Back Home on the Prairie

            Yesterday evening, we returned home after three nights in downtown Chicago.  I loved walking in the city, being moved along in the waves of people on the sidewalk and then weaving through the crowds when they got too slow for me.  We stayed near the Water Tower, and in the background, we heard church bells, cars, and countless sirens in addition to other hotel guests in the hallway and in the room next door.

            So when we lay in bed reading last night, I was struck by the quiet.  Marilyn was reading a novel she had not been able to put down, and I was paging through a new book of poems I had received for Christmas.  The loudest sound was my turning the pages—that is, until a gust of wind shook the house, and the room filled with rattling and creaking.  I turned to Marilyn and said, “We’re home.”  

Photos of the prairie and the big city in Dec. 2011.

This was taken on our walk in Meadowbrook Park, Urbana, on December 23, 2011.

This new sculpture in the park is called Diamonds are Forever.

I love the colors of this sculpture.  Its title is Fathers and Sons.

Afternoon view from our hotel room window in Chicago.

The lion outside the Art Institute was decked out for the holidays.

A Mini Meditation on Fog

As I drove home on the highway a few nights ago, I observed the fog. 

I had no choice: I had to pay complete attention even on the parts of the highway that run dead straight for miles at a stretch. 

Some people joke that one can read a book while driving on these highways on the flatland that is central Illinois.  I, myself, laugh every time I see the curve that is brightly marked on I-57 heading back south from Chicago.  “Pay attention!  The road does not run straight here!” I chuckle.  Having lived in valleys where roads follow the curves of mountains, I still marvel at the straight lines of the Midwest. 

That night, though, I could see only a few yards ahead of me, and the familiar was unrecognizable. 

At one point, an oversized tree trunk seemed to appear in the median of the highway, its immense girth topped by branches reaching out in two directions.  As I got closer, it transformed into a concrete beam holding up an overpass, an overpass that became visible only briefly just as I drove under it. 

A little later, an orange haze appeared in the sky ahead of me.  It glowed, and I wondered, could those be the city lights reflecting off of the fog?  After all, I should have been nearly home.  Just as I accepted the city lights as a reasonable explanation, the orange glowed more brightly and seemed to get closer.  Beginning to feel as though I was in a sci-fi movie, I watched the glow slowly develop a defined shape, a rectangle.  It was the sign announcing my exit, a regular green highway sign lit by amber lights.  On an otherwise woefully boring highway, that sign turned into a mysterious, even alien presence when filtered through the fog.

I have been thinking about the fog since then, about how it enclosed me in just what was right there.  When I moved through it, it demanded complete attention to every segment of highway, every foot of air through which I moved.  The fog generated an unexpected clarity even as it obscured the world around me.

Distributing Food on the Third Thursday

Note: I wrote this piece for the December 7, 2011, issue of The Uniter, the newsletter of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Urbana-Champaign (http://uucuc.org/), which has begun a two-year Hunger Initiative.

On the third Thursday of every month, I look forward to spending the evening volunteering at the Wesley Evening Food Pantry.  I know that at the end of the evening, I will feel tired, I will feel grateful, and I will feel happy. 

I have been volunteering at the pantry since I went there on a service project with Parkland College's chapter of the American Association of Women in Community Colleges (AAWCC) in December of 2008.  Ever since then, as long as I am in town, I spend an hour or more at the pantry on the third Thursday.  And that is all it takes for me to leave smiling and to know I made a difference: an hour or two each month.  I go every month because I enjoy it so much; I do know that when I am unwell or swamped, there are other volunteers who keep the pantry going.  I feel no pressure to go, just a desire to be part of it. 

The Wesley Evening Food Pantry was created by Donna Camp five years ago because she saw a need for an evening pantry for those who work during the day.  It takes place on the third Thursday to help folks to make it to the end of the month.  You can find out a lot more about the pantry at http://wesleypantry.org/. 

What I want to tell you here is that volunteering at the pantry is one of the highlights of my month.  Whether I help clients to "shop"--the pantry is set up like a grocery store--or walk around cutting open boxes of food, or hand out numbers to those arriving for the evening, I feel useful.  I feel like I am doing something concrete to make life just a little bit easier for someone else.  I also feel grateful for the opportunity to be kind to others who are having a difficult month.  Problems in this world are enormous, and I sometimes feel helpless when I listen to the news.  At the pantry, the helplessness is replaced by a sense of purpose created by a very specific task, a task that has to be done so that our neighbors have food for the rest of the month. 

I say I leave the pantry smiling.  I leave also feeling humble.  I know how tiring it is to go to the store after a long day at work.  At the pantry, I meet folks who sometimes wait an hour or two for their number to be called so that they can get groceries, and then they might share a ride or take a bus home.  They might spend the entire evening just getting groceries.  They have to have much more stamina than I do. 

Finally, I leave my Thursday evening shift feeling grateful--for the people who created the pantry, for the opportunity to help, and for the meal awaiting me at home.  I am reminded to appreciate the ordinary. 

The Hunger Initiative is going to organize a group volunteering opportunity at the Wesley Evening Food Pantry  on January 19, 2012.  If you would like to join the group of volunteers, look in future Uniters for information about training before that evening. 

My Penn State

I am a Penn Stater.  And I don’t understand football. 

In fact, until recently, the only sport that interested me was tennis.  My friends are still surprised by my new interest in baseball.  As I watched the recent World Series, Heidi tried to trip me up by asking how many field goals the Cardinals had.  When I replied, "What are field goals?” we both laughed.  I might be the only Penn Stater who has never attended a Nittany Lions football game--even though I spent seven years in Happy Valley while I got my PhD in English.  That was the longest I had lived anywhere since I was a child, so State College became home.  My body still remembers the slope of South Allen Street and the few steps it takes to cross College Avenue to the mall lined with Dutch elms. 

Despite my lack of interest in football, I understood early its importance at Penn State.  I worked at the alumni magazine as a proofreader my first year in State College; the offices were in Old Main , and I heard frequent references to Joe Paterno.  At the end of that year, I toured the capitol building in Washington, D.C.; while I waited to enter the senate chamber, the security guard on duty asked me where I was from.  When I told him I was visiting from Penn State, he replied, “Ah!  Joe Pa!” with a smile on his face.  I smiled back while shrugging inwardly. 

For me, Penn State was never about football.  Rather, it was where I finally felt comfortable in my own skin, coming out as a lesbian and coming into my professional identity.  

I attended my first National Coming Out Day rally on the steps of Schwab Auditorium on a drizzly October morning, handing out flyers announcing the first meeting of the Coalition of Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Graduate Students, which I co-founded in 1991.  I still wear a t-shirt decorated with a purple Nittany Lion composed of double-woman and double-man symbols inside a black triangle.  I helped to organize the first gay rights march through State College; I staffed the Gay and Lesbian Switchboard every Friday night for years (by the end of which we had changed its name to include Bisexual and Transgender).   I fell in love and entered my first relationship.

While I was at Penn State, I shopped at a farmers' market for the first time and planted my first garden, learning the difference between annuals and perennials.  My then-partner and I grew huge "pillows" of glorious impatiens.  When I would walk on campus in front of Old Main, I would notice the red impatiens in the sun wilting while the ones in the shade thrived.  I'd shake my head knowingly. 

In State College, I had weekly lunches of Chinese food or sushi with a dedicated dissertation director who made sure her advisees understood the demands of the profession and who sent feedback on my chapters before I had recovered from drafting them.  Over those years, I made friends who nursed me through having my wisdom teeth pulled, who brought me my first live Christmas tree, who went dancing with me on “gay night” at the club so I didn’t have to go alone.  I opened my first email account--with a psu.edu ending.  I learned to surf the internet.  I had students who challenged me and taught me; some of them were even English majors who played on the football team. 

State College was the place that launched me.  And I missed it, feeling the warmth of my old home when I heard Penn State sports mentioned on the radio now and then.

Now, I can't turn on NPR without hearing about the child-sex-abuse scandal at Penn State.  The week the news broke, I felt like I was punched in the gut, and then I felt sick to my stomach for days.  I found myself listening to the dates of the attacks and then breathing a little more easily when I heard they were after 1997.  That was when I moved to the Midwest to start my life as a professor. 

Still, as a Penn Stater, somehow I feel responsible for those children.  So how was it that those who knew about the abuse did not feel obliged to stop it?  I know many writers have offered thoughtful answers to that question, and others have expressed rage at the lack of intervention.  And I am not naive; I know the abuse of children is not unusual, that such horrors are perpetrated everywhere, all the time.

What I am struck by is this sense of connection, this sense of responsibility to Penn State and to State College that I feel even now, nearly fifteen years after I left there.  Perhaps that connection is one of the legacies of Penn State, too: I know so many of my fellow alumni are struggling with this horror and with what restorative justice can look like. 

Last summer, my partner, Marilyn, and I stopped in State College for a couple of days on a road trip out east.  We parked our car at the Atherton Hotel and walked everywhere those two days: to a musical at the wonderful theater downtown, to the Creamery (it had moved since our last visit, and that unnerved me until we found it again), to brunch at the Corner Room.  Marilyn has connections to three other Big Ten universities, but she now shares my affection for State College.  It can have that effect. 

On College Avenue, I bought a blue tie-dye t-shirt that says HAPPY VALLEY across the front.  I wore it last on a warm October afternoon in Connecticut, playing Rummikub on the patio with our nine-year-old twin nephews.  After this recent story from Penn State, I am reminded how some people see my beloved boys, and I feel unspeakable horror and a furious sense of protectiveness.   I am not sure if the words on the t-shirt will feel true again. 

I also know, though, that Penn State is much more than the recent scandal.  And that it will always be the place where I became more myself, where I found what I needed at a crucial time in my life.  I imagine I will return to South Allen Street and walk up the mall lined with Dutch elms.  I am struck, though, by how these recent events, though not directly connected to me and conveyed to me only by the media, can change my sense of the place I called home.