Good morning, May dear...

Today was the last day of April. That makes tomorrow the first day of May. Ha!

I feel about May a lot the same as a hiker feels about an uncharted mountainside.

So. With my eight minutes that I’ve got here before May starts and the ghosts of misused summers begin leaning in, here is my little pledge of accountability. There’s human food to be feasted on here, kids. There’s ground to be covered, mountains climbed, books read, people loved, skills honed, music heard and sights widened. I pledge to fill the summer with good stuff. The summer needn’t be rushed or packed. That isn’t what summer is for at all. But it should be well used. 

It’s 12:01. Happy May Day.

Read The Lord of the Rings Trilogy – Take the littlest sisters out shopping one at a time – Watch Dr. Who – Watch a full length ballet with Mom – Deliver on my brilliant fitness plan – Learn how to “cut” on a slalom ski – spontaneous picnic – Write letters! – Write letters! – Write letters! – Write some poems – Love poems? – Bake a sugarless cake – Cook things for people – Serve – Drive to the Atlanta Temple – Show some love every day – Be a genius and figure out how to modify my retainer – Catch a lizard – Share a concert experience with my family – Take pictures of the cool stuff we do - Watch favorite movies dubbed in French – Make a friend – Twenty-five inch waist – Teach myself Swan Lake choreography – Music swap with the siblings and Dad – Fill mom’s iPod – Spontaneous field trip to Atlanta – Solo Day – Study the scriptures with gumption – Write in this blog better – Take a day and re-figure a basic understanding of literary history: who wrote what when – read “Proof of Heaven” – read “Jesus the Christ” – Re-read things – Beat Mariah in the tan-test – Unleash a little unchecked vanity for a while – Experiment with contemporary dance – Choreograph - Go to bed when I’m tired.
Wake up with the sun. 
Go outside. 
Be Present. 

Get your brown nose outta your navel, son.

Day one was a "get to know" day---a day for the quiet students to find the best burrowing holes and the louder ones to test the acoustics.

During the first thirty minutes of surveying the class, it occurred to me that most of the people in the room (though no one knew anyone else from Adam or Eve) were sharing the same thoughts. We were forming the same questions, making the same judgments--formulating and sizing up--as we evaluated the terrain of ENGL295.

Jumping at the opportunity that every "get to know" day presents, one boy asked a question (the question), which was a bit off topic, but that he'd already made up his mind to ask. This question, he thought (or had observed from experience) would win him some brownie points, or better yet, set him apart from his classmates.

"What inspired you to pursue English?"

...asked the student of the teacher professor doctor of English, taking little to no consideration of the fact that this woman had probably been asked that exact question by countless brown-nosers with polos and iPads just like his and was running painfully low on original responses.

What he didn't know, however, was that, one desk to his right, I had recently formulated the same question (in similar words even). But just before raising my hand, I'd decided against it. I took another path of thought---one informed by the fact that that question, at that time, even if it was genuine, would seem artificial, cliché, and might even stink a little of the arrogant English monster major that lurked inside every single person in that room.

But I digress.

Unrelated. But funny. Always.

The real point is that from a very short psychological distance away--back just a few turns down this boy's thought map, I could see that our brains were doing the same thing. We both thought of the question--both motivated by a desire to impress. We both considered asking it. We both weighed the benefits of speaking out, "being brave", and demonstrating our "genuine interest".


Regardless of who was "right" or more socially apt in the classroom setting, we were both concerned, not with whatever worn out answer the doctor of English would give, but what she would think of our asking it. And it was at this moment that I was impressed to consider how much could be gained in a room where 20 heads are spinning and gearing over the same handful of self-centered concerns. These are anxieties that are completely irrelevant to the fact that we have woken up at an unholy hour of the morning and walked a half mile in the snow to put our butts in a desk and LISTEN. Rather, I suspect the majority of people, not just us eager English majors, have at the forefront of their minds, not "What is the task at hand?", but "How am I perceived by those around me?"

20 heads. 20 people that traveled from their native land to learn more than they already knew, and for one entire class period, we stared at the professor and navel gazed.

How much valuable brain power is shoved down the shredder when this energy sucking fascination with "Me" is the filter through which all useful information must pass before landing in the fertile soil of honest, unselfish consideration? We don't ask, "What will my question or my comment say?" We ask, "What will my question or my comment say about me?"

Maybe this is why we have "get to know" days. To "get self-consciousness out of our systems" before the real work begins.

In the words of Jack Welch,
"It is more important to be interested, than to be interesting." And I humbly and hypocritically suggest we reevaluate for which purpose we are raising our hands.

To My Siblings Who May Not Remember This Later

Not quite this bad. But I love this photo. 

The laundry room was the liver of the house. One needed only to look inside the awkward, L-shaped extension of garage to get a general idea of the state of things. Nothing that passed in or out of our home on Sugar Creek Lane did so without, at some point or another, doing time in the laundry room. It was the control center, the lost and found, the archives, the post office, the janitorial headquarters, the craft zone, and, for all intents and purposes, the oracle of all knowledge—or at least, it was where the oracle of all knowledge paid the bills, kept track of wrinkled up field trip permission forms, made important phone calls to family that lived in Texas and, on eight days of the week, did the laundry.


Our little southern style, suburban cottage went through countless renovations over the course of my growing up—my family moved from Provo, Utah to the little town of Cumming, Georgia in the Winter of 2000. Given the life expectancy of toys, furniture, and major household appliances in a home with five children under the age of nine, we were used to our house’s metamorphic nature from day one. Whereas my friends’ homes stayed more or less the same from fifth grade to twelfth, there was rarely a time when our company didn’t notice a new stair railing, re-stained wood floors, or the complete 180 degree change in color scheme of the guest bathroom. Nowadays, it’s easy to tell what year a photograph was taken indoors by looking at the color of the walls in the background. If one performed an archeological cutaway on any vertical surface, one would find a neat chronology of color, ranging from boring, “new home” taupe, experimental and discomfited sunflower, gutsy sapphire blue, and bleached eggshell white.


Given all of the change—most of it on accounts of necessity or repair—one room remained untouched, undisturbed in all its elegant chaos. The laundry room, sometimes referred to as “Mom’s Office” depending on the context, never tasted any more renovation than that of a hinge on the door that was moved from the left side of the chipping, misshapen threshold to the right which allowed the door to swing out instead of in. (This seemingly insignificant alteration was a brilliant and celebrated improvement upon the lives of everyone.) Even though the laundry room itself remained in a state of timelessness, its naked shape weathering the bedlam that would be a family of nine, it was the best place to see the tapestry of our life and times unfurled.


The laundry room was an ancient cave like the one in France with the prehistoric horse paintings on the walls and ceiling. Only, instead of cave drawings, coloring book pages from before I was ten, and many more since, were taped up above Mom’s desk. A shelf on the far wall was home to clay figurines born in elementary school art classes: a garden gnome-turned fairy, a dinosaur with a bloody mouth and a missing claw, and two orange, burrito-looking vases with glass pebbles hot-glued to them. There were photographs, old and new—some of grandparents when they were “our age”, Christmas photos of our cousins’ families, wedding announcements for people we didn’t know, graduation announcements for kids we saw at church, birthday cards that still begged a thank you note even though they’d been received months ago, and post-it note upon post-it note upon post-it note that served as little 3x3sq extensions of our mother’s brain—the part that handled memory and logistics. Sometimes post-it notes were splattered all over the walls, the desk, filing cabinets, and window—a work of pixel-y modern art in green, pink, and yellow pastels.


The laundry room was also like the Island of Misfit Toys, or rather, toys that had lost parts, or parts that had lost toys. Cupboards originally designated for socks, crayons, or batteries served as sanctuary for Polly Pocket accessories, Barbie’s limbs, and tiny Noah’s Arc figurines. Lonely Uno cards could be found sometimes in the shuffle of envelopes and magazines. For some reason, the laundry room was the go-to place for something without a home. Perhaps the reason was that the laundry room would actually be organized occasionally, and when it was, it was quite organized, sometimes over the course of several days. All that was in need of a place was found one, or else found a permanent spot in the laundry room to sit forever and ever, Amen. When this happened, it was as if the universe got wrung out and everything fell into order. Cleaning the laundry room was a lot like cleaning the water filter in a fish tank. For a few days our family would take in a deep breath of fresh organization, rejoice over found articles, and mourn over that which was not found (because if it wasn’t in the laundry room, face it kid, it’s lost forever).


Each child had a single horizontally oriented file wherein all important documents were kept: report cards, programs from ballet and piano recitals, cheap, but shiny, blue ribbons with unraveling gold yarn and gold writing that said “’A’ STUDENT”, drawings of fairies and dream-tree-house blueprints, fancy certificates for being able to do the standard number of push-ups for a third grader, and all the cute, little, toothy postcards from the orthodontist reminding about appointments. Where the oldest stuff went after the file cabinet filled up remains a mystery. However, there’s something in my gut that says nothing was thrown away that was once kept in “our files”. There was an unspoken sacredness to the laundry room and everything kept therein—down to the smallest wallet-sized school portrait from the seventh grade—the one I couldn’t stand because my hair was so flat, but Mom was convinced it was lovely. Besides, it was a sin to throw away pictures.

I guess the laundry room of my childhood was not so much the liver of our home, as it was the heart—a place where we kept things most precious, and maybe where things went to become precious. Though I’m in college now, and my “laundry room” consists of a shoebox under my bed with things like letters from missionaries, birthday cards from grandparents, and just a few post cards I bought and never sent, I hope to one day have such a room. I look forward to covering the empty walls with two dimensional treasures, filling cupboards with outdated technology like DVDs and old disposable film cameras, and putting an unopened badminton set in the corner to collect dust until a not-too-hot summer day when my children and I will forage through our own laundry room for something to do.