I was making bread. I do this often. Yesterday it was pizza crust. And I know that instant yeast was invented just so I could skip the “proofing” step, but did you know that the proofing step is one of my favorite things? So I put the warm water into the bowl. And I sprinkled in the yeast. And the salt. And, because I wanted to watch it do some fun stuff, a little sugar. And I watched, nose almost touching the rim of the bowl. And the yeast got wet and started to sink down into the water, a few heavy little flecks at a time. Then, as I sat there and smelled the magic yeasty smell, it started to dance. The little flecks of fallen yeast rose up as great blobs of frothiness. In different rhythms and in different places in the bowl, they got their groove on and floated up to the top. I stared as they crowded each other out of the surface and started rising higher, above the water level, until they’d become this frothy, airy cloud of perfect yeasty gorgeousness.

Did you know that yeast will proof and rise without sugar? I make bread without sugar all the time.

But did you further know that if you want to watch it jive like I wanted to watch it jive last night, you need to add a little extra sweetness? There’s a lesson in there for me. I know it.

I am grateful for the things that rise to the top and the sweetness that allows the process to become a beautiful thing.

Um.

Still there.

I am a romancer of learning. I love to know a bit about everything (or not everything, as you may choose to look at it).

And I’m not alone.

This week, I’ve made friends with Walt Whitman, which is a riot. Kind of like reading a stream-of-consciousness blog. He’s the best. I’m all kinds of inspired. And listen to this:

BEGINNING MY STUDIES
Beginning my studies the first step pleas’d me so much,
The mere fact consciousness, these forms, the power of motion,
The  least insect or animal, the senses, eyesight, love,
The first step I say awed me and pleas’d me so much,
I have hardly gone and hardly wish’d to go any farther,
But stop and loiter all the time to sing it in ecstatic songs.

See? Uncle Walt was romancing the education, too. And look where that got him. He was the quintessential American poet (until Maya — Maya forever).

I got a copy of “Leaves of Grass” from the library this week. It’s the crumbly newsprint copy that holds that old-book funk, making my eyes water and my teeth itch. The cover has a picture of Uncle Walt looking like Santa Claus in his madman’s beard and his suede hat, and carries a purchase price of $1.25 (twelfth printing, 1964). I may be laying all my faults bare today, but I confess I wanted to play with the poems before I committed. I’m ready to commit now. I want to get my own copy. I want it hardbound. I think I’ll buy it for me for my birthday. I’ll add it to the pretty black sweater I bought myself last month and hung in Husband’s closet and the Alice Walker poetry book “Hard Times Require Furious Dancing” which is gorgeous and was 80% off at Border’s last week. And then I’ll stop buying poetry books for myself. And sweaters. And I’ll let someone else wrap them all up for me.

And I’ll revel in the fact that it’s okay for me to romance the education. To peek in. To flirt with knowledge. To date around when it comes to writing style and reading choices and book buying commitments. I can be the jack-of-all, master-of-none, and that is fine. That is me. That is how I learn, how I live, how I love to discover. The things worth working for are there, and they are important, and even crucial, but for me, they all revolve around relationships, not accumulated knowledge.

If it’s different for you, more power, pal. That’s great. I admire the ability and the desire to plumb the depths. And please pardon me while I swim around here in the shallows, enjoying the stunning life in the tidepools, the sunlight playing off the shiny rocks, and the heaviness of the wet sand.

Last night I did the Valentine’s dinner, with a little something that was each person’s favorite. That by no means should be misinterpreted to say that everyone liked everything on the table. But everyone ate. And everyone loves stuffed mushrooms. Isn’t that funny?

So while Kids and Husband cleaned up dinner, I snuck upstairs and finished up the object lesson for Family Night. Which went a little something like this.

I put 5 wrapped gifts on the ottoman that serves as coffee table/laundry central. They all had the same wrapping paper (plain white – who knew such a thing was possible?) and a different ribbon (so I could remember what was inside). Then I told everyone to pick one. To pick THE BEST one for them.

Grabbery ensued.

Not really. They all picked until there was only one left, which Kid 4 gave to Husband. Then I asked them how they chose. One kid said that this bow was the best color. So I said, “Good. You chose based on appearance. Okay.” Which made her glance around with a perfect, guilty look on her face. Someone else said, “This one is the one everyone would have chosen if I hadn’t chosen it first.” And I said, “Good. You chose what would make everyone else jealous.” Then, “This one was closest to me.” Which I loved, because it let me say, “Oh, great. I’m glad you didn’t have to do any work for yours.” Husband said, “I didn’t choose.” “Okay. Complacency. Excellent.”

Within two minutes I had them all rethinking their choice.

Ha.

Then I said, “What kind of information would make you sure your choice was right? What if I told you that one of these things cost very little money? One I had to go a specific place to find. One, I searched and searched for. One I could get anywhere. One of these things wouldn’t do most of you any good.” But I didn’t tell them which. I let them sweat for another few minutes. It was great to see them worried about their decision.

Then I brought it home. I told them that Heavenly Father wants to give them gifts. He has gifts for them, and knows what is best. He’s ready to tell them which gifts are best for them if they’re willing to listen.

Then I asked Kid 3 if she would pass her gift over to Kid 1. She did, and was left empty-handed for a minute. I said maybe three more thoughtful things about the Lord’s good gifts (including the part about how sometimes it may feel like everyone has a gift but you, and you need to trust that there is enough to go around) and then orchestrated the hand-off. Everyone was left holding the proper gift, I told them again that God wants to give them the gifts that are right for each of them right now, and let them open their Valentine’s presents.

And there was much rejoicing.

Hey, it doesn’t happen often*, but when it works, we rejoice.

*Clarification: Family Night happens often. Every Monday night. Successful object lessons? Much harder to come by.

Haven’t you?

Last month I taught at a conference where Brandon “Check out my dimple and my NY Times Bestsellers” Mull said that passion is contagious. He meant passion for our writing. If you’re feeling it when you write, someone should feel it when he reads. I love that. Here’s how Brenda Ueland  said that Tolstoy said it:

“Art is infection. The artist has a feeling and he expresses it and at once this feeling infects other people and they have it too. And the infection must be immediate or it isn’t art. If you have to puzzle timidly over a picture or book, and try, try to like it and read many erudite critics on the subject so that you can say at last: “Yes, I think I really do begin to understand it and see that it is just splendid! Real Art!” Then it is not art. (Though it might be Art to others who would see it and be immediately infected.)” (from IF YOU WANT TO WRITE, 1938 page 105.)

I think I have the virus. The passion virus. I read things that strike me as brilliant, and I don’t even wait for a critic (or a blogger, or a friend, or a Kid) to tell me it’s good. I just feel it and I know, and I want to do something about it. I want to write better. I want to read better. I want to play an instrument (um, but I don’t actually do that), and I want to bake something beautiful and I want someone else to feel it, too. I want someone else to Get It.

And it goes both ways. I’m reading at a YA novel I’ve heard a bunch of buzz about, and I’m not feeling it. I should be, but I’m not. The premise is great. But the leaps, the jumps from here to there are just TOO MUCH WORK for me. At another time, maybe I’d feel it, but my revisions are Hard Work right now, and we all know I’m not willing to do that much Hard Work in a day. One thing is enough. So there’s no passion virus for me in that one.

And that’s okay.

Because there are as many kinds of books as there are readers, and writers. We can’t please everyone, any more than we can expect to be pleased by everything. (Unless you happen to be DeNae, who is pleased by every-everything, all the time.)

And what if I’m not feeling the passion virus on my own work? What then?

I try anyway. I dive in. I read some of my chapters, or at least some of my scenes, and I breathe in really deep and try to catch something. (Like when I was in 2nd grade and my cousin C and I walked around Boston’s suburbs in the rain trying to catch pneumonia. If you don’t understand that, you’ve never been a middle child drama queen, so don’t even try.) And often it works, the lurking and the breathing in. There’s something there. Usually. And if I can catch it, even just a little, then the germ can spread and I can feel the passion again. Also, I can steal the germ from someone else’s work. Because isn’t that how we all caught it in the first place? At the knees of a parent or teacher, spinning webs of Passion Virus for us to catch?

Breathe it in, and get sick of it all.

Such as the one I just deleted, that I should maybe have held on to.

The offer for Psychic Octopus Detectives. Shoot. Or was it Psychic Detective’s Octopus? See? I should have saved it.

I couldn’t make this stuff up, friends.

—

In other news, I’ve got a lot of rewriting to do. Remember when I said (often) that I like revisions? Well, theoretically, I do. I like the polishing part. The fixing the typos part (which I never, ever seem to do on my blog). The reading over and laughing at the funnies part. But remember the stringing beads analogy that I sort of stole from Brenda Ueland’s brilliant “If You Want to Write”? Where she talks (and also I talk) about picking up a bead and staring at it, getting giddy over its sparkliness, and choosing to use it? Well, the revisions where I have to snip the string and dump all my pretty beads back onto the tray, those revisions hurt a little. I can still use all (or almost all) the beads, but they’re in the wrongest order. It’s a kind of starting over, and starting overs are hard (for the lazy).

—

Kids 3 and 4 and I picked the big orange popcorn bowl full of strawberries yesterday. We had crepes for dessert. My dad pronounces “crepes” like a Frenchman. I pronounce it like it rhymes with “grapes” and this makes him shudder, I’m sure. But whichever way you say it, it’s really tasty with fresh strawberries and squirty whipped cream. The rest of the berries went in to the freezer for smoothie-making goodness. Mmmm again.

—

Kid 2 went to her first real-real boy-girl party last night. There were parent chaperones there. They watched a “Black Lagoon” horror movie, which made her laugh. Are perverse senses of humor genetic? I think she got my dad’s.

—

Kid 1 performs her Shakespeare monologue today. In honor, we’re all using British accents all day at our house. Nobody knows this yet, as most of my family is still in bed. What a surprise they’ll get when they say “good morning” and I respond with “Cheerio!” Either that or they’ll roll their eyes and suggest I go back to bed. One of those.

—

My Cowboy neighbor brought me a bag full of meat yesterday. Really. Do you think that’s a good first line for a book? That’s not the point. He thought his dumb dog had gotten into my yard and ripped bark off my tree, but I couldn’t find any damage on any of my trees. Still, he was sorry enough to offer to replace whatever tree the dog had attacked, and give me a whole lot of frozen hamburger meat. From his cows. That he raises himself. He also offered to sell me half a beef (that’s how they say it) and I didn’t know how to tell him I don’t like meat that still has bones attached. But the Cowboy neighbor is a gentleman, and let it go.

If we don’t know the hard stuff, what do we really know at all?

I’m extremely lucky (lucky = blessed), and I know it. I am healthy. Happily married. Supported. With 4 excellent, healthy, smart, obedient  kids who love each other. The hard things we go through in our family are fairly consistent, but nothing, nothing compared to some of the hard things other people face. And how do I know that? Because people talk about their struggles. They write about them. And careful novelists write about the hard stuff they know – either because it happened to them or someone they love, or because they learn enough to know.

For instance, did you know that there’s a standard September book-banning issue? At the beginning of a school year, people say what they don’t want anyone to read. I have issues with that. *Please don’t misunderstand. I have plenty of standards. There are many, many books that I choose not to read, becuase of content or message or for any number of reasons. I am fairly conservative in my reading. But I don’t tell people that they shouldn’t read things (except for once in a while, my kids. Because that IS my job. Totally.) So, anyway, people campaign for books to be removed from library shelves, in schools and out. And this year, one of the books that a religious group is trying to ban is Laurie Halse Anderson’s SPEAK. I was about ten years late reading this book (don’t ask me where I’ve been since 1999), but I was floored by it. Floored. It was really one of the most touching books I’ve read. Ever. I put it right into the hands of my then-14. She recoiled a little. As she might. The book deals (forthrightly) with rape. And its aftereffects. And it’s hard. But does its being hard mean we should never read it? Or never let our kids read it? Or ignore that the problem sometimes exists? I say no, especially when the problem (in this case, rape) is always going to be prevalent, and some girl needs to know that she’s not alone. That she’s not singled out for pain and horror.

Do I want to read any book that glorifies violence? Oh, no. But do I leave it in your hands to decide if you want to seek out such a thing? Of course. Does SPEAK glorify rape? Not a bit. Not at all. It gives a voice to a victim. It’s the responsibility of the strong to speak for the weak, of the mighty to stand with the unprotected. (And then, that victim, that weak one, that unprotected child stands strong and speaks for herself, and for others.)

Many people are saying this better than I. Click on this link to hear Anderson’s words, and see her suggestions for effecting change.

And there’s this other thing. I read on Sara Zarr’s blog yesterday this quote by author Veronica Roth:

“It’s all fine and good to walk around thinking “I’ve been saved! Woohoo!”, but seriously: saved from what? Sometimes I wonder if they even know, or if it’s too uncomfortable to think about.”

Is it simplistic, childish and unfair to say that I see both sides of that question? Some things are too uncomfortable to think about. But we stretch our brain by thinking about them anyway. We stretch our spirit. We grow. Remember growing? That’s what we’re doing here. Learning, growing, choosing – and how do we know what to choose? We learn the difference between good and evil, when it comes right down to it. Does that mean we delve, explore all kinds of evil, so we can really know it? No, not for me.

Want a metaphor? Well, you’re in luck. Because I have one.

Once upon a time I lived in Oklahoma. Which is a remarkable place. And I tried to grow a garden, because I’m some kind of glutton for punishment. Here’s the thing about gardening in Oklahoma. The dirt? Is brick. Like, you could probably cut it in cubes out of the ground and build a wolf-proof house out of it. It’s red, and hard, and solid. Seeds bounce off it. The ground sort of laughed at my efforts. Shovels didn’t really make a dent. It was sort of… baked.

And as I tried to plant seeds (because a woman of character grows things in the dirt) I realized that this ground needed to be broken. Split. Harrowed up. And I made it happen. Do you know what? It hurt. It hurt me to push through that hard. To use muscles I’ve never used before. To see very little success. And to move away before I could enjoy the fruits (but that’s another metaphor entirely). But what if my heart, protected, untouched and hidden, baking in the warm sun, has hardened like Oklahoma dirt? What if, by staying away from the shovel and the pick, crucial seeds are bouncing off my heart?

There are things that need to grow in my heart. Sympathy. Empathy. Understanding and forgiveness. But if I can’t let the seeds in, nothing will grow. It can’t. I’m not allowing it. So I need to let my heart be broken open. I’m not talking about inviting abuse. Not at all. I’m talking about allowing some of the pain that real people experience every day to crack me open a little so something beautiful can grow. And when our hearts get a little harrowed up, a little broken on behalf of someone else, I think our souls expand. I think that learning to understand others’ pain makes us bigger. And from the fertile ground of a broken, harrowed heart, beautiful trees can grow, to shade the weary and feed the hungry and make the world a little more beautiful.

Maybe.

But here’s something we talked about.

Healthy literacy is like a healthy diet. To eat well, you need a blend of this and that. Lots of variety. Lots of color. Would it hurt you to have a cupcake once in a while? Of course not. Go for it. As long as you’re eating real food, too. If all you eat is cupcakes, you’re going to get a tummy ache.

Healthy literacy is like that. If all you read is Post-Apocalyptic Zombie Mermaid Romance, you’re going to get a tummy ache. So we talked about that. We discussed healthy options, things that make brains grow and thoughts stretch. Some parents require kids to eat foods they’re not comfortable with, in order to give them vitamins. Some teachers require kids to read books they wouldn’t choose, in order to feed them ideas and questions.

There is a point. Here it comes.

I asked the kids, “Is there anything you should NEVER eat?” – and there was a short silence and then some funny response. But my point was this: You should never, never eat rat poison. It is only made to kill. Likewise, there is “literature” out there that is like rat poison. You shouldn’t read it. It will poison your mind and kill your soul. But guess what. It is not my job to tell you what that literature is – I won’t tell you what you shouldn’t read.

It IS my job to help my Kids figure that out. Especially if I’ve tasted it and I know it’s poison. Or if I’ve never tasted it but someone I trust has pointed out the poison. Sometimes, books/movies/magazines/music are practically LABELED Rat Poison. These are things I teach my kids to avoid, because I’d rather not have them poisoned and their souls killed. But it is not my place to say Rat Poison should not exist.

But I will stand up and say that it should not exist in my home. And I will fight it off here.

Sadness is not rat poison.

Cursing is not rat poison.

Bad choices, when followed by consequences, are not rat poison.

Those things are called LIFE. And life is important. We should live it, read it, explore it. And we should talk about it in our home. And we will. Even when it is hard. Because we want to be people who are open to ideas and thoughts that will help us make intelligent choices and become empathetic humans. And most of all, we want to be good. Well. Healthy and wise. And we will choose to read some things, and choose not to read others, and we will not take that choice away from you.

One funny thing happening is this: I have a major character who used to be named Nate, but is now named Charlie. This has nothing to do with a brother who may or may not be named Nathan, and everything to do with another character whose name is Nick (and Nate and Nick being too close = too much possibility of confusion). Anyway, so many months ago I did a search-and-replace Nick with Charlie (because this thing is 45K words long already, and I’m all for shortcuts). This morning when I started reading? I read the word “unfortuCharlie.” I laughed. Out loud. Then, thousands of words later, “extermiCharlie.” More laughing, and I made Kids 1 and 2 come see it. They laughed too. Yes. This is what passes for comedy around here.

(Did I mention that I sent the ms out to my critique group? Without reading it first? As in, unproofed and totally unprofessional? They may still love me. Or they may lock me up for six months. UnfortuCharlie, indeed.)

Since I unearthed this thing, I’ve realized it’s not as terrible as I thought it was when I slammed it into the dark file six months ago. And this is a metaphor for life, I think. If you think you hate me and I’m worthless, just lock me in a closet for six months, and I’ll bet that on retrieval, I’m far more witty and charming than you thought I was when you threw me in there. Just saying.

In other news, Kid 3 got her glasses yesterday, so I’ll be sure to pester Husband to take a photo of her cute face that we can post here. Then, in a month when her braces go on, we can post another, and you can refrain from calling DCFS because I rocked my Kid’s world by getting her glasses and braces At The Same Time. I know. Mom of the year, out the window once again. *Sigh*