Keep Calm and Love Australia

So the first pest control person didn't speak a language I knew, but I thought he did; I think he knew how to nod in approximately the right places. The second one said, "Wow there's a lot of webs; this place hasn't been maintained for this...and you've got a lot of trees. These are probably black spiders (a little like really big black widows, can make you sick, but not immediate-death-inducing)."

He went on: "Funnel-webs don't build on houses; they build in the ground."

The third person I spoke with, an experienced groundsman who's lived in the Blue Mountains bush for many years said, "Oh yes, funnel webs do build on houses, in eaves, on fences...anywhere there's a little corner of space." He showed me an area of fence that looked just like the fence outside the room where TJ was sleeping, where my greatest battle was fought, I armed with a broom and telling myself, "Strike with purpose. Do not waver." I almost flew a standard as I went around the house killing the things. What should the standard be? A dead spider? No. Standards are symbols of what we fight for. I would have had three smiling Kozinski kids on it.

So, anyway, after all that bravado, who knows what they were; all I know is that they were crawling out from the house and now I hate that house...the pest control said, "We'll just spray powder into the eaves and roof."

The groundsman said, "You've got to hit the things with the spray, directly. If there's an infestation, that's a real problem."

So the honeymoon with Australia is over. That was quick...I didn't have much time to be infatuated with it. Only a month in the country and I bet the "They"  that is the nebulous infrastructured bureaucracy would like us to leave quickly and quietly. No one wants immigrants who already know the number for the Tenant Tribunal.

What immigrant wants to live in a place where one really should wear welding gloves and thick rubber boots just to rake the lawn (funnel webs can bite through regular shoes and 'pansy' garden gloves..what I thought of as adequate)?

But in all the stress, and the hating of the creatures here, I have seen some funny things. The giant purple house on Nestor St. which looks like a cake from the cake decorating shop, an Indian version of the immigrant's-dream-come-true Portokalos house in a Big Fat Greek Wedding; a man with a T-shirt picturing a Star Wars storm trooper with the caption "Support Our Troops;" a man carrying up the gifts towards the Arnold Schwarzenegger crucifix for mass at the Paramatta cathedral who had on jeans, a paisley dress shirt and--oh yes--bright red dress shoes, with a face and head that looked like a benign, conservative grandpa.

I've seen some really weird things too, things that make you go 'eew.' One is an advert for a bank, showing you as a little red baby figurine standing, triumphant on a pile of prone, defeated white baby figurine bodies. I guess you're supposed to think you are the baby on top. And somehow that has to do with the bank. Weird.

There's some really stupid things too. I've already mentioned the trolleys with the four swiveling wheels: the anger about this is not abating. The other is that the lanes, and the parkinglots, are just really narrow. There's places that I really feel like I'm playing Street Rally, only I'm a middle-age woman in a bubble-shaped Toyota Camry (boring as hell with a V .2 engine) driving on the other side of the road on the other side of the car, and not in a Ferrari along the coast of Monaco (which might make up for it--what a place to kick the bucket)--sometimes, going on the loop-de-loo on Hastings Road on the way to Redfield, I let go and say "whee" but most of the time I feel like I'm about to hit something.

There's some things I love. I love the make-it-yourself yogurt places, and I love it when someone offers 'morning tea' or 'afternoon tea'--and it doesn't mean the acidic-to-the-max-but-tinny-thin Lipton junk and no milk and nothing else: it means good tea, with milk always ready and little sandwiches and delicacies. Very cool. It makes the Hobbits and their 'elevenses' delightfully real. I did find out the hard way that Australians really do just drink their tea and move on...none of this taking their drink with them into the meeting. "Oh you Americans" is what you'll get if you do that. I guess we like to carry our drinks round with us...I never noticed.

I've had the odd experience of hearing the American accent as if from the outside...after not hearing it for awhile (immediate family doesn't count for some reason), I was listening to the radio, and they were interviewing a Concert Master who is playing with the Australian Symphony. I was thinking, "She's saying intelligent things, but why does she sound so--well, what is it--kind of slow or something. I wonder if she has a speech defect?"

Then I realized suddenly that she was from somewhere on the East Coast. We do speak more slowly, almost excruciatingly slow compared to Australians; we have less lilt and inflection. Our accent is kind of a clipped, slow monotone with disproportionately large 'ay' sounds. But it is ours and it was nice to hear it and be able to follow along so very easily, like being in water the exact temperature of your body.

Getting to know a new country is perhaps a little like marriage. For most of us, the honeymoon ends when the plane hits the home tarmac, and for a few of us, at moments, even sooner. Sometimes, like in marriage, in rushes the desire to just go back to the way things were, especially when you find that the dangers and troubles are very real. But there's something about keeping promises, keeping faith, that patience IS love, that having virtue makes it possible for us to truly love. Without them we can't. I know that from the wrong-side round--sometimes learning is most powerful when we experience in ourselves, in others, the opposite.

I've always been an escape artist. Part of the charm of a new place is that it is new--I am an adventurer, but not an outdoors one. I hate camping. I'm a cultural adventurer--learning about a new culture never gets old, besides a few moments struggling with the stupid trolleys or trying to make a simple U-turn (not an option here for the most part): "There's a roundabout 2 km along--"

"Shut up."

"Pardon?"

"You know what you can do with your roundabouts and your trolleys and your spiders?"

"Pardon?"

Anyway, even with those things, I feel so enriched by a new culture. One great experience recently was attending a Syriac Catholic liturgy. We were invited by a prospective Campion student, who was born in Iraq. He's twenty-something and has lived in the cradle of human civilization and now, even inexplicably to himself, way out of the cradle, here at the ends of the earth. He has started businesses, worked as a mechanic, started a restaurant, and survived wars and immigration. His face is beautiful with joy and hope, and he wanted us to come and see his parish church.

The mass was full of Semitic people, people with black hair and deeply olive skin, long noses and luminous eyes with thick lashes and dramatic eyebrows. As I looked around, I realized that many of them looked like traditional icons of Jesus and Mary--suddenly the icons looked less like foreign, ancient symbols and you could almost see what they might have looked like. Some of them looked like the Man on the Shroud of Turin.

We were told this liturgy is the oldest known liturgy in the world, older than the Orthodox, older than the conglomeration of ancient liturgies that is the Tridentine...so I was interested to see what elements it might have in common with the Tridentine or the Orthodox rites--because, I surmised, those commonalities might be root actions that the disciples instituted.

The women wore head coverings; some of them did not, but the majority, who did, tied their scarves behind their neck. They looked like old Greek grandmothers to me when they did that, and I felt that old pang of reminiscence. The young women wore lots of make-up and fancy shoes, which made them look like Cleopatra. I understood the thing about Cleopatra's nose when I looked at them; their noses were straight and long, coming out from their faces dramatically, and it gave them a solemnity, a gravity, a beauty that is simply not Western at all. They make Claudia Schiffer look like a Precious Moments doll.

When the music started, Ana and I looked at each other. Syrian music is both sad and happy at the same time; it is in the minor, but with trills and a strength that is more like solemn joy than melancholic Irish music. As I watched the music player sway and add impossibly fast and complex trills to the solemn base line, I felt chills go up my spine--I was listening to something living, something that still visibly moved the people in their soul, that was also ancient.

They chanted--and you could hear a possible root of Gregorian chant came, but it was more complex and less bare. It wasn't polyphany; the music itself had detail and a movement that made it both simple and complex. It kept you interested, but allowed you to pray; it brought you into itself, both the rational mind and the emotions. It seems, to me, to be more about the full human person than Gregorian chant, engaging the emotions, spirit and mind in equal, balanced measure.

We listened to a language that is the direct descendent of the Aramaic that Our Lord spoke...it was wonderful to hear the Old Testament read with similar sounds to those Christ made when He was in the synagogue. The Syrian priest sang the Scriptures: I wondered if Christ did, too.

There were many responsive prayers, and you could see that the servers must have played a response-role right from the beginning of Christianity.

We went outside after, and no one stared at us as if we didn't belong. They looked at us with gravity and nodded. The young priest, tall and dark with a winning smile, greeted us and moved on easily. I found there seemed to be a feeling that these people were comfortable with their emotions, with each other, a people that accept what comes along the road, a people sure of their roots--roots not only racial but cultural and religious.

We, on the other hand, almost ate someone's funeral luncheon, thinking it was coffee hour. Luckily we noticed the lamb on the spit was surrounded by somber, crying people in black. We said goodbye to our friend and went to Red Rooster, suddenly returned to a Western ethos. We sat and watched button-nosed Norwegians race down a snow hill in Sochi as we ate. Talk about hitting the other end of the culture spectrum...the Scandinavian intensity reminded me of the cross country runner portrayed in Tintin, who is very Western-white bread and saying, after he'd won and been piled with laurels, "Yes, thank you...I'll do better next time..."

I thought about those roots I felt at the Syriac liturgy, and promises to keep, and virtue that disposes you to love; I thought about the virtues without which love invariably turns to hate, to indifference.

We probably have to break our lease, which makes me uncomfortable. I don't want to live in a house that may or may not be infested with some kind of spider. We may or may not have a case, especially with a pest control person who is for some reason, incoherent. Too much spray?

It has made me think about promises, and Austen's virtue of constancy, the virtue she said underlay all the others, made the others possible. Is being rooted in culture, in religion, a guarantee of virtuous constancy, that ability to keep promises and to make your 'yes' a 'yes'?  A rooted culture, a small-town life definitely challenges you to be real, to be constant...you can't hide, really, or escape from small-town family and friends. They simply know you, as you are. And this is good.

But also, being uncomfortable, facing loss, facing a new culture, also can challenge your true constancy: "Virtues are only real under threat." Along with the being known, it is also easy, in a small town, to create a role, a facade that works. One can become the 'respectable member of the community' and never be able to see the true inconsistencies behind it because the cost of being real is too high, a la Austen's characters who preserve respectability at the expense of true virtue, who in the end saw respectability as virtue.

Constancy is about keeping promises when one should, and knowing what the 'should' is about. It is about living your true self, saying a 'yes' from the true self. If one says 'yes' from the true self, that is the frame within which love can grow.

I was a young woman who did not keep promises; I was too run by the demands of my own feelings. A cross for the young is that you do not yet know yourself. It wasn't until meeting St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Jane Austen, Tolkien; it wasn't until I saw that Christ rested in the Eucharist in the Crypt Chapel at St. Mary's in Annapolis and knew that my yes to the Church meant a great deal of pain for others; it wasn't until Thaddeus and I struggled through, time and time again, that I began to see the true value and personal cost of constancy. And it does have great personal cost...to hang on through a storm requires something higher to live for; it requires a greater power that we must work with.

My moments in life of not keeping promises are the most painful wounds I have; my making promises I did not know the true meaning of, in youthful and selfish ignorance; my lack of the constancy built on true self-knowledge and a balance of the rational mind with the emotions and the spirit did indeed mean that I could not love.

Anyway, at mass today, after getting over the red shoes, I realized for the first time what St. Augustine is talking about when he says that we ourselves provide our own punishment. I also understand what he's talking about when he expresses his need of the power of God to fill his weaknesses, like water rushing into a hole. To keep constancy around the really serious promises in the messy world, out of a rather messy heart, is not in my power alone.

Grace Building on Killer Spiders

As they say, "Just when it seemed things were back to normal..."

I was putting the finishing touches on the Bulli house; I'd got to the point where I thought things like, "This would look nice here" or "A painting of this would go great on this wall" when I noticed a strange web by our front door. I knew there were spiders; the garden is quite extensive, and spider webs would be a normal occurance.

I'd cleaned out the beds and begun the process of re-establishing order, when I saw that web. Funnel-web. I knew about these things; the females are larger but less aggressive and less poisonous; the males are smaller, aggressive (they jump to attack) and their bite can kill you in nine minutes (like angry babushkas versus SS swat troops). Then I saw one, in the garage. I wasn't yet concerned, because if they are like black widows, they would tend to stay in dark corners and hide.

Then I saw more. Also, we'd been pestering the management company for screens downstairs. I've seen, incomprehensibly in this climate of some rather dangerous bugs, lots of houses without screens. "That's just the Aussie 'whatever,'" someone told me. Well, though we are fresh from a land where mountain lions stalk about neighborhoods, we were adamant about having screens.

Finally, the screen man came the same day as the 'flick man'--pest control. He kept coming back up the porch from the garden and looking at me, shaking his head as he knocked funnel-web after funnel web spider off his brush-stick.

After the spraying, the spiders must have had a war conference. They all started coming out on the outside of the house--balcony rafters, window frames. I myself killed five (how many Australians have had the adventure of killing five of these things?). By this point, I thought, "Well, they probably like to stay outside." At least that's what the flick man said.

At about nine pm, Ana was, without being asked, being unselfish and sweeping the kitchen floor. The house was quiet; everyone was tired from school and me from fighting with spiders. Thaddeus was out at the gym.

I see Ana come around the corner, her face calm but white. "Come with me, Mom. Quietly."

I didn't need to be told what it was.

There he was, on the floor. I attacked him with the broom and nearly destroyed the couch in the process. I would have set the damn thing on fire if I'd thought it would have helped.

Looking at the little carcass, Ana and I were breathing hard. Nine minutes til death and the thing jumps at you. We looked at each other and I said, "We're outta here."

I called Thaddeus, and all of us (shoes on and I wish we'd had nuclear bomb suits) packed up what we needed for the night; we called Ryan, and Peter Pelican, and Peter brought over the keys to our refuge, the Rausch House. Peter did not stay to chat.

We all jumped in the car and drove away. We pulled up to the Rausch House, and Thaddeus got a couple bags and walked toward the front door: right into a huge web. We all started screaming; it was 11 pm by now, and we probably woke up the neighborhood, but we'd lost our minds by then. The said web was occupied by a 50 c piece-size spider. We shone our cool i phone flashlights on it and then right there, on the spot, looked it up online on the said cool i phones. We identified it as a 'common garden orb-weaver.' We almost hugged it.

In the house we went, all of us wondering what this truly ridiculously scary experience was about. TJ fell asleep immediately; it took me much longer. I kept freaking out at anything that moved.

As I lay there, happy to be away from that house, I remembered the first night we slept there; I remember that I woke up in the middle of the night, feeling a terrible presence. I thought, "We have to get this house blessed." The next morning, without any knowledge of what I'd been thinking, Thaddeus said, "I asked Fr. Luke to come over and bless the house." I held that in my heart, wondering what it meant.

This morning, waking up in a refuge house, I wondered about the meaning of this; either some things are just random, just bad luck, just being in the wrong place at the wrong time--or, things have meaning, all things...good and bad events, naturally scary things a means to some supernatural end. When I wonder about this, I always think about Gandalf saying, "I've never met such a thing as luck in this world" and a priest who said once, "All these things on our road are the will of God coming to us in some way."

So I wondered, because this was like being attacked in some way. Other people I respect have said, "How can you say that bad things are somehow God's doing?" It is a tough question.

I thought about it, still, as I drove TJ and Sophie to school. Ana was too tired to go.

As is my habit now, I stayed at Redfield to say a rosary in the chapel. The year 10 boys came trooping in as I was praying, for a recollection with Fr. Felix (from Spain). I listened half-way and kept praying. He said, "In my homeeleey, remember I say 'Eet ees self-geeving and geenerowseety....." and his voice went into Charlie Brown-adult-voice-mode for me, as I prayed for a good resolution to our issue of being chased out by insects.

Suddenly, my full attention was on Fr. Felix: He was saying, "Selfishness is a poison...you know, we have in Australia these funnel-web spiders that can kill you. That is how strong is their poison. They have those fangs, you know? When we do selfish acts, we are like poison for the human community. Someone said once, 'One selfish act poisons humanity;' on the other hand, good acts bring health and goodness to the world."

It was one of those rare moments when you know God is looking right at you, a direct gaze, and He's speaking through someone--to you.

I saw, through my full attention, through my questions and fear, my own selfishness. Not a morose thing at all; when true sight happens, it isn't depressing: it is frightening. Why? Because you can see it but yet, when you really truly see your own face, you know you don't have the power to change it. Perhaps that is why we don't want to truly see our vices; it is like finally, after years, seeing a huge wall at the edge of a garden one has been living in for years, and realizing that one isn't in a garden but rather in a prison.

All you can do is stand at the foot of that wall in your heart and cry out for God.

I sat in the chapel and then went into see Fr. Felix. I asked him, "How does one deal with the poison of selfishness and yet be balanced about what one needs?"

"Yes," he said, "A mother especially has to take care of so many needs; it is a matter of keeping a balance, and of knowing that you can only be generous and self-giving in the power of God. You keep the image of Christ on the cross, and you think, 'You did that for me; I can do this little things for the other.'"

How pat that sounds; how many times have I heard that? I needed a bunch of spiders to help me see this truth anew, yet again. Yes, in order to make dinner with love, or clean that boys' toilet yet again, or do the -what is it now? 10 thousandth? load of laundry, especially in my middle-aged, hormonally-challenged, forest-dweller state, it takes the power of God. How do I then remain myself? Am I just a vessel for Him? Who am I? Am I just the selfish part?

Somehow, He says, "I will make you new"--like the lover who pours his whole being out for the beloved, we are not diminished by His help. Somehow. It is one of those truths I know, but I do not understand.

This was the grace of God for me, building upon nature, as Thomas Aquinas says; God using the things naturally around us, even the hard things around us, to create situations of grace...if we are looking.

The miracle is that none of us got bit, especially TJ, who had four of these things living right outside his window (with no screen). That's the miracle part. Sometimes you know the angels are about. It was clear to me that God simply wanted us to go through this, but that He held our lives in His hand, like a parent who calmly watches you approach the edge of a cliff...and you don't know the cliff is there, and you don't know that He's holding on to you, to let you learn, and live, one more day. One day, He will let you go, letting go only to catch you on the other side: learning will be over; a new life will begin.

Ana had her own grace-lesson: "Scary things like this, Mom, make you braver in some weird way...I laugh now, in the face of tarantulas."

Flowing Time and a Divided Will

Things are more like a river flowing rapidly in the spring; the ice blocks of moving, starting school, getting acclimated are slowly melting. I sometimes feel the spaces now left by those who daily enriched my life in Lander, from little Susanka boys trooping across the lawn, coming to play, to loving friends who carried my heart in tough times.

Life is just slightly quieter now; I remember after the particularly stressful time in 2009, suddenly learning to love a normal day. I still have that appreciation and love for the normal routine...and slowly, things here are coming into normal focus.

I realized the other day, for example, that I didn't know what was going on in traffic half the time...the lanes would suddenly, without warning, become left-turn only lanes; and in Sydney traffic, turning around is a ten-minute procedure (u-turns are simply not done for the most part). Suddenly something came into focus for me: the signs indicating lane changes, roads, stoplights, etc, are on the left. Not the right, which was where I was unconsciously looking all this time. I didn't even see the signs on the left. We see largely out of habit, out of what is normal for us.

This is usually a good thing, but it is a good lesson to have to shift focus, frustrating as it is. It is that same steep learning curve that you feel when you realize suddenly that you were not seeing something, simply out of habit--a kind of long-term choice about which we become, slowly, unaware.

Part of the flow comes from beginning to people our emotional landscape once again; one such time was when we had a lovely three-course dinner at Peronis in Paramatta with some of the Campion Foundation board members, to celebrate Geoff Caban, the departing Academic Dean.

Ordering dinner, delighted with the nightly made-up menu offering course choices (it reminded me of the Rotterdam ship, having dinner with Poppo in his very 70s tux), I amused the Italian owner, who had wonderful blue eyes, by asking for beef entree (appropriately, here, 'entree' is 'appetizer'--how did we Americans get that backwards?) and beef main course. He said sardonically, "I'm sorry I don't have beef on the dessert course." I just laughed and didn't tell him I was just glad to be able to eat something on the menu, and that I never get tired of beef. Not beef ice cream, though. I'm not that English (who might really eat something like beef ice cream).

I delighted in Edmund, with his kind, but sharp-edged humor, who lived for a time in Bellingham, and has been to Sheridan and Gilette as part of his job in the mining industry; Joe, who was a real estate banker and is one of the most gentle people I've ever met; Karl Schumde, a founder of Campion and one of my favorite people. I met a new delightful person in Sophie York, a woman about my age who is a lawyer, activist, law professor--an energetic, confident woman, who laughed at Edmund's quips all the way from the deeper parts of her being.

Sophie, Edmund, and I talked about the American idea of the 'respectable member of the community'--it is an American ideal that, like the road signs on the left, I didn't even see was part of what I thought was a normal landscape. Edmund said, "We don't have that in Australia. There are no 'respected members of the community.' We are all equal." We thought together about how this is a class notion, a notion of hierarchy that has its positive and negative points. Australians don't hold people up for 'doing a fine job and being respectable' and so there's perhaps less incentive to build community, to be philanthropic. On the other hand, the 'respectable' idea can be phony and simply--a desire for classes--or as someone said, a kind of subtle caste-system.

They all struck me with that Australian real-ness and good humor, people of great dreams and great optimism, and great energy, successful people who were also deeply involved in their faith and so giving back, supporting a new Catholic idea in a culture that does not, largely, value it or even see it for what it truly is...the inculcation of wonder, the precursor, as the great Simone Weil says, to prayer, which is in turn the precursor to a relationship with God, to salvation.

Sophie told us about why she'd set up a scholarship at Campion in her sister's name: "She died of cancer at 36; she was, at the time, completing a liberal arts degree...the faculty of the university gave her a kind of graduation for the point she'd reached. She came to that party only a few days before she died."

I thought of that strong will to live, that strength, that I see in Sophie her sister as well, and I marvel at it. I'm made of much thinner stuff.

Although students have not yet come back to Campion, Thaddeus has been doing interviews of prospective students; Campion strikes me, after our conversation, as following, in a sense, the spirit of it's saint-founder, St. Edmund Campion. Campion was a young man who converted through a process of realization that he was indeed moving along the shallow path of worldly endeavour. His single-minded turn, his discipline, his movement against the current of his time, to his death, is remarkable; and I seem to hear this same single-minded miracle happening with some of the people who decide to come to Campion.

Part of the flow now comes from Ana, Sophie and TJ  all starting school. I wondered how we'd handle a school-city routine, coming from homeschool-small town. I remember a wonderful family counselor once, who uses horses to help families heal, who evaluated us and told us: "You all work together like clockwork." This was, at the time, a pleasant surprise to me; my German Henrietta part was thinking that we were largely a disaster area.

I see now the clockwork...we make our lunches and get up at 6:45; out by 7:25 and on the road up north to the schools, flowing along with early-morning traffic.The kids are taking such responsibility; they care about their work, their social responsibilities.

7 :45 am- I'm busy testing all the different routes and times; I like Pennant Hills Road, because it flows like a river through one of those interesting parts of Sydney that seems like a cultivated, rooted, place of older money, a place where one can see colonnades and intricate stonework peeking out from sweeping drives and tall trees. New Line Road gets crazy though; as I drive along, like a leaf with many other leaves on the current, I wonder how many of us are thinking of the convicts who suffered the back-breaking work of building these roads up through the hills, out of Sydney towards the Blue Mountains. I often imagine them, leaning on a shovel and looking out across the same hills covered with the bright green of the gum trees. Did they take in any of the beauty, or were the trees just another sign of the wilderness that was their jail-wall? Some of them escaped out into the bush, and most never made it out, or surrendered in a few days or weeks, to get away from eating snake meat, or in one case, each other.

What would they think, now, of the slick cars and red-tile roofed homes? What would they think of the girls pouring out of classrooms at Tangara School, being told, "Where is your hat? Put your hat on, thank you."

3:15: Sophie and Ana pour themselves into the car, the heat of the afternoon wafting through the doors; they debrief:

"I can't think about one math problem for as long as I want; they talk so fast that I can't understand them."

"The girls seem to know which assignments to spend time on, and which ones to blow off. I don't."

"I want to be in the music band, too."

"Mom--they have a great music room with garage band."

"I discovered I can do my French homework in art class. Isn't that cool?"

Uh oh.

I try to encourage them to think of positive things along with the hurdles; I am finding that for them, it is not only a new country, and a new school, but a new existence that requires skills they have not yet needed. They have had, through homeschooling, the luxury to contemplate, to savor things. They have also not had to learn how to have a schedule (which is not so good).

3:30, Redfield College: TJ is sitting on a planter with his two friends Leo Chang and Leo's little brother, proportional replicas of each other. His legionnaire hat flap has been poked out through the hole in the back, so that he looks like he has a very stiff ponytail sticking out the back of his head.

We ride home, and Ana keeps trying to say something, gets interrupted, and finally says, "I've been trying to say something for ages." TJ, quick as a whip, says, "It's only been two minutes--what are you, a bug? A fruit fly?"

We all burst out laughing, and it is a second when I see the TJ who sometimes says deeply witty things, or gets right at the heart of an issue, succinctly and wisely. Most of the time, though, he is more like a cricket, chirping, limbs whirling. I wonder if he is struggling with tons of energy, or attention issues--all these he would come by, as they say, naturally. His parents are classified officially as 'random' in some Book of Judgement somewhere. Our weaknesses are probably his to some degree.

I just read St. Augustine's Confessions again for GB classes, and Augustine speaks about the problem of 'two wills'--we seem to have to fight against ourselves, our weaknesses. He asks why God, who is Simplicity, who has the ultimate freedom of a single will entirely love, a will absolutely free for love, a will that is Love Itself, would somehow allow the divided will, the warped will, of evil, the absence of good. It is a hard question and the answer only comes when it is lived, I think.

TJ, though, and the rest of us, must fight with a divided will; it seems the point of this life, this journey, of suffering, is to refine the will into a single one devoted to love, to God. The weaknesses become opportunities to see our true divided state; if we can see it, if we can see ourselves as we are, we may just surrender in a heap at the foot of the Cross, asking God to heal the faultlines in us, the parts of us that consistently choose the lesser good.

Sophie says through the soft roar of the wind and the cars pouring down Pennant Hills Road, "We were talking in religion about heaven; it is a strange thought that we would be somewhere forever."

I thought, yes, a single will devoted to love, completely, is forever. It is forever peace.

In my times of inflammation, or exhaustion, I have cried out to God to let me rest, finally, in that forever; but He just smiles at me, or recedes into the shadows of my moments of despair. Yesterday, as I read St. Augustine, I finally saw again, slightly more in focus each time, through my weakness, through my pain, that I am a person of conflicted will; a little suffering will send me scurrying away from love; how many times have I chosen the lesser good, hurt those who truly loved me to run after those who pleased me or flattered my ideal of myself? Augustine keeps saying, "These consequences, the pain in our lives, is meant to discipline us"--I think he means the discipline that results in a disciple, a student, of love.

So all that is in our life that is new, or hard, or challenging; all that is old and chafes our old wounds open again and again, is for us, as a mirror is for the face. I thought again about those convicts building the Old Northern Road and New Line Road. How far would one have to dig beneath this slick pavement to find their blood, splattered by the whip, in the stones and soil? Was their suffering a mirror for them? Or did the unfairness of it, the harshness of it, for some of them, destroy their spirits? God alone knows how to discipline--to cut with the surgeon's knife--without destroying also what is good.

I am a person of weak and divided will--but I know, because of my wimpiness around chronic pain, that I simply cannot, ironically, will a single will. It has to be my knowing, like a lover knows his beloved, my own weaknesses, knowing the truth about myself.

Every time I read the Confessions I feel like I have spent some time with St. Augustine himself. Amazing, fruitful work that never loses that richness, even after four or five times.

I am hoping, through Fr. Percy, to meet Sr. Prudence Allen's sister. I wonder what she thinks about the divided will.

Birth Towards New Normalcy

The last few days have felt like a birth canal; pretty visceral, I know. Sorry. It is just the sense of being pushed and pulled towards something that you're unsure of...towards normalcy, of the Australian variety here.

I was imagining, all this time, myself sitting in a garden surrounded by green and sunlight, with some hours during each day to just have quiet. I have looked forward to this like an oasis--always a dangerous attitude, because I get too easily attached to my expectations. They become idols.

But today, I did sit in a beautiful garden in the sunlight, and prayed easily, fluidly, for the first time in many months. I looked around me, as if just born, blinking at the gift God gave me--the gift of answering gently, perfectly, my little picayune expectations. Our house was owned by an older lady who lived here for many, many years; once again, we are in an area that is just beginning to shift from older people to younger families. The Gardener, as I think of her, seems to have known and loved plants, like the Byrds who owned our house in Lander for so many years. In this garden, there are eucalyptus trees, myrtles, orchids, fruit trees, six garden plots with some food items growing, and a mysterious sand pit. Barry, our neighbor, solved this mystery for me. Barry is younger than us, and has a fiance and a little daughter. He looked over the fence in that friendly, straightforward way, and said, "G'day. You made it finally, ay?" Barry told me that the sand pit was, orginally, a beautiful frog pond. "We've lots of frogs over here now, looking for water." I am thinking about resurrecting the frog pond. How cool would that be if I got it right? How awful if I didn't? It could become a mossie (Aussie for mosquito) pond.

But to get here, to these few moments of a new normalcy? Wow. I haven't even been able to sit down and write anything for a few days: we got our beds, finally, and so moved over to the Bulli Road house, which we named Chutley House. Why? No why. Just Chutley. We also had to clean the Rausch St. house, and we thanked it for a good few weeks; I had to buy uniforms, school supplies, make a couple trips to the bookstore to spend oodles (and each time I bought TJ a subway sandwich, because he's not yet in school); get the girls to school and back; unpack at Chutley House...so it was like major compression.

The day I dropped off the girls to school was a lovely day...not too hot. Tangara (Aboriginal word for 'unity' I think) School for Girls looked all lacy and dressed up, with the beautiful parallelistic Australian woodwork, and the coral-colored brick. The school is like a California school, with all the walkways outdoors; it looks like a little village. Sophie and Ana, in their blue hats and plaid cotton dresses, looked more cute than I can say, and they handled themselves so well in their first moments there.

They didn't look back as I left; as hard as a new school is, they seemed to take it in stride. TJ and I went on our compressed way, shopping, cleaning, unpacking, getting lost, all the usual. When we picked them up at 3:15, Sophie said, "I have ten friends." Ana, more quiet, was thoughtful and philosophical about the whole thing. "I was a bit lost in math, but then I started to figure it out. What is a Pythagorean triad? I mean, I know what Pythagorean theorem is, sort of, but a triad? The girls are friendly, and nice, but boy are they wild sometimes and sarcastic."

I had all sorts of images of what 'wild' might be, but I know she's got her own perspective--which is, I surmised, different from my tough public school girl perspective, born of memories like ditching, sprinkling chalk dust on Mr. Phillip's head, or plastic bottle battles with Mr. Jones.

 So I asked. "Well," she said, "they wanted to play Murder in the Dark down in one of the music rooms...so they went down there and then got sent out."

"Oh," I said. Ana is my little orchid flower.

Sophie was busy deciding a kind of persona she should adopt with Australians. She said, with her interesting mixture of strong ideas and timidity, "I am not sure how to deal with shy people."

I realized that I have my own, almost unconscious, deep hopes for them regarding school...again, a dangerous pastime. This came home to me when I picked them up the next day at the Swim Carnival. I saw the few hundred girls cheering and sitting in their houses (Ana and Sophie are in Atlantis--the others are Tintagel (Arthurian), Siena (St. Catharine), and La Mancha). I teared up for some reason, just sitting there at the Blacktown Aquatic Centre, at the side of the huge partially outdoor pool. It just seemed so rich, so full of potential, but not as sketchy or full of pitfalls as my entry into public school was in 1978. There seems to be fun, but ordered within a strong sense of mission, that mission being the end--the good--of the person, which only an eternal viewpoint can see or apply to young people.

I realized, even with the tearing up, that neither school would be anywhere near perfect. But it seemed to me good. And the beautiful facilities, the smiling girls, loping around like young fawns in their resplendent youth; there was a feminine ethereal quality, mixed with Aussie fun. I am often, as Elizabeth in Pride and Prejudice is, 'hard on my own sex'--but sometimes I get the Glimpse of Adam: I see the beauty, like light, airy and inspiring, that is unconscious femininity.

I also realized that I have to let Sophie and Ana live it, and go through it...anytime they express doubt, I want to say, "Do you know how blessed you are?" --but I have to let them be themselves, and struggle where they need to struggle, for that is also a good. It is one of the goods that we brought them here to experience...to be stretched.

Tonight, Friday, I picked them up and through some traffic, we got home. Then we had to turn around almost immediately to get them out to Our Lady of Angels youth group. As I complained and wanted to turn around and snapped at everyone, and generally behaved like a three-year-old in the traffic and heat (I didn't give anyone the finger, though, and I'm starting to understand that Sydney drivers use their horns like cattle prods, little beeps that feel like small electricity shocks), I heard another, more mature voice inside me: "Usually, you know, when you are really getting frustrated, it means that there's devil-flack...he doesn't want you get them to youth group."

So I shut myself up.

We pulled into Our Lady of Angels, and suddenly it was another little slice of heaven; the seven pm light, that lovely golden slant, was pouring through the eucalyptus, and the heat of the day was just giving way to a cooler breeze. I could hear sounds of voices, singing, and I crept in after Sophie and Ana to the church. I expected to see a choir leader of some uncertain, heavy-jowled middle age (am I really that too??) frazzling away at timid teenagers, but instead there was an angelically handsome Filipino young man, maybe seventeen, playing the piano and teaching the other secondary students how to breathe. I sat in the church, looking at Christ; the young people started singing, and they sounded like the voices of wind through the trees, or rushing water, without a trace of the metallic edge of older vocal chords. It was beautiful to see them, on their own, praising God, some with their eyes closed. They instructed each other with a straightforward humility; it was just so good.

I left with TJ, who was literally climbing walls outside...poor little guy.

Making Memories on Australia Day

We're starting to make memories.

Thaddeus, who lives sometimes in an alternate universe of books and young-boy wonder, has done some funny things, one being the result of a desire to see the little frogs that we hear everywhere. We were walking home from Campion at night and he heard them in the little bushes by the sidewalk.

"How cute," I said; "I wonder where they are."

Next thing I know, the bush has been kicked pretty hard by a size 13 foot attached to Thaddeus. The frogs, of course, went silent. What's the equivalent in frog noise of "Oh, crap"? Whatever that is, that is what sound they made next: a tentative 'ribbit.' The bush was kicked again, and I caught a sudden glimpse of a little frog form, but stomach up, flying through the air.

That sight seemed enough for Thaddeus.

He also has been here just long enough to create some of his 'impressionistic' drawings of people's personalities. Ana, though, did Thaddeus and has the same gift of capturing something very funny about a person: Thaddeus is definitely a shark lamp slightly tilted.

We also made memories going down into Sydney for Australia Day; we met my cousin and her family. Of course we made them wait because we rookies drove, instead of taking the train. The train procedure just seems a little too much detail for me right now. It will come, I hope. So, of course we got turned around and went over the Harbour Bridge twice, twice going right over the Thorntons' heads, who were standing at Circular Quay. Then, when we parked, we got caught in a port-a-potty line, where the damn thing cleans itself for a minute every time some one uses it. "Self-cleaning cycle, please wait" is now burned into my bladder walls. The Thorntons are patient people.

Not only that, they have reached out to welcome this immigrant family, from sharing their home and time with us to helping us put cheap but useful furniture together; I thought of them when I read this in my devotion this morning; I quote it at length because it is so worth reading, and I believe the happiest people are people, like my cousins, who live this:

What is the essence of being a Christian? It is certainly more than doctrine, precepts, and commandments. It is first and foremost a relationship – a relationship of trust, affection, commitment, loyalty, faithfulness, kindness, thoughtfulness, compassion, mercy, helpfulness, encouragement, support, strength, protection, and so many other qualities that bind people together in mutual love and unity. God offers us the greatest of relationships – union of heart, mind, and spirit with himself, the very author and source of love (1 John 4:8,16). God's love never fails, never forgets, never compromises, never lies, never lets us down nor disappoints us. His love is consistent, unwavering, unconditional, and unstopable. We may choose to separate ourselves from him, but nothing will make him ignore us, leave us, or treat us unkindly. He will pursue us, love us, and call us to return to him no matter what might stand in the way. It is his nature to love. That is why he created us – to be united with him and to share in his love and unity of persons (1 John 3:1). God is a trinity of persons – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – and a community of love. That is why Jesus challenged his followers and even his own earthly relatives to recognize that God is the true source of all relationships. God wants all of our relationships to be rooted in his love.

Jesus is God's love incarnate – God's love made visible in human flesh (1 John 4:9-10). That is why Jesus describes himself as the good shepherd who lays down his life for his sheep and the shepherd who seeks out the sheep who have strayed and lost their way. God is like the father who yearns for his prodigal son to return home and then throws a great party for his son when he has a change of heart and comes back (Luke 15:11-32). Jesus offered up his life on the cross for our sake, so that we could be forgiven and restored to unity and friendship with God. It is through Jesus that we become the adopted children of God – his own sons and daughters. That is why Jesus told his disciples that they would have many new friends and family relationships in his kingdom. Whoever does the will of God is a friend of God and a member of his family – his sons and daughters who have been ransomed by the precious blood of Christ.

An early Christian martyr once said that "a Christian's only relatives are the saints" – namely those who have been redeemed by the blood of Christ and adopted as sons and daughters of God. Those who have been baptized into Jesus Christ and who live as his disciples enter into a new family, a family of "saints" here on earth and in heaven. Jesus changes the order of relationships and shows that true kinship is not just a matter of flesh and blood. Our adoption as sons and daughters of God transforms all of our relationships and requires a new order of loyalty to God first and to his kingdom of righteousness and peace. Do you want to grow in love and friendship? Allow God's Holy Spirit to transform your heart, mind, and will to enable you to love freely and generously as he loves.

We finally met up with the long-suffering Thorntons at the Hyde Park fountain, and the city seemed like one big festival. People with sequin Australian flag dresses (fashion faux pas); people with flag umbrella hats, many families just enjoying the day. It seemed family-friendly, joyful, and not super-loud, even with all the crowds. I find Australians joyful and fun, but not loud or obnoxious (except for the sequin dress). They seem less jaded, less cynical, in some way, from Europeans or Coastal Americans. It is as if Minnesota emptied and all the Minnesotans ended up in a place with super weather.

Next to Hyde Park, there was a great vintage car show. One car was a tiny German make from just after WWII; I remarked that it looked just like the cockpit of an aeroplane, even to the point of opening from the top, the same way. The owner told us that it looked like that because after the war, Germans were not allowed to make anything metal-industrial, so they had to use scraps from the war to create new machines and autos. This was one of the more creative results. The cutest entry is below:

We took an old-fashioned London double-decker bus (no charge--Australia does many discount things to make it easier for families to enjoy the sights) down to the QVB, or Queen Victoria Building. This was built on the occasion of a state visit by the Queen, probably in the late 1800s. There was a large statue of Victoria near the entrance, and she would be absolutely frightening if she stood up--impossibly thick and muscular-looking, a bit like Soviet statues of workers I saw. Huge and strong. The propaganda is very apparent, I suppose. Lynnette and I stared at what must have been a mistake. Her Garter Star was firmly affixed, I might say plastered, right to the tip of her left breast. It looked awfully uncomfortable (no wonder she looked so morosely thoughtful), and then I remembered an Amazon costume, or Athena, or some Greek goddess in war costume, with the very same idea. Maybe more propaganda. Or just too tempting for the sculptor.

And sometimes, the Australians dress her up.

The statue has an interesting history; once installed in front of the Irish parliament building in Dublin, it was removed sometime after Irish independence and was finally given to Australia in 1986, upon the restoration of the QVB. The statue,  left in the tall grass in a school yard somewhere in Ireland, was shipped to Australia and given a home in Sydney. Perhaps it is one of those interesting ironies of history that the Queen whose government oversaw many of the homeless and unwanted Irish shipped to Australia to finally--after rejection--find a place in a New World, had the same sequence of events happen to her image in bronze.

Regardless of the rather imposing Victoria, the QVB, though, is really quite beautiful- not muscular at all, just a beautifully feminine, intricate shopping centre. Poor Victoria. I bet she was more like the building than the statue, and had to be made into an imposing figure, in order to keep an empire, in its long afternoon, together. The QVB reminds me of Gum's in Moscow: Gum's was one of the first true malls in the world; about a mile long, Gum's is a marvel of stained glass arch-ceilings, lovely wrought-iron railings, and fluted pillared walkways. The QVB is very similar, but different from the Gum's I knew during the end of the Soviet era; here the walls were colorful, the place was full, and the shops were lovely. There were places like a pewter soldier-model shop, complete with a whole Nazi scene, Gallipoli, and other famous Australian battles.

Clocks formed a part of the building: clocks in the shape of huge castles, and a complicated Australian history-themed one. 

This section of the clock commemorates the forced taking of Aboriginal children, to inculcate them into white culture. The inscription below the diorama says, "The Taking of the Children."

We then went down to Darling Harbour; we ate lunch, visited the Maritime Museum, where we saw the replica of Captain Cook's tall ship, the Endeavour, come in to dock.

We went to the Vikings: Beyond the Legend exhibit (who wants to get beyond the Vikings as a legend?). Actually, it was quite interesting; the gold filigree crucifixes from the Christian era were astoundingly beautiful. The kids (and Thaddeus) had fun:

Brad and I met a coffee barista from Mauritius, a small island far out from the eastern shore of Madagascar; he had a lovely French-Australian accent, and traded me an American dollar still left in my purse for a two-dollar Aussie coin. I've been having fun, by the way, planting money surprises in church collecting baskets. I like to put the dollars I have left in the basket and then watch the usher when he sees them. Anyway, the young barista from Mauritius told us, "My father wanted us to have education, and so we were either going to go to America or to Australia. He chose Australia because America is so violent."

I told him that many places in the US are quite safe, but that yes, there were some disturbing trends--like what in the heck is going on in Colorado?!

Here's some Australian police on lunch break. Brad said, "Even the police must eat lunch sometime."

As we walked back towards Hyde Park, Lynnette and I talked a little about the culture of Australia: she talked about the tension, in Australia, between maintaining a history and culture in the midst of tremendous immigration. Like many western nations, Australia values both its culture and history, and yet does not want to discriminate or keep people out, simply to maintain it. Yet, there is a real danger of it becoming unhinged from its roots, to become a meaningless, hyper-pluralistic place, a place without a sense of place.

This is something I have noticed here, and I wonder what the Australians will do, over time. They have made something of a success of 'the middle way' in terms of economics. They are not completely socialistic (it is a very different feel here from Canada or even the UK), but they are not laissez-faire capitalists, either. Economics is a cultural response to a situation; it reflects deep values, really, religious values. What is the end of a person? What is the responsibility of the family that is a nation towards individual members? Economics reflects this.

I didn't feel the same excitement as the 4th (really, the only flag I immediately want to kiss is the Greek flag, actually); I do feel a love for my country of birth, though, third-culture as I am. It was funny on Australia Day to see lots of people around you emotionally attached to an idea, a group, to which I have as of yet little emotional attachment.

So far, though, I respect Australians, and Australia. They have built something quite amazing, with very little time, out of terrible circumstances, and they have been more quick than Americans to deal with their injustices to aboriginal people. Everywhere, on Australia Day, one sees the Australian flag next to the Aboriginal flag. I am interested to know more about these mysterious people, people who were some of the last initial-participation people in the world, people who saw the creation as full of magic and mystery.

Meeting Bishop Fisher of Paramatta

No, it wasn't him.

Here's a little bio on Bishop Fisher from Salt and Light org:

"Most Rev. Anthony Fisher OP, was Auxiliary Bishop of Sydney, Australia and served as Coordinator of Sydney's World Youth Day 2008.  He is now Ordinary of the Diocese of Parramatta in Australia.  Bishop Fisher received a doctorate in bioethics from the University of Oxford in 1995 and became the founding Director of the John Paul II Institute for Marriage and Family in Melbourne." 

Here's a link to an interview with Bishop Fisher on the scientific dilemmas around stem cells and many of the important moral and bio-ethical issues of our time:

http://saltandlighttv.org/witness/anthony-fisher-bioethics.php

And here he is:

The Bishop Fisher I met (and of course I thought of one of my heroes, Bishop John Fisher of Rochester, UK, martyr) came in a white Holden (looks like a British Camry) in the rain. We were all assembled at Karin and Ryan's home: Kozinskis, Messmores, and--oh yes, not a nickname--Peter Pelican, who is the new Dean of Students for Campion. 

All I knew about Bishop Fisher was that he was a well-known bio-ethicist.

He came in the door in his plain, white Benedictine habit, the only thing marking him as a bishop being the simple, gold pectoral cross hanging down his chest, partially obscured by the cowl. Looking just slightly older than myself, he is not a tall man, and seems all of one blonde color. He looks a little English, a little Scandinavian. This white-blonde-cream blandness was only apparent. 

As we ate together, Bishop Fisher became visible. He has a stance at times, when the Bishop part is there: he instructs and answers questions as one used to constant interviews; at other times, he was busy winning wit ripostes with Thaddeus (I've only seen one other person turn Thaddeus' own wit upon himself: in this he reminded me of Jason Baxter); at times he laughed more deeply, and seemed deeply interested in what someone was saying; at other times he looked suddenly tired and lonely. 

He said that he first thought of being a priest at fifteen, and then became ordained ten years later; he said, "Bio-ethics chose me" meaning that it was the call of need in culture that took him in that direction. He wanted to work, for a doctoral degree, under John Finnis, and would therefore go wherever Finnis was (Bishop Fisher did not know at the time). I asked, "If he'd been in Egypt, would you have gone?" 

He laughed and said, "Sure."

Finnis was at Oxford, and so Bishop Fisher attended there, and began his work as a religious bio-ethicist. About bio-ethics he said, "Of course philosophy is essential here; yet there is also the moment when you meet the person who is asking you to shoot them because they are in a burning car, and in these extreme lines, often only revelation answers us adequately. Thus, in this field, you need people who are not simply scientists or philosophers, but also theologians and doctors. You need someone who can see the reality of the thing, not get into these--" and here he rolled his eyes delightfully, and continued, "--these stupid formulas like the ones coming out of Georgetown. Just absolutely stupid stuff, such as 'balancing respect for autonomy, nonmaleficence, beneficence, and justice'--with that kind of nonsense, you always end up preferring autonomy over everything else. It just doesn't work in real life."

From several comments he made throughout the night, I gathered that his time is simply rarely his own. I asked, "Do you have time to write in your field?" 

He said, "These days, my subject matter is usually chosen for me, by the needs of the moment, by the conferences and speeches--" and he waved his hand around lightly. 

His face did light up when he spoke about World Youth Day in Brazil; he said, "We took the youth to Peru, also, for a week of helping the poor. Most of them have never seen such poverty; in Lima, there is no water to speak of because it never rains. And if it did, the little villages perched on the sides of hills would disappear." For next World Youth Day in Poland, he thought of perhaps taking Aussie youth through India for a similar exposure. "It changes them profoundly," he said. 

We asked him about the Catholic culture in Australia. He said, "The Catholic population in Australia is the largest religious group here; in most areas of institutions and politics, the largest group is made of Catholics, the second-largest is people who were Catholics at one time. It was, in the beginning, the Irish, but in Paramatta, since WWII, it has been waves of immigrants from Lebanon, India, Sri Lanka, the Phillippines, and even the Mediterranean. What's interesting is that within a generation, the Italians and many Mediterranean people were completely secular; the Filipinos, though, and the Lebanese have held on to their faith and traditions. I think they have a deep and consistent value on family and family prayer life."

He related that he was going to do some public event with Miss World, who is a Filipino woman. "Unlike most beauty queens who want to talk about world peace, she talks about the rights of the unborn and respect for family life. Should be interesting."

When he laughed, or was interested in something, he had a light-filled, sparking expression in his blue eyes; he had the alternating deep interest and sudden tedium of those who are deeply intelligent, as if his own brain sometimes made his spirit tired. At times I sensed what I often sense with celibate religious, which can come across as something like contempt for us in the world...but I think that is only what it feels like. I think perhaps there is a little envy for the simple pleasures of family life; a certain sense of loss around little children, and a single-mindedness about the duties of the vocation. But what do I know? I would have to walk in those shoes to really understand the gap of emotional connection I sometimes feel around those called to the religious life. I've met a very few priests and nuns who seem to be able to live emotionally in both worlds; I am thinking of the few golden moments with the pastor of the little church in Friday Harbor, WA, who was able to love me deeply and listen to me while yet having one foot away in heaven. Instead of making me feel far away from heaven, he pulled me in with him, it seemed. 

This bishop is not like that generally, although there were moments when he was; he mostly seemed like a man whose heart was deeply embedded in the call to obedience, to the cross.

He seemed to relax, though, as we joked about the Arnold Schwarzenegger cross in the cathedral; he seemed to take delight in Thaddeus' absurdities about funny things in liturgies and Catholic stereotypes gone bad, in Peter's questions about his life, in Ryan's enthusiasm for Campion, in Karin's comments. He paid especial attention to little Katie Messmore and told her she grew more beautiful every day. 

He struck me as one, like Pope St. Gregory of the sixth century, who was called out of study, reflection, into that beautiful cross of kenosis, the especial masculine form of self-emptying for the sake of the other. It seemed his life was guided, to me, not by his own desires, but by the needs of others; not even his own considerable talents were what lit up his eyes, but rather the conversion of the youth.

When I kicked Thaddeus for bantering about his cathedral, the Bishop turned to me and laughed, "A bishop called to his cathedral is like a husband called to a wife he's never met; sometimes you lift the veil and she's missing an eye and has a mustache...yet you love her, anyway."

Foibling

Today I got lost trying to get to a park for a play date. Karin (president's wife) got the Campion ladies together, and I didn't have the gps and got lost. Karin directed us via phone, with Ana talking in the back, and I just hope Karin didn't hear my language as I made U-turns and got honked at. I think my sense of direction is off--north just does not seem like north, and so on. I wonder why; I'm sure there's some good scientific explanation, but I just feel like a compass that's lost its magnet. As Fr. War-greg told me, "Our patience is only real when we're in a situation that tests it."

I've got a long way to go. It reminds me of being in Costa Rica, and losing patience with the Costa Rican men who seem to have few words around American women that don't sound like sick cats mewling. I began flipping them the bird, as I walked to work along the side of the road in San Jose. At some point, I didn't even look up: just the finger. Maybe not such a good idea. Don't want to do that here with honking Australians. I should be past that by now. Now I know where TJ gets it. Oops.

We finally got to the *&^ park, and kind Karin came out to meet us; she has three children, her oldest being the same age as my youngest. Helene, the Business Manager's wife, has four kids that I can remember; two older girls, two younger. Like little goats in a new pen, the girls eyed each other and with the help of us older ladies, eventually started talking to each other.

Leone was also there, the wife of the new Dean of Students; her children are little-little guys, very blonde and cute. They've just moved here from up north, in Queensland. It felt funny to be talking about the 'warmer north.'

An interesting part of the conversation was listening to Helene talk about Australian government and culture; we started on this tack because of Australia Day approaching. Helene is a second-generation Dane, and she said, "I have no connection with the Queen; I don't see the reason for a queen at all; she's as far away from Australia as the Queen of Denmark."

Someone else mentioned that this an issue among Australians generally; some feel a deep connection with the constitutional monarchy, and the British Governor General, and a Prime Minister, but others feel it is a pointless connection.

Australia Day is held January 26th, the anniversary of Captain Arthur Phillip's first claiming Australia for Great Britain in the late 1700s. The Governor General and Prime Minister give out awards to various Australians on the eve of Australia Day.

Another Aussie I spoke with later today, who shall remain happily nameless, just said it was a reason to drink a lot ( 'it' being Australia Day, not the Queen, Governor General, or the Prime Minister).

I then went over to Campion to see Thaddeus. Poor Thaddeus; already having trouble with Google Drive, he gave me his payslip numbers as a matter of course, and when I saw the numbers, I lost my breath and almost my lunch. This is happening a lot.

Why did I lose my mind? The gross salary appeared to be about half of what we had budgeted. I envisioned myself busking at Manly Beach to pay for everything else. Not a bad idea. I was already planning this as my new career; Thaddeus tried to calm me down and we went into see Ryan. He looked at us, smiled and said, "They pay here fortnightly, not monthly."

Silence.

Then laughter. Then we three Americans started having fun with the odd billing cycles here--rent is per week, not month; car payments per month; salaries fortnightly ("roughly 26 pay periods per annum"--what?? why?); who knows what the electrical company does?

We went out in the hall and Geoff and Tony, in the office, gathered around and asked if I was alright. I like the Australian straightforwardness, and want to join in, so I just told them my mistake. They said, "You need a drink for Australia Day."

Tonight we are to have dinner with the Bishop. No idea which one...but exciting anyway.