Summing Up 2009: Our Choices, Our Worries, Our Faith

Anyone who knows me very well at all knows that I've never been a religious person. Raised Catholic by a father who wielded church attendance like a weapon, I pretty much got out of the institutionalized religion business as soon as I could (college). But lately I've been coming around to this idea about God and trying to believe in something greater than us puny humans on this earth. If only to provide myself some solace as I sometimes wonder slightly if we made a mistake in changing our lives and coming here to Florida. We aren't making it financially and it's scaring the crap out of me.

This Fall we've realized our house is not sustaining itself, not like it was supposed to, due to all the money we put into it over the summer while still trying to sell and some unforeseen repairs since we moved out. So it's become clear that we have to somehow find a way to get rid of it. As early as feasible in the new year we'll put it back on the market and we really hafta hafta hafta sell it this time. If we don't, we face some grim choices. And since we need to get this all settled one way or another before we can go to Panama, it turns out that that damn house is the biggest obstacle to moving forward with our plans.

David keeps lamenting the 100k we lost in equity in just a few short years, but I know we are far from alone in that category. The only difference between us and these other unfortunates is that many of them are willing and able to hang onto their houses until the market will rebound (supposedly). For David and me, that's not an option, we just want to be free from what's become a huge burden. It's too bad because at one point we both loved that house, and it was pretty good to us over the years (minimal upkeep needed and the rents helped us pay for our wedding).

So that's basically the story of Why We Aren't In Panama Yet. And also explains why David got some (low-paid) IT contract work a while ago. I've been sporadically trying to get work also, here there and everywhere (for instance, today I'm applying to a little cafe in the sweet village of Venice Island to the south of us), but applying for "real" jobs in IT also. To that end, I recently had a phone interview for software tester job up in Tampa that went really well. Would mean moving again (otherwise it's over an hour commute from where we are) and delaying Panama, by at least a year probably, but might be worth it if we can meet our expenses and replenish our savings.

It feels like a let-down though, after all our grand plans, and I guess I also feel a little bit embarrassed. I often find myself wishing this was easier; I really thought we had possibly gone through the hardest parts of the transition to a new life, but I guess not. In fact, David said just today that we are going to be in transition for awhile yet, most likely and so my conclusion is that I need to accept it.

But along the way to acceptance, and in moments of weakness, I can't help but wonder...were we too stubborn? Plowing ahead with the move to Florida even when the house didn't sell? Should we have worked longer, stayed in Milwaukee another year, saved more money? But then a deep inner voice (God?) say no. It's good that we detached from our settled lives in Milwaukee (as detached as we can be while still owning the house), even better that we left the safe but soul-sucking jobs, and it's OK to do this in sort of spaced-apart-stages. It's OK to do this anyway that works best for us, actually.

We certainly have no regrets about trading up in terms of warmth and avoiding the Great Winter Storm of 2009 (reason for my hyper-focus on Milwaukee weather this winter - it makes me feel like we definitely made the right choice!). What we're not missing vs. what we are loving, below:




































I keep thinking that if I have enough faith and pay enough attention to where "the flow" is taking us, we will figure out the right choices, find the right path. Not that I think God is going to magically work everything out for us (God helps those that help themselves, remember?), but that really, everything is going to be all right ultimately. I don't need to panic or to make this into a disaster because there's no point to such self-inflicted suffering. It doesn't help anything. David keeps telling me we'll never be homeless (he can always get a job as a nurse) and I believe him. Besides - my loyal readers will be glad to know - things thankfully aren't quite that dire yet.

We are figuring it out, step by step, and will prevail, whatever that ends up looking like. In the meantime, we are very blessed to have each other, and to have the tenuous life we have created in Florida so far. And we hope that 2010 brings us all more joy and abundance, no matter what the bank account balance.

Happy New Year everyone!

The Day The Music Died - Part Three

"Let's go fishing in the morning
just like we've always done
you can come inside and wake me up
we'll pack and leave by dawn
we will pack and leave by dawn...
and the truck will climb up slowly
and we'll see how far we've gone
and the hills will stretch before us
they are rolling on and on
they are rolling on and on
and the fish will watch our boat
with envy and with fear
because we will live forever
and our days are slow and dear
and our days are slow and dear"
~"Fishing in the Morning" by Dar Williams

After the funeral, we went up to Lake View Cemetery right next to Volunteer Park, a place so beautiful and pristine it's like a country club for dead people. I'm still not sure how we got him in and wonder what some of old money Seattle might think of having this ex-hippy, Catholic Worker House founder in their midst - a man who I think still subscribed to a Socialist newspaper at the time of his death, despite being a home and small business owner.

Dad's old friend Larry Shoup, who he and my mother met in Ethiopia during the Peace Corps (where they went shortly after their wedding in 1966), gave a graveside Eulogy. It was yet another incredible speech that revealed more aspects of his life. They regularly went on backpacking trips in the Cascade and Sierra Nevada mountains, and their "week-long hiking adventures were always one long conversation about all that was going on" in their lives, their families and the world.

Larry choked up and finished with:
"I want to end by discussing another of Paul's endearing attributes, his hopeful nature. Paul loved to fish, and was always optimistic about catching another big one. This hope was manifested in his fishing nickname - 'Last Cast Hirning.' So when it was time to go, he always wanted to make one last cast of his line, and then another, and another, solemnly promising each time that this was his 'last cast.' Sometimes he would indeed catch one and an enduring scene in my mind's eye is a vision of Paul reeling in a fish with the excitement that was his trademark. One has to have hope to do anything, and Paul's high level of hope, his optimism, was always an inspiration and a lesson for me."

We walked back for the wake, and my friends gathered around me in the front yard of my childhood house like mother hens, clucking and handing me beer after beer. Heidi had flown up from San Franscico, which meant the world to me and I've probably never thanked her properly for it. At one point, she and I snuck down the alley to have a clandestine cigarette, like we were thirteen again.

I remember my uncles, my mother's sweet brothers up from Portland, OR, befuddled in their grief like the rest of us, and helpless to do more than strong-armed carry in cases of Henry Weinhard's, for fortification of the mourners (one woman said it was becoming "too much of an Irish wake" for her, as she departed).

I also remember faces from communal masses of long ago at "Round Table" (an adjunct household to Pacem in Terris), tear-streaked talking about how it was the end of an era, so much seemed lost somehow now...something like that, I wish I had a been a little more sober to have taken it all in, but I guess it's pretty understandable that I needed to numb out. I don't remember how the evening ended, I just remember how empty the house seemed without him, and how I knew that it would never feel full with his presence again.

And what was the rest? Afterwards, when people gradually stopped dropping by the house with their casseroles and condolences, I prepared to go back to some kind of life in Milwaukee. But all I wanted was to remain in Seattle among all that was familiar, and with my family in that cocoon of hurt.

Before I left, I had my long hair chopped off, as if in some sign of grief, but really it was something I'd been wanting to do for a long time. I was pretty much immediately sorry, and I'm sure it wasn't easy for David, who I had started dating in June before I left for "Union Summer." Even though I told him about it ahead of time, what he must have thought when he picked me up at the Chicago airport - poor guy was only just getting to know this long-haired chick and there I showed up looking like Ralph Macchio (see the "Post Script" post).

I felt so strange coming back to Milwaukee like that - I had planned to return after the internship finished and pick back up with house painting and working my cafe job and desultorily reading academic stuff to prepare for second year of grad school. When I got back into town, I wasn't due at either job yet, and so David and I went camping in Kettle Moraine State Park, among the gently rolling hills of rural Wisconsin.

After setting up the tent, we went to the beach and I walked into the slightly fishy water of the small lake, despite a sky that threatened thundershowers and lightening. I dunked my shorn head under, and hoped - for something, anything less painful to happen next.

The Day The Music Died - Part One

So bye-bye, miss american pie. Drove my chevy to the levee, But the levee was dry. And them good old boys were drinking whiskey and rye Singing, "this'll be the day that I die. "this'll be the day that I die." ~Don McLean "Amercan Pie" 

It was July 1996 and I was away in Ohio for "Union Summer" - a month long internship through the AFL-CIO - with my friend Meta. I was at the house of one of the SEIU organizers, taking a break from passing out flyers and knocking on doors of low-paid nursing home workers (trying to convince them that forming a Union was in their best interest), when Meta got the page and called me. 

This was pre-cell-phone days and I had given my parents Meta's pager so they would have some way to get ahold of me while I was gone from Milwaukee. You know, you always do that, give an emergency contact number, but you never think anyone will ever need to use it. Meta didn't say much when she called, just that "you need to call your family in Seattle, now" and I knew it couldn't be anything good. 

I got my mom first, but she was crying too hard to talk so she handed the phone over to Dave, my older brother, the responsible one who always took care of things. Well, he would have to take care of things now, a lot more than he ever expected to, at the age of twenty-seven. I heard him say something like the following: "There was an accident - on the hiking trip - Dad fell, and...he died Michele..." I don't know what came out of me, probably "oh my god" and some kind of protest "how could that be?!" and then crying. Someone brought me some toilet paper for the tears and probably sat next to me, touching my shoulder. I was mostly in shock, I'm sure, and just wanting someone to tell me what I was supposed to do next. 

Meta came to pick me up, and took me back to the dorms at Kent State where we were staying, and helped me make my flight arrangements. We had to drive all the way from Akron to the airport in Cleveland? Cincinnati? I don't remember exactly, but recall there was one of those dramatic mid-western thunderstorms on the long drive, that continued during my red-eye flight back to Seattle: ...as we travel across the map of this world and move through the crowded cabin or simply stare out the small window we are given, watch god play with the fluff of our lives: the weather outside like lasers or a child playing with matches illuminating the clouds and night-sky... 

This was right after the crash of TWA flight 800, initially thought to be a terrorist bombing, and so security was newly heightened at all U.S. airports. [see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TWA_Flight_800] Because of this, I wasn't met at the gate like I expected; instead Dave, my sister Stephanie and Dan Raymond (close friend of the family) met me at the security checkpoint, and I remember how strange that seemed at the time. 

The next part is a bit of a blur, with all kinds of decisions and arrangements to be made about the death certificate, mortuary services, transportation of the body, the "viewing" and funeral, most of it taken on by Dave, as I remember. A lot of it seemed to be happening in gray haze and slow motion, until the technicolor moment when his casket arrived. Kenna, my mother's college roommate, had driven the body all way from Omak, her town on the other side of the Cascade mountains, where his fall happened. She had also arranged for the casket - the most simple pine box with a beautiful carving of a bear, done by a local Native American wood-worker. My aunt, who flew in from L.A. with my poor shell-shocked grandfather (your children are supposed to outlive you, after all), commented on this: that it was a perfect symbol for my father, who was gruff and forbidding, but also beautiful and cuddly and majestic, in his own way. 

I remember being there when the van pulled up with his casket - I had been in high-stress mode in moments leading up to the viewing, with all the family and friends in town, and wanting to do right by him, trying to take some of the burden off Dave. When my father's body finally arrived, and they brought its heavy weight in to rest on casters among flowers and photos, it suddenly seemed all too real and I just broke, cried my first really hard cry, which was like lifting a burden I hadn't even realized I was carrying.

Growing Up Catholic Worker

When my parents were younger than me and had a lot less money, they did an incredible thing: they packed up everything they owned into a blue Volkswagen bus and drove, with their kids (a two-year old me and my five-year old brother Dave, not to be confused with David, my husband), and another couple with their 2 children, roughly the same ages (Heidi and Johnny).

They drove from Los Angeles, CA - where the two couples had met in UCLA married-housing, location of my father apparently giving up on his dream of being a professor, because no one was hiring white men doing African History any more, and the dissertation was too hard to complete while working to feed a family - to Seattle, WA to start a Catholic Worker House.
http://www.catholicworker.org/historytext.cfm?Number=4

Growing up, I took it for granted that my parents had done this sort-of weird thing, in their mythical hippy past, back when they didn't have wrinkles or IRAs and probably smoked something called "grass" - but now I'm amazed by it, what bravery it must have taken, what faith and belief that they really could change the world with their actions.

I wish I could have witnessed the conversations leading up to their decision, how they planned it all out, or didn't - maybe they just went? What were they thinking though, as they left L.A., what did they think as they drove all that way on Interstate Highway 5 to Seattle, how were they imagining this was going to work out for their young families, did they think that if it went bust oh well, we have time to figure out some alternative? Legend has it that I pulled poor Heidi's hair the whole trip up there - between that and whatever else four young kids can dish out, plus the usual road-trip frustrations, I don't know how they made it.

They arrived late-summer 1974, in pre-Microsoft Seattle, before a Starbucks on every corner and McMansions springing up in the ever-expanding suburbs. I picture it all pioneer-rough, the air smelling of salt from the still pristine Puget Sound, with way more trees and overall "green space" than exists now. When the guys at Pike Place Market threw fish because it was just what they did, not because tourists stopped and took photos, or anyone had written about it for a business book parable. A new place, and one hospitable to young people with ideals and the energy to make the much-talked-about actually happen. But admittedly, some or all of this could be my own romanticization of the past...

In any case, with some help from the local Jesuit parish, they found a large house in what was, at that time, a slightly marginal section of the Capitol Hill neighborhood. There they created Pacem in Terris ("peace on earth" in Latin), envisioned as a "house of hospitality" for the hungry, the poor, the sick and lame, for battered women and their children, for those down on their luck and even just the lonely who wanted to serve; "what Jesus would do" for people, if he were alive and owned a house, basically.

And a soup kitchen in downtown Seattle, called the “Family Kitchen” was soon to follow. There are photos of me having my third birthday party there, standing up on a chair with ice cream on my face and cake in my hair, grinning without restraint, among Seattle's homeless. I don't remember much, not the peace protests or strange transient men or communal masses, but I remember drinking powdered milk (it was awful), and the produce from their dumpster diving, gathering fruit flies in the room off the kitchen (kind of awful also, but it was cheap and therefore fit the mission).

But it wasn't sustainable, at least not for my family, or not for my father. We moved out after about a year, to rent a house a few blocks away that my parents eventually bought and in which my mother still lives. I don't know why we left exactly but it may have had something to do with what's mentioned in this excerpt from a 1974 Seattle Times article -
"The Ray-Keils and the Hirnings decided to pool their resources and try communal living in Seattle, on Capitol Hill. They freely admit the still young experiment has not been all roses. 'The thing is that Larry and Alice have moved a lot further from consumerism or middle class lifestyle than I have.' Paul said. 'Intellectually, I’ve reached the same conclusions they have, but I’m finding it a lot harder to adapt my life.'"

He went on to talk about how hard vegetarianism was for him, how he couldn’t give up meat, but I think it was more than that. I think it was a lot of things I would love to be able to ask him about now, but mostly I think it's like my friend Heidi (still my friend, despite all the hair-pulling) says:
...here you are, thinking in some ways that quitting your job and looking for a new better way to live is giving your dad the F- you, or defying him, or letting him down somehow – but really, you’re living the life he couldn’t maintain. One he could intellectualize but couldn't risk committing fully to. The life he wanted when he had young children and he was dreaming of the future and wanted to make it right for you.

Don't know what my life would have been like, had my family stuck it out at Pacem in Terris. Heidi has her own story to tell, as part of the family that stayed, but we were the family that started it and then went away. Even so, I love and admire my parents for trying, for doing something incredible with their lives, that I get to inherit, and fully appreciate now. As Heidi also remarked -
Maybe they didn’t make huge change in the world like they tried. Maybe there is still injustice, and war and nuclear weapons and overwhelming poverty. But the one thing they certainly changed was who we are. Maybe that’s the real change they accomplished, and what they should be most proud of, in some ways. That's the you that's willing to give yourself to this new life -- and not let fear stop you.
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The Catholic Worker movement has a long and illustrious history which this post can't hope to encompass, see links below for general info, but in terms of the specific Catholic Worker house I experienced, this was all I could find online (a very cursory search):
http://www.pieandcoffee.org/2005/06/09/catholic-workers-of-the-pacific-northwest/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Worker_Movement
http://www.catholicworker.com/
http://www.catholicworker.org/communities/volunteers.cfm
http://lacatholicworker.org/
http://www.occatholicworker.org/
http://karenhousecw.org/
http://www.geocities.com/casa_maria_worker/