there are some things I just can't explain...

I just must share this: At the county benefits session today, a middle-aged man asked (in total seriousness): "In light of the increased awareness of male breast cancer, can men also take advantage of the county's free mammogram program?"
I'm not making this up.

Sunday

Sundays are now my favorite day of the week, and this is why: I get to spend all day with friends who to me embody all that is good about this group we call Christians, these imperfect lovers of a servant King and his beloved humanity. When people can come and cook and eat together, inspire and encourage and challenge, talk earnestly and passionately and yet without hurt or anger or pride about issues that affect our community and world, that is beautiful. It is such a vastly different world than the "Christianity" of bitter and divisive talking heads, of prosperity gospel and empire and self-righteous blindness. And I cannot express how grateful I am to be a part of something that is so life-giving and good. It is good. And I am blessed beyond measure.

the Nobel "Peace" prize

Just a thought: Isn't it hopelessly cynical to award a Nobel Peace Prize to the Commander-in-Chief of a country with by far the largest military budget in the world? If this is what we hold up as creating peace, haven't we set the standard just a bit low? As I understand it, PEACE is not merely the absence of tragically short-sighted wars. Peace is healing, it is paradigm-shattering. Peace means children can grow up in a nation in which they do not have to fear that their government will be overthrown because of ideological differences with a superpower; it means that families will have good food and clean water; it means that more money is spend on education and health care than weapons systems. Obama may be many good things-- but he is not the representation of peace.

not making sense

One of the most jarring experiences of my Mexican travels last month occurred at 3am at the U.S.-Mexico border in Nogales, Arizona. Woken from a frozen and not-too-deep sleep, my foggy brain struggled to comprehend the identity of the uniformed officials walking down the bus aisle towards me. Surely they must be Mexican-- we're entering Mexico, and they're speaking Spanish. Turns out they were American, and equally mystified by me. "Where are you going? Why are you going there? Do you have family there? You're traveling alone? Why? How much cash do you have? How long are you traveling for? You're just traveling? I'm going to keep your passport for now, please get your things and come with me." I became increasingly annoyed as they searched my bag and asked me questions about my employment-- or lack thereof. After it was all over (the closest thing I had to contraband being an enormously heavy book on the history of the CIA that actually would double pretty well as a weapon in a pinch), I asked-- Why did you single me out? Had it been any kind of reasonable hour, the answer would have made me laugh out loud: "You don't make sense."

But of course my presence on a Mexican-bound bus in the middle of the night, with a backpack, little cash and a big book, made perfect sense for an adventurous soul who has just lost a job and wants to explore the tantalizingly close country to the south. What the Border Patrol agent meant was-- you don't make sense to me. I didn't fit into his idea of normal. And of course he's right-- what I was doing might very well sound like lunacy to 98.5% of the American public. But what he didn't know was that I come from a family with a distinct indifference to "normal."

The story as I have heard it from my slightly scandalized grandmother is that in 1980, with their six week old daughter in a box between the front seats, my parents up and left their rural Northeast homes, families, and lives, and drove to Tucson, Arizona. They didn't know anyone in that whole huge desert mountain state. I'm still not sure why they did it. But they moved into a tiny apartment, installed the baby's crib in a closet, and set about creating a life in this run-down desert mequite-scented city. They watched gloriously violent thunderstorms break over the mountains at night, scavenged food from dumpsters, took pictures of their white-blond home-birthed babies by cactuses. Eventually they bought a house in a bad neighborhood where they persuaded vegetables to grow in the rocky soil, endured a break-in (and stayed!), raised bees and rabbits, provided refuge to refugees (not the official, government-sanctioned kind) fleeing CIA-initiated violence in their Central American nations, and home-schooled their young children (one of my earliest academic memories is my father telling me about the atrocities Columbus committed on the New World's indigenous peoples). Even in Tucson's notoriously weird culture, I imagine my parents' lives never "made sense."

Later, they moved to Mesa, a sprawling suburb of Phoenix, and for a few years flirted with normalcy-- my mother taught high school, my father got a Master's degree, they owned a house with air conditioning (still no TV). But the year my brother and I turned 7 and 9, my parents moved us to a distant archipelago nation in the Pacific Ocean. For a four and a half year stretch interrupted only by a six month cross-country roadtrip return to the U.S, our lives were normal only to inhabitants of the Phillippines. I grew up thinking there was nothing terribly unusual about absurdly jam-packed buses, coup attempts, day-long games of capture the flag in the tropical forest, neighbors roasting dog for dinner, blackouts and bucket showers and black sand beaches.

I guess there's a time for all of us when we realize that our parents-- and the lives they have created for us-- are not normal. When I was ten, during our six-month return to the U.S., I remember tearfully begging my parents to let me be a "normal American kid." Which is funny now, because what on earth did I know about being a normal American? Nothing, but I did my best to learn after we returned to live in rural Alabama and then Georgia. As a teenager, my parents' steadfast refusal to do what made sense-- my ideas were closer to the view of the Border Patrol guard-- were a constant source of embarassment, and at times drove me to hysterical rage. It is not normal, I wailed, to make your children pull weeds every day, to dig through public trash receptacles for aluminum cans, to allow my little brother to get down on his stomach in a grocery store and search for coins underneath vending machines, to buy clothes at thrift stores, to fertilize the garden with urine, to live in a house with 8 foster kids, to charge me ten cents per mile to drive the family car. I suspected that we washed and re-used ziplock bags and shopped at thrift stores because we were abjectly poor, because that was better than the appalling alternative that my parents chose to live this way. None of it made sense to me when I compared our life with that of my classmates, who shopped at the Gap with their fashionably dressed mothers and received brand new Audis for their birthdays.

For years I tried to escape my parents' oddities. I got a job and bought new clothes and makeup, stealthily threw away ziplock bags, kept my friends away from the house, dated the boy with the Audi and went on ski vacations with his family, agonized over the ultimately hopeless quest to become popular. I opted for a very small, very white, very conservative university with Georgian architecture and a well-pressed population of beautiful people studying business management and nursing. I was going to make sense, to have a normal life.

But something in my DNA just wouldn't let me be normal. Cracks formed in the carefully constructed image, and I began to do surprising things-- working at a youth hostel for a summer in Amsterdam; dumpster diving for Krispy Kreme donuts; volunteering to spend the night sleeping on the cold floor of a homeless shelter; developing a love for all things Latin. I sought out friends who ridiculed sororities, convinced me to sell blood plasma and smuggle food out of the cafeteria in my backpack instead of buying groceries, and traveled to exotic places. The decision that ultimately would prevent me from ever being really content with normal was signing up after graduation to spend a year of voluntary service in Jamaica. The truth is, throughout it all I never even got close to being normal-- no matter how hard I tried to strangle the independent spirit my parents instilled, I couldn't achieve the normalcy I craved. After a while, I think I just got tired of fighting it, and that's when I discovered the richness lurking outside the mainstream-- the absolute terrifying beauty of throwing open your windows to the gritty rainstorm of life.

Now I'm no crazy hippy-- I hope to own a house, and I do buy new clothes sometimes and spend far more money that my parents would approve of on going out to eat. But it's the "nonsense" that makes my life rich and interesting and rewarding. I've traveled to places my parents have never seen, and I went through all of law school without owning a car. I re-wash ziplock bags, compost, make bread and only shop at thrift stores on 50% off days. I aspire to represent poor and crazy people. I too left the East coast for the rocky wide open spaces of Arizona. I don't make sense to Border Patrol agents-- and I think that's a good thing.

Now my parents live in the Atlanta suburbs in a house without conventional heating, raise ridiculously tame chickens, occasionally eat roadkill, and restructure their acreage by manual labor and scavenged materials. Recently, my 13-year-old brother (home-schooled!) wrote to tell me about our Dad's latest project: Laura, he got some mortar free from a development, but it got rained on, so "what he does is puts it in a screen and shakes it so that some mortar dust falls out into a bucket and repeats this even though we probably don't need it. "

Yes, Phillip, your parents don't really make sense. And my prayer for you is that you never will either.

unemployment: my unexpected vacation

I’ve been unemployed for over a month now. How I came to this status is not really important, except to say that the only thing unpleasant about the ending of my employment as a private DUI attorney was the timing. I had been drifting along, convincing myself to endure with the tantalizing prospect of a different someday, when Someday rudely and prematurely arrived, stripped of its rosy vagueness, hard and fresh with an unblinking undeniable stare. So I did the things that a rational person does: I cried, and called my mom; applied for all the jobs I could find, and for the first time in my life filed an unemployment claim. And then very quickly, I realized that time unmarred by commutes and schedules and 8 to 5 was a precious gift, something to be treasured, valued, lived. That was when my post-employment life became not a holding of breath, but a deep exhale.

First, I went to Mexico. Twice. Two days after my emancipation, not two miles south of the border on the way to the coast, I was greeted by a police officer with a radar gun, who earnestly insisted that I pay $20 for recklessly endangering the lives of school children. The children, of course, were nowhere to be seen, but rather than question his motives, I launched into a spontaneous, impassioned and grammatically questionable defense argument. I would hate to have a bad experience on my first visit to your lovely country, especially when I didn’t see any signs, and as you can see, my speedometer registers in miles– not kilometers– per hour; please, give me another chance; if you catch me speeding again, I’ll gladly pay the ticket and thank you for it. Whether he was surprised to find a gringa speaking Spanish or just exhausted by my persistence, the officer released me fifteen minutes later. Exhilarated by the success of my audacity– there is nothing more thrilling to an attorney than winning a lost cause– I pulled back into traffic, the Mexican-plated cars racing past (apparently only foreigners are a danger to the invisible schoolchildren). No matter-- I’m Mexican beach-bound, my $20 intact.
In all, I spent 10 days in Mexico, feeding my untamed nomad side, reveling in the alternate universe that lies just across the border from Phoenix’s strip-malled and sprawling civilization. I slept on the beach, and, awakened at 3am by a song which loudly, systematically and thoroughly described each and every body part the singer intended to shake, I confronted the drunken owner of the music with empty threats to call the police (and it worked!). I ate countless tacos at linoleum-topped tables along the street, embellishing the richly flavored meat and handmade tortillas with the contents of ever-present condiment trays: pickled carrots, three kinds of salsa, cucumbers, onions, pico de gallo, guacamole. I logged countless hours on buses, watching the landscape change from desert to green mountains as an eclectic assortment of Spanish-dubbed movies rolled on the overhead monitors. I wandered through Alamo’s colonial cemetery, the gravestones blinding white tribute to forgotten generations against a limitless blue sky. I took a train along the Barranca del Cobre, the wind in my face as I stood in the corridor between train cars, flashes of blazing verdant canyon and murky fume-filled tunnels racing by in breath-taking succession. At the bottom of the canyon, I explored the glorious ruins of an abandoned hacienda, golden afternoon light pressing through tall windows in the crumbling adobe and stone walls, horses and rusting cars grazing in the overgrown rooms. In the plaza of a tiny forgotten pueblo along the river’s edge, I dodged children– so many!– who ran and ran to the tuba-driven polka rhythm of a tireless band of hefty middle-aged men in boots and white hats. Even after the last shout of "Viva Mexico!" on El Grito night, that distinctly Mexican beat narrated my dreams.

In Mexico I experienced the generosity of strangers, my initial guarded hesitancy turning to slightly embarrassed gratefulness. In a tiny colonial city of brightly painted stucco mansions, the hotel owner and his friends invited me to join them as they discussed Tecate-influenced philosophy and played guitar on a lamp-lit balcony, while banda music blasted from trucks full of young men circling the plaza below. A stranger in Los Mochis gave me a ride to the train station at 5am. Backpackers from Spain, Columbia, and Germany became traveling partners and friends. A chance encounter with a young store owner in Cuahtemoc turned into three hours of conversation with his family. I left amazed by the irrationalities of global commerce (twice a year, he drives to Atlanta to buy Mexican-made clothing to re-sell in his store) and enriched by the warmth of these strangers, my homesickness assuaged. Ten days flies by in Phoenix, but across the border it’s plenty of time to remind yourself of how big and wonderful and chaotic the world is.

Of course, all spontaneous backpacker trips come to an end, and then real life has to be confronted– but what does that look like when you don’t have a job? I had an interview, but then– well, I’m not just going to sit around waiting when there’s life to be lived. A group of us walked ten miles through a canyon, burdened like mules, the red pink white rocks becoming more spectacular at every turn, past the jarringly trash-strewn village of the Havasupai tribe, to see the falls. All forgotten when we plunged into the pool at the bottom of impossibly high Mooney falls, pressed towards the thundering torrent, spray so fierce and hurricane-wild you literally cannot take another step forward. I stood and shouted in the presence of this raw and incomprehensible power, a taste of the Divine in liquid form. In Prescott I hiked with friends to the top of a fragrant pine-scented mountain and surveyed the forested horizon from a fire tower. Back in Phoenix, weeks of record-breaking summer heat finally relented into breezy mornings and cool nights.

Although part of me wishes unemployment was a constant itinerary of Mexico road trips and spectacular scenery, my normal routine in Phoenix offers so many small beautiful chances to savor life. I make, and dutifully check off, absurd to-do lists: Form a corporation. Sew cloth napkins. Plant a garden. Go to a No More Deaths meeting. Write to Barbara Kingsolver. Call Grandpa. Find that New Times article on dumpster diving. Make a Christmas card list. Inspired by a book of Barbara Kingsolver’s essays, I’ve rediscovered my love of writing. I paint and clean and make phone calls for my church. I went to an art museum (because it was free) and made a valiant and unsuccessful effort to understand modern art. I’m enriched by long lunches with friends, and I pass hours– formerly unjustifiably luxurious amounts of time- immersed in books and introspection. I’ve even taken a few pro bono consumer law cases, which so far has meant writing threatening letters to the nasty woman who took a car from her developmentally disabled son-in-law. I go for long runs through Indian School Park in the cool glorious mornings, and mad dashes up Camelback to watch sunsets. In short, I am loving life.

I know that this unintentional vacation will end. That I will at some time in the not-too-distant future again be a productive, employed member of society, a person who wears suits and arrives early to an office. But for now, I have learned to enjoy the incredible gift of time– time to breathe deep, re-evaluate, and dive deep into life.