Kid at heart

There is a baby-shaped hole in my heart.

My life at Georgetown had at least seven hours of kid time built into my schedule on a weekly basis. I taught dance to little ones at the YMCA with Dance DC, and I volunteered in the Child Life Department at GU Hospital -- playing and socializing with the kids in the pediatric ICU and the Hematology/Oncology Unit. I was even promoted to "cuddler" senior year (you know, kind of a big deal), which just meant I wore a different colored volunteer vest and was allowed to hold babies in the NICU. I saw a lot of sad things in the PICU and NICU and even grew attached to a few kids who didn't survive their diseases. But I loved seeing the same little face smiling at me from room 5301 every Tuesday and Thursday; I loved nearly falling asleep with a chubby baby in my arms after a long night in the library; and I loved seeing the kids at the Y get excited about dancing, even amidst their fits of bouncing off the walls (literally).

Performance day at the YMCA.

Now, though, the only kids I see are the ones wandering past the Culinary Training kitchen from the Early Learning Center with their parents in tow. I do have a great vantage point from my desk to adore them, but that gets creepy and I don't get to play with them. There were the occasional young clients at Bread and Roses during the summer (who brought me both great joy and great sadness), but thankfully they're all attending school by now.

This is all reason why I'm grateful to have my kid volunteers around at Bread and Roses. Yes, they have a lot of energy. Yes, they spill a lot of things. But they are so genuinely eager to help and so precious while they do it. One of my twenty-something volunteers convinced this sixth grader yesterday that every time he buttered a piece of bread he had to make a "whoop" sound -- loud but hilarious. Another girl was stopped dead in her tracks when I responded to her sassy question about serving spaghetti at breakfast time by explaining that a lot of these folks wouldn't eat until they came back the next day. It's exciting to think that I might be shaping -- ever so slightly -- these kids' perceptions of service and homelessness. I know that service during my youth, whether wrapping presents with my dad for the McKey Christmas Club or making and distributing sandwiches with my Girl Scouts troop, truly fostered an attitude of service in me. Hopefully the same will be true for the kids who come through B&R...hopefully I can show them how fun service can be, and how easy it is to treat every person with dignity.

a good book is hard to find

Well, that's actually not true at all. Good books are quite easy to find, but that's the title I chose because I feel like I'm dating this book I'm reading. It's called Cutting for Stone, and I love it. I really do. But I just can't finish it. Abraham Verghese is incredibly talented. He writes beautifully and sophisticatedly and tells a story unlike any author I've read recently. But my goodness, I cannot get into the plot, and it breaks my heart. Perhaps it's because after a day of work with homeless folks and housed-but-unemployed folks, followed by hours spent in intentional community, I need something with a bit more levity. Perhaps it's because being out of school has shortened my attention span or dulled my intellect. If it's the latter, then I'm in big trouble for the rest of my adult life because it's been only four months since I was last studying (MCAT). Maybe I'll come back to it. I hope I do. It is bizarre how it feels like such a big decision to walk away from this book. The fact that it's monsoon-ing outside, I'm sick, and I drank six cups of coffee this morning only intensifies my feelings.

As a memorial to the time we spent together, here is a quote from Cutting for Stone that I liked: "But you don't always know the answers before you operate. One operates in the now. Later, the retrospectoscope, that handy tool of the wags and pundits, the conveners of the farce we call M&M -- morbidity and mortality conference -- will pronounce your decision right or wrong. Life, too, is like that. You live it forward, but understand it backward. It is only when you stop and look to the rear that you see the corpse caught under your wheel."

I'm now accepting book recommendations that are not The Hunger Games, with which my housemates are obsessed but which I'm just not interested in reading (not least because it was written for a 13-year-old audience).

Wisconsin Pride

People in L.A. have pointed out to me that I have a lot of Wisconsin pride. Even at Georgetown, somehow all the 20-odd Wisconsinites knew each other, and that just bred more cheesehead love. There are a lot of things I dislike about Wisconsin, such as this embarrassing fact, but then there are things like this that just make me laugh and miss the kind folk of the Dairy State...

The red is an area where there are more taverns than grocery stores, and yellow is the opposite. Enough said.

Things that have happened

Sorry for neglecting you, blog readers. My only explanation for my absence is that I got hooked on the show Parks and Recreation (go watch it immediately), so every time I opened the internet to write a blog post I got sucked into the next episode...it's a wonder I didn't fail out of college. Here's a crash course on the mid-October to mid-November happenings of my life: 

We went to San Diego for Halloween weekend.

The seven casamates of CMC dressed up as loose interpretations of the seven days of the week. I was Wednesday (from the Adams Family).

San Diego was beautiful (especially Balboa Park, pictured below), and further convinced me that L.A. is ugly.

But then Los Angeles tried to make us think it was pretty with this sunset on our drive back.

On Halloween night, we walked down Santa Monica Blvd. in West Hollywood with a couple thousand other Los Angelenos in costume.

Jackie and I "volunteered" at a gala benefitting a fellow L.A. JV's agency, which actually turned into us just being the youngest, least-wealthy guests at a ritzy country club in Pasadena.

My parents visited! In typical Arnold fashion, we spent the weekend eating good food and drinking good wine.

We visited a winery in Temecula.

And drove along the coast to the Mission at San Juan Capistrano.

My parents took the whole casa out to a Korean BBQ restaurant, where the waitress shot us disdainful looks all night long for being Korean BBQ beginners. But we didn't care because the meat was so. flavorful. 

We met with some of Casa Ita Ford for a hike near Pasadena.

Other news-in-brief: St. Joseph Center had a staff-wide retreat, where I was reminded of all the great things going on at our agency. We did a few 5K walks for local organizations, including the food bank I visit every week for Bread and Roses. We sent a new class of almost-graduates from the Culinary Training Program to their externships. And Bread and Roses is getting ready for a Thanksgiving feast on Tuesday!

Oh, and the Packers are still undefeated, which I will now enjoy from the Packers bar I found in West L.A.

A Voicemail Chronicle of 2011

I recently emptied my cell phone's voicemail, and found a pretty entertaining chronicle of the last year of my life (the oldest message was from Dec. 2010). A couple exciting job interviews and offers; my five-day spiritual director before I knew she'd be so fantastic; our contact person in Tupelo, Miss., for Habitat for Humanity showing hints of her insanity (which I didn't pick up on at the time); my bank informing me my account was overdrawn (oops); my current supervisor setting up my Bread and Roses interview in March; a tricky near-reveal of the NSO 2011 theme; a friend's happy birthday message; a couple MCAT well-wishers; and a few proud-dad congratulatory messages along the way.

I got sentimental for a minute and thought about how blessed I am to have had all these people and experiences in my life...and then I deleted them all. (Which means my voicemail is back open for business, folks!)

Writer's Block and Falling Leaves

I've felt inspired to blog on many occasions recently, but I have been facing a peculiar case of writer's block. A couple weeks ago, one of the volunteers at Bread and Roses passed away unexpectedly. Although I didn't know this almost-thirty-year-old fellow well, it was a jolting experience with reality that I couldn't move past without somehow processing it in writing. I don't want to eulogize him or reflect on my guilt over feeling that he was an inefficient volunteer; instead, I just want to post this poem (sent to the JV's by a nun who knew we missed autumn) in his honor. I considered quoting a theologian or philosophers who had spoken eloquently on the reality of death, but poetry expresses something prose simply cannot.


The Falling Leaves by Joyce Rupp


with a constant chorus of cicadas
the leaves tumble down,
from long, thin silver poplars,
they twirl to the ground,
dancing the Autumn death dance
beneath the great blue sky.


the leaves seem glad at the going.
(is there something I don't know?)
sparkling in the October sunshine,
they fill the air with gentle rustling.


one, then another and another,
on they skim down from above,
bedding the forest table before me
with comforting crunches and crackles.


this gigantic death scene of leaves
does not smell of sorrow and sadness,
rather, the earth is colored with joy
and the leaves make music in the wind.


why is this dance of death so lovely?
why do leaves seem so willing to go?
are they whispering to each other,
urging one another to be freed?


maybe "you first and then I'll follow"
or: "you can do it, go ahead"
supporting one another gladly
in their call to final surrender.


I have not yet discovered the secret
of the serenity of sailing leaves;
every autumn I walk among them
with a longing that stretches forever,
wanting to face that death-dance
and the truth of my own mortality.