Overdrive

Everything was just mildly exciting for me until yesterday--then it went into overdrive, for some reason, as if everything we've done in the last few months struck me all at once.

We were at Tangara School for Girls buying uniforms. We don't even know if we'll be able to afford the schools (waiting on scholarships of sorts), but as school starts in a week, I've been going like a robot through all the hoops. In the uniform shop, my blood pressure skyrocketed, and true to my normal reaction, I ignored it and went on as if nothing had happened.

As the cash register rang and rang (beautiful wool kilts, swim costume, sports outfit, a lovely hat, a blazer with the emblem stitched, and on and on), I just watched, numb.

On the way home, Sophie began voicing her concern that she wouldn't be able to be herself in a place that measured how many centimeters a hem fell on the floor when the person is kneeling. I was wondering how on earth I would get them to school in time every day...I still have a hard time parking, and being on time is not my strong suit.

"She's got a point," I thought to myself; my experiences with the boys' school, Redfield, and the girls' school, have been really different. All the people of the boys' school, men and women alike, look a little more worn in, even beat up, but they are helpful and sympathetic to this immigrant family. The girls' school has seemed cleanly, clearly efficient, but almost cold. I wonder why. They seem a little picayune; maybe that is a fall-out of separating the sexes. Does the girls' school become archly cute and terrifyingly well-kept; does the boys' school just smell worse and worse? If I were Sophie, I might want to be in the boys' school, too.

I listened to the kids' discussing and I remembered the feeling of dread I had when coming to a new school.

When we went to Greece, I was starting first grade. I remember, being somewhat shy, that empty feeling of fear in the new classroom; that is when Iris and I became friends. Iris had been born in Athens; she was German-Viennese and her father worked for the Goethe Institute in Thessaloniki. Iris was true to the spirit of her namesake; she was like a messenger from the gods, a rainbow of healing, for a frightened little kid. Being an old Pinewood School hand, she came right over to me and invited me into her group. There is nothing like a friend to calm us, to sweeten life; and I was her devoted, fast friend because of the first few minutes of our aquaintance. We have remained friends all these years, something special for two rollling stones. I could see that she was a real friend, because she reached out to me when I was alone; she had the sight of those who understand friendship: She knew that to have real friends, one must first jump off the cliff and be one, that to be a friend requires risking ourselves on a gamble that is another human being.

When we moved to California, there was no Iris at first. I found only coldness and lived in the twilight of those who are seen as foreigners, too odd to fit in anywhere. Eventually, I did find Kelly--or, like Iris, she found me. Funny that they are both red-heads.

So, if the school thing works out, I hope each child finds an Iris.

Sometimes our anxiety becomes physical; this has happened for me. My throat actually swells, and it swelled last night. There's lots of anxiety monsters having a frat party in me right now--what do they eat for lunch at school? What kind of shoes do they have to have? Why aren't there screens in the bedrooms on the ground floor in the house? WTH is that cistern for?

I lay in bed last night and read Mary Dean's card to me....there's nothing like the love of a friend. I miss my friends, and wonder WTH we're doing here. Sometimes God seems very blank...

It is, I think, that He is so Other. Beyond being, being-in-act, not potency (something like that), He cannot even be classed as 'different from us' because there is simply no comparison between those who receive their being, live within it, and Someone who has no source. Well, it just doesn't compute, so I imagine concommitantly, how He answers us, and reacts to us, often doesn't compute. When we try to naturalize Him too much, we run the danger of trying to prove Him with our own categories, categories that can diminish the mystery. Christ is an absolute, fertile mystery as well as a brother.

That's when I start talking to the Cloud of Witnesses, because they aren't so Other. I ask them to pray for me from their eternal, but human view, so I can stop freaking out at money and efficient girls' school ladies in uniform shops, or Hookers, or cisterns with an antennae topped by a big red ball, or even my own children having very normal doubts. I often remind God that He doesn't know what it is like to be a middle-aged, hormonally insane woman who has a hard time hearing in the spirit when things get overwhelming. He does know about being a young man--totally different worlds. I'm probably wrong, though; He probably, somehow, understands better than I do.

I was thinking about being lonely, and the chapel door at Campion was locked, so I sat outside and said, "I guess you can hear me from here" which, of course, makes no sense at all for One who is so other. I said, "I miss my friends."

Ana came up behind me as I walked along a path away from the chapel, and put her hand on me in her gentle way. We played the beautiful piano together; she is composing another haunting song. Then Angela came in, following the unusual musical sounds. Angela, the librarian, is one of my favorite people here, the one I remember most fondly from our visit in August. She is the child of immigrants from Czechoslovakia, or whatever it is called now, and she is part Jewish. She loves the library; in fact, I've never seen someone who loves a library so much. She is like the mother hen here, I think, and has millions of stories to tell. To Angela, the Library is a magical place of wonder and healing and relationship. I never, not once, thought of a library that way.

I continued to freak out all night, listening to the much-needed, relieving rain falling gently, but God willing, it will pass. It has been a wild six months, closing one chapter of life, and trying to turn over the page to the next.