31 Days of St. Ignatius

July 31st is the feast of St. Ignatius of Loyola, and Loyola Press is hosting a month long fest for the saint!  There is a calendar with interesting Ignatian links for each day (full disclosure, one of my reflections is featured on  July 9), watch their Facebook stream for other features during the month.

Who is St. Ignatius of Loyola?  Project Gutenberg has his autobiography in a number of electronic formats, there is a short biography here and here, or you can read Margaret Silf's imaginative conversations with Ignatius, Call Me Lopez. Or watch for a daily interesting (to me at least) Ignatian fact posted here...

Fly the friendly skies - or not

I got up before dawn this morning to fly to Chicago. There is not much traffic at 5 am, and though the lot was pretty full, I found a spot to tuck the MINI without undue difficulty. I got to the terminal to find a line for security that was more than an hour long. Wound around and then backed up into the next terminal.

Worried that I would miss my flight, I asked the TSA person who was directing people to the end of the line if the lines were shorter at other terminals. "You can't get through unless you go thru security here," she assured me. "The other security lines are closed, then," thinking this would explain the unusually long line. "You have to go through here" she asserted, "you can go look if you don't believe me." I took a deep breath and headed to the back of the line. Then I realized that as I walked across the bridge from parking, I had seen the security lines in the next terminal over, they were open then, and they hadn't been long. So I asked the TSA police stationed there if all the rest of the security lines were closed. "No, of course not." Ah. On my way past I let my previous informant know that all the lines were open.

In under 15 minutes I had walked to the next terminal, gone through security (no line here) and found my gate. We boarded, there are a boatload of kids on board (5 in the row I'm in alone, including a munchkin from a huge family that got here so late from security there were no seats together left who is sitting in the center seat. The little ones are so excited. I can hear one little boy say, "Are we are in the air yet?" The one next to me pulls her seatbelt tight, "I'm ready for blast off." If only. Thunderstorms in Chicago are delaying us.

We taxied back to the gate, and many of the young ones are confused. "Aren't we there yet?" I'm busy praying for the parents. It's all friendly, but I do wish we were flying!

Reapply after swimming, vigorous activity or capsizing

Yesterday Crash and Math Man dusted off the boats and dug all the rigging out of winter storage (and put air in the very, very, very flat tires of the double-decker trailer). Today, my merry men and I headed off to sail at a nearby state park.

Math Man was coming from his morning golf game, so the boys and I got the boats up there, off the trailer, rigged and in the water.  After all that effort the teen-aged team was hungry, so they went off to get a snack and I slathered on sunscreen and took out the Fiat Lux.

The wind was tricksy, puffing here and pooping out entirely there.  But there was a whole fleet of other Lasers out there racing, gorgeous to behold.  Nigh on inspiring.  So inspiring, I thought I'd give a series of racing tacks a fly.  So my first tack of the season, I pushed the tiller over, pulled in the main sheet and tried to come about without losing my wind.  It was a bit rough around the edges, but hey, it was the first tack of the season.

Next tack, the wind puffs as I bring the boat across the wind.  Uh-oh.  The full sail and I are now on the same side and boat begins to roll.  I scramble for the other side, but too late.  The laws of physics have no sympathy, and certainly don't wait on my necessities.  The boat was going over, and I was going in.  Splash, bang.  I'm in the water.

I haven't had to right a capsized boat in deep water in forty years, and never without backup or another person to assist.  I wonder at my age if I can do it.  I make sure I'm not fouled in any of the lines, swim to the back and hang my full weight onto the end of the center board.  Slowly, but surely, the sail comes out of the water and the boat rights itself. Whew.  OK, now to get back in without letting the boat sail away without me.

I am short.  I am so short that the extra three inches of the personal flotation device kept me from being able to reach the inside of the gunnel.  Argh. I strip off the jacket and heave it into the boat.  Bearing more than a passing resemblance to a beached whale I'm certain, I follow the jacket into the cockpit.  I gather the lines and my dignity and am once again sailing.

It's good to know I didn't have to tread water waiting to be rescued by the lake patrol.  I lost neither glasses nor hat in the mishap.  I had brought dry clothes for the end of the day.  I could put more sunscreen on (having both swum and engaged in vigorous activity). It was, as Chesterton would have it, an inconvenience rightly considered — that is to say, an adventure.  If only the bruises didn't look like they are going to be quite so spectacular...

Sounds of summer writing

There are no bells or buzzers at college to tell you when classes are changing.  Inside the classroom I can tell when it's nearly time to go by the way students begin to wink out — first one or two, then entire rows vanish — as they transport themselves mentally, if not physically to their next destination.  In my office, which sits at a crossroads along a linking corridor between wings, I can hear the rustle of backpacks and bodies as students flow like sand through the neck of an hourglass from one wing to the other.

Writing in the study under the eaves at home, such hour markers are entirely absent.  I can look up from desk, shocked to find two hours or more have slid undetected through my fingers.  There is a silkiness to time in the summer.  The birds sing endlessly outside, the leaves of the enormous oak outside my window stir sleepily in the breeze, the sounds of the train that run nearby brush by my consciousness.  There is the continuous throaty hum of lawn mowers and leaf blowers, fighting their endless and losing fight against entropy, trying to contain the abundant growth of summer.  And then...

There is the high pitched squealing from the neighbor children's motorized trikes on the driveway across from me.  I find myself scrunching up my shoulder blades in the aural equivalent of a squint, and have to take a deep breath and let their sounds go.  And the car alarm on the next block that goes off for 10 minutes at a stretch that has me routinely fantasizing about printing out the research that shows they are not deterrents to theft and taking a walk until I find the offending car.

As much as I'm momentarily annoyed by the snags in my summer silks, they are good reminders to stand up and stretch. To let the sounds of summer not just dance around the edges, but to soak into my being.  To take my book, my yellow pad or even my laptop out onto the back patio and breathe.  To stop trying to rein in and control the abundance of summer's growth.

The hardest part of teaching

Crash is home from WJU, thoroughly soaked in Greek.  He's adding to his cooking repertoire in return for tutoring me in Greek, this week learning to stretch the dough for my thin crust pizza.  (My crust is surely not as thin as Stratoz' or my great-grandmother's strudel, you can't quite read the paper through it!)

As we put together the pizzas, I kept wanting to show (do!) rather than coach.  I would hand the spoon back, or give him back the grated parmesan cheese or...until finally Crash popped out with, "The hardest part of teaching is letting someone else do the fun part."

Yep.  My respect for my parents grows ever deeper.

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My general chemistry students aren't likely to believe that I actually enjoy working out a hard problem, and it's hard to coach them through it instead of just indulging in the doing myself.  But it's true.