Butter

Certainly, I could be entertained for the rest of my life with all this access to technology. Even if I eradicated technology, the novels on my bookshelf could amuse me for years. And then, of course, there's writing. That would occupy me for a long while. If I didn't know how to write, even, then crocheting could entertain me for some time as I have many skenes of yarn still left. And if I had none of that, I could rub sticks together or churn butter and always have something to do. 

But if no one would be there to say, "What delicious butter this is," then I suppose it would all be for nothing.

L.L.B

An Improver

I know it isn't my right to write about the medical and personal lives of my students, but their life stories are a reminder of the Lord's goodness. One in particular has been dealing with health issues since she was a baby and has in the last few years been dealing with cancer. To be honest I'd lived fairly ignorant of the process of cancer until I met her. Staff meetings revealed that she would again have to go for a check up or that a pain in her side would leave her out for the day. And all I could do was imagine it made the girl really tired all the time, and that's as far as I could understand it. 

I'd never known a person with cancer. Not one this close.

I met her as a freshman. She had long brown hair then. When her mother served on our school board, they'd invited me over for steak. They can grill up a good one. I sat salivating over its peppery, juicy tenderness as she told me about her daughter's heart transplant surgery when my student was a baby. And then we played games and my student eagerly chatted about her best friends.

Despite her medical needs through the years, she remains a bright and energetic student now into her senior year. She was fine for a short time into her sophomore year, and then there was news. She would have to go through treatments. They had found various spots. 

That whole year she continued to finish my sophomore English class, declaring often, I might add, that she was not a lover of reading or writing. I smiled though, because she wasn't (and isn't) the type of student to give up when she dislikes the material. She would turn in various poems and responses and even in the summer we'd email and communicate through her tutor. I'm certain that many students would have pushed all the work away, declared that it demanded too much, especially because the amount of attention on her health was substantial. But every due date I gave her, every requirement, every assignment, every quiz--she was always ready and she didn't complain. Not once. 

She went through another round in her junior year, and by that time she was taking Media with me. We decided it wasn't necessary for her so we didn't continue with it. 

This year she has been in school throughout the semester and things are looking good for next semester. In fact, she just went in for another scan and her mind is at ease because the doctors told her the recent pain in her side was just a cracked rib. (Just a cracked rib!) So when she told me this on Friday, I smiled, because for many a cracked rib would be their hardest medical scare to date. And kids her age just don't deal with those things...not typically. 

But I don't find her peers to be ignorant of her situation. They ask her about things, and she tells them, and they pray for her, because what else can they do? They cannot bear her pain, only witness it and try their best to appreciate their own health. 

Because of her I know how I am blessed by God. If he can take a tiny baby and allow medical professionals the ability to transplant a tiny heart and allow this baby to grow up and to be positive and happy and an improver and confident and funny and to share her life story in a chapel time to a hundred other students...if God can allow bravery to come from a small frame of a young woman, then surely he can know your heart (both physical and figurative!).

Tomorrow she presents her Composition portfolio. She has been working hard all semester, and it makes me proud. I always pray that students will see improvement in their writing, not perfection. And she did. 

"Miss Boman," she said, "I really thought I'd hate this class. I'm just not. I'm just not the writing type. But it was good. I learned to like it." And that made me laugh.

When you have a new or an improved lesson and  through discussion, activities, and essential questions the students are so with you that they don't even realize that good learning is taking place. They lean forward, laugh freely, sit pensively, and look you in the eye, and then you know it's working.

When you finish the last stitch to an infinity scarf or a blanket, and you know that many people can't do it like you. Your friends actually appreciate their crocheted gifts and they say "what talent" and even though it's crocheting, you feel adequate. 

When you look loneliness in the figurative eye, greet it as an old friend, and allow it to sit into your world and take up space; whether it leaves or stays you recognize it and choose never to be distressed by it.

When you pop in an old film and you can mouth every word, but remind yourself to be quiet so you can basque in the actors' inflections. 

When you can see your family members accomplishing great feats; their competences are a mystery because to you these people were more common than buttered toast.

When you sit on a wooden pew to ponder the inestimable sacrifice that Christ made so you could find favor with God; when the wine has washed down the bread and you can feel grace in your heart.

When you entreat yourself to keep pushing one foot in front of the other and reach the top of whatever sand dune, hill, or mountain you're climbing and you laugh because its so wild and you're one of a few who are hanging out there and seeing the wildflowers and letting your hair be whipped by the wind.

When you realize after reading something that you're smiling like a dork. When you read a naughty section of a novel while you're in public and try your best not to laugh or show emotion.

When your friends really talk to you.

When your friends crudely joke with you.

When you feel more content to be chubby and functioning than skinny and sick.

When you and your little brother laugh; much ado about nothing.

When your grandma takes you camping and tells you all her stories about being a little girl and hiding in the portapoties to wait while bears left their campsite; when you can see her eyes become distant while her mind rushes back to meet the past.

When you and your friends sit for hours in coffee shops and write on napkins life goals and attempt to woo the waiter only to find out he's happily dating someone and they make a really cute couple anyway.

When you watch people talk passionately about literature and you do everything you can not to interrupt them and talk about your own favorites.

When you feel like you dressed hipster enough to be part of a band.

When you want to sleep but can't because all your thoughts stayed quiet until bedtime and they have to be heard right NOW, and you think, "My word. I should be paid for how productive my mind is being."

When your niece laughs and says your weird first name clear as day and then wants to play. 

When your brother-in-law becomes as good a friend as your own family. When your brother-in-law's family becomes just as close. 

When your favorite dog wiggles his butt because you walked in the door.

When you're grading and instead of writing "Doctors assess" your student writes "Doctors asses" in the middle of a very serious essay.

When you're traveling through the night and you can see the red sunrise peak over the mountain tops.

When you sit and let Mom rub your back. 

When you realize that your childhood stories are totally bankable. 

When you're told you sort of resemble Emma Stone from a certain angle and you kind of act like her, too. 

When you've written something you like.

Searching for Elna

God really spared me from ever publishing something juicy and autobiographical about my late teens and early twenties. Thank goodness I didn't, but Elna Baker did, and I really wish she'd publish something again. She wrote The New York Regional Mormon Singles Halloween Dance, published a couple follow up articles, and then vanished. I've recently discovered her on Vine, but that doesn't give me much information...just that she has a dog and a boyfriend now and maybe travels? I can't tell. Now that I'm through nearly all the ages she wrote about, I find myself yearning to know more about how she went on. How does one plunge through this life? Maybe she found out that time spent with others matters more than time spent writing about them. 

Leaders

Americans should broaden their view of leadership.

I have hesitated to publish this post because in affirming the great works that women can do, I may exclude the great works that many men are doing. I do not wish this post to be viewed negatively toward men. I have known many to be strong, faithful, and God-honoring. And I understand that as history would have it and as many cultures would have it, the books tell us that men have been chosen as leaders predominantly. I believe that in many cases, history needed men to serve in the instances they did. 

But times are changing, and as America's history has proven, we fear the unknown. We don't bend that well as a unit. And we can do better. The unknown in this case is wondering what the world would look like if our political leaders comprised more balanced numbers of women and men. Unthinkable maybe because we've never seen it. 

I think America needs to consider qualified persons for a job rather than only qualified white males (a very low percentage of all qualified).

Perhaps the people who fear change think, "It's just not the way we know the culture around us to be." That's a silly way to think. If everyone accepted only the world around them as fact and lived on that way, then Jesus' words, death, and resurrection would have no merit (I could go on about many great innovators). 

In 2009 I worked on a college service team over Spring Break in Inez, Kentucky. After a day of painting, dry walling, and talking with the locals, my group sat around the dinner table. Someone asked the girls, "On a scale of one to ten, how much do you enjoy being a girl." What I heard shocked me. One by one, my female peers said twos, threes, and fours, and when it got to me, I said, "eight" and added "It's not easy at times, but definitely an eight." Sara, a friend of two years, piped in. "Yeah. I cange my answer. Nine. Eight or nine." 

The guys all said it would be a one or two, if they were female. Why is it not seen positively to be female in this country?

I think the group agreed that the numbers were so low because of the negative portrayal that women have had in the media. America's obsession with sex makes it inconsequential to objectify a woman. By pure physicality a woman is generally weaker, and a man is stronger. The problem is not in having biological differences. The problem is in how women and men have believed bent notions that women are weaker other areas, too. 

Many people blame the media for this view of women. Documentaries such as Killing us Softly or Miss Representation thrust a series of images around. Women in provocative clothing and advertisements. Women who are skinny and women who appear less than the man, essentially. In Miss Representation, images in the opening montage flash between these and then to women who have made great strides for our country - Susan B. Anthony, Coretta Scott King, and so on. To guess how correct the producers were, I opened to the first page of my InStyle magazine to see this:

So I agree mostly. If this is the standard for a woman's value, then women might as well leave their intellect and preset of skills to the wayside. It's a magazine for women. Men don't typically read it. So the belief is that women vie for this image, too; it is not just the pressures that men put on women. In any case, through media, women hear that they must be desirable. And I'd be lying to say I didn't believe it, too. People want to be desirable. The danger is that both men and women buy into this belief. 

Media are the easy targets.  

That's one reason women don't have as many opportunities in leadership as men, but not the only one. We have a very serious heart issue that tells us it's okay to diminish the value of our neighbor by miss representing them, and for decades and centuries this notion has begun wars, has started holocausts, has made people fear their neighbor, and wrapped up in misinterpretations, chauvenism, and media influences, we have developed a belief that women are as important as the flawlessness of their skin, among a host of other misconceptions. 

I want to blame media because it seems like the easy out. But I think we have to first look at the state of our own hearts. If we did, then maybe our media wouldn't plague our perceptions so much. Maybe then women (and men) could be objectified less. Maybe a woman's role could have a broader definition, as could a man's. 

I do not aim to equalize men and women. I would be comparing apples and oranges, and it would be fruitless to do so (pun intended). Rather, I intend to say that both can fulfill certain duties in this world, and it would be a shame if the person most fit to lead our nation out of economic struggles were not elected becasue of her gender. 

My gift is not in leading but in teaching. I'm glad the patriarchs of our country considered that okay, you know, since Aristotle's teacher Plato was male. I know of a number of decent men and women who could run for public office, and if I penciled them down, the numbers would probably be similar. 

As a Christian and a woman and an English speaker, I have learned that there is a lot at stake in pronouns, but I think it's okay to end this post like this:

If a woman's gift is serving, let her serve, if it is teaching, let her teach; if it is encouraging, let her encourage; if it is contributing to the needs of others, let her do so generously. If it is leadership, let her govern diligently. If it is showing mercy, let her do it cheerfully. 

Roller Rinks

I feel like if you've been keeping up with my blog for this long, then you deserve to know about something. 

In college, sophomore year, a number of my friends decided it would be fun to roller skate in Sheldon at a little roller rink that doubled as a pizza place. About twenty minutes away from Dordt, it was close entertainment. The dress, they said, would be eighties sweat wear.

I wore gray leggings, a short one dollar skirt I bought at a thrift store, floppy pink socks, and an off-the-shoulder top, my hair in a side pony. 

Once there we ate pizza. Tiny hands from tiny children reached swiftly onto the buffet table and grabbed the cheesiest slices. It didn't take long for us to realize that there was an age gap in the skaters from 10 to 19, we of course being the older crowd. Kids weaved in and out, no fear, between me and my friends while we tried to retain body memory and keep our balance, the disco light swirling in all directions on the wooden floor. 

From time to time I took a break, but when they called age groups on the floor to do the limbo, I glided out, having secured my balance, finally, and felt confident enough to do this. The 19-year-old crowd got placed with the 10 and 11 crowd, so it was going to be a tough battle. 

 

One by one we reached over, grabbed our ankles, and avoided the bar. On the third time through I shifted my knees inward, head tucked, butt out, and that's when I heard it. My skirt was ripping off my body as I moved. Fully aware this was what it was, I toppled, sitting, other limboers avoiding me frantically. I felt my behind and a flap from my skirt--my one dollar skirt--hanging by its seams from my waist. Standing up, back mostly away the crowd, I attempted the best possible back skate off the rink. Okay, you know how to do this. Push both legs out and squeeze them back in. Do it. But it had been a while, so I scooted sideways. 

My friends still a bit unsure as to why I had removed myself but fully aware that 11-year-old boys and girls had bent over laughing, discovered the predicament quickly when they met me in the dark corner where I stood. Somebody gave me her sweatshirt to hug around my hips like we did in the nineties. 

If I ever have a child, I'm going to tell him or her that the world is unfair, and that this lesson can most effectively be learned on a roller skating rink. At this moment, for I would like to think my son or daughter enjoys talking to me, we will discuss protocol for roller skating rink parties, and I will help boy or girl conclude that the only way to look good out on the rink is to practice on one's own time in the driveway and to get friends to lower a broomstick and to double check their intended attire with me so that, at least for one night, he or she will have no real story to tell. 

The skating rink girls. What a fun group. 

This was a different night.

The Fall

The Fall

She cannot say it

They met - she saw - he might've been real

In moments she stroked his cheek

Wrapped presents with bows

Told him thoughts and waited for his

That never came

Alone alone alone she was

In his company

The fingers that scribbled those cards

To her for her 

But he never with her

Wouldn't kiss her

Just a prize, her

Three years time, her

Twenties gone and gone, her

And in them never loved her

And here she's 

Colored in the fall, 

And sad,

But fine

And fine.