TJ Hirst

The Question: Have I Seen the Hand of God Reaching Out to Touch Us Today?

All day I talk and talk and write and talk and, I hope, listen. These expressions spring out of my desire to comprehend the richness of it all. When I learn something new I want to share and see how others saw the same thing.

Everyday we exchange information, but I seek more. I want to exchange thoughts, stories, words, ideas, looks, actions. I want communication that connects.

Misunderstandings seem more common. Some days I wonder if we haven’t become like the people who were building the tower of Babel, “confounded, that they may not understand one another’s speech.”

My speech is confused in the ears of others so frequently, so personally, so deeply, so profoundly that I pray fervently that I will be understood.

When my answer comes, though, I learn there is something more important than being understood—that is to understand.

Composting toilets, fields of prairie grass on the roof and cob wall art greeted my daughter and her friends for an Activity Day field trip to the campus that houses several companies with goals of researching, developing and promoting sustainable living through renewable energy and high efficiency housing.

The composting toilet and worm composting brought the young titter of embarrassment from the group, but they all took a sniff of the bathroom where deposits are made and then covered with sawdust and could prove that it doesn’t smell.

One of the young boys in the group said, “I’ve got to use the bathroom, Mom.”

She quickly grabbed his hand, pulled him in the opposite direction and said, “We’ll use the first one.”

The companies on campus include a nonprofit, Happy Dancing Turtle, a for-profit, Hunt Utilities Group, and RREAL, Rural Renewable Energy Alliance. The offices themselves are an experiment in different earth-friendly products and materials. Our tour guide, Quinn, showed how the main office is made of straw bales and covered with cob. Cob is a stucco-like material that is made from basic ingredients: clay, sand, straw and water. They use cob to cover the straw bales, decorate the walls and even to build bathtubs and sinks.

Quinn is one of the artisans who paints the cob, often using a natural milk-based paint called casein. In the back room of some offices, one might expect to find old storage boxes, but they produce cob right on site and made their back room look more like a stable with stalls of straw and sand, water troughs and giant mixers.

In another building on campus with 76 solar panels, we visited the greenhouse where 10 miles of black tubing bring warm air from other parts of campus and deliver it to the floor of the greenhouse. There, Quinn also explained the layers of roofing material (which are identical to our roof garden layers) that lie underneath the dirt and prairie grass on top of the building.

The kids were bored by some of the more complicated processes like the intricate technical monitoring of the moisture and temperatures in the buildings and looking at an actual solar panel. But they held on through the heat and walk until the time to make paper from their used paper.

I admit that I hang back from fully embracing the green movement. It seems funny to label some of the things I am already doing like planting a garden, preserving my own food, using smart building and energy products in and on our house as sustainable living.

With that perspective, though, I realize that my children through educational opportunities like these will grow up with less reluctance and may adopt some of the more unusual practices. Let’s just say, though, that there are limits and if I find a composting toilet at their house when I go to visit my grandkids years in the future, I’ll stay somewhere else.

Have you ever been to a county fair? August always opens in our Minnesota community with the county fair. But I’ve never been. My whole family has, but I’ve resisted. Until this weekend when I stopped being such a snob and we descended on the place where. . .

A person can still showcase
blue ribbon livestock, canning and baking, crafts, vegetables, flowers and art.

And eat deep fried food—fried cheesecake, monster ears and
cheese curds—that repulse us anywhere else.
(Surprisingly, for this up north town, the nachos were the best we’ve ever had.)

And put children on live ponies that circle around like a carousel
and even get all the authentic smells that go with it.

And watch it come to an end on a
dazzling-for-child yet fearful-for-mom ride at $3.00 a ticket.

I lost myself in The Host by Stephanie Meyer for my first real summer read, and I rejoice to have finally finished it. Contradictions? Yes, the whole book conflicted me.

Last summer I spent a few days camped in my hammock with the Twilight series (Twilight, New Moon, and Eclipse). I’d heard a buzz that I had to read them. The youthful adventure and romance provided an easy escape from my serious nature and a possible bridge between my teenage daughter and me.

But you know there’s more to them than that, don’t you? Sure, author Stephanie Meyer writes a captivating story with a plot that carries a reader through its pages, wanting more. But her words are not shallow or hollow; behind the surface story lie powerful issues.

The complexities of love, marriage, and mortality are intertwined with the emotions of human sexuality in Bella’s and Edward’s relationship. Look for them. These characters are not only posing questions for each other but causing us to examine our current culture’s attitudes about sexual love and ask ourselves the same ones.

My daughter threw me into Meyer’s new adult novel, The Host, when she requested it from the library. Since she is only 14, I required that I read it first. Apparently the large-print edition didn’t have as many holds on it, so what we picked it up at the library last week was a 1144 page book that was bigger than a Bible. I didn’t have three days to devote to hammock reading, so I lugged this paperback with me to swim lessons, to exercise at the Y, from upstairs to downstairs and back, and into the late hours of light Minnesota summer nights. Since my vision adjusted to the 14-point type and I couldn’t read anything smaller, I had to set aside all my other reading until I finished.

I discovered three things when I was lost in this author’s latest novel:

First, The Host is definitely an adult novel. It is not overly sexual or violent or over the head for a youngish teenager. But the subject matter and ideas are more advanced than Twilight’s young adult audience. I told my daughter that she could read it, but that it will not be what she came to expect from the others.

Second, the depth of ideas is exactly what I was looking for, and she met those expectations. The Host is the story of a soul, Wanderer, from another planet who inhabits a human body. During her assimilation into her human host and Earth life, ethical challenges hit her hard when she realizes that Melanie, her host, still resides within the body. The plot moves along quickly when her choices pit her against her own. In an unexpected community Wanderer discovers love and hate and that both bring large variations and important choices.

Finally, here’s the conflict—I don’t like science fiction. The first few chapters of Twilight were not overtly weird. I genuinely liked the characters and the setting before I realized the book was about vampires and werewolves. In The Host, however, the first few chapters were clearly science fiction and quite confusing to me. I almost gave up reading it several times. I’m not a fan of this genre and was glad when the story moved closer to a form I could relate to.

Overall, it’s a worthy summer read that can be purely entertaining or just keep Meyer fans satisfied until Breaking Dawn is released on August 2, 2008. But honestly, like Meyer’s other novels, hidden behind the hype is a whole lot more.

My childhood memories of Independence Day include a parade of neighborhood children through our subdivision carrying homemade signs and riding tricycles and move on to the professional floats that attracted much larger crowds to Fair St. Louis beneath the Gateway Arch.

Now, we’re living in Brainerd, a smaller railroad town turned resort community in central Minnesota, and take part in what the community organizers hail as “Minnesota’s 4th of July Capital.” Truly, I am amazed that 35,000-40,000 people turn out for the parade, community corn feed and fireworks display, but there is something about a small town celebration that attracts the spirit of the day. Last year, when we visited elsewhere for the Fourth, it just didn’t feel like the same holiday to my kids.

I have mixed feelings about the large crowds that such community events draw together. When a large cross-section of people gather and bump up against one another you see and hear things you normally don’t. When my children were young and I was a little more cautious and probably a lot more judgmental, I felt on edge throughout such celebrations. Now, with time, they’ve grown easier in their needs and I’ve grown calmer in my attitude, and we all enjoy a good parade capped off with too much food and a burst of fireworks.

The parade itself is a phenomenon to me. Usually, it isn’t more than a two-hour stream of local dignitaries and princesses waving from the backs of convertibles, fire engines blaring and spraying hot crowds, floats on the backs of flatbed trucks, campaigning politicians, drum lines and dance lines, and a Shriner’s band.

This year we were honored to have General Bruce Carlson, a four-star general in the U. S. Air Force as the parade’s grand marshal. He grew up in Brainerd and is now commander of the Air Force Material Command at Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio. Even though this parade it is not a television-choreographed display of all things fantastic, the crowds staked out the best spots with blankets and lawn chairs the night before and early in the day.

All things seem right in America when you can leave your blanket along the city curb with four rocks weighing it down from the wind and come back to it eight hours later, untouched except for four complimentary flags laid upon it for us to wave while we watch. It is enough evidence to pass over current pessimism of American values and enjoy what attracts the big names and the big crowds to a small town parade.