She's an American Girl

A new little American arrived on Monday July 9th. Her name is Lemar and she is the first born American to the refugee family from Iraq whom I tutor. I went to visit her last Thursday. She is perfect, so small and dainty, with a sweet little mouth and alert eyes. Her family is thrilled that she has been born in America. Their journey has been a long one, from Iraq to Syria (where their son was born) to Turkey and finally to Washington State. Her father pointed out that she will know nothing of Iraq. She will grow up with fir trees, rain, Mount Rainier, and mild summers giving way to cool misty autumns. She will be bi-lingual, speaking arabic at home and english at school. She will watch Sesame Street, eat hamburgers, go to proms, and talk on the phone for hours with her american friends.
Her life will be very different from her parents. I hope it will be peaceful, with an uneventful coming of age, and smooth ride into adulthood.
Nowhere in this world is there the guarantee that life will be smooth and easy.  There is no promise that living in the United States will be perfect, without incident. But her parents hope so. They are happy to be here, happy to be learning english, working and going to school to better their lives. They feel safe. They miss their homeland. It is a far away memory, full of dry land and palm trees. But they thank God that here, in this small part of a big country, they have found a new life, and have brought in a new life, a new little American.

A sour start

Today is day one of the new little life I am bringing into the world...sour dough starter. I have read articles and books on starter, have read blogs, the back of flour packets, and heard stories of starter that has been passed down for generations. So, sitting on my counters, in a Bonne Maman jam jar is my little experiment in growing live cultures. I, being the good mama, will feed my little starter each day for five days. Then, when it has bubbled and fermented, I will mix it with other ingredients and make bread.
It is fitting that I am beginning my new, unemployed adventure with sour dough starter, because it is a bit like "if life gives you lemons, make lemonade." Things went sour in the last six months. Nothing was produced out of it, nothing was accomplished or created. But, now, I will take the sour and make something delightful. It is the first step to finding that niche, that reason d'être that has haunted me for sometime now. Oh how I envied people (yes...envied) who did not have this over arching dread that they were always in the wrong place at the wrong time, or the right place at the wrong time. Whatever time it was, it seemed that the timing was off. As I am always saying, maybe too often, that in life, you either have too much time and no money, or money and no time. I fall into the former now, and was for a bit in the later. Too much time, an eternity of it reaching before me.
The key to all of this, of course is to be wise with your time, to utilize it in a profitable manner, and never to waste or squander it. But this goes back to my perplexing dilemma of that over arching dread that I am not doing the right thing. How does one justify one's existence, or know what that even means?  Do I dare,  and do I dare...as Eliot said.
Yes, yes...there are endeavors out there that are good and true and at least give the impression of using your time wisely. There are those who work to feed the poor, to help those who are helpless and practice altruism. That is good, and praiseworthy. But is it the whole picture, the answer to my overwhelming question? Is taking the time to ponder the Big Picture, worth the time it takes to do it?
Well, I think so. I think that if we are to find that balance in life, we need to find both the creative soul inside of us, and the working body that moves us along.
This is bringing me back around to my little jar of starter. In producing a live culture from something as simple as flour and water, I feel I am tapping into knowledge that has existed for thousands of years. I am taking part in something very simple, making bread. But in doing this, I am creating a product that will satisfy those who eat it, and satisfy my endeavor to make it. I am using my mind and my body to create food.  Simple, but so complex at the same time. Bread, as my french friend pointed out to me, is the cornerstone of most cultures cuisine. It holds a great place for the French, as I found when I made a joke to my friend about how hard the knob of bread had gotten that we could use it as a door stop. I was then informed that for a french person, bread was to be greatly respected and honored, never wasted(even though later that evening, she tossed it in the kitchen trash. No matter how esoteric you make the bread, there is no point in holding onto a chunk you can break your teeth on).
Day one of my little starter in my jam jar is a great step on a new adventure, which is to find that creative purpose in even the most simple of things.

in my end is my beginning....

Woody Allen is credited with the quote, " If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans!" So, here you go, Lord...my plans.
As my beloved T.S. Eliot stated, "To make an end is to make a beginning..." My end was the job I just left, a job I toiled at for 4 years. It ended, not because I wanted it to, but because there was no other way to begin. It had to end.  I had planned to start the day after my last day of work, but was too exhausted from the whole sorted ordeal to even attempt a smirk out of the Almighty. Losing a job is like having your leg removed. There is a phantom job left in your head, one that you still wake thinking, "Did I finish that report?" or "Should I have left instructions on how to maintain the adjunct list?"  You check your emails thinking that someone is going to ask you where something is, or could you do this on Monday. You are still connected to it, still feeling responsibility for it and still anguishing over things that you never quit mastered, and things you did very well. My phantom job was still clinging about me like the dust left from shaking of an old blanket.
But it was not meant to be and I was dismissed after a stressful six months of feeling like the operation was a success, but the patient died. I struggled through each day with that heavy stone sitting in the pit of my stomach, waiting for the end that was inevitable, crossing off the days in my trusted date book until the final week. I woke each morning thinking about the last time I would shut down my computer, the last time I would shut my office door and the final exit out of the Art center, where I could no longer enter as my magnetic key card was deactivated and my ID card turned in to HR (heavens, what did they think I was going to do with it? Pose as a fake Administrative Assistant and get a deal at Office Max?) I was erased, eradicated, not a trace left that I had ever been there.
So, in those last days, I pondered what the heck I would do with myself with the eternity of time I had stretching before me. I spun tales to those around of plans to finish my masters thesis, of attempting to go into teaching, but in reality, I was looking at just trying to make it without falling into a downward spiral of panic. When you take away a routine, and one is not replaced immediately, there can be a sense of drowning, or the sensation of stepping off a very high cliff, hoping madly that there is an unseen bridge to catch you. It all depends on YOU now.
So, I decided to tell God my plans. To give him a good belly laugh, and in the process, to chronicle my adventures. Here is a list of those things that will be tried in the next few months:
I will make cheese
I will make bread...these two arising from finishing Barbara Kingsolver's book "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, A Year of Food Life"...as I live in an apartment with no place to own a goat, grow my own veg or reap the bounties of my harvest, I will try to make goat cheese and bread, a small step into the wider world of self-sufficiency.
I will paint...paintings, not walls. I will pick up where I left off so many years ago and begin to paint again.
I will write (oh how many of us in our autumnal years have decided to be writers...you can spit and hit one of us). I have so may ideas and some of them are quite good, if I do say so. I have been writing my whole life, so this is just making it a habit instead of something I squeeze in when possible.
I will go to Paris...soon, and this is a fact. The very second thing I did, after leaving my job, was to ask my french friend if I could stay with her in Paris, and she said yes. So off I will go to write in Paris for a couple of weeks. Ha...eat that old job!!
And of course I will finish my masters thesis, and go for that teaching certificate. Then...who knows?
Is this it? I don't think so.  Wait and see.