I could only hope that my body's temple of the Holy Spirit is half as beautiful as this

St. Joseph's Chapel~Spring Hill College~Mobile, Alabama

An extra 15 minutes turned into a prayer for you

My parents were married at this altar

All I got was "God-bearing Virgin, conceived without sin....--- were placed at this altar
--- something Society of Jesus and those something --- May 1910 A.D."
There's 5 years of Latin at work.

"Her winter ended, and she felt the return of her own extravagance" --A. B.

The return of my own extravagance is usually marked by a noticeable dent in my stack of Christmas books and the return of hours upon hours of knitting. Here I am, five months later, finally cracking the spine of a book that I've kept tucked neatly between my cotton gingham-clad mattress and the wooden frame of my loft bed for all of spring semester. It became almost comforting as I crawled sleepily into bed in the wee hours of the morning to see it there, though the words on its pages were as mysterious to me as that boy across the room in my Theo class: the familiar external brought a feeling of calm, though what was inside I had no idea. Obviously my days and nights were filled with academic reading, so as not to have even five minutes for such frivolities as pleasure reading, much in the way my attention in class was dominated by the need to diligently copy down notes, not daydream about said boy.

Sarah Vowell's Assassination Vacation is nothing less than an absolute delight for an American culture nerd like me. In fact, when my older brother handed me the book, his comment was, "You're an American Studies major. You'll love this." Vowell is a contributing editor for the ever-popular Chicago-based radio program This American Life. My brother introduced me to This American Life, as well, when he gave me a copy of a story Vowell had done about her experiences in the high school band. Vowell's voice (also the voice of Violet in the Incredibles) sticks in my mind and I can barely read a whole paragraph without hearing her voice in my head, describing part of her halftime show as being, "A little Latin-flavored number called Tico-Tico."


Vowell writes with an amusing and endearingly dry sense of humor. The book, which follows Vowell across the country on a tour of sites important to the history of American presidential assassinations, is immediately engaging, even for those not as interested in random presidential facts as I. The first passage to elicit an audible snicker from yours truly was a vignette Vowell recounts of an awkward Bed and Breakfast table scene the morning after she saw the play Assassins, a "'musical in which a bunch of presidential assassins and would-be assassins sing songs about how much better their lives would be if they could gun down a president'" (3).

"Now a person with sharper social skills than I might have noticed that as these folks ate their freshly baked blueberry muffins and admired the bed-and-breakfast's teapot collection, they probably didn't want to think about presidential gunshot wounds. But when I'm around strangers, I turn into a conversational Mount St. Helens. I'm dormant, dormant, quiet, quiet, old-guy loners build log cabins on the slopes of my silence and then, boom. It's 1980. Once I erupt, they'll be wiping my verbal ashes off their windshields as far away as North Dakota" (3-4).

Other favorite lines include, "Going to Ford's Theatre to watch the play is like going to Hooters for the food" (21); and "...the National Park Service dedicated this restoration, duplicating the setting of one of the most repugnant moments in American history just so morbid looky-loos like me could sign up for April 14, 1865, as if it were some kind of assassination fantasy camp. So how sick is that?"(22).

I'm only 45 pages in, but I expect that this will be a quick read, as I'm very happy to get to know this ever-close, but yet-unknown friend, between scarf-knitting bouts (Yes, I know it's May, and I live in Alabama, but I knit nonetheless). As for the boy in Theology class....we may never know.

N.B. You can find more from Sarah Vowell, including free weekly podcasts from This American Life here. As a side note, if you do visit This American Life online, look for the 2007 Tour Poster in the store, which my brother's girlfriend Lilli designed (click to enlarge it to see the whole thing.)

Item #38

That's right, we're domestic.

Who wants to pick 'em?

Can you tell the Mama from the Papa?

She and I Felt a Little Crabby....

So we went to the Bay!

File this under "reasons I love the South"

Mmmm....lunchtime.

2 down, 8 to go.

These guys did not go quietly. I think they heard the boiling water calling their names.

"We must be willing to get rid of the life we've planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us" -- Joseph Campbell

So I've been back in Alabama for about 3 days now, and everytime I venture off my quaint little cul-de-sac I'm reminded both of why I love Alabama, and why I will not be moving back here, for a while at least. Here are a few little snapshots of both:

• I wheel my car into the small strip of parking in front of one of my new favorite stores: Initial Impressions. It's a monogram shop. That should be enough said there about why I love Alabama. But I look over to my right and adjacent to the monogram shop is a wine tasting shop where couples are sitting on the patio enjoying the sticky-sweet afternoon, in no hurry to be anywhere. Love it.
• Continue on my way toward town intent on getting the winter salt and spring love-bugs scrubbed off my car. I enjoy my cruise through the carwash, thinking about what the three different colored soaps actually do, and how I used to be deathly afraid of carwashes as a child -- sobbing uncontrollably from the back seat of the station wagon. Pleasant enough this time around. But then I get to get out and wait on a bench while they vacuum. And that means enjoying the company of every red-neck and their brother sitting around me. A middle-aged woman in 8 inch wedges and a low-cut tank top with badly-hidden bra strappage was indeed a delight to observe. The blonde, weasly-looking young man wearing a wife-beater had absolutely amazing "hocking and spitting" talent, post-cigarette. I know there's trash everywhere, but I forgot how much more prevalent it is here.
• On my way home from mass, I drove down Government Street towards the historic district. I couldn't help but notice the gigantic, elegant oak trees that shade the entire street -- the limbs of the trees on the south side of the street enmeshing with the limbs of the trees on the north side of the street. Those trees have been there for decades, weathering the coming and going of people and trends...standing strong, roots deep, reminding us of Southern elegance and tradition.
• Driving west, up the Hill, I get mixed feelings. Part of me knows that this is the best side of Southern culture, and at the same time, it doesn't feel like it used to. Large, gracious homes represent the old blood and old money that flows through this city. Family names mean everything. Growing up, I always saw myself here, working with the Junior League and doing philanthropic things with my husband's money, when I wasn't decking my children out in hand-made, monogrammed bubble-suits. But now, I begin to feel like I could never be that woman I used to think about when I was younger -- I could never settle to live this life, where ideals seem shallow and achieved dreams seem ultimately unfulfilling.
  

Three of my friends are flying to Africa today. Africa. It is a completely different world than the one I know. When I see the pictures people send back from their experiences in the Third World, I can't help but think to the images I have in my mind of the life I planned for myself for so long -- the big, white Suburban to haul my well-dressed children to their prestigious private school. I know that that's not really what I want now. I don't know what the new image should look like. What is the life that is waiting for me? Yes, I want to raise a strong family, yes, I want them to have the privledges I've had, yes, I want them to wear monogrammed clothes, gosh-darn-it, but there is something more that I want....that I have yet to figure out.