In Acknowledgement

I love writing. 

I’ve loved it since kindergarten when I wrote my first poem (roses are red, violets are blue, teachers are nice and school is fun) and I heard my teacher say I was unique.

She was my favorite teacher.

For a few years in elementary school, I had a pen pal in Japan. Sometimes I even wrote back to her. She wrote beautiful letters to me and enjoyed the ones I wrote so much, she finally had to tell me less was more.

I thought that was so considerate.

In high school I wrote for the campus newspaper.  Our faculty sponsor saw my potential and told me I could write editorials some day. For somebody else’s paper.  I felt special.

And, of course, when my husband was still my fiancé and was away in Germany serving his country, I wrote to him every single day for almost a year and a half.  I mailed him hundreds of letters. I told him what I was thinking and how I was feeling and all of my girlish dreams and what colors I wanted in our kitchen and which songs I was thinking of using at our wedding. He saved every single letter in a box he stored outside in a shed.  If it weren’t for that terrible flood, I could post some excerpts here for your enjoyment, but would you believe they were all eaten by termites?

Talk about bad luck.

So here I am today, writing a blog, grateful to all those people who believed in me.  They’re each so remarkably humble, they begged me not to mention their names in public. Still, someday, if I publish a book, I know they’ll be there to support me just like they always have. My husband's already building a shed where we can store the hundreds of autographed copies I'll have on hand.

Silent partners.  I owe everything to them.


Photo courtesy of Scott Hamlin's photostream
http://www.flickr.com/photos/scotthamlin/7207331332/

#Football Fan Fail#

Football is weird.  Baseball is not. Baseball is hot dogs and peanuts and popcorn and America. Football is beer. And Cheetos.  Big deal. Baseball makes sense.  You get three chances to hit the ball and if you mess up, you go to the end of the line and wait for another turn. That’s a life lesson right there. In football, if you’re anywhere near the ball, you get mauled by a gang of millionaires in tights. Who want to kill you. Or maim you. And score points for doing it. That should earn them life without parole.

Baseball is logical. A pitcher is called a pitcher because he pitches the ball to a batter whose job is to hit the ball with a bat.  See?  Logical.  Football makes so little sense, when the game crossed the Pond to England, even the Queen couldn’t figure it out.  She thought it was another name for soccer.

My husband enjoys all kinds of sports, but he loves football, where the goal is to make it to a big game in January and then go to Disneyland. I’ve sat on the couch beside him and tried to take football lessons so maybe we could both enjoy this love of tackling and sacking and neck breaking. I heard husbands like their wives to share their interests. It’s going pretty slow.

So far I’ve figured out that when there’s two minutes left in a quarter, it’ll be another twenty minutes before those two minutes are up. I know a touchdown scores six points and a field goal scores three and you need time-outs to stop the clock, and if the other team used all theirs up and your team has control of the ball at the end of the fourth quarter, all your guys can just stand around talking while the two minutes left on the clock actually runs out in two minutes and the coach takes a shower in Gatorade.

My husband knows a lot about football teams. But the team he loves with all his heart is a college team that doesn’t even get to go to the Super Bowl. Ever. He is a University of Florida Gators fan.  I don’t know why. He didn’t go to college there. He’s from Florida where there’s another big university with a team called the Seminoles, but he despises them. I think it’s because he likes alligators. If the Seminoles had chosen a gator as their mascot, I think he’d be a Seminoles fan.

A few years ago, our son moved away from home to go to school in Kentucky where people have blue blood. That doesn’t mean they’re socialites or rich, unless they live in Lexington on a horse farm. It means it’s a state law that you have to like love the University of Kentucky Wildcats and dress in blue.  But our son was born in Florida and is a fan of his father, so he holds UK fans in low regard and supports the orange and blue of the Florida Gators.

This has made him one or two friends. But they’re loyal friends and those are the best kind.

One year we thought it would be funny to send our son an alligator head—the kind they sell legally in tourist shops along Florida interstates - I thought I should explain that clearly. We covered it in bubble wrap and mailed it to him for a joke. But he thought it was cool and put it on the television as a decoration. Boys do things like that. Suddenly we began to notice that the Florida Gators were winning a lot more games. And our son noticed that every time he put the gator head on the TV during a game, whether he watched it or not, the Gators won. When he forgot to put it up there, they lost.

Now I think our son and his magical gator head should be recognized by the Gators' coach as a state hero, even if he does reside in the state of Kentucky. That makes him, like, an undercover agent and a superhero.  Unfortunately, the Gators had a losing streak a couple of years in a row and we found out that the whole thing started when our son’s dog got hold of the gator head and ate it for breakfast. If he’d just told us sooner, the Gators might have at least gotten an honorable mention at the Super Bowl.

Eventually, we took care of the problem. It’s mighty hard to buy a gator head out here in Arizona, so the Florida Gators just had to tough it out for a while until we took a driving trip down South. But the first time we stopped for gas in north Florida and saw gator heads for sale on the counter next to the moon pies and license plates, we bought two of them—one for our son and one for my husband.

Now the Gators are in recovery mode. It’s taken two gator heads on two televisions to help get them back on their feet again but we’re committed to the effort.  I still think baseball makes more sense than football and I’ll always jump at the chance to go see our Arizona team play in person.  But I know I’ll never be the kind of genuine fan my husband and son are.  You can’t really blame me, though.

I refuse to put a diamondback rattler on my television set so the Yankees can learn a lesson in humility.

That’s just stupid.

A Necessary Proclamation

WHEREAS, modern science has underestimated the public health threat of annual Common Colds and;

WHEREAS, there is no fundraising organization dedicated to the annihilation of the Common Cold and;

WHEREAS, antibiotics are ineffective against the virus referred to as the Common Cold, else they would be named antivirotics and;

WHEREAS, physicians never report personally contracting the Common Cold despite daily contact with dozens of donors and;

WHEREAS, evidence of the perfection of the immune system of physicians has been suppressed from the Common Public, lending itself to suspicion that either

1.      the Common Cold is a financial friend to physicians or

2.      physicians are immune to the Rhinovirus because they are, in actuality, space aliens and; 

WHEREAS, it is offensive to humans to have their personal noses compared to a rhinoceros and;

WHEREAS, the Rhinovirus has set up habitation in the primary legal residence of the undersigned who shall be known hereafter as the Wife and the Husband and;

WHEREAS, the only certainty in life is death and taxes and there is no cure for either one and;

WHEREAS, science and physicians and antibiotics and death and taxes have been proven to be considered as helpful advice for those with inflamed rhinos;


BE IT RESOLVED, 

That, in an effort to combat the Common Cold by the Wife and by the Husband and thereby increase the stock holdings of companies with substantial interest in perpetuating the Rhinovirus, Robitussin and Kleenex,  

AND as Ayr Saline Spray and Ricola and Ibuprofen are recognized for their efforts to destroy both the Rhinovirus and the personal savings account of the Wife and the Husband;  be it further

RESOLVED, that the offspring of the Wife and the Husband should be instructed to invest in the stock market with special attention to the purchase of stock in the aforementioned pharmaceutical companies; 


ELSE, there should be no reasonable expectation of an inheritance in the natural passing of the Wife and the Husband as a consequence of having contracted the Common Cold. 




THEREFORE, it is hereto proclaimed that  

RHINO DAY 2018, January 8th, be recognized as a day when the Wife and the Husband have had enough of the Rhinovirus and further declare it to be fair game.

In Perpetuity. 
Amen.                
         

Photo courtesy of: http://www.flickr.com/photos/nicolaavery/4907205936/in/photostream/

1975

1975. 

I was seventeen. He was older. If he hadn’t joined the Air Force to see the world, we never would have met. It’s twenty-two hundred miles from Phoenix to Sarasota, and desert dwellers don’t thrive in humidity.  I sat at the piano playing the hymns of my childhood while the congregation sang and the quiet airman joined in. He wasn’t like the others. I wasn’t like the girls he’d dated.  It seemed an unlikely match made in heaven. 

Those are the best.

I wasn’t looking for marriage. Neither was he. But from June when we first said hello to the following April when we both said good-bye, we fell hard. He was everything I knew I would love in a man. He called me Sonserai, his bright morning star. He also called me The Kid, because I was. I had another year of school to finish. He owed nearly two years to the military when they gave him orders for Germany.

I still remember where we were when I first heard that song.  John Denver was the new folk favorite and his lyrics mirrored many of our feelings.  “My Sweet Lady, do the tears belong to me, Did you think our time together was all gone?” was a dream of our someday life together and the approaching pain of a long separation. “Follow Me where I go, what I do and who I know, Make it part of you to be a part of me,” was sung joyfully the next fall at our wedding.

But two weeks before he had to report to his next base, we sat in a steakhouse with friends sharing a going away dinner.  A melancholy song began to play over the speakers and my heart connected to the sentiment before I could prevent the falling tears.  “All my bags are packed, I’m ready to go . . .already I’m so lonesome I could cry,” the folk singer mourned. “So kiss me and smile for me, tell me that you’ll wait for me, hold me like you’ll never let me go.  I’m leaving on a jet plane, don’t know when I’ll be back again, oh babe, I hate to go.”

It’s been over thirty-six years since he came back and those words still make me cry. Sixteen months apart because I was a year too young. But the separation demanded truth from us and, by the time he was discharged by the military, we gained a confidence in our relationship that has seen us through many storms on the level of that separation. 

It wasn’t the age of the internet or cell phones or skype.  We had to do virtual dating, otherwise known as snail mail, with three or four sneaky phone calls thrown in, courtesy of his Air Force buddies who worked in Communication on the base.  Every day we wrote about our thoughts and dreams and counted down the days til we’d be together again. 

And when I sent out the wedding invitations, I gave one of them to the mailman. If not for the postal service, who knows what would have become of us.  I still buy stamps out of gratitude.

To this day I don’t understand how John Denver was able to garner our hopes and dreams and heartache into the lyrics that made him famous. I’m not sure why the marriage of a girl many thought was too young to a man some thought was too old for her has turned out to be so enduring. Maybe there’s no way to explain a lasting love. We just keep turning to each other for love and hope and comfort, filling one another’s senses.

"Like a night in the forest, like the mountains in springtime, like a walk in the rain, like a storm in the desert, like a sleepy blue ocean. . .”

Like 1975.


(Thanks to Liz Shaw for today's inspiration from www.TheWritingReader.com, "Leaving On A Jet Plane.") 

Frozen Fish

At 6:30 a.m. MST the outside temperature on our back porch in San Tan Valley, Arizona, was 26 degrees. 

Did you see that? T-w-e-n-t-y-s-i-x.  I haven’t seen twenty-six in twenty-eight years.  Never mind doing the math—it’s none of your business how old I am.

At 10:30 a.m. MST it was 38 degrees Fahrenheit, and at 3:00 p.m. we reached a record low high of 44.  F-o-r-t-y-f-o-u-r.  And that is the reason my sweetie and I sat on the sofa like frozen slugs on this frigid day, watching documentaries on TV about Alaska.

It made us feel warmer.

I learned about moose (mise?), glaciers, and brain dead adventurers who think it’s fun to risk life and limb on a little seven-mile stroll up frozen Mt. Denali.  I found out mises grow brand new antlers once a year and promptly tear them up fighting other male moose for a date with a female only Bullwinkle could love. 

No brain cells there, either. 

I learned that glaciers have fissures and it’s more important to watch where you walk there than it is in a cow pasture.  And I learned that I am blessed to detest the word ‘adventure' because at least it means I didn’t die today on Denali.

So here I sat, hidden under piles of blankets—held captive to the remote controlled by my husband—watching flocks of fish jump in the air straight into the mouths of waiting brown bears. Alaskan fast food, I guess.  I watched a thirty-minute program about the five-year life span of salmon.

And when it was over, I didn’t know whose life had been wasted more—mine or those fish.

Only two out of every fifteen hundred eggs will survive to become salmon. They live and grow and—I  assume—hide a lot for three or four years until they become victims of their own instincts. Then, for no apparent reason, they click their little tailfins together, chant “there’s no place like home,” and begin an illogical ten thousand mile journey upstream all the way back to their hometown.

It’s an adventure that will cost them their life.  

They fight waterfalls and fatigue and hungry, lazy bears.  They even encounter a specialized predator called a salmon shark with an infinite appetite for omega 3’s.  And after nature reduces the surplus population of salmon, if the survivors are clever and strong and lucky enough to make it back to the family homestead alive, they will lay all their eggs in one basket and immediately die.  What a depressing, pointless life.

I was distraught and left with this thought: It sure sucks to be a salmon.

Apparently Alaska presents a hostile environment to man and beast and fish.  But if you’re a shivering slug on a sofa, there seem to be no known predators.  The only risk to my survival at the moment is dying from boredom or heat stroke under all these blankets.

But why take the chance?

Tomorrow I’m swiping the remote.

The Common Cold

There’s a reason we live in the desert.  We can’t handle the cold.  I really want to handle it.  But when the temperature drops below fifty I break out in hives, I think my thyroid goes into hibernation, and I put on three sets of socks. 

It’s been in the thirties for over a week already, and tonight the low is going to be in the teens here.  I don’t know if I’ve ever even seen a teen! When my brother-in-law heard about our approaching natural disaster, he said, “Well, what do you know . . . hell did freeze over.”

And it’s going to be cold all week – highs only in the upper 40’s!  Imagine!!  Only two months ago it was in the 90’s here and now we’re all going to look like the Ice Queen blew through.  Desert dwellers don’t know how to cope with cold.  It beats out the war in Afghanistan on the evening news with warnings to cover all our tender animals and bring the plants in from outside.  Or maybe it’s the other way around – I’m so unfamiliar with this kind of catastrophic preparation.  If there was a heat wave or a dusty haboob coming our way, I’d know just what to do, but this? 

Tomorrow when the sun comes out it’s going to feel like it’s still down – the high is going to be the lowest high in over two whole years!  I’m not sure, but I’m guessing the governor may have to ask the president to declare us a federal disaster area, because you know the snowbirds aren’t going to spend any money here in this frozen wasteland.  They’re gonna all load up their fifth wheels and head someplace warm, like South Dakota. That's what geese do when they start to freeze, right? Head south?

Just when I was starting to believe in global warming, too.  This is going to set science back at least fifty or sixty years – back to before Al Gore invented the internet and found out the ice caps are melting and we’re all going to fry like bacon soon. 

All I know is I could use a little global warming right now – directed right at my frozen feet. Maybe somebody forgot to tell Mother Nature about that inconvenient truth, cuz her thermostat’s set pretty low here in the Valley of the Sun this week.

I hope I remember how whiney I am right now when July comes again this year.  It’s not likely, but it could happen.  After all, tonight hell’s going to freeze over. 

 

(Photo courtesy of Mr T in DC’s photostream) http://www.flickr.com/photos/mr_t_in_dc/3203055447
 

Dirty Windows

“Windows installed new updates.” 

Yes, I know.  Windows also shut down in the middle of the blog I was reading about farts.

“Windows failed to restore” my last session properly.  “What would you like Windows to do now?”  

Don’t tempt me with that question, Windows.

“Windows cannot write your blog for you.”

Windows doesn’t even want me to write my blog. Apparently.

There are many things Windows cannot do.  Windows cannot return me to my place in the middle of the fart story.  Windows can’t recover the words it lost on my blog piece in between auto save and random updates. Windows cannot read my mind—which is a good thing at this moment.  Windows cannot tell me why they didn’t install those updates at 3 a.m. last night when it closed out my browser the last time. Windows cannot apologize for rumytypingdely interrupting my morning reading. 

Windows cannot stop moving my cursor to inappropriate places right in the middle of . . .  ah, geez.  Look what Windows did in the middle of my last paragraph. That could be Word’s fault or even my supersensitive laptop, but I’m blaming Windows. Talk about an attitude.

I think Windows is either female or a dog or a female dog—Windows needs a lot of attention and becomes destructive when I’m not meeting her needs.  I thought Windows was created to serve me, but . . . . STOP highlighting random words from other paragraphs and deleting them while I’m typing!!!

I’m going back to pen and paper.  Windows is going in time out.

I saw that look, Windows.

Don’t mess with me.



(Photo courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/robgiampietro/5298280750/)

O Neti Pot



To the tune of O Tannenbaum/O Christmas Tree - with apologies to its unknown author

O Neti Pot O Neti Pot

How lovely are your waters

O Neti Pot O Neti Pot

Cold germs are lousy squatters

When sinuses refuse to flow

In pain with hope to you I go

O Neti Pot O Neti Pot

How comforting your waters.

O Neti Pot O Neti Pot

You are my help most trusted

O Neti Pot O Neti Pot

When sinuses feel rusted

I turn to you and my best friend

The saline/soda sinus cleanse

O Neti Pot O Neti Pot

This cold will soon be busted.

O Neti Pot O Neti Pot

I’ve come so late to know you

O Neti Pot O Neti Pot

And now so much I owe you

You cleared me up and made me proud

My snoring now is not so loud

O Neti Pot O Neti Pot

Where would I be without you?

Dedicated to the worst cold I've ever had and beaten - good riddance.


(Photo courtesy of www.neti-netti-pot.com)

A Load Of Corn

When I was pregnant with our first child, Rob and I began to learn the importance of spoken words.  We discovered if you tell a child to get down off a stool because “you’re going to fall!”, the kid just might believe you and fall.  Or if you always tell your kid, “you’ll never amount to anything”, he probably won’t.  He could have amounted to something, but instead he believed his parents.  

Parents aren’t always prophetic—sometimes kids just obey commands.

Following that vein, we decided we would never tell our future kids that they were bad or good based on their behavior.  We would tell them they “did a bad thing”—or a great thing—and correct their choices, but we would do our best not to identify them with their behavior.  We were determined to teach them how much God loves them because God loves people, and skip the performance traps of both human nature and, sadly, a lot of pathetic theology.

Enter that poor first kid—the one parents always practice on.  Our son is the first child of two first children, which explains, in part, why we were determined to perfectly teach our kid he didn’t have to be perfect.  Right.  We told him there were consequences for his decisions, but kind of missed the memo where you need to emphasize both good and bad consequences.

Our two-year-old boy burst into the kitchen one morning, full of gratitude and big news.

“Mommy!” he yelled.  “I ran out into the street when Daddy told me not to, but he didn’t consequence on me!” 

#parentfail#

The thing I’ve learned about consequences is this—they occur as a direct result of my choices.  It’s a lot like farming.  I’ve been told.  I don’t actually know how to keep a houseplant alive, but that, too, is a result of my choices.  If I’d just bought a fake one to begin with, I wouldn’t be throwing a perfectly good, but dead, begonia in the trash. 

When a farmer sows corn seed, he knows that, with sun and rain and good soil, somewhere down the road he’ll harvest corn.  A lot of corn with a lot more seed to sow a lot more corn.  He will not harvest tomatoes, no matter how much he loves tomatoes and no matter how much he wishes and hopes for tomatoes.  He will reap exactly what he sows, much later than he sows, and a lot more than he sows.

It’s the natural law of sowing and reaping.  I can choose to be merciful to my kid and overlook a bad choice.  But if I continue to do that without correcting him, I’m pretty much raining sunshine and fertile soil on a future of bad decision making on his part, all with the watering pot of my approval.

I have been shown mercy more times than I can count in my life.  It feels like I’ve been corrected more times than that.  But I am ever aware that my decisions have consequences—good or bad—and that I am the sower of my own field.  The confusing thing to most of us is that we forget that reaping comes much later than sowing with a greater harvest than a tiny little seed.

And if we’ve been sowing some bad stuff, the harvest is going to pretty much suck.

Life lesson for this week: people can forgive, mercy can fall, but a seed sown is a crop you will harvest.

It’s just the law of sowing and reaping.



(Photo courtesy of Wattpublishing's photostream at Flickr.com)
www.WATTAgNet.com

A Hobbit Defense

On second thought, I can relate to Bilbo Baggins. 

The quiet little man with an orderly house who was so private, it caused all the other hobbits in Hobbitville—or whatever—to start gossiping about how antisocial he was becoming. 

I’ve been accused of that.

And then suddenly, adventure was thrust upon him.  Marked on his door without his permission.  Which led to the abandonment of everything that made him feel safe, along with the added benefit of completely depleting his pantry.  That would really irritate me if I’d spent three days collecting the coupons that put all that food there in the first place.

Personally, I really dislike the word adventure.  In our house, it is considered the “A” word, and is banned from all polite conversation.  So I felt really sorry, and a little uncomfortable, for poor Bilbo when he was first accused by his friends of being a selfish hermit, and then criticized by Gandalf’s gang for being a woos.  (Can I say ‘woos’ in a blog? Is that even how you spell it?) 

That’s what you get for trying to be quiet and be yourself.

Interestingly, though, Baggins came around, chiefly because the overly-tall wizard had good instincts and believed there was a courageous hero buried deep in the heart of the short, non-dwarf.

The truth is, as the story illustrates, there is a yearning in all of us to fight a great battle—a noble, important battle for a life or death cause. But it’s dangerous.  There’s no guarantee we’ll come out alive and return home to our chair and slippers. And, in my case, there’s no guarantee the journey would involve a big enough supply of chocolate. 

As Bilbo pointed out to the hungry dwarves who trashed his kitchen, he had a home and was content to hang out there.  The dwarves were nomadic and could understand neither his point of view nor the price he was being asked to pay to journey with them on a great adven . . . .well, you know, that word. But I understand.  I have a home.  I have a family.  And when life marks a challenge on the door of my life, I’m usually pretty irritated about the interruption, too.

But the living God lives in me, the triune powerful Father, Son and Holy Spirit, three in One. And there are times when I am forced to believe what God tells me, even if it flies in the face of popular opinion or circumstances.  In those situations, when my choices are to sink or swim, I have come out swinging with the Sword that the Spirit wields, clothed in the supernatural Armor of God.  God always wins.  And He lets me come along to watch Him do it.

It’ll always be that way.  I hope that didn’t ruin the ending for you.  

It's just that I read it in the Book.

Beat your plowshares into swords, and your pruning hooks into spears; let the weak say, I am a warrior!   Joel 3:10 Amp.



(Photo courtesy of erjkprunczyk's photostream at flickr.com)http://www.flickr.com/photos/24842486@N07/8271005722/

Movie Critic At Large

Oh, I could make so many people upset with me.

I’m not sure it’s worth it just to keep up with that blog challenge and put something up today.  I mean, I have friends on facebook who might hunt me down after they hear what I have to say.  So before you read any further, I have to warn you.

You might not like what I’m about to tell you.

Okay, fine. I saw The Hobbit today and if you’re wondering what I thought of it, here goes.  I thought it was . . . noisy.

Now, it’s not like I don’t know the story.  As a matter of fact, when Rob and I started dating, the first gift he ever gave me was a paperback copy of Tolkien’s classic.  I was sixteen, I’d never heard of Tolkien, and I wasn’t a big fan of fantasy books.  But I read it because my boyfriend gave it to me.  And then I decided to still date the guy who thought a book about furry-footed hole dwellers would change my life. 

I know quality when I see it.

Today, thirty-eight years later, my former boyfriend and I sat through three hours of slobbery orks, grudge holding dwarves, minimally magical wizardry, and stunning scenery.  I liked all their Scottish accents.  I thought the one mysterious woman was beautiful.  But overall, it was just noisy.  It also had no ending.  Now I’m going to have to sit through another six hours spread out over the next two years before we find out that Bilbo develops a dangerous addiction to that golden ring and Frodo steps in to save the day.  I can hardly wait.

I hope that didn’t ruin the ending for you, but I did warn you.

I told you I read the book.

(Photo courtesy of Xadrian’s photostream, Flickr.com)

http://www.flickr.com/photos/xadrian/7930303196/

The Gift Of Christmas

“It’s midnight.  Happy New Year, baby,” I told my darlin’, and he took me in his arms and kissed me.  And then I started crying. 

Never have I been so ready to retire a year as 2012.  Never have I looked so forward to a new one as to 2013.  We need a better year than the one whose calendar just ended.

It was January one year ago that the call came.  My sister-in-law asked if my husband was home.  She had news for both of us about my father-in-law.  And as I hung up the phone, I prophesied truth out loud, and alone.

“Rough road ahead,” I said with a sinking heart.

I didn’t know the half of it.  Before the year was over, we made four trips to see his dying father.  The final journey was the one no one ever hopes to make, as we said our last goodbyes.

One short year—the longest of my life. 

But children—what pure hearts they have.  No wonder Jesus said none of us will enter His kingdom unless we become children again.  On Christmas day two weeks ago, we celebrated with our daughter and her family a few miles from our own home.  With Christmas presents unwrapped and dinner demolished, we set up the computer and called my mother-in-law to send her our love via skype.  We chatted and laughed as the little ones hammed it up in front of the camera. And then my granddaughter—the four-year-old who prayed for her Pap throughout his long illness—spoke to the heart of the matter.

“Mam,” she began, her mind wondering grown-up things, “we prayed today for your peace and comfort.  Do you miss Pap?” she questioned.

We waited and watched as her great-grandmother gently answered her on this first-ever Christmas without her husband of sixty years.

“Yes, I do,” she replied, “and I do feel peace and comfort,” she finished.

Suddenly no one else was in the room but this sweet little granddaughter and her Mam.

“I feel sad that he died.  Are you sad?” she continued.

“Yes, I am sad,” came her grandmother’s reply.

“Well, I think he’s saving a place for us,” Allie told her grandmother, and her Mam smiled.  “I think he and Jesus are having fun,” Allie concluded.  “Guess what I got for Christmas!” she said next, and the conversation was finished as soon as it began.  The innocence of a child and the love of her great-grandmother connected in an honest moment of comfort for everyone.

At the end of a long, sad year, when the loss of a father overshadowed the birth of a Child, the love of another child returned joy to grieving hearts.

It was the gift of Christmas.

What A Card

Of all the ways I like to waste time, playing cards is my favorite.  Growing up in a trailer park in California like I did meant there wasn’t much for a kid to do. So in the fourth grade when some army brats moved in on the row behind mine, they invited me over to play some serious cards—War.  Then we sat on their front porch for hours while they taught me to shuffle and bridge a deck. 

Those eight-year-old girls changed my life.

I was already pretty good at Fish and Old Maid.  But they taught me to play a mean game of Rummy, as well. For a while, those were the sum total of my gambling vices, except I never bet any money when I played. We were Baptist and didn’t believe in it.  I was just betting I could win.

And that’s my favorite part of playing cards—being competitive.  It’s the only place you’ll ever see my aggressive side, unless you happen to get in my way on the freeway and then I just want you to know—you had it coming.  I’m not a mean card player either.  If I’m losing, I might make rude comments and suggest that my opponents have no scruples and no skill, but that doesn’t make me a poor loser. 

That makes me a big mouth.

Playing cards without money is great therapy, in my opinion.  You can get out all your frustrations in one short losing hand and a couple of displays of poor sportsmanship, put all the cards back in the box when the wrong team wins, and laugh over dessert with the same people you wanted to strangle just five minutes earlier. Nobody's broke, no one gets hurt and you all practice tolerance. It’s a politically correct pastime.

Cards level the playing field.  Don’t you agree that the best way to get to know people is to play Hearts with them?  You might think your husband is easy to read, but just let him run the cards and heartlessly saddle you with twenty-six undeserved points, and suddenly you start to wonder if he ever meant all those things he wrote in your Valentine’s Day cards. 

Okay, maybe that’s a bad example.

I just think you really get to see people being themselves when you all sit around a table playing Penochle or maybe Hand and Foot.  There’s a lot of good natured kidding that goes on and if the other players aren’t too sensitive, everybody knows the insults flying back and forth are just a friendly way of telling people you think they’re fun to hang out with. 

It can be a real confidence builder when you stop and think about it.

And cards are educational, too.  Our kids learned complex math skills during raucous rounds of Cribbage at our house.  To this day, when they shop at hardware stores, they sort through screws by counting fifteen two, fifteen four and a pair for six.

When I look back on my extensive life, I think I owe a lot to a deck of cards.  Counting cards improved my memory, Euchre taught me to read other people’s minds, and learning how to short suit myself taught me to be logical.  And don't forget about the importance of being a team player.  It takes two brilliant women to gang up on overconfident husbands and beat them at their own game, you know.

So when the time comes for my children to choose the nursing home I’ll wind up living in, I won’t hold a grudge just because they refuse to take me in and store me in their attic.  As long as there’s a Euchre table waiting for me in the dining room there, I’ll think I died and went to heaven. All I’ll need is three other geriatric gamers who can hold their own against a gray-haired card shark masquerading as an old lady.

After all, living out your final days in an assisted care home isn’t the worst fate a person could experience.  I'll just have to remember what I’ve learned by maintaining my perfect losing streak in Hearts.

Play the cards you’re dealt.

(Photo courtesy of FieZero's photostream)
http://www.flickr.com/photos/fiezero/4267963765/

Language of the Heart

Girlish screams and toddler giggles fill the living room where a collection of cushions, upended on the floor, have been turned into a shadowy cavern. Intently staring from the corner, a wild animal stalks his prey, and then roars at the two sisters who taunt him from the safety of their cushion cave. Suddenly, the curly blonde emerges and streaks past the waiting predator, misjudging the distance between them. His long legs grab her and snap shut, trapping her as though he were an alligator. But she’s not afraid—heroic and brave, she knows what to do.

“Calf Rope!” she yells, and the wild animal grumbles, releasing her reluctantly. As she runs back to where her sister still hides in safety, I trespass on the adventure.

“What’s a caffrobe?” I ask my son-in-law.

Every night at bedtime, my granddaughters ask their daddy for one of his adventure stories where the two of them are the stars. Princesses or fairies, Allie and Juliet are always the protagonists, while the role of antagonists is filled in every tale by the mandatory lion and snake. No matter whether the girls are floating helplessly towards Africa in a hot air balloon or lost in the woods, BoBo the Monkey always shows up to rescue them from their slithering and roaring archenemies. And if they’re ever trapped, yelling “Calf Rope!” is almost more powerful than BoBo.

We love stories, don’t we?

Besides entertaining us, stories persuade and motivate us by appealing to our emotions and stirring up empathy. In his book, Epic, John Eldredge writes that “story is the language of the heart,” and “sheds light on our lives.” How much would it help in our relationships with others if we knew their stories? Not their favorite fairy tale or adventure book, but the twists and turns of their own personal plots that have made them who they are today.  We seem to stumble upon others partway through their own life-novels, several chapters into their story, and frantically try to fill in the missing elements so we can understand what’s happening now. But unless we’re ready to listen with our hearts to the story they feel safe enough to share, we’ll never feel empathy for the person whose wounds are kept hidden behind their self-protective armor.

In J.R.R.Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, Sam the gardener asked Frodo, “I wonder what sort of tale we’ve fallen into?” It’s a rare friend who will listen patiently to our story and help us make sense of the tales we’ve each fallen into. Most of the time, we’re too busy avoiding the question in our own lives to help someone else understand theirs. Or worse, we’re too quick to judge without knowing the facts.

Maybe we need our own BoBo to remind us there’s a way out when we feel trapped. But first we need to be someone who listens.

Foot Fetish

I just read on Facebook that women spend two percent of their lives trying to figure out where the bruises on their legs come from.  I know where mine come from.

Tripping over the furniture I just kicked with my toes.

I’ve been walking for most of my life, and I’m pretty good at it.  Professional, even.  But my feet are always tripping me up.  They’re traitors—non-conformists in every way you could imagine.  First of all, they’re large. Wide. And blind, apparently. They have absolutely no idea how much danger they’re in most of the time.  I’ve lost so many toenails kicking things in the dark, my pedicures are covered by insurance now. And I have this little toe at the end of both my feet—twins—with practically non-existent toenails.  They’re short and squatty, and when they stare back at me my toes look like they’re squinting. 

I was thirty-five years old before I ever even painted them with nail polish.  Why would I put color on something I didn’t want anyone to look at? I always wanted to have cute, pretty feet. As vain as that sounds, the truth is I dreamed of wearing skinny sandals where my feet didn’t hang over the sides.  And I wanted to buy a pair of heels that looked as cute in my size as they did in the shelf sample which could only fit a ten-year-old.

But there’s no liposuction for feet.  And since foot binding was completely out of the question, I finally just forgave my feet for not being cute and started wearing flower art on my big toes anyway. At least the flowers were cute. Then I bought a lot of sandals. 

That’s when the trouble started.

I started kicking things for no logical reason.  Bedposts. Otttomans. The dog. But the worst offenders were grocery store shopping carts.  You know those tiny little wheels that aren’t far enough away from innocent toes? Wow. Give one of those a piece of your mind and half of your toenail, and it’ll teach you to stop racing to cut people off in checkout lines.

My daughter tried to help me out one Christmas.  She and I used to have an ugly slipper competition where we gave each other homemade slippers that won only if they were hideous.  She took the trophy every single year because the judging was rigged—my husband and son always voted for her entries instead of mine. But one year even I voted her slippers the winner.  She made me a pair that looked like little bumpered cars to protect my toes in the dark. 

It was so thoughtful I bawled like a baby.

These days I’m a lot more conscious of where my feet are and where they shouldn’t be.  I don’t let them near vagrant table legs. I wear tennis shoes in the grocery store. I keep them away from the dog. And I’m sporting a new kind of sandal with bumpers on the front.  I’ve thought of just about everything to keep my feet happy and healthy, if not cute.

Now if I can just learn to keep them out of my mouth. 

Photo courtesy of Neuro74’s photostream at flickr.com  (http://www.flickr.com/photos/neuro74/3495826955/)