Now we’re nine years out from college…and this book has me feeling like I could throw up, just anticipating. Don’t wanna go through this! Save me!

To how many schools did you apply? Money was an issue for us, like it is for most folks, so my parents had me limit my choices to five schools. I had the blessed fortune to be born a “good tester,” so my PSAT, SAT, and ACT scores had me getting sheaves of college pamphlets in the mail every day, which eventually took over an entire corner of our living room. Overwhelmed! I first made a short list by geography (Mom wouldn’t let me go further than a few hours away from home), and then I called each school to verify which had A) bona fide music composition majors (as opposed to a few composition classes under an umbrella of “Music Theory/Comp”), and B) large marching bands. (Okay, we all had our own priorities; don’t judge.) In the end, I submitted apps to:

1) University of Maryland (in-state; most likely to fully fund me)
2) Penn State
3) Frostburg State
4) West Virginia University
5) James Madison University

Of the five, JMU was my favorite. Sadly, they were also the only one to give almost nothing in the way of scholarship money, so it was off the table for us. Penn State also didn’t come through with much aid. Frostburg and Maryland offered full tuition packages, but I heard rumors that their music composition major was on the chopping block (which turned out to be accurate), so I nixed them; Maryland’s counselors actively tried to steer me away from music composition and into computer programming at my interview (saying I could then get a Master’s in theory and not do a composition program until the doctoral level…), so I had misgivings there as well.

WVU offered a full ride and no warning bells. Let’s go, Mountaineers! And despite my concerns about the lack of a single, contained campus (oh, JMU was so pretty when we visited!), it was probably one of the best decisions I’ve ever made – and not just because Eric was a student there already, just waiting to meet me.

In hindsight, I probably had it easy with the whole college selection and admission process. My program wasn’t extremely competitive to enter (that was left for grad school), and I knew that Ivy League was financially out of the question before I even entertained the thought. I can only hope and pray my boys have it as easy as I did, with solid test scores and reasonable criteria for their schools. I’d of course love to see them at our alma mater…but it’s up to them. (But I’ll be honest enough to admit that I do pray that they’ll at least go to college. I don’t think I’m unusual in that wish.) I think that’s part of what’s making me antsy as I read the book, though; staying hands-off is sometimes a challenge for me, and that’s a theme for the parents in the story. I can identify with them and their stress far too easily.

Nine years. Six, probably, until the real stress starts. Hold me!

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So, come out, come out, wherever you are. I’ll even give you a question to answer in a comment, to make it easier! Just something that’s been brewing in my head since I posted a group picture from my high school graduation, and a friend commented how we “thought we were so cool.” I honestly don’t remember feeling cool that day – or many days at all, back as a teenager. Now, looking at that picture, I think I probably was “cooler” than I felt, big hair and all. So, for your own consideration: when in your life was your own self-esteem highest?

If you don’t feel like answering that, say hi anyway. Hello!

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So, now that I’m back at my own desk, I can take a moment to think about the past year and the coming one. A recap!
January: The recession comes to roost, and we weather worries about Eric’s job stability. Luckily, he remains employed, though many of our nearest and dearest do not.
February: Like every other February in these parts, it was all about the snow and ice. I ran a lot, trying to keep the SAD away. Also, Sam got his first crush at school.
March: Eric’s dad had quadruple bypass heart surgery, but came through okay. I hit my peak training for my first marathon.
April: Apparently, my mind was on my marathon taper, as that’s just about all I wrote about.
May: I ran a marathon! We went to Chicago for our 12th wedding anniversary! I had the start of my dental badness, but overall, a good month!
June: The start of summer. Did the Lighthouse Run in a heat wave that kicked everybody’s butt, but I came in 2nd in my age group anyway. Sam turned eight, and we learned that low-key parties are the best.
July: Hit a weird emotional low, but my parents’ visit up here resurrected me. More dental badness.
August: Eric’s dad came to visit! Went on a mostly successful family vacation to Green Bay! A good month, all around.
September: School started for both kids, and Gabe loved his new school. Training peaked for my running. Even more dental badness.
October: Ran another marathon, which included a trip back east to enjoy my family. My baby turned five, which made me feel antique.
November: Had a sort-of impromptu trip back to Ohio for Thanksgiving, and I ran a 5K with Alysia, which was phenomenally great.
December: Oh, the holidays! And they felt crammed into a short time this year, with the last week feeling the longest, encompassing the travel and family love.

Nobody died this year, which was a huge thing! A few downs, plenty of ups; it wasn’t what I’d call a “stable” year, but it wasn’t catastrophic, either. I’d love to see 2010 be a slow rise upward, and I’d sacrifice a couple of the elated spikes to avoid the stomach-dropping lows. Not all of them, though. Life needs excitement, even at the price of some scariness. The big theme of the year seems to have been seeing and taking more opportunities to be with our loved ones, which was wonderful.

This morning, I hit upon a good theme for myself over the next year. In honor of the late awesome Urban Couch, 2010 will be the year of “Do you really believe that?” Asking myself that whenever I catch myself falling into assumptions or ruts will help shake me out of dangerous comfort zones and redefine my limits. We want to grab hold of our budget with both hands, for example, and I’ve not got a good history with that. But do I really believe that I just can’t handle money? Do I really believe that it’s beyond me, honestly? No. No more than I believe that 50 kilometers is beyond me, as I’ll prove this summer.

Here we go! Happy New Year!

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We had a really good speaker at MOPS this morning, discussing holiday traditions – how the original Christmas was about as simple as it could get, and how we’ve turned it into something too complicated, too chaotic, and way too money-based (apparently about $450 billion dollars in America alone, last year). It was thought-provoking, to say the least. We probably do far less in the way of certain traditions than many folks, due to geographical constraints; it’s easy to avoid running from one house to another on Christmas Eve and Day when your families are almost more than a full day’s drive away. We still spend too much, though. Some years have been better for us, when we’ve gone into it with a coherent plan to which we manage to keep fairly closely. This year hasn’t been that year. And we’re doing the travel thing, too, leaving on Christmas day – not what I would have chosen, but the best way to maximize our available time before Eric and the boys have to return to work and school.

We have only a few traditions, when it comes to it. We put up and decorate the tree fairly close to the day after Thanksgiving, and I like to do it as a family. We go to the Christmas party that Eric’s company holds for employees’ children. I have a wooden Advent “calendar” tree, on which we hang an ornament each day (Sam is very good about remembering to do this, even when I forget). Christmas morning is organized: we hand ’round the gifts in an orderly fashion, and then we take turns opening one gift, letting everybody fawn over it before moving on. Each of us gets a Christmassy sweater as one of our gifts, and (one of my family’s traditions when I was growing up that I’ve decided to keep) each stocking’s assortment of items includes a magazine or comic book. These are simple things, and while some new traditions may also stick (making recipes from Eric’s mom’s stockpile of holiday treats, for example), there’s nothing too fancy or distracting on the horizon.

And then there’s me, who last year went on a neighborhood run late in the morning, enjoying the sights and sounds of the holiday, and who very much plans to do that this year, next year, and every year to come. It’ll be my own tradition – my time to reflect, breathe, and feel the joy that the day is supposed to have. Yes, family; yes, Christ. But yes, too, to blood pumping fast in my veins, letting me feel breathlessly alive and ready for more. That’s my holiday. God bless us, every run.

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I remember going for days without sleep back in college. Oh, the music one could write without the sanity gained from regular REM cycles! Admittedly, the course work for other classes got a bit sketchier under those circumstances, but it did tend to lend a certain ability to cut through the chaff and say exactly what one meant. Without sleep, while I was taking a self-guided research course one summer, I wrote a positively scathing paper on a particular modern composer who I found (and still find) to be a pretentious lunatic. Turned out that the professor leading the self-guided course had just returned – in time to accept and grade my paper – from a meditation seminar with said composer. Awkward…

Jokes get way funnier when you haven’t slept in a while. Stories get much more entertaining, at least once you get past the initial stage of tired grumpiness, in which you bite people’s heads off if they seem to be straying from a single point. Go beyond that, and the brain becomes far more open to following any tale in any direction. Art is more stimulating – especially when it seems to be moving around inside the frame. And it’s an oil painting. Of still life. Oh, the places you can go!

Of course, there are drawbacks. I’m afraid that Eggs Benedict are on a lifetime ban from my menus, after I ate a plate of them when I came off working an all-night shift at a restaurant and then went to stand in line for financial aid at the student union. I think sleep is required for the digestion of hollandaise sauce, perhaps. I remember that Eric and a friend of ours were having a grand time that morning, having giggle fit after giggle fit over the episodes of “Captain Planet” and “The Head” they’d stayed up watching all night long. One of them would mutter, “‘Man with big head uses secret purple monkey technique!” and they would both be on the ground. I was already on the ground, groaning over the eggs. Perhaps sleep would have been a wise choice for all of us that day.

Earlier than that, back in high school, I remember staying up nearly all night studying advanced chemistry, which I had no business taking in the first place. I understood next to none of it, but I struggled on, and that meant very late hours of rereading the same textbook sections, over and over, as if I’d have a breakthrough moment on the forty-ninth trip through. Oh, I had moments, but only when the words would begin to rearrange themselves on the page and spell out new and exciting messages to me. And I wasn’t even a coffee drinker back then; who knows what I could have managed with chemical stimulants?

Now I am in my mid-thirties, and I could perhaps say that I know better, but the truth is more simple: despite all logic, I’ve become a morning person. Can’t blame the kids; they would prefer to stay up late and sleep even later. This one is all me, and it’s working for now. And so I head off to my comforter, my pillow, and my dreams. Good night!

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Today isn’t that day for me. For starters, it’s only Gabe’s second day of school, so we’re still finding our way into a routine accommodating that. Then there was the pitiful way he’d managed, last night, to convince Eric to get up and make him pancakes for breakfast this morning – unusual for a weekday, when he normally forages for his own food and resents our efforts to so much as suggest alternatives. So there was pancake making today, which was delicious but not only took over the kitchen, but also used up the last of my milk. No coffee for me.

But then some good surprises came, in the form of many new and unfamiliar kinds of squash at the farmers’ market (squash is quickly becoming my favorite vegetable)…and goat meat. Never cooked with it before, but, as I told the lady selling it, I am all about the new.

The unexpected is often very nice, so long as it’s something that fits into what we can handle and incorporate into our lives. Sometimes, though, there are those moments of stark shock, a time when we find ourselves stopped in our tracks, unable to so much as blink, let alone incorporate what we’re seeing or experiencing into our thoughts and reactions.

Eight years ago today, I didn’t expect routine to come easy. I had a three-month-old, and “the usual” wasn’t quite something I could take for granted yet. If I was expecting anything, it was to be a quiet morning with floor time and toys, followed by a short outing to see the new library, opened after renovations just that morning. Instead, tiny Sam surprised me by falling asleep on the floor all by himself, with no nursing or fussing or rocking…and that was because I was too busy being stopped in my tracks, rocked to my own core, to even notice until after it had happened. I was too busy watching planes crash and buildings fall.

The unexpected can be extreme. My goat meat discovery feels ridiculously minor, like a toddler “discovering” the grass in his front yard, having learned how the world could be changed by flipping on a television and finding that “The Today Show” would be somewhat different on a particular September morning. Some days are better boring, better without certain kinds of education.

My sons won’t know a world without Patriot Day. For them, it’ll be like other memorial holidays are to my generation: worthy of note, worthy of solemnity, but not filled with the stark ache that those of us who remember that day will feel, possibly until we pass from this world. Gabe’s class wore red today. He has no idea why. Sam heard me talking about it and knew what I was talking about, sort of, and they’ll likely discuss some of it in school as well, but he won’t “get it.” I don’t know whether to be relieved or worried about that.

May my boys’ lives have a lot more surprise squash than the other kind of surprise. That’s an obvious wish, but it’s the one on my heart today. Many of us may be wiser people for having had our hearts shaken by that day, but some wisdom is too heavy.

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Back in West Virginia, when I was an undergrad, our composition professor was also the choir director at the Episcopal church where Eric and I would eventually be married. We weren’t attending church at the time – typical college students – so our professor eventually strong-armed us into participating in his choir on Sunday mornings. Neither of us had any Episcopalian background in our spiritual lives, so the liturgy and style of worship was entirely new and unfamiliar to us; nevertheless, it caught both our hearts, and St. Thomas à Becket Church will always hold a piece of me. We no longer attend an Episcopal church, but that one was lovely, in its leadership, membership, and spirit.

And its pancake supper.

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No, we had different holiday viewing traditions in my family. Of course, we watched “Rudolph,” “Frosty,” and Charlie Brown; I remember my mom highlighting the specials in our old TV Guide (remember when we all used the print version instead of scrolling through the listings on a devoted channel?), marking off what was showing and when, so that we could pick out the favorites and not wind up plopped in front of the screen at every opportunity. The movie I most remember, though, and to my recollection the only one we actually had on video cassette, was the television adaptation of The Best Christmas Pageant Ever.

I loved the movie. I loved the book, too; it got packed away after each Christmas season with all our other beloved Christmas readers, brought out with fanfare when the decorations were ready to go on display. The movie, though, was always on our video shelf; if I remember correctly, it was a bootlegged version and shared a cassette with C.H.O.M.P.S. (Don’t judge.) We could watch it whenever we chose, but it always seemed to show up around December.

The story is about the Herdmans, a crazy family of unruly kids who stumble across a church’s nativity pageant and decide to take the whole thing over. They fight, steal, sass, and generally cause chaos, but somehow come to their own understanding and interpretation of what the play and the holiday are about. All the while, the churchgoing adults and children go from looking down their noses at the family to seeing that maybe Christmas is more than just costumes and pageantry.

As a little girl, I identified with Beth, the narrator. She was dominated by her friend (the play’s “usual” Mary) and her ambitious mom (the director), and she had the same ideas and worries as they did, but she was the first to start to see the changes in the Herdmans and in her own mind. (For some reason, it irked me that she was “only” in the choir of the play; though the character never expressed any desire to play a larger role, I was seeing myself in her place intensely, and my own frequent frustrations about being pushed out of the spotlight wound up being displaced on her. Tangential, but interesting.)

I don’t know what put me in mind of the story tonight, but I was struck with a sudden urge to revisit it. I think I’ll start with the book first; Sam might enjoy hearing it. The movie looks to be available only through independent bookstores; I might just see if I can borrow my parents’ copy…assuming we didn’t completely wear it out years ago.

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I make myself wait for it all. Christmas stuff isn’t allowed to be displayed in my house until after Thanksgiving (and it must come down at Epiphany, and no later). Thanksgiving is reserved for after Halloween, of course. And Halloween is kept sacrosanct for the month of October.

Then all restraints are removed.

I was never hugely into Halloween until college, when my second freshman roommate (the first was a tragic tale and short-lived, better left untold) was a complete Halloween addict. The day we moved into our dorm room, I found her stringing little flashing pumpkins over her window – in September. They stayed there all year; I grew accustomed to them. When we moved apart after that year, I even sort of missed them.

In my own home, I find myself really enjoying decorating for holidays, and especially for Halloween. It’s just not acceptable, for some reason, to hang shiny purple and gold spiders from your ceiling fans at any other time, and as regrettable a statement as that may make about current societal tastes, it’s refreshing to pry loose the bonds of everyday decorating strictures for one month of the year. I do have to restrain myself a smidge at present, what with my children’s reluctance to allow anything over a PG-level of frightening in the house. (Skeletons are okay, as long as they don’t talk; creepy eyeballs may be acceptable, but blood is over the line.) That’s all right; plenty of years to come for me to go all Hellraiser with the dining room.

Gabe is asleep at present, and I’m hoping to have most of our current stash out of boxes and onto the walls by the time he wakes. He should enjoy the switch in mood, I hope! He’s a little confused about why I’m putting up pumpkins and not birthday cakes, though; he knows that his birthday is in October, so if it’s time for Halloween, why are there no party hats?

Uh-oh, I hear him calling. Time to start the magic!

Postscript:
GABE: “It’s like Christmas…with spiders!”

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Okay, when I was in college, I had to do a senior recital on the piano (separate from my composition recital, where I programmed works I’d written). It was a graduation requirement, so even though I really didn’t want to do it, I had to. Actually, the requirement only stated that I do a half-recital (split at the intermission with another performer) or play at a few college convocations, but my piano teacher was whacked out on something and had me work up enough pieces that they filled a full recital’s worth of time. The college made me perform; she made me perform a lot. What they couldn’t make me do was advertise.

I put up posters, sure, just like everybody did. The time, date, and my name were in something like 6-point font at the bottom. I also scheduled the thing for early on a Sunday morning, when nobody would even be hanging out around the halls between practicing. I think there were only about eight people in the theater: Eric, my parents (Cory, were you there?), my teacher, two good friends who were in my piano studio, and a couple of Malaysian piano students who may have still been operating mostly on Malaysian time.

With all that, I was still petrified and excited, all at once. That’s what I’m feeling now.

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It’s been two years since she died. This will be our third Christmas without her, since she died just before Christmas. I wonder when I’ll stop linking Christmas to her dying, even in the back corner of my mind. Somehow, I doubt I ever will.

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