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Coming home to rest
THEY SAY THAT home is where the heart is. Of course that is true, but the heart can be found in a number of other places as well; in the wind, in the right place, held hostage by a lover, in the chest. So what is it that makes us as Americans so obsessed with the concept of home ownership?
Matthew Voz |
Summer time is together time
WITH SUMMER COME the hot, lazy days, cool night thunderstorms, and open schedules that we who suffer each year through a real winter often dream about in the middle of January. We can all remember as children how we counted down the days until the end of school, shrieked with joy as the bell rang on the last day, and spent the next 90 days dreading the beginning of the next school year. As an adult it is my attitude, not my schedule (I am a high school teacher), that has changed.
Matthew Voz |
Ruminations on learning
I RECENTLY WATCHED the Oscar-nominated film An Education, a cautionary yarn about a young girl who is sucked into a questionably adult world with the consent of her parents, abandoning her plans to attend Oxford, and eventually learning about life, love, and innocence lost.
Matthew Voz |
Women and men redefining roles
DOES ANYONE REMEMBER Pat? You know, the inscrutably androgynous office grunt from Saturday Night Live? Well for those of you who don’t remember, Pat was funny because you couldn’t tell whether she was a man or a woman, which caused an uncomfortable and ultimately humorous tension for the viewer. No one knew how to treat Pat because she couldn’t be identified as a man or a woman.
Matthew Voz |
Our animals, ourselves
HE LAY THERE awry, body pressed up against the glass, his eyes wide with existential terror. His chest heaved in a panicked rhythm. His fins lay flaccid along his contorted spine, his mouth puckered as though preparing to kiss the hand of God.
Matthew Voz |
Make the most of the dark
AS THE LONG winter lopes on through the early months of the new year, as the nights get shorter, and the days longingly and imperceptibly longer, an appreciation for the darkness grows in me. Perhaps it is the promise that the thaw and the light, though still far away, are coming toward us that allows me the breathing room to enjoy the cold and the dinners in the dark.
Matthew Voz |
Grandparent privilege
BY NOW, WITH Christmas behind and the New Year upon us, your children have probably been inundated with toys and candy canes and late-night movie sessions. Most likely they have also had a number of emotional meltdowns, temper tantrums, and the like; after all, part of the fun of the Christmas holiday is exhausting our children through chaotic social interaction while simultaneously feeding them junk food and surrounding them with toys to fight over.
Matthew Voz |
Children or not
POLITICAL SCIENTISTS CALL it pluralism—the existence of different, often competing, interests, opinions, and lifestyles within a single society. Some people like to refer to it as a melting pot, other people think of it as more of a public toilet. But whatever your opinion of our diverse culture, perhaps no two groups are more different than parents and childless adults.
Matthew Voz |
Warming the heart
DESPITE THE FACT that I hate shopping malls, that I don’t believe Jesus was the son of anyone but a couple of lovers from Nazareth, and that I am very uncomfortable when strangers are nice to me, I will argue that Christmas could be one of the last vestiges of social cohesion and family values remaining in a country whose traditions are usually served piping hot from the microwave.
Matthew Voz |
Innocence Cost
SOME FRIENDS RECOUNTED the following story to me, which has become the inspiration for this month’s column. It was a hot summer afternoon, over 95 degrees and humid—the kind of day that turns your brain into hot mayonnaise around two o’clock in the afternoon. That was about what time it was when the police officer showed up at the door of my friend’s quaint two-story house ...
Matthew Voz |
Memories are made of this
I WONDER IF everyone feels the same way I do when they go to visit their parents, and the kids are off being spoiled by grandma and grandpa, and you fall into the couch to enjoy, finally, a quiet moment. There is nothing on TV so you pick up a dusty photo album from a shelf, or maybe even your baby book tucked away in a drawer somewhere, still cradled in its protective plastic sheath.
Matthew Voz |
Blood Brothers
Fugazi says, “You are not what you own.” The Bible says “Watch out and guard yourself from all types of greed, because one’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions.” (Luke 12:15) The second noble truth of Buddhism is that attachment to worldly things causes suffering, and nowhere is this more clearly seen than in the interactions between children.
Matthew Voz |
Kidzilla
ONE SUMMER DAY, probably in mid-July when one has been on summer vacation long enough to be bored but is not so close to returning to school that each day is savored, I was loping around my grandparents’ farm looking for something to do.
Matthew Voz |
The second rule of parenting
THIS IS THE GEOGRAPHY of my childhood. I would be released by the afternoon bell from my Catholic grade school on the east side of town. Crossing the school playground that doubled as the church parking lot I would begin my walk home on the battered, 50-year old, Works Progress Administration (WPA) sidewalks. I would walk past the Lutheran church with its pedestrian architectural simplicity, then past Dr. Hauger’s dentist office, its strange late-1960s white-pebbled exterior walls drawing up traumatic memories of the smell of pink gel in the back of my throat—intensive fluoride treatment.
Matthew Voz |
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