Me: I'm almost done editing your resume. Which is very impressive, natch.
Me: (Did I just say natch? I need to go to bed...)

Renee: what the hell IS "natch" anyway??

Me: "Natch" is short for "naturally." They used it in all the teenybopper paperbacks I liked when I was in middle school.
Me: Claudia Kishi, for instance, was always saying things like "natch."

Renee: did you just reference the babysitter's club???????????
Renee: it's like i think i love you more than humanly possible and then you pull a move like that.

I love you too, Renee.

Bonus link: A fellow nerd revisits her awkward(est) years one Babysitter's Club book at a time.

I'm a public radio junkie with unrealized broadcasting dreams, so I knew immediately she must be from a local station, or maybe an Annenberg School student working on a project. But why she was recording what she was recording - the chimes that mark the library's close of business - I couldn't imagine.

Nor did I realize I would find out the answer so soon. But a friend called me this evening to exclaim that she'd just heard a short piece about the library on NPR, part of an "audio postcard" series meant to focus the listener's attention on a specific moment in a particular place characterized by a unique sound.

Past postcards have come from the National Hollerin' Contest and the Iowa City dog paddle. Today's came from the reverberating atriums of one of the nation's historic free public libraries. In it, the head security guard explains why they continue to use old-fashioned chimes to scoot patrons towards the door at day's end - and, as always, he gives as fine a performance as one can while striking four notes with a wooden mallet. In an institution sometimes mired in bureaucracy and red tape, as government agencies so often are, I am thankful for this humanizing tradition, and I hope that our patrons are, too.

A final note: at the very end of the piece, if you bend your ear close to the speaker, you can just hear the heels of my boots clacking up the marble staircase. Or so I'd like to think, anyway.

Audio postcard: The Bells of Philadelphia

I'm calling it The Curved Path in honor of a return to my roots. I adopted the pseudonym online about four years ago, while I was an intern at Sojourners magazine. Perhaps the most important truth I took away from that formative year was that everything about life was messier and more complex than I could possibly imagine. That realization was encapsulated for me one day at a retreat center, when I walked a labyrinth, a spiritual metaphor for life on - you guessed it - the curved path.

You can read about that experience in my most recent column for catapult magazine. If you want the condensed version of this blog's m.o., however, look no further than the pithy prayer I read before setting foot to ground in the labyrinth:

O God of many paths, I stand before this labyrinth today, metaphor of my journey to you. In the Western world I have been taught that "the shortest distance between two points is a straight line," and being an impatient person, I am uncomfortable with waiting. I have often modeled my journey to you on the straight line. But you, God of infinite patience, have shown me that there is another path: the curved path.

Whether by choice or by necessity, this path is the one I've been taking lately. It's full of detours, but those are usually the most interesting part of the journey, even though they're often the most irritating in the moment. (Just ask my roadtrip buddy/sparring partner/lifelong fling Nathan.)

My former blog was about the journey itself, the Big Picture and its corresponding Big Questions. But this one is for the detours, which is to say: the recipes, the television programs, the terrifying but surprisingly alluring prospect of having children, the satisfying yet difficult new career, the half-assed sewing projects, the neighborhood gossip, the daily sadnesses and outrages, the good things my friends are doing, and the photos that document all of the above. (Well, except for the third item down the list - I'll spare you that.)

In short, the curved path is made up of what Kathleen Norris calls "the quotidian mysteries." She subtitled her little book on the subject "Laundry, Liturgy, and 'Women's Work,'" which might be suitably applied to this blog as well. Ordinary time, ordinary life, is sanctifying. The mundane is where the holiness happens, when it happens at all. I try to keep my eyes open so I'll know it when I see it - and I'll try to write it down here when I do.