My Subconscious Drinks Riunite and Watches Daytime TV

During that writers' conference I attended in April, there was one session advertised in the brochure as an opportunity to mine one's subconscious mind for writing material using relaxation techniques and guided imagery.

That's code for "hypnosis" if I ever saw it, so naturally I signed myself right up. If there's anything I love more than looking up an old boyfriend on Facebook to see if he's bald yet, its New Age religion.

Now, in the past I've had no success getting in touch with my spiritual self. I was the person at your high school retreat who kept one eye half open and peered surreptitiously at her peers during quiet prayer. I've tried meditation, and found it nearly impossible to shut off the running commentary in my head. But I am desperate to try, and darned if I was going to miss an opportunity to mine the old spiritual quadrant, and for writing material, to boot.

The presenter, Suzette Martinez Standring, began the session by speaking very eloquently for some time about the writing process, about the kind of writing that resonates most with readers, and the importance of evoking all five senses in one's work. I took copious notes, and before I knew it, it was time to go under.

The process was familiar, one I'd tried to follow countless times before when awake with insomnia or in the throes of an airborne panic attack.

The room was darkened, and we were encouraged to breathe slowly and deeply.

To still our minds.

To get centered.

To tune in to faraway sounds.

And to relax each part of our bodies in turn.

Next, we were to imagine a cord of light extending from the bottoms of our feet down to the center of the earth. We were invited to visualize ourselves at the top of a staircase. We would take three steps down. With each step, we would journey deeper and deeper into ourselves so that when we finally reached the bottom, we would be "in trance."

I was skeptical, but earnest. When I got to the bottom of my visual staircase, I was supposed to enter a place of great beauty and serenity. It could be anything I wanted it to be, as long as I felt at peace there, and comfortable.

I didn't see much. So, I pictured myself lying face down on a patch of lush green grass in a forest clearing. I have always enjoyed lying face down in grass because - and you didn't read it here - it is just like hugging the earth. Zero degrees of separation! To me that is very profound.

Anyway, I'm lying face down on the grass and trying to conjure up the feeling of sunlight on my back. It seems as though a babbling brook should be there, so I install one, and spotty sunlight beaming through the trees, as well.

The problem is, I know I'm not really in a forest. I know I'm still in the Torch Lounge at the University of Dayton. My hyper vigilant brain has failed me again, but I keep on visualizing the heck out of that forest clearing because I am going to get hypnotized if it's the last thing I do.

After a few more minutes of this, we are told to let a memory come to us, anything at all.

I get nothing.

After a little while, though, I see a red ball with a faux weave pattern, the multi-purpose kind every kid whose ever gone to school in America knows well. And that ball brings me back to Mr. Finneyfrock's gym class on President's Physical Fitness Test Day, like this:

I am ten years old. It’s President's Physical Fitness test day at school and I am hanging from the playground chin-up bar in a test of endurance. My size 2 feet, encased in white Keds with rainbow stripe friendship pins beaded through the laces, dangle several feet above the loamy ground. The mustachioed Mr. Finneyfrock, in soccer cleats, shorts, and yellow jersey, is standing next to me with his timer. It is warm out, and a soft breeze is blowing. I’ve been up on the bar for almost four minutes now and am barely showing signs of fatigue. My classmates stand in a semi-circle around me, cheering for me and my freakish strength.

I continue to hang there, wondering how much longer I should stay. My arms are not very tired. In fact, I like the slight burn, the sense that by the strength of my thin, tanned, arms alone, peppered with the golden threads of hair I detest, I am being held aloft. When I finally lower myself down, I am an elementary school hero. "IT'S A GODDAMNED RECORD!" Mr. Finneyfrock bellows.

Granted, this was not an unfamiliar, buried memory, but it was unbidden and true. Thing was, I couldn't for the life of me figure out what it was supposed to mean. I thought about it in the context of my current situation and the soul searching I've been doing to find my calling in life, about how I hoped that calling would include writing in some form of another. (Ironically, being at a writer's conference was unearthing all the self-doubts that have always plagued me in this regard.) I decided it meant that I was strong, stronger than my outward appearance belies. And then I didn't think about it again.

But last weekend I was sitting on my couch, staring at the wall and picking my cuticles. The kids were asleep upstairs, and my husband was down in the wine cellar, updating his inventory. I was considering making myself a cup of bedtime tea and taking a stab at some prophetic dreams, when suddenly it hit me.

Hang in there.

I'm supposed to just hang in there, it's as plain as the nose on my face, as obvious as the chin-up bar in my waking dream.

And . . . as cliché as a Hallmark card. Apparently, my subconscious mind has been drinking Riunite and watching Lifetime TV.

(But something is going to happen.)

I know it.

B-Baller

I had a great aversion to organized sports as a child and made it my business to become invisible during game days in gym class.

If we were playing dodge ball - and we always were - I would cower in the back of the court until my number was up, hoping against hope that I didn't get hit in the face, chest, or rear. These were by far the three biggest danger zones, but strictly speaking, there is no graceful way to exit a dodge ball game.

During softball season, I was the kid picking flowers in the outfield and praying that the ball did not come within a ten foot radius of my person, lest I be forced to catch it or, more horrifying still, decide where to throw it next.

Soccer was the most benign of the sports evils because you could stand around looking vaguely occupied and pre-emptively skedaddle when the ball started heading in your general direction.

The P-Dawg, who spent his youth league years hiding in the broom closet, also confirms having had a great disdain for organized sports.

Which is why we were both surprised to find that the little V-meister has been dreaming of becoming a baller and dying to join the junior Lithuanian basketball league which meets in the church gym on Saturday afternoons.

If you've never had the opportunity to watch a group of five and six year-olds play basketball as I did yesterday, I would highly recommend it on the basis of entertainment value alone. The aspiring athletes did fairly well with the dribbling, passing, and blocking drills, but things started falling apart about thirty minutes into practice when the scrimmage game began.

There were about three kids who actually knew how to play, and the rest of the motley crew traveled up and down the court on their periphery, like electrons spinning around an atom's nucleus. Every once in a great while, a proton or neutron would accidentally gain control of the ball, and then one of two things would happen:

1. He/she would stand paralyzed until someone came up and plucked it clear out of his/her hands.
   
   
2. He/she would take off running in the wrong direction.

For us parents watching from the sidelines, it was excruciating. Periodically, you would hear someone screaming instructions like, "PASS IT! PASS IT!", "Other way! OTHER WAY!" and "Take your hands out of your pants!"

The V-meister, for her part, was an enthusiastic though cautious participant, running up and down the length of the court on the exact same trajectory (just inside the sideline), but never attempting to take control of the ball or receive a pass. Whenever her team scored, she would shout "Yea!" and do a little jig. Every once in awhile when playing defense, she would remember what Coach Cliff taught her about blocking and randomly stick her arms up in the air - never mind the fact that there was no one from the opposing team, or any team, anywhere in her general vicinity.

But she loved it. She has advised us that she wants to play again next week, and is requesting that the P-Dawg install a net in our driveway so she could practice every day.

I'm proud of her. Basketball is the most entertaining and least offensive of the ball-centric sports.

Still, she must have gotten a recessive gene.



(I was too busy screaming from the sidelines to take any pictures of the game, so here's a random gratuitous V-meister shot, just for the heck of it.)

Decisions, Decisions

I am mired in indecision about the V-meister's academic future. Her tenure is up next year at the shining beacon of a Montessori pre-school/kindergarten where she's been happily ensconced since the age of three, and though I would gladly continue to deposit her there every morning until college application time, we must move on.

So I have been diligently attending open houses and scheduling classroom visits at area schools in hopes that one of them will speak to my heart. In fact I am really hoping that one of them will speak directly to me and just tell me what to do already, so I can stop picking my cuticles while sitting on the couch and staring vapidly out the picture window. The choice pretty much boils down to a private Montessori school with no religious affiliation, or a Catholic parochial school.

This may be a case of over-analysis, but in my head I have already made a future Nobel laureate or slovenly derelict out of the V-meister based on where she attends grade school next year. And the problem is, though I always assumed my children would attend Catholic schools, now that I've witnessed the Montessori magic firsthand, I can never go back to not knowing the kind of opportunity it affords.

The P-Dawg, who has been guzzling Montessori Kool-Aid, feels certain that if only he'd gone to Montessori school, there would be a cure for cancer today or at the very least, he'd be surgeon general. He was very bright as a child, but felt completely unchallenged in the traditional school environment. Consequently, the P-Dawg spent over fourteen years goofing off in the back row before deciding to get his act together. And the V-meister is a lot like her father, so for P-Dawg the choice is obvious.

I, on the other hand, enjoy a healthy Montessori Kool-Aid buzz, but still sometimes crave a good old fashioned glass of parochial Hi-C. I'm pretty sure that if I'd gone through Montessori school, I could add fractions today instead of Googling "what is two-thirds times two" whenever I have to double a recipe. But I did get many good things from Catholic grade school, even though a lot of my memories involve desperate cowering in the back right quadrant of a dodge ball court.

As much as I believe in the Montessori method, a part of me thinks my children would benefit from a mainstream school experience. I already feel a little defensive when I tell people my kids go to Montessori school because they are obviously assuming it's interpretive dance all day long while the teacher smokes a hookah pipe out back. And even though the P-Dawg could have become surgeon general, he just as easily might have grown up to be an incense burning, basket-weaving, dulcimer playing Naderphile who can't hold down a desk job. (Not that there's anything wrong with that.)

So I can't totally give up the idea of sending V-meister to the bright and cheerful Catholic school around the corner, where she can wear a cute little uniform jumper, ride an orange bus, watch Old Yeller, get Jesus, memorize multiplication tables without understanding what they mean, and be bullied by pint sized tyrants wearing clip-on ties. I won't lie, I want her to fit in with the kids in the neighborhood and have friends at the pool.

But I also want her to enjoy school, learn fractions, grow independently in the direction of the person she is meant to be, see things in terms of the big picture, and have the opportunity to work ahead in the areas where she's ready.

I know the decision seems like a no-brainer, but it isn't.

Anyone out there a product of Montessori education? What do you think, in the long run?

The Bad Egg

I must have been six, with pig tails, saddle shoes, knee socks and a hunter green plaid uniform jumper. I had two friends - Mary Catherine and Sarah. They were nice girls, like me, though they did not always save me a seat at the lunch table.

We ate in the auditorium, with its penitentiary-like windows and lingering Lenten fish fry smell. On rare occasions, narrow beams of palest light invaded to expose the dust mites swirling overhead. The auditorium roared with restraint at lunchtime, a buzzing cacophony of indoor voices and folding chairs scraping endlessly over wide planked wooden floors.

I had not managed to secure a safe seat among my friends that day. To my right sat Dominic DiNunzo and on my left was Kristie Fini. Between the two of them they had a smorgasbord of delectable middle class American lunch fare: bologna sandwiches on white, chocolate milk, chips, Ho-Hos.

I opened my metal Hollie Hobby lunchbox and rooted around. There was no sandwich, but a piece of European rye, an orange, and a hard-boiled egg. On the egg was a message from my mother, written carefully in number two pencil: "I love you very much." It was adorned with hearts and my mother's trademark signature, a swoopy capital "M."

Though I would have preferred an All-American spread (and an easily pronounceable, non-ethnic name) I liked hard-boiled eggs, and this one in particular heralded a sudden rush of love for Mama, at home in our kitchen doing motherly things.

Kristie Fini was first to notice it.

"What. is. THAT?"

All heads within earshot turned towards me and my hard-boiled egg, which I now clutched tightly in a sweaty little hand.

Dominic Di Nunzio chanted, "Rima has an egg! Rima has an egg!"

It was true; I could not hide it. I could only stare intently at the pock-marked table edge, trying to control a wildly quivering lip and a sudden desperate longing for my Mama, who was still the center of a world now shimmering unsteadily behind a salty fog of tears.

I wanted nothing more than to be ensconced safely with her at that moment, despite - and because of - that stupid hard-boiled egg.

This post was my contribution to this week's {W}rite of Passage Challenge, which was to describe an elementary school lunch. You can read posts from the other participants here:

You Gotta Love Nuns

We took the kids to the natural history museum over the weekend, where they saw their first planetarium show.

The beginning of the presentation depicted a daytime sky. As soon as the sun appeared, the little J-dog dutifully shielded his eyes, even though we told him it was OK on account of it being a planetarium and all. He watched the rest of the show through a crack between his fingers.

It's a proud testament to my hyper-vigilant parenting style (DON'T LOOK AT THE SUN, KIDS! ARE YOU LOOKING? STOP LOOKING! YOU'LL BURN OUT YOUR EYEBALLS!), and it reminded me of the fifth grade, when a once-in-a-lifetime total solar eclipse occurred in our hemisphere.

It just so happened that this very special eclipse was even more spectacular if you happened to live, as I did at the time, in the deep south. In my little Catholic grade school, we spent many a science period preparing for the auspicious day by making shoe box solar eclipse viewers. I don't recall the exact details, but the shoe box solar eclipse viewer is a low-tech sciencey-type of contraption whereby you can indirectly view an eclipse without blinding yourself.

On the morning of the eclipse, the brothers Rama and I traipsed off to school brimming with excitement about the phenomenon we were to witness that day. The buzz in my classroom was reaching a fever pitch as we fifth graders tinkered with our viewfinders and prepared to file outside to witness the scientific marvel that was mere minutes away.

But it was short lived. Only moments later, our diminutive and roundly feared principal - Sister Patricia Ann - walked in. She pulled down all the blinds, confiscated our eclipse viewers and had us put our heads down on our desks for the duration.

We couldn't be trusted not to look straight at the sun. Someone was bound to burn their eyeballs out.

My mom experienced the eclipse standing in our backyard. She said it was the coolest thing: twilight at ten o'clock in the morning, even the birds were still.

And I guess I can see where Sister Patricia Ann was coming from, but I've never really forgiven her. I associate "eclipse" with the gluey smell of my fifth grade desktop, and I always wonder: has anyone actually burned their eyeballs out?