Velveteen Mind

A Wedding for Everyone {Part One}

Seven year ago today, we were married. 

Although neither of us had ever called it home, New Orleans called to us, so it was there that we chose to plant the roots of a life which we would forever call home.

Laced with the strength of chicory, echoing with the sounds of friends and family, bruised by adversity, warmed by tradition, spiced with variety, worn threadbare by the lives that dug their heels in deep to the rich swamp soil...  New Orleans was the perfect place to swear our souls to one another. 

And no, we didn't keep it simple.  But we certainly kept it real.

Real joy  ...hope  ...celebration  ...tradition  ...flair  ...fun  ...love  ... Real us.

 

Surrounded by love.  Friends and family and well-wishes wrapped in smiles.

A bride wrapped in the wedding gown worn by her mother.  Made by her great-aunt.  Hand-painted and fussed over and preserved with hope and anticipation.

The end of something solitary and the beginning of everything whole.

Everyone should have a beginning such as this.

 

An early afternoon ceremony in St. Louis Cathedral in Jackson Square in the French Quarter.  We arrived in carriages and hushed tourists' whispers of "who are they again?"

Strangers taking our pictures and generously offering to send us copies of our own. 

Everyone should have paparazzi on their wedding day. 

 

We are you.  You can have this, too, you know!  Just ask.  You don't have to be fancy, you just need to want to have more fun than a couple of dreamers should be allowed to have...  and then have it.

St. Louis Cathedral would be the only serious moment in a party to stretch eight hours

long.  It would be the last hushed or still anything.  A beautiful foundation to a spectacular day...  to spectacular hopes for our whole lives long. 

I smiled so much as I walked down the aisle, I thought my face would ache for years.  The beginning of laugh lines that would be nurtured by baby's giggles and toddlers' antics.  Laugh lines deepened by new lives to enter our own, to erase the melancholy of the father walking his baby girl down the

aisle only to be rewarded by hilarious miniature versions of himself. 

But first...

Can you hear the beads rolling into the square, bunches and bunches headed to eager hands?  Can you hear the crowd gathering?  Can you hear the Second Line Band assembling?

I do.

Everyone should have a parade through the streets after they say "I do."

 

We left in our wake screams of celebration, cries of surprise, and not fewer than a few bums with pearl-like beads around their necks, dangling medallions announcing our union.  This was a wedding celebration for everyone. 

 

And everyone should have the blessings of the street people on their wedding day.

~~~

...this is only the beginning, so be sure to stick around for Part Two...

~~~

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Anticipation

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Gravel Paves the Road to The White House

The sound of gravel crunching under slow-moving tires is the sound of the small town to me.  The sound of cicadas on a warm summer evening, while you wave at your neighbors honking as they drive past your home.  That is small town life.

 

I grew up in a small town of 5,000 in Southern Illinois.  Our town was the metropolis of our county, or so it seemed to me.  We were surrounded by towns whose populations made them more like villages, whose residents came to our town to shop at the Wal-Mart or go out to eat at the fancy new smorgasbord.

Separating those towns from ours were two-lane roads bordered by cornfields, soybean fields, cows, and hay bales.  The only traffic lights were the blinking kind.  You often had to pass tractors on the road or hold your tongue as you followed behind the Amish in their wagons.  It was that kind of small town.

The phrase "small town values" is being thrown around a lot lately.  On one side of the aisle, you hear the declaration "We believe in small town values."  On the other side, you hear the question "But what are small town values?"

Defining "small town values" is as easy as defining what "love" is to a toddler.  You know it when you feel it, but it is difficult to put into words, particularly when you find yourself on the spot facing a raised eyebrow and a smug smirk awaiting your sure-to-be fumbling explanation.

 

 

(feed readers, click through for video above)

The question of small town values and whether or not they are relevant or important is intriguing, regardless of your political leanings.  The majority of our country, if not our world, is small towns.  Much of the populations of our cities migrated from small towns.  Small-town-America is the root of this country, so what does that mean to us?

There is no one definition of what "small town values" is, but to me it means a greater ability to see the people around you.  Really see them.

Have you ever spent so much time online for weeks at a time that you find your head utterly filled with noise?  You didn't notice it happening, but then you step outside one evening, discover it quiet, and realize that you had cocooned yourself within a wall of static? 

Picture yourself working on your computer, appliances running in the kitchen, laundry running in the next room, kids watching TV, husband listening to his iPod...  and suddenly the power goes out.  After much rummaging around for flashlights and grumbling about how you have so much to get done, you finally submit to the fact that you'll probably be in the dark for at least a few more hours, which no amount of huffing and puffing will change.

And then it happens.  You realize that you've just had an eye-to-eye conversation with your kids that lasted longer than the time it takes to say, "In a minute..." or "As soon as I finish..." or "Tell me about that while I'm..." 

Notice how they cut their eyes the way your grandmother used to when they say, "I have a good idea..." and then that idea is revealed to revolve around candy.  The way they touch their hair when they are thinking of what to say next or tap their fingers together while anticipating your answer on that candy question still on the table.

It's easy to miss those details when you aren't even looking at them.

There is nothing to distract you from them and you find yourself able to see them.  See them clearly.  Hear them without the background hum of your modern life keeping you consistently 20% distracted.

That feeling is what small town life is to me.  It is a simplification, to be sure, but when compared to life in a large city, I think it is accurate.  For me, at least.

Now take it a step further and imagine turning off the TV news and radio talk programs and Internet for two weeks.  No newspapers, no magazines, nothing other than your personal world filling your attention.  You still listen to music and watch movies, go out to dinner and take your kids to the park.  But you aren't necessarily aware of what is going on a world away.  You don't know about every tropical depression forming in the ocean and cease fire being negotiated over some sandy terrain.

I have done that.  I can tell you first-hand how amazing it is to watch your priorities crystallize.  To feel the stress drain away that you never knew was there, held in the base of your neck, stemming from problems that may or may not ever have anything to do with you.

You find yourself living your life, not a million other people's.

That firmly planted grounding of self and family and immediate community is small town values to me.   

I am not advocating ignorance.  I'm not even advocating small town life.  Rather, I am trying to put my finger on what small town values are by submerging myself in the feeling of a small town and reaching down to the core of me, asking "What do you see?  How do you feel?"

I feel compassion on a personal level.  I see community at its root.  I am digging my hands into a foundation that is rich and firm, but that must be maintained in order to remain strong and fertile. 

Without that strong foundation, we can not build our tall towers that allow us to see those that were previously beyond our horizon and beyond our reach.  Beyond our help.

Ask yourself, "What are small town values?"  Tell me why they are important.  Tell me how we can ever help globally if we can not first live a fully realized life locally.

Gravel paves the road to The White House.  I struggle to articulate why that is important to remember, but my gut tells me that it is.

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You Loot, We Shoot

Three years ago today, Hurricane Katrina demolished the Gulf Coast.  We lost everything we owned, save for three days' worth of clothes, one guitar, a handful of photos, and our lives.

We evacuated ahead of the storm, as we always do and always will.

We had no idea what Katrina had wrought until a few days after she was gone.  The video below is of us at Maguire's parents' house, blissfully ignorant of how our lives were changing as we sat in the dark. 

While we played with a 13 month old Q, our home was going under water.  It was being battered and blown to bits.  His toys were being submerged and smashed and dragged out to the Gulf of Mexico.  His Christening gown, passed down from his great-grandfather, worn by his grandfather, by Maguire, and then by him, being swept away. 

Every photograph and journal I had saved so carefully since elementary school, warping and floating away.  The photos from college, where Maguire and I met.  Our wedding.  Our honeymoon.  The photos of me pregnant.  The photos and videos of Q's birth.  The videos of him learning to walk and talk...  all gone.  And we had no idea.

 

Night of Katrina from Megan Jordan on Vimeo. 

 

What Katrina left us was the gift of charity.  The importance of family and friends.  The impermanence of the material and the futility of regret.

As I sit here, hurricanes are forming to the south of us.  And yet we remain.  We will evacuate, but not before protecting all that we have rebuilt.  All that we have fought for and struggled to call home again.

But we will evacuate.  And with us, we will take our most precious gift from Katrina, our son Goose.  Because one other possession Hurricane Katrina took away from me was the illusion of control.  Had it not been for her, I would not have released my need to plan every moment.  I would not have opened my carefully guarded life to the unexpected gift of the right baby at the wrong time.

Thank you, Katrina, you complete and utter wench.

But Gustav and Hanna? 

Stay off of my property because looters will be shot.

And yeah, that's my dad.  And, yes, he will shoot you. 

~~~

Feed readers, if you don't see the video, be sure to click through.

~~~

Related Posts:

Victor Vito (our Katrina story)

Camille was a Lady, Katrina was a Bitch (on the 2nd anniversary)

Hierarchy of Suffering (why being a victim is a waste of energy)

Resilience or Defiance: on the Third Anniversary of Hurricane Katrina

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Tattle-Tale

"I have a need for everyone to follow the rules and admit when they are wrong.  I guess it's a 'tattle-tale' issue."

That was the line I just delivered to my dad during his impromptu visit to our house so that he could say hey to the boys.  While here, he brought up my recent post-edit about comment deletion and my strong stance against it.  His response to my revelation about needing to impose order in an unruly world was little more than a blank stare, a roll of the eyes, and a look that said, "Hi, have we just met?  This is not news."

I have been fighting a losing battle to make the world bend to my opinions my entire life.  The "rules" I want people to follow are mostly rules I have made up in my head.  If I could pass them into law, I would, but that requires a lot of organization and probably at least a few business suits. 

"Your expectations are too high" is something I've heard so often that I would like to announce that from now on, all you have to say is "Code Flying Pigs" and I'll know what you mean.  Yet I keep plowing right along, acting surprised and disappointed when people make decisions that I disagree with, or at the very least would not have made myself.  You know, wrong decisions.

(that was a joke-- are the trolls still sticking around?)

Needless to say, it should come as no surprise that I was fascinated by all of the different takes on how I could have handled finding a three year old boy alone in Hellboy II the other night.  You were all refreshingly honest about how you would have handled it and that is what made it so interesting. 

If you haven't read it already, the brief rundown is that while poking my head into Hellboy II on my way out of the local movie multiplex, I found a three year old boy sitting alone in the passageway into the screening room, wrapped in a blanket, watching the movie alone at midnight.  After a bit of hesitation and disbelief, I pulled up a little piece of dimly illuminated hallway with him and kept him company for the duration of the movie, trying to distract him during scary parts, and then accompanied him to the exterior hallway after the movie was over.  After some lost-in-translation Spanglish, a handful of siblings appeared out of the other theatres to claim him and I went about my business, a little more disillusioned than when I had entered the theatre over three hours earlier.

But I couldn't help wondering if I made the right choice.  The right choice of multiple choices available, all which raced through my mind while I made "ew" and "yuck" faces at him during the movie.  Here is what you said:   

• 9 of you would have done the same thing I did, which is sit with him until someone claimed him but not report it to management
• 2 of you said you would have left him alone and minded your own business
• 13 of you would have taken him to management
• 3 of you would have left him where you found him and went for management yourself
• 4 of you would have called the police

So why did I choose to do what I did?

Leaving him alone was certainly a thought that crossed my mind.  More specifically, "What are you getting yourself into?" is what crossed my mind, but I was already sitting down, so there was no turning back.  I never could have stopped wondering what happened to him.

Likewise, leaving him alone while I went for management was not a viable option for me because had he been gone when I returned, I would have tortured myself with doubt.  Pretty much, I claimed responsibility for him from the moment I saw him and wasn't going to relinquish it until the responsibility was handed over.

That leaves us with taking him to management and/ or calling the police.

I mentioned that I am a tattle-tale, right?  I not only want people to be called out for their mistakes, but to admit the mistake and make amends for them, as well.  "An eye for an eye" just makes us even in my book; the punishment begins after we are even.

And no, the irony is not lost on me that I was in effect "stealing" the last 15 minutes of a movie.  I went in that room with that intention, so the boy was no excuse.  In fact, I routinely "steal" up to 30 minutes of movies before and after the film for which I have bought a ticket.  In my defense, I never watch more than 30 minutes, because that would just be wrong. (insert the equivalent of a wink here.)  I think of it as an extended preview; if 30 minutes is good, I definitely buy a ticket the next time around.

I never said that my rules are necessarily based on law.  They are also subject to change without notice.  I will admit that being a subject in my queendom would be challenging, at best.

Nevertheless...

Something about how comfortable this little boy appeared (in the situation, not as an audience member of Hellboy II) told me that this was not the first time he had watched a movie in this theatre at midnight by himself.  He had a blanket, which just said "I came prepared" to me.  Then, when his siblings appeared, everything about their relaxed demeanor told me that this was routine for them.

For the record, had no one showed up to claim him after the movie, I would have delivered him to management and stuck around until the situation was resolved.    However, my initial suspicion that one of their parents must work at the theatre was confirmed when the oldest girl nodded in response to my question, "Does your mom work here?"

As far as I could tell, their mother worked the late shift at the theatre and used the movies as babysitters.  This was more or less confirmed when the oldest girl said, motioning to the double sign indicating either Hellboy II or WALL-E as the movie showing on that screen, "Yeah, he always thinks that movie is WALL-E."

Given this, I could have marched them all to management, or at least to their mother, and lectured everyone involved about how wrong it is for kids their age to be out at midnight, let alone watching a horror movie.  But I didn't, for the same reason I did not call the police.

What if management didn't know their mother was doing this and she was therefore fired?  She would have to find another job, which around here might mean working at a casino, and then what would she do about child care?  Who knows what shift she would have to take and there are far worse places for kids to be at midnight than in a movie theatre, in the same building as their mother, who can probably check in on them occasionally, should she so choose.

Look, I know this is a lot of conjecture on my part, but this was my thought process in a dark theatre, watching a scary movie, in the middle of the night with a tiny little boy I did not know.  I wanted to do right by him, but doing right by him in the short term and the long were two different things.  My need to make everything "right" by my book might not be "right" for his life.

By the same reasoning, had I called the police, I may have been doing more than punishing the mother for making a bad decision.  If she was, in fact, an illegal immigrant, I can't imagine the consequences.

So I stayed with him until I could turn him over to someone that could claim him as their own.  I didn't take him out of there because even touching him seemed like crossing a line.  I didn't turn anyone in because the repercussions were more than I could reasonably predict.  Instead, I tried to help him out and distract him for a short period of time during which I could reasonably predict the repercussions.  Hellboy II is not a movie for toddlers, in case you were wondering.

I still don't know if what I did was right, but I thank you for your opinions.  You all felt so strongly about it and it was seriously fascinating.  Can you imagine what that scene would have been like had we all been there?  Mad chaos, to say the least.

I still don't know if what I did was right.  It felt right, but sometimes beating people over the head until they cry "Uncle!" feels right.  Figuratively, not literally. 

When you open yourself up to what is happening around you, it is amazing what you will find.  If you just scratch the surface, you might stumble into a world of underground theatre children, for whom spending their nights at the movies may become just footnotes in the story of what their mother did to provide for them.  Or for whom you may be provided a single opportunity to help and you blow it because you don't want to make things worse. 

I still don't know if what I did was right.

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