mejaka

You have but one firstborn--

One chance to celebrate

Or mourn

First words, first steps, first days of school;

That first real job, first date.

We mothers look to them--

Imagine, hope and dream

and plan.

I thought

this leaving time would be 

so full of hope, an aching sweet

wing-spreading day;

A circle on the calendar, the morning

of a great adventure and a sending-off.

But some things cannot be unsaid

or be undone--some things

Are what they are, will always be.

I have but one firstborn.

One chance.

To celebrate, or mourn.

It's time to go digital.

I've resisted this.  Digital cameras are one step further from artistry; technology can do so much to fix photographer error.  But then again, only so much...so I suppose it still comes down to the mind behind.

But that lag time.  It's awful. Or was.  I used a friend's digital--granted, one that cost over a thousand dollars retail--and guess what?  Lag time so small my mind didn't notice.

But you know I'll buy one and a week later they'll come out with something better.  That, to be honest, is going to be the great economic challenge of my children's generation.  Brett and I have had, at every stage of our lives, more money than our parents did, and a higher standard of living.  But at the same time, we've spent money on things they never dreamed about.  Computers.  Cellphones.  Two cars (okay, I'm sure they all dreamed about that, as in, wouldn't it be nice to be rich and have two cars, and they do have two cars now).   

But technology is moving so fast that I foresee a day when keeping up with the Joneses--a bad human habit, which once meant buying a nice house or car and today means having the latest cellphone as well--will translate to buying new things every MONTH. 

Still, with my Pentax still exhibiting that annoying tendency to shutter problems whenever the flash is attached, and with Polaroid closing and APX film fading--changes are coming, and I'm just not sure fixing the Pentax would be a good bet for my photographic future.

Plus, there's the books.  I just experienced them.  Not that I haven't known they existed, but I'd never actually tried putting my own photos (or in this case, my friend Lauri's family portraits of us she did last spring) into a computer template and making a book of it.  I'm nearly done now with my first complete book, having spent several hours in the past few days testing various services.  And I'm hooked. This is what I wanted when I reluctantly started scrapbooking.

Best thing is, I'm pretty sure that Brett is already convinced that it would be cheaper to buy a $1000 digital camera and make an occasional (three times a year?  Four?) book than it is for me to shoot and develop the number of photos I do and then make those dangerous trips to Micheal's (or worse, a real paper-arts store) to buy papers and pens and page protectors and binders and--oh, wow, is that carving medium?  And look at these calligraphy inks!

So.  My birthday, in June, is very near the day when we expect to have all our remodeling-and-kid-crises paid off...Hm...

It's hard to fully enjoy Donny Osmond's interpretation of Joseph (Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat) after seeing the Utah State production in 1991. 

The video was in the church library's weedout pile this past week, so I grabbed it.  I've wanted to see it for a while.  I'd seen the show first as put on by the Blackfoot (Idaho) community theater, and it was cute and fun and funny in a small-budget, big-creativity, happily hokey way.  And of course, I'd seen the USU production, which featured my brother as Joseph.

Donny's decent.  But John was better.  And the USU staging topped the film's, easily.

What I especially remember about the USU production:

Seth, then two and allowed in only because a friend of John's and of the director's vouched for him, was mesmerized through the entire production.

Despite the hijinks and craziness of the opening scenes, with Israel cruising in on rollerblades and Potiphar's wife's cornucopia-boob costuming, the instant they threw Joseph/John into prison the audience fell silent, and as he sang "A Land of Our Own," people began to cry quietly.  Donny doesn't quite pull that off, but John did. We rolled into that scene on a wave of laughter, but John changed the mood like changing the lighting, making the prison, and the pain--and the promise--as real as truth.  "Children of Israel are never alone; for we know we will find our own peace of mind, for we have been promised a land of our own."

That final scene, with the coat of many colors that fell over John's shoulders and filled the stage and spread out over the stairs...

Seth came and watched the Donny version with us, for a while, but he left like last week after just a bit over an hour. I think he wants to be comfortable here but he doesn't know how right now.  And all we can do is just keep throwing open the door and our arms until he figures it out.   

The children of Israel were children of the promise, covenant people, and so is he. What he doesn't understand is that the promise will only be fulfilled if he lives up to what he was meant to be. 

We hadn't talked about it for days--maybe even more than a week--but I remembered yesterday afternoon that it was the day of the full moon snow hike.  Brett had noticed it on the website for our local college's outdoors program a couple of weeks ago, but there'd been so much going on we'd forgotten.

Until I remembered.  I was about to drop Miss Anna off at a party, and it occurred to me--this is the day of the snow hike.  And more, my son Braden had just informed me that rather than a full moon, we were to have a lunar eclipse.

I called Brett to see if he was up for going, but with less than an hour and a half before meeting time, he wasn't answering his phone.  I left him a message in which I tried to strike the right balance between wanting to go and being okay with staying home.  I wasn't sure I could arrange it all in the hour I had left, and unless both of us had pretty high enthusiasm, it wasn't going to work out.  Brett generally folds quickly in the face of complications where adventure is concerned.

But think of it--showshoeing in the mountains under a full lunar eclipse.

By the time Brett called back I had reduced the complications from six to four.  Someone would pick the boys up for their meeting.  Now there was just Anna to arrange for, clothes to figure out, food, and getting there on time.

A friend was willing to take Anna.  Clothes could be pretty simple--Army long johns under jeans, they said, not ideal but good enough.  If we grabbed fast food on the way, we might just make it.

And so we did. 

So that's what I did last night.  A four-mile hike. I walked through the forest in the glow of a red moon reflected off the snow.  I saw the eclipse and walked in its darkness, awed by the blaze of light just below Orion's belt, stars I had never seen in Orion before, and welcomed the shadows back with the moon.    Awesome.

Until moving here, I had never seen a wild moose. The first I saw was during a berry-picking excursion with some friends. We were actually still in the cars, driving up a winding mountain road, and as we came around a corner we found ourselves tailgating a big cow moose. She seemed inclined to stay on the smooth road, and trotted ahead of us for a good two minutes before she finally crashed into the shrubbery and up a draw on one side of the road.

I was beside myself, she was so amazing.

The next sighting was a cow and two calves along a stretch of rural highway down the center of the state. Cars were pulled over to watch as she tried to find a way to cross. She was moving up and down parallel to the highway at some distance, looking at the traffic, advancing and retreating. We watched for ten minutes, until she finally found a break in traffic and loped across the highway and down the slope on the other side. I got some shots of her and the calves against the snow, dark against white, a sense of vastness more than a sense of moose.

The next time, I was in the park not quite a mile from my house, talking to a man about his impressively well-trained German-strain German shepherd and about the huge awful French-castle-styled golf course development for which he was project manager. He was clearly not a local, so when he said calmly, "Hey, wow, look at the moose," I expected to see one of the local herd of deer. A moose in McCall Park?

But when I turned around, there it was, a young moose not 25 yards away. I had my camera but no film. We watched him for twenty minutes or so as he went from one area of the park to another, looking for a way out that didn't involve walking through a human neighborhood.  The project manager said he'd email me some of his digital shots, but he never did.

And then, yesterday.

I was driving out to my son's friend's house, where my son--a new driver--had put his father's truck into a snowbank. As I drove along, my younger son and I were talking about the local moose sightings and how we wished we could see one. I said, "Dang, I WANT TO SEE A MOOSE!" He said, "I'll see one before you will," subtly referring to a large wooden cutout that sits in a field along the road which we were following. I laughed...As we came to the field, he looked out across it and said, "I see a moose!" The moment he said it, I--looking out the other side of the car--was seeing the ungainly hulk and thick sturdy legs of a huge bull moose at the far end of a long driveway. He was calmly stripping the thin branches of an ash tree of berries, right in front of a house, and someone was throwing snowballs at him from the garage.

I wanted to turn back immediately for my Pentax.  But my husband and middle son were stuck in the snow, and I had to drive on.

We got to the house, hooked up the tow strap, and I pulled the truck out. On the way home, we kept close watch for the moose--and there he was, right in the same yard.

He was still there when we got back with the camera (now equipped with a 270-mm lens). We watched for a half hour, shooting pictures. I walked carefully about halfway down the 40-yard driveway, making my husband so nervous that he brought the car down although he likely felt weird about the whole experience (standing alongside the road shooting pictures, being on someone else's property and in their driveway, and so on).

I'm old-school yet, with a film camera, so it will be tomorrow before I have the pics on disk, but I can't wait to see them.

Moose are such a strange combination of awkwardness and grace, of ugliness and beauty, of gentleness and menace. They represent wildness in a way that the deer or even the bald eagles here don't.

They are among the most incredible wild sights I have seen to date.  Being in the presence of a moose makes being human feel like a very insignificant thing, after all.

What would you do if you had one day to live and you were still young and healthy?
Submitted by Green Tea Adelaide.

I would gather my children, my husband, our extended families and a handful of close friends around me and just enjoy each other.  Go for a walk, play Frisbee, have a picnic, talk about eternity.  We would have a family prayer, and I would ask my father to be voice.  Each person there would know why I loved and valued them more than anything else on this earth, and would rather be with them doing quiet things than anywhere else, doing anything else.

There is a great deal of this earth that I would like to see, a lot I'd like to do--but if I had only 24 hours, my top priority would be to give every minute of love and friendship to them that I could.  On the scale of things not to be missed, love wins.  As for adventure--with an adventure and discovery as big as the one I would have ahead of me, anything else pales in comparison.

My father can raise one eyebrow way up his forehead in one abrupt move.  This is the reason, in all the Polaroids of my childhood, it seems my brother, sisters, and I are always laughing.

I remember Polaroids when they were part of the domestic landscape--when every picture was an instant picture, spit out of the side of the camera like a flippant tongue.  We were coached--"Hold it here, by the tab.  Don't open it yet!  Not yet...not yet...okay, let's count to ten and then you can peel it back...One...Two..."  We huddled around waiting for the moment when we could finally separate the photo and watch the colors fade in slowly--bright shirts, dark hair, pale skin.

Today Polaroid has announced the end of the instant camera.  The company will quit production of its signature product, close plant doors, and by 2009 instant photography will be relegated to memory and history.  That's when Polaroid predicts the supplies will run out.

That big old bellows-fronted box camera of my parents'--along with the Brownie that I haven't seen for decades--will be a collector's item.  My memories of those instant-picture Christmas mornings will place me in time, as part of the last generation who casually posed for a Polaroid--without thinking of it as "a Polaroid."

Just...a picture. 

Today I taught algebra.

It's not my favorite subject to teach, but I can do it.  I actually enjoy math much more than I did as a middle-school student myself.

I hate to be among those who reflect on their own pasts and make comparisons, but here I am.  In six periods, I had one class that didn't absolutely resist any form of management or redirection.  One.  Out of six.

Three classes were over 30 students each.

One class got so belligerent while we were preparing to play a game that I had the TA recollect the gamepieces.  Sending 14 kids to refocus (in another teacher's classroom, who is trying to teach) is out of the question, so I did one of the stupidest things I've ever had to do as a teacher.  I made them sit with their hands on their desks (to keep them from throwing papers around, a recurring problem) and talked to them about their behavior and my responses.

At one point, one of the girls raised her hand and said, "Can I say something?  Will I be sent to refocus?  Can I be honest?"

I let her speak.

This _seventh-grade student_, who had been rolling her eyes and huffing from before I even took roll, then said to me quite matter-of-factly, "I don't like you.  I think you're grouchy and crabby, and I don't like subs who are grouchy."

She seemed to feel she was perfectly within her rights and entirely in line to make this comment.

I responded that I was not there to be liked, but to be a teacher.  I prefer to get along well with students and I generally have no problem with them, but if I am forced to choose between being liked and being a teacher, I will be a teacher.  I added (perhaps unwisely) that being liked by a somewhat random middle-school student was inexpressibly irrelevant to my life. 

Another girl then spoke up to say that if a teacher had problems with the classes she was teaching, sometimes it wasn't the students; sometimes it was the teacher.

I conceded that that was true, but that in three years of substitute teaching I had had exactly three lousy days.  Given my record of enjoying nearly every assignment I'd ever received and rarely having difficulty, I told her I had no qualm hanging the responsibility for this one on the students I was teaching--students who had refused to quiet down when asked, had showed repeated disrespect, had engaged in the poking-and-property-stealing behaviors more appropriate to the developmental levels of 3rd graders, and who had by their behavior brought us to this ridiculous point.

Then I let them go.

Today I taught algebra.

It's not my favorite subject to teach, but I can do it.  I actually enjoy math much more than I did as a middle-school student myself.

I hate to be among those who reflect on their own pasts and make comparisons, but here I am.  In six periods, I had one class that didn't absolutely resist any form of management or redirection.  One.  Out of six.

Three classes were over 30 students each.

One class got so belligerent while we were preparing to play a game that I had the TA recollect the gamepieces.  Sending 14 kids to refocus (in another teacher's classroom, who is trying to teach) is out of the question, so I did one of the stupidest things I've ever had to do as a teacher.  I made them sit with their hands on their desks (to keep them from throwing papers around, a recurring problem) and talked to them about their behavior and my responses.

At one point, one of the girls raised her hand and said, "Can I say something?  Will I be sent to refocus?  Can I be honest?"

I let her speak.

This _seventh-grade student_, who had been rolling her eyes and huffing from before I even took roll, then said to me quite matter-of-factly, "I don't like you.  I think you're grouchy and crabby, and I don't like subs who are grouchy."

_Raising Sand._  Alison Krauss and, no kidding, Robert Plant.  Absolutely mesmerizingly beautiful.

I heard the review on NPR and intended to look for it, but my friend Kim beat surprised me with it this past week. As much as I love music, as much as I've been steeped in exceptional music since childhood, very few songs strike a chord this clear.  Billy Joel's "And So It Goes."  Some of Simon and Garfunkel.  Five for Fighting's "Hundred Years" (which came out shortly after my husband's eldest brother died in an airplane accident).  Some of Starland Vocal Band (but not "Afternoon Delight," their only really bad song).  Some musical-theater songs ("Children Will Listen" from _Into the Woods,_ for example).  Words and music have to work equally, because I'm a musician and a writer in love with melody, harmony, and language.

Krauss...and Plant.  I'd never have guessed.