Conversation with mechanic this morning:

Mechanic: Are you a law student?

Me: Uhh, no. I'm a lawyer. What makes you ask?

Mechanic: Oh, the paper in your car. Well, not so much the paper, but the AMOUNT of paper in your car.
____

I crossed paths with an old aquaintance from law school yesterday. We maybe had one conversation in law school, but he remembered my name. I was so impressed. Way to apply the whole - How to Win Friends and Influence People - principle of remembering people's names. Went to a party tonight and ran into a few other lawyers who practice with him. They say he is just amazing that way; always remembers peoples' names. I appreciate that quality. Makes me want to be more like that. Thanks for inspiring me David, I can't spell your last name...
_________

Experience as I was leaving work with a foot and a half of files in my arms because my bag broke from over use (or abuse, whichever you like better):

Sariah (name changed to respect employment contract):  You really have a lot of files in your arms.  Are you sure you don't want help, because you really look like you need help...? 

Me:  Oh, no.  I'm fine, but thanks. [as we pass security guard]

Security Guard:  Hey, do you need help carrying those files? 

Me:  No, really, I'm fine, but thank you.

Security Guard:  You really need help carrying those files.

Me:  Maybe, but really, I'm sure I'll make it to my car.



A few seconds later...

Two african-american dudes with dread locks and pants hanging low:  Hey, do you need help carrying those files?

Me:  No, but thanks so much for the offer.

Dudes - with sincere look of concern:  You really do need help with those files.  Are you sure you don't want us to help you?

Me:  Oh, thank you so much for being willing to help, but I really will be fine.  [Touched by their genuine concern.  Big smile of sincere appreciation for their kindness]

Dude:  You know, you have a really pretty smile.

Me:  Thanks so much!

Day made. 

I may just smile at a few more people...
and remember a few more names...
and try to cut back on the paper in my car. 

That last one may be shooting a little too high...

Half Marathon 2012

I have trained for two half marathons which I did not run, and run two half marathons for which I did not train. By the end of yesterday's half marathon I was done. I was not two for two. No need for more. Before I ran the half marathons I'd run a marathon and decided that one was enough to check it off my list. Done and done. I was hot and sweaty. It was at least 90 degrees, no exageration and the ENTIRE course was uphill. I have a passionate dislike for hills, and I am exceptionally bad at them. To top it all, I felt sick, the kind of sick only ladies are aquainted with. It was miserable. But quit I did not, and finish I did. At the end my legs hurt, I was drained of energy, hot, sweaty, and convinced that this too would be checked off my list of things to do in life. I was somewhat sad that my once adventurous spirit was becoming less so because that list I made as a young girl was slowly completed. What will I be doing with myself 10 years from now? I ran the race with my old roommate Liza. We sat, ate, recovered. Then the awards ceremony started. We had already decided we didn't want to stay for the awards ceremony, but we were too tired to move, so there we were. They started with the oldest category first - what seemed to me to be the very, very old category. Then to the sixties...then the fifties. My thoughts - 'Wow, these women look amazing...and they have 20 years on me...and they beat me, by a lot. That could be me in 20 years.' Keep in mind that I have now eaten a banana, rehydrated myself, and my body is slowly feeling better, and so is my spirit. I didn't win any awards in this race, other than the one they give everyone who doesn't quit.

But here is the thing, we all know that exercise is great for our health - but to really see it for the first time is a wholly different experience. These women in their late 50's looked vibrant, and honestly they were leaders and many of them had managed to convince large groups of other people to run with them. They were socially connected, and physically they looked decades younger than their physical age. My decision to quit racing was killed by seeing these vibrant, older women. As I drove the two hour drive home in my rusty old car, I remembered an article I had read several years back about how astounded French scientists to see the results of how good running was for one's health. So quit I will not, and continue I will for these, and many other reasons.

The Men Who Make Our Dreams Come True

Sometime this past year the realization hit me that my Dad is the man in my life who has made all my dreams come true. He and my mother taught me to dream, then helped me make those dreams a reality. He put me through college. He put me on a mission. He funded my study abroad. Thanks to him I was able to be debt free right out of college and be independent enough to pursue the things I really wanted.

Tonight I was reading a blog that I follow; the blog of a perfect stranger. She couldn't help but talk about how amazingly selfless her husband is. And to be honest, reading it made me want to be more selfless. I'd love to be able to make someone that happy. It inspired me.

That is the thing I love about guys. And I know I generalize -a lot, but let me here.

I am so grateful for my older brother, Ethan; for our endless hours of conversation. For his frank and happy way of being that I love so much. I am grateful for the way his first thought when he realized I'd driven to Georgia was to see if he could fix my air conditioning.

I am grateful for my little brother, Vince, for his sweet nature. I had to learn to be careful when I was in law school when I answered the question "How are you?", because he'd find a way to do something about it. He'd always ask for permission to call me from Belgium when he was on a mission there while I was serving in France.

I will always be grateful for my high school sweetheart, Chris. He was so other-centered that it baffled me. He taught me that I could be, and was loved. Even all these years later, his influence still makes me want to be a better person. Furthermore, when life throws its punches, I hold my head up a little higher when I think of how he treated me. He made me believe in my own value because he genuinely did. His kindness melted walls I didn't even know existed.

There are also my guy friends who always seem to contact me when life seems to be blue (ahem, Nate, his timing is nearly always flawless). Or who thankfully only work ten minutes away when I'm stranded on the side of the highway in 100 degree weather with a flat tire. (Ahem, Brett - he dropped everything to come help). Or there was the time my car got broken into and Chad drove an hour down and spent the day helping me replace my window and repair my car. There are guy friends who allow me to stretch my wings (Shaun) and ones who are consistent friends even after years and years (Jake - he has been far more forgiving and patient than I deserved). And of course, there are the guys who have been, usually without knowing it, direct answer to prayer (Charles - helped me fix my roof without lnowing Id spent my morning praying for that specific help and Mark- he and his wife brought me food once after I'd prayed for it without knowing of my prayers).

I am so grateful for all of them. They say that the errand of angels is given to women...but I would venture to say that it isn't gender specific.

Here's to all the guys who make our lives so awesome.

Second Hand Stories

I called Grandma and Grandpa tonight to tell them about the movie Red Tails. These were the stories I got in return, plus one from my friend Brett.

On John Walling:

John Walling was a childhood friend of Grandma's and an only child in his family. He somehow mananged to make it on to Japanese ground, take pictures, and bring them back to Nantucket. Unfortunantly, John was killed later in a submarine. Naturally, most of the Nantucket boys joined the Navy, being seamen and all.

Grandma went on to say that in the basement of Auburn Cottage there is a wooden post with the initials JW carved in them. John had carved these when he was a kid, and Great-Grandma Jones didn't have the heart to paint over it after John died. Grandma said he was one of the nicest people.

I'll have to check that out next time I make it to Nantucket.



Auburn Cottage, where Grandma grew up

On Depth Charges:

Grandma and Grandpa asked me if I'd ever heard of these...and no, I'd never heard of them. Grandpa told me I'd lived a sheltered life. Indeed, I've never lived through a world war. Grandpa explained that the submarines would try to find other submarines. So the German submarine, for example, would shut off all of its power, try to make absolutely no noise, and the American submarine would listen for it, and use their machinery to figure out where the submarine was, and then bomb away at it.

Grandma, who lived on Nantucket Island during the war said that at nights they could feel the depth charges. Auburn Cottage was right on the harbor. They'd get to school the next day and ask each other if they felt the depth charges. Some had, some hadn't, but they hoped they'd gotten the German submarines.



Ginette, Colette, Aunt Anne (mom's sister) and Uncle Jack with an ocean facing picture by Auburn Cottage

On the Tuskegee Airmen:



My friend Brett used to work for a carpet cleaning company and one night he got a call from a house that he didn't realize he was supposed to be cleaning. It was an honest mistake, but it caused him to be quite late to that appointment.

When he got there the man was irritated. To make matters worse, Brett blew a fuse. And to make matters even worse, he blew the fuse again. The very irritated man at this point brought Brett down to the fuse box. On the way down, the man pointed to a photo and asked Brett if he knew what it was. In fact, he did. And he realized that this man was a former Tuskegee Airmen. The irritation melted on the part of the man when he realized Brett knew what he was, and respect grew on the part of Brett, and the entire feeling of the night changed. The man showed Brett a book about the Tuskegee. There were so many more people in the book that Brett expected, until it dawned on him that every single mechanic, personel, etc. were all included in this group and they have reunions every year.

On the desegregation of the U.S. military:

Grandpa said that he was a part of the military when Harry Truman integrated blacks and whites in the military. Grandpa, a northern boy, was in the navy and working in the hull of a ship when a new man came down to work with them. Since he was coming down on a ladder, his feet were the first thing they saw. There was a southern boy down there with my grandfather and as soon as he saw the color of the man's legs he found a phone and called upstairs.

Southerner: Sir, the man coming down here is colored.

Officer: What color is he?

Southerner: Black.

Officer: Well, don't worry, it won't rub off on you. [And he hung up.]

Smile, You Don't Know Who Is Watching

This morning I stopped at my usual stop light on the way to work when that strange feeling you get when someone is looking intently at you came over me. Looking to my right I noticed a pedestrian on the street looking right at me as I waited for the light to turn. I suddenly became very self-aware. What was so unusual about me sitting in my car that it would cause a pedestrian to pause? - I mused. It was then that I realized I was just sitting there in my car with a huge, genuine smile.

I couldn't help it. The guy on the radio had cracked an incredibly witty joke causing me to laugh outloud, alone in my car. But you don't just go from laughing to straight faced, you kind of smile for a while after - and that was the very moment the pedestrian caught me. I guess there is something that gives a pedestrian pause when a person sitting in her car during rush hour traffic in downtown St. Louis is randomly smiling.

With that said, later in the day I came across this:




Enjoy!

Something Strange is Lurking....

My second year of college, I noticed that there was something strange about these people, but I couldn't put my finger on it. There was this...helpfulness, that I just didn't understand. A case in point was this guy in my apartment complex, Will. One of my roommates was not feeling well one day and Will, in his usual Will way, went door-to-door in our appartment complex trying to find her an asprin, or something of that sort. After 20 minutes or so, he did find it for her, and brought it by. But the thing was that Will, and so many others did this kind of thing ALL THE TIME. They seemed to always be on the look out for helpful things they could do, and then they would do it.

This may not seem strange to you, but of course it is important to understand that I was 19 years old, just coming out of one of the most selfish stages of a person's life - here, most notably mine. My friends and I were coming out of the stage of life where you try to get away with as little responsibility as possible, and the bottom line is that YOUR convenience and YOUR wellbeing were paramount. Up until that year, my peers had always been the same age as me.

I had pondered this phenomenon for a while that year. What WAS it that drove these people, so many of them, to be SO helpful ALL the time? Didn't they get sick of it? What ever made them to be that way?

As a backdrop to the series of Stud/ettes of the Month, Will, coincidentally, was the first ever stud of the month. We blew up his picture and posted it prominently on our fridge that Will was our Stud of the Month. My apartment kept him as stud of the month for an entire year because each time we'd consider nominating someone new, he'd do something else so genuinely thoughtful that no one could compare. (So there you have it, Will was the Stud of all Studs of the Month).

A few years went by, and I found myself in France, with a black tag pinned to my chest announcing to the world that I was a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ. As a missionary, my entire life changed. My life wasn't about me anymore. Not my schooling, not my goals. It was about everyone else from sun up to sun down.

Sometimes it was about serving my companion or other missionaries. But most of the time, it was about everyone else. Before my life had been about school work and adventure. I could bury myself in the library to get school work done for hours at a time. But now, I was on the streets talking to people, meeting with people - people who I would NEVER have met in my college life. I am convinced that there is something about representing Christ that causes people to open up much more quickly. There were so many times in meeting with people that they would tell us so much about their interior world. Things that are tender, personal and generally only shared with the closest of friends. We didn't ask for these stories, but I guess when people see that you are representing Christ, that it is their place to share these things with you. I found so many walls inside myself melting. Here were the poor, the tired, the hungry and the humble. So much comprehension of humanity that I didn't know I didn't have. My compassion for others grew.

There are promises that I suspect most missionaries make to themselves about their future. I will never forget this. I will always serve people. I will really listen. I won't let people around me in my future be so neglected as some of these people have been. And you really, really mean it.


(Picture copied from Will's facebook of him on a mission)

The thing is, that you generally come away from a mission a little...different. A little more Will-like. There was some point on my mission that it clicked for me. Those strange service-oriented people - they had all served missions. You see, boys in the Church of Jesus Christ typically leave when they are 19 to serve their missions. The women leave at the age of 19. So when I was 19, my male peers were all gone to serve, and the older ones were, for the first time, part of my peer group. As a 22-year-old, I too joined the ranks of returned missionaries.


(Me as a missionary in Marseilles)

Naturally, most of us fall short of the promises we made ourselves. We go back to school and life. We are still a little...different. But sometimes, those poignant feelings that caused us to become that way dim just a bit, but it is always still there.

But part of being a "Mormon" is that service is part of the program. Everyone is assigned people whom they are to teach and serve. Right now, I've got four ladies assigned to me. I teach one lady, we'll call her Judy for the sake of ananymity. She is much older than me, married, and handicapped with a degenerative disease. She rarely leaves the house, so visits are most welcome, health allowing. I dutifully visit her once a month. Sometimes, I don't. But today I had scheduled a visit with her. She had offered to make me lunch.

Over some homemade meatloaf we discussed life. Her legs are getting worse. Her eyes are getting better. She takes great pride in her garden. I've never seen her at a Sunday service, it is possible that I never will. She is incredibly intelligent and very giving. It was a genuinely enjoyable lunch and that feeling of admiration towards another human settles gently in. As part of my duty, I ask, and in addition try to seek out what her needs might be, and how I can best serve her. I left making the mental note that I need to be back this spring to help her plant her garden.

As I was driving home, I re-realized, just how great doing service for others makes me feel. It has a way of putting me in a profoundly great mood. Not only does it open my eyes and humble me, but it does bring a sense of genuine happiness that leaves its mark much the same way I feel my skin glow and my muscles feel more healthy beneith my skin for hours and days after a good work out. But strangely, service is like exercise, and I forget how great it feels until I do it again and then, the memories flood back of my mission, the promises - this amazing feeling. Remembering awakens the appetite that has been there, unnoticed, all along.

And in that perfect way that Heavenly Father manages to time things in my life, as I opened the New Testament where it is marked and I just happened to be reading in John 13 - the scripture about Christ washing his apostles' feet.

"If I then, your Lord and Master, have washed your feet; ye also ought to wash one another's feet. For I have given you an example, that ye should do as I have done to you."

It took me a long time to realize that the strangeness lurking beneath Will and others stemmed from here.

Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet

I first called my grandmother for fashion advice. Funny only because we are not fashionable people. But there was a murder mystery evening for which I was trying to assemble an outfit; it was set in the 1940's.

I knew nothing of 1940's fashion, but somewhere in the process of preparing my outfit, I realized that my grandmother grew up in that era. Surely she would know. I got her phone number from mom and gave her a ring.

In the midst of learning from grandma how they curled their hair, I learned of what a lazy, Sunday afternoon in my great-grandfather's household was like. I learned about the war, and how fashion resembled the war with their padded shoulders and uniform-looking suitcoats. I learned that grandma had saved so many of her dresses for her granddaughters to try one day. She had never, ever mentioned this in all of the days of hauling my mother's old dolls with their chests of doll clothing down from the attic when we used to go to play. In fact, it seemed strange to me that she had thought to do this, and I only knew because I happened to call.

That Christmas my sister Ginette and I arranged a fashion show at grandmas house. We fit perfectly into her old dresses. That phone call started a series of phone calls that continue to this day.

The thing that surprised me most at first was that almost all of my conversations with Grandma ended up being about the war. The war had little meaning to me, but, as it turns out, was so formative to my grandmother and even after all these years, seemed to be something that still is a huge part of her.

I learned of her classmates from the tiny island of Nantucket going off to war. I learned of her father joining the navy and how smart he looked in his uniform. I learned of the ringing of the church bells when the war ended...and black outs...

I am an immigration lawyer, fascinated with all things international. If I had it my way, the whole world would be as abundant as America. My grandmother buys nothing but American goods, and she is stubborn about it. One Christmas, I had to ask, 'Why? Why is it so important that we only buy American things?" I was one of those children who drove her mother nuts by always asking why. Grandma's first response was about how it is important for the American economy. My response was something about why we wouldn't want our commerce to bless the rest of the world. Why would we be so concerned about our country to the point of not purchasing from other countries? Grandma's stern response at last gave me my sought for insight - because she watched so many of her classmates give their lives for this country.

Grandma's support for our country led to receiving gifts last Christmas that were all made exclusively in New Hampshire, and I loved it. Curiously, among the gifts given to her family, were books about an old concentration camp that was in New Hampshire during the world wars. Who knew?

In reading Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet I learned that there were other concentration camps of a different sort during the second world war, camps to which they placed Japanese Americans during the war. I learned of a harshness and paranoia that I had only ever heard vague things about.

I cried so much while I was reading the book that it wasn't necessary to wash my makeup off, as I had cried it all off while reading. The biggotry, the needless hysteria. I am a huge fan of good character development, and this book did a decent job of that...which didn't help the tears.

But also, as an immigration lawyer, clearly I have both a bias and a soft spot for immigrants, the language barriers, the economic struggles, and the social isolation that can be there. This book hit a chord on that level too.

So many of the elements in the story made me think of stories I've heard from Grandma, the ringing of the bells at the end of the war - feelings of elation that rippled throughout America during that time - that I look forward to getting her insights about the treatment of Japanese Americans during the war next time I call.