Amy Loves Books

This is the Jesus that I grew up with.

He was present at bonfires. His scripture was sung. I sang that "his words were found and I ate them- his words became to me a joy-and the desire of my heart-for I have been called by His name."

Jesus was there in the arms of the weavers and knitters and bakers and potters that passed me from lap to lap. He was there in the eyes of the girls that took the wildflowers I picked and placed them in their hair and wore them all afternoon. He was there in the voices that spoke of “smiling on your brother, getting together and trying to love one another”. He was in he sunset that gave backdrop to the baptisms. He was everywhere. He was everything. In our laughter. In our tears.

This was my favorite song, my favorite verse. My father would ask for song requests from the congregation and I would yell this request from my spot on the staircase.

And Jesus said:
“Come to the water, stand by my side.
I know you are thirsty.
You won’t be denied.
I felt every tear drop.
When in Darkness you cried.
And I strove to remind you - that for those tears I died.”

This is the Jesus I met when I was a child.

Beauty. Truth. Love.

Love.

Although I have had, to quote Christine Kane, “a couple of years there I got lost in", I was not in my lost years when I started getting tattoos. It was not an impulsive, alcohol fueled decision. It was not an attempt to rebell against being a minster's child. It was not about rebellion at all. I got my first tattoo because of Milan Kundera.

In one of Kundera's novels, he wrote about a woman who would stare at her naked reflection in a full length mirror and desperately search for some part of her reflected physical body that she felt she could connect to. She wanted to be able to look in the mirror, and recognize herself. Not “this is what I look like” recognition but “this is who I am” recognition. Kundera lamented the fact that we have no choice about the physical body our soul inhabits. He grieved the fact that, so often, the physical body we are trapped in feels so alien to the person we know that we are.

I read this, and I decided that I wanted a tattoo. I wanted to have something on my physical person that I could point to and say “yes, there I am”. The only problem (as has been my problem for most of my life) was that I was just a little too early. Tattoo parlors had not yet become acceptable, and there was one guy in town that supposedly had learned to give tattoos in jail with toothpaste and fountain pen ink or something equally frightening - but I was just not brave enough to seek him out.

After I met George, we decided to get tattoos together. George knew everybody, and I trusted George. When he said he knew of a guy that gave tattoos out a studio he set up in his garage apartment, and that this guy was legit - I figured that my time had come. I will admit to being a little apprehensive walking up a steep flight of homemade wooden stairs to this guy “The Midnight Iguana” guy’s makeshift studio. But it seemed clean. And he humored me when I insisted on seeing him unwrap the needle he used on me from a brand new plastic-sealed envelope.

I had decided to get a tattoo of an Irish wedding band - with the hands for friendship, the heart for love, and the crown for loyalty. While George was getting his tattoo, I flipped though the tattoo albums and came across a page devoted to

hobo signs

. On it, there was a drawing of a smiling cat with a caption underneath that said “a kind lady lives here”. I did not really know about hobo signs, but I knew that something about that smiling cat was calling me. I went ahead with my original tattoo, and tucked the smiling cat away in my heart.

Anyone who has a tattoo can understand what I mean when I say that having my first tattoo just made me want another one. The first tattoo went on my hip - in a place where I would never be obligated to show it. But I could not get that smiling cat out of my mind, that smiling cat with its caption: “A kind lady lives here”. I looked up hobo signs and found out that they were signs that homeless men (hobos) left for each other to warn them about the road that lay ahead. The smiling cat on a door post, fence, or tree meant that this was the home of a kindhearted woman - a woman who would offer a meal, or let you work for a few dollars, or give you an old coat. It was the kind of woman I want to be. In high school, I had a slightly unbalanced teacher who knitted a sweater out of her own hair and made us design our own tombstones and epitaphs. On mine, I wrote “Here lies Amy, she was kind.” Kindness has always been important to me. I can be unkind - but I want to learn to be kind. I want to be the sort of woman that would have hobos put a smiling cat on her gatepost.

A few years later, Michelle Shocked put out an album called “Kind-Hearted Woman” with the smiling cat on the cover. Her smiling cat, however, had the addition of a red heart on its belly. One look at it, and I knew that this was the picture I wanted - this smiling cat with a heart. By now I was married and a mother, but I went back to “The Midnight Iguana” (in his third location by now - a new expanded and very surgical looking parlor with three studios) and got my second tattoo, this time on my shoulder.

I want a third tattoo. I have wanted one for years. I want to get one on the small of my back. This will be my last tattoo (I think) because - realistically - I am running out of discreet places to put them. I am waiting, because I have not found the right symbol for this final tattoo. At one point, I wanted something that would remind me of The Sacred Romance, but I could never find the right symbol. Lately, I’ve been wanting a tree. It will have to be perfect, whatever it is. And then I will have three places that I can point to when I look in the mirror. Three places that remind me who I am, and who I want to be.

In honor of the request for more writing about the trials of growing up in the ministry.

This first time I saw a naked man - no wait - make that plural - naked men was during communion.

My father’s church was in a house less than a block away from the main gates of Florida State University. It was the only house on the street that was not owned by a sorority or fraternity. The fraternity across the street was a very bad fraternity. They were very bad boys. They had a habit of getting underage girls drunk and taking them on the roof, where the girls inevitably fell. This happened more than once. You would think, after the first time - they would keep the underage drunk girls off the roof. But no. Girls kept falling off the roof. They eventually got kicked off campus because of the whole “underage drunk falling girl” thing. This incident happened before that though. The roof incidents occurred when I was a college freshman; this happened earlier, when I was still in high school.

I was sitting in church one morning, and I was sitting up against a window that looked out on College Avenue. The curtains were drawn and everyone was quiet. My father gave the communion meditation and everyone was being very reverent and silent. I heard a huge commotion outside, yelling and horn honking - so I peeked behind me out between the curtains to see what was going on. There were about five frat boys standing in the back of a pick up truck, wearing nothing but neckties - driving up the street and honking and screaming. I had seen the back view of them, a whole truck of naked men. The first naked men I had ever seen. I was beside myself. What was the right thing to do? This was wrong. This was so, so wrong. There is no nudity during communion. Should I stop my father? Should I let all the reverently meditating Christians know about the TRUCK FULL OF NAKED MEN? I didn’t know if I should laugh or cry or call the police or what I should do.

Then, I heard the truck turn around and start driving back. Honking and yelling. Honking and yelling. I knew what this meant. This meant that if I looked - I would get the FRONT view. I had never seen the front view. It was very mysterious to me. Should I tell my dad? Should I look? I was a good girl. I just bowed my head and squinched my eyes shut tight and I thought of the verse about taking communion with an unclean heart and I wondered if seeing naked boy behinds made my heart unclean or not but I just decided to go ahead and take communion and pretend there were no drunk, naked frat boys right outside the window. I figured that it was better to stay quiet and not ruin the moment for everyone else.

Still, it was so, so hard to keep myself from screaming “We are taking communion and there are DRUNK, NAKED BOYS OUTSIDE!” I never told anyone about this. It was just so wrong. It was so unbelievably hilarious. That's how it struck me - as being so, so, funny. Nobody needed to know. I however, always carry with me this paradox - that while we took communion, there were boys wearing nothing but neckties right outside the freaking window. And nobody saw them but me.

I grew up in Florida, swam in lakes stained the color of tea from cypress. There were alligators in the lakes - you could hear them croak. I swam in sinkholes too. Sinkholes with the bodies of the lost somewhere under the water. The forgotten bones of those that had been brave or stupid or drunk and had dared to go diving. You were never supposed to dive in a sinkhole.

I knew that if an alligator came at me I was supposed to run and climb on top of a picnic table. I knew to shake my shoes before I put them on. I knew how to catch lizards, how to stroke their stomachs and make them unable to move as they laid in the palm of your hand. I knew that if they could, they would escape your grasp and their tail would break off and twitch around in your palm like a phantom - like it was looking to be reattached. This was not supposed to hurt the lizards, they grew new tails eventually. It always seemed to me though, that it must hurt the tail.

I knew that the frogs came out in the rain . We used to go on frog rides, my brother and I, in the back seat of our big blue wood paneled station wagon. We sat, holding brown paper bags and my dad would drive slowly in the rain. Frogs would jump across the street and my mother would get out and grab them and put them in our bags. We would sit there, in our pajamas, with bags of frogs jumping in our laps.

I knew how hot the vinyl seat of the car got when it was sitting in the sun. Coming home from church, the vinyl would burn the backs of my legs and my father would give me his Bible to sit on . I knew to keep Noxema in the fridge and take aspirin for sunburn. I knew that it would rain for fifteen minutes every day at 4:00 .

I knew all this, and I hated it.

What I wanted, more than anything, was snow.

I dreamed of snow. I fantasized about snow. I wanted to have snowball fights, make snow angels, build snowmen. I was sick to death of the heat, the constant buzz of insects. Sick to death of sweat and bare feet. I wanted a world hushed and silent and sacred and covered with snow.

When I got to be in high school, I would go through L.L. Bean catalogues with a longing that was almost physically painful. How I wanted flannel, and sleds. I was convinced that I would marry a poet and we would live in New England in a little cabin with lots of maple syrup and red plaid flannel. There would be stacks of firewood and down jackets and slippers lined in lambs wool. There are references to this dream in my yearbook. There is one unimaginably cruel reference to this dream from the only poet that I ever dated. The boy who made me reconsider dating poets, with their ability to give such beauty and such pain. Their tendency to show up at your window the night before the SAT with a half drunk bottle of vodka and the ability to so completely break your heart because you could not fix anything.

I did, however, date a non-poet just because he was from Maine. Just because I though he might come with an invitation to Thanksgiving in Maine.

The first time I saw snow, I was sixteen years old. My parents were leading a marriage conference at a fancy hotel in Chicago. We arrived on the tail end of a massive blizzard. There, I found snow that was three feet deep. There were icicles two feet long. I was in heaven.

I spent every moment I could outside. I wallowed in the snow. It was incredible. I picked icicles off of buildings. I swam in the snow. I would come inside and sit in the sauna to thaw myself out, and then I would rush headlong back into the snow.

All the people in the hotel, all the Chicago natives who were so numb and desensitized to the beauty of the snow, looked on with amusement at this teenage girl playing in the snow. I did not even care. It was wonderful. I had longed for this moment my whole life. I spent three long days in reverent, joyful, awe over what I had found.

I still live in the south. I still long for snow. It snows in Georgia once every few years. It snowed last night. Enough to cover small patches of grass with ice. Enough to close the schools. Not, however, enough to swim in. Not enough for me.

The Song Loving Hands by the amazing Christine Kane

Everyday you wake up
And everyday a day goes by
You're never gonna catch up
'Cause there's never enough time
And there's no one in your love life
There's nothing on the news that's nice
But something keeps you going
Something's keeping you alive
It's a penny on the sidewalk
It's a feather on the subway train
It's sleeping to the rhythm
Of the Sunday morning rain

Chorus:  It's those magic little moments
You're trying hard to understand
Wondering if it's luck or loving hands

It's blowing off your homework
And putting all the books away
To sit beside the window
And watch the snow accumulate
It's mailing off a letter
When you love to lick the postage stamp
It's your favorite purple sweater
It's the moths under the midnight lamps

It's praying to the stained glass
When you don't know what an angel is
It's the memory of a mustache
Of a weathered kind of kiss
And it's going to confession
And telling all the sins you've tried
And the priest is getting angry
At the smile you cannot hide

There's so much anger in these streets
So much hanging on your feet
So much sadness in the faces that you meet
And there's all this politics and hate
All these prices that you pay
But all this hope to guide your way

It's the parking lot attendant
Lettin' you go in for free
It's bitin' all your nails off
Instead of losing gracefully
And it's laying on a rowboat
When you're lazy like the summer breeze
And your arm is hanging over
So you autograph the sea

1. I once bought a desk just because it reminded me of the desk that I imagined that a character that I loved might have owned. I sometimes put my hand on the surface of the desk when I walk by and whisper "hello" to him. This makes me smile.

2. I read the ends of books first but if I really love a book - I will leave two pages towards the end unread so that I don't ever have to finish reading it.

From Expecting Adam by Martha Beck, a memoir about her spiritual rebirth after having a child with Down syndrome:

"It wasn't until the amniocentesisis had been performed and John and I left the clinic that I began to wonder about what I thought and felt the first time I saw my baby's face.

The strange thing is - the problem, if you want to call it that - was that it wasn't the first time. I was positive of that. At the sight of that little face, I was flooded by an unmistakable recognition, a sense of deja vu beyond anything that I had ever experienced before. It was like seeing an old friend with a new haircut: he didn't look exactly the way I remembered him, but I definately remembered him. When I first saw my daughters, I felt the reverent sense of amazement of a discoverer. I was consumed with the desire to get to know them, to find out who they were. When I first saw my son, there on the ultrasound screen, I didn't have this response at all. Instead, I felt the burst of joy when loved ones are reunited, and I thought, 'Oh! It's Adam!'"

I love this passage.

I think we are born and we begin to forget. Our lives are a process of forgetting - of hiding. It starts the first time we are told to "be quiet" by and adult that heard us cry but does not take the time to actually hear us cry. It starts when our mother is feeding us and looking our eyes and the intensity of the connection, of the love, she feels is overwhelming - so she looks away. She turns on the telivision. We shift our focus to the buttons on her blouse and believe it is our fault that she turned away.

We forget each time we are told "I am not your friend anymore". Kids don't mean this when they say it. We don't mean it when we say it. But we believe it when we hear it.

But then - we have these moments. Remembering moments. Long before I read Expecting Adam , I had a name for these moments. I called them "flashes". You see something - and it resonates. It is not interest. It is not discovery. It is not attraction. It is recognition.

You recognize the painting the first time you see it. You have seen it before. This is what was in your heart when you drew with crayons, and wadded up the picture and threw it away in embarassment because it was not what you were trying to draw. The picture has been a part of you. It unlocks a part of you.

You visit a place and you have to pause. You think "I have been here". The trees are familiar to you. The way the sunlight filters down - you have been trying to find your way back here. You remember something that was lost. A question that you did not even know you were asking gets answered and the answer is "yes".

You hear a song for the first time and you have to repeat it ten times in a row because immediately - you know it. You have been singing it your whole life. This is just the first time you heard the words.

You meet a person and you know they are the key to something that was locked. It is like you have always known them; you are only just now learning their name. It is reunion. "Oh look!," you say, "It's Adam".


These are our breadcrumbs.

"Okay - so will you promise me that the proposed blog name you turned in is not anything gang related?"

My third block class - the repeaters - are making blogs on Thursday. Encouraging comments will be welcome from all.

In Richard Foster's book on Prayer, he states that tears can be a form of prayer. I really like this. I am a crier. The whole "no tears in heaven" thing. I don't buy it. I can almost guarantee that I will be crying in heaven.

I have always been a crier. I do not remember my earliest crying moment; my father tells me this story. He says that they took me to Disneyland for my fourth birthday because I was completely obssessed with Alice in Wonderland. All day long at Disneyworld, I looked for Alice. We rode the teacup ride - the Mad Hatter was there (the Cheshire Cat too) - but no Alice. My dad says that they knew I was disappointed but that I never said a word, just kept looking for Alice. Finally, at the end of the day, they took me to the Mickey Mouse Revue.
I sat in the darkened theater between my parents.
A figure of Alice lit up on stage and she began to sing "Golden Afternoon".
At this point, my dad felt me quietly squueze his hand and when he looked over at me, he saw that I was crying.

I cried so hard when I watched Snoopy Come Home that my mother had to turn off the telivision. It was just unbearably sad to me. Charlie Brown loved Snoopy - but there was that little dying girl that had had Snoopy first and she loved Snoopy too. And Snoopy loved both of them. And it was just horrible. Who should Snoopy choose? I had no idea. I still don't know how it was resolved because my mom turned it off. I assume that Charlie Brown had to get Snoopy back - but did the little girl just die? God, it was awful. There was no easy answer. Someone would have to sacrifice. Whoever ended up with Snoopy would carry the weight of that sacrifice with them. I could not watch.

I have continued crying. Everything makes me cry. Sure, Hallmark commercials make me cry - but weird stuff makes me cry too. I just get so moved by random moments. Once, I commented to my friend about crying when I vote. I said something like "you know how you always cry when you vote?". She looked at me like I was insane. Maybe I am. I cry when I vote. I go in that booth and pull the curtain and when I go to pull the lever to register my vote it just overwhelms me .

I cry just beacuse. Because the beauty sneaks up on me. The beauty overwhelms me. This can be embarassing. It is the sight of a wild plastic bag blown by the wind. It is seeing Alice, who I had loved, at last. It is a the beautiful burden of sacrifice. It is the moment when I hear my heart whisper "yes, that's it. that must be what it looks like".

This past fall, I was doing classroom observations and it was the first pep rally of the year. I am a very little (5'2" ) white girl teacher at an all black inner city school. I am in my thirties but I look about twenty (seriously - I get carded for R rated movies - I get stopped and asked for my hall pass). I could not possibly look more out of place or conspicuous. I was there in the gym and the band was playing and I just started feeling overwhelmed by it all - but I did not want to cry. It was a fleeting moment for all the students, a moment they did not even realize would pass. I wanted a way to save it for them, a way to hand it back when the world came crashing and haunting back at them. The band played and the kids were stomping on the bleachers. The ninth graders were there trying to look cool and the seniors were going crazy in the stands - so proud to have arrived. I wanted to leave. It was not cool to cry. I started biting the insides of my cheeks, breathing my yoga breating. I tried looking at the ceiling of the gym. There would be no crying at Pep Rallies.
I was doing pretty well.
But then the football players came out. The kids were cheering and the football players were so excited and happy to be football players. They were just kids and they were running into the gym and the crowd was cheering for them and one of the football players did a front flip and the crowd went wild and I just could not watch. It was too beautiful. I stopped pushing it aside. The beauty washed into me. I cried at the pep rally.

I picture this conversation in heaven:

stranger - who is that girl over there crying?

jesus - oh - that's Amy

stranger - is she allowed to do that here?

jesus - it's okay.

She's happy

"This world falls on me. With Dreams of Immortality. Everywhere I turn. All the Beauty just keeps shaking me."

Halloween with all the hippies. We are standing in front of the house that was our church.
I hardly look like the kind of little girl that got sent to school with a sign that said "I BITE" saftey pinned to her dress, do I?
Might I add that my parents now vote Republican? I just don't get it.

I am just a little kid in this picture.

I am being held in he arms of one of the hippies so I can have a good view of the lake.
So I can watch my father baptize my new sisters and bothers.
It is sunrise.

Afterwards, we go up on the hill and someone plays the guitar and everyone sings.

I sit on their laps and eat wheat bread and honey for breakfast.

Note : Most effectively read with "Just Like Honey" on iTunes.

I met George in the fall of my junior year at UGA. He was working the security desk in in the lobby of mycollege dorm. He had a fantastic gargoyle impersonation. He would perch on the railing of the staircase and stick out his tongue and get very, very still. He was so cool. A lot of people go to college in Athens because they want to be cool. George was one of the few people who actually was that cool.

He lived in a legendary Athens landmark - a pink house with a tin roof and a big front porch that had been lived in by members of a now-famous band. It was sort of passed from hipster to hipster. It was a stones throw from the shack that “The End of the World As We Know It” video was filmed in. Those chosen to rent the tin roofed house did so with the understanding that they had the responsibility to throw huge Bonfire parties on the property each semester. George lived in the house with four other people. He was from England. He had long hair and steel-toe boots and a leather jacket. He smoked Marlboro Reds. He laughed all the time. He did not care what anyone thought of him. He was beautiful.

The year before, I had come off of a string of relationships that went from bad to worse until I woke up one morning and could not look myself straight in the eye with the knowledge that I had sunk so low that I had spent the previous evening actually watching the Super Bowl with a boyfriend that I, were I true to myself, never in a million years would have even considered being friends with. He had been my “trophy” boyfriend: rich, handsome, and stupid. And I hated myself for sinking so low.

I had been “in love” my freshman year of college with a boy that used me and hurt me so bad that when he dumped me for a cocktail waitress named “Sage” (ruining Simon and Garfunkel’s “Scarborough Fair” for me forever, I might add), I snuck into his house when he was in class and gave all his clothes to Goodwill. It was not losing him that hurt, it was having someone reject me so totally. It was hearing, “Well, it’s been fun - but what I really want is a cocktail waitress named Sage". I was desperate to be redeemed. I had stayed a pretty good girl, waited until I was “in love”, hadn’t had sex until I was nineteen. After I was dumped, I went through three boyfriends in three months. Each of them represented a rapidly progressive compromise. When my dating criteria became something along the lines of “he has a nice car” - I realized that I had no idea who I even was anymore. I made a vow that I would never date again unless I thought I actually might marry the boy. I cleaned up my act. I made peace with God. I rededicated my life. I attended Bible Studies. I was good to go.

So when I met George, I had taken myself out of the dating market. I was hardly the image of the model Christian with my prairie dresses and Dr. Marten boots and extensive collection of import Smiths albums. I was trying to fit into the “Bible Study” mold. Kind of trying at least. I mean, I attended Bible studies. I was trying to be good. I was trying to follow all the rules. Then, George invited me to come and hang out with him. I should say that I hesitated, but I didn’t.

On our first and only “date”, we snuck into the Botanical Gardens and went and sat down in a grove of trees. We talked. We kissed for the first (and last) time. Then, it started to rain. George invited me to come to his house to dry off and get a cup of coffee. We talked some more and then some more and it was getting really late and it was really raining. And George propositioned me. He knew about my whole “rededication-being- a-good-girl-not-wanting-to-date” vow and so he told me that his room was the attic bedroom and every time it rained, he would lay and listen the rain on the tin roof and he always wished he had someone to share that moment with. He invited me to stay the night - just as friends. This was definitely not in the rule book of acceptable young Christian woman behavior. But I believed George. I trusted him. I think I already loved him. And I fell asleep, fully dressed, by his side. The rain beat down on the tin roof and he did not kiss me. He just reached out and took my hand and held it in his all night long.

From that moment on, we were inseparable. George escorted me into a world of hipsters and parties. I was still struggling with reconciling my newly rededicated faith and my attraction to (and at-homeness in) the counterculture. I never did drugs or drank enough to get hung over, but with George at my side I spent my days in coffee houses and my nights in pubs. We usually got served our food and drinks free, because George invariably knew whoever was working at any given location. (I learned from him that all the punk rocker waiters and waitresses that worked at a certain 24 hour restaurant that was popular with the frat boy crowd as well as the 12am-5am hipster crowd would lick the plates when the frat boys came in). George got me to start smoking, but I rebelled against the Reds because I did not like the cigarette-taste that lingered in my mouth. Instead, I smoked cloves - which I knew he thought was a little wimpy of me - but I loved the way they made my tongue taste sweet and the way they burned so slowly. I wore his leather jacket. We would go and do laundry at 3 am. We would hit the Potter’s House thrift store and fill bags with clothes from the rag pile for 3 bucks a bag. We got morning custard and coffee every day at The Bluebird Cafe. We got our first tattoos together. We had so much fun.

Unlike me, George was wild. He drank a whole lot. He sometimes let himself get picked up by girls and he would go back to their place and leave me for a while - but he always came back to hold my hand before the end of the night.

I know that people thought we had some sort of strange andvery open relationship, but the truth was so much more complicated. George and I never had sex. Not even anything remotely close.

Every night, George slept by my side. If he had to work security, I would leave my door unlocked and he would eventually wander up into my loft and take my hand in his and fall asleep. Most nights, we slept under the tin roof in his attic room. We just held hands. We always held hands.

One night, we went out to visit some bars because George was doing “research for a sociology project”. I was drinking a bit. When I drink, I get very content and passive - which is unusual for me. Especially the passive part. I was feeling really passive though, really happy. All was good and right in the world. We drove back to his house and for some reason, I was not wearing shoes.

I don’t remember what happened to my shoes, but I remember that when we got to the house, George said that he ought to carry me inside because the big bonfire party had been the previous weekend at the yard was still full of bits of glass. It was raining. George came around and opened my car door and carried me into the house. No one else was home so he told me to stand there with my eyes closed. Being in a passive and content state of mind, I complied. He lit candles all over the living room and he told me to open my eyes and when I did he had started playing the song “Singing In the Rain” on the stereo and he took me in his arms and started to dance me around the room a la Gene Kelley.

It was one of the perfect moments of my life.

My friendship with George was much more than friendship. It was beautiful. It was love.

I think, like so many people, I had always confused sex and love in my mind. Sex was always linked to love. When I daydreamed about falling in love, it was always tied up with feelings of sexual longing. I had had boyfriends. I had had sex. Until George, I had never had love. We talk about friendship love as if it is less than sexual love. We denigrate it. We say to ourselves that friendship is nice, but it is not “true love”. We shy away from intimacy. We worry that it is unhealthy to be intimate with someone without a subtext of sex.

We miss so much.

I learned so much.

In the Spring, George and I shot a short independent film together. I wrote and directed the movie. It was called “maybe I used to love you”. The film was basically a rant by a girl who had realized that her ex-boyfriend had never really loved her at all - had never even known the color of her eyes. The girl was me. The boyfriend was all the boys in my string of bad and worse relationships. I finally got it. That thing I had had in the past in all my romantic delusion - that was not love. Love was patient. Love was kind. Love did not take. Love wanted the best for the other person. Love knew the color of your eyes. Love looked at you not as something to take and use, but as something to treasure and give. I knew, at last, how to love and be loved.

While I was editing my movie, George told me that he knew the perfect guy for me. I shrugged his comment off. I was not interested in dating. He knew that. Unlike my previous conviction, this time I really meant it. I was perfectly happy just the way things were. I could have been happy with the way things were forever. But George insisted.

He lied to me finally. He told me we were going to the movies. He said he just had to stop by a party for a second to check on something. He set me up. He gave me my husband. Because George knew me, he knew what was best for me. He introduced me to a guy that he called “Smiley”. And he was right, he had had the perfect guy for me.

George taught me so much. He made me bold. It prepared me well for marriage -but more than that - it has made me unafraid to really, deeply love my children and my small handful of friends. I buy them art that reminds me of them. I look them straight in the eye.

I rush into love now. I tell people that I am falling in love with my students. I mean it. I have taught them for three weeks and am ready to change entire my life plan and move into the inner city and teach them forever. I see them. They are beautiful. I am in love.

I don’t so care anymore about being loved back. I am fearless. I have had someone really see me, want nothing from me, and love me. I carry that with me always. I carry it in my heart.

I can't seem to sleep so I figured I would make a list of random details:
1. I am an actual Countess. (long story, but it is true)
2. I have two tattoos.
3. I make up stories to fall alseep at night.
4. I named one of my kids off a road sign.
5. I still own dress-up clothes.
6. I think the ocean at night is terrifying.
7. I think it is quite possible that toys come to life when we are not looking.
8. I would love to sneak into Disneyworld after hours and sleep in The Swiss Family Robinson's treehouse.
9. I think circus peanuts are the perfect candy.
10. I always read the end of books first.

Just in case anyone is interested in attending academic conferences - Penn State just put up the Feb. list of Calls for Papers. The link is on my list.

I am thinking about the "Texas Chainsaw Massacre - Remake or Original?" conference myself - it has "dissertation" written all over it.

On an only slightly unrelated note, wouldn't it be cool if people took off their shoes before communion and danced during the offering?

I suppose I ought to write more entries about my husband, my best friend Tricia, and my children.

But I don’t want to.

There are a number of reasons. Mostly, it's because of Beautiful Girls.

A few years ago, I got a Christmas card from an old friend in my hometown. On the bottom of the card, he wrote that he had recently rented the movie Beautiful Girls and that the Natalie Portman character had really reminded him of me. This comment threw me into a depression that lasted about a week. See, when I watched Beautiful Girls, the Natalie Portman character reminded me of me too. When my old friend made this comment, I realized that - aside from my husband - that there was not a single person that I knew that knew the side of me that would remind them of Natalie Portman in Beautiful Girls. I had play groups and women’s Bible studies and even a book group - but to everyone there - I was “Arden and Lily’s mom” or “the preacher’s wife” - and those are roles I play - but they are not really an accurate summation of who I really am. I actually made a blog once that I was going to call “my so-called life as a mom”. I just could never work up much desire to write in it. My husband and children are a huge part of who am I - but this writing part of who am I - I want this just to be “Amy”.

That said - here is my very partial list of reasons I love my very cool husband.
1. Because when I met him he drove a fabric-covered hearse.
2. His sketchbook.
3. Eleven years later, and he still calls me “Princess”.
4. He defrosts my car for me when it is cold outside.
5. Our first date involved two year old triplets and Beauty and the Beast - and he still came back for more.
6. I am the only girl he has ever kissed.
7. I get to hear him preach.
8. He gets the whole “Brother Sun, Sister Moon” thing.



And here is my favorite thing ever written about marriage. When I get invited to weddings, this is what I always write in the card I send:

The Angel of Marriage
by Joan Logghe

Utterly alone
the angel of marriage longs for union
It matches people up by mistake
in its blind drive to pair

Not the wisest of angels,
but the most loving. A cross
between the forgiveness angel
and the angel of longing, odd Baroque hybrid.

Classical music
plays through the angel of marriage.
Wine glasses break under its stomped foot.
Legal documents line its Byzantine garments.

Angel of stress
and dishes, angel of rice. Teapot angel
angel of folded laundry. Beautiful, loyal angel
of small town husband, big city wife.

Mercurial angel
of form change and myriad days.
With your knitting needles for darning,
your fervent epoxy of sex. Right out
of the Bible, angel of long haul.

Hover over us.
Help us do the work that piles up in loads.
Give us Sundays of psalms. Do childcare. Be faithful.
Rescue the holy from the matrimony.


After that shout out to the ones I love best - back to our regularly scheduled programming.
Not my life as a preacher's wife.
Not my life as a mom.
Just Amy.

You think you're cool? You think you're a trendsetter? Well, check me out. I was a pirate way back in 73 when Johnny Depp was a nobody and Orlando Bloom was not even a twinkle in his father's eye.

Ah yes, those were the days. The days when all a girl needed was a dishrag to tuck in her pants and a plastic aligator head chompy-thingy for protection and she could sail the wide open sea in search of whatever treasure may come her way. Those were the days indeed.

If I still had notebook folders to write song lyrics on, here are some of the ones I would write:

Do something pretty while you can
Don’t be a fool
Reading the Gospel to yourself is fine.

Time just hates me - that’s why it made me an adult

The future is stereo that eats your favorite tapes
The soundtrack to your youth that can not be replaced

Don’t stick me in a cage, with a bottle of rage, and a family like the mafia

If you are feeling sinister
go off and see a minister

Stop wasting your words convincing yourself no one hurts

I’ve been feeling down
I’ve been looking round the town
For somebody just like me/but the only ones I see
Are the dummies in the window/they spend their money on
and it saddens me to think
that the only ones I see are mannequins
looking stupid, being used, and being thin

If you find yourself caught in love
say a prayer to the man above
you should thank him for every day you pass
thank him for saving your sorry ass

If I could do just one little perfect thing, I’d be happy
they’d write it on my grave or when they scattered my ashes

I want poetry and music and some laughs

I am not the only proverb that never really fits
and I am not the only Caufield that’s catching more than kids

Some people wish that they could be like Moses
and get their information from burning bushes
well I tried and the neighbors complained

I had a dream last night that I was taking a graduate class in history but instead of discussing history with us, the professor subjected us to cosmetic dentistry treatments.

I have often felt that I do not make a very good girl. It may have something to do with shoes. It could, quite possibly, be linked to Barbie heads.

I have never been comfortable around other girls. They make me uneasy. I just have never really known how to care about all the things they seem to care about. When I was younger, I blamed it on my parents. If only they had let me see the movie Grease, then maybe I could have joined in on the playground while all the girls sang “Summer Nights” and gushed over John Travolta. I have to confess though, that when I finally did see Grease, I thought it was stupid. I still don’t understand what Sandy (or I) was supposed to see in that moron whats-his-name - or why it was liberating for her to give up her comfortable, easy look and start wearing tight pants and spiked boots.

Another thing I blamed on my parents was the fact that I never could get into the whole “hair and make-up” routine. Being a high school student in the eighties, hair was, quite literally, a big thing. I blamed my lack of hair-fixing desire/ability on my childhood lack of a Barbie head. They made these toys for girls that were like huge Barbie heads. They came with hair curlers, and brushes and a whole palate of make-up - so you could practice your grooming skills on Barbie. I was never allowed to have one of these. I always wondered if maybe, having a Barbie head would have cured my hair and makeup fixing deficiency. Maybe it would have, but then again, the one time that I played with one at a neighbor's house I used all the green eye shadow to turn Barbie into the Hulk. The green eye shadow never really washed off all the way, and from then on, my neighbor’s Barbie head looked like she was on the verge of puking.

In addition to my failures as a stylist to Barbie, I am also completely ignorant about the whole “shoe” thing. Evidently, girls like shoes. This is what I hear. I see greeting cards with slogans like “she who dies with the most shoes wins”. I see little Christmas ornaments that look like shoes. I hear about not wearing white shoes after labor day. I hear that “you can always judge a woman’s style by looking at her shoes and purse”. I just do not get it. I tried to walk in high heels once. After that, I gave up. I have had three shoe phases. For a while I wore vintage 50’s dresses and saddle oxfords. Then, I wore prairie dresses and boots. Now, I wear one pair of clogs in the winter and one pair of sandals in the summer. The idea that my shoes should change with my outfit is incomprehensible to me. Which brings me (finally) to the point of what is going to turn out to be a long essay. The point being, that I really love gay people.

I had a great aunt that died before I was born. She was a Red Cross nurse during World War II. While she was serving overseas, tending to the wounded young soldiers, she feel in love with one of her fellow nurses. When the war was over, they moved to rural Ohio and built a farm together. My mother lists the times that she spent her aunt’s farm as her happiest childhood memories. Her aunt would make her a little lunch and tie it up in a red bandana attached to a stick like a hobo. They would go on long hikes through the woods, stopping to inspect hollow trees for evidence of fairies. One day, my mom asked her mother if Christine was Aunt Nellie’s husband. My grandmother washed my mother’s mouth out with soap and told her to never say anything like that again.

I had a best friend in high school. His parents worked for the state Democratic party and were ex-hippies and they had both a white VW wan and a white VW bug. We would skip school and ride around town, stopping for orange juice muffins and herbal tea at the Mill and listening to Cat Stevens and Simon and Garfunkel on the tape player. I would have my feet up on the dash and he would be driving, practicing smoking so that when he smoked around strangers, he would seem experienced and cool. Once we decided to learn to tie-die, so we tie-died his sheets black using his mom’s bathtub and then realized that the dye had seeped into the tub itself and turned it a nasty shade of gray. He puked on my tape of “Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me” and messed up the balance of it somehow so that Hot Hot Hot was always a little more distorted than it should be - but I loved it that way - because it made me think of him. I have a vivid memory of riding in the car at night and being in the drivers seat and my friend would be stoned and would lay down in the passenger’s seat with his head in my lap. And the Florida night would stretch across the flat highway in front of me and I would drive and U2 would sing “with or without you” and slight of hand and twist of fate, I loved him.

He would also use me as his cover story. His parents thought he was out with me when he was not. I was his boyfriend’s date to the prom. I was the only one that knew.


When I was a senior in high school, I had a chance to work with the theater department at Florida State on a production of Romeo and Juliet. For the first time in my life, I felt truly embraced by a group of people. There was one really brilliant boy. He was one of the funniest human beings I have ever met. He had this habit of breaking into sign language when he was talking to you and pretending to be deaf. Strangers, walking by, would look at you, talking to him, in amazement - seeing a real, live, deaf person . They would smile compassionately. He used to call me “Gidget”. Most of the actors were pretty angsty in that typical tortured artist way. Not this guy. He was just strong and funny and kind.

There was a crisis in the theater department the next year. I had abandoned theater to study art history and English, and I did not see my theater friends very much. I heard about the crisis from a friend whose mother was sleeping with one of the professors in the theater department. One of their new BFA students had just tested positive for AIDS. At this point, there were no drug cocktails to take. AIDS was a death sentence. This student had been asked to make a list of everyone that he had slept with. Evidently, the list pretty much covered the entire male population of the theater department.

That Sunday, I was sitting in church. My church was just a few blocks from the college campus. I was sitting in the back and I looked and saw, sitting on the front row, the brilliant boy from Romeo and Juliet. My heart sank. I knew there was only one reason that he would be in a church. I knew he must have been on the list. He was dressed in a button up shirt and tie, and I pictured him trying to dress the “right way” for church. I could not wait until the service was over so that I could go and welcome him. Unfortunately, the sermon began. With the emergence of AIDS in the news, the minister began to preach on the evils of homosexuality and the wages of sin. When the congregation bowed their heads for the benediction, my friend quietly slipped out. When I saw his empty chair, I rushed outside to try to find him. But he was gone.

There is no place for me in current debates. I side with the outcasts. I can not help it.

They did not play with Barbie heads; they understand my wool socks and clogs.
We have alot in common.

I see the stone set in their eyes.
I see the thorn twist in their side.

And I wait.

And I love them.

I have never liked Valentines Day. My earliest memories of the holiday are of being disappointed. I was a child in the seventies, back in the days when you did not have to bring a valentine for every kid in the class. I would decorate my little valentine box and always hope that maybe, just maybe I would find out that I actually had friends. That maybe I even had secret friends. Unfortunately, the only valentines I received were the ones from the kids whose moms made them give valentines to every kid in the class. I know that this was the case because they made sure to tell me so. I was a weird little kid. I talked to trees on the playground. Nobody wanted that rubbing off on them. It would have been cooties of the worst sort.

A few months after I got married, Valentines Day rolled around. I decided to give it another try. Maybe now that someone really did love me I would finally see what all the Valentines Day fuss was about. Maybe now, I would finally get a “real” valentine - a valentine that was not given out of compulsion or obligation. Unfortunately, my husband presented me with a valentine with a watercolor picture of rocking chairs on the front. Inside it said “when I think back on all the golden years we have spent together...”. This not a valentine that said “Love” and “Romance”; this was a valentine that said “Crap! I waited till the last minute and just grabbed the first card that said ‘wife’ on it”. So I just gave up on Valentines Day for good. I said that Valentine’s Day is just a stupid, manipulative, commercialized holiday of the worst sort. I meant it.

This year, it was not so easy to dismiss Valentines Day. My five year old daughter has been valentine crazy. For the past week, she has been in a valentine-making frenzy. She slips them under my door. She leaves them on my bed. Valentines are everywhere. She makes valentines for her friends, for her teachers, for our pets. One valentine is not enough. She makes stacks and stacks of valentines for each person. She made valentine banner out of connected computer paper and announced that the house was now “a utopia of love”.

At the same time that she has been fanatically preparing valentines, her first tooth has been lose. In our house, the tooth fairy commemorates the first lost tooth with a "golden" dollar, so this is a very exciting time. Every morning, she updates us on the status of her tooth's increasing wiggliness. For a week, we have been both counting down the days until Valentines Day and anticipating the day that she will lose her tooth. Yesterday morning , on Valentines Day, she came in to tell me that her tooth was just about to fall out and that when it did, the tooth fairy was going to give her a golden dollar and that she had decided that she was going to take that golden dollar to church and give it to Jesus. She was so excited. “Don’t you think that Jesus will really love a golden dollar. Don’t you think he will really be able to help the poor?” she asks. I tell her Yes. He will.

And I am thirty-three years old. And I finally get Valentines Day.

A Mantra and a Blessing


Isaiah 55:12

Faith: empty churches, having communion administered, wine not grape juice, graveyards, thunderstorms, sitting in the crook of a tree branch as a kid during sunrise services on the top of an indian mound surrounded by all the hippies and singing I Am The Bread of Life, birth

Myth and Fairy Tale: Cupid and Psyche, The Wild Swans, The Steadfast Tin Soldier

Literary: The Secret Garden, Milan Kundera, e.e. cummings

If they were real people, I'd have run away with them: Edmond Dantes, Holden Caufield, Joe Kavalier

Cinema: Escape to Witch Mountain, The Piano, Brazil

Edible: Food Sticks, Nice Mice, Chez Pierre, The Grit, orange juice muffins from The Mill, any latte that does not taste like an ash tray

Art: Hylas and The Nymphs , angels without faces

Music: The Smiths "stretch out and wait" , Indigo Girls "you know, me and jesus - we're of the same heart/the only thing that keeps us distant is that i keep fucking up"

Ideas: secret passages, wardrobes that open up to lamposts in the snow, finding a key,
keeping the lighthouse lamp burning, living in a treehouse

Advice: "just keep passing the open windows"

So, I am teaching at an inner-city high school. The kind of high school I have to pass strip clubs to get to. This is only my internship. I am still violently divided as to whether or not I should teach in this school, or whether I should accept a job in a nice upper-middle class school where all my students will have computers and speak fluent English and where they are allowed to carry backpacks because no one is afraid that they will bring more than notebooks and pens to school with them.

But, I digress. For now, I am here, teaching in the inner city and I have one class that is almost entirely made up of kids that have already failed 9th grade English at least once. I decide (being the naive, go-getter, new little optimistic teacher that I am) to read to them from Poetry 180. Poetry 180 is a project by the Library of Congress to bring "a poem a day" to American high school students. The idea behind Poetry 180 is that you just read the poem to the students and let them enjoy hearing it - without requiring them to analyze or dissect it. I decide that in addition to hearing the poems, I want my students to actually see the poems, so I print them on overhead projector film and project them onto the blackboard.

There is this notion among educators that everything you do in class must be assessed. If you have students write creatively, you must have some form of "authentic assessment" to grade them. You must have a specific objective and that objective should ideally be tied to whatever standard of learning the students will be tested on to prove that they are not being left behind. There is not much room, in this sort of teaching, for reading something (or writing something) just to enrich the mind and soul. After all, personal enrichment and appreciation of beauty is not a measurable standard. As a result, Poetry 180 is met with some skepticism. Still, it only takes a minute or two to read the poems and I decide to just go ahead and throw them out there. If I catch any flack, there is plenty of attention to standards and measurable crap and rubrics for assessment in my lesson plans.

So, I am there in my third block class (with all the repeaters) and I put Billy Collins' poem "Introduction to Poetry" up on the overhead projector. One of the female students reads the poem out loud. There is a moment of silence. I wonder if maybe this was a crazy idea, bringing in poetry to a group of kids that are completely burned out and don't care at all about such abstraction. I wonder if maybe, my supervising teacher was right when she told me that these kids would never get anything out of the poems if I did not explain them beforehand with "prompts and scaffolding". Then, one of the boys in class speaks up. "Mrs. J", he asks "can I read this poem in Spanish?". I say yes and as I stand and listen, this boy translates the poem into his native language. It is one of the most beautiful things I have ever heard. And I can not test this thing that this boy has gained or hold it up against a Q.C.C objective, but in this moment I know that he has truly and deeply and meaningfully gotten it. And I know, deep down in a place in my heart that is beyond assessment and quantitative evaluation, that moments like this are the reason that I am a teacher.


Introduction to Poetry


Billy Collins


I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide


or press an ear against its hive.


I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,


or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.


I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.


But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.


They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

When I worked at Barnes and Noble, I came up with a rule for myself. My rule is simple; I refuse to read a book with feet on the cover. My aversion to books with feet on them started with the novel The Scandalous Summer of Sissy LaBlanc, which features a pair of feet with red toenails propped on the rim of a bathtub. I am not sure exactly what this book is about, but I would bet that it tells a very heartwarming story about a Southern gal with guts and an eccentric friend or sister or mother who finds both her authentic self and true love when she begins playing her beloved dulcimer in public, or takes up watercolor painting, or reads a pack of old letters (found in the attic of her childhood home), or looks through a scrapbook that belongs to someone who is either dead or in the process of dying.

After this book was published (and became a huge hit), lots of books began copying the “feet on the cover” look. Evidently, some marketing whiz decided that women must really love to buy books that feature cover art of a pair of feet that have just received a pedicure from the local strip-mall nail salon. There is, I suppose, something about that image that we (as women) are supposed to gravitate towards. It is as if we will look at that cover and realize that this book is about a woman just like us. A woman who gets her toenails painted a cute shade of persimmon at the Asian nail salon and has spunk and sass. A woman who is just - well - misunderstood. A woman whose problems would all disappear if she just move or return home to some idyllic small town where she could find a way to indulge her inner creative genius and who would then find out that her long-lost first love had actually been pining away for her all these years and had built a gazebo or a summer house or a sailboat from scratch - just for her and just in anticipation of the day when he would be able to take her to that gazebo or boat and tenderly make love to her (with a gentle breeze blowing) and afterwards (as they sipped hot chocolate from a thermos that he had packed) he would pledge to her his eternal fidelity.

The proliferation of these books bothers me. Somehow, they have managed to transcend the “romance” genre and they get packaged in nice trade paperback editions - with a 14.00 price tag and a non-Fabio photograph of feet on the cover. These books are categorized as “literature”, and they are shelved right next to Faulkner. I am not too much of a literary snob. I have been known to read a trashy novel or two. Trashy novels have their place. What really bothers me is that these “feet” novels are masquerading as semiserious literary offerings. As the public develops an appetite for them, these novels get published and marketed and displayed (and thus purchased and read) at the expense of artistic and thoughtful literature. “Feet books” are the equivalent of reality tv. A few reality shows are an enjoyable alternative, but once the market is glutted with them, people begin to lose access to quality, scripted television.

When I worked at the bookstore, we put up a corporate-mandated display table for women’s history month. The table had a big sign that read “Women’s Literature”. The table was full of “feet books”. I complained to one of my supervisors about the lack of actual literature on the table, but was told that the display titles had been included in our corporate bible (a.k.a. “The Daily Planner”). Still, when no one was looking, I would surreptitiously replace large stacks of titles like Confessions of A Shopoholic, Good In Bed, and Thoughts While Having Sex with stacks of novels by Toni Morrison, Edith Wharton and Margaret Atwood. Vive Le Resistance!