SIBDIN (sibling dinner) last Saturday.  My sister is the photographer-extraordinare, so I leave all the “real” photos to her.

Aren’t those napkins gorgeous?  I keep telling Mamma Mia that she needs to open an Etsy shop (or contract with Anthropologie).  I am bringing them with me to Philadelphia, no joke.  I will be eating in style.

She made a batch of beef taco meat in the crockpot: adobo chipotle shredded beef to be exact.  The husband and wife ended up eating leftovers for dinner, so the wife left the beef out to cool while writing.  ”Perfect,” she thought, “now dinner is ready for tomorrow!”  But then she completely forgot about it and let it sit out all night.  When she awoke, the smell had wafted throughout the house and her sweet husband asked, “Oh, I wonder if we can still eat this?”

That night, that sweet husband picked up a pizza for dinner and baked it in the oven and brought it to her for dinner.  And the wife fell in love, all over again.

You may remember that I posted about Leymah Gbowee and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf earlier this year.  Gbowee is the subject of “Pray the Devil Back to Hell,” a documentary which tells the remarkable story of how Gbowee and the women of Liberia brought peace to war-torn Liberia through their organized protests against dictator Charles Taylor and rebel warlords.  You should really watch it.  And . . . you can!  Without going to the library.

PBS is airing a special series on Women, War & Peace.  It begins tomorrow night.

“Pray the Devil Back to Hell” will air on Tuesday, October 18.

I tend to have troubles with my shoes.  They fall down the steps of the White House, I pick the wrong pair for conference presentations, and even yesterday, I was chosen to go first for research project presentations apparently because I could “click my red shoes together and everything would go well.”

It’s been really rainy here in Minneapolis the past few weeks, the kind of rain that chills your bones and makes you wonder where the lamb of spring is supposed to be.  After longing for a good pair of rain boots to keep the wetness out, I finally found a beautiful pair on clearance for over 70% off.  Deal.  I had them sent from Illinois, only to find that they were hard to get on my feet.

I expressed this conundrum to a colleague who shares my clothing taste (even to the point that we dress exactly alike more often than not… it’s eerie).  ”Mine do that too,” she said.  ”Just pull really hard — they are meant to keep the water out.”

So this morning I pulled really hard, and on they went.  Fantastic… or so I thought.

By 9 am, during the middle of my last public speaking class, my feet were feeling a bit cramped.  Maybe I needed to walk around and stretch the rubber.

Two hours later, in the computer lab editing my notes for my thesis prospectus defense tomorrow, they hurt again.  Suck it up, I thought.  You’re not a wimp.

Lunch brought a welcome excursion out on campus, and they felt better.  But then, just hours later during eight undergraduate in-class presentations, it was all I could do to not pry them off my feet then and there.  After class, we walked back into the office.

I tried to pull off the boots.  The wouldn’t budge.  Two friends tried to pull them off, first with me sitting on my rolling desk chair.  Once I ended up half-way across the room, we decided the floor would be a better place to launch our attack.

Now would be the time to insert the classic joke: how many Comm Studies grad students does it take to pull of a pair of rubber boots?  The answer, in this case, would be three: two to pull the right one off, and one more to twist the left off (and lend a pair of extra jogging shoes she keeps handy in her desk).  One of the “puller” friends now is the proud (new) owner of said boots — she’s the same size but has more, um, delicately-shaped bones on the tops of her feet.

My feet screamed for joy as I walked home in my black Anthropologie dress, black leggings, and super-cool black and pink running shoes.  Oh yes.

So, on this last day of classes for the year, I’m thankful to report that indeed, I never can have too many friends… or shoes.

“The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.”

How true.

I’ve reached the “complete” status in my Liberia paper for the class.  I did my research, read the relevant material, turned in a first draft, responded appropriately to her comments/edits, and did everything I need for a good grade in the class.  But now, for graduate school, “well” equals a plateau.

You either choose to leave it there, or choose to brush off the dust (literal, my accumulated stack of library books, and figurative, the mental dust) and rework, reframe, reposition, and… think.

As Dr. Persuasion put it, it’s easy to talk about what other people say.  It’s a whole other thing to say, in understandable words and in ways that “make it sing” what I am trying to say and what I think about the subject.  It’s a process of development, teasing out the important parts and theorizing in ways that make sense to rhetoricians.  But I also want it to make sense to real people, to people outside academia.  That’s the challenge.

My goal is to submit this essay for publication in the next few months.  It’s a high goal, but one that I want to try to meet, if only for the experience of editing my own work and really thinking through my questions and successive answers not just with knowledge, but with imagination.

She’s the perfect advisor, really.  Believes in me and encourages me, but pushes me to do my best — “you can do better than that.”

That’s the kind of professor I want to be someday.

Given the fact that when my husband and I babysit other children in small numbers (two is our high point) and love the time and yet collapse in exhaustion afterwards, it’s a wonder my parents are still alive.  I should also mention that our babysitting chunks have only extended for 24 hours.  We play, sing, make crafts, go on walks, and then after twenty-four hours tops, we return them to their parents.  It’s a nice trade-off.  But as family videos will attest, life with five children under nine and, later, six under fourteen was busy, unpredictable, complicated, hilarious, and for the majority of the time, very non-returnable.  Thanks for putting up with the chaos, Mom & Dad.

For what seemed to be the never-ending reality of my entire life (of eight and a half years), I was sister-less.  Mind you, I could play Cowboys & Indians with the best of them, although my role usually ended up being a civilizing, motherly presence which cooked dinner and put the tired cowboys to bed in our blue nylon tent.  We romped in the tall grass behind our duplex, delighted in a “real creek” and a vegetable garden which provided leafy greens to otherwise pretend buffalo meat day after day.  Then there was the blue playhouse next to the apple and crabapple trees.  For some reason, my brothers never seemed to love the canning and preserving of the ripe apples as much as I did (or, in realistic terms, probably producing fermented-bordering-on-rotten squished apple peels which would explain why I had to promise to never eat them).  But, like good protectors, they would ward of the sharks (if we were on a submarine), the lions (when we were off on a safari), and the “bad guys” (easily applied to many situations).

I had other little friends who had sisters, and I envied them shamelessly.  Boys were great.  But a sister?  After an entire eight-year life of trucks, wooden toy guns, “bobba-dudies” (i.e. a mixture of gun noises, Psalty-the-Singing-Songbook melodies, and occasional Indian war chants), and even the abduction of my precious American Girl dolls, I screamed for joy when my parents told me that I might indeed have a little sister.

Although my parents had ultrasounds with my brothers, they decided to wait until the baby was born to find out if it was a boy or a girl.  And so I began to pray for a sister.  Every day.  I knew that God knew the baby growing inside my mother, and I knew that He could hear my prayers.  It was the first time in my young life that I remember tangibly, faithfully praying for something.  And God answered my prayer.

I’ll never forget where I was standing when my dad called from the hospital to deliver the news.  ”You have a baby sister,” he said.  I ran down the hall, screaming for joy.

Today that baby sister is sixteen years old.  She is stunningly beautiful, hilarious, sweet, tender-hearted, a lover of people, steadfast, humble yet unafraid to speak the Truth and live in it.  She is an example to me of what it means to be an honest, godly, deeply loving woman of conviction and a continual reminder of God’s faithfulness and His sovereign ability to answer the desire of our hearts.

Happy Birthday, sweet Bethany.  I love you.

This last weekend, I had a meltdown moment.  A compilation of many things that built up over time, it was a mixture between “the world hates me” and “I hate the world.”  Utterly irrational, but seeming very legitimate (to me) at the time, I must have been that woman commercials, television shows, movies, and multiple people joke about.  The type for whom  dry-witted husbands buy “Get a Grip” tea.  Marketing to women and their significant others alike, the tag-line reads “Women are complex creatures, often ruled by a delicate balance of hormones…”  How poetic and lovely-sounding.

Anyway.  JPJD is a wise, wise man.  He listened.  He nodded.  And then he spoke the truth I desperately needed to hear.  That’s what I love about him.  He’s man enough to listen and sympathize, and then even more macho to speak what is right and true.

And then, ten minutes after I nearly bit his head off (figuratively), he turns up the radio and sings me this song.  I am the most blessed woman in the world.

But even better than a husband who sings to me is a God who sings over me.

The LORD your God is with you,
the Mighty Warrior who saves.
He will take great delight in you;
in his love he will no longer rebuke you,
but will rejoice over you with singing.

-Zephaniah 3:17

My God is with me, the One who saves.  He takes great delight in me.  He will no longer rebuke me because of Jesus Christ, but instead, he will rejoice over me with singing.

I am blessed indeed.

I am taking a class on the rhetoric of the first and second waves of feminism from my advisor this semester.  When attempting to choose a project for the class, a colleague suggested looking at Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, the president of Liberia and first elected female head of state in Africa.  It combines both my interest in presidential rhetoric and the study of women’s rights.  Great, I thought.

Man, was I ignorant.  Her rise to the presidency is not a simple “I wanted to run for president and got elected” like we see in the United States.  Civil war, crime, corruption, and a movement for peace organized entirely by village women are all parts of her story.

If you care about people and about justice, you need to learn about Liberia, these market women, and President Johnson-Sirleaf.

A few resources and suggestions:

• Pray the Devil Back To Hell: This movie chronicles the story of Leymah Gbowee and other ordinary women who decided they had had enough of civil war in their country and the corrupt shenanigans of then-President Charles Taylor (go here to read a story about him from today).  Not for children or the faint of heart, but an important and inspiring work.  You can read a transcript of an interview with Leymah here.  This movie is available on Netflix, university libraries, and your local library.  Check it out.  Literally.
• Iron Ladies of Liberia: Set after the women’s movement which elected Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, this documentary chronicles the problems and difficulties facing the new president and her cabinet.  A great follow-up to Pray the Devil Back to Hell.  Also found at Netflixs and libraries.  No excuse.
• This Child Will Be Great: Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf’s autobiography published in 2009.  She gives a history of Liberia before detailing her own life.  A woman of grace, character, and determination.

Take the time (60 minutes for each documentary and/or about 3 hours for the book) to read about these remarkable women.  It puts my cocoon-wrapped life in perspective.

He was serious, and tough enough. Everyone who ever ran against him misunderstood this. He was an actor, they thought, a marshmallow. They’d flatten him. “I’ll wipe the smile off his face.” Nothing could wipe the smile off his face. He was there to compete, he was aiming for the top. His unconscious knew it. He told me as he worked on his farewell address of a recurring dream he’d had through adulthood. He was going to live in a mansion with big rooms, “high ceilings, white walls.” He would think to himself in the dream that it was “a house that was available at a price I could afford.” He had the dream until he moved into the White House and never had it again. “Not once.”

He ran for president four times and lost twice. His 1968 run was a flop—it was too early, as he later admitted, and when it’s too early, it never ends well. In 1976 he took on an incumbent Republican president of his own party, and lost primaries in New Hampshire, Florida, Illinois (where he’d been born), Massachusetts and Vermont. It was hand-to-hand combat all the way to the convention, where he lost to Gerald Ford. People said he was finished. He roared back in 1980 only to lose Iowa and scramble back in New Hampshire while reorganizing his campaign and firing his top staff. He won the nomination and faced another incumbent president.

In Reagan’s candidacy the American people were being asked to choose a former movie star (never had one as president) who was divorced (ditto) and who looked like he might become the most conservative president since Calvin Coolidge. To vote for Reagan was not only to take a chance on an unusual man with an unusual biography, but also to break with New Deal-Great Society assumptions about the proper relationship between the individual and the state. Americans did, in a landslide—but only after Jimmy Carter’s four years of shattering failure.

None of it was inevitable. The political lesson of Ronald Reagan’s life: Nothing is written.

–Peggy Noonan, Ronald Reagan at 100

It can be said that every great president can be remembered in just one sentence: “He freed the slaves”; “He made the Louisiana Purchase.”

Yet, 22 years since he left office and seven years after his death, the name Ronald Wilson Reagan can still provoke a more complex debate.

There is no one phrase that can describe his legacy. Several come to mind: “The Great Communicator,” or “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.”

There is much debate over President Reagan because we all think of him differently. And over time, history sweetens our memories. But no matter what policy disagreements you may have had with him, you have to admire his style of politics. He embodied a spirit of bipartisanship.

–Sen. Diane Feinstein, Reagan’s Spirit of Bipartisanship

Reagan was always underestimated by his friends and by his opponents. He actually believed that was an advantage. Many political opponents thought he would be an easy mark. But his overwhelming victories in the four elections he won revealed the folly of such suppositions.

Reagan was friendly to all that he dealt with. He had no “secret persona” for those close to him. He was the same man whether talking to top staff members in the Oval Office or when addressing 10,000 people at a political rally. His integrity and sincerity were obvious — one reason he was so genuinely admired by the American people.

It was also a tremendous source of strength for those of us who worked for him. At every stage of his political career, we were confident he would fully support us if we did the right thing. In the first Cabinet meeting after his inauguration, he stated that what he wanted to hear from us was the truth and what was right to do for the American people. Politics, he insisted, should never color our advice.

–Edwin Meese, Reagan Took Advantage of Being Underestimated

It has been argued that Ronald Reagan was a myth himself, a construct of his own and other people’s imaginings, rather than an extraordinary American about whom some untruths are told. The sentimental colossus his acolytes are trying to erect today, with gilded pecs, red-painted smile and an NRA-approved pistol in each manly fist, bears no resemblance to the man I knew: in private a person of no ego and little charisma, in public a statesman of formidable purpose.

–Edmund Morris, Five Myths About Ronald Reagan

The secret to Reagan’s success was that he cared about the big stuff without troubling himself with the little stuff. The determined simplicity of his vision made him the butt of many a joke by liberal pundits who had him beat cold on IQ points. But in so ridiculing him, his critics misunderstood the key virtues for a political leader.

I have spent my entire career in legal education. Whenever I write about technical subjects, I quickly find myself mired in multiple exceptions to a general rule. “But what about” is the phrase that guides academic inquiry. That approach works for lawyers, who spend inordinate time arguing about novel cases that fall at the margin of two competing principles.

But political leaders are, thankfully, not necessarily lawyers. Their job is to define the terms of the debate. They should leave the details to, well, people like me.

Any effort to go down into the weeds has two fatal consequences for the politician who wants to be a statesman. First, it narrows the scope of the principle so that the general public can no longer figure out where their political leader stands. Second, the public emphasis on minutiae presents the image of the postmodern man consumed by doubt and devoid of inner conviction.

Leadership cannot thrive on nuance or uncertainty. It depends on unshakable commitments to sound principles.

That is where Ronald Reagan excelled as a president. On the domestic front, Reagan insisted that the essence of a free society rested on these key building blocks: individual freedom, personal security, limited government and states’ rights. The political theorist in me says he misfires on every point: His respect for freedom does not talk about the need for taxation or the regulation of public utilities, each worthy of a lifetime of study. Bald claims for personal security make no references to the limits on self-defense. Even the most limited of governments have their work cut out in providing national defense, preserving order and maintaining infrastructure. States’ rights overlook the need for a federal government to preserve a national market, and to counter local forms of racial and social intolerance.

But these details do not define presidents whose job is to control public discourse by setting the right starting points. The values articulated will in the end become presumptions that should yield in time to prudent exceptions. But the key insight is that free society has to start with the right presumptions. It must reject the absolute power of the state to impose whatever laws it conjures up in the name of community and the common good. Those starting points play out in concrete cases. Perhaps the most dramatic incident of the early Reagan years was his confrontation with the more than 11,000 air traffic controllers he fired in August 1981 when they refused to return to work. Reagan broke a union.

Forthright pronouncements also defined Reagan’s triumphs in foreign affairs. He knew in his bones that the want of inner conviction disarms any president engaged in international diplomacy. Moral relativism in international affairs is not a sign of intellectual discernment. It is a sign of moral weakness. Lots of hard political issues come in all shades of gray. But by the same token, the words for which Ronald Reagan is most remembered drew sharp contrasts. In March 1983, he called the Soviet Union “an evil empire.” Speaking at the Brandenburg Gate in June 1987, Reagan stated his major premise: “We believe that freedom and security go together.” This was followed by his direct challenge to Mikhail Gorbachev, his Russian counterpart: “Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” Which Gorbachev did by November 1989.

These simple declarative sentences define the man and his massive achievements. They are what all Americans should remember about Ronald Reagan on Sunday’s centennial of his birth. He knew that in politics, as in life, Dooley Wilson had it right. The fundamental things do apply. Ronald Reagan was a great president because he stood for what is great and enduring in the human condition.

–Richard Epstein, Secret of Ronald Reagan’s Success

About eight years ago, I was a freshman in college in a tiny town at a tiny school in Michigan.  The tiny-ness had no bearing on my time spent there, and the relationships I formed remain especially sweet.  One Sunday morning a group of my friends decided to go out to breakfast at a greasy little diner on the way to church.  I was tired and feeling a bit queasy, but thought some eggs and toast would help.

A few minutes after our orders were taken and we were talking and laughing over cheap, bitter, overheated coffee, I passed out, fell on the tile floor, and the well-meaning waitress called 911.  I don’t really remember the particulars of the next few hours, save a few details.  I remember being carried out on a gurney to an ambulance and (what seemed to be) a long ride to the county hospital.  I remember being “with it” enough to ask where my two best friends were.  If they were there, I knew they would take care of me (never mind the doctors or nurses or paramedics).  And when I had enough glucose pumped into my veins to be more conscious, I remember two beautiful women walking into the hospital room triumphantly with pineapple orange juice, cinnamon raisin bagels and cream cheese, and sliced deli turkey.

“Sugar and carbohydrates and protein.  Eat it.”  From that time on, no to protein was not an option.

The point of it all is to say that one of those dear nurses and best friends had an ambulance ride of her own yesterday, and more than anything I wanted to fly to her ambulance, her hospital room to be able to show up with juice, bagels, and turkey… or whatever would have made her feel cared for and loved.  She has a wonderful husband and family there, so I know she will be okay.  But still, I wish I could do for her what she did for me those eight years ago… and what she continues to do by her life and example every day.

I love you, dear one.  Rest.