2,006 Words about My Sister

Several months ago, I wrote a bunch of words about my brother. I mentioned at that time that I also have a sister, Erin, and now, at last, her time has come. Here on her [big one] birthday, I present to you 2,006 words about my sister.

Erin is seven and a half years older than I am, so she was in double digits by the time I formed my first memories of her. They were, as they so often are, of bath time. Erin helped my mom bathe my brother and me, and when my mom wasn’t in the room, Erin and Mark played a fun little game of Trick Emily, She’s Innocent and Gullible. They would say, “Emmy, Emmy, there’s something on the wall behind you. Stand up and see what it is.” I’d stand up to take a look and my sister would promptly zerbet my butt. Mark and Erin laughed and laughed as I sat back down in indignation. Then they’d pull it again. “Really, Em, there’s something there. I promise I won’t do it again.” You know how this ends.

Erin didn’t walk through the house. She ran. She ran, and she jumped up and hit every doorframe on her way. Leaping and running, leaping and running. You’d hear her smack the frame with her hand, and then you’d probably hear her smack her toes on the coffee table or dresser or fireplace or piano. She never knew where her toes were in relation to the rest of her body. “Ouch! It ‘urts. It ‘urts,” was an everyday refrain.

She was a pretty good kid, but she acted up from time to time. One time she had been grounded (for whatever reason) and told that she couldn’t have any friends over. I’m betting she was around thirteen at the time. My parents left her home alone while she was grounded, so naturally she invited her friend Amanda over to hang out. Erin’s bedroom was above the garage, so when my parents came home early, much to Erin’s surprise and dismay, she heard the garage door open from her room. With only moments to plan her friend’s escape, she grabbed Amanda’s hand and ran down the upstairs hall to my bedroom, whose window opened to the roof of the screened-in porch behind the house. Downstairs was too dangerous. There was only one way out now. She forced Amanda out my bedroom window and onto the porch roof. The roof slanted toward the ground, of course, so it gave Amanda a few more feet of safety, but it was still a giant fall. Poor Amanda, petrified, perched on the edge of the roof and surveyed her future down below. Erin whisper-screamed, “JUMP!” Amanda shook her head. “Jump right now!” Head shake. “Amanda, get your butt off the roof!” A deep breath and a flying leap.

My parents didn’t find out for years.

Erin didn’t invite me along to play with her and her friends, but she didn’t exactly exclude me either. Sometimes, she dedicated whole evenings just for me. I wanted nothing more in the whole world than a Barbie house. I had loads of hand-me-down Barbies, but no hand-me-down house. Erin solved the problem by building me whole Barbie houses out of household items. The structure was made of books (the Children’s Classics series was particularly useful for stairs), and the furniture came from sundries she found lying around. The little three-legged plastic white things that came in pizza boxes were Barbie coffee tables. The rubber hot water bottle was a Barbie couch. Erin’s Barbie mansions were three stories tall and full of small surprises. She’d lock herself in her room while she worked; then she’d bring me in for the grand reveal. A year or two later, a friend gave me a real Barbie Dream House. I found it deeply disappointing.

Erin showed me how to do cartwheels and headstands. She had a pair of giant pom-poms, ‘80s style, and she taught me a few cheers. She showed me how to play “Heart and Soul” on the piano. She had a special way of making me feel like I was big stuff.

When she was 16 or 17, Erin took me to a haunted walk for Halloween. You can’t imagine how excited I was to go out with my sister, just the two of us. She borrowed a friend’s truck and played me a song from her friend’s tape collection. “You’ll like this one, Em,” she said, and played this song. I was rolling with my sister, listening to a song about pretty brown eyes like ours. It was worth every second of screaming my head off on the haunted walk.

Our family was close with another family that had two girls. Jennifer was near Erin’s age (probably about 16 at the time) and Katy was near mine (somewhere around 9 or 10). We were all having a sleepover one night, Jen and Erin doing their thing, Katy and me doing ours, when Erin and Jen decided they were going to sneak out. They debated and schemed in the bedroom. We could wear black and go out the window. We can’t let Katy and Em hear us. If we’re quiet when we pass Mom and Dad’s bedroom… Etc. They were just getting up the nerve to go when they heard Katy and me in the living room. They came out to find that we had just returned from a midnight walk around the block. We had gone out the front door, naturally, and returned by the same method. Sometimes the younger girls can teach the older girls a thing or two.

I remember going out with Erin when she was about eighteen. We were starting to look more alike as I got older, and people were calling me “Little E.J.” She curled her hair in hot rollers most days, so she did mine the same way on this particular night. I can remember sitting on the chair in the dining area while she dabbed a little bit of makeup on me. We drove in the Jeep with the top down and visited her boyfriend (hot stuff), who was working at the ice cream shop. She bought me a scoop of Rocky Road and I basked in the glory of everyone saying we looked so much alike.

Don’t be fooled into thinking that she had lost her mischievous side. Around that same time, I was trying my darndest to do the splits. My friend Jenny and I were stretching every single day. I couldn’t do a front split, but I was getting closer and closer to a side split. At long last, I did it. I had won!

Erin was in the front yard when I ran up to the house, shouting that I had finally done it. “Erin! Erin! I did it! I did the splits! I did the splits!”

“Oh, you mean like this?” she said, as she dropped into a perfect front split.

She was a lifeguard at the local pool, and I remember one night at the pool in particular. Erin and all of her lifeguard friends were closing down after hours, but they let me stay. The pool had three enormous slides that were usually governed by strict rules, but after hours, anything went (shhhh). Erin let me slide face-first and do some spins while she cleaned up and clocked out. I had ridden my bike to the pool, but Erin packed it into the back of the Jeep and gave me a ride home. She was full-on eighteen years old at the time, and I was eleven, so I was used to Erin having an active social life that took place largely outside our home. She was often out with friends, often home late. I had already considered it a special night because she let me stay late at the pool, but when we got home, she said, “Hey, Em, I’m in the mood for blueberry muffins. Want to bake some with me?” It was already 11:00, but I was all in. We stayed up and made muffins and talked.

As busy as Erin was, she often made time for us to be together. If she was home at night on the weekends, she’d sometimes invite me to sleep in her room so we could stay up to talk and listen to music together. I don’t know what we talked about, but I remember the feeling of peace and fun. I just liked to be with her. I also remember that she’d often read a chapter or two of the Bible to me while I drifted off to sleep.

She made chocolate pudding in champagne flutes and topped it with whipped cream. To this day, I think all puddings should be served in champagne flutes.

She was the worst brownie maker ever. They always burned.

We moved to Kentucky the same year Erin entered her freshman year of college. Erin was in Kentucky with us for about a month before she embarked on her new life out of the house, so most of our Kentucky friends didn’t know her at all. It always bothered me that people there didn’t think of her when they thought of our family. I wanted everyone to see how great she was. I wanted them to know that I had an older sister and that she was adventurous. She was in just about every sport in high school, not because she was passionate about any of them, but because she was willing to try anything and just wanted to have fun with other people. She sang in front of our church of hundreds. I’d never have the guts to do that. She was hot enough that she got asked out by an airman when she was working at the pool, which is just about the coolest thing that can happen to a recent high school grad, but she was lame enough to take him to church for their date. She literally took him to church.

Today is Erin’s birthday, and it’s a BIG ONE. She is now a wife and mother. In fact, she’s a super-mother of seven kids. She’s ridden all kinds of waves--the same that we all face in our adult years--and she’s done it with such grace. Erin and I still talk too late into the night every time we see each other. We’ve done it when she’s had to get up with infants in the wee hours of the morning. We’ve done it the nights before our weddings, when we were desperate for sleep but too worked up to close our eyes. We’ve talked too late on school nights and work nights.

We talk on the phone only once every couple of months. I told her recently that our problem is that we wait too long to call each other, so when we do talk, we have two months of conversation to catch up on and we stay on the phone for a couple of hours. That means we have to set aside a few hours for a phone call, which makes us wait longer to call each other. I suggested we talk every week or two. Then we’d only be on the phone for a half hour or so, and we’d stay in touch better. We tried that for about three weeks, only to find that we were talking two hours every time, just the same.

Erin has counseled me through all sorts of decisions. She has listened when I’ve been stressed, and she has gently prodded me when she felt it was needed. She kept me from making at least one serious error, when I was thinking about dating a boy I shouldn’t have been thinking about dating. She loves completely, and gives of herself to those she loves. I couldn’t be luckier to have such a sister on my side. Plus, look at them gams!





I love you, Erin. Happy hmumrrmptieth birthday!

1,587 Words about My Brother

Let's talk about my brother Mark, please. I was going to write this for his birthday, but that's long past now, so I'll just write it for the heck of it. This is going to be entirely about my brother, but let me state now that I also have a sister who I adore. I have a thousand things to say about what she means to me, but this particular piece is reserved for Mark. Let's discuss him.

My brother, you need to understand, is an enigma. If a person can fail a personality test, he has failed them all. He always lands right down the middle of every category. He is all personalities and no personalities. He is person. A few months ago I asked him what category he thought his personality fit into. He said, "Whichever one is where you're happy except when people are stupid."

Since we can't examine test scores to learn about my brother, let's take a look at his actions. I'm his sister, so I can only see him as his sister. I have to write what I've experienced from my position, not what I imagine his friends, wife, colleagues, kids, etc. experience. Let's start at the beginning.

My parents say that my brother cried without ceasing for the first three years of his life. He would not be cuddled or comforted. They suspected that he had some kind of health problem, perhaps digestive, so he underwent all kinds of tests and went on a gluten-free diet in case it was celiac. Nothing helped. He outgrew whatever it was before they could diagnose it, so my bedraggled parents never found out what caused his three years of wailing. Whatever it was, I like to think that I cured it with my arrival.

When I was born, Mark was immediately fascinated with me, the new baby. He would pat my head every time he passed me. No matter how they tried, my parents couldn't get him to quit patting my head, so they taught him to pat gently. That's the way it was, and that's the way it stayed.

Mark and I were buddies from the start. One of our favorite games was Trip and Fall, which consisted entirely of Mark tripping and falling for my amusement. We built snow forts and rode bikes together. I followed him everywhere. (I'm 32 years old now, and I still catch myself following him around the house.) I remember one time when we played out in the snow for as long as we could stand it. I was five years old at the most, so Mark must've been about eight. Snow had crept into my mittens, and my hands were freezing. I had just learned about frostbite, so I was terrified that my hands were going to fall off. Mark took me to his friend Adam's house, which was closest (our own home was a distant three houses away), and asked if we could come inside to get warm. He wrapped my hands in blankets, and I watched him play Sorry! with Adam until I thought that my limbs were out of danger.

When we got a little older, our roaming range expanded. We moved to an air force base in Oklahoma, which was just about as safe as could be. We were free to go anywhere we wanted on base. Every Saturday was the same. Mark would come in and wake me up (surprise, surprise, I slept later than he). Then we'd plop on the floor and watch cartoons together, stopping only for a small cereal break. If you learn nothing else of Mark, know this: he is, and has always been, the king of cereal. After cartoons, we'd put on play clothes and shoes and just leave for the day. In the summer we'd go to the pool. In other seasons we'd ride our bikes to the general store and play arcade games or pick out toys. For lunch we had two slices of Anthony's Pizza (pepperoni) and two Clearly Canadians, always. Mark paid for my food and arcade games out of his lawn mowing money. After that, we were off to the bowling alley or dollar theater, both a short bike ride away. I saw Jurassic Park with him at that theater—his second time, my first—and that was my first PG-13 movie at a theater.

Friday nights were movie nights for us at home. "Which one is it gonna be: Indiana Jones, Back to the Future 2, or Hook?" We saw the drinking contest at the beginning of Raiders of the Lost Ark, but we didn't understand alcohol or drunkenness. We just thought they didn't like the taste of whatever it was they were drinking. We didn't like the taste of grapefruit juice, so we figured we'd have grapefruit juice drinking contests. We never seemed to get loopy like the people in the movie, so we kept drinking until we were full and sick instead. Then we'd walk it off outside for an hour or so. We did this many times. I don't know if my mom was exasperated that all her grapefruit juice was gone the day after she bought it, or happy we were getting fruit juice and taking walks. Maybe both.

Mark saw Rookie of the Year before I did and came home and described it to me scene for scene. The entire movie. I loved it.

Mark has never been a particularly silent or chatty person—like most of us, he falls somewhere in the middle—but every time he has spoken, he has spoken his mind. When he was about twelve years old, he famously told a girl he didn't like to "Quit calling me! I hate you!"

Our bedrooms shared a wall, so we had secret knocks to say "goodnight" and I love you."

We hid behind a chair and eavesdropped when our mom and grandma (Mama Jo) got into a fight, which was the only time we heard grown-ups really arguing. It was like sneaking a bite of birthday cake before the candles have been lit.

Mark got me through middle school. It was a lonely, nasty time for me. Our sister was away at college, so I relied on Mark more than ever. I was 13, 14, and uncool. Mark was 16, 17, and if not cool, at least well-liked. He had his own life and friends, and he was out of the house a lot more, but he still included me. He still played games with me. We made up a game called Porch Ball, and we look forward to dominating at the Olympics as soon as the committee adds it to the games. Mark gave me rides around town. He watched movies with me and introduced me to The Simpsons.

Mark stole my milk at dinner every night. He'd watch me until I wasn't paying attention, then he'd switch my full glass with his empty glass. Sometimes he'd drink straight from my glass. Sometimes, if he could get me to lock onto a story he was telling, he would pour my milk into his empty glass while I was looking straight at him. He had to keep his hands steady and confident and his voice impassive, but he got really good at it. Those were his great victories.

When he was trying to get up the nerve to ask a girl to a dance, we rolled a ball back and forth to each other in the upstairs hallway. Occasionally he'd go over to the phone, pick it up, and set it back down, then come back to roll the ball. We talked a little bit about the girl and the dance, but mostly we just rolled that ball. We did that for hours.

I cried when he left for college, but he left a note for me under my pillow, listing all our inside jokes. I keep it in my box of treasures, of course.

That's basically the last time we lived in the same house. I think he moved back home and commuted to school for one semester of college, or maybe that was a summer, but things were different at that point. I was happy in high school and was out of the house with my friends a lot. Mark was a grown-up, or at least as much a grown-up as he'll ever be.

So let's examine Mark's personality now that we've seen him from childhood to adulthood.  There's the brutal truth-telling part of him. That's harsh, but I can't exactly fault him for that. You don't have to wonder where you stand with Mark. But behind that, or rather in front of that, there is great kindness, gentleness, and fun. He still loves to make up games. He would still trip and fall for children if he thought it would make them laugh. He recently lamented to me that a gigantic snow pile had formed in the middle of his office's parking lot last winter, but he couldn't convince anyone to dig a fort with him. Twice he has flown me out to visit his family, at great expense to himself and without a word of regret or bitterness. As I've said before, he sent my husband and me on a trip out of town, complete with sailing charter, when I had a miscarriage.

I do not know what his personality is, and I suppose I don't care. Throw away the tests. There's porch ball to play.

Why So Taboo? Opening Up about My Miscarriage

I had a miscarriage a few months ago. I’ve never understood the taboo around miscarriages. We told our family and many of our friends about the pregnancy right away, knowing full well the inherently high risk of miscarriage in the first trimester, because we wanted them to be around us through joy or, if it came to it, pain. I’ve never announced anything publicly about it because I have not been up to the task of accepting public condolences. Our closest friends came over the day we knew I had miscarried—hell, two of them were there when it happened—and they offered the support we needed in that time. I find that I retreat in grief. I stay home and refuse phone calls. It is my way.  But now, a few months out, I find the need to express.

I didn’t know what to expect with miscarriage. Many people who are close to me have gone through it themselves, but I still didn’t imagine it right, back when it was part of Imagination Land. I thought it would be sad. I thought a person would mourn and move on. Maybe I didn’t know what the mourning would be like.

I found out I was pregnant on August 7, well over a year after we had started trying to have kids. We had to delay trying for many years while we got over some "practical" obstacles, and then we had to endure further obstacles related to my health. I’ve always wanted to be a mom. In 2^nd grade, I wanted to be a mom and a pediatrician. In 3^rd grade, mom and teacher. In 9^th, mom and photojournalist. In college, mom and whatever, man. During our time of trying, pregnancy continued to elude me while I watched our friends have their second and third kids. I saw teens get pregnant by accident. I saw friends debate about whether or not they should have another, then get pregnant, then take a few hundred photos in a field, then have their babies. Facebook had never been more annoying. Every #blessed was a reminder that I was #cursed. I was frustrated and furious and sad and jealous.

Then on August 7, that test said “Pregnant.” We sprang for the expensive one that writes out the answer in digital letters, because the stupid, generic, three-year-old waste of storage space in my medicine cabinet had shown only ambiguous pink lines. That super-deluxe, crystal-clear test was worth every penny. When it said "Pregnant" we were lost for words, simultaneously floored and uplifted by the fantasy of it all. Could this really be happening? It was.

I have never been more elated than I was in the following week. I was carrying a gorgeous secret within me. That clerk at the grocery store—she didn’t know. The coworkers I passed in the copy room—clueless. I tried not to smile so much, so as not to give it away. I thought of nothing else. We marked dates on the calendar and started talking plans for moving to a bigger place. I spent a thousand hours looking up OBGYNs and an actual 60 minutes on the phone with the insurance company. It was every bit as good as I had imagined it to be. My mom told me, “I’m sorry to tell you, but your body is never going to be the same ever again,” and I hate that she was wrong.

The miscarriage happened on a Saturday morning, and I don’t want to say much about it. It happened just a little over a week after I found out I was pregnant, and it turns out you can get very attached in a week. It was an early miscarriage, which is the best that can be said for it. Everyone’s experience is different, so I can’t make any sweeping statements about what miscarriage is like in general. For me, it was lots and lots of tears, lots of weakness in my limbs—as though I couldn’t lift my arms—and a hearty dose of anger. The word for that day was Empty. I had been betrayed by my own body, the same body that had been tormenting me for years. Our neighbors had brought home a newborn the week before. We had the door open the day of the miscarriage, and the newborn’s cries came floating through the air that night to rattle around in my empty soul. We shut the door. Jonny held me all day long for days.

Before I had a miscarriage, I had thought of them, physically, as a single event. In my mind, it was something that happened quickly. In truth, it carries on for days and days, like a heavy, painful menstrual cycle. It was a relief when it finally ended; we could call that chapter closed and try to move on. Our friends and family were so supportive through the whole thing. I’m glad they knew. They brought us food and gave us lots of hugs. They sent care packages. My workplace gave me as many days off as I needed. We were surrounded by love, and we felt it, but the sadness was overwhelming.

The kindest gift came from my brother, who is familiar with sorrow. My voice broke when I called him to tell him the news, so he guessed it right away. He said, “Do you want to take a trip somewhere? Anywhere? I’ll send you wherever you want to go.” I told him no, but later that week I called him back. Jonny was about to go out of town on a long-planned trip, and I craved time with him outside of our usual routine. I’m claustrophobic in L.A. in the best of times, and these were not the best of times. My brother sent Jonny and me on an overnight trip to Santa Barbara, where we chartered a sailboat for a few hours on the ocean, accompanied only by our skipper Spencer, an occasional pod of dolphins, a champagne and cheese picnic, and silence.

My family owned a little sailboat when I was a kid. We crammed into it and took it out on a nearby lake on hot, Oklahoma Saturdays. I used to love sitting on the lower side of the boat (which surely has some kind of nautical name about which I know nothing) and leaning my head way back, as far back as I could risk it, until the ends of my hair grazed the water. From that perspective, the horizon flipped. The sky was water and the water was sky. I did the same on the boat in the ocean, and although my head came nowhere near the water on the much larger vessel, the effect remained. I sat and looked and considered the new world, now that the horizon had flipped.

Something changed for both of us when we disembarked. The sail felt timeless. We lost ourselves in the peace of the ocean, and when our feet touched land, the ocean stayed with us. Our shoulders loosened and we walked on steady legs.

Since then, the sadness has ebbed and flowed. I never know when something will trigger it, and Jonny has become accustomed to finding me crying from time to time. He always knows why I’m crying, and he comforts me with his arms. He’s a good man. I think about the miscarriage every day, on bad days every hour. I hate to call them bad days though, and now that I think about it, the truth is that I think about the baby, not the miscarriage. I cherish the memory of our little one, no matter how little time we had, and I want to remember. I am hopeful that I’ll be pregnant again, that my body will forever change, that once again my senses will take on annoying superpowers and I’ll smell every ounce of perfume the world has ever produced every time I go to the bank, and that I’ll get to meet and hold the next one, but I hate to think of other people calling the Next One the First One. The next one will always be Number Two and the first will always be Number One. That’s who they are. I fear forgetting.

I also fear Fear. I think I was given a special grace with the first pregnancy. I usually worry about everything, but with the first, I didn’t worry at all. I was full of joy for that week, which is as it should have been. It was the time to dance. I want to be pregnant again, but I fear never again being able to abandon myself to joy in pregnancy. I fear living in fear, so I fear, so I fear, so I fear…

Jonny and I are trying again, of course, and the old feelings are there. I’m frustrated and furious and sad and jealous, but I’m hopeful too, and excited, and sometimes—crucial sometimes—content. About a year ago, long before the miscarriage, I had a conversation with my friend Elizabeth about my frustrations with my unpredictable, uncooperative body, and my weariness with ugly feelings of jealousy. No one enjoys jealousy. It doesn’t feel good to want what your friends have, to look at the life you’ve been enjoying and say to yourself I want more. I was telling this to Elizabeth and she gave me some wonderful words, as she always does. She said it was OK to grieve the experience that I had thought I was going to have. She said it was normal to feel the way I felt, but the important part was not getting carried away with it. “I’ll pull you back from the edge if you get too bitter,” she said.

I’ve peeked over that edge a few times and learned that the method that has consistently pulled me back has been the age-old adage Count your blessings. I’ve counted my blessings again and again for the last year and a half. I’ve counted them the way an angry father in a sitcom counts down from ten, tapping my fingers and huffing and puffing. I have been surprised to find myself smiling by the time I’ve gotten down to 3, 2, 1.

Thanksgiving is coming next week, and as I count my blessings in thanksgiving, I count down to number 1, the baby we had. I believe in Heaven and I believe we’ll meet our first child someday, but April 13 will come and go this year, and we won’t have our baby in our arms. The sadness still overwhelms me, but my God, I’m grateful.

Save Your Money! An Experience I'll Never Pay for Again

By Emily Walls

 We came for the fish. We left with perspective. This is the story of five sojourners who bought the water snake oil.

Spoiler: These faces are doing one whole hell of a lot of foreshadowing right now.

In our commute from Batavia to Chicago that morning, the sky, in her generosity, lavished upon us a beneficent deluge and soaked us through in her magnanimity. The four winds, not to be outdone, meted out a handsome contribution to the cause, and so it was that by the time we walked from the train station to the double doors of the aquarium, we received the full benefit of the weather's kind donations. Sopping and shivering in the ticket line, we reached into the bottoms of our leaky pockets for the admission fee we had calculated the day before, but wait!, one among us must have said. For just a few hard-earned dollars more, we could enjoy a 4-D Experience! Not one, not two, not even three, but FOUR dimensions (madness!) were available to us for a fraction of an hour's wages. Moreover, the footage in which we would immerse ourselves like never before (and perhaps be linked to telepathically?) was from Planet Earth, the justly popular BBC show we knew and loved. We relinquished the inflated fare and forfeited our souls to Charon, who ferried us gleefully across the Styx and into the theater.

We arrived in Hades, though we did not yet know how far we had strayed from Heaven's gates. We affixed our comically oversized 3-D glasses to our faces—the first humiliation the theater thrust upon us—and relaxed in our seats as the lights dimmed. At last, we would have peace.

The problems began during the on-screen introduction to the 4-D Experience. In a series of shots showcasing the wonders of 3-D, an old man on camera spat a mouthful of water straight at the lens. The scene was (I'm going to spoil for you right now) the most exciting shot in the entire production. The scene was also our introduction to the fourth dimension so liberally lauded in the aquarium's marketing paraphernalia. As the water gushed from the old man's mouth on screen, we in the audience were treated to a simulated effect in the audience: a languid spray of water that mastered its indolence just enough to humidify our already saturated faces.

Perplexed but undeterred, we persevered to the feature presentation. After all, our first foray into the fourth dimension came only during the teaser. Surely the feature, with its high budget and carefully calculated effects, would take us to worlds hitherto unseen. It began by taking us to Earth, a world hitherto seen. The footage showed Earth from space, which, you may remember from science class, is a vacuum. How best could one simulate a vacuum? Why, with wind, of course. Six enormous fans, three per side of the screen, breathed into life and bellowed upon us their frigid remonstrances. Our already dampened skin received blow after shuddering blow from the wheezing propellers as the spaceship on screen soared endlessly through the emptiness.

Before the hypothermia progressively reduced our consciousness, we were able to discern in that initial, eternal shot that the footage was familiar. It was the same exact footage, in fact, that we had seen on television months before, but this time a 3-D effect had been tacked on clumsily during post-production.

Nevertheless, we continued. We had paid our five dollars and, by George, we were determined to get a five-dollar thrashing. The next few scenes gave us alternating wind and mist, as coordinating scenes flashed before us. Naturally, if saltwater surged from a distant whale's blowhole on film, we experienced a freshwater spray from the seats in front of us. If gazelles leaped through the Serengeti, an icy blast was the obvious corollary. We huddled in our seats, our arms wrapped close around us and our feet sacrificed to the spray to give our soggy faces a reprieve. 

If we could only burrow into our seats, we would find shelter from the screen, we thought. Foolishly. Deeper and deeper into our seats we crouched until a water snake on screen announced our final humiliation. As Sigourney Weaver commentated, the serpent slithered through the water in great, fluid motions. For its final moment on camera, the snake chose to glide toward the camera just a touch faster. It did not strike. It did not spook. It just picked up the pace. In the theater, we were informed of the creature's accelerated ambulation in front of us by swift, hard stabs in the back. Plastic rods about three inches long and a quarter inch in diameter emerged from their lairs in the backs of our seats and jabbed us directly in the spine. We lunged forward reflexively and received a prompt spray of water straight in the eyes.

We were bruised. We were blind. We were shivering. We were wet.

The credits rolled before us, and as the house lights lifted, we solicited each other for the kind of sympathy that only comes through shared experience. We stumbled out of the theater colder, damper, and, I hope, enlightened. Only time, the true fourth dimension, will tell.

Pixar vs. Miyazaki (Someone Had to do it...Right?)

By Jonny Walls

Hayao Miyazaki is one of Japan's most celebrated filmmakers. He is the mastermind behind many of the greatest entries in the formidable Studio Ghibli canon, including such films as Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, My Neighbor Totoro, Howl's Moving Castle, and many more.

From Spirited Away

Pixar animation studios are the American outfit behind the Toy Story series, The Incredibles, Ratatouille, Wall-E, Finding Nemo, and other modern classics. They are the the innovators responsible for birthing that particular style of computer animation which has since become nearly ubiquitous.

 I hope that what first struck you about the title of this piece is how unnecessary it is to try and weigh Miyazaki's work against Pixar's. I hope you rushed to this piece in wrath, intending to tell me how trivial of a notion it would be. Because you'd be right.

And yet, here we are.

Perhaps the triviality behind this concept is the very thing that intrigues: Miyazaki and Pixar are both so different and so good. It's a wonder they're able to occupy such vast expanses of greatness within the animated realm, and experience so little crossover. And they're not different in the way Jaws and The Jerk are different, or the way Alien and Stranger than Fiction are different. Those wonderful films all vary on the surface, but share similar bones in terms of three act structure, character arcs, and the like.

Pixar's films, on one hand, employ computer-generated animation wherein every angle, every straight or curved line, every color, every frame, conform to perfection. They are modern masterpieces of the three act structure and Western storytelling, which they have it down to a science. They embody everything good and effective about the style (and they're animated to boot). For this reason, they are in many ways similar, but in many ways the polar opposite, of Miyazaki's films.

Miyazaki's films employ old school, hand drawn animation. They breathe the air of slight imperfection and glow with the light of the human touch. Though I'm no expert in Eastern storytelling, I'm going to go out on a limb and claim that Miyazaki's films embody, in no small way, a large part of what Eastern storytelling is all about. Far fetched, I know, as he is a Japanese filmmaker, but there you have it.

Culture Shock

The first time I saw Spirited Away, my first Miyazaki film, I knew I loved what I'd seen, but I wasn't quite sure what I had seen either. I remember thinking that much must have been lost in translation from a literal, linguistics standpoint, as well as a cultural, thematic standpoint.

In one early scene in Spirited Away, the protagonist, a young girl named Chihiro, must cross an entire bridge while holding her breath. If she fails to do so, she will become visible to the magical creatures and spirits all around her, possibly exposing herself to danger. It's never explained exactly why holding her breath will keep her invisible or how the origins of this bizarre system came about, and the gimmick doesn't reappear in act three. It just pops up for one scene and is forgotten in the ether of this magical world.

Now, if this were a Pixar film, the breath-holding concept would be thoroughly motivated and explained, and it would have a specific purpose beyond the immediate problem at hand—Chihiro crossing the bridge. And, almost surely, it would resurface in act three, just when we'd forgotten about it, and play some role in redeeming the protagonist. Only this time she'd be able to master the technique, thus bringing the vision of her growth full circle. And this would happen because that's what well-oiled, watertight three act structure films do. Nothing is frivolous. Nothing is arbitrary. Nothing happens just because.

But with Spirited Away and many of Miyazaki's other films, a plot device (if one can even label it such) like the breath-holding concept is just that: arbitrary. In an interview about Spirited Away, Miyazaki addresses this very scene. He says that he wanted to employ some arbitrary rule such as holding one's breath to remain invisible, because that's the way children's games often go. Arbitrary rules are imagined and applied, without necessity of explanation.

Arbitrary is normally the enemy of good storytelling. In a Western style story, it serves only to weaken the foundation, yet with Miyazaki, it strengthens the vision of the world he's created. As a Western viewer, it feels strange at first, but when his films and others like it are accepted on their own terms, they take a from of their own that is equally rich.

Experience vs Experience

The big difference in the two styles can be neatly summarized in the way that they approach the word "Experience." In both cases, the goal is to create a beautiful, compelling, and unique Experience for the viewer, and both camps succeed. But Pixar's films approach Experience, first and foremost, as something to be drawn upon. From the heart-wrenching final scenes of Toy Story 3 or Up to the odd familiarity of Marlin's anxiety in Finding Nemo, Pixar's films use our own lives and experiences, but portray them from alternate points of view, which helps us see our own all the more clearly.

Miyazaki, who approaches experience from the other angle, seeks to create a new experience for the viewer. Or put another way, he strives simply to provide an environment in which unique experiences may be cultivated. It may be a bathhouse for the spirits where every hand-drawn frame oozes an indefinable, otherworldly quality, or it could be a magical moving castle with a rotating portal to different kingdoms in the blustery hills of some far off, enchanted world. He's not interested in guiding us all to the same place; he simply seeks to beckon us away from home.

It's Not So Cut and Dried as Black and White, Up and Down, East or...

The truth is that Pixar's films, while running a tight and deliberate course, also do amazing things to sweep us up in their wonder, above and beyond the plot. These small touches range from a quick shot of a baby fish falling off of a "trampoline" and bursting into tears, to the glowing lights of Paris in the background of a scene that's actually about a lost rat. But the main objectives of these films are all driven by singular purpose and ruthless efficiency. And bravo to Pixar for that. I hope they carry on showing us our own lives in new and exceedingly entertaining lights, not wasting a single frame along the way.

Conversely, Miyazaki's films aren't all floating images and whimsical allusions to the most abstract hints of reality. (Some, such as My Neighbor Totoro, show that Mr. Miyazaki can tell stories with the best of them in any fashion he desires.) Even in his most abstract form, Miyazaki's films still make use of plot, character development, and purpose, but the viewer should remember that these elements sometimes lie in the shadows of the overall experience he wishes for us. He is a true marvel and one of the rare filmmakers who can actually pull it off.

The Big Takeaway

Don't be stupid enough to try to compare Miyazaki's films with Pixar's. In fact, don't be stupid enough to compare any films from a strange culture to any Western films. If there's a lesson in here (and I'm not positive there is), it's that Experience comes in many forms and needn't be married to one style.

By all means, go see Brave this summer. Enjoy it. But if you've never checked out a Miyazaki film, or if you have and found it off-putting, go give some of his stuff a look. You just may feel yourself being taken away from home, and what's more, you may like it.

By Jonny Walls

Remembering Mama Jo

By Emily Walls

My grandmother screamed routinely in movie theaters. I'm not just talking Psycho. I'm talking Seabiscuit.

She prepared and froze her Thanksgiving casseroles before Halloween, her immaculate freezer a refugee camp for bulk-purchased Cool Whip and stalks of rhubarb.

When she trumped my trick in Euchre, she sang her high school fight song in its entirety.

For holidays, my family traveled from four states away to see her, and we always found her furniture covered in bedsheets "to keep it nice for company."

She ironed my grandfather's underwear. When I objected to the futility of de-wrinkling hidden boxer briefs, she responded, "Ah, but you've never seen him in his underwear."

My sister likes to say that our Mama Jo never shoveled snow a day in her life; she swept it with a broom as it fell.

"Towels are for sissies," my grandmother must have thought, because I never saw her use them on her trek down the hallway to her bedroom after a bath, her clothes folded neatly in her arms.

When I was a child, I feared my grandma, at least in part because I was not allowed to call her "Grandma." She insisted on being known as "Mama Jo." Grandmas were old, feeble, dowdy; Mama Jo was anything but. Once when I was five years old, I said to her, "Thank you, Grandma." She whipped around, pointed her finger at me about an inch from my nose, and shouted, "WHAT did you call me?" I would have pooped my pants right there if I weren't even more afraid of spoiling her white carpet. No one in the world but my Mama Jo ever had the audacity to keep white carpet pristine and plush for twenty plus years. She was manic about cleaning, so much so that if you wanted to talk to her you had to follow her around while she straightened and folded and dusted and wiped.

I avoided her in my younger years, but as I aged I sought her company more. She always spoke in superlatives, so I was sure to get marvelous feedback from her for any story I told. I could count on her for a "That's terrific, honey" or a "Well doesn't that beat all," no matter how dull my tale. When it was her turn to tell a story, she was magnetic. She whooped and hollered. She shook her head in dismay or elation, as the situation warranted, and she splayed her fingers wider and wider with the increasing intensity of her story. Her energy was boundless, so it's no wonder that friends gathered to her in droves.

I remember one particular conversation I had with her in 2003. On summer break after my freshman year of college, I visited my parents, who were temporarily living with my grandmother. Mama Jo and I stayed up late talking, as we often did, and she launched into what was more or less her life story. I had never heard it all in sequence the way she told it that night, so I was fascinated by each step. She told me about her parents' clothing store in Logansport, Indiana, and how she had spent her childhood in that town. She adored her mother (who she only ever called "Mother"), and she told me about watching Mother put on her lipstick to get ready for a night of cards and conversation with their supper club. I never met my great-grandmother, but I'll be she was charismatic like her daughter.

Mama Jo also told me about her older brother, Bill, who had spina bifida, if I recall correctly. He had limited or no use of his legs, so when he was a child he got around on a little cart pulled by a goat. Mama Jo loved Bill and toddled after him everywhere. When they were older, he played piano in a kind of a big band outfit, and she sat in on practices and danced along and had herself a time. She was in her early teens at the time, so it was extra special to her that Bill let her, his little sister, tag along with the band. He was her hero.

As Mama Jo's story progressed, she eventually got to the later years of her loved ones and ultimately to Bill's death. The details are fuzzy for me, but I think Bill died of cancer. He was in the hospital, declining rapidly, and Mama Jo went to see him. Bill had become a Christian just a short time before, so he was ecstatic with joy despite his pain. I remember that when she told me about Bill's death, Mama Jo was cleaning her kitchen counters (of course). She wiped and wiped the same spot as she spoke, and her tears fell to the end of her nose and dropped onto the counter she was cleaning.

"I had relied on Bill for so long, you see," she said. "I saw him there in the hospital and we both knew he was going soon. I said to him, 'Bill, what am I going to do without you?' He said, 'You've got Bob [my grandpa] and the kids, Joan. You'll be fine. This isn't the end.'" Mama Jo sobbed in earnest and paused in her cleaning to wipe her nose. "So Bill died soon after."

She said it so simply and moved on quickly to other stories, but now when I recall that night in 2003, my thoughts go immediately to what she said about her last conversation with Bill. That little snippet was significant to me, and for many years I tried to figure out why. It was only in this last year, in fact a month before my dear Mama Jo's death, that I realized why her words had such weight with me: They would one day be my own.

After a severe stroke in 2004, Mama Jo began the period of mental and physical decline that would make up the rest of her life. The stroke robbed her of her energy and sharpness, but it was encephalitis in 2007 that took away her short-term memory. When I visited her in recent years, I gave her lots of hugs and told her constantly that I loved her, but I never said to her what I was really thinking: What am I going to do without you? A month before Mama Jo died, I got a call from my mom that Mama Jo had taken a turn for the worse, perhaps due to another stroke, and that Mama Jo was in quite a bit of pain. Naturally I cried when I got the news, and I turned to Jonny for comfort. He held me and shushed me and stroked my hair, and he asked me gently, "How do you think you'll feel when she dies?"

I considered for a few moments and then said, "I think I'll rejoice. I don't want her to go, but I know that I only want her here for my own benefit. I like that I still get to hear her voice and that she tells me she loves me every time I see her, but I hate that she's in pain now. Mentally, she's been gone a long time. I know she'll be happier with Jesus, but it's hard to let her go."

Soon after, Mama Jo's conversation with Bill came to my mind, and I realized that in that conversation in 2003, she had answered my future question. Like Mama Jo had done before me, I asked, "What am I going to do without you?" and like Bill's response, the answer came. "You'll be fine. This isn't the end."

When we buried Mama Jo on New Years Eve of this last year, my family gathered around her grave to shovel dirt onto her lowered casket. We prayed prayers of thanksgiving, and as I watched my family take turns digging into the earth and sprinkling a covering over her grave, I had an irrepressible and inappropriate impulse to laugh. I had to hide my face to keep my wide grin out of sight of my mourning relatives. Nothing about death is funny, but I found that I could not help rejoicing that burial, an act of finality, was not in fact final. It was not the end for Mama Jo or for Bill, and it wasn't the end for me.

Since that cold December day, I've gone through different stages of mourning for Mama Jo. I still cry sometimes, and she would laugh to know that the triggers are usually cleaning-related. I know there is more to process with her death, particularly because she was my third grandparent to pass away, and I am now beginning to mourn, not just her, but her entire generation.

There is comfort too. That night that Mama Jo told me her life story, she also told me another bit of information. She told me that she had been praying for my husband and that she had just purchased my wedding gift: Oneida silverware from L. S. Ayres. This was news to me, especially because I wasn't dating anyone and in fact had NEVER dated anyone. I was peeved too, because she refused to give me the silverware early and told me I would only get it when I got married.

"But that's archaic," I said. "What if I never get married? Are single people to eat with their hands?"

She was indomitable, as always. "Oh, you'll get married," she said. "And he'll be good-looking too. I know it."

On May 15, 2009, I married Jonny Walls, a looker, on a beach in North Carolina. Mama Jo came to the wedding, but in her advanced state of decline she did not recognize Jonny (though she had met him many times before), and she forgot the ceremony minutes after it happened. Naturally, she did not remember to get me a wedding gift, but as was so typical for her, she had prepared years in advance with that silverware from L. S. Ayers. A few months after the wedding, I unpacked the silverware that was finally mine, and as I grabbed a couple of spoons from the box, the receipt she had included fell to the floor. I picked it up and checked the date. She had purchased the silverware on May 15, 2003, six years to the day before I got married.

I'm looking forward to having a good laugh with her over that one when I see her again.

Asking the Question and Chasing the Game: The Story of a Comeback

By Josh Corman

The question-askingest SoB I know.

Asking the Question

Up until a few years ago, I thought that I had heard every sports-related cliché and metaphor in existence. Then I started watching soccer. It didn’t take me long to realize that soccer commentators – my favorite is the darkly humorous yet empathetic Ian Darke – possess a diverse, insightful vocabulary all their own, perfectly suited to mirror the nuance of The Beautiful Game and - if I can be grandiose for a moment - life.

I’ll share two expressions which I had never heard before I started supporting Liverpool Football Club of the English Premier League (imagine you were the parent of a bright child whose behavior and performance in school fluctuated so violently that you alternately believed he should apply to Harvard or be given up for adoption – that’s what supporting Liverpool is like, in case you need a frame of reference). The first is “asking the question,” and the second is “chasing the game.” I want to examine both of these expressions for their significance on and off the pitch.

“Asking the question” can be loosely defined as “prodding your opponent in a variety of ways, hoping to discover a weak link in their defenses.” Obviously, the concept itself isn’t unique to soccer. A quarterback hurling a deep ball early in the first half to gauge how well a cornerback is covering a star receiver is “asking the question.” Watch any basketball team try to penetrate a zone defense and you’ll see what appears to be a series of non-committal and innocuous passes, but what you’re really observing is a series of increasingly pressing questions. The offense just needs one to go unanswered, and they’ll strike.

In soccer, the potential payoff for “asking the question” is more immense than in any other sport I can think of. A goal is approximately equivalent to two touchdowns in American football, a twenty to nothing run in basketball, or a Grand Slam in baseball – it doesn’t represent an unconquerable deficit, but it makes the going very tough for the opposition. And so teams whip crosses into the penalty area, push their right and left backs up the field to increase pressure on the defense, attempt intricate pass combinations designed to catch a defender wrong-footed, and rip twenty-five yard rifle-shots just to make sure the keeper is on his toes, all in the interest of procuring that most critical accomplishment in the entire sport: the break-through goal.

If you watch soccer, you might be nodding along at this point. If not, you’re likely thinking, ‘Well, obviously. Why the hell doesn’t everybody just “ask the question” until they get a goal or three?’ The answer is simple. “Asking the question” is a risk every time, and mitigating risk is a huge part of what most soccer teams do during their ninety minutes on the pitch. Often, mid-level clubs achieve success by toothlessly passing back to their own keeper and pushing forward only slightly, rarely daring to “ask the question” in any serious capacity. By playing it safe, they hope to keep the game close against more dynamic clubs and, at worst, eke out a draw. “Asking the question” is too dangerous for them to attempt with any real flair or consistency, because more capable sides will often have a ready answer. They’ll clear a probing cross to safety and surge forward in a fluid counter-attack, visibly, tangibly shifting momentum and catching their meeker, milder counterparts with their pants down.

Yes, “asking the question” is always a risk, but the dominant clubs, ones to whom adjectives like “inspired,” “powerful,” “invigorated,” and “masterful” can be routinely applied, “ask the question” constantly. They don’t delude themselves into believing that mere possession equals dominance. Possession is an illusion of a statistic. Soccer isn’t about safely cradling the ball between the midfield and center backs. Possession is only as valuable as what you do with it, and “asking the question” is the best way to make possession count.

Chasing the Game

Goalless draws are admittedly abhorrent. In fact, I’d bet that the primary reason that soccer isn’t more popular in America has less to do with its ill-grasped nuance or the lack of an elite domestic league. Rather, I think that the concept of draws - altogether repugnant to the American sports audience as a collective, goalless draws doubly so - kills the idea of soccer before it's given an honest chance. We just don’t like the idea of subjecting ourselves to ninety-plus minutes of a contest in which neither side achieves their objective. We love meritocracies and hierarchies, and feel like sports should reflect this love.

I’ve seen the dull side of the game and mostly come to terms with it. Of course it’s still maddening to watch a team deliberately hold out for a draw instead of “asking the question” of the opposition even once during a lifeless back-pass-fest, but those games are actually rarer than the average soccer-hater would have you believe.

What happens more often is that the teams feel each other out - “asking the question” a few times and applying all that open reconnaissance to a developing strategy - until one of them gets a goal. Then, something changes. Faced with a one goal deficit, the team on the short side of the scoreboard has a critical strategic (and moral, really) decision to make. They can keep doing what got them a goal down, or they can “chase the game.”

A team that “chases the game” is a little desperate, they feel cornered, and, backs to the wall, they’ve realized that their last best shot is to come out swinging. It might start with a more aggressive formation or more persistent attempts to pass the ball into attacking position, but no matter the strategy, a team “chasing the game” is a team qualitatively different from that more reserved version of itself. The change in perspective ignites something in a team that’s a goal down. They often spark to life as though a switch has been flipped and their confidence builds, they push up the field and take chances, firing balls into empty spaces filled almost magically by their sprinting teammates, they pass and cut and put the other team on their heels. And then, they score.

Watching the deciding moments of a soccer match level at a goal apiece is almost like watching a different sport. With little time left and a lot to be gained by clear victory, both sides are “chasing the game,” and the pitch suddenly seems wide open. The mad scramble for the winning goal results in fluid, dynamic soccer that represents the way the game was meant to be played, the best it has to offer. And when you see this, the same thought will likely occur to you that occurs to me every time I watch it unfold: ‘Why don’t they play like this for the whole ninety minutes?’

But the answer is the same as the answer to the earlier question: fear. Worry. Risk-mitigation. There is something inside players and managers, especially those who play for a side that doesn’t have the financial or geographical advantages of a Manchester City or Barcelona, that compels them to play things close to the vest, maybe send the occasional long ball in to a striker, and hope for an early break-through. I’ve seen it time and time again. That first goal, the one that shoots more conservative game plans all to hell and forces the losing team to “chase the game,” is sometimes the very thing that actually wins the game for the team that gave it up, because suddenly just holding the ball and waiting for something lucky to happen doesn’t make sense any more.

The Beautiful Game

I’ve been teaching high school English for four years now. I have a pretty cushy gig by high school English teacher standards, actually. Four sections of AP English Language and Composition with a roster of kids who are almost all decent and courteous and intelligent and serious about their school work. I like the people in my department and get along well with the administration, plus I’m pretty good at the job itself.

None of these things is all that important, however, because I can count on one hand the number of days in four years that I’ve come home from work and felt fulfilled or content. My job does nothing for my spirit. It doesn’t speak to my purpose, or offer me a chance to express my talent and intelligence in their highest forms. This is just a fancy way of saying that I don’t much like what I do.

I never wanted to be an English teacher, I just thought I did. I thought this because I assumed that there exists a relationship between loving to read and write and teaching English. This may surprise you, but the two have almost nothing to do with one another. It didn’t take me long to realize this, and for four years, I’ve been holding the ball in the midfield, booting it left to right, dropping it to the center back, then to the goalie, half-heartedly “asking the (occasional) question,” waiting for something lucky to happen. I’m sure you can imagine how much fun this would be to live through. Just like watching a goalless draw. I haven’t been losing, really, because I’ve done some writing, and I have a job that’s at least tangentially connected to my interests, but I’ve not been winning either.

These thoughts and dozens of others like them have been weighing on me for a while now, and at some point during the last couple of weeks, those forces in my life which are opposed to my joy and satisfaction scored a break-through. I was suddenly down a goal, shocked at how quickly it had all happened, seriously wondering about my capability to recover. The choice resulting from this blow was simple, though not easy. I could choose to stay the course, knocking the ball around and hoping for a break that wasn’t likely to ever come.

Or, I could “chase the game.”

I started pushing back against those oppositional forces. I started “asking the question” again and again. What do I want to do? And what has to change for that to happen? At first, the opposition repelled my advances. Fears over finances and security and failure countered my attacks ferociously. But I kept pushing, and finally, the opposing defenses broke down.

It started, of all things, with an argument my wife and I had. Like a lot of arguments, this one started over nothing particularly important, but led to a revelation: It’s awful doing a job that feels in no way like what you’ve been built to do. I said this to my wife, and her only response was, “Then do it. We’ll make it work.”

I’ve never stood on the pitch at Anfield, Liverpool’s home stadium, sweating, exhausted, staring a deficit in the eye, only to have 50,000 flag-waving supporters rise to their feet and belt out Liverpool’s club anthem, “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” but I think it would feel something like hearing those seven words from my wife: Then do it. We’ll make it work. It’s risky, I know. But the choice to chase my passion is my equalizer.

The game is level at a goal apiece, and I’ve got the opposition on its heels.

By Josh Corman

Follow me on Twitter @JoshACorman