Kruka Goes To Baltimore

Make Not a Public Spectacle of Thyself

2011-01-28T13:22:00.004-05:00

Dear Loyal Blog Fans,

I know I have sorely tested your patience this year. I promised you a blog, and what have I given you? Nothing but heartache and disappointment. And a picture of a fish. How can I make it up to you?

How about by letting you choose which story you want to hear next?

Yes, that’s right! I’m going to give you a few incidents from the last few months in Baltimore to choose from, and you can vote (by leaving a comment) on which story you want to hear! The contestants are:

a) The worst book club ever

b) The time I stuck my finger in a blender

c) My quest for the best cup of coffee in Baltimore

d) Tales of drama and trauma from my after school program

Okay! Those are your options. Let me know in the next week, and I’ll get right to work on the winner. In the meantime, I have a little treat for you -- two tales from my misspent(ish) youth. They may not be new to some of you, but they are pretty special nonetheless. Enjoy!

Make Not A Public Spectacle Of Thyself

Catholics tend to favor short graces before meals: "Bless us, O Lord, and these thy gifts which we are about to receive from thy bounty through Christ, our Lord, Amen." You can say it in one breath. It’s easy to remember. It has a certain grandeur that I find right and fitting when talking about God’s magnanimity toward mankind.

Also, did I mention that it’s short? I've been wary of long graces for years, ever since I let my love of singing and trivia get between hungry children and their food. On Girl Scout camping trips we always sang grace before meals:

The Lord is good to me,

and so I thank the Lord,

for giving me the things I need

like the sun and the rain and the apple seed.

The Lord is good to me.

Cute, right? Unfortunately, I had learned this same grace at the summer camp I attended, and one camping trip I excitedly told my leader -- there was another verse that she was unaware of!

For every seed I sow

An apple tree will grow

And there will be an apple tree

For everyone in the world to see

The Lord is good to me.

I should have thought this decision through a little better.

First of all, the second verse is clearly inferior to the first. It is totally off topic, rambling on about trees and apples and everyone in the world and not even getting to the point until the last line -- which it stole from the first verse. Obviously, the first verse took all the good material.

Secondly, tacking on that second verse makes the song twice as long. I always liked singing, so this didn’t bother me, but my fellow scouts didn’t share my enthusiasm for rather poorly written music. And, of course, I had just doubled the amount of time spent staring at their food before they could eat it. The original version had been ponderously long already; The leaders always sang it slowly and reverently, like a choral anthem, trying to imbue it with an air of gravitas that its poetry simply did not merit.

While neither the stupidest nor the most memorable thing I did in my time with the Girl Scouts, this is definitely the thing I have taken the most flack for. At least ten years down the line, I know my Girl Scout friends have still not forgiven me for turning the Fritos in their California tacos into mush during a soporific rendition of "Johnny Appleseed".

Once again, sorry about that!

All of this to say, in my opinion, the shorter the grace, the better. Alas, not everyone agrees with me.

I was perhaps eleven years old and I was at a banquet dinner of some sort. My sister, father, mother and I were seated at a round table with six or so acquaintances of the family. Those unimportant details of the evening have blurred considerably in my memory over the years, leaving only the vivid memory of what happened a few minutes after taking our seats. We were asked to stand for grace. This, we could all handle. Unfortunately, the pastor at this event made the mistake of requesting that we all join hands.

I was a fairly serious and well-behaved child, but nothing could have tested my self-control more than this seemingly mundane gesture. My family has never been good at physical contact of this sort. We think it's stupid, and unfortunately that fact seems to “out” itself in the form of sidelong glances and suppressed giggles. I both loved and feared those moments: so satisfying at the time, but ultimately not worth the punishment I would receive later. This night would prove rather different, and therefore I cherish this memory. This memory has all the gratification, none of the mortification, because it would be my father, not us, who suffered the wrath of my mother that night.

We were already a tad giddy that evening, for reasons I can no longer recall, and therefore not in the best state to endure the trial which was to come. Nevertheless, we all dutifully joined hands around the table, my sister and I standing on either side of my father, and bowed our heads. Grace was significantly longer than any we had ever endured, and had a decidedly Protestant style which was totally alien to me -- definitely feisty, if not quite fiery. Also, this grace was topical, dealing with gratitude for family and community, with frequent references made to various calamities that had recently been on news. Though the subject matter was hardly funny, the unfamiliarity of the grace, its sheer length -- which surpassed the five-minute mark, if memory serves -- and my childish tendency toward uncomfortable laughter were already all I could handle.

Then, there was my father.

Uncharacteristically, he was very goofy that night. “Misbehaving” as my mother would have said through tightly pursed lips, had she been able to speak during grace. Forced into silence, she instead glared at my father, trying to communicate with her eyes, but the three of us were already too far gone for that. All our energy was being expended simply trying to maintain our composure. I was biting the inside of my mouth with all my might, eyes clenched tight, desperately trying not to laugh -- as my father rhythmically squeezed my hand along with the cadence of the pastor’s speech.

Why was this so funny? Who can say. All I know is at the time it was the funniest thing in the whole world. Still, we did not laugh. It would have broken one of the cardinal rules of the Kruk house: Touch not the walls, Sit not on the fancy furniture, and Make not a public spectacle of thyself. The first two remain inviolate to this day; the last, alas, would be broken many times in the years to come, but never so egregiously as that night.

The pastor’s prayer was intensifying, and our self-control was weakening. As the tempo of the speech tempo picked up, so did my father, his invisible gestures miming the words. The pastor exhorted us to “draw together!” and my father would pull our hands a little closer. “Hold fast!” and he would tighten his grip. The pastor, now really hitting his stride, begged for mercy and compassion for the victims of wars and disasters, reaching the apex with the line “May we never be parted!”

And my father threw down Kate’s and my hands.

We burst into laughter -- and not just any laughter. It was the kind of laughter that makes you unable to breathe, that doubles you over, that makes you see spots and forget that you are in the middle of a banquet hall of people, every one of whom has now turned to look at you incredulously.

As is so often the case in life, it was Mom who saved the day. I really cannot emphasize enough just how clever and quick-thinking my mother was in this moment. In case I’ve never said it before: Well done, Mom. After a few seconds of horrified silence, punctuated by our guffaws, Mom grabbed both of us, buried our heads against her bosom, and stroked the back of our heads. As we sobbed with laughter, she whispered to our shocked table mates “The girls are very sensitive.” They nodded sagely, clearly moved by our display of tenderness.

And that is the story of how my sister and I became known as the most emotional, sensitive, compassionate girls in Livingston County.

Kruka Drives In Baltimore

2010-09-09T00:21:00.003-04:00

I am a terribly negligent blog owner. If my blog were a goldfish instead of a blog, it would be soggily floating upside down on the surface of its tank. Luckily, blogs aren’t fish, because my tender heart has yet to heal from the loss of dear Glub-Glub during my junior year of college – Yes, I named my fish Glub-Glub, you got a problem with that? – and I couldn’t handle a dead blog on top of that crushing blow. But since the blog lives on, I turn my attention to it again, this time to tell you about my diverse driving experiences here in Baltimore.

I certainly have my quirks as a driver, as any of my passengers would readily divulge. I am fiercely possessive of the driver’s seat; my musical tastes are completely arbitrary and enforced with the authority of a dictator; and the use of the word “deer” is strictly, freakishly curtailed among my passengers. Despite those oddities, I think of myself a very good driver -- courteous, cautious, and level-headed – due to an important lesson I learned early on in my driving career.

When I first got my learner’s permit, my mother taught me the basics in the church parking lot down the street. Before adjusting my rearview mirror or explaining the gauges on the dashboard, she taught me the first and most important rule of the road: “Everyone on the road,” she said, “is an idiot.” She looked at me appraisingly, then added, a little ruefully, “Including you.”

This bit of sage advice was the segue into a lecture on responsible driving, but really, I only heard those opening sentences, and five years later they still echo in my ears. While my driving mistakes have been relatively minor and mercifully few, the years have taught me that on this subject (along with many, many others) my mother was correct: We, the drivers of the world, are all stupid.

No, that is too generous; we are not just stupid. We drivers are like the person in the locked ward of the hospital who thinks he is a super hero. We get behind the wheel and suddenly we are Bruce Wayne, and that 1999 tan Toyota Carrolla is our Batmobile. Such drivers dodge and weave, disobey traffic lights, and speed like maniacs, all the while humming “dah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah BATMAN!”.

Above: Batmobile.

Below: Beat-up Toyota Corolla.

Note the difference, drivers everywhere!

Because my mother warned me about such drivers, I have come to expect them. However, she failed to mention at that time the idiocy of another group with whom drivers share the road: pedestrians. Back to the church parking lot -- Now behind the wheel and terrified of my newly-revealed idiocy, I saw a man walking on the sidewalk across the street, a hundred feet away from us. I slammed on the brake and refused to move until he was out of sight. What if he darted in front of my car? What if he ran into the street? What if he leapt onto my hood, danced a jig, and jumped up and down? This man proved entirely reasonable, but I knew that such crazed pedestrians existed somewhere, even if I had not met them yet.

I began to feel justified in this fear when I got to college. On Fridays and Saturdays in college towns, one expects to see drunken students ambling along. At Kenyon College, students are wont to party hard, like all collegiates. However, being stuck in the middle of nowhere and bereft of more licit entertainments, Kenyon students are also shockingly likely to study hard and take their academics seriously. This means that our drunken students were especially unpredictable.

One moment the plaid-shirted guy with the can of Pabst in his hand is walking calmly down the sidewalk, albeit in a not-perfectly-straight line. The next, he is in the street, loudly declaiming in French or reciting that monologue from his senior thesis production of Esotérique by Jacques Malcompris. If asked who Malcompris is, he takes take a deep contemplative drag on his Camel light and informs you with a shrug, "He's this really obscure playwright. You've probably never heard of him".

Of course, those individuals tend to be upperclassmen; their brains are too hard-wired after years of academic rigors to let their studies go even when they are drunk. Kenyon freshman are just like freshmen everywhere: completely unhinged for the first few months, so drunk on their newfound freedom that they don’t need alcohol, but they go ahead and drink too much anyway. They are, in a word, your quintessential idiots, and among the worst pedestrians you could ever fear to encounter. Mercifully, they only emerge on party nights, and since they move in packs, you can spot them a mile away.

Driving in downtown Baltimore is like being constantly surrounded by drunken freshmen. Baltimore pedestrians stand obliviously in the street, wildly waving for taxis or gaping at the Inner Harbor. They walk through intersections against glowing DON'T WALK signs while traffic veers around them. They march through stopped traffic and knock on windows, trying to sell drivers lukewarm bottles of soda. They chat on cell phones and wander across roads with all the care and attention of a distracted toddler. None of them move in predictable or logical ways, because they are all stupid.

Besides the pedestrians, driving in a city presents that just do not exist where I am from, and the learning curve has been steep. The first day of driving to work by myself was a white-knuckle affair, full of last-second lane changes and honking horns. I drove as slowly as possible, inciting road rage where'er I went. But every day makes me a little bolder and a little better at navigating city streets, and I am coming to an unexpected conclusion: I like city driving.

What’s more, I am getting good at it. I can spot a double-parked car in my lane a block away and can parallel park on the second try, if not the first. To my utter delight, phrases like “Pratt Street is a parking lot at rush hour, what with all the construction down by the Inner Harbor” roll off my tongue with ease. The biggest surprise of all? Due to the guidance provided by landmarks like regularly numbered streets, even when I get lost, I am usually able to get un-lost by myself.

Here is my requiste “full disclosure” moment, though: Caitlin, Chris, my mother, Natalie, and I think maybe Sam have all received phone calls from me, begging for help because I was lost in a neighborhood I did not recognize. Most of the pleas took the form of “This neighborhood looks worse than mine; I think I’m lost” or “Everything is beautiful and there are trees everywhere; I KNOW I’m lost”.

So never fear, dear friends, I haven’t changed too much, in driving or in other manners. I still get lost with great regularity. I still burst into song unexpectedly, confusing and disconcerting all those around me. I am still completely incapable of conveying sarcasm in my everyday speech. Just tonight I inadvertantly startled my dinner host with unintential sincerity. I told her that my housemate and I argue about leaving the water running while washing dishes: She shuts it off because she wants to conserve water; I leave it on because I hate the environment, and enjoy stealing water directly out of the cupped hands of dehydrated orphans.*

Nope, I have not changed, nor will I. The commute to work keeps me humble. Every time a pedestrian waltzes into traffic, or a car blithely ignores a red light, I heave a sigh and remember, everyone on the road is an idiot. And that most definitely includes me.

*Two things: Yes, I was being sarcastic, or at least trying my darndest. Also, I think I stole that line about dehydrated orphans from David Sedaris. He probably said it better, though.

Incongruities

2010-08-17T00:44:00.004-04:00

My first full week in Baltimore is now complete, and though much has happened, much still remains to happen. Kitty and I will be moving out of the convent this Saturday. Though I will miss the sisters very much, I am looking forward to setting up our own home, instead of being a guest (no matter how comfortable!) in someone else’s home.

I started work at Transfiguration Catholic Community last Wednesday. Sister Suzanne, who has worked at Transfiguration for years, took me on a drive on Friday to see the extent of the parish. The area is poor, that much is obvious, but Sister Suzanne urged me to look past the obvious. She told me that “If you look long enough, you begin to see the incongruities of the city. It is funny -- and it is beautiful.”

She was right.

Baltimore is like a crowd of people, forever yelling, running, clashing, fighting amongst themselves, and yet still mostly getting along: students determined to prove themselves and hipsters determined to prove themselves different; the businessmen hurrying to and from work and the poor looking for work; parents stuck in rush hour traffic while their kids sit on the front stoops and play ball in side streets. Baltimore is like the stream of workers when the night shift and day shift switch places. Everyone is always going somewhere, from the doctor running toward the hospital in his scrubs, to the homeless man who begs everyday at the corner of Charles and Wheeling, pacing as he rattles his styrofoam cup.

So in the spirit of Sister Suzanne’s request, here is an account of my first week, offered up as a series of incongruities:

I visited a Sister who lives in the parish. We nibbled fig newtons in her living room, which was fastidiously cleaned and decorated to the standards of a bygone era. The wingback chairs, the freshly dusted china cabinet, and the doilies on the side tables made the place feel exactly like my grandmother’s house, with one exception. The sister sat sipping her iced tea in front of a floor-to-ceiling mural of protesters marching in the streets; their signs read “We want bread, but we want roses, too!”

The morning of my first day of work began with a ticket on the hood of my car. I have permission to park in the “Reserved for the Sisters of Mercy” section of the hospital’s garage, but clearly Security did not know that. My heart sank, then I flipped the ticket over and saw a message on the back: “We heard you would be staying at the convent for a few weeks. We will keep an eye on your car. Welcome to Baltimore! -- Security”.

Sr. Suzanne told me a story. While one of the local churches was still open, its corner briefly became a hang out for drug dealers. One afternoon, there was going to be a funeral. A few Sisters who worked at the parish were waiting outside for the hearse. They saw three drug dealers standing on the far corner, scowling and talking amongst themselves. Finally, one of them walked up to the sisters: he wanted to know what time the service was, because they felt it would be wrong to sell drugs during a funeral. He said they didn't want to disrespect the dead.

Kitty needed a new cell phone, so we drove to the nearest Verizon store, in the swanky, touristy district of Baltimore, the Inner Harbor. I waited outside the store, enjoying the view of the harbor and the comforting aura of prosperous commercialism all around me – restaurants, shops, museums, and the wafting sounds of a street performer’s trumpet. I saw a small animal dart into the landscaped bushes in the median. Too small to be a cat. A weasel? Groundhog? They don’t have those in the city, do they? A squirrel? Where was its tail? The one and only rat I have seen in Baltimore was not in the abandoned buildings of Sowebo, but darting in and out of the shrubbery at the Inner Harbor. The rat hid in the bushes, clearly self-conscious and very far from home. I almost felt sorry for it.*

My sleeping patterns have been disturbed here by the lack of darkness. The city is never really dark. I could shut the blinds, but everything outside is still such a novelty that I don’t want to. There are no stars in the sky, but my sleepy country eyes see the network of lights on the ground as constellations. My garbled thoughts right before I fall asleep tend toward the sentimental and maudlin, so forgive me, but in those half-wakeful moments this past week I found myself thinking that the endless city lights made it look like the sky and the earth had switched places.

Classically, beauty requires symmetry. That which is regular, controlled, precise, and congruent is beautiful. That which is anomalous, wild, ambiguous and incongruent is ugly. My bedroom window affords a panoramic view of the city. From eighteen stories up, everything looks well-ordered in a way that I know is simply not true at street level. Still, I keep looking, because I choose to take hope in the thought that even those things –and those people – that have been considered ugly for so long are not totally devoid of beauty.

It doesn't seem that hard to believe anymore. Why not? If a parking ticket can brighten your day, then anything is possible.

*For the sake of honesty:

I have to confess, my pity for the rat is almost entirely an artistic embellishment to facilitate more streamlined story telling. Before he has a chance to call me out on this, I will disclose that I was on the phone with Chris Simon when I saw the rat, so he knows the truth of the matter. Though I would have to ask him for confirmation, I think my actual initial response was something along the lines of “Oh. My. God. There is a rat. It is the biggest heffing rat in the world. I didn’t know rats came in that size, I didn’t even know rats were really a thing, oh my God, it’s a rat, it’s a rat, IT’S A RAT! IT IS GOING TO EAT ME! OH MY GOD, IT’S A RAT, KILL IT!I have no idea why I was so certain it was going to eat me. It was nowhere near me, nor did it look like it might come sprinting at me or anything. Nevertheless, my fears were very real, if completely unfounded and irrational.

Kruka goes to the convent

2010-08-09T22:51:00.007-04:00

Yesterday, after eleven hours, twenty dollars in tolls, four states, three musical soundtracks, and two traffic jams, my exhausted housemate Kitty and I made it to Baltimore. I managed the fifteen minutes or so of necessary city driving with poor grace, but we did eventually arrive at our destination: the Sisters of Mercy convent on the top floor of Mercy Medical Center.

Yes, that's right. I am in a convent.

I hasten to add that I am not joining the convent. No -- I am a guest of the sisters. Seriously. I have a badge to prove it and everything. Still, I know that the image of me in a convent is going to strike most of you as pretty hilarious. This will be especially true for those friends who recall the year or so during college when I received an onslaught of recruitment mail/emails/phone calls from nuns for no apparent reason. Rather than try to stem the tide of laughter, I am resigning myself to it. In order for you to have an accurate mental picture, let me dispel a few myths:

1) Nuns are mean.

FALSE. There is no better greeting party than sisters. They helped us bring in our bags, had our beds made, and our dinner ready. And they did it all with the broadest and most genuine smiles on their faces. As Sarah Graves (a fellow MVC volunteer who is going to Guyana) would say, they were psyched to see us.

2) Convents are uncomfortable.

FALSE. Those of you who've seen Sister Act may recall Sister Mary Lazarus describing her convent in Vancouver: "Cold water, bare feet. Those were nuns. It was hell on earth -- I loved it. This place is a Hilton!" I am definitely staying in the "Hilton-style" convent, not the "Vancouver-style" convent. I have my own full bath, a television, an extremely comfy bed and a sitting room I share with my housemate Kitty. There's a kitchen down the hall and a private dining room downstairs where all the sisters who work in the hospital eat together. Plus, there's WiFi. You really can't pretend you're "roughing it" while wirelessly surfing the world wide web on your MacBook.

3) Nuns all wear black and white penguin outfits.

FALSE. Not all nuns wear habits. These are sneaky, camouflaged nuns -- they look just like the rest of us! Sisters of Mercy wear regular stre

et clothes with a special Mercy pin. At a glance you would never know who's a nun and who's not! It's kind of like being a super hero; When you see Clark Kent, you don't realize at first that he is Superman. And after some of the sisters I have met, I am very comfortable comparing them to super heroes. Sister Madonna teaches GED and adult education classes; she took her vows in 1945. Sister Elizabeth Anne is probably around the same age I would guess, and she still actively works within the hospital. I met a trio of sisters in Michigan who were all around the Golden Jubilee mark -- that would be 50 years of vowed life -- and still working, with no signs of slowing down.

4) Nuns are uptight.

DEFINITELY FALSE.

The sisters had two bottles

of wine and a six-pack of beer waiting for Kitty and

I when we arrived yesterday. I gladly had a bottle of beer; I was exhausted and wound-up after 11 hours on the road, and was eager to relax. As I got up to leave the table, one of the sisters asked me if I'd like another beer. Thinking she had misunderstood my gesture, I said, "No, thanks, I think I'd like to go to bed". She replied "Why not take a bottle with you to your room?"

"Nuns are awesome" is just one of the revelations I've had in the past 24 hours. I have also realized that, although Baltimore is a city and it is important to be careful, I am probably not going to be shot just because I set foot outside the hospital during the daytime. I went on a walk by myself this morning. In forty-five minutes in downtown Baltimore I saw no homeless people, no apparent drug dealers and no prostitutes; I was not shot, stabbed, threatened, mugged, or even hit up for spare change. I did see cute coffee shops, an independent bookstore, and a surprising number of pleasant, normal people who nodded to me as we passed on the sidewalk.

By the time I arrived back at the convent, I had also arrived at a conclusion: I have far more to fear from the sticky, cloying, omnipresent heat in Baltimore than I do from its residents. Anyone looking at my matted-down hair and sweat-streaked makeup would have been far more likely to try to give me a dollar than ask me for one.

This concern -- that I might someday be mistaken for a homeless person because of my heat-bedraggled appearance -- is probably unfounded, but I must admit, there is a kernel of hope amidst that fear: Perhaps this year I will fulfill my secret desire to be a hipster. I mean, I'll be living simply, which is theoretically part of it, right? Eschewing mindless bourgeois consumption and all that? So all I need to do other than that is wear lots of layers, a splash of plaid, a smirk of knowing cynicism and those stupid sunglasses, right? I think I can handle that.

Much love,

The Worst Hipster Ever,

Kruka

And thus it begins...

2010-08-08T00:07:00.001-04:00

Hello my fair friends*! Well, the day has arrived. After 22 years of rural living, Anne "Kruka"** Kruk is headed to the big city. And I am going to LIVE IT UP!

...just kidding. Although if any of you have ideas about how to "live it up" on a stipend of $210 a month, I'd love to hear them. Instead, I am going to be volunteering for an inner-city church and enjoying the practice of communal "simple living" with my housemate, Kitty.

I get to Baltimore tomorrow. I promise to fill you in at a later time on all the details of orientation this past week, or at least those details that are amusing and worth retelling. It's a little late for those now, with a ten hour drive looming on the horizon. For the moment I will just tell you that I have met more nuns in the past week than I had met in my entire life. It's been pretty epic.

Now, some of you may have some questions about my choice to start this new life in the big city.

For instance:

Any One of My Many Wiser and More Worldly Friends: Anne, aren't you scared of cities?

Anne: Oh yes, I'm terrified of them. They are noisy and scary and have no cows or farms. Instead they have heavy traffic, inscrutable public transportation, and mean people.

Wise Friend: So, what will you do when you get lost?

Anne: Cry.

Wise Friend: Just cry? That's your whole plan?

Anne: At the moment, yes. I guess I'll figure out the rest as I go along...???

Wise Friend: Anne, what is going to happen to you!?

Anne: I have no earthly idea, Wise Friend, but YOU will, if you read my blog! That's where I am going to chronicle my many misadventures, humorous failings, and newest anecdotes. You should read it!

Wise Friend: That sounds awesome, Anne! I'll read it all the time!!!

Anne: Thanks, Wise Friend! Wow, you really are wise!

Prove your wisdom: Read my blog!

Much, much love,

Kruka

*"Friends", in the plural, might be an overestimation. I doubt many of you will read this. My mother probably will, which is nice, but beyond that, I'm keeping my expectations low (as a wise midwesterner once taught me to do).

**If you are wondering about the derivation of my nickname, ask Sam Turner. She explains it really well. (I love you Sam!)