The Fox and the Child, directed by Luc Jaquet ("The March of the Penguins"), was a refreshing end to a hectic week. Kate Winslet narrates this thoughtful tale of a child's friendship with a red fox who lives in the wilderness surrounding her home somewhere in the heart of rural France. We liked the film for its cinematography (dazzling shots of wildlife and nature); but the narration was good, too, and so was the music. The only person who had anything critical to say about the film was our resident nature-lover: "That girl should have KNOWN the fox didn't belong to her," she told us, indignantly. "It was a WILD fox." So, yes, there was that; but it ended well, I thought, and there was redemption, even for the child who should have known better.

For a sensible but kind review of the film, you might try the one that came out in the Times Online last year. It begins: "If this were a breakfast cereal, it would be a bowl of muesli with fresh fruit, topped with glistening honey." I can't help but agree.

Really alright

"It's raining," I said as we looked out the window together after class.

"Where?" he demanded. "I don't see rain."

I tried to point it out to him: fine mist and sullen drizzle drifting down over tired leaves, the slick puddles stretched across the tennis courts, the heavy weight of the clouds pressing down on us. But, "Not so much," he said. "It is what you make of it, you just have to do a little reinterpreting."

I wasn't having any of it. Reinterpreting on a worn-out Thursday afternoon? Too much work, probably not worth the effort. "I'm going home," I said, "I'm just going home."

So I walked back to my car, and there was wind and a little rain, and I was cold and wet and miserable. I felt bad, too, because he had only been trying to cheer me up, after all, and I hadn't been very considerate of those attempts: gray day gone grayer, I thought.

But grayer days happen sometimes (trust me, I've had a lot of them lately), and I know that, eventually, they disappear into sleep and sweet nights and the gentle breaking of a new day.

"I'm sorry," I texted my friend. "And you know what?

"The rain is really alright."

Tuesday morning

After a week of gray skies, the clouds have suddenly lifted to reveal streaks of light: the dusty rose and salmon of an early morning, the bold glow of a full moon on a November evening, the sharp crackle of blue stretched above bright leaves in the afternoon. October is my favorite month of the year, and at the beginning of the week, I was mourning its passing. Couldn't it be all October, all the time? I wanted to know.

It can't, of course. But the sudden luminosity of the air is a comfort today. November has its own charms.

Did you see that moon?

There is a hum of contentment here. We are all busy about our own things, happy in our interests and passions, in the comings and goings of our individual, overlapping lives.

Once, when we were planning yet another move, we sat in the parking lot at Bel Air. I said, "Dad, we're pretty mobile people, all of us here in America, but especially us here in this car. We have to say goodbye a lot." Painfully didactic, even in my mid-teens, I explained how I saw it: "We say goodbye a lot, but we don't have to say goodbye to each other, right? We bring us with us, always together. Like 'flittenloops,'" I said, coining a word. "We're rings with wings: we bump into other people sometimes, and other times we leave, flitting off to the next best thing. But the loop itself, well, that doesn't change. It has integrity, self-sufficiency."

I haven't always been as grateful for this unbroken circle as perhaps I should have. But then there are Saturdays that remind me: this is really where it's at. Right here. Where home and heart are bound together with graciousness, humor, and the willingness to care.

This is why Oregon

Across the heavy, sweet scent of red wine in plastic cups and over the ticking of found-object clocks they read to us. We are a small crowd in folding chairs; they, two finite voices grasping at the broken wholeness of the world, speaking of rain and sex and cancer with wryness, love. "The words are better heard out loud," I said later. But I like them in my head, too. Because voice or not, there is a tenderness here that makes me feel at home.

I was born here. Or I moved here only a few years ago. But we all belong in this fertile valley with its fish and fields--its friendliness.

Just a gathering in an art gallery on a drippy Thursday evening, here to hear. Our tastes are alternately divergent and overlapping, but I think it safe to say that we share at least one thing: an appreciation for the streets we walk and a thankfulness for the familiar outlines of the everyday. Oregon is our Promised Land, the blessing we grew up with, a choice we made.

On Meeting Sylvia, After Reading Her Journals

There was anger in that sudden rush of words:
Red ink pouring over dumb page
To rage against the intolerable turning of the wheel
Beneath which you were broken, battered, crushed.

I watched speechless:
Blank face playing field for your emotions,
Empty heart too full to hold it all,
Like wax--impressed by desire, drama, tragedy.

There is a weight to all this desperation:
Hot irons flattening creases in the soul
To press thoughts growing round and bulging out,
To stop, mold, remake when really wrinkles are better.

Communal jigsaw on the third floor

The staff in charge of archives and exhibits have scattered puzzle pieces across a table in the foyer at the top of the stairs. The signboard reads, "Communal jigsaw," and people have paid attention to it. Over the past four weeks, and in the intervals between my treks up and down those stairs, the puzzle has grown, the pieces have melded, blotches of color blend together and take on significant form. No one ever works at it for very long, but somehow, between hours spent studying for exams or stressing about the problems of the universe, progress has been made.

A few weeks ago, someone told me, "You were more honest today than you've ever been. Not," she hastened to add, "that you lie as a matter of course. But just that you actually told me, for the first time, what you're really thinking."

I have, I suppose, a reputation for reserve. When I said goodbye to my coworkers at my first job before moving to Oregon, one of them said, "Look at her! You can tell she has English blood in her--so calm and reserved." That is, not especially emotional, at least not in public.

Let's just say that communal puzzles don't tempt me much. Their publicness--the way they unfold and develop in plain view--scares me a little and makes me feel vulnerable. I am convinced that I will be happier if I simply walk on by: if you don't make an effort to put the pieces together, then you can't fail at the attempt, right?

But my conviction is crumbling. I might be wrong about this puzzle-thing, I guess. The communal jigsaw might be an acquired taste, but that certainly doesn't make it a less worthy or desirable one. I am more than willing to admit that the process of matching shapes and sorting colors finds its justification when conducted in public contexts: personal pursuits are more significant when we are willing to work on them with others, and if we are willing to admit that perhaps our individual visions can be enriched by the contributions of the person piecing things together beside us.

That doesn't mean it's easy to leave our quiet puzzle corners behind (or even that we ought to completely forsake those private goals). It's just to say that this morning I walked past a table on the third floor, and I thought that at least attempting a contribution to the work in progress was probably more honest and beautiful than refusing to stop and try.

Alcove with a view

Study in Autumn from the third floor of Hamersly

Monday

The weekend is over. All the donuts are gone and new homework assignments are tapping insistently on the door. Nothing new here; but that's the beauty of this season, isn't it? I told my family yesterday, "This is what I love about fall: it's here every year, and I'm still excited to see it."

I began my day today with two reflections on life and happiness.

The first talks about the connection between monotony and contentment (HT: Sriram):

In its essence life is monotonous. Happiness therefore depends on a reasonably thorough adaptation to life’s monotony. By making ourselves monotonous, we make ourselves equal to life. Thus we live to the full. And living to the full is to be happy.

The second reflection, equally important, is about riding out the in between times:

Years ago I heard a message about suffering and how at times we have to wait before we will have a song to sing. That message was by Jill Briscoe who happens to be friends with my dear friend Steph (whom I haven't met yet, but I hold her dear to my heart nonetheless.) She heard the same wisdom from her friend in this way: Oh, Steph. This is just the Selah before your next Psalm. Don't miss this or you won't know the next song. The Selah. That is where I am living right now. In that space between the praises.

So this is where Monday finds me: living monotony contentedly, just doing the next thing (ad infinitum), ready for praise or Selah-space--whatever happens to be coming my way next.

Flavor of a Saturday

A long day, intermittently gray and rainy, punctured by a morning thunderstorm, lulled into evening by a sweet wind and clearing skies. I spent the early hours of the day reading through The New Yorker. Piping hot homemade donuts and freshly ground coffee were grace notes to a series of engaging articles. My favorites? The ones about football, children's literature, and publishing, of course!

In "Offensive Play," Malcolm Gladwell develops a fascinating comparison between football and dogfighting:

At the core of the C.T.E. research is a critical question: is the kind of injury being uncovered by McKee and Omalu incidental to the game of football or inherent in it? Part of what makes dogfighting so repulsive is the understanding that violence and injury cannot be removed from the sport. It’s a feature of the sport that dogs almost always get hurt. Something like stock-car racing, by contrast, is dangerous, but not unavoidably so. . . . So what is football? Is it dogfighting or is it stock-car racing?

"The Defiant Ones" is an astute review of contemporary children's read-alouds:

Anxious parents—the midnight Googlers who repeatedly seek advice from experts—learn that there are many things they must never do to their willful young child: spank, scold, bestow frequent praise, criticize, plead, withhold affection, take away toys, “model” angry emotions, intimidate, bargain, nag. Increasingly, nearly all forms of discipline appear morally suspect.

The publishing article is, unfortunately, not linkable, and I don't have my hard copy at hand, but suffice it to say that I am disillusioned with Alloy and its packaged plots.

And lest I forget, there was this whimsical, yet insightful commentary on the "Nobel Surprise":

If President Obama really had to get a gift postmarked Scandinavia this month, he would probably, on the whole, have preferred the Olympics. At least at the Olympics the judges wait till after the race to give you the gold medal. They don’t force it on you while you’re still waiting for the bus to take you to the stadium. They don’t give it to you in anticipation of possible future feats of glory, like a signing bonus or an athletic scholarship. They don’t award it as a form of gentle encouragement, like a parent calling “Good job!” to a toddler who’s made it to the top rung of the monkey bars. It’s not a plastic, made-in-China “participation” trophy handed out to everyone in the class as part of a program to boost self-esteem. It’s not a door prize or a goody bag or a bowl of V.I.P. fruit courtesy of the hotel management. It’s not a gold star. It’s a gold medal.

We can take it as a sign of what a lucky fellow our President is that winning the Nobel Peace Prize has been widely counted a bad break for him.

When I wasn't reading The New Yorker, I was rereading parts of the Consolation of Philosophy, pondering the implications of doing and having one's own in Plato's Republic, and celebrating a sister's 11th birthday. She's the only person I know who requests a bag of birdseed and then, upon opening it, hugs it like it's packaged in diamonds. Then again, as my brother said this evening, "We're not geeks. We're just enthusiasts."

Happy end-of-Saturday!