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21 This I recall to my mind, therefore have I hope. 22 It is of the LORD'S mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not. 23 They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness. 24 The LORD is my portion, saith my soul; therefore will I hope in him. 25 The LORD is good unto them that wait for him, to the soul that seeketh him. 26 It is good that a man should both hope and quietly wait for the salvation of the LORD. 27 It is good for a man that he bear the yoke in his youth. 28 He sitteth alone and keepeth silence, because he hath borne it upon him. 29 He putteth his mouth in the dust; if so be there may be hope.

I’ve been reading Lamentations every morning this week, just reading the entire short little book straight through in a different translation each day. This morning when I read the above verses I just for some reason thought of Pandora’s box. The hope part, of course, is what made me think of it. So I thought I’d craft a piece about Lamentations and weave in portions of Pandora. But. That’s just how things are with me right now. My notebook is crammed with notes, little things I want to write about here, and that’s all there is. Notes. Notes about Hannah, about Lizzie, about children in my class, about Pittsburgh, about each of the books I’m reading. That’s the problem, I think. I’m reading too many books. I’ve always done that–kept at least six books going at a time. Right now, there’s Lamentations, a novel about a man taking a bicycle trip across the United States in an attempt to come to grips with the loss of his parents, an anthology of the best teen writing of 2005, a book about using poetry to create community, and a book about fighting for intellectual freedom in public schools. What I need is a reading/writing retreat. I need to find someplace to go, where I can take a box of books and a box of notebooks, and read and write. I need that. Because until that happens, I’m going to have all this inside me, this going in six different directions, and no sense of rest or resolution.
So, there will be no Lamentations/Pandora piece today. Just hash. A reflection of my current state of being.

Speaking of reading/writing retreats, Bill is converting to Catholicism. His wife is Catholic, and they had been attending an Episcopal church as a sort of compromise. But she wasn’t happy with that, so he is taking conversion classes. I wish I had talked to him more about his classes while we were in Pittsburgh, but there was just no time. What that has to do with reading/writing retreats is that his wife goes on lots of retreats. Sometimes they are solitary/silence retreats. That is fascinating and very attractive to me. It makes me think of Philip Yancey–when he spent a week or so in a cabin in the Pacific Northwest and read the Bible straight through and saw things he’d never seen before. Anyway, Bill is taking these classes. He told us this when we were at an oyster bar we’d walked around in circles trying to find, in 20 degree weather, gale-force winds. So I was still pretty much frozen and couldn’t really find it in me to enter the conversation. Even when the whole discussion they were having about genre turned to an argument over the Left Behind book Lisa is reading right now. The Catholics, Methodists, and Episcopalians at the table wanted to label it fantasy; Lisa held out for another genre, I can’t remember what. It is always interesting to me, being with this wide array of backgrounds. Patricia, Leslyn, and now Bill are Catholics. Rachel is Episcopalian. Lisa is Baptist. What am I? Friday night at Morton’s (a famous Pittsburgh establishment with no prices on the menu) I tried to talk to Patricia about the Catholic Bible, but she said she’s never read it, so we didn’t get very far. The food at Morton’s was almost too good, if that makes sense. Every course was a meal in itself, and by the time dessert came, we were almost too full to enjoy it. But only almost. All the food we had in Pittsburgh was good. We’d been told we could not leave the city with having pierogies and Yuengling. Both were excellent. So I’ve had to practically fast since I’ve been home, and I’m finally starting to feel somewhat normal again.

Back to the retreat thing. I’ve been thinking about it, and even though I’d really like to go on a solitary-all-by-myself trip, I also think it would be very edifying to go with a group of people. We could all read and write and come together every five or six hours to have a meal and share. Maybe at a state park. So I’m going to give some thought to who I’d like to do that with. You’d really need a broad range of people to make it work. Obviously people who read. I’m just thinking out loud, but maybe we could read through the Bible. Divide it up into books among the participants, then come together to share insights. Anyway, it’s an idea. Maybe over Christmas break. It’d be a good way to end the year.

Which leads me to another question I wrote in my notebook: If I were stuck in an elevator, who would I want to be stuck with? Usually every year during Thanksgiving week I make a list of the people in my life for whom I am most thankful, and I try to drop them a line and tell them so. I didn’t do that this year. Not that it’s too late or anything, but I just can’t get my thoughts together. I think I would like to be stuck in an elevator with all of those people. Because I am beginning to really understand that I don’t spend enough time with the people who mean the most to me. I take them for granted. I don’t treasure them. I mean I do. Privately. But I don’t tell them so often enough. Would I tell them if I were stuck in an elevator with them, away from the distractions of daily living? Would I? Or would I say, "Hey, I saw the funniest e-card that had a turkey singing I Will Survive?" You never know until it happens, I guess. Maybe I would start with the turkey, and then say "So, tell me about your relationship with God." Maybe.

Bill was stuck for 40 minutes in a small elevator at the Omni with 12 other people. He is good at picking out places to eat, and he called from his room to tell us he’d be right down and then we waited 40 minutes, wondering where he was. When he came in, he was in a state. Apparently the experience was not a good one, not like my own imagined elevator retreat. He’d just been to a special session that Mary Kaye had done on writing about Katrina, had seen her slides of the devastation in Bay St. Louis, had heard her share her experiences, and then right after that he got on the elevator and was stuck with people who are not made of the same stuff as we are. He said the more they whined and complained, the madder he got at them. He wanted to scream at them, "This is nothing, people! I just left a room full of people who are still looking for family heirlooms two blocks away from the concrete slabs on which their houses used to sit. If you’d ever sat in a gas line for five hours, or waited two hours every single day for a tiny bag of ice, you’d know this is just a blip on the screen. Shut the hell up." While I kind of understand where he was coming from, still I think of the Laura/Caller syndrome. I mean, here are these people right there in front of you (and behind you, and all jammed up against you) who are agitated and uncomfortable and they’ve never been through Katrina. Never been "wiped clean" of their minor irritations, and so they can’t be expected to not need comfort. Love the ones you’re with, is what I think. Take all those horrible experiences you’ve been through and allow them to make you more compassionate toward others, more patient with their narrow comfort zones. Katrina definitely changed us. We are not who we once were. We’re just not. My friend Katherine from Long Beach was in my first session Thursday morning. I saw her across the room early on, then during the break we talked and finished out the second part of the session sitting next to one another. When people would see our name tags, they’d ask us about Katrina, about how it was, how it still is. After the session, Katherine told me she is uncomfortable talking about it with people who didn’t go through it. That it feels right to discuss it with survivors, but now with outsiders. I know what she means. It is sacred somehow. Maybe we’re just not ready, and maybe we will never be. Mary Kaye told me the name Katrina means to wipe clean. I looked it up and found that it means "pure". And yes, I think there is a purity that came to us from having been through it. It just sort of swept away all the things that were extraneous, that didn’t matter. And the things that do matter–people and relationships–were left. I can’t even talk about it here, it seems, even though a total of two people have this link. What I know is that the lessons I learned, about loving and valuing people, were hard and lasting lessons. Dreams about heads in jars and other things perhaps didn’t make those lasting impressions.

Having time off always makes me want more. Yesterday the girls and I spent the afternoon shopping in Hattiesburg, and then we met Tim for supper at O’Charley’s. I’m eating my leftover Bayou Pasta right now with a glass of ginger ale, and later we’re going shopping again. Hannah and I daydreamed yesterday about quitting my job and homeschooling. She would like that, she says. But I don’t know. I have 19 years in the retirement system and I make $50,000 a year. I could still make money from my side jobs, but not what I make now, of course, working the main job and the side ones too. In Pittsburgh, we learned about some different ways to fund staff development personnel and co-directors. Kim wants to figure out a way to buy two-fifths of my contract from my district. I think even if she can find the twenty thousand, my district is just not that progressive. There’s never been a job-share done there. I can think of only a couple of people I’d even consider sharing a classroom with, and they might just be interested since they both have pre-school age children at home. So then if I worked two or three days a week, and Tim rearranged his schedule to be home more during the week and maybe work on Saturdays, we could probably home-school the girls. Well, this is the kind of stuff that goes through my head all the time, and I always just end up doing the same thing I’ve always done, going to work five days a week, and then working all these outside jobs too because they’re the ones that keep me intellectually stimulated, and we are stretched way too thin. Did I learn anything from Katrina or not? It all makes me tired. This is why I don’t have enough time for reading and writing.

Lizzie seems to be going through a crisis of faith or something. She has so many questions, and then when I answer them, my answers don’t always line up with her experience. She rode home with Tim from Hattiesburg last night and he said she sobbed most of the way home and asked why God doesn’t do what she tells Him to do? She’s told Him over and over that her stomach hurts, and He doesn’t make it better. She has told Him. I think it may be time to read the Narnian chronicles to her. She’s watched The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, but I think maybe the Horse and His Boy would be good for her right now. He’s not a tame lion; He likes to be asked. I was having my own deep conversation with Hannah; one that ended with me in tears. I don’t know about this teenage thing. Can I do this? I have no choice. Also, Lizzie is going through a very emotional time. She is crying a lot. Last night, we picked up several DVDs to watch and we all watched The Two Brothers together. But only for a little while, because Lizzie couldn’t take it. She could not relax and watch the movie, because of the threats to the lion cubs from the very start of the film. She was building up to a breakdown from the very start, and then when the daddy tiger was shot and the cubs were separated, she was undone. Absolutely undone. She was sitting in my lap and I kept telling her it would all be okay, that people who love one another are never permanently separated, that it’s only temporary, and that they would find one another. I was telling her all these things about the power of love, and she was in convulsions in my lap. Hannah took her back to her bedroom and put on a Strawberry Shortcake movie and the rest of us watched The Two Brothers. Can I do this? I have no choice. I should be able to, really, because Lizzie is exactly like me. I come undone over separation, too. Sometimes, often really, I wonder why, of all the mothers in the world, my children had to get stuck with me?

There are some other notes in my book that I want to write about, but I guess it’ll have to wait. I want to write about Brett Favre and all he’s done for Katrina victims on the coast, about being attacked by an ironing board at the Omni, about dancing with Dick (or not dancing with Dick) at the jazz fundraising dinner, and about how teachers will walk a mile in the snow to avoid paying cab fare but don’t blink twice over shelling out a couple of hundred dollars at the Heinemann exhibit.