I remember arriving, soggy shoes squeaking on tile under garish hall lighting, jostling our way to proper rooms, each to find our own hard-seated desk.

Then looking around at faces familiar from last year and a few new ones. All of us friendly to a degree in a here’s-my-lost-family manner. And who will our new (or same) parents be? Who will guide us into texts and through plenty of ughs and sighs at homework?

For my part, I watched the older soul at the front of the room intently, hoping for understanding, for kindness. Usually, somewhere on his or her face, in eyes behind glasses or below receding hairline, I saw it. Compassion. Enthusiasm.

I wanted what they wanted. A launch into beneficial learning. The first day, at least, it seemed wholly, newly possible.

Here’s to launching into new possibilities.

But I was there first. What I found, the night I tripped inside its doorway and ever since, has been a place to ask a good question.

Man, I needed that.

I’m going to share a page from a little diary. Written in pencil, the entry is dated Saturday, August 3, 1974.

On Monday evening some friends from Illinois, the Hershisers, came to visit. There are four in their family; the parents, LeRoy and Gwen, and the kids Tim, 18 and Stephanie, 15. We had a great time with them on Tuesday, when we went to Pt. Defiance park for the day. Stephanie and Tim are funny and neat. Tim is great in electronics and knows all about electrical stuff. He fixed about everything that needed repairing around here, from our TV to our casset tape recorder. I’m afraid I sort of like him a little too much but he has a girlfriend back in Sterling, Illinois and I won’t be seeing him for probably many years, so I think I’ll get over him.

I was 14. A later entry that summer found me meeting a boy named Mike at a campground, talking with him late into the night (with my brother there. “Unfortunately,” I said), and then searching in vain for Mike the next day. Ah, those years. Amazing, still, to me, is how one piece of my continuing adolescent adventures returned in a meaningful way a few years later.

Tim came back to Tacoma. We started dating (his old girlfriend a bittersweet memory) when I was 17, my senior year.

I recall his sister saying, sometime after we married, that ours had been a fairy tale love story. Lately I jotted something related into my Moleskine writing notebook:

I’ve been a main character in a fractured fairy tale. I’ve also been the wife in a stable, committed relationship. Both my stories have played out with the same man.

Here’s the strange part: in both cases we have lived a broken love.

Although we find ourselves on a healing journey, the two of us remain morally tattered beings. And yet we have seen ourselves striving for better, wanting goodness.

If only God would give it to us.

The Bible’s word “depraved” brings up questions for me. Why, for one thing, doesn’t God give us moral “pravity”? Make us “praved”?

Is depravity like being declawed? Defenestrated?

Why don’t we get secondary pravity, like some say we get secondary virginity?

How can the command, “Go and sin no more” fit, if I’m to be ever depraved while walking this planet, while going?

I jotted these thoughts along with glimpses of answers I’ve been forming over the decades since I was that 14-year-old girl. Since that first glimmer of my fractured fairy tale. I had some fun with possibilities. Maybe I’m discovering the channel I can write in, on, betwixt.

Yesterday I received a gift in the mail from Fresca. Thanks, bloggy buddy! It’s a book of quotes titled A Writer’s Commonplace Book (British, eh, what?).

Leafing through pages this morning, I was reading aloud to Tim. Here’s something we both found interesting, by Margaret Mead:

Three different types of marriage. One for young people who just want to live together and have sex…another for couples who want to raise children. A third is for older people who want companionship.

Mead was married three times, and her sexual orientation apparently “evolved” later in life. Her fractured fairy tales obviously look different than my own, hetero-oriented, stormy story. But I like these ideas to explore, especially when thinking about writing for people, in marriage type 1, 2, or 3 (maybe with the same person), living along that vast and varied avenue of our reality which is characterized by believing in God and Jesus.

Plenty of us are fractured. How many sigh and groan, thinking most of the others they see are living happily ever after?

And what, pray tell, old chap, might it be like to climb back in the window, fenestrated, wearing a sprig of pravity in one’s hair?

I’m struck by the beauty in Orthodox rituals – from decorous clothing to music to incense. They’re at once simple and opulent. The people regularly practice fasting, as in abstaining from meat, dairy products, olive oil, and alcohol. Right now, during Great Lent, the fast holds fast for around fifty days. And to this cloud of witnessing faithful I have lent my husband.

You might reconsider inviting us out for pizza until after Easter.

Many Protestants decide on something to give up for Lent. The reasons appear to range from wanting to achieve holiness to a remembrance of the sorrow Jesus’ disciples felt after he died. (One of the better articles I’ve read, here on Wikipedia, contrasts and compares several Lenten observances.)

I like what my daughter told me, about the purpose of the fast being preparation for the feast, for the joy to come. In such a sense I tend to look at life, because, you know, life is hard and then we die. But if one has a view of the hardness bearing eternal purpose, well, then, it might just all be worth it.

The only thing I’ve given up for Lent is shoes. I’m trying out barefoot jogging on my treadmill. Apart from blackening my soles, I’m thinking this might be okay. Better than what Asics has bestowed. I need to strengthen muscles in new ways, but first thing I lengthened my stride. Not the same texture as when striking smooth sand at the beach, but I liked it. I remember wanting to run like this while dreamily staring at fields we drove past on vacation.

For me, perhaps, the motivation has ever been freedom. Let’s give up the shackles that have bound our thinking. Let’s dance across the dunes, wind in our hair.

But I did first need to see myself stepping so intentionally onto a path that destroyed me and those around me. I hadn’t believed I could really be bad. Until I saw it, those years ago, I couldn’t mourn. And mourning was good.

It still comes to me in organic ways. When I need it, I guess. Before the feast and joyful exercise, the darker actions of blessed loss and good grief.

I found out I had been doing it. My dear teacher, Mrs. Love (I couldn’t have made that up), noticed how my face scrunched during math time, as I tried to make out problems on the board. She reported this to my parents.

There’s little doubt how it happened. Like most kids, I had a bedtime. For us first-generation TV children the schedule easily corresponded with programs. (I will always associate the closing music of some shows – Flipper, Get Smart, Bonanza, Lost in Space – with having to go to bed.) Before second grade we moved to a remodeled, older parsonage next door to the church, with an entryway and a grand (at least it was grand to us) staircase. Each night after TV I dragged myself slowly up the carpeted stairs to my room at the top landing. If I was lucky, I had remembered to close my window shades earlier; if not, there was blackness outside where an alien face might be lurking.

After tugging down the shades, slipping on my nightie, and rearranging a dozen stuffed toys on my bed, I was out with the light. Or was I?

The hall light remained on, comforting my brothers in their room. In its dim illumination I found my greatest comfort, reading the book from beneath my pillow. I knew I shouldn’t stay up reading, and so it was a thrill. I also dreaded the coming new day, because, despite Mrs. Love and the chalkboard smell and the bright green shrubs outside our class window, I had issues with school. It was a weird thing to do, going away from my home and my mommy and brothers each morning. Wearing a dress, as well, making every day except Saturday a bit of torture.

Stories kept my heart and mind alive; I couldn’t resist them. Later, after the optometrist fitted my first pair of glasses, my parents discovered my reading habits and gave me a bedside desk with a lamp. But I was already ultra-myopic.

Somehow, though, nearsightedness has helped me hang onto my own space and the thrill of being just me. It cocoons me at the swimming pool, where I still remove even my contacts before going under water. I know then what it would be like to be legally blind. And I’m not worried about it. Always seeing beyond my nose is overrated. Squinting doesn’t help, but still I do so, when my dear husband appears to be approaching. I like letting him into my world.