Sarah and Men: A Story in Two Parts (with Glossary)

Part I.

At one point last year, Reija turned to me and said, "Sarah, I've been trying to picture all of the men that I know you think are attractive to see if I can find what they have in common."

"Oh?" I said.

"Yes," she said. "And the only thing I've come up with is that none of them have great hair."

Note: My apologies to those of you male readers who might think I find you attractive.

Part II.

This last Sunday was my second Sunday in my new ward. Because I've been busy with my move-in-to-do list--namely, painting my room and setting up my bed so I can stop croaching on Jeanette and Erika and the couch, and sleep in my own bed, which I finally did last night (wahoo!)--I haven't been thinking much about the fact that a new city will also mean new boys to meet. And date. If all goes well. But the thought started coming to me this Sunday as we were walking into church, so as the services started, I looked around to check out the situation. A quick survey of the men in my ward and the thought, These boys look nice, but there aren't any yet that I feel like really could be, you know, for me. At first look. I figured I'd have to wait to get to know people or know more people or let life unfold or whatever, but that's what I was thinking. Until the second speaker.

He stood up. He started telling his leaving-Provo-and-coming-to-DC story in this way that was funny and charming and tender. He spoke heartfully of his testimony of repentance and of the Savior. He was bald. And I thought, "Oh good, there's at least one guy in this ward who looks like he could be my style."

He was the high council speaker.

The end.

Note: To my credit, he was youngish (in his early thirties? nothing the Stanford Second Ward hasn't seen), and he isn't married. He wasn't wearing a ring, he didn't mention a spouse or children, and then we checked him out on the stake website afterwards. No woman with the same last name at his address. In fact, he lives near me in a townhouse with some single guys. But still. STILL. Still.

But who's surprised?

A Glossary for the Mormoncentric Terms Used Above:

• Ward: An LDS church congregation.
• Stanford Second Ward: One congregation of young single adults between the ages of 26 and (heh hem) 35 (or older) in northern California. I was a member of this ward for about a year and a half.
• High Council: A group of men selected from a number of wards in a given geographic area (we call it a "stake"), who are chosen for their spiritual maturity (ish). They are typically middle-aged or older. And are almost always married; though, it turns out, they don't have to be.
• High Council Speaker: One Sunday a month, each ward in a stake is visited by a high councilman from (often one from another ward in that same stake) who gives one of the talks during services. High councilmen, being middle-aged or older, are known for being long-winded and dry. Not the kind of speakers that usually prompt crushes by girls in the visited congregations.
• Reija: Pronounced RAY-uh. A newly former roommate of mine, with whom I lived for two years at Melville, an Edenic sort of mansion-cottage in the un-self-sustainably affluent and idyllic town of Palo Alto. She is seerlike and observant. Like an eagle prophet.

I just saw Charlotte Gray with Billy Crudup and thought he was ridiculously good-looking. And he has great hair. Ish. Right?

(He's the one on the right. The one who doesn't look like a high councilman.)

We do!

I attended a wedding in Pennsylvania on Saturday afternoon. That's one of the glories of the East coast. State-trotting is like hop-skotch. It's child's play.

It was the wedding for a friend from law school, who was one of our most discontented law students during our first year. And maybe all the way through. But she ended up marrying the law association president, who was essentially the posterboy for law school and the law school life. As Karren would say, life unfolds.

But they were a beautiful couple--beautiful--and they were married on the front steps of her family's home. They had a Quaker ceremony, which meant that there was no officiator, just my friend's grandma reading them questions and waiting for them to reply, simultaneously, "We do." I don't remember the questions, exactly, but they were wedding-like and lovely.

Do you promise to love each other, cherish each other, value each other's independence and spirit, while working still to become one and one family?

We do.

Do you promise to be rich and poor and still in love?

We do.

Do you?

We do.

And then, at one point, the grandma asked us, the audience, a question:

Do you, friends and family, promise to welcome this new couple into your lives, to support them in their marriage and help them to become parts of your communities and become the strong and loving family that they desire to be?

And, from our white folding chairs under a large white lawn tent, the eighty of us had to/got to answer:

We do!

We do. Which of course made me wonder--do we? Will we? Do I? Can I? Will I? How?

I'm still thinking that through. But it was lovely. And it was followed (in an even larger white lawn tent) by barbecue chicken and pasta salad and cupcakes and the best veggie burgers I've ever had and drinking (but not for me), and I was back in Virginia before midnight.

Welcome to the East coast. We love marriage here. We do.

When the L Burns Out, Whose Gym Is It Then?

At one point in college I thought I was earning $7.00/hour because I had been earning $6.50, and they gave me a ten-cent raise.

I was 19 years old.

It took me a few weeks to figure it out.

Tonight, I joined the Gold's Gym near our house. I went in, bought a yearly contract from a woman named Victoria Valeur (rad, RAD name) (but no, she was not wearing a velour suit), worked out, and walked home, all between 8 and 9 pm. As I told V.V., I needed to get home in time for the season premiere of The Office. She was sympathetic. And sufficiently speedy.

My point is this: As I was running at minute 19:30, I thought, "You have thirty seconds left until you can change the speed," and then I thought, "No! Don't get caught in that trap! You really have seventy!" And then I remembered college.

Oh, time. How it teases.


(I actually saw a Gold's Gym in Austin with the L burned out. It was glowing there in the dark, a floating, illuminating reminder that heaven cares about our corporeal existence. And wants us to take action.)

A Coffee Cake So Immense

I saw a coffee cake today that was so big that it made me think of a poem KT recently posted on her blog. It is a poem about autumn. It begins with this line: "Lord: it is time. The summer was immense."

I quoted it to one of my co-workers, another new associate with whom I was going to lunch. She and three others and I found ourselves unusually without scheduled lunches (it's typical for new attorneys at my firm to lunch with more senior attorneys for most of the days during the first few weeks of work), so we headed to the Corner Bakery. We paid for ourselves. I'm not sure what she thought of my comparing summer to a coffee cake or quoting Rainer Maria Rilke at a casual Tuesday lunch, but it was a nice moment. A nice moment of collegiality and humanness and food we were buying ourselves (like real working adults) in the midst of two days of sitting, drinking free herbal tea, eating free fruit, and listening to people say, over and over again, in many and different ways, "Welcome to firm life." For example: "Here's a gift umbrella."

Tomorrow I start actually working with my assigned practice group, which works solely on pro bono cases (meaning, cases we do for free, for the good of thing). I'll spend three or four months with them, until I rotate into another group, another practice area, another kind of law with other co-workers. Maybe by then the mean blisters I got yesterday will have healed.

But my shoes. They were oh-so-pretty. Once the blisters die down, I do plan on wearing them again. Half-size too small and all. Patent leather stretches, yeah?

My next goal is to have a job where I don't spend the second day of work thinking mostly about my feet and whether or not anyone would notice if, underneath my computer-training console, I wore the flip-flops I'd smuggled in my bag.

Autumn Day by Rainer Maria Rilke

Lord: it is time. The summer was immense.
Lay your shadow on the sundials
and let loose the wind in the fields.

Bid the last fruits to be full;
give them another two more southerly days,
press them to ripeness, and chase
the last sweetness into the heavy wine.

Whoever has no house now will not build one anymore.
Whoever is alone now will remain so for a long time,
will stay up, read, write long letters,
and wander the avenues, up and down,
restlessly, while the leaves are blowing.

(Translated by Galway Kinnell and Hannah Liebmann, “The Essential Rilke” (Ecco))

Mary Tyler Moore

I've started watching the Mary Tyler Moore Show on hulu.com. I'm about eight episodes in to season one, and already I'm charmed. Wikipedia calls it one of the best sitcoms of all time. I can see that. It's about Mary Richards, a girl who'd been putting her boyfriend through medical school, until she realized he was graduating but still wasn't going to marry her. So she took off for a new life--and got a new job as, she was boggled, an associate producer of a news show--in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Her new day had dawned.

The opening credits are this lovely montage. Pictures of Mary Richards/Tyler Moore driving off in her car, alone, overlaid by images of her last days at work, the party that bid her goodbye, packing her things up. And she gets to Minneapolis and she wanders the streets in her fur-lined hooded overcoat and in the end, she's surrounded by the people of her new city, who walk by busily, and she revels in it all and throws her mod beret triumphantly into the sky. Mary Tyler Moore. You're going to make it after all.

I start work tomorrow. I'm a new girl in a new city, with a job title that sounds incomprehensibly adult to me. I'll go to work tomorrow, put on my new clothes (no beret), and hope that when I'm pushed on the metro and passed by others busily walking by I'll feel triumphant and not just infinitesmally alone.

Resolution #1: Be like Mary Tyler Moore. Make it after all.

How will you make it on your own?

Who can take a nothing day, and suddenly make it all seem
worthwhile?

Well it’s you girl, and you should know it

With each glance and every little movement you show it

Love is all around, no need to waste it

You can have a town, why don’t you take it

You’re gonna make it after all

How will you make it on your own?

This world is awfully big, girl this time you’re all alone

But it’s time you started living

It’s time you let someone else do some giving

Love is all around, no need to waste it

You can have a town, why don’t you take it

You might just make it after all.

For the Halibut

If I were to say that I had just come back from Alaska, you might ask something well-meaning like this: What was your favorite part? (As did both my parents and possibly one or more of my younger siblings.)

Alas, it's a question that stumps me. But I'm trying not to run from challenge, so, as a stop-gap measure, I will nominate three.

Three Possible Favorite Parts of My Trip to Alaska

• the (almost) sheer beauty of the place
• Whittier, AK
  
• Christy Y., a long-lost friend I met up with, who was spending her summer driving tour buses around Alaska.
  

The Beauty
It was rainy and gray about half the time I was in Alaska. The clouds were serious, sometimes masking entire mountain ranges (if I had a dollar for every time someone said, "If the clouds weren't out, right there would be Mt. McKinley!", I'd be well on my way to being able to afford some Sarah Palin glasses), but still, still--the hills were green and the rivers were white and I saw the northern lights. Just one night, in Fairbanks. We had to walk out of the light of our hotel parking lot and stand in the shadows of behind a hulking building. But there they were in the sky. A faint green swath through the low sky, undulating on the south end like a slow, frayed ribbon. And the sun came out for my final few days there. Half the trees were yellow, and valleys opened up on both sides of us as we deadheaded (drove) the coach bus home from Fairbanks. I wanted to build a house on the side of the highway and never never leave.


If I half-closed my eyes and ignored the industrial lots, the functional and unpretty buildings, and all the machinery, it was a seriously beautiful place.

Whittier
Alaska's state motto is "North to the Future."

During the forties, the Japanese claimed two small islands off the coast of Alaska, and, according to my reliable tour bus driver friend Christy, the American government freaked out. From Alaska, Seattle is only a hop away. (It is three hours from Seattle to Anchorage on a commercial plane today.) So the U.S. government looked to strengthen their Alaskan presence. One place they chose was Whittier because, apparently, Whittier is almost always covered by clouds, making it virtually impossible to see by air. The only way into Whittier (besides navigating through the waterways) was by railroad, twelve miles through a mountain. In Whittier, the government built one giant building, in which everyone did everything. This one building housed all the housing, the doctor's, the grocery store, a church, a movie theatre, everything, apparently. Everyone spent almost every day inside of it, because, it being Alaska, the weather was usually bad.

Today, the one main building still stands, but it is hollowed out, moldy, defunct, and vandalized. Now people live in two buildings: a row of apartments one street away from the water and one high-rise backed up against the base of a mountain. Cars can drive through the railroad tunnel into Whittier, but the tunnel's only wide enough for one car at a time. So the tunnel alternates. In to Whittier, from 4:30 pm to 4:45 pm. Out from Whittier, from 5:00 pm to 5:15 pm. In to Whittier, from 5:30 to 5:45. You see.

Christy and I decided to drive to Whittier on our last day. We hung out at a glacier visitors center until it was 4:22, then we drove to the tunnel. We paid our $12, waited for the green light, and in to Whittier we went. 25 mph, 12 miles, through a small, dark tunnel. And when we emerged, we were in Whittier, which, no one told us, was absolutely beautiful. The small town of Whittier is ringed by high green mountains, with waterfall cascades and blue and brown glaciers. It was covered by clouds today (as usual), but with no rain. A white cap of clouds, a blue water inlet, and a ring of green mountains and glaciers and waterfalls. We got lost trying to get to the old and the new main buildings (who knew there would/could be a dead end in Whittier?), but saw the whole thing (including the excessively creepy old building) in time to make it out during the next out-from-Whittier tunnel window.

(I didn't take this picture of Whittier. Like most publicly available pictures of Alaska, this one is unrepresentatively sunny. But you can see the beauty of it--and the buildings. The old creepy moldy one is the big white one on the left. The new apartment/multipurpose building is the high-rise on the right. Yes, it does have a waterfall right behind it. So awesome.)

If anyone had spent any money making the buildings in Whittier be charming and not just present, it would be a hideaway destination of our dreams. Oh, the forties. If only they hadn't been distracted by fighting that war.

Christy Lu
I met Christy in the year 2000, during my first (and only) summer home from college. She had been roommates with two of my first-cousins in Cedar City during 1999-2000. When a neighbor in New York wanted a summer nanny, we thought of my cousin Becky, who didn't want the job. But she thought of her roommate Christy, who did want the job. So Christy came to Long Island and nannied, and I came home to Long Island and worked as the drivers' ed department secretary, and when we both weren't at work, we were together. It was a great summer. But we lost touch after one or two post-summer emails, until August, when I emailed her and asked her if I could come stay with her for a week in Alaska. You know how I am.

I found Christy again because I'd run into my cousin at a family reunion. I told her how I was thinking about Alaska (state #46!), and she told me how she'd just seen Christy and how Christy was in Alaska this summer, driving a bus. I was on that bandwagon fast.

So Christy's company let me come along with her for her final tour of the year. I got to watch her charm her passengers, joke with them, delight them. "You had the halibut?" she asked one passenger, after we'd had dinner on a train. "Oh, yes," said the middle-aged, white female passenger. Christy smiled, all dimples and cheeks and little white teeth. "Now you can say you came to Alaska for the halibut."

I got to watch her maneuver the 45-foot coach, checking her mirrors, turning the steering wheel slowly, backing up straight into a 10-foot wide space with her eight-foot wide bus.

And I got to hear her thoughts, watch her movies, share her food, and remember how good it is to be with good women, who are confident in God and positive about life and willing to watch four hours of Jane Eyre before bedtime. What a good time. What a blessing. What a mercy.

Now, South to the Future
Christy is trying to decide what next to do with her life and with her talents and schooling. She knows she will tour Europe this fall and then visit many of her nine siblings. She might even come and stay with me for a month or so. But what then? She's not sure. Talking with her about what is next for her made me think about what is next for me. I'm done with college. I'm done with grad school, with law school, and with any sort of student living, probably. I'm done for now, for the time being, with California. And though my heart remains loyal, I've already moved out of Melville. I am, as I write, on a coach bus to DC, where a key waits for me under a flower pot, where my car waits for me in a driveway, and where I will wait for my new roommates to come home.

I loved Alaska, and I am glad that I went. And I am now especially glad to come home to a future I've been waiting for.

"You've Got to See It Before It Melts," Said Mrs. Klein. (Mrs. Klein Is My Parents' Next-Door Neighbor.)

Tomorrow I go to Alaska.

!

I have a goal to go to all fifty states before I'm thirty. Alaska will be state #46 (following which I'll have two years to hit four states before my birthday in December 2010: North Dakota, Arkansas, Tennessee, and Kentucky).

I'll be honest: I actually never thought I'd go to Alaska in my lifetime. Turns out, all you need to travel are time and money. I guess I grew up thinking that there would be more barriers to exotic locales than those. Checkpoints, papers, purposes, questionnaires, savvy, know-how.* A minimum threshold of glamor or good will, at least.

Nope. Alaska. If Sarah O. can do it, you can too.

I'll be back in a week, and I will tell you how it goes. And if I get a glimpse of the Palin brood.

Oh man. I'm so excited.






Woop woop!





P.S. If you have some extra time and are wanting some more media to consume, I'd like to recommend the Mary Tyler Moore Show. I've been watching it on hulu.com. I started with season one, episode one (to do it right), and I've got to say--the show deserved its fame. It's still charming. And she's still beautiful, fake eyelashes and all.

*Okay, I guess technically when traveling abroad there are checkpoints and papers. But I'm a low-hassle kind of girl, I'm realizing. Which deserves its own post. For now, I want to say this: checkpoints and papers are much less hassle than I expected. Maybe because, in my experience thus far, both checkpoints and papers were, at core, just issues of money and time. And, as a new law school graduate, I've got the latter and no meaningful way of appropriately valuing the former. I'm good to go.

Mix Tape?

Or mixed tape?

I'll take comments.

A Short Story (with Plot Points) About My Sister (and a Friend) on Her (Their) Birthday(s)

Today is Beka's thirteenth birthday. She is a teenager.

This morning I made and hung nonsensical and plentiful birthday signage around the house (continuing/importing a long-time roommate tradition because, as Michelle once said, "There's something about signage that's so effective").


In addition to this real world posting, I wanted to do an online posting and bedecor my blog with a short story to the world about the arrival of Bekarek, my youngest sibling and newly teenaged sister.

* * * * *

Thirteen years ago on a day right around today...

[insert graphic of flashback time waves--dddddddd, dddddddd, ddddddd]

Exposition
My good friend Jen was prepping for her 14th birthday, which was to be on September 9, 1995. She was really excited that my mom was due somewhere near her birthday, and she often (often) tried to convince me to deliver her a baby sibling with which to share her birthday. I tried to explain how little control I had over the situation--so few inducements at my disposal--but she was still hopeful I could work it out. I thought, what are the chances? My life is never that cute.

Rising Action
And then, la, on September 9, 1995, my sister was born. I couldn't believe it. She was beautiful. And she was the things we'd hoped she would be--healthy, human, and compliant:

• she was born two years after our youngest, making us all two or four years apart--> Nate, two years, Dan, two years, Anika, two years, Sarah, two years, Joseph, two years, Dad's dissertation, two years, Jacob, two years, Peter, four years, Rachel, two years, now Bek, AND
  
• she was a girl, keeping with our grouped gender pattern--> boy boy girl girl boy boy boy girl girl. Now Rachel would have a partner, too. (The big boys: Nate & Dan; the big girls: Anika & Sarah; the little boys: Joseph, Jacob, and Peter; and now the litte girls: Rachel & Rebekah.)
  

But, she wasn't blonde. She was darker (well, just not blonde, really), which, at the time, we figured disrupted our oft-remarked upon alternating complexion scheme--> vanilla chocolate vanilla chocolate vanilla four years vanilla chocolate four years chocolate, now another chocolate.* We were happy to have her anyway.

AND SHE HAD COME ON JEN'S BIRTHDAY! What more does a 14-year-old girl want than to surprise her friends with really good birthday presents? Very little.

Conflict
So, I decided not to tell Jen or any of my other friends until Jen's birthday party, just a few days after the 9th.

For Jen's 14th, we went to a nice Japanese restaurant. I learned how to use chop sticks and ate food cooked at my table. The beef was so good, and we were laughing so hard, and it was a great, great time. Then came the moment when Jen would open the gifts. I'd covered a box in magazine cut-outs and Modge Podge (a shellaq substance totally in vogue in the mid-nineties), and inside the box, I had placed a piece of paper.

Climax
Jen: I love this box, Sarah! It's mint! [Or whatever we were saying then.]
Sarah: Open it, Jen! Open it! [As fourteen-year-olds, we were always talking with exclamation points, I'm sure.]
Jen: Okay! Here I go!

She opens the box. She sees the paper, which says

Born September 9, 1995
Baby Girl Olson [she wasn't yet named]
some lbs, some ozs [I don't remember those details, alas]
Chocolate
Healthy

Jen reads it silently. Her face! Her face! I can see it! She's excited, too! She exclaims!

Jen: Yippee!

Then, her face falls. She is puzzled.

Jen: (slowly) You named her Chocolate Healthy?

Denouement
Oh man. I laughed so hard I think I fell off my Japanese bar stool.

Resolution
No, no, we didn't.

* * * * *

To Jen and especially to Beka: I love you both. Happy, happy birthday to the two of you, on this good September day.

*Not too long later, we realized Beka was a breed all her own. Blue eyes and light brown hair. Caramel.

What We Lose, What We Hope to Find Again

She told me what she misses most right now is the hugging. "No one hugs me here," she said. "I'm so lonely, and no one hugs me." She listed her new friends: "My roommate doesn't hug me. My friend doesn't hug me. My neighbor doesn't hug me. My classmates don't hug me. And I don't have visiting teachers, so they don't hug me."

"Do you hug them?" I asked, knowing, of course, that it was an unfair question. Unfair because I didn't really ask it to know the answer--if she was hugging in her new life, she would already have said so--and because I had wanted to imply that the solution was within her grasp. (Her grasp. That's funny.) My know-it-all/colonizing tendencies. I'm working on them.

"Well," she said, "I already instigate enough touching that I'm trying to be sensitive about it. Sometimes I give side hugs, and sometimes I put my arm around this boy I know. I don't want--I don't want him to get the wrong idea."

She and I were talking on the phone. It was late where we were, in the same time zone, in the same state, but not within six driving hours of each other. I wished my arms were longer.

I was okay with her living apart from me, I thought. We'd been roommates before we both moved. "I'm okay with you living apart from me," I said. "But only when I think that the people around you are treating you well."

"Oh, they are, they are!" she said quickly, then stopped. We were both quiet.

"Maybe I should start hugging them," she said. "Or scratching their backs in church, like I want to. Or playing with their hair when I come into a room and they are sitting down." She laughed. "What would I say to them, when they asked what I was doing?" She laughed again. I said, "You'd say--the human body needs to be touched seven times a day to be healthy." Touched positively, I thought. I didn't say it out loud. I figure she'd understand the distinction. "Launch your loving on them," I said. "I'm for."

Seven times a day. Here, where I am, in this few-week period when I'm between lives--between California and DC, just living in NY with my family--the touching for me is fine. My sisters and I are close, and we voluntarily squeeze onto couches, onto the benches around the kitchen table, onto the chairs at church. I get hugged well at church, too, by Jane B. and Marissa and a variety of other Relief Society sisters when I see them. They hug me often and tightly. In my home branch, I feel like a rock star.

But I'll soon be on my own, too. Making a new life in DC. I'll need to find new grocery stores, new Blockbusters, new places to buy sweet potato fries. I'll spend the first weeks, months, picking up new habits, routines, defaults. I'll refit my old things into new spaces: my mugs in new cabinets, my clothes in new closets, my oh-so-familiar face looking back at me from mirrors that shine and crack in ways that are new to me. And I'll have to find people to hug. To hug and be hugged by.

I've lived in DC twice before, and I already love my roommates there. So I will, I'm sure, have a leg up. An arm, I guess, if you will. But this moving and loving and need for touch.

What else am I going to find I've lost in the transition?

Wrinkles in Time

I have a wrinkle. My first one. It's a small vertical line in my skin, not quite halfway between my eyebrows. It doesn't go away when I stop smiling. That's how I know it's a wrinkle.


I'm not so much concerned that I have one. I'm one of those who's excited about finding gray hairs, admittedly maybe at least as much from principle as from a sense of aesthetics. (Though among many others, a young John McCain reminded me again that gray can be good--who knew he was so good looking back in the day?) But I am worried about how I got it.

I got it from furrowing my brow.


Brow furrowing! Alas. I didn't realize I'd spent so much time being grim.

I told this to a friend recently--"I have a wrinkle, and it's from furrowing my brow"--and the friend said, "I always thought it was a prayer line."

Prayer. That's a nice thing to think about me. But always, as in, before this conversation?*

I just got back from a week-long visit to Texas, and there my best friend Laura had this idea: If I want laugh lines (and I do--they're the romanticized result of a life of buoyancy, good health, and cheer), then I should turn lemons into lemonade. I should start laughing with my wrinkle.


Genius. Reminds me of my brother Jacob's newest favorite quote: "There go my people. I must find out where they are going so I can lead them." (Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin)

As a child the "it will stay that way" threat about ugly face-pulling seemed silly to me. Its illogicality was so obvious as to be nonsensical. The face--it's so plastic, so malleable. Wide mouth, rabbit nose, bubble cheeks, evil eyebrow, pursed lips. Turns out, I was wrong and folk wisdom is finally having its day. Who knew?

What I'm saying is this: The furrowing. Watch out for the furrowing.

*

A Gchat Lesson on Patience and Action

I wrote like three drafts of this blog post with all kinds of high-falutin' and mock epic ramp ups, but really I just want to say this: a friend of mine said a seriously beautiful and seemingly true thing today about how on earth we reconcile the need for patience and the need for action.* I feel like its truths will unfold.

Here:

5:10 PM David: patience is the essence of fine mexican food, sarah o [...]

that's what my favorite mexican restaurant in san diego has painted in large print on the wall

so i've decided to apply it to other aspects of my life

me: Wow.

5:12 PM Wow was too big a word for that moment, maybe.

Nevertheless, I am impressed.

Though how do you balance patience with taking control?

David: here's how i see it

me: say

5:13 PM David: i walk up to the register

and i spell out my order

tell them what i want

that's taking control

then i wait as they prepare it

knowing that it will be delicious

that's patience

I know. Seriously. A metaphor that is genius, elegant, and tasty.

Muchas muchas gracias, David Shoe.


*Or in scriptural words:

James 1:4: But let patience have her perfect work, that ye may be perfect and entire, wanting nothing.

versus something like

D&C 58:29: But he that doeth not anything until he is commanded, and receiveth a commandment with doubtful heart, and keepeth it with slothfulness, the same is damned.

With Peter* Gone

We decided to drown our sorrows in fruit.

Missing Peter (and missing California), I went to Trader Joe's before dinner and bought

• the six-pound container of blueberries
• three containers of white nectarines (my favorite summer fruit, hands down)
• one watermelon
• one crenshaw (like a not-quite-ripe canteloupe)**
• six pluots
• a honeydew melon
  
• a pineapple.***

At Trader Joe's, the checker had said, "How are you today?" He seemed to mean it, so I told him: "I'm good--but sad." And I told him how my brother left today on a two-year mission to Japan for my church (which, of course, required explanation) and how my family sent me to the store to buy comfort food. He said, "But you are proud of him, yes?" "Yes," I said. "Absolutely. Very proud."

But sad, too. The checker packed my groceries, and I considered the sadness. Peter's leaving this morning was tender. Beka buried her face in Peter's suit and cried as she hugged him goodbye. Rachel watched the huggings wet-eyed and solemn-faced. Jacob hugged Peter firmly, like a man-brother, and then said (with unexpected brightness), "Have fun." When Dad and Peter drove away, Mom and Rachel ran after the car. They stood on the sidewalk crying, long after the car had gone. When they finally came in, they told us that a neighbor had seen them out there and had come out to ask them if everything was all right.

Tonight Dad reported that Peter had cried all the way to the airport.

Grief seems too heavy a word for moments like these. Mourning, too. But they are the words that come to mind. I am grieving for Peter, and I am grieving for Palo Alto. I am mourning the loss of Melville and my law school days and the salads I loved and bought and got with the ridiculously good beef at Pluto's. Mourning that Peter will not raise his arched eyebrows at me across the table at breakfast tomorrow.

But Peter is not dead; he's in Utah. And Palo Alto and Pluto's are not gone. They are only gone from me. For now. And "Melville" may be gone, but the three women I loved are not (they exist, they assure me, though I'm having trouble visualizing their lives with others and apart from mine).

I both worry and have faith that I will not so acutely pine for days gone by forever. I know I will feel happier about Peter's whereabouts, and soon. (After nine years of my own away-from-home living, including one year of his own college life, I am used to having him gone, am I not?) My life will soon (too soon) fill up with the concerns and the chatting of new roommates, ward members, friends, visiting teachees. I am callous/faithful/pragmatic enough to move on. But what should I do in the meantime, in this interstitial zone? I don't even have a good name for it. The Empty Room. The Time Between. The Crossroads of Some-of-the-People-I-Love-Best-Have-Gone and There-Has-Not-Yet-Been-Enough-Living-to-Muddy-My-Memory-and-Mask-the-Leavings. Maybe that's the damnablest part of all. I can't even name the place I'm at and the feelings I have. At least, not succinctly. The sadness cat has got my (articulate) tongue.

When I left Trader Joe's, I left with four paper bags and one plastic one. As I pushed the cart away, the checker said, "I hope you have enough food." He said it half tenderly, half teasingly.

No more Melville and two years with no Peter?

No. The answer I'm going with is no.


*My use of "Peter" here is multivalent, of course. It's both literal and symbolic. Peter represents Peter himself, a seriously good 6' fellow of the brotherly persuasion, but also he represents the things I recently have moved from and/or lost. It has been a time of emotional and compounded leavings. Which is, I have to say, both exciting and totally sucky.

**Only these first four fruits were served at dinner. I'm sure we'll need fruit tomorrow. (Also, among other things I believe these days, I'm newly thinking that to be fully appreciated, honeydew melon should be served as a lone fruit. Preferably as the side of something hot and juicy and savory, like sausage. Or quiche. Consider.)

***(I also bought Trader Joe's marshmallows, which were square (because Trader Joe's has to be different) and which we roasted on forks and fondue skewers over our electric stove to make smores after dinner. We stood around the kitchen, trying to gracefully eat the drippy, sticky marshmallows we sandwiched with dark chocolate bars and pistachio-white chocolate chip cookies, and trying not to notice that Peter wasn't there.)

Elder Peter Boshard

It seems almost unnecessary that my brother Peter was set apart today as a missionary.

He's going to be serving a full-time mission for two years in Tokyo, Japan, so, yes, in our church, this meant that he needed to be "set apart" (which is what we call the rite when he is given the official responsibility of being a missionary and blessed by the priesthood with the gifts he will need). And yes, being a set apart full-time missionary means that he will not be around, that he will not be on facebook, that he cannot read for government or study math or hug girls, that he will not come home for Christmas or leave me short voicemail messages about how he loves me and about what songs he's been singing non-stop of late. So yes, after today, having been set apart, his life will be different.

But I'm trying to imagine meaningfully, how.

Full-time missionary work seems to me to be about (1) learning to live in a fully consecrated, single-eyed, disciplined, and devoted way, and (2) blessing others through, among other things, spreading the gospel of Jesus Christ.

But, as a sister, I have to say, these are ways of being Peter is already practicing. He is, already, a student in AP Godly Living.

For one. Peter has led a more fully focused life than anyone I know, really. And he has since--I don't know, he started getting grades, probably. Maybe before. I probably wasn't consistently paying attention. Peter's focusedness has led to a lot of (entirely deserved) public acclaim, acclaim he likes (but only very, very privately) but also that he (entirely rightfully) finds highly problematic and distracting from what he really wants, which, I think, is to love God, serve others, and live in accordance with God's will for him. So, even as Peter was working towards being valedictorian, concert master, homecoming king, the physical education student of the year, an Eagle Scout, a seminary graduate, then a freshman at Harvard, a weekly homeless shelter volunteer, and a home teacher--he was also focused, sacrificing sleep and energies and so so much time--on being a rockstar, loving, and tender brother. A faithful pray-er. A diligent scripture-studier. (Even right now, as I write, he is sitting with the family in the living room, talking Judaism and Jesus and our nephews, when he really needs to pack. Dad said, "Peter needs to pack." And Peter said, characteristically, "This is more important. I can sleep on the plane.")

And, two, Peter shares his love of God thoughtfully and routinely with the people around him. Today, seven hours after he was set apart as a missionary, he baptized and confirmed his long-time friend and mentor (and, formerly, his high school teacher), with whom he has been working to study the gospel (as well as AP Java, AP Spanish, AP calculus, etc., etc., among other things) for years. Daily (literally, daily) conversations about the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants, Preach My Gospel, God, Jesus, the Spirit. Even when Peter left New York and went to college, he was talking with Ross, praying for him, and trying with heart and Spirit to answer his many searching (and analytically minded) questions.

Missionary/hard work? Peter knows thee well.

But I do have faith--I do--that a full-time mission will teach Peter things. I'm sure he does, too. I have my own private hopes for him, of course (I'm a colonizer, we know, and spend too much time wanting other people to be what I want them to be). This includes a desire for him to come home more familiar with heart break. But too, interestingly, with a more natural joie de vivre (we, as a family--we're all working on this--we have a talent/tendency, we're realizing, for the intense and the sober). Maybe with the desire and ability to orate loudly, maybe like a Baptist preacher. (Okay, now I'm just making a wish list. How AWESOME would it be for Peter to come home from Tokyo able to preach like a Southern Baptist orator? AWESOME. And what are the chances? Almost nil. But a girl can dream.)

I was trying to explain earlier to Peter and Beka that, for me, as someone who has never served a full-time mission, missions are like this: "Ahhh? Twinkle twinkle twinkle! Ahhhh!"

I'm not sure what will happen during Peter's twinkling. And I feel safe predicting that it will not feel like twinkles to him. (Especially if heart break is on the horizon.) But I know that he and his companions and Japan will all be better for their years with each other.

As I am already better for my years with him.


Peter B., I love, love you so.

I ate so much zucchini bread tonight

I'm hurting right now.

(But my mom made it, and it was so, so good. Maybe I'm making up for living away from home and thereby missing any regular chance at periodic but sane consumption of her baked vegetable sweet bread goodies as they've emerged from her lovin' oven over the course of the last nine years?)

On This Day in 1988

Twenty years ago today, on August 21, 1988, my family arrived in NY.

We'd lived in Stanford for four years, while my father was getting his PhD. We'd never lived in the East. My parents met and married in Salt Lake, and in 1984, they and the five of us then-living kids picked up and moved to CA. For four years we traveled back and forth between Palo Alto and Salt Lake, summer after summer, Christmas after Christmas, but it wasn't until 1988, when Dad finished school and took a job, that we packed up and left the West. In the end, it was a choice between Stillwater, Oklahoma, and Long Island, NY. (Maybe, if they'd chosen differently, I'd be blogging now in an OSU sweatshirt.)

Grandma and Grandpa Hoggard drove ahead with our stuff in a Hertz-Penske truck. We followed behind in our old tan van, driving 55 mph without air conditioning through Nevada, Nebraska, New Jersey, to, finally, New York. We wound our way around the city, found Long Island and the LIE, and, on a summer afternoon, pulled into West Sayville. 118 Cherry Avenue, West Sayville, NY. It was a new day. For dinner, we had Chinese food from the Wai Wah Kitchen. When second grade started a few weeks later, I told people who asked that we were planning to be in NY for "three to five years, seven at the most."

Twenty years later, today, Mom hung signs in our livingroom. "Happy 20th NYersary!" For dinner, as usual, we had Chinese food (but not from Wai Wah's Kitchen--our move in 1998 put us an hour west of West Sayville). We looked at old pictures, wrote fortunes for our fortune cookies, and made predictions about what would be true for us in 2028. "We'll have forty grandkids," Dad said to Mom. "That will require some more marriages," she said, looking at Jacob, Peter, Rachel, Bekah, and me significantly. "One hopes," I said. (I'm for children being born in wedlock, is what I mean.)

But today--also today--is my own anniversary. Today I made my own trek from Stanford to NY. I've finished law school, I've taken the bar, and I've moved out of Melville. Yesterday I made a final victory loop around Palo Alto. I said goodbye to my favorite tree. I bought chocolate chips from JJ&F's. I ran up College Ave, stopped by the Klutz store, returned a key to the law school, picked up my transcript, picked up my diploma, and walked down Embarcadero through our leafy, lovely neighborhood to Melville. KT, MH, and I had dinner at Pluto's. I hugged KT at Melville, RM in my heart, and MH at SFO. MH said, "Today San Francisco. Tomorrow, the world." And I dragged my suitcases away.

I JetBlued it over night and ended up here this morning. It's August 21, and I'm back in New York.

So Much* Has Been Funny to Us Lately

Sarah: I eat my Ben & Jerry's with milk. Appreciate my superior ways.

Michelle: Remember when our home teacher today tried to explain why he thought I was more "innocent" than you?

Michelle: I would have expected this mint ice cream to be green.

So once, we tried to be serious. (Note Michelle's regression, particularly.)

It's a good life.

*I'd say everything has been funny (that's the blog title Michelle and I agreed upon), but KT has had some super tragic family news. We are praying for her cousin and his lovely wife. See the wife's charming (ridiculously charming) blog here: http://nieniedialogues.blogspot.com/.

Last night I was reading in D&C 78, and I came across this:

17 Verily, verily, I say unto you, ye are little children, and ye have not as yet understood how great blessings the Father hath in his own hands and prepared for you;

18 And ye cannot bear all things now; nevertheless, be of good cheer, for I will lead you along. The kingdom is yours and the blessings thereof are yours, and the riches of eternity are yours.

May heaven be with us all but especially, especially with the Nielsons.

Sunday: A Day to Lift, A Day to Level

Today, I made this beauty:


It was, of course, originally full of heart-shaped watermelon chunks and blueberries, until it met seven girls I know.

Let's see that again. (Here, modeled by the lovely Sara S., one of the seven girls I know.)


And also today, I made this mess--gratuitously:



I'd made a normal sort of mess prepping my dinner (a bowtie pasta salad with salmon and edamame in a dill-ginger-mayonnaise glaze), but during dinner we decided that I would maybe take KT's bookshelf with me on the move, which meant a quick unloading of said bookshelf in preparation for the packers and movers coming early, early tomorrow. But the kitchen was messy, and MH was in it (but on the phone), and I didn't want her to think--Oh, those roommates, always leaving messes they may or may not remember to clean up--which, of course, she could rightfully think--so I was faced with a choice: clean up the mess, so it will be taken care of, OR find some way to let her know that the mess was on my mind and that I would, in fact, return.

I chose the latter. Go big or go home. So I scattered the edamame pods all over the counter, and I took the lid off the PAM spray and the lid off the ginger container, and then I turned to the pasta.

It was while I was sprinkling the remaining dry farfalle on the counter by the sink that Michelle turned from her phone conversation and said: "Sarah, WHAT are you doing?" And I threw the empty pasta bag on the ground and ran.


As Michelle says and said again today: "Sarah, you're on one."

Melville at Night

Points of interest:

The second window from the top left is slightly ajar. It is now, as it often has been, propped open by a small blue plastic elephant that appeared in my room one day. The first two windows on the left are mine.

The next two windows are Michelle's room, where she is, right now, peeling and cutting five green apples and talking on the phone with a boy. When her phone rang, we both guessed who it would be. As she flipped open her phone and walked from the kitchen, I heard her say, "I'm taking my apples with me."

The bottom two left windows are the kitchen, where I was (until I went outside to get a blanket from my car and ended up taking this picture) cutting watermelon into heart-shaped chunks, with a cookie cutter that disintegrated just as the job was done. Michelle (in her room) and I (in the kitchen) are both preparing our contributions for a Tea and Testimony party two ward friends are having after church tomorrow. We'll drink herbal tea and eat mini-apple turnovers and heart-shaped watermelon chunks and talk about how the Lord has blessed our lives recently. It will be a good Sabbath.

The bottom two right windows are the windows to our eating room, what I began to call the Cupcake Room after Reija's birthday cupcake extravaganza. (You can see the curtains Reija bought and hung for our first Christmas at Melville.) Michelle and I ate beef stroganoff there two hours ago (at 9 pm)--she made it with mustard, as per the infallible instructions of Rachael Ray. Also, two hours ago, there I demonstrated for Michelle what my moving this Wednesday will be like. She was a large slice of nectarine (bruised, significantly); I was a small one. The beef pieces came (my movers) and packed my stuff off to the right side of the table (DC). My nectarine slice flew from the plate it shared with Michelle over the table and through the air, landing (just north of the beef pieces) on my plate, which happened to be covered with stroganoff gravy. "The gravy of my family's love," I explained to her.

She said the move is now, finally, clear to her.

Actually, no, she didn't. I totally just made that up. I think she's in denial.

And the dark windows (which you can't see) to the right of Michelle's windows are the glass that protects a sleeping KT from a Palo Alto night. Karren has been working hard for work and hard for Prop 8 (it's newly her assignment to rally ward members to support California's initiative to state constitutionalize marriage as between only a man and a woman), but she is, gratefully, asleep now in her wide, white bed.

Beneath palm leaves and moonlight, Melville wants Reija.

The Pantry

Melville has a pantry.


It's a cute pantry. A little three-foot-by-three-foot sort of job, in the corner between the fridge and the stove. Since Christmas, it has held not only our food stuffs--scattered on shelves and floor--but also a small Reija-made painting of a ship and a great white whale. In honor of Mr. Melville and the name he contributed to our street and, derivatively, to our house.


The success of the pantry is its slimness, its size of two-peopleness, its folding blue door that allows someone(s) to enclose themselves in the pantry. Shut off from the kitchen. Alone for a moment. With the cake mixes and the sugar and the syrup--and with each other. The makings of many sweet things.

The pantry. Place where Melvillain dreams have come true.

I have one week left (before I move) for it to happen for me. I'm ready, and I believe.