by Lehua Parker | Feb 14, 2014 | Mainland Living, The Business of Writing
“It’s pronounced L’wah. It’s French,” proclaimed the guy sitting next to my son, Aaron. Aaron gives him side-eye. The guy and his girlfriend are studying the bios of the authors seated on the platform in front of the room. It’s the first day of a writers’ conference and I’m here to talk about how to write children who sound, act, and think like children instead of mini-adults. Seated in the middle of the table, I figure I’m in a power-spot.
“No, says the woman, spotting a dark-haired, olive-skinned author seating herself to my right. “It’s Native American. It’s Leh-huish-hah.”
Aaron tries not to snicker.
“I’m telling you it’s French. L’wah!”
“Welcome everyone. Let’s start by having each of our panelists introduce themselves.”
“Aloha! My name is Lay-who-ah Parker and I write…”
When they hear me say my name, they both shake their heads. “No,” the guy says, “she’s wrong.”
by Lehua Parker | Feb 10, 2014 | Mainland Living
At first glance you’d think my fourteen-year-old daughter is a pretty, self-confident jockette and honors student growing up sheltered and cherished in ways only the truly privileged take for granted. But get to know her and you’ll realize that she’s a deep thinker who knows how to blend. At her core she’s a can-do, no-nonsense, uber-competitive, authority-questioning young woman with the analytical brain of an engineer.
It’s a potent combination that usually leaves people underestimating her until she eviscerates them with her tenacity and logic.
Last night she came home spitting nails from her weekly teenage girls’ church youth group activity. “You know what we did? We made little toy lizards to go on backpacks.”
“Okaaayyy,” I said. “And you didn’t want one for your backpack?”
“The lizards weren’t for us; they were for kids in Africa. It was a service project. I asked how tiny beaded lizards were a service project—wouldn’t starving kids in Africa rather have a sandwich? And they said these were to go on the outside of the backpacks that other people were filling with things kids need. This wasn’t a service project—this was decorating someone else’s service project.” She was deeply and thoroughly disgusted.
I totally got where she was coming from. I also understood why the adult youth group leaders thought this was a brilliant idea: weekly activity, check; service project, check; fun thing to do, check. Now who has an idea for next week?
There is one inescapable fact of a lay ministry—it requires a lot of volunteer work from its members. And sometimes people don’t grasp all of the purposes and reasons behind what’s being asked of them.
Too often in teen girls’ programs the focus becomes what’s cute, easy, and fun instead of worthwhile. Somehow the idea that we’re supposed to be helping girls grow into capable young women of faith gets confused with entertaining them. We avoid asking more of them out of fear that they’ll stop coming and lose sight of why we want them there in the first place.
Combine a skewed focus with a checklist mentality, and you’ll understand why so many church youth camps are held in somebody’s vacation cabin, meals are pre-prepared off-site by other adults and ferried in three times daily, and a twenty-minute hike is deemed as good as the five-mile requirement. We all know it’s a serious pain to set up tents in the wilderness. It’s also far easier if adults plan, shop for, and cook all the meals—double-bonus points if leaders can avoid doing that over a smoky campfire or wonky propane burner. Throw in some spiritual thoughts, a couple of crafts, and check, check, check—girls’ summer church camp is done.
But that’s not the point.
Young women need to do hard things in order to learn that they can. They need experiences that teach them that their service has real value. And that takes time, effort, and a non-checklist mentality from the adults. To do less is to underestimate them—and ourselves.
God never said it would be easy, only worth it.
I know my daughter dutifully made as many of the lizards as she could to the best of her ability. I suspect the whole time she was calculating the man-hours and hard costs that went into them, figuring if they’d sold the lizards for $5 apiece as a fundraiser and then taken the money they raised and…
But beyond asking why they were making the lizards, I doubt she said a word. Like I said, she knows how to blend.
On her way up the stairs to her bedroom she paused. “You know, Mom, when I’m grown up I hope I get to work in a girls’ youth ministry. That way I can make sure we do something real.”
Me, too.
by Lehua Parker | Feb 1, 2014 | Mainland Living
Lately, behind me in the shadows and corners of dimly lit rooms, Death stalks softly.
I’m uncertain if it’s simply the rule of three—three good things in a row, three bad—or if having my foot in a cast has made me more aware of the inevitability of age and the gradual entropy that all things slid toward. But in the past few weeks I feel like I’ve been confronted with too many near misses—a friend diagnosed with aggressive breast cancer, but cured with surgery; a niece in a car accident escaping bruised, but not broken—along with the death of a dear colleague’s spouse from complications of lung cancer and the death of the father of one of my high school friends.
It feels like Death is gliding by, culling whom he chooses, his chill fingers caressing the back of my neck.
Things come in threes.
How far back can I go to round out the threes? How far removed is too removed to count?
As much as I want this grisly set of threes to be done, I know that this trio’s ending is really just resetting the countdown clock. It’s the illusion of completeness that brings a sigh of relief.
One, two…
Three.
by Lehua Parker | Jan 29, 2014 | Book Reviews & Announcements, MG/YA Fiction
Shucked by Megg Jensen is a fun, light-hearted, YA rom-com-adventure read, perfect for escaping dishes and laundry for an afternoon. It’s the story of 15 year old Tabitha who was raised by an archeologist mom who took her all over the globe in pursuit of adventure. Tabitha’s comfortable in a Korean dojo or trekking solo through Egypt, but attending school in an average American mid-western high school is enough to send her spiraling.
Good thing she has her grandmother to lean on.
Along with all the typical teen drama of mean girls, does-he-like-me-I-think-I-like-him boyfriends, cheerleading practice, catching up in math, and finding a best friend, Tabitha is confronted with questions about her mother’s past—and current whereabouts—that leave her vulnerable to international smugglers. It’s a rocket-paced read full of outlandish, comedic coincidences that make it easy to keep turning pages.
Tabitha’s voice and perspective is easily identifiable as a teenage girl. She’s funny, real, and worth getting to know.
I know I’m not the target audience, but I do think teen girls will find much to love in this book. In fact, I’m passing it along to my own 14 year old daughter. There’s enough PG romance to titillate, but nothing to make parents blush.
Shucked by Megg Jensen is available from Amazon.
by Lehua Parker | Jan 21, 2014 | Mainland Living, Mana'o (Thoughts)
The PiBs are back in town. You can spot them in a New York minute or L.A. heartbeat, the People in Black, dressed for an ice age in 30+ degree weather—a bleak, but chic ice age—walking very quickly and importantly wearing bright Sundance badges, drinking skinny lattes, and talking a little (way) too loudly about Bab, Mark, and JJ on cell phones. They park anywhere they please, cut in line, and will run small children over to get to the counter where they take forever to order because they have to know the provenance of every item on a burger so that they can order a salad, sans croutons and dressing, with an organic cruelty-free lemon-wedge on the side.
Gotta watch the carbs, you know.
To save us all time and misery, I’m telling you upfront that our Heber mom and pop burger joints don’t have dairy-free cheese or sugar-free ketchup or free-range pickles. Part of the adventure of traveling is eating new food. Branch out a little, PiBs. Try the fry sauce.
Like the swallows and Capistrano, for the past 30 years the PiBs have annually flocked to our little town chasing the magic of the Sundance Film Festival. And yeah, I remember the first one—I was a budding director and writer myself attending a nearby university and was bribed with free tickets to point people in the right direction and to keep the riff-raff like me out of dimly lit rooms over-crowded with non-fire marshal compliant rows of folding chairs.
Since those college days I’ve been to some of the big galas and events as both a paying and comp’d guest. Meh. The food’s always pretentious, tiny, and undercooked—something you’d forgive and forget if you were there to stargaze instead of to sample the celebrity chef like I was. I’ve seen remarkable movies—and a lot of crappy ones, too. People forget it’s a film festival, not the Oscars. Best way to tell if you’re in for a stinker? Average the age of the people in the theater around you. Sub-25? It’s really going to suck. You’ve got average at least ten years older for it to be any good.
But back to the PiBs.
Am I glad that they spend money in my town? Abso-danm-lutely. I love to see jets worth the combined GNP of most third-world countries lining the tarmac of our small town airport. I like watching the local fuel truck filling them up and all the taxi cabs buzzing in from Salt Lake City. Our quaint artisanal cheese, jams, jellies, and candy shops sell out. It’s a post-holiday season boon to local ski instructors, photographers, and restaurants. I have friends who rent out their houses and escape to the beaches every January—double score.
I know that the benefits continue when attendees see the quality of our ski slopes, hiking trails, and reservoirs and come back for a vacation when the craziness is over. I’ve even met people who moved here after attending the film festival.
There are clear benefits to having Sundance here, check.
And if it were only about watching independent films, I wouldn’t mind the crowds. We get crowds with all our world-class athletic events, too. My real problem isn’t with the films; it’s with the wanna-bees and their assistants. I’ve actually been in line at Wal-Mart trying to buy the kinds of things Moms need to keep on hand when a gaggle of gel-slick hipster PiBs demanded their own checkout line because they were in a hurry. Didn’t we know who they were?
Seriously? You pulled that line while shopping at Wal-Mart for bottled water, folding chairs, and cheap Park City sweatshirts?
And then there are the people who wail and gnash their teeth in the street, shocked that their car was towed after it was parked under a no parking sign. Once a guy actually called the cops and complained that towing his car was rude and demanded they bring it back.
Yeah, good luck with that. Our sheriffs don’t know (or care) who you are either. They’re too busy making sure the emergency service vehicles can make it down the street.
Now that I don’t work in Park City, most of the time I can avoid the worst of the plague, but this year with a foot in a cast, rocking a knee scooter and a daughter who would rather ski than breathe, I’ve been spending too much time around them. My favorite recent run-in was at a movie theater where my husband and I went to kill some time before dragging the ski fiend and her friends off the slopes. (We were watching a non-Sundance film at a mixed use venue.) I was trying to maneuver through a crowded hall lined with double red velvet ropes that cordoned it down to a narrow one person pathway. (Fire marshal, anyone? Anyone?) A big guy was headed toward me, noticed my predicament, and stepped to the side to let me by. At least five Botox betties and two skinny jean wearing dudes with tasteful grey temples immediately leaped through the gap, blocking me from going anywhere. Big Guy rolled his eyes.
“Can you see me? ‘Cause I can see you,” I said as each person shimmied by.
It wasn’t until Big Guy growled, “Don’t worry. I got your back. Next one I tackle,” that someone woke up from his it’s-all-about-me daze long enough for me to roll by.
Yep. It’s the yearly PiB plague. I much prefer the Olympic athletes and their crew. They always grab a door for me. “Bummer man,” they say with a headshake, “And during prime ski season, too.”
“It’s pronounced L’wah. It’s French,” proclaimed the guy sitting next to my son, Aaron. Aaron gives him side-eye. The guy and his girlfriend are studying the bios of the authors seated on the platform in front of the room. It’s the first day of a writers’ conference and I’m here to talk about how to write children who sound, act, and think like children instead of mini-adults. Seated in the middle of the table, I figure I’m in a power-spot.
