On kids and death

When my son Graham was two and a half, my aunt was the director of an exclusive preschool program run by an Episcopal church in Beverly Hills. She let us join their weekly toddler group where all of the mothers were a decade or two older than me. Most had older kids, as well—5- and 8- and even 10-year old kids—some who were already in therapy. No one seemed to be there for religious reasons, no one but the teachers, who I now know had likely prayed each morning before class for an opening in which to plant a seed of light or truth in a willing heart. One day I made the mistake of asking one of them, privately, on the sidelines of circle time, about Death. Specifically, how to talk to young children about Death.

“Well,” she said gently. “I suppose it depends on what you believe. For me, personally, I believe that when we die we go to Heaven to be with God and Jesus and all the Saints and angels. And that’s not hard to talk to kids about at all.”

How nice for you, I thought. Returning to the circle of sophisticated heathens, I realized I was angry in a new, unspoken, unspeakable way. I hated her for that answer. I resented her kindness and her confidence. Despised the possibility that she and others like her could have the last laugh about the most important thing I’d ever endeavored to do in my life. I placed Graham’s hands in mine as we circled them around like wheels on a bus and affirmed in my spasming heart that I would do anything to do right by him. Like a g-force drop in a cable-slackened elevator, the first seed gave root to an even more terrifying thought: was it possible, despite all my brilliant, enlightened ideas to the contrary, that the people—those people— who believe in God were actually the ones who had the edge when it came to raising kids?
–From Elijah & the SAT

In twenty words, the point of religion

“Religion is the means by which we come to understand how to be a finite being in an infinite world.”

–Source unknown

Sweet Memories

A weekend of rain is all the winter it seems we’re going to get in Southern California this year. Still, the gray skies set my mind and spirit on homespun things. I signed up for a knitting class. I need something different—something more creative than technology can provide—to occupy my hands, mind, and nervous energy each night. And I’ve just spent the morning baking. For all our growing awareness of the evils of sugar, nothing transports memories through time like homemade sweets. On our close-knit cul-de-sac I’m always assigned desserts for parties. Tonight I’m bringing salted caramel tarts to an Oscar screening, and, as I set the dulce de leche in a roasting pan to thicken, I think of my cousin Chris and his wife Laurel. It was a recipe they introduced us all to one Thanksgiving, a new option to sit aside the pumpkin, apple, and pecan pies at my Aunt’s house. It was my aunt who taught me to bake when I was little. We would have sleepovers and she would take me through every recipe, step by step. I can still picture myself standing on a stool in their tiny kitchen in Van Nuys, she in her nightie, finessing a wooden spoon through the batter, turning the big white bowl in the crook of her bent arm. I have a bowl just like it, a Williams Sonoma standard that I’ve had for 20 years now.

But not everyone likes salted caramel tart. Some people, like my husband, like chocolate more than just about anything. So I flip through my old recipe book and find a yellowed entry for fudge pie with walnuts. I am delighted beyond words to discover I have all the ingredients on hand. At the bottom of the recipe there’s a note from his mom, who passed three years ago. “In my experience, it slices much better if you chill it first. But it’s a wonderful recipe to serve to very special friends.” It’s signed, T.D. for Terry Davis, with a smiley face, and I stop to imagine what scraps of my life’s work will be unearthed later by my kids, my grand kids— and what, out of the great swath of if, will be meaningful to them. To make the crustless fudge pie I use the hand mixer that the mother of my uncle (I’m never sure what that would make her–a great aunt, maybe?) gave me at my bridal shower, 29 years ago. Still works like a charm. Just like the simple joy of placing the large near empty bowl laced with streaks of thick, sweet fudge in front of Lon. A thousand memories of pies and cakes and parties come flooding back as I see him smile at the sound of those five magical words, “Want to lick the bowl?”

Have a sweet and Blessed Sunday. And even if the movie Nebraska doesn’t win best picture, remember, it should.

The story of Elijah begins here

Head Butler reviews Baptism by Fire, tees up Elijah & the SAT

Another voice of Elijah

Even if you’ve never read a word of the Bible, you probably could name at least one biblical example of provision lasting much longer or stretching much further than it should have. Think about it. Go ahead, I’ll wait. You might have thought of the story of the loaves and the fishes (there are several of them actually), different times when Christ took a little bread and fish and turned it into enough to feed the Staples Center and send everyone home with a doggy bag. Or the time God made a day’s worth of lamp oil last longer than humanly possible, which is remembered each year for nine days of Hanukkah. And if you’re fond of a good wedding reception, you might have recalled Jesus’ first miracle, where he turned water into an endless stream of the “finest wine,” amazing and delighting the guests and kicking off, at his mother’s urging, the beginning of the end. The point is this: God knows how to make stuff last. But who can really afford to believe it? Let’s just say, for the sake of argument, that we give up our earthly to-do lists and start asking how He—whoever he is exactly— thinks we should spend our days and we even learn to pray and we even start to hear him and then suddenly the worst happens: we run out of money. Or food. Or time. And we’ve got no back up plan. No cushion. Not even a well-connected friend to pull us back up when we fall.

It is this fear that drives us to drive our kids to aim for the big numbers, the sort of SAT scores that’ll ensure they’ll never run out of anything—ever. This is our legacy to them: we made sure they jumped so high that the world could never fail to pay them enough to make them feel safe and secure all the rest of their days. But for all the mathematical certainty of that equation, we don’t feel sure at all. (Elijah & the SAT, p. 55)