pounds. She beats Billy's 9 lb 1 oz record. Judd, her dad, told me that she sleeps like a 2 month old already, at only a week. He's not claiming victory yet. Valerie and I sigh when we see Dawn come down the steps this morning. "She'll be jogging in a week." She probably will.

Her older brother is Jay on this blog, and I'm going to name her Kestrel.

It's one of the perks of blogging. I get to name the characters.

280. Ghetto

I don't mean ghetto like how rappers mean ghetto. I mean more like how ghetto used to mean a somewhat sealed off portion of a city filled, in European cities, with Jews, and then later in America, with Italians or other immigrant groups.

I drove down McKnight Road today and thought about the kid I used to pick up, for $40 a week, and take to the summer camp where I worked, which wasn't a summer camp as much as a glorified babysitting job in the air conditioned school where I'd worked the year before. I remember how Anthony was so shocked I lived in the CITY, in the GHETTO. He meant it like the rappers do. Crime everywhere, drug dealers and pimps on every corner, shoot outs between cops and gang members.

Omigosh it's such a terrible place. Anthony hated living so close to the ghetto, out there just west of 170, and was happy that the lawsuit his mother had pursued when the teacher at his county school did something unspeakable to him (!!! That's how it was said to me when I asked him what he meant by "settlement") had paid off and they were moving out to the far reaches of West County. Where he wouldn't wind up, you know, caught in the crossfire.

Now, his obvious personal problems aside, it wasn't the first or the last time I'd heard the sentiment.

I don't live in the ghetto. I live on a tree-lined street a half block from a Victorian walking park. I know all my neighbors and not a single one of them sells drugs. Not a one. A few of them own guns, but they shoot deer with them. People hold down jobs that do not involve pimps. Really.

I know it hasn't always been this way--I know because I've been there, called the police about that. And I know that I do live closer to the scene of crime than the boy I drove to camp that summer (although I will point out that some crimes happen anywhere).

But in some ways, I wonder about the ghetto-ization of my children. They are city kids who do city things. They attend a charter school and go to a city parish. Yeah, I take them out to the country and they know an oak from a maple from a catalpa tree, but I wonder about the area of the world I skip over on my way to the trees and bugs and pit toilets. The suburbs.

I grew up in the suburbs, the same suburb all over the country. It is the same wherever you go. Yeah, it was New York Ave and South 1st Street and Orangewood Trail and Fairwick Drive and Sonora Place and Pruitt Street and North Beechwood and Spring Meadow but it was all the same dang place. By the end of it I was more than happy to shed it. The longer I live in the city the less it looks like an option. Even my parents live in the city now.

But will my kids? Or will they shun the ghetto and the 'old ways' of their parents and move out to some tacky exurb? Will they feel they were kept from something because I raised them in the city instead of the two-car-garage no sidewalk lifestyle of my own childhood?

There must be a reason beyond ignorance and fear to want to raise your child out there in the suburbs. Maybe it's yards or driveways. I don't know. I just know that as a child, I would have been shocked by the way my kids are being raised. If I knew them as peers I would be intrigued and probably a bit jealous of what they had that I didn't have. Fiona and Daisy haven't expressed similar ideas yet about friends out in the suburbs. I don't think they see the difference so strikingly yet. People live in different places. Simple as that. I don't know why county kids don't see it the same way. Maybe it's an inside-looking-out vs an outside-looking-in mentality.

Anthony would be, let me count, 27 years old now. Old enough to have a family of his own. I wonder where he lives.

279. Growing Up

"Are you going to the competition this weekend?" asks Iris. Of course Fiona is, and Iris realizes this as she says it. "Oh, yeah. I'm going and I'm going to kick Veronica's butt."

"I thought you and Veronica were different ages?" I point out.

"They combined the competitions so that there'd be enough people," she explains. Fiona, Iris, and I, I'm sure, are all thinking about Veronica for a moment, because then she continues: "You know, it's one thing to be really good at something, but if you aren't a nice person, it isn't enough."

278. Summer Evening

The sun past the park treeline, I sit facing north watching a plump gray squirrel creep along the electric wire highway above my alley. A mosquito bites me but does not leave a welt. Humming A/C units turn off and on. The air is still but more pleasant than it's been in 2 weeks. I hear the phone ring inside, Jake's voice talking with Daisy and Fiona.

Clouds this year have given dimensions to the sky that shock and please me. The sky is so big now, bigger than I remember it every being since I moved from Texas. Jake says I'm wrong but this year is different.

A squirrel gnaws, somewhat desperately, at my baby pin oak branch. I need to decide between the pin and the scarlet. With the magnolia, two redbuds, a dogwood, and the straight hybridized red/silver maple, I can't keep both oaks. Like Penny says: I can't grow every tree. I think the scarlet will win. It's already taller than my house and the pin is crooked trying to get enough light.

My foot is resting on a large patio pot containing a basil plant and a jellybean tomato. Tiny red grape-sized fruits, the woman at the market told me. Right now they are green but I have hope.

Our old dog's bowl is still on the porch. Jake, I think, suggested it as a burglary deterrent. I don't think it would fool me.

The euonymus is leaving this fall. I will replace it, perhaps with a Japanese maple. The euonymus attracts too many flies to its flowers.

Steve and Jerry's wisteria is blooming, but they moved to Amsterdam, I'm sure they don't care. I miss them. To bastardize Frost, good hostas make good neighbors.

277. Pool

Bree is so happy with the new pool. Yes, Bree, the neighbor, not one of the kids in my house. Zelda told me that she came home after the first afternoon when she and Noah came to swim and was very happy.

Our old pool was a galvanized metal horse trough. It was reminiscent of my childhood but it was a tetanus shot waiting to happen. Each summer involved more and more fiberglass patching and painting. I was done. We rolled it into the alley last fall for bulk pick up and bought this one in the springtime. Total cost was astonishingly low, especially considering that there's a freaking filter built in. The water is clean and I don't have to constantly change it out. It's smarter. Maybe not nostalgic, but smarter.

In my experience, that's not always true about new things, but this time it is.