I love The Messiah. The real One, and Handel's, both.
For years I have been wanting to hear it again somewhere, (Handel's, I mean) but every year for years on end, either we had scheduling conflicts, found out about it after the fact, couldn't afford the tickets....something.
One year...the last year I heard it, we saw it advertised in the Augusta Chronicle, and we, and various friends of ours descended upon the church who had posted the announcement. It turned out to be a small church with an awkward, dim, 70's sort of feel to it.
The greeters seemed a bit startled to see us show up. We wouldn't be able to see the performance, they said, because there wasn't enough room for them to be at the front of the church, so the singers, et al, would be in the balcony, behind and above us. And if we had coughs, would we please not go in? Because they were recording it and they did not want any coughs to appear on the recording.
Tyler had a cough. He sat down anyway and sucked his coughs up.
As valiant of an effort as they no doubt were putting forth, it wasn't quite what we had been anticipating.
That was the last time I heard it given, and I really wanted to hear it this year.
Really Really REEEEALLY.
My love of The Messiah goes back to my childhood. It got a sentimental boost when The Chief was entering my world and he happened to sit beside me at a Messiah performance one blessed Christmastime. That was the first he really noticed me, he told me once. I was already putty in his presence, but he was oblivious...
How did I get on this subject...
Let me see here...Ok. Yes...I really wanted to see the Messiah this year. I put out a plea on facebook for my friends to let me know if they heard anything about it being performed anywhere.
They rose to the challenge splendidly! I got messages tucked into my mailbox and replies to my post. One friend generously posted a whole list of places she had received from "a very reliable source".
Perfect!
I reviewed them and selected one that fit our nutty Christmas Season Schedule.
Then I told The Chief I was just going to immerse myself in the pleasure of anticipation.
And I did.
I also took the liberty to immerse myself in the pleasure of anticipating it on behalf of the natives, who did not appear to be properly anticipating it on their own behalf. Tyler, whose memory of hearing The Messiah was largely shapen in a darkish, retro-ish church where he defied the concerned greeters, said frankly, "I'd rather stay home. Can I stay home?"
"No." I told him. "You will love it!"
Todd said. "Will we have to dress in Sunday clothes? If we have to dress in Sunday clothes I do not want to go."
"Of course you do." I said. "But honey you will love it! I know you will!"
Our oldest son and his wife decided to go as well. He generously offered to call and see if you had to buy tickets ahead of time or if you just bought them at the door. He equally generously later turned that detail over to his wife. She generously actually did the job. The first time she tried calling the number posted with the announcement, no one answered. On a following day she tried again. The phone rang and rang and rang. Finally someone answered. She told them what she wondered. When and where could tickets to The Messiah be purchased?
The phone person seemed very vague, noncommittal, and generally clueless, but finally said it would probably be best just to buy them at the door.
Excellent! That's all we needed to know.
I called the Chief early today and reminded him when we would need to leave, so he could make sure to knock off work in time. We crammed homework and I fixed the fastest thing I could think of for supper.
And then we all got ready to go. The Chief and I wore coordinating clothes in festive hues.
Fun! Fun!
The church was on the far side of town, 45 minutes away, at least. We stopped at the ATM to get cash for the tickets. The Chief winced ever so slightly, but not enough to rob me of my joy.
Scott was coming as well, in his own car, with his wife and his backseat full of people who had come from 30 minutes even farther away than we.
But we got there before they did. And were one of the first ones apparently.
The only ones, in fact.
The parking lot was empty. The church was dark. What had we gotten wrong? The place? The time? The date? Dustin pulled the facebook post up on his phone. All the numbers and date were as we had thought.
Scott and his carload pulled up beside us and we discussed the mystery with them a bit there in the dark vacant, parking lot.
"Maybe they built a new church somewhere." said the Chief, for lack of a better explanation.
Dustin looked up the address. "This is the right address." he said.
He pulled up the announcement in the "Events" section of the Augusta Chronicle on his phone. "It says, 'First Baptist Church of Evans on the 17th of Dec. at 7:30."
Then after a pause he said, "Hey, this was from a 2010 edition of the newspaper."
2010!
The hilarious absurdity of it all hit me suddenly and I broke into wild laughter, and the tribe joined in.
Sooo...that was that.
"Well, what shall we do then?" we asked one another.
The Chief decided he wanted to go to Home Depot to look at some reciprocating saw, or something.
We girls decided we wanted to go to Hobby Lobby.
Home Depot was closest and we were shortly there.
The guys piled out. We girls sat in the parking lot and waited. And waited.
"We looked at other things, too." they explained helpfully when they returned.
On we went to Hobby Lobby. They decided to drop us off at Hobby Lobby and go on to Best Buy while we did our thing. After all, I had just told The Chief a few days previous that someday I wanted to go and spend all day in Hobby Lobby if I wanted, with a bunch of money. Waiting in the parking lot was clearly not in their best interest.
I did not have my purse. I did not have my phone. I had been planning to go to church, after all.
The Chief pulled up in front of the store, reached for his wallet, peeled off a few bills and handed them to me with the air of a man trying to salvage the night for his wife. We spilled out, and headed for the front door not at all unhappy with our substitute plans. The guys took off down the street.
At the front doors a lady stood facing arriving shoppers as if she had a message. In fact, she did have one, and she delivered it matter-of-factly. "We close in five minutes." she said.
We turned around and walked back out into the dark sidewalk. I looked at the disappearing vehicle. It was well beyond the range of even the most wildly gesturing, loudly screaming woman. Not that I would have done that.
"We could go to Bath and Body Works!" said Regan.
Great plan. My two girls and I headed down the sidewalk with only slightly dampened spirits. But Bath and Body Works was closing too. Who closes at 8PM the week before Christmas??
We turned and walked back up the sidewalk, as if one place on the sidewalk was better than another. It seemed preferable to standing still.
I considered our situation. I had no phone, and I knew good and well The Chief intended to leave us there in sweet peace and pure HobLob shopping bliss for quite some time. He's just that kind of man.
"I'm going to borrow someone's phone." I said. I did not want to be stranded in the dark parking lot of a closed store, while the mighty Chief and his valiant sons sacrificially put in as much time as they could stand at Best Buy.
This was clearly a desperate move for an introvert such as I, but I could think of no other plan.
We could start out in search of Best Buy, I supposed. But I wasn't quite entirely sure where it was. And what if we got there and they had changed their minds and gone somewhere else? And then what if they returned in the meantime to a dark store and no one was around? No. I could not start traipsing over town with two girls in "Sunday clothes".
I had to borrow a phone.
Women were streaming out of the store. It was closed now, and they were being shooed out in droves. I approached the first one that emerged from the doors when we got there. Trying to look as harmless as possible, which wasn't really all that hard, I said, "Do you have a phone I could borrow?"
She was altogether gracious and accommodating, pretty much like every woman feels as she is walking out of Hobby Lobby.
"Honey...." I said, with the strange phone to my ear and the strange lady listening in. I don't know if he was at all surprised to hear that coming from a totally foreign phone number or not. If so, he hid it well. "Hobby Lobby closed at 8." I said, "So we're just out here on the sidewalk. Could you come get us?"
I thanked the kind lady and we betook ourselves to a bench positioned down the sidewalk a spell for people like us, and waited for The Chief and Sons.
Before long we saw them coming down the street. They pulled up. We piled in. I handed the Chief the roll of bills he had just handed me. "I'm sorry, Babe." he said. He did not look entirely devastated, but he seemed sufficiently sympathetic. "It's okay, really," I said. "Life is too short to spend it disappointed."
We headed for home.
And then, with a sudden burst of inspiration, The Chief decided to go to Krispy Kreme for doughnuts.
Can you think of a better way to salvage an evening? I can't, frankly.
He pulled in, and for one dreadful moment we thought they might be closed. But they weren't! They weren't!!!
He bought two dozen, piping hot, and we lit into them immediately. If you have never had one hot off the presses, you cannot know how ethereal it is. But you should. Really truly you should.
It can fix almost anything. And what one won't fix, two will. especially if you have them with a cup of freshly brewed coffee. Believe me.
You have heard this from a very reliable source.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Postscript: I have absolutely no doubt that my generous friend had no reason not to trust her source, and I furthermore have no doubt that her very reliable source fully believed their information was accurate and was doing their best to be helpful. We bear nothing but appreciation and goodwill in our hearts for their benevolence to usward. And if any of y'all hear of The Messiah being presented anywhere near our town in 2015, we would love if you would let us know! Thank you!
Wednesday, December 17, 2014
Sunday, September 7, 2014
Singed Wings (a "Guest Entry")
The following account was written by my mother, Ruth Kurtz, at the time, for a college journal when she was in college, likely in the early '50's, though taking place in the 30's. A friend of mine alerted me to its existence recently. I had never seen it before. It is a true story, and I think it deserves a larger audience.
Singed Wings
Since the time when my mother would arouse me for my 2 a.m. feeding, I have always been lured by a fascination for night life. Perhaps it is the bright lights--a sort of moth-to-candle type of attraction; perhaps it is the half-feeling of festivity in the air; perhaps it is merely the fact that humanity looks better by lamplight.
At any rate it was that appetite for night life that prompted an older and a younger sister and me to crawl into the car with my father one Saturday night. His destination was only a few hundred yards away, the corner garage, where he was going for gasoline, but that garage constituted the center of Park View's night life; so we loved to go there.
When one traveled by car from my home to this particular garage, there was hardly time to shift into high gear before he was there, but the rubber finger of darkness had erased enough of the familiar features of the place that its charm was in no way lessened.
On the particular Saturday night of which I speak we coasted into the magic pool of light that encircled the front of the building, and, as always, the odor of gasoline, new tires, and grease met us intoxicatingly. Entranced, we rolled down the windows and hung out our smudgy little faces. (Our mother never bathed us until the very last thing Saturday night because we always got dirty again unless we were taken directly from tub to bed.) We waited while my father got out.
Suddenly something was not as it should be. The car had moved! In fact, it was still moving. We did not realize that my father had parked, without pulling the brake, against the car ahead of us, and that car now, within its own rights, was leaving. All we knew was that with uncanny certainty we were moving forward.
My older sister was in the front seat, and she, with amazing foresight, promptly scrambled out, slamming the door behind her. My younger sister and I were in the back seat, and, with the departure of Mary, the burden of the enterprise rested on me. Edith was petrified with terror. To move from that moving death trap cumbered by her was an obvious impossibility. To leave without her would be murderous; so I stayed.
One thing that I had learned during the seven or eight years of my life served me in good stead at this moment. I knew how to drive a car. All you had to do was to keep from running into the other cars on the road and you were all right. That should not be hard. I leaned across the back of the front seat and seized the wheel.
My last glimpse of Mary showed her by the gasoline pumps holding her ears to shut out the inevitable crash with which runaway cars always terminate their short careers. Then with a hearselike lurch, our old Peerless swayed out into the road and was off.
I wanted to hold my ears too, but that would never do. There was an immense curve just ahead. Somehow we made it and continued on. I wondered for a second why I couldn't see the road. It was terrifically dark. The only time I was absolutely certain whether or not we were on the road at all was when another car shot by, with a superior flirt of its headlights.
After a time I remembered that people usually drove cars from the front seat; so I slowly wormed my way over the back into the place behind the wheel.
Edith was sniffling in the back seat. I wished she would stop it. I wanted to do the same thing, but we both couldn't; so I tried to act brave.
"What are we going to do?" she whimpered, between sniffs.
"Don't be afraid. They'll come after us." I lied. I knew they couldn't come after us. Whoever heard of a man catching a runaway car? I envisioned us driving to our grandmother's place. How surprised she would be to see us. It never occurred to me to wonder how we would ever cover those 200 miles to her home. We never had any trouble finding the way before. Why should we now?
"Nobody's coming yet," quavered Edith, kneeling on the seat, her face pressed against the back window. I looked around for one hopeful moment and turned back just in time to wrench the wheel and prevent us from clipping off a brick post and mowing down a length of hedge in front of someone's house. I guessed I'd better watch where I was going. We labored up out of the ditch and continued on to Grandmother's. I didn't dare take my eyes from the road, but I'm sure we were going a hot seven or eight miles an hour.
"I sorta believe someone's coming, " Edith remarked damply from the back seat. The next minute the door was jerked open and a man took the wheel from my willing hands. I noticed, as he turned the car around, that we had already gone almost half through Park View.
Some remark that the garageman made to me as we drove back put the notion into my head that what I had done wasn't the dumbest trick I had ever performed. Maybe my father would even think I was smart.
He and Mary were waiting when we got back, and as he talked a minute to the garageman, I thought I saw a flicker of pride in his eye. He crawled into the car and started for home while I waited smugly for him to say something.
He said, "Why didn't you pull the brake?"
Singed Wings
Since the time when my mother would arouse me for my 2 a.m. feeding, I have always been lured by a fascination for night life. Perhaps it is the bright lights--a sort of moth-to-candle type of attraction; perhaps it is the half-feeling of festivity in the air; perhaps it is merely the fact that humanity looks better by lamplight.
At any rate it was that appetite for night life that prompted an older and a younger sister and me to crawl into the car with my father one Saturday night. His destination was only a few hundred yards away, the corner garage, where he was going for gasoline, but that garage constituted the center of Park View's night life; so we loved to go there.
When one traveled by car from my home to this particular garage, there was hardly time to shift into high gear before he was there, but the rubber finger of darkness had erased enough of the familiar features of the place that its charm was in no way lessened.
On the particular Saturday night of which I speak we coasted into the magic pool of light that encircled the front of the building, and, as always, the odor of gasoline, new tires, and grease met us intoxicatingly. Entranced, we rolled down the windows and hung out our smudgy little faces. (Our mother never bathed us until the very last thing Saturday night because we always got dirty again unless we were taken directly from tub to bed.) We waited while my father got out.
Suddenly something was not as it should be. The car had moved! In fact, it was still moving. We did not realize that my father had parked, without pulling the brake, against the car ahead of us, and that car now, within its own rights, was leaving. All we knew was that with uncanny certainty we were moving forward.
My older sister was in the front seat, and she, with amazing foresight, promptly scrambled out, slamming the door behind her. My younger sister and I were in the back seat, and, with the departure of Mary, the burden of the enterprise rested on me. Edith was petrified with terror. To move from that moving death trap cumbered by her was an obvious impossibility. To leave without her would be murderous; so I stayed.
One thing that I had learned during the seven or eight years of my life served me in good stead at this moment. I knew how to drive a car. All you had to do was to keep from running into the other cars on the road and you were all right. That should not be hard. I leaned across the back of the front seat and seized the wheel.
My last glimpse of Mary showed her by the gasoline pumps holding her ears to shut out the inevitable crash with which runaway cars always terminate their short careers. Then with a hearselike lurch, our old Peerless swayed out into the road and was off.
I wanted to hold my ears too, but that would never do. There was an immense curve just ahead. Somehow we made it and continued on. I wondered for a second why I couldn't see the road. It was terrifically dark. The only time I was absolutely certain whether or not we were on the road at all was when another car shot by, with a superior flirt of its headlights.
After a time I remembered that people usually drove cars from the front seat; so I slowly wormed my way over the back into the place behind the wheel.
Edith was sniffling in the back seat. I wished she would stop it. I wanted to do the same thing, but we both couldn't; so I tried to act brave.
"What are we going to do?" she whimpered, between sniffs.
"Don't be afraid. They'll come after us." I lied. I knew they couldn't come after us. Whoever heard of a man catching a runaway car? I envisioned us driving to our grandmother's place. How surprised she would be to see us. It never occurred to me to wonder how we would ever cover those 200 miles to her home. We never had any trouble finding the way before. Why should we now?
"Nobody's coming yet," quavered Edith, kneeling on the seat, her face pressed against the back window. I looked around for one hopeful moment and turned back just in time to wrench the wheel and prevent us from clipping off a brick post and mowing down a length of hedge in front of someone's house. I guessed I'd better watch where I was going. We labored up out of the ditch and continued on to Grandmother's. I didn't dare take my eyes from the road, but I'm sure we were going a hot seven or eight miles an hour.
"I sorta believe someone's coming, " Edith remarked damply from the back seat. The next minute the door was jerked open and a man took the wheel from my willing hands. I noticed, as he turned the car around, that we had already gone almost half through Park View.
Some remark that the garageman made to me as we drove back put the notion into my head that what I had done wasn't the dumbest trick I had ever performed. Maybe my father would even think I was smart.
He and Mary were waiting when we got back, and as he talked a minute to the garageman, I thought I saw a flicker of pride in his eye. He crawled into the car and started for home while I waited smugly for him to say something.
He said, "Why didn't you pull the brake?"
Friday, September 5, 2014
Helpfully Yours
Last evening Todd emerged from the school with his backpack, lunchbox and an unwieldy expanse of poster-board.
"I've got to make a poster about my favorite tree." he said when we got home, looking for a place to put it.
"Today?" I said. "Is it due tomorrow?"
"I guess." he said, with an air of phlegmatic fatalism.
"Do you have other homework?" I asked.
"Yes." he said.
"Do you have a favorite tree?" I asked.
"Uhm....." he said.
This was code language for "no". It took me all of 2 seconds to decode it.
"We" would have to develop a love for a tree. Quickly.
A cursory scan of his instruction sheet indicated that this tree had to be a particular tree, not just a certain type of tree. We couldn't, say, decide weeping willows were his favorite tree. It would have to be a particular weeping willow.
"Dogwoods are nice." I said helpfully.
"Mmm..." He seemed uninspired. "What about maples?" he suggested.
We have two maples. They are basically saplings. The one we planted last year. It is still tied to a stick to keep it going in the way it should go. The other is in a pot waiting for some other trees to be felled to make room for it. It looks a little unhealthy probably because I let it get too dry this summer.
Neither one really has the characteristics of a "Favorite Tree."
"Maples...? I said dubiously. "Think about dogwoods, Todd." I encouraged. "They have such pretty flowers in the Spring!" I said brightly. "And in the fall they turn nice and red."
He considered this.
I could see love growing in his eyes.
"I know which one!" he said suddenly, with a delightful burst of affection. "The one at the end of the lane! Come on!"
It's a quarter of a mile to the end of the lane. He had chosen roughly the farthest tree we own.
At least it wasn't a maple.
He burst out the door and headed up through the woods on Becky's pink bike.
"I don't want to get ticks." I called after him. "I'll take the lane."
We arrived at the end of the lane and surveyed his tree.
It was a nice tree.
It had lovely red berries on it already, but the leaves were still green. The leaves were kind of mottled, it seemed, the closer you got to them. I climbed up on the bank upon which it grew to select a few specimens. The red berries would be a nice touch on the poster. I was glad there were berries. Maples don't have berries. This was a good choice on his part. He watched me contentedly from astride his bike.
Something stung my foot. I looked down. I had stepped in fire ants. Ouch.
Ouchouchouch.
Off he took triumphantly on his bike. I followed at my own pace, bearing dogwood specimens and stinging feet. Or foot.
"I have to draw a picture of it." he said, back in the livingroom. The blank piece of poster-board lay on our living room floor, dominating the diminutive space.
"Are you sure??" I said. His drawing skills are not notable.
"She SAID!" he said emphatically.
"I don't see it on the paper." I responded.
"Miss Karen SAID we have to draw a picture of it!"
"It says here you are to have PICTURES of all these things....not the real thing." I said uncertainly, reading over the list....leaves, twigs, cones, flowers. Oh well. We had actual twigs. They were going on there. They would add dimension.
I googled "dogwood". And clicked on "images for dogwood".
"Come here, Todd", I said. "Which pictures do you like? I pointed out some I thought would be nice.
He chose some pictures and we printed them off. Beautiful pictures. This was definitely the right tree for him to love. He had chosen well.
I loosely arranged the things we had so far on the poster-board.
I looked at his paper. "You are suppose to include the circumference of your tree," I said. "You'll have to measure it." Todd sagged. "I don't feel like going out to the end of the lane again." he moaned.
"Why don't you choose the dogwood at the edge of the yard?" said Becky, helpfully.
"Which one?" he asked dubiously.
"The one by the dog house!" she enthused. She liked this tree. She liked to climb it. He did too, actually.
Todd switched favorite trees and off they went with my sewing tape to measure it. 16 and a 1/2 inches.
I pondered whether it mattered that the twigs we had were no longer from his favorite tree.
Todd was reading his paper. "I'm suppose to do this all by myself." he observed.
"By yourself??" I asked. I took the paper and started reading..
"Your poster will be graded on these things", I read near the bottom "....Neatness....Did you do it yourself without your parent's help?..."
Help. What is help exactly?
I mean, really...
"Okay" I said. "You'll have to do it yourself." I backed away from the poster.
"There's a whole list of questions." I said. "Maybe you want to type the answers to them? Make sure you type the answers in complete sentences."
He knew nearly nothing about typing, but I figured typing would add some novelty to the project that might save him from despair as well as contribute to the "neatness" stipulation.
I retreated to my bedroom to sew.
Pretty much every time I started in on a seam and the sound of my sewing machine filled in the air, I could hear him calling "MOM!" beyond the roar of it.
"Just wait till I get to the end of my seam!" I would holler back, pedal to the metal.
The end of my seam would come and I would rise from my sewing and go see what he wanted.
I only answered questions. Answering questions is not help. I didn't touch anything. Sometimes I did offer useful information. And then I went back to my bedroom and my sewing.
"You need an apostrophe there." I said, pointing to the apostrophe on the keyboard. But I did not push the apostrophe key.
"Is that a complete sentence? You want to write your information in complete sentences," I reminded. "'A tree' is not a complete sentence."
I did not, however, type the complete sentence.
Eventually it was his bedtime. He typed on. The questions were not all answered.
"You have just one more," I said. He was dragging ever so slightly.
He laboriously hunted and pecked.
And then he printed it off. Ctrl "P". He knew how to do that. I didn't even have to offer any useful information.
"How do you want to put it on your poster?" I asked.
He stretched a length of doublestick tape on the back of his first picture and positioned it on the poster.
"Is it straight?" I asked as unhelpfully as possible.
"Yep" he said recklessly, pulling out another length of tape.
"How are you going to attach the twigs? I asked. "Maybe you could staple them on?"
I held the twigs but he did the stapling. It was clearly a two-man job.
We stood back and surveyed the poster.
"Are you sure you had to draw a picture of the tree?" I asked presently.
"I don't know." he said limply. His eyes were starting to glaze over. "I should have done my other homework first..."
His other homework! "Just go to bed.". I said. "You can do it in the morning."
In the morning he did his other homework.
"If your teacher said you have to draw a picture of your tree you had better draw one." I said.
I decided he would probably have better results drawing from a photo rather than drawing from the tree itself. I found the camera, and an SD card. Then I ventured out in the morning sunlight and snapped a picture of his favorite tree, feeling very grateful that I didn't have to sojourn to the end of the lane to do so.
I loaded it onto the computer. "Here." I ordered "Get a piece of paper and a pencil and come copy it."
I left to comb Becky's hair. No helping. It was nearly time to leave.
When I met up with him again the tree was drawn and he was commencing to cut it out with a scissors.
"You drew that??" I said. It looked surprisingly like The Tree.
"I helped a little with the leaves." said Tyler.
"He was suppose to do it without help!" I wailed. It was time to go out the door.
"He never let go of the pencil." Tyler soothed.
Todd was plastering "his" picture to the poster.
"Do you want to straighten it up a little maybe?" I said hastily.
"Nope!" he said. "That's the way I want it." He looked at it proudly.
"Okay! Come on!"
We were almost late.
I herded the natives out the door.
Becky offered to carry his poster and held it before her as grandly as if she were bearing the King's train. It was deposited safely behind the back seat and off we went to pick up their cousins and then on to school
We were done, for better or for worse.
He was done, rather.
We pulled into their cousins' drive and loaded them up.
Do you have your poster, Chris?" asked Todd.
"No," said Chris, nonchalantly. "I left my poster in your vehicle."
Todd searched in the back and pulled out Chris' blank poster.
"It doesn't matter. Just put it back," said Chris, "It's not due till next Thursday."
"I've got to make a poster about my favorite tree." he said when we got home, looking for a place to put it.
"Today?" I said. "Is it due tomorrow?"
"I guess." he said, with an air of phlegmatic fatalism.
"Do you have other homework?" I asked.
"Yes." he said.
"Do you have a favorite tree?" I asked.
"Uhm....." he said.
This was code language for "no". It took me all of 2 seconds to decode it.
"We" would have to develop a love for a tree. Quickly.
A cursory scan of his instruction sheet indicated that this tree had to be a particular tree, not just a certain type of tree. We couldn't, say, decide weeping willows were his favorite tree. It would have to be a particular weeping willow.
"Dogwoods are nice." I said helpfully.
"Mmm..." He seemed uninspired. "What about maples?" he suggested.
We have two maples. They are basically saplings. The one we planted last year. It is still tied to a stick to keep it going in the way it should go. The other is in a pot waiting for some other trees to be felled to make room for it. It looks a little unhealthy probably because I let it get too dry this summer.
Neither one really has the characteristics of a "Favorite Tree."
"Maples...? I said dubiously. "Think about dogwoods, Todd." I encouraged. "They have such pretty flowers in the Spring!" I said brightly. "And in the fall they turn nice and red."
He considered this.
I could see love growing in his eyes.
"I know which one!" he said suddenly, with a delightful burst of affection. "The one at the end of the lane! Come on!"
It's a quarter of a mile to the end of the lane. He had chosen roughly the farthest tree we own.
At least it wasn't a maple.
He burst out the door and headed up through the woods on Becky's pink bike.
"I don't want to get ticks." I called after him. "I'll take the lane."
We arrived at the end of the lane and surveyed his tree.
It was a nice tree.
It had lovely red berries on it already, but the leaves were still green. The leaves were kind of mottled, it seemed, the closer you got to them. I climbed up on the bank upon which it grew to select a few specimens. The red berries would be a nice touch on the poster. I was glad there were berries. Maples don't have berries. This was a good choice on his part. He watched me contentedly from astride his bike.
Something stung my foot. I looked down. I had stepped in fire ants. Ouch.
Ouchouchouch.
Off he took triumphantly on his bike. I followed at my own pace, bearing dogwood specimens and stinging feet. Or foot.
"I have to draw a picture of it." he said, back in the livingroom. The blank piece of poster-board lay on our living room floor, dominating the diminutive space.
"Are you sure??" I said. His drawing skills are not notable.
"She SAID!" he said emphatically.
"I don't see it on the paper." I responded.
"Miss Karen SAID we have to draw a picture of it!"
"It says here you are to have PICTURES of all these things....not the real thing." I said uncertainly, reading over the list....leaves, twigs, cones, flowers. Oh well. We had actual twigs. They were going on there. They would add dimension.
I googled "dogwood". And clicked on "images for dogwood".
"Come here, Todd", I said. "Which pictures do you like? I pointed out some I thought would be nice.
He chose some pictures and we printed them off. Beautiful pictures. This was definitely the right tree for him to love. He had chosen well.
I loosely arranged the things we had so far on the poster-board.
I looked at his paper. "You are suppose to include the circumference of your tree," I said. "You'll have to measure it." Todd sagged. "I don't feel like going out to the end of the lane again." he moaned.
"Why don't you choose the dogwood at the edge of the yard?" said Becky, helpfully.
"Which one?" he asked dubiously.
"The one by the dog house!" she enthused. She liked this tree. She liked to climb it. He did too, actually.
Todd switched favorite trees and off they went with my sewing tape to measure it. 16 and a 1/2 inches.
I pondered whether it mattered that the twigs we had were no longer from his favorite tree.
Todd was reading his paper. "I'm suppose to do this all by myself." he observed.
"By yourself??" I asked. I took the paper and started reading..
"Your poster will be graded on these things", I read near the bottom "....Neatness....Did you do it yourself without your parent's help?..."
Help. What is help exactly?
I mean, really...
"Okay" I said. "You'll have to do it yourself." I backed away from the poster.
"There's a whole list of questions." I said. "Maybe you want to type the answers to them? Make sure you type the answers in complete sentences."
He knew nearly nothing about typing, but I figured typing would add some novelty to the project that might save him from despair as well as contribute to the "neatness" stipulation.
I retreated to my bedroom to sew.
Pretty much every time I started in on a seam and the sound of my sewing machine filled in the air, I could hear him calling "MOM!" beyond the roar of it.
"Just wait till I get to the end of my seam!" I would holler back, pedal to the metal.
The end of my seam would come and I would rise from my sewing and go see what he wanted.
I only answered questions. Answering questions is not help. I didn't touch anything. Sometimes I did offer useful information. And then I went back to my bedroom and my sewing.
"You need an apostrophe there." I said, pointing to the apostrophe on the keyboard. But I did not push the apostrophe key.
"Is that a complete sentence? You want to write your information in complete sentences," I reminded. "'A tree' is not a complete sentence."
I did not, however, type the complete sentence.
Eventually it was his bedtime. He typed on. The questions were not all answered.
"You have just one more," I said. He was dragging ever so slightly.
He laboriously hunted and pecked.
And then he printed it off. Ctrl "P". He knew how to do that. I didn't even have to offer any useful information.
"How do you want to put it on your poster?" I asked.
He stretched a length of doublestick tape on the back of his first picture and positioned it on the poster.
"Is it straight?" I asked as unhelpfully as possible.
"Yep" he said recklessly, pulling out another length of tape.
"How are you going to attach the twigs? I asked. "Maybe you could staple them on?"
I held the twigs but he did the stapling. It was clearly a two-man job.
We stood back and surveyed the poster.
"Are you sure you had to draw a picture of the tree?" I asked presently.
"I don't know." he said limply. His eyes were starting to glaze over. "I should have done my other homework first..."
His other homework! "Just go to bed.". I said. "You can do it in the morning."
In the morning he did his other homework.
"If your teacher said you have to draw a picture of your tree you had better draw one." I said.
I decided he would probably have better results drawing from a photo rather than drawing from the tree itself. I found the camera, and an SD card. Then I ventured out in the morning sunlight and snapped a picture of his favorite tree, feeling very grateful that I didn't have to sojourn to the end of the lane to do so.
I loaded it onto the computer. "Here." I ordered "Get a piece of paper and a pencil and come copy it."
I left to comb Becky's hair. No helping. It was nearly time to leave.
When I met up with him again the tree was drawn and he was commencing to cut it out with a scissors.
"You drew that??" I said. It looked surprisingly like The Tree.
"I helped a little with the leaves." said Tyler.
"He was suppose to do it without help!" I wailed. It was time to go out the door.
"He never let go of the pencil." Tyler soothed.
Todd was plastering "his" picture to the poster.
"Do you want to straighten it up a little maybe?" I said hastily.
"Nope!" he said. "That's the way I want it." He looked at it proudly.
"Okay! Come on!"
We were almost late.
I herded the natives out the door.
Becky offered to carry his poster and held it before her as grandly as if she were bearing the King's train. It was deposited safely behind the back seat and off we went to pick up their cousins and then on to school
We were done, for better or for worse.
He was done, rather.
We pulled into their cousins' drive and loaded them up.
Do you have your poster, Chris?" asked Todd.
"No," said Chris, nonchalantly. "I left my poster in your vehicle."
Todd searched in the back and pulled out Chris' blank poster.
"It doesn't matter. Just put it back," said Chris, "It's not due till next Thursday."
Sunday, August 10, 2014
Girls' Day Out.
It's perfect writing weather. Sunday afternoon, and dark. Very dark. The rain is pounding on the roof and running in wide liquid rivers down the window panes. Thunder breaks now and then with commanding force.
The natives who are here are subdued. The ones who are not went abroad to play disc golf, they and the Chief and an assortment of natives from other settlements, or at least other wigwams. Where the settlements begin and end is a bit nebulous.
What they are actually doing, I do not know. I think it is safe to say they are not doing what they set out to do.
I think I will tell you about our Girls' Day Out. It has nothing whatsoever to do with anything I just wrote, it's just that it is perfect writing weather and I need a subject.
Regan and I had been planning one for a long time, a Girls' Day Out. Weeks, at least, and perhaps months. We had some things we wanted to do, she and I, and some things we needed to buy in town. The last several times we had gone shopping the littlest natives, in spite of being gung ho at the outset, were burnt out after roughly one store's-worth of shopping. This burn-out might have been accentuated, ultimately, by vehicular woes, I don't know, because we had had a few, frankly, ranging from blown tires to pegged temperature gauges, and....other things....
We have old vehicles with hundreds of thousands of miles on them. They add dimension and interest and surprises to life.
But I digress. Anyone who knows anything about the joys of shopping, knows that shopping with someone who doesn't want to be shopping robs it of every joy...whether that person be a squalling baby, or a very patient grown-up. If they don't want to be there, you might as well go home. This is one of the Universal Truths of shopping.
But the littlest natives are pretty much ever-present, and how we were to dispense of them for a half a day or more was unclear, so we kept our eyes open and bode our time.
It came one day when Becky's school teacher called and asked if Becky would like to come help her do some prep work at school sorting tests and quizzes along with some other girls. Becky was, of course, thrilled.
"You can drop her off about 9:30 and pick her up about 2", her teacher said.
Perfect. That would be long enough to get in some great shopping! Just about right.
I sought out Regan and told her about the breakthrough in our search. "I'll see if Dad can take Todd to work with him." I said. I knew he would if he could.
"Do you know what you're doing Friday?" I asked The Chief that evening.
He didn't, but he as much as promised to take him, regardless. So we were good to go. The rest of our week was planned with shopping in view.
Friday dawned. It felt like vacation. It WAS vacation! A whole day shopping, just Regan and me, with no non-shoppers asking, #1,when we could go home, and #2, when we could eat, feigning utter exhaustion one minute and engaging in games of hide-and seek among the clothing displays the next, which of course would have to be stopped by the Wicked Squaw of the South and further impress upon them the rank miseries of shopping, and drive them back to asking questions #1 and #2.
I woke to a quiet house. Brewed my coffee and surveyed the day. It looked so tidy and nice. The school was in the opposite direction of the city we intended to patronize by 30 minutes. The wigwam lies between the two.
We would take Becky to the school, and then drop Todd off at the job-site which was, by an unusual stroke of happenstance, assuming happenstances come in strokes, just a mile or three beyond the school. And then we would head north, just Regan and I, and a clear day, and a shopping list. It would be blissful.
I was just about to wake the natives when the phone rang. It was my sister-in-law. "Would you be interested in some steak?" She asked. "Our freezer quit running and a bunch of the stuff is thawed. It's still good and cold but we need a place to put it. We have a bunch of steak in there. Would you be interested in grilling it for us in exchange for maybe half of it? It needs to be kept cold though. Would you have room in your fridge if I would bring it over after awhile?"
That sounded like a super deal, mostly. Except that it would eat into our shopping day. I mentally tabulated the space in my refrigerator. Thanks to a collection of irregular occurrences I also had roughly six gallons of iced tea to keep cold, and fridge space was becoming a bit precious. I arranged to pick up the steak on the way to deliver the non-shopping natives to their respective destinations. We'd bring it back home and put it in the fridge. Somehow. It wouldn't eat into our day. Much.
So off we went. Just before we made it for the steak-stop, our vehicle quit running. I started it again, and off we went. We pulled in, and it stopped again. Oh well, we were here. We packed in a laundry basket of steaks. Good steaks. T-bones, rib-eyes, flank steaks, in abundant measure. Wow. How cool was this? We never eat steak.
And off we went to deliver Becky to school. The vehicle cut off again. Once. Twice. I looked at Regan. This seemed a bit iffy. I delivered Todd to the job site, and we wended our way hand-in-hand among the various work crews till we located the Chief.
"The Expedition keeps cutting off." I said. "Do you think we should take it or had we better take the Saturn?"
"I think you ought to take the Saturn." he said. It was not a big deal. We were taking the steak home anyway.
At home we miraculously found place for the laundry basket-worth of steaks among the many gallons of tea.
We then transferred our stuff from the Expedition to the Saturn.
We rolled down the windows. The Saturn has no air-conditioning.
The last time we had taken the Saturn to town, the natives and I, steam had rolled from under the hood, and we had sat in the blasting Georgia heat waiting for help to come in the form of the Chief. I was sure I had fried the motor, but I hadn't. Skippety-do-dah! It looked bone dry, but The Chief put water in it and we were good to go. The natives had been driving it ever since with no trouble.
We situated ourselves, Regan and I, a little later than we had planned, but it was okay. I started it up, pushed her into first gear. She had her issues, this little car, but she was fun to drive. I kinda liked the windows down anyway.
"I'm a little nervous." Regan said.
"I'm not," I said blithely. "It's been working fine."
We pulled out onto the road and headed down the road for the second time that morning, past familiar houses, through the pecan trees...
"One thing about your dad," I said. "he will drop whatever he is doing and come rescue us, if we need it. He's a good man. I'll take a good man over a rich man any day of the year." Not that they are mutually exclusive necessarily, but if you have to choose....
We caught the next road and we were on our way. It wasn't too hot. It was just nice.
"Can we go to Goodwill?" Regan asked. "O. wants me to see if the sequels to her books are there. She saw them the other day when she bought the ones she has but she didn't realize they were sequels."
Of course we could. We could do anything we wanted. It was Girls' Day Out. Also, I had some stuff in my trunk to donate to somebody. I would dispose of it here.
We searched with partial success for the books, met a couple friends, who were also shopping, and stopped and talked to them.
And then we were off again, to the other side of town, which was congested as usual with traffic, but more-so than sometimes because it was nearing lunch hour. From traffic light to traffic light we waited through several revolutions because the intersections were clogged beyond remedy. I looked down at my temperature gauge, just in case. It was as far to the right as it could go.
"Oh no." I said, "it's running hot again. Here, turn on the heat." We turned on the heater full blast. I checked my rear view mirror to see if there was room in the through lane for me to be. There was. I merged into that traffic, which was at least moving, unlike the left turn lane, and we were off. "I have to find water!" I said, feeling a little desperate. Where was water?? Should I just keep moving or should I stop if I couldn't find any? I tried to call the Chief. No answer. I came to Washington Rd and took a right, keeping one eye out for water, and another eye out for red traffic lights that might impede our movement. Oh no. A red light. I dove into the nearest shopping center, traveled the perimeter of it and caught a side street. These were not my stomping grounds. I had no idea where I was going. Where was water? We scouted for gas stations, and spotted one up ahead, I pulled in and circled it. No water hose. No spigot that we could see. I barreled out on the road again flowing with traffic and blessing every green light with fervency.
Where was water? I was killing this car. I knew I was. I killed the last one. And I was killing this one. The temperature gauge was dropping. Whew. But what did that mean? Where was The Chief? Why didn't he answer his phone? We were being blasted with intense heat. I barreled across a major highway and it soon became apparent we were heading deep into the land of neighborhoods and subdivisions. There were no convenience stores in sight. The speed limits were low.
I had no idea where I was.
"If we have to stop here I won't have any idea how to tell Dad to find us!" I said. I chose a subdivision entrance and we started winding deep and deeper into some unknown neighborhood."
"We don't want to be back here!" Regan protested.
"I know!" I said, "but I have to keep moving. It'll come out somewhere. It has too!"
It didn't really matter where; I was totally lost, regardless.
So far, I had been turning right when I turned at all, just because turning left generally meant waiting for lights and/or traffic to cooperate, but after we had explored the depths of that subdivision and once again found ourselves at the entrance we decided to try turning left because there were clearly no convenience stores to the right. Also, I thought, it would be really nice to be able to tell The Chief where we were when the time came that he answered his phone, and the car died. Or maybe it would be other way around.
The gauge continued to stay down some, but I had no faith in it. Heater still running full blast we caught the next road.
The phone rang. It was the Chief. He has talked to me before in this same situation. He always says the same thing. "Try to get to water and get water into it as quick as you can. Be careful not to burn yourself. I think if you're careful you'll be okay, it's an overflow tank. Do you have a rag of some kind to put over the lid when you open it?" He says the same thing every time, but I have to hear him saying it again anyway.
"I can't find water anywhere!" I said barreling down the street. Which street, I didn't know.
There is only so much you can do for your wife on the phone. He knew, and I knew, he had done what he could. We had walked this road before. "Call me back if you need me." he said. I hung up.
I saw a road I recognized and took it. Familiar territory again! And there was a gas station! Hope! We swung in. Heat blasting. Windows down. Eyes peeled.
No water.
We pulled out again into the parking lot that fed into it. I took mental inventory of the places along this road. There were no more convenience stores anywhere near that did not lie beyond great blocks of traffic that had come to a stand-still. I knew this because we had come full circle. That will happen if all you do is take right turns.
The phone rang. They were done at the school a little earlier than they had planned. We could come pick Becky up. Regan and I looked at each other. There was NO WAY we could go pick Becky up. I called The Chief. "Don't worry about it, I'll go get her. She can be with me" he said. I hung up.
Should we take to the road again? It seemed futile.
"I'm stopping", I said to Regan "I might kill it, but we have no way of knowing where there will be water. As long as we're moving the gauge stays reasonably low, I'm going to pull across this parking lot here and buy some water at Walmart."
And so we did. I parked off at a distance, quite a ways from Walmart. I didn't want anyone to ask us if we needed help. I didn't want anyone to look at me. Trouble, in my opinion, is most easily handled in private. I can handle large doses of trouble as long as it's not public trouble. Private trouble is the way to go.
So I parked way out. And cut it off. Whew. We were here at least. Off the road, in a place I had been before. No more being blasted with manufactured heat on top of the regular Georgia heat.
"Do you want to go in for it?" I asked Regan. I was feeling a bit, well....tired. I wondered if I had ruined another vehicle.
"No." She said. "I'd rather stay with the car."
I started across the long parking lot. We weren't really parked in front of Walmart at all, it was a ways away. I called The Chief again, and told him what I was doing. "Do you think 2 gallons will be enough?" I asked.
"Yes," he said, "that should be enough."
I bought three gallons.
I felt a vague urgency to get back to the car and put water in it. I didn't know if at this point all hope was lost or not, but it seemed like it would be wise to get it in there. Who knew? Not me, for sure. But just in case....
The lady in front of me was slow. She was an old lady. She had with her a grown man. Her son, I presumed. He was mentally handicapped and was rifling through her bags while she was trying to pay, hunting something. She tried to get him to stop, but he was clearly a handful. She had had him all his life, I guessed. She loved him, no doubt. There was also no doubt that he would have been a tremendous responsibility for a woman her age.
My three gallons of water were getting a bit heavy, She and her son moved on. I made my purchase and headed for the door. In the doorway ahead of me another woman leaned on her cane and crept along. She was large. There was no polite way to pass. I slowed down, and adjusted my load.
"I have no troubles at all." I thought to myself, "compared to these women. I can walk without pain. My daughter sits, with sound mind, in the car, waiting for me to come back."
Once out of the store I headed across the parking lot. I had parked a long way out. Three gallons of water...I felt my arms lengthen a few inches. Private problems are best. I walked on.
There was Regan, waiting patiently. I opened the driver's door and pulled the hood release. It was probably already fried. But I would do what I could. I went around to the front, found the little latch, and propped the hood open with the thingie they make for that purpose.
I opened one gallon of water and perched it near me, then I carefully opened the lid to the over flow tank, and peered inside.
It was full.
It was full of water all the way to the fill line. I stared at it with my gallon of water in my hand.
I called the Chief. "It's not out of water. I said. The tank is full."
"Well, I don't know what's the matter with it." he said. "Maybe it's a fan that's not working. You'll probably be okay, if you keep it moving. If you want, you can try to go on out to Kohl's as far as I'm concerned."
"I am not going to Kohl's." I said. I wanted food. I wanted drink. I wanted to go home.
Regan and I were of the same mind. We had had enough excitement for one day. We discussed our options, and decided in the name of Girl's Day Out redemption we would stop for a caramel frappe and Buffalo Chicken fingers at Burger King. It was a wild extravagance under normal circumstances. We shared a frappe, and savored our chicken fingers, absorbing the luxury of air conditioning and just being together.
And then we came home. With our three gallons of water, we came home. And walked into an empty house.
We had marked off this day on the calendar. We had nothing else planned. Regan took a book and curled up in the recliner.
I repaired to our bedroom with the book I have been reading "Swallows and Amazons."
Silence fell.
At length, I wandered back out to the living room. Regan looked up from her reading and rearranged herself.
"It's been a good day," she said.
"It sure has," I replied.
The natives who are here are subdued. The ones who are not went abroad to play disc golf, they and the Chief and an assortment of natives from other settlements, or at least other wigwams. Where the settlements begin and end is a bit nebulous.
What they are actually doing, I do not know. I think it is safe to say they are not doing what they set out to do.
I think I will tell you about our Girls' Day Out. It has nothing whatsoever to do with anything I just wrote, it's just that it is perfect writing weather and I need a subject.
Regan and I had been planning one for a long time, a Girls' Day Out. Weeks, at least, and perhaps months. We had some things we wanted to do, she and I, and some things we needed to buy in town. The last several times we had gone shopping the littlest natives, in spite of being gung ho at the outset, were burnt out after roughly one store's-worth of shopping. This burn-out might have been accentuated, ultimately, by vehicular woes, I don't know, because we had had a few, frankly, ranging from blown tires to pegged temperature gauges, and....other things....
We have old vehicles with hundreds of thousands of miles on them. They add dimension and interest and surprises to life.
But I digress. Anyone who knows anything about the joys of shopping, knows that shopping with someone who doesn't want to be shopping robs it of every joy...whether that person be a squalling baby, or a very patient grown-up. If they don't want to be there, you might as well go home. This is one of the Universal Truths of shopping.
But the littlest natives are pretty much ever-present, and how we were to dispense of them for a half a day or more was unclear, so we kept our eyes open and bode our time.
It came one day when Becky's school teacher called and asked if Becky would like to come help her do some prep work at school sorting tests and quizzes along with some other girls. Becky was, of course, thrilled.
"You can drop her off about 9:30 and pick her up about 2", her teacher said.
Perfect. That would be long enough to get in some great shopping! Just about right.
I sought out Regan and told her about the breakthrough in our search. "I'll see if Dad can take Todd to work with him." I said. I knew he would if he could.
"Do you know what you're doing Friday?" I asked The Chief that evening.
He didn't, but he as much as promised to take him, regardless. So we were good to go. The rest of our week was planned with shopping in view.
Friday dawned. It felt like vacation. It WAS vacation! A whole day shopping, just Regan and me, with no non-shoppers asking, #1,when we could go home, and #2, when we could eat, feigning utter exhaustion one minute and engaging in games of hide-and seek among the clothing displays the next, which of course would have to be stopped by the Wicked Squaw of the South and further impress upon them the rank miseries of shopping, and drive them back to asking questions #1 and #2.
I woke to a quiet house. Brewed my coffee and surveyed the day. It looked so tidy and nice. The school was in the opposite direction of the city we intended to patronize by 30 minutes. The wigwam lies between the two.
We would take Becky to the school, and then drop Todd off at the job-site which was, by an unusual stroke of happenstance, assuming happenstances come in strokes, just a mile or three beyond the school. And then we would head north, just Regan and I, and a clear day, and a shopping list. It would be blissful.
I was just about to wake the natives when the phone rang. It was my sister-in-law. "Would you be interested in some steak?" She asked. "Our freezer quit running and a bunch of the stuff is thawed. It's still good and cold but we need a place to put it. We have a bunch of steak in there. Would you be interested in grilling it for us in exchange for maybe half of it? It needs to be kept cold though. Would you have room in your fridge if I would bring it over after awhile?"
That sounded like a super deal, mostly. Except that it would eat into our shopping day. I mentally tabulated the space in my refrigerator. Thanks to a collection of irregular occurrences I also had roughly six gallons of iced tea to keep cold, and fridge space was becoming a bit precious. I arranged to pick up the steak on the way to deliver the non-shopping natives to their respective destinations. We'd bring it back home and put it in the fridge. Somehow. It wouldn't eat into our day. Much.
So off we went. Just before we made it for the steak-stop, our vehicle quit running. I started it again, and off we went. We pulled in, and it stopped again. Oh well, we were here. We packed in a laundry basket of steaks. Good steaks. T-bones, rib-eyes, flank steaks, in abundant measure. Wow. How cool was this? We never eat steak.
And off we went to deliver Becky to school. The vehicle cut off again. Once. Twice. I looked at Regan. This seemed a bit iffy. I delivered Todd to the job site, and we wended our way hand-in-hand among the various work crews till we located the Chief.
"The Expedition keeps cutting off." I said. "Do you think we should take it or had we better take the Saturn?"
"I think you ought to take the Saturn." he said. It was not a big deal. We were taking the steak home anyway.
At home we miraculously found place for the laundry basket-worth of steaks among the many gallons of tea.
We then transferred our stuff from the Expedition to the Saturn.
We rolled down the windows. The Saturn has no air-conditioning.
The last time we had taken the Saturn to town, the natives and I, steam had rolled from under the hood, and we had sat in the blasting Georgia heat waiting for help to come in the form of the Chief. I was sure I had fried the motor, but I hadn't. Skippety-do-dah! It looked bone dry, but The Chief put water in it and we were good to go. The natives had been driving it ever since with no trouble.
We situated ourselves, Regan and I, a little later than we had planned, but it was okay. I started it up, pushed her into first gear. She had her issues, this little car, but she was fun to drive. I kinda liked the windows down anyway.
"I'm a little nervous." Regan said.
"I'm not," I said blithely. "It's been working fine."
We pulled out onto the road and headed down the road for the second time that morning, past familiar houses, through the pecan trees...
"One thing about your dad," I said. "he will drop whatever he is doing and come rescue us, if we need it. He's a good man. I'll take a good man over a rich man any day of the year." Not that they are mutually exclusive necessarily, but if you have to choose....
We caught the next road and we were on our way. It wasn't too hot. It was just nice.
"Can we go to Goodwill?" Regan asked. "O. wants me to see if the sequels to her books are there. She saw them the other day when she bought the ones she has but she didn't realize they were sequels."
Of course we could. We could do anything we wanted. It was Girls' Day Out. Also, I had some stuff in my trunk to donate to somebody. I would dispose of it here.
We searched with partial success for the books, met a couple friends, who were also shopping, and stopped and talked to them.
And then we were off again, to the other side of town, which was congested as usual with traffic, but more-so than sometimes because it was nearing lunch hour. From traffic light to traffic light we waited through several revolutions because the intersections were clogged beyond remedy. I looked down at my temperature gauge, just in case. It was as far to the right as it could go.
"Oh no." I said, "it's running hot again. Here, turn on the heat." We turned on the heater full blast. I checked my rear view mirror to see if there was room in the through lane for me to be. There was. I merged into that traffic, which was at least moving, unlike the left turn lane, and we were off. "I have to find water!" I said, feeling a little desperate. Where was water?? Should I just keep moving or should I stop if I couldn't find any? I tried to call the Chief. No answer. I came to Washington Rd and took a right, keeping one eye out for water, and another eye out for red traffic lights that might impede our movement. Oh no. A red light. I dove into the nearest shopping center, traveled the perimeter of it and caught a side street. These were not my stomping grounds. I had no idea where I was going. Where was water? We scouted for gas stations, and spotted one up ahead, I pulled in and circled it. No water hose. No spigot that we could see. I barreled out on the road again flowing with traffic and blessing every green light with fervency.
Where was water? I was killing this car. I knew I was. I killed the last one. And I was killing this one. The temperature gauge was dropping. Whew. But what did that mean? Where was The Chief? Why didn't he answer his phone? We were being blasted with intense heat. I barreled across a major highway and it soon became apparent we were heading deep into the land of neighborhoods and subdivisions. There were no convenience stores in sight. The speed limits were low.
I had no idea where I was.
"If we have to stop here I won't have any idea how to tell Dad to find us!" I said. I chose a subdivision entrance and we started winding deep and deeper into some unknown neighborhood."
"We don't want to be back here!" Regan protested.
"I know!" I said, "but I have to keep moving. It'll come out somewhere. It has too!"
It didn't really matter where; I was totally lost, regardless.
So far, I had been turning right when I turned at all, just because turning left generally meant waiting for lights and/or traffic to cooperate, but after we had explored the depths of that subdivision and once again found ourselves at the entrance we decided to try turning left because there were clearly no convenience stores to the right. Also, I thought, it would be really nice to be able to tell The Chief where we were when the time came that he answered his phone, and the car died. Or maybe it would be other way around.
The gauge continued to stay down some, but I had no faith in it. Heater still running full blast we caught the next road.
The phone rang. It was the Chief. He has talked to me before in this same situation. He always says the same thing. "Try to get to water and get water into it as quick as you can. Be careful not to burn yourself. I think if you're careful you'll be okay, it's an overflow tank. Do you have a rag of some kind to put over the lid when you open it?" He says the same thing every time, but I have to hear him saying it again anyway.
"I can't find water anywhere!" I said barreling down the street. Which street, I didn't know.
There is only so much you can do for your wife on the phone. He knew, and I knew, he had done what he could. We had walked this road before. "Call me back if you need me." he said. I hung up.
I saw a road I recognized and took it. Familiar territory again! And there was a gas station! Hope! We swung in. Heat blasting. Windows down. Eyes peeled.
No water.
We pulled out again into the parking lot that fed into it. I took mental inventory of the places along this road. There were no more convenience stores anywhere near that did not lie beyond great blocks of traffic that had come to a stand-still. I knew this because we had come full circle. That will happen if all you do is take right turns.
The phone rang. They were done at the school a little earlier than they had planned. We could come pick Becky up. Regan and I looked at each other. There was NO WAY we could go pick Becky up. I called The Chief. "Don't worry about it, I'll go get her. She can be with me" he said. I hung up.
Should we take to the road again? It seemed futile.
"I'm stopping", I said to Regan "I might kill it, but we have no way of knowing where there will be water. As long as we're moving the gauge stays reasonably low, I'm going to pull across this parking lot here and buy some water at Walmart."
And so we did. I parked off at a distance, quite a ways from Walmart. I didn't want anyone to ask us if we needed help. I didn't want anyone to look at me. Trouble, in my opinion, is most easily handled in private. I can handle large doses of trouble as long as it's not public trouble. Private trouble is the way to go.
So I parked way out. And cut it off. Whew. We were here at least. Off the road, in a place I had been before. No more being blasted with manufactured heat on top of the regular Georgia heat.
"Do you want to go in for it?" I asked Regan. I was feeling a bit, well....tired. I wondered if I had ruined another vehicle.
"No." She said. "I'd rather stay with the car."
I started across the long parking lot. We weren't really parked in front of Walmart at all, it was a ways away. I called The Chief again, and told him what I was doing. "Do you think 2 gallons will be enough?" I asked.
"Yes," he said, "that should be enough."
I bought three gallons.
I felt a vague urgency to get back to the car and put water in it. I didn't know if at this point all hope was lost or not, but it seemed like it would be wise to get it in there. Who knew? Not me, for sure. But just in case....
The lady in front of me was slow. She was an old lady. She had with her a grown man. Her son, I presumed. He was mentally handicapped and was rifling through her bags while she was trying to pay, hunting something. She tried to get him to stop, but he was clearly a handful. She had had him all his life, I guessed. She loved him, no doubt. There was also no doubt that he would have been a tremendous responsibility for a woman her age.
My three gallons of water were getting a bit heavy, She and her son moved on. I made my purchase and headed for the door. In the doorway ahead of me another woman leaned on her cane and crept along. She was large. There was no polite way to pass. I slowed down, and adjusted my load.
"I have no troubles at all." I thought to myself, "compared to these women. I can walk without pain. My daughter sits, with sound mind, in the car, waiting for me to come back."
Once out of the store I headed across the parking lot. I had parked a long way out. Three gallons of water...I felt my arms lengthen a few inches. Private problems are best. I walked on.
There was Regan, waiting patiently. I opened the driver's door and pulled the hood release. It was probably already fried. But I would do what I could. I went around to the front, found the little latch, and propped the hood open with the thingie they make for that purpose.
I opened one gallon of water and perched it near me, then I carefully opened the lid to the over flow tank, and peered inside.
It was full.
It was full of water all the way to the fill line. I stared at it with my gallon of water in my hand.
I called the Chief. "It's not out of water. I said. The tank is full."
"Well, I don't know what's the matter with it." he said. "Maybe it's a fan that's not working. You'll probably be okay, if you keep it moving. If you want, you can try to go on out to Kohl's as far as I'm concerned."
"I am not going to Kohl's." I said. I wanted food. I wanted drink. I wanted to go home.
Regan and I were of the same mind. We had had enough excitement for one day. We discussed our options, and decided in the name of Girl's Day Out redemption we would stop for a caramel frappe and Buffalo Chicken fingers at Burger King. It was a wild extravagance under normal circumstances. We shared a frappe, and savored our chicken fingers, absorbing the luxury of air conditioning and just being together.
And then we came home. With our three gallons of water, we came home. And walked into an empty house.
We had marked off this day on the calendar. We had nothing else planned. Regan took a book and curled up in the recliner.
I repaired to our bedroom with the book I have been reading "Swallows and Amazons."
Silence fell.
At length, I wandered back out to the living room. Regan looked up from her reading and rearranged herself.
"It's been a good day," she said.
"It sure has," I replied.
Sunday, July 27, 2014
Deliverance
I haven't even looked at this blog for a long time, but I thought of something awhile ago. It's just a little something, but I am going to put it here.
It relates to this song, a spiritual, and the question raised in it:
"Didn't my Lord deliver Daniel
Deliver Daniel. Deliver Daniel
Didn't my Lord deliver Daniel
Then why not every man?"
It proceeds in verse number two...
"He delivered Daniel from the lions' den
Jonah from the belly of the whale
The Hebrew children from the fiery furnace
Then why not every man?.."
I can imagine the slaves singing it as they hoed to its rhythm, asking with heavy hearts that ached for freedom and the dear homes from which they had been so rudely ripped, the question it posed. "Why not every man?"
And I have pondered it too. I have. And once while I was thinking on it, something occurred to me.
God did indeed deliver Daniel from the lions' den, but He did not deliver him from slavery. He was pulled unharmed from a pit full of ravenous lions to continue living life as an exile in a strange land.
And Jonah, after the "whale" saved him from a watery grave and disposed of him properly on dry land, did God hand him a beach towel and a pina colada and steer him to the shade of the nearest palm? Nope, He sent him to preach damnation to Ninevah, that great and wicked city, same as He had sent him before. And Jonah did it.
It would not be pleasant having to do that down Main Street in Bible-belt-burg, never mind Ninevah, where they already hated him and he hated them, and maybe had a good dose of fear of them as well. But that's what Jonah faced after his "deliverance".
The three Hebrew children emerged from the fiery furnace without as much as a whiff of smoke about them to continue the life of slavery they had known before, just as Daniel did.
But these things they knew: God saw them. God loved them. God had his hand on them. God was in control.
We too have our Babylons; we have our Ninevahs. We have circumstances from which we cannot escape, and responsibilities from which God does not rescue us.
But we also have our moments of deliverance, where we can see His tender and powerful hand touching our lives in extraordinary ways.
He tucks in miracles amid the madness.
Sunbeams now and then, dance in the shadows.
And we too can know that God sees. He loves us. His hand is on our lives. And He is in control.
That is true for every man. And enough for any man.
It relates to this song, a spiritual, and the question raised in it:
"Didn't my Lord deliver Daniel
Deliver Daniel. Deliver Daniel
Didn't my Lord deliver Daniel
Then why not every man?"
It proceeds in verse number two...
"He delivered Daniel from the lions' den
Jonah from the belly of the whale
The Hebrew children from the fiery furnace
Then why not every man?.."
I can imagine the slaves singing it as they hoed to its rhythm, asking with heavy hearts that ached for freedom and the dear homes from which they had been so rudely ripped, the question it posed. "Why not every man?"
And I have pondered it too. I have. And once while I was thinking on it, something occurred to me.
God did indeed deliver Daniel from the lions' den, but He did not deliver him from slavery. He was pulled unharmed from a pit full of ravenous lions to continue living life as an exile in a strange land.
And Jonah, after the "whale" saved him from a watery grave and disposed of him properly on dry land, did God hand him a beach towel and a pina colada and steer him to the shade of the nearest palm? Nope, He sent him to preach damnation to Ninevah, that great and wicked city, same as He had sent him before. And Jonah did it.
It would not be pleasant having to do that down Main Street in Bible-belt-burg, never mind Ninevah, where they already hated him and he hated them, and maybe had a good dose of fear of them as well. But that's what Jonah faced after his "deliverance".
The three Hebrew children emerged from the fiery furnace without as much as a whiff of smoke about them to continue the life of slavery they had known before, just as Daniel did.
But these things they knew: God saw them. God loved them. God had his hand on them. God was in control.
We too have our Babylons; we have our Ninevahs. We have circumstances from which we cannot escape, and responsibilities from which God does not rescue us.
But we also have our moments of deliverance, where we can see His tender and powerful hand touching our lives in extraordinary ways.
He tucks in miracles amid the madness.
Sunbeams now and then, dance in the shadows.
And we too can know that God sees. He loves us. His hand is on our lives. And He is in control.
That is true for every man. And enough for any man.
Saturday, June 21, 2014
Rituals of Summers Past and Present
Yesterday I arose, by the dawn's early light, feeling better than I had for some time. I looked out the window at the day breaking across the world, and thought, "Blackberries! We should go pick blackberries."
I knew where there were blackberries. They were growing all along the pecan orchard path where I like to take my morning walks, I haven't walked there for a few weeks now, but when I last did they were blooming lavishly, which could only mean one thing.
I slipped into the hall and called the natives from their beds, "Get up, y'all. Let's go pick blackberries!"
They stirred, lazily, luxuriously, clearly in summer vacation mode. And presently emerged, one by one, barefoot, groggy, mildly interested in the promise of a variation in the routine.
We collected our vessels and piled in the car, anxious to beat the sun.
Blackberry picking is a rite of summer. When I was quite young and our family lived in the tidewater region of North Carolina, we would leave the little yellow cinder block house we called home one summer morning a year to go pick blackberries. My siblings and I would line up on the tailgate of the old green Wagoneer, legs dangling, and Mother would drive. We'd each have our container for picking into and a stick to drag on the road behind us to make patterns in the deep, fine, black, Carolina dirt. We younger ones would have the arm of an older one around us to keep us where we belonged, and off we'd go in search of blackberries. I can remember the happy excitement swirling all through me as if it were yesterday. I am sure the arm around me was just exactly necessary.
We would pick enough for one pie, I remember my mother saying. They were not that plentiful apparently. But we all picked until we had enough, there along the roadside above the canal, under the punishing southern sun and then we'd pile back onto the tailgate, in like fashion as we had arrived, and head back home, trailing our sticks in the dirt road, in anticipation of the matchless pie. Mother could make a pie, I tell you.
The Chief has his blackberry picking memories too. And they include quite a few more blackberries than mine do. Subsequently, his memories are a lot hotter and sweatier I suspect...but still, at this distance at least, they are apparently quite sweet. He picked two gallons of them himself at one time. He and his siblings sold them to their parents for 25 cents a quart, he thinks.
"I still like to pick blackberries" He said this morning in fond revery.
There is something about it. It is an entirely uncomfortable and miserable endeavor. And altogether addicting. The natives and I eased from the blacktop into the dappled morning shade that the orchard trees provide. Windows down, eyes peeled.
"There's some!" I said.
"But there are more farther down." Regan replied.
She knew. They had picked here before, she and her fellow natives. So we rolled slowly on in.
Most of them were still red, but here and there were patches of ebony orbs. We stopped at a promising looking place and she and I commenced to picking. The littlest natives ran further down the trail in search of "better spots".
The morning was so sweet, the promise of the heat to come lay just beyond, but right now it was perfect. Blackberries dropped, "boink", "boink", "boink", until the bottoms of our containers were covered, and then there was no more noise as layer was added to glistening layer.
The sun rose higher. The briers tore at our limbs and clothes. Now and then one would lodge and remain and we'd stop to extract it. Bees buzzed. We sidestepped gigantic fire ant hills.
The sun rose higher. Sweat dripped. And on we picked, moving along the road slowly, forever tantalized by the berry beyond.
We'd eye our accumulation now and then, and figure how many pies we could make, or cobblers or muffins. The sun rose higher still, and there was nothing fun about it anymore. The littlest brave spilled his twice and was fast losing enthusiasm.
But there were always just a few more. And always just a little more space in the container to fit another one, and another. And then another. But at some point they started falling off as much as they stayed on and it became apparent that it was time to quit. So we picked one more. And then that one...
That's the way it is with blackberries.
And then we piled into the car, crawled out the orchard lane and eased onto the blacktop. Hot. Tired. Scratched. Happy.
We went up to the store for a Powerade. The natives waited in the car while I went in and chose one out of the case. Melon. And we all shared it. And shared it again.
I suppose the cashier thought I looked a little bedraggled for that time of the morning, but I didn't really care.
We had blackberries.
I knew where there were blackberries. They were growing all along the pecan orchard path where I like to take my morning walks, I haven't walked there for a few weeks now, but when I last did they were blooming lavishly, which could only mean one thing.
I slipped into the hall and called the natives from their beds, "Get up, y'all. Let's go pick blackberries!"
They stirred, lazily, luxuriously, clearly in summer vacation mode. And presently emerged, one by one, barefoot, groggy, mildly interested in the promise of a variation in the routine.
We collected our vessels and piled in the car, anxious to beat the sun.
Blackberry picking is a rite of summer. When I was quite young and our family lived in the tidewater region of North Carolina, we would leave the little yellow cinder block house we called home one summer morning a year to go pick blackberries. My siblings and I would line up on the tailgate of the old green Wagoneer, legs dangling, and Mother would drive. We'd each have our container for picking into and a stick to drag on the road behind us to make patterns in the deep, fine, black, Carolina dirt. We younger ones would have the arm of an older one around us to keep us where we belonged, and off we'd go in search of blackberries. I can remember the happy excitement swirling all through me as if it were yesterday. I am sure the arm around me was just exactly necessary.
We would pick enough for one pie, I remember my mother saying. They were not that plentiful apparently. But we all picked until we had enough, there along the roadside above the canal, under the punishing southern sun and then we'd pile back onto the tailgate, in like fashion as we had arrived, and head back home, trailing our sticks in the dirt road, in anticipation of the matchless pie. Mother could make a pie, I tell you.
The Chief has his blackberry picking memories too. And they include quite a few more blackberries than mine do. Subsequently, his memories are a lot hotter and sweatier I suspect...but still, at this distance at least, they are apparently quite sweet. He picked two gallons of them himself at one time. He and his siblings sold them to their parents for 25 cents a quart, he thinks.
"I still like to pick blackberries" He said this morning in fond revery.
There is something about it. It is an entirely uncomfortable and miserable endeavor. And altogether addicting. The natives and I eased from the blacktop into the dappled morning shade that the orchard trees provide. Windows down, eyes peeled.
"There's some!" I said.
"But there are more farther down." Regan replied.
She knew. They had picked here before, she and her fellow natives. So we rolled slowly on in.
Most of them were still red, but here and there were patches of ebony orbs. We stopped at a promising looking place and she and I commenced to picking. The littlest natives ran further down the trail in search of "better spots".
The morning was so sweet, the promise of the heat to come lay just beyond, but right now it was perfect. Blackberries dropped, "boink", "boink", "boink", until the bottoms of our containers were covered, and then there was no more noise as layer was added to glistening layer.
The sun rose higher. The briers tore at our limbs and clothes. Now and then one would lodge and remain and we'd stop to extract it. Bees buzzed. We sidestepped gigantic fire ant hills.
The sun rose higher. Sweat dripped. And on we picked, moving along the road slowly, forever tantalized by the berry beyond.
We'd eye our accumulation now and then, and figure how many pies we could make, or cobblers or muffins. The sun rose higher still, and there was nothing fun about it anymore. The littlest brave spilled his twice and was fast losing enthusiasm.
But there were always just a few more. And always just a little more space in the container to fit another one, and another. And then another. But at some point they started falling off as much as they stayed on and it became apparent that it was time to quit. So we picked one more. And then that one...
That's the way it is with blackberries.
And then we piled into the car, crawled out the orchard lane and eased onto the blacktop. Hot. Tired. Scratched. Happy.
We went up to the store for a Powerade. The natives waited in the car while I went in and chose one out of the case. Melon. And we all shared it. And shared it again.
I suppose the cashier thought I looked a little bedraggled for that time of the morning, but I didn't really care.
We had blackberries.
Tuesday, May 27, 2014
The Poverty of Loneliness
It's Vacation Bible School week. The Chief and two thirds of the natives go every night, either as instructors or instructees. Our Vacation Bible School is staffed by volunteers, and since we have a wedding looming large and it helps in minimizing the chaos to have one person keeping the home fires burning (bad analogy for Georgia in summer, I know) I only volunteered to take refreshments one night.
So I am home, with dishes in my sink and Becky's happy parting words ringing in my ears, "Good-bye Mom! I hope you don't get lonely!!"
Ahh. So sweet of her to care for my emotional well-being in this fashion.
But I wonder why she said that.
I wonder if she gets lonely. This the child who will go off and read for hours at a time with zero human interaction...wandering alone outside, collecting seeds from flowers, sitting in a tree, or painstakingly making "leaf cards" by pinning small interesting objects to large leaves with tiny twigs, who can just sit quietly for long lengths of time with her knees to her chin, observing her own toes. I don't see her as a person given to loneliness.
Neither am I. For I am a little like her.
Or she like me.
I can hardly remember feeling lonely, though I have been before.
I like being alone. It gives me time to think. And there is no end to the interesting thoughts there are to be thunk. And issues to ponder. And projects to plan. And dreams to dream. And memories to relive. And prayers to be prayed. And books to read.
There are so many nice things you can do when you are alone that do not work well when there are people around.
Most of my life is lived with people in close proximity. The wigwam is small and the natives numerous and getting bigger. And that is nice too. I love them all. I like them, too. And the happy noise and commotion of living is a joy of its own description. But it is a different brand of joy than aloneness joy, and I crave the latter if the former goes on for too long.
Jean Paul Sartre once said, "If you're lonely when you're alone, you're in bad company."
I think there is sometimes truth to that. But I think there is often more to it as well. But what? Why are some people lonely when they are alone and others not?
People speak of being lonely in a crowd. Clearly it in not solely an issue of solitude. My guess is it is not really an issue of solitude at all. It is feeling unknown or unloved. Those two factors, either together or separate, make us feel very lonely.
Vincent van Gogh once said, "A great fire burns within me, but no one stops to warm themselves at it, and passers-by only see a wisp of smoke.
You can hear the loneliness in his voice. The wistful wishing that somebody would notice. Would see. And stop. And enjoy his fire. Explore it. Find it fascinating. And pleasant. That someone would pull their chair to it for a long while. And then again, and again.
"The loneliness you feel with another person, the wrong person, is the loneliest of all." I don't know who made this observation, but it is so true. And the reason is, is because there is no knowing. No connecting. No loving. No liking.
But the connection you feel when you are with someone, even if it is just one or two someones, if it is pure and strong and good and real, that connection fills your heart always, whether you are with that person or not, whether you are in a crowd or whether you are alone. And you are not nearly as prone to loneliness, if you know you are both known and loved by someone somewhere.
Is that right? I think maybe it is. Maybe too simplistic?
I don't know for sure...and that is all the time I have to think right now because the dishes are still in my sink and the sound of car doors slamming will soon reach my ears.
So I am home, with dishes in my sink and Becky's happy parting words ringing in my ears, "Good-bye Mom! I hope you don't get lonely!!"
Ahh. So sweet of her to care for my emotional well-being in this fashion.
But I wonder why she said that.
I wonder if she gets lonely. This the child who will go off and read for hours at a time with zero human interaction...wandering alone outside, collecting seeds from flowers, sitting in a tree, or painstakingly making "leaf cards" by pinning small interesting objects to large leaves with tiny twigs, who can just sit quietly for long lengths of time with her knees to her chin, observing her own toes. I don't see her as a person given to loneliness.
Neither am I. For I am a little like her.
Or she like me.
I can hardly remember feeling lonely, though I have been before.
I like being alone. It gives me time to think. And there is no end to the interesting thoughts there are to be thunk. And issues to ponder. And projects to plan. And dreams to dream. And memories to relive. And prayers to be prayed. And books to read.
There are so many nice things you can do when you are alone that do not work well when there are people around.
Most of my life is lived with people in close proximity. The wigwam is small and the natives numerous and getting bigger. And that is nice too. I love them all. I like them, too. And the happy noise and commotion of living is a joy of its own description. But it is a different brand of joy than aloneness joy, and I crave the latter if the former goes on for too long.
Jean Paul Sartre once said, "If you're lonely when you're alone, you're in bad company."
I think there is sometimes truth to that. But I think there is often more to it as well. But what? Why are some people lonely when they are alone and others not?
People speak of being lonely in a crowd. Clearly it in not solely an issue of solitude. My guess is it is not really an issue of solitude at all. It is feeling unknown or unloved. Those two factors, either together or separate, make us feel very lonely.
Vincent van Gogh once said, "A great fire burns within me, but no one stops to warm themselves at it, and passers-by only see a wisp of smoke.
You can hear the loneliness in his voice. The wistful wishing that somebody would notice. Would see. And stop. And enjoy his fire. Explore it. Find it fascinating. And pleasant. That someone would pull their chair to it for a long while. And then again, and again.
"The loneliness you feel with another person, the wrong person, is the loneliest of all." I don't know who made this observation, but it is so true. And the reason is, is because there is no knowing. No connecting. No loving. No liking.
But the connection you feel when you are with someone, even if it is just one or two someones, if it is pure and strong and good and real, that connection fills your heart always, whether you are with that person or not, whether you are in a crowd or whether you are alone. And you are not nearly as prone to loneliness, if you know you are both known and loved by someone somewhere.
Is that right? I think maybe it is. Maybe too simplistic?
I don't know for sure...and that is all the time I have to think right now because the dishes are still in my sink and the sound of car doors slamming will soon reach my ears.
Friday, May 23, 2014
Penance Post
I have been sorely neglecting breakfast prep of late. I am lousy at making myself get up when the guilt level for staying in bed is moderate. It shouldn't be moderate, I know. It should be off the charts. But it's summer now, here in Georgia it is. Summer vacation. And the working men pull out at 6:05AM roughly, the first shift does. The first shift consists of The Chief and two native sons, which means I have to get up at an objectionable hour in order to have breakfast ready for consumption some time before six.
But guilt, however moderate and vigorously justified, tends to have a cumulative effect. This morning the build-up was sufficient to propel me out of bed. That, and the groggy awareness that there was not enough milk for them to eat cereal.
The first shift got fried eggs and toast. I made it in my sleep, largely. The second shift emerged immediately after, and got fried eggs, toast, and bacon, because I was nearly conscious by then, having sipped the first layer of coffee from my rooster mug. (Don't tell the first shift.)
So....I have this load of breakfast guilt that I have been shouldering for a week or so and in looking for ways to assuage it I lit upon this inspired solution: I could write a blog!!
This may seem an unlikely cure to you, but if you knew how regularly The Chief has been pestering me to pen another blog entry you would recognize it for the bit of brilliance that it is...counterbalancing the breakfast guilt and nullifying the blog guilt in one brief sitting.
There is one small problem, I don't really have anything to write about.
Everyday life is just so dreadfully everyday, but it's all I have to work with so we'll have go with that, I guess, however inadvisable, like Christian, of John Bunyan fame, driven to escape his burden.
Well, maybe not quite like that.
This Spring began like most other Springs, with the world desperately attempting to wrench itself from Winter's clutches. It was a bitter and ugly battle this year, but Spring sprang, jubilant and joyful at long last.
In one way, Spring at the Wigwam was very different. The first-born native asked his lady, fair and true, to be his for always. And she said "yes".
I don't quite know how this can be. I still feel the pains of labor, and the aroma of Johnson's Baby Lotion still lingers fresh and sweet in my memory. But it is.
"What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes." James said that. And he was right...the mist is rising, rising. So beautiful, so real.... and so elusive.
In some ways Spring was very much the same. The stuff that accumulates in my greenhouse over winter had accumulated there just like it always does. The Chief eventually cleaned it out, as he is wont to do.
I cut open the little gold or white packets of seeds, mostly from Park's Seed Co, and tucked hundreds of little seeds into their little potting soil beds as ever before.
"I don't want to plant garden too early." I told the Chief. "And I don't want to plant a whole lot, because I still have pretty much in the freezer, and it's going to be crazy busy with this wedding. We won't have time to put up piles of stuff."
I would have time if I loved to do it. But I don't. I don't like canning and freezing the fruits of our labors.
I love to plant seeds in the gentle warmth of my greenhouse when the world outside is dead and cold. I love to watch those first little arches push their way through the earth. I love to mix the blue fertilizer with water in the old galvanized watering can and shower their thirsty little selves with nutrients.
I love to plant garden with Kent and the natives in the evening hours, him making the rows, because he can make lovely, straight rows, and the natives and I dropping in the little seeds at regular intervals, with cool soil between our toes and the air laden with the sounds and smells of spring. It's one of the best things ever.
I love to watch them thrive. I love hearing the chicka-chicka-chick of the sprinklers out the windows when the sunny days are many and the rainy days are few. I like to watch the miniature beans emerge from their blossoms and slowly lengthen to glistening clusters of green goodness. And the tomatoes turn from green to pinkish, and then at long, long last, to red. I like to search for hidden cucumbers beneath the shade of leafy vines and snip prickly okra with kitchen shears from their stalks. I love digging beneath the thick mulch and robbing the potatoes of their first fruits. And gathering fresh herbs to add to whatever I am fixing for supper. I especially love eating all of that backyard bounty.
But I don't like setting up canning and freezing operations in a steaming summer kitchen, and putting food up for the year... Bleh.
Triple bleh.
This is another huge source of guilt. Bigger than breakfast guilt. Bigger than blog guilt.
I can hear my mother saying sagely, "Don't consult your feelings."
Every Mennonite housewife worth her salt embraces this aspect of living with roughly the same attitude as she embraces breathing.
I haven't quite figured out how to assuage this guilt yet. I don't think I can do it with a blog. But the guilt does not dissuade me from looking for ways to get out of it. A wedding in June was the perfect excuse. So I told the Chief, "Let's plant a small garden."
He listened, I am sure. But he did not hear. We have 30 tomato plants growing in three majestic rows. And 46 pepper plants. One pepper died. There had been 47.
It's my fault, partly, since I planted the seeds. But what was I to do, when there are all these seeds in the packets and all these varieties we wished to try??
And then there are the flowers. The ones I planted. Plus the ones I bought. Plus. the ones donated by dear friends. The flowers are my department from beginning to end, generally, though the Chief will make the beds for me if I need new ones. I bit off more than I can chew this year. I still have a long way to go planting flowers, and my parts are already protesting mightily. I have dropped into bed more than one night altogether spent. Admittedly, I am not the hardiest person, so the results of my labor are not as impressive as I wish.
My mind keeps scouting around for legitimate ways to get the Chief involved in flower planting to save me from myself. Sometimes he does. Sometimes he sees the fate of the foolish and steps in to save the day, or the night, as the case may be. But mostly, I am on my own.
Next year I will remember, and acquire a more moderate collection of plants.
And next year I will rise before dawn every morning and make lovely breakfasts.
And I will for sure put up copious amounts of produce; with a smile on my face I will do it.
Next year, I will live guilt-free.
But guilt, however moderate and vigorously justified, tends to have a cumulative effect. This morning the build-up was sufficient to propel me out of bed. That, and the groggy awareness that there was not enough milk for them to eat cereal.
The first shift got fried eggs and toast. I made it in my sleep, largely. The second shift emerged immediately after, and got fried eggs, toast, and bacon, because I was nearly conscious by then, having sipped the first layer of coffee from my rooster mug. (Don't tell the first shift.)
So....I have this load of breakfast guilt that I have been shouldering for a week or so and in looking for ways to assuage it I lit upon this inspired solution: I could write a blog!!
This may seem an unlikely cure to you, but if you knew how regularly The Chief has been pestering me to pen another blog entry you would recognize it for the bit of brilliance that it is...counterbalancing the breakfast guilt and nullifying the blog guilt in one brief sitting.
There is one small problem, I don't really have anything to write about.
Everyday life is just so dreadfully everyday, but it's all I have to work with so we'll have go with that, I guess, however inadvisable, like Christian, of John Bunyan fame, driven to escape his burden.
Well, maybe not quite like that.
This Spring began like most other Springs, with the world desperately attempting to wrench itself from Winter's clutches. It was a bitter and ugly battle this year, but Spring sprang, jubilant and joyful at long last.
In one way, Spring at the Wigwam was very different. The first-born native asked his lady, fair and true, to be his for always. And she said "yes".
I don't quite know how this can be. I still feel the pains of labor, and the aroma of Johnson's Baby Lotion still lingers fresh and sweet in my memory. But it is.
"What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes." James said that. And he was right...the mist is rising, rising. So beautiful, so real.... and so elusive.
In some ways Spring was very much the same. The stuff that accumulates in my greenhouse over winter had accumulated there just like it always does. The Chief eventually cleaned it out, as he is wont to do.
I cut open the little gold or white packets of seeds, mostly from Park's Seed Co, and tucked hundreds of little seeds into their little potting soil beds as ever before.
"I don't want to plant garden too early." I told the Chief. "And I don't want to plant a whole lot, because I still have pretty much in the freezer, and it's going to be crazy busy with this wedding. We won't have time to put up piles of stuff."
I would have time if I loved to do it. But I don't. I don't like canning and freezing the fruits of our labors.
I love to plant seeds in the gentle warmth of my greenhouse when the world outside is dead and cold. I love to watch those first little arches push their way through the earth. I love to mix the blue fertilizer with water in the old galvanized watering can and shower their thirsty little selves with nutrients.
I love to plant garden with Kent and the natives in the evening hours, him making the rows, because he can make lovely, straight rows, and the natives and I dropping in the little seeds at regular intervals, with cool soil between our toes and the air laden with the sounds and smells of spring. It's one of the best things ever.
I love to watch them thrive. I love hearing the chicka-chicka-chick of the sprinklers out the windows when the sunny days are many and the rainy days are few. I like to watch the miniature beans emerge from their blossoms and slowly lengthen to glistening clusters of green goodness. And the tomatoes turn from green to pinkish, and then at long, long last, to red. I like to search for hidden cucumbers beneath the shade of leafy vines and snip prickly okra with kitchen shears from their stalks. I love digging beneath the thick mulch and robbing the potatoes of their first fruits. And gathering fresh herbs to add to whatever I am fixing for supper. I especially love eating all of that backyard bounty.
But I don't like setting up canning and freezing operations in a steaming summer kitchen, and putting food up for the year... Bleh.
Triple bleh.
This is another huge source of guilt. Bigger than breakfast guilt. Bigger than blog guilt.
I can hear my mother saying sagely, "Don't consult your feelings."
Every Mennonite housewife worth her salt embraces this aspect of living with roughly the same attitude as she embraces breathing.
I haven't quite figured out how to assuage this guilt yet. I don't think I can do it with a blog. But the guilt does not dissuade me from looking for ways to get out of it. A wedding in June was the perfect excuse. So I told the Chief, "Let's plant a small garden."
He listened, I am sure. But he did not hear. We have 30 tomato plants growing in three majestic rows. And 46 pepper plants. One pepper died. There had been 47.
It's my fault, partly, since I planted the seeds. But what was I to do, when there are all these seeds in the packets and all these varieties we wished to try??
And then there are the flowers. The ones I planted. Plus the ones I bought. Plus. the ones donated by dear friends. The flowers are my department from beginning to end, generally, though the Chief will make the beds for me if I need new ones. I bit off more than I can chew this year. I still have a long way to go planting flowers, and my parts are already protesting mightily. I have dropped into bed more than one night altogether spent. Admittedly, I am not the hardiest person, so the results of my labor are not as impressive as I wish.
My mind keeps scouting around for legitimate ways to get the Chief involved in flower planting to save me from myself. Sometimes he does. Sometimes he sees the fate of the foolish and steps in to save the day, or the night, as the case may be. But mostly, I am on my own.
Next year I will remember, and acquire a more moderate collection of plants.
And next year I will rise before dawn every morning and make lovely breakfasts.
And I will for sure put up copious amounts of produce; with a smile on my face I will do it.
Next year, I will live guilt-free.
Monday, February 10, 2014
"Extra! Extra! Read all about it!"
LUCY YODER HACKMAN was the winner of the diary/journal giveaway contest! Congratulations, Lucy!
Happy memory-keeping! A big THANK YOU to all of you who entered!
And another sincere thank you to each of you who read my blog. Seriously. ~Rhonda
P. S.
If you didn't win one, go order one! :)
Happy memory-keeping! A big THANK YOU to all of you who entered!
And another sincere thank you to each of you who read my blog. Seriously. ~Rhonda
P. S.
If you didn't win one, go order one! :)
Friday, January 17, 2014
Knowing What to Throw Away and Knowing What to Keep
The other day I stood outside my closet looking in and said to myself, "This is pathetic". And it was. Our closet is the biggest one in the house. The other two are small. Very small. You would think having the biggest closet would be a tremendous blessing.
Actually it's just a tremendous job.
This is why: There is no room in anyone else's closet. This is the indisputable truth. So everything that has to go anywhere, of course, goes in ours.
"Where should I put this, Mom?", they say. And I look at "this" thoughtfully, and say. "Put it in my closet, I guess."
They never ever argue with this answer. That is the one upside of this scenario. The natives are completely happy with everything going in my closet.
But the results, after multiple months of this, are not pretty.
So I stood there looking at all the Stuff and I said to myself, "This is ridiculous. There is no way we need all this Stuff." I labeled trash bags. "Goodwill" "Give to somebody" "Pitch" And I started hauling stuff out of there.
In the process I pulled out a sizable container filled nearly to the brim with letters and diaries. The letters were the ones the Chief and I exchanged when we were dating. We lived hundreds of miles apart. Calling long distance was expensive. Cell phones and e-mail hadn't emerged on the landscape. These were the olden days. We were lucky we weren't confined to sending smoke signals.
And my diaries! Dear and blessed repository for the overflow of my teenage heart.
I pulled the container out and pushed it in a vacant spot on the floor beside the dresser. My closet called.
But the diaries called louder.
I opened one and started reading. Cobwebs draped so many of those memories. Some of them lay entirely dormant, and I strained to remember people and activities that at the time they were penned had needed no introduction or explanation. Other times, good old friends and old familiar places came back to life.
I read how Mother and I played tennis in the mornings before we each went to work, she, to teach school, me, to my job at a publishing company. She nearly always beat me despite being 44 years my senior. The skills she had developed as the tennis single's champion in college trounced any agility edge I may have had. What fun we had!
I read about Dixie who disappeared into thin air, and magically reappeared on Christmas eve.
About my sister Kristin, who has always been the more industrious of the two of us, making deals with me that in essence extracted more work out of me than I would have otherwise produced. She was good for me. She still is.
I read about the stream of friends who called, and dropped by. The girl-friend drama. The boys who figured in somehow.
And the one who hung the evening star in my sky and upon whom the sun rose and set. From one diary to the next, year after year, he was featured heavily, if not in reality, in my dreams.
Suddenly, I was 17 again. There was no closet.
The Chief came home and he started reading them. He has always, since his first night-long diary-reading marathon a few days before our wedding, been a great fan of me keeping a diary. He settled himself against the headboard of our bed and began reading, a perpetual smile in his eyes. "You were already nuts at 17." he said presently. And a little while later..."I am certainly glad I didn't meet you after you were already married."
He must not have gotten to the place where I had, after much anguish of heart, determined to be available as long as he was.
Not long hence, after spending the long New Year's Eve drinking Pepsi and playing Settlers of Catan, we welcomed the New Year with open arms and sanguine hopes. (We're giving it the benefit of every doubt.) And then, like a Normal Person, I went to bed. To sleep. The Chief went to bed too. But not to sleep. He sat against the head-board again and read diaries. Every ninety seconds or so he would start to laugh, and read me excerpts. At one point his tone was laced with perplexity, "My name doesn't even show up in this one till about half-way through." He said.
"Well!" I replied. "You never made any moves." Hope deferred maketh the heart sick.
"If I had had any idea!" he said. "If you had given me the least glimmer of a smile, even once, I would've had something to go on."
"Do you realize it's quarter of two??" I asked from the recesses of my feather pillow. He laughed and kept reading.
I quit keeping a diary when the natives were young. It's hard, when you're a young mom, to retain enough internal resources till the end of the day to be able to commit the day's events to paper. At that stage of your life it's a supreme victory to have kept everyone clothed and fed, and reasonably happy. If you've done it, you understand. If you haven't, you never will entirely.
Life is crazy when the natives are little. Unpredictable. Fun. Unexpected. Disastrous. Hilarious. But crazy.
I would call my mother on any given day to tell her the latest thing, and she would laugh in the most rewarding fashion, and say, "RHON! You better be writing this stuff down!"
I should have. But I didn't. I wish I had. Because if it's not written down, you forget. You really do. Maybe not the big things. But a million priceless little things; they are lost forever.
Today communication opportunities explode on the horizon like fireworks against a night sky. Facebook. Twitter. Texting. E-mails...we type out the details of our lives and share them with the people we know, and many we don't. But in 25 years, where will they be? What will we have? In the end, they are as fleeting as smoke signals.
This year, I will keep a diary again. I will. There is no point in mourning the lost years. They are gone. But I have this day. This year. These wonderfully everyday life experiences. This stuff, unlike most of the Stuff that accumulates in my closet, becomes dearer with the passing of time. These are the treasures of tomorrow.
And maybe....someday....they will wheel my chair adjacent to the Chief's and he will read to me again. About how on New Year's Eve, 2013, we played Settlers of Catan till midnight, and how he read to me from my diaries till nearly 2 AM while I tried in vain to sleep. And he will laugh. And I will too. And after awhile I will say, "Babe, do you realize it's 8 o'clock? It's way past time for your medication".
And he will laugh again. And keep reading.
* * * * * *
My sister, Kristin, the industrious one, designed an extra nice journal. Actually, she designed a journal, a one-year diary and a three-year diary. Vision Publishers published them for her and they did a lovely job, as they do with everything. In addition to having beautiful hard covers, and an inspirational scripture verse at the bottom of each page, they have thoughtful features inside. There's an appendix in the back to record the page numbers of significant events so you can locate them quickly. There are also sections headed "Family, Home, Friends", "Church, School", "Work, Hobbies, Miscellaneous" where you can record special events themselves, both for ease of retrieval and so you can expand upon a noteworthy occasion without overwhelming the confines of your daily entry allowance.
The one-year diary provides you with one full page per day, and keeps a year's events neatly contained to one book.
The three-year diary gives you 1/3 of a page per day. This works well for persons who like to touch the highlights and enjoy quickly comparing what happened on this years's date with last year's.
The journal is undivided by date, allowing you to write as much or as little per day as you please, or to skip days, if you tend toward writing only occasionally. Or if you prefer a book for recording your thoughts, more than life events, a journal is perfect.
I have the journal. I can seldom stuff one-day's-worth of life onto one page. And I skip days sometimes, even when I am keeping one regularly.
I love my journal! It doesn't have a whole lot in it yet, but at the end of the year, it will be brimming with life and memories...for our own enjoyment, and for the enjoyment of our children, and maybe theirs'... if it doesn't get lost in someone's closet.
Don't you want one too? Yes! I know you do! So enter to win a free one! My sister is giving away a diary or journal, to whomever wins this snazzy easy-to-enter contest! So enter! Just leave a comment below. Any comment! And if you would like one and don't win one, you can order one here.
Keep one yourself. And maybe give one as a gift to a child or teen in your life. A diary is a safe place to unload your heart, hone writing skills, and record your life events, unlike some of the current options out there.
And it will become more valuable with time. I promise.
This contest will end at noon on Monday, February 10, 2014 EST. If you wish to enter and have trouble doing so, e-mail me and I will gladly enter for you! rjstrite@gmail.com
Actually it's just a tremendous job.
This is why: There is no room in anyone else's closet. This is the indisputable truth. So everything that has to go anywhere, of course, goes in ours.
"Where should I put this, Mom?", they say. And I look at "this" thoughtfully, and say. "Put it in my closet, I guess."
They never ever argue with this answer. That is the one upside of this scenario. The natives are completely happy with everything going in my closet.
But the results, after multiple months of this, are not pretty.
So I stood there looking at all the Stuff and I said to myself, "This is ridiculous. There is no way we need all this Stuff." I labeled trash bags. "Goodwill" "Give to somebody" "Pitch" And I started hauling stuff out of there.
In the process I pulled out a sizable container filled nearly to the brim with letters and diaries. The letters were the ones the Chief and I exchanged when we were dating. We lived hundreds of miles apart. Calling long distance was expensive. Cell phones and e-mail hadn't emerged on the landscape. These were the olden days. We were lucky we weren't confined to sending smoke signals.
And my diaries! Dear and blessed repository for the overflow of my teenage heart.
I pulled the container out and pushed it in a vacant spot on the floor beside the dresser. My closet called.
But the diaries called louder.
I opened one and started reading. Cobwebs draped so many of those memories. Some of them lay entirely dormant, and I strained to remember people and activities that at the time they were penned had needed no introduction or explanation. Other times, good old friends and old familiar places came back to life.
I read how Mother and I played tennis in the mornings before we each went to work, she, to teach school, me, to my job at a publishing company. She nearly always beat me despite being 44 years my senior. The skills she had developed as the tennis single's champion in college trounced any agility edge I may have had. What fun we had!
I read about Dixie who disappeared into thin air, and magically reappeared on Christmas eve.
About my sister Kristin, who has always been the more industrious of the two of us, making deals with me that in essence extracted more work out of me than I would have otherwise produced. She was good for me. She still is.
I read about the stream of friends who called, and dropped by. The girl-friend drama. The boys who figured in somehow.
And the one who hung the evening star in my sky and upon whom the sun rose and set. From one diary to the next, year after year, he was featured heavily, if not in reality, in my dreams.
Suddenly, I was 17 again. There was no closet.
The Chief came home and he started reading them. He has always, since his first night-long diary-reading marathon a few days before our wedding, been a great fan of me keeping a diary. He settled himself against the headboard of our bed and began reading, a perpetual smile in his eyes. "You were already nuts at 17." he said presently. And a little while later..."I am certainly glad I didn't meet you after you were already married."
He must not have gotten to the place where I had, after much anguish of heart, determined to be available as long as he was.
Not long hence, after spending the long New Year's Eve drinking Pepsi and playing Settlers of Catan, we welcomed the New Year with open arms and sanguine hopes. (We're giving it the benefit of every doubt.) And then, like a Normal Person, I went to bed. To sleep. The Chief went to bed too. But not to sleep. He sat against the head-board again and read diaries. Every ninety seconds or so he would start to laugh, and read me excerpts. At one point his tone was laced with perplexity, "My name doesn't even show up in this one till about half-way through." He said.
"Well!" I replied. "You never made any moves." Hope deferred maketh the heart sick.
"If I had had any idea!" he said. "If you had given me the least glimmer of a smile, even once, I would've had something to go on."
"Do you realize it's quarter of two??" I asked from the recesses of my feather pillow. He laughed and kept reading.
I quit keeping a diary when the natives were young. It's hard, when you're a young mom, to retain enough internal resources till the end of the day to be able to commit the day's events to paper. At that stage of your life it's a supreme victory to have kept everyone clothed and fed, and reasonably happy. If you've done it, you understand. If you haven't, you never will entirely.
Life is crazy when the natives are little. Unpredictable. Fun. Unexpected. Disastrous. Hilarious. But crazy.
I would call my mother on any given day to tell her the latest thing, and she would laugh in the most rewarding fashion, and say, "RHON! You better be writing this stuff down!"
I should have. But I didn't. I wish I had. Because if it's not written down, you forget. You really do. Maybe not the big things. But a million priceless little things; they are lost forever.
Today communication opportunities explode on the horizon like fireworks against a night sky. Facebook. Twitter. Texting. E-mails...we type out the details of our lives and share them with the people we know, and many we don't. But in 25 years, where will they be? What will we have? In the end, they are as fleeting as smoke signals.
This year, I will keep a diary again. I will. There is no point in mourning the lost years. They are gone. But I have this day. This year. These wonderfully everyday life experiences. This stuff, unlike most of the Stuff that accumulates in my closet, becomes dearer with the passing of time. These are the treasures of tomorrow.
And maybe....someday....they will wheel my chair adjacent to the Chief's and he will read to me again. About how on New Year's Eve, 2013, we played Settlers of Catan till midnight, and how he read to me from my diaries till nearly 2 AM while I tried in vain to sleep. And he will laugh. And I will too. And after awhile I will say, "Babe, do you realize it's 8 o'clock? It's way past time for your medication".
And he will laugh again. And keep reading.
* * * * * *
My sister, Kristin, the industrious one, designed an extra nice journal. Actually, she designed a journal, a one-year diary and a three-year diary. Vision Publishers published them for her and they did a lovely job, as they do with everything. In addition to having beautiful hard covers, and an inspirational scripture verse at the bottom of each page, they have thoughtful features inside. There's an appendix in the back to record the page numbers of significant events so you can locate them quickly. There are also sections headed "Family, Home, Friends", "Church, School", "Work, Hobbies, Miscellaneous" where you can record special events themselves, both for ease of retrieval and so you can expand upon a noteworthy occasion without overwhelming the confines of your daily entry allowance.
The one-year diary provides you with one full page per day, and keeps a year's events neatly contained to one book.
The three-year diary gives you 1/3 of a page per day. This works well for persons who like to touch the highlights and enjoy quickly comparing what happened on this years's date with last year's.
The journal is undivided by date, allowing you to write as much or as little per day as you please, or to skip days, if you tend toward writing only occasionally. Or if you prefer a book for recording your thoughts, more than life events, a journal is perfect.
I have the journal. I can seldom stuff one-day's-worth of life onto one page. And I skip days sometimes, even when I am keeping one regularly.
I love my journal! It doesn't have a whole lot in it yet, but at the end of the year, it will be brimming with life and memories...for our own enjoyment, and for the enjoyment of our children, and maybe theirs'... if it doesn't get lost in someone's closet.
Don't you want one too? Yes! I know you do! So enter to win a free one! My sister is giving away a diary or journal, to whomever wins this snazzy easy-to-enter contest! So enter! Just leave a comment below. Any comment! And if you would like one and don't win one, you can order one here.
Keep one yourself. And maybe give one as a gift to a child or teen in your life. A diary is a safe place to unload your heart, hone writing skills, and record your life events, unlike some of the current options out there.
And it will become more valuable with time. I promise.
This contest will end at noon on Monday, February 10, 2014 EST. If you wish to enter and have trouble doing so, e-mail me and I will gladly enter for you! rjstrite@gmail.com
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)