"Sometimes pool-pah exceeds the power of humans to comment."

Fewer more insightful words have I ever encountered.

I can comfort myself with the knowledge at least that hopefully later on in life when I am more mature I will be able to comment on the pool-pah of the present. Hopefully in a novel which will then put all the upright pool-pah to shame.

I don't ask for that much out of my life.

Another bus stop reflection,

The summer has used up all of its soft breeze and scorching days. Now it seems the leaves have all paused in their waving. They are breathlessly awaiting their dazzling finale.

These are the dog days of summer. The days which squeeze your heart and make you wonder how you ever live in other seasons. The days when you feel stretched and loose. Colors seem brighter against the dusty background of houses. Flowers everywhere are singing their final choruses in a well practiced harmony.

Everything you do is deliberate: you slip, you lay, you chop, you hum. Even your bones have long forgotten the chill of winter.

"Pause," you think as you stare at the clouds, ever-changing, in the sky. "Pause."

The answer to the why question I keep receiving,

"...his last words were, 'I go to seek a Great Perhaps.' Thats why I'm going. So I don't have to wait until I die to start seeking a Great Perhaps."

-Looking for Alaska

It's dwindling now, isn't it?

Caitlin asked an interesting question in the car this afternoon. She said, "How did my life get misplaced so badly?"

An interesting question, and one that applies to my return this evening. I came in the door after being accused of doing something ridiculous. I walked through my living room to the door to my basement and no one spoke to me. I came downstairs and found myself in disarray. My sister's clothes, not mine, were strewn across my bed. My pillows were missing. My books were pulled off my shelves. There was evidence of a ball of yarn, but no ball to be found.

How did this happen? How did I get moved out when I was gone for forty eight hours?

Or better yet, how did my life get misplaced so badly?

'Why does everything need to be labeled?' or 'Summer in the City'

To me, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is two things. It is a love story to Brooklyn and it is a love story about reading. Now, when I first read Betty Smith's classic book I connected with her main character Francie Nolan. For a few weeks I insisted to my mother that she call me Francie, tried to climb the trees in my backyard and went on a kick where I visited the library everyday after school. I reread that book this summer and fell in love again with its beautiful story.

At one point in the story I was so awed by one quote that I literally placed the book in my lap while I tried to regain the air in my lungs-

"Because," explained Mary Rommely simply, "the child must have a valuable thing called imagination. The child must have a secret world in which to live things that never were. It is necessary that she believe. She must start out by believing in things not of this world. Then, when this world becomes too ugly for living in, the child can reach back and live in her imagination."

This morning I climbed out of bed and filled an over sized mug with powerfully strong coffee. I got my brother out of bed and made sure he was settled in front of the TV singing along to Diego before I went back down to my room to retrieve my book. Then, I began a routine which has been a part of every summer for as long as I can remember. I curled up on my couch and began to get lost in a new world.

The summer is a time where I could travel through whichever books I choose. I was a lonely kid and the summer only ever meant a lack of schoolwork for me. I could disappear in any corner of my house I could steal and read till I was found. But it was in these summers that I built block by block the world I now use to escape to just as Mary Rommely intended.

I looked around the walls of my room this morning and saw my collected books. My father has been bothering me for years to get rid of them. He wants me to essentially dig through my childhood and tell him what I can live without. I don't know how to explain to him that I can't.

But those books, the ones I read in the summers, are the ones that I remember most clearly. Those are the books which I have read multiple times, the books which even now I am tempted to take with me to school. They aren't always the most respectable books, but they are the books which have stayed with me and helped me build from the ground up, my imagination.

My heart beats with anticipation,

I'm going to write this in the first person, despite the fact that the first person scares me.

It all came together for me this morning. I have been in an odd place this summer. I couldn't really get a grip on myself long enough to enjoy things. Not that this summer hasn't been fun, I have just felt very different. I had one of those, I'm sure this is significant feelings all summer long. That tends to be a heavy burden to carry. You can't anticipate everyday being significant without triple checking everything. So it got tiring and annoying and I decided that I was going to ignore it and live my summer despite omnipresent significance.

But I discovered the significance as I was getting dressed this morning. I am, it cannot be ignored, at the end of a stage in my life.


This is the end of my before. My very distinct and drawn out before. But this summer a lot of changes have been made. I am comfortable with things about myself this summer that it has taken me twenty years to learn. I have come to terms with things that have happened to me and that I am who God has made me.

And that is the end of my before. I have no question that in one month's time when I get on a plane I will be able to say that I am staring my after in the face.

Hankering,

(Is that a real word?)

I wanted to write a blog about sunshine and fold-up chairs. About novels and over-sized sunglasses. About wisdom and tiny brown notebooks and characters who say, "IT'S ALL LIKE THE OCEAN!"

But at the moment I cannot find the words. So, I will write it all down in my little brown notebook, about all the wisdom that is absorbed while I absorb vitamin D and maybe later, I will copy it here.

Or maybe not.

Snapshots,

I.

She recalls how Billy Pilgrim looked back on his memories of the war with mixed feelings. One of his fondest memories was taking a nap in the ruins of Dresden. This, she believes, is the perfect morning. The sun has given everything a photographic look. It trickles down through the trees and reminds her of a nap. Both a nap and this sunlight incite the same feelings.

She knew it could only last a short while longer, but she cannot bring herself to care like she has in the past. She knows there will always be more sun drenched mornings with Mary-Ellen.

II.

"How much of my life," she wonders, "Has been hidden behind the off key music of an ice cream truck?"

It is the kind of melody which can float unnoticed in the back of your head for quite some time.

She leans back on two legs of her chair like her father is always scolding her for and knows it has been sent by God. She knows this because it is interrupting her and making it difficult for her to repeat her new mantra of, "I AM SO ANGRY." She sighs knowing that the sun will set on her anger.

III.

She stomps along the sidewalk watching dust clouds drift at the surface.

She thinks, "I don't know if I could feel this alone on a desert island."

She walks a few more paces and then thinks, "This does not hurt as much as it did before."

She blinks but this time the tears would not disappear. It may not hurt as much, but these tears will still not disappear. Even amidst the loneliness and the dull ache she can cling to this fact, though it may not hold her for long- It does not hurt as much as it did before.

IV.

She questions Ross about the sticks of chalk she found in the pool. He shakes his head and answers, "NO, LILA, GRANDMA GO HOME!"

What a calming release it would be to not understand the questions of life and thus not be required to submit answers.

He ruins all the charm he had by picking his nose when he thinks she isn't looking.

V.

Nobody, no nobody, who ever lived their life on the shores of an ocean can say that this world is damned. She feels the wave crash over her face and becomes at once herself and part of the world. For that one instant, while her previous breath goes stale in her lungs, she experiences infinity.


VI.


A boy with curly red hair and trendy sunglasses came and sat with her as she waited for her bus. He ignored her headphones, but her conscience would not allow her to ignore him. Twenty minutes later her bus pulled up to the curb, and as she shifted on the ground he offered her a hand and pulled her to her feet. Then he turned and walked across the grass. This red haired boy hadn't been waiting for the s56 after all. He just sat in the grass for twenty minutes with her.

She thought, I wish I could bottle that moment. It is equal parts magic and sunshine and God. It made her yearn to hold someone's hand. It made her want to run 100 miles, write old friends letters, and paint her bedroom yellow.

God, she knows, shows up in the funniest places.


VII.

The August crickets provide parentheses around her scattered thoughts. She has always called them August crickets ever though they usually appear in July. There are times when she can rest her elbows on the cooling cement of her stoop and pretend the voice of God is in the crickets.

It was listening to the August crickets that she first decided God was in the summer. As they chirped in a chorus around her ears her lonely childhood heart heard the words, "Take off your shoes for the place you are standing is holy ground."

One verse dimmed and another swelled to take its place. "Take of your shoes," the crickets whispered, "Take off your shoes."