Summer Ceremonies

Of all the annual events in the summertime the Ceremony of the First Tomato is my favorite. About four days ago I picked the first ripe tomato from the garden. It was perfect in every way: good color, without a blemish and firmly round to the touch. It was time for the best BLT sandwich you've ever had. I took my best serrated knife and sliced it with the confidence that comes from trust in Mother Nature. I don't like to rush this event. Beaven and I enjoyed our lunch to the fullest. It was magnificent.

I want to savor that moment because I'm about to embark on another summer ceremony not nearly as satisfying. The call to the Air Conditioning repair people.

Almost the minute the van pulled out of the church parking lot taking my man away for a week's mission trip to Mexico our AC crapped out.

Beaven always has a handle on home maintenance. And Air-conditioning is one of his specialties. He's known this field since he was young starting with the year he installed a walk-in cooler for the family bakery. He had just gotten out of the Air Force where he had taken a correspondence course in Air-conditioning and Refrigeration. Then, after he retired. one of the first things he did was take three or four classes in the same subject. Did he intend to get a job as an AC repairman? Heavens, no--he was just interested in how they work. On paper he's an expert. In practice, he's a rabid consummer of summer comfort and knows just what repair company to call to come fix the damned thing and how to tell if they're ripping you off.

So I sit here getting ready to make the phone call solo. I will just have to trust the repairman and write the check by myself.

I worried for a minute about how uncomfortable I would be here in late June without air-conditioning. Then I remembered we have the "guest house." This is a pretty big storage building we bought and converted to sleeping quarters for guests plus a dandy hobby shop for Beaven. We tried to call is a Ham Shack because he's got all his ham radio stuff in there but people thought this meant we were smoking hams in it. So now we call it either the hobby shop or guest house, depending on what we're using it for. But the main thing is that it has a window AC unit.

This week it's my Writer's Grotto. The reason I didn't go on the mission trip is that I've been finishing the book I'm writing on mission. At some point I had to stop going on mission trips long enough to write about them. I moved the laptop out there when it started getting uncomfortable. I ended sleeping out there last night because it is so much cooler than the house. In fact, I may just move out there permanently. It really is a lot cooler than our bedroom since we have so many windows it's impossible to keep cool in the summer and warm in the winter.

My little temporary home is cozy. It's nice and cool. We've insulated it so well that with the windows closed I can't hear the outside world or tell if it day or night. I've been typing my fingers off in there. I had to come into the house to post this blog because I haven't figured out how he's connected to the internet in there.

I gotta go anyway to call the repair people. Wish me luck. The annual Ceremony of the Broken Air-Conditioning can be a bitch if you're not in the right frame of mind. I'll need to find my happy place.

Compassion

If my week had a theme this would have been “Compassion.” First I finished reading “Same Kind of Different As Me.” It’s by Denver Moore and Ron Hall. I won’t tell you about it, that’s what Amazon.com is for, isn’t it? Just buy the book and read it.

One thing I can tell you about the book is that it’s about compassion.

Then Nancy, who writes her own blog— Introduced me to a new love: TED. That stands for Technology Entertainment and Design. This is an annual assemblage of people that started around 1984 to explore those three fields but now grown to many more people interested in not just those three fields but now including innovation and creative thoughts of the world. My kind of folks.

And the person who was highlighted in a speech you can view on-line was Karen Armstrong. She is quite popular nowadays because she’s an expert on the three Abrahamic religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. She has been interviewed a lot since 9/11 because she understands that we all have more in common than we have differences. TED gave her an award in March this year and her acceptance speech is featured on their website. She wanted to talk about Compassion. She manages to distill all three religions down to one common theme, compassion. She says that the Golden Rule is found in each of these religions and, in fact, it pre-dates them all. The Golden Rule goes as far back as Confucius, five centuries before Christ.

Here’s the quote I found from her speech: “In compassion, when we feel with the other we dethrone ourselves from the center of our world and we put another person there.”

All of this is to lead you to what I want you to do this week: Pray for the people in Iowa. The TV is saying that the flooding there this week is the worst natural disaster since Katrina.

When I was in Mississippi helping with the Katrina recovery we had a lot of folks spending time with us while they helped rebuild. And just about the largest group of volunteers came from Iowa. I never could figure it out. Was it that boring to live there that they came to volunteer more than any other state? One week there were so many Iowans that they filled our camp and the rest of their group had to stay at another PDA camp. It was an entire Presbytery sponsored trip from North Central Iowa Presbytery. And they worked their hearts out. This was their 4th or fifth visit to help and when they left they said they’d see us again in six months. Maybe it wasn’t boredom. Maybe it was compassion.

They were a quiet bunch, unlike most Texans. If a Texan is anywhere nearby you usually know it. Maybe it just seems that way because I’m from Texas. But these folks from Iowa were such a low-key bunch of folks I kept thinking they were bland and unremarkable. Now I realize what I perceived as bland was only their compassion. They had dethroned themselves from the center of the world and put their friends in Mississippi in that place.

Please remember them in your prayers this week. I anticipate PDA will offer other ways you can help. If you can, make a financial donation to their recovery. Maybe we will be able to take a bunch of folks from Mississippi to go to Iowa to show compassion.

Grand Camp and Wedding Tips

Greetings from Grand Camp! One week every summer our granddaughters come for the week. We always start with a short business meeting around the kitchen table. This is when we write out a list of everything we intend to do.

So far we have 11 things on the list. They range from building a miniature golf course to learning the Ten Commandments. The last one is their Sunday School class assignment, not my idea. We got them signed up for swimming lessons. They’ve already had a water balloon fight and made something out of paper mache’. And the miniature golf course got a lot more miniature when they decided on only two holes. The rest of the list is fairly easy; things like bowling and going to Chuck E Cheese.

In other generation-bridging events this past week I went into Garland early Saturday to help Elizabeth give a bridal luncheon. Emily and I worked in the background as cooks/maids so Elizabeth could concentrate on being the perfect hostess. Somewhere between the Shrimp Puffs and the pita bread crisps we realized we really work well together. And it was nice to help Elizabeth out for a change—it’s usually the other way around. Then that night we went to see Sex and the City followed by dinner. A great day, no?

I fell in love with one of the minor songs from the movie and ended up ordering the whole soundtrack when I couldn’t get the single of “Auld Lang Syne.” The version sung in the movie is in a Scottish dialect, the way it is supposed to be sung. If you wait until the end of the movie like we did and check out the music credits, it gives the name of the songwriter as “Robert Burns.” Yes, the poet. I guess it proves what an absolute nerd I am but I love the way this song is sung. But I also loved the movie so I guess I’m not an uptight nerd. Let me reassure anyone who loved the TV show that the movie does not disappoint. It was perfect.

Since the kids are here underfoot I won't have time to write anything very profound so I’m going to punt today and leave you with one of my oldest essays. I wrote it after Emily got married. I was quite the expert by then. If you ever need wedding advice, just ask me.--

Neither one of my girls got married in June. Instead, they got married within a five month time span. This made it a lot easier to plan Emily’s wedding since Elizabeth’s had been so recent. All we had to do was call the florist, photographer, caterer and basically ask for what we had done a mere five months prior. In some cases we learned valuable lessons the first time around and made a few changes. But in some case we didn’t learn a damned thing and made the same stupid mistake all over again. I offer wisdom we learned the hard way. I guess if we had a third daughter we’d have the perfect wedding. Yeah, right.

Wedding Tips
· Brides: Let your mother run the show. She’s waited all your life for this occasion, since the moment of your birth. She started planning this wedding the day she brought you home from the hospital. Your name was probably chosen based on how it would look on the invitation
· Mothers: Let your daughter run the show. She’s read about a billion brides magazines and knows what she wants--she wants the wedding just like the one the millionaire on Long Island had last spring with the string quartet and the orchid canopy. But, she’s also probably helping to pay for it and it’s her money.
· Men: Let the women run the show. Your job is to show up in the rented tux and keep your mouth shut. If you possibly can, try to look interested. If not, avoid giving any kind of negative opinion. You have no idea what you’re talking about and nobody really cares what you think. How many weddings have you planned?
· Relax. Somebody, sometime, will screw up. Expect it. Accept it. Apologize, if needed. Move on.
· Allot a certain number of nervous breakdowns. Keep track of them. Pace yourself so you don’t use them all up before the big day.
· Try not to let nervous breakdowns upset you. If the bride wants to throw the ice cream sandwich across the room because she’s late to go taste the cake, just smile and point out that she appears a little upset. You might tell her gently “This looks like you may be having one of your 10 allotted breakdowns, dear.” But don’t say anything else.
· Invite everybody you can think of. It’s better to be accused of trolling for gifts than accused of being a snob.
· Be kind to your feet. Wear tennis shoes as much as you can, even up to 15 minutes before the ceremony is permissible. (Try not to appear in public like this, however).
· Avoid heavy medications and/or alcohol. You want to be able to remember all this and you certainly don’t want to embarrass anybody.
· Forget about eating at the reception. It won’t happen. Yes, you did pay a lot of money for this food. Plan instead to eat twice as much at the next wedding you attend.
· Put those disposable cameras at the reception tables. It’s the best money spent with the greatest payback. One warning, however: keep them out of the hands of the 9 year old cousin from out of town, otherwise you could spend your money on 86 fuzzy pictures of various food trays, the ice sculpture and the serving guys.
· Have the ceremony recorded some way, either audio or video. Later, when your spouse claims you promised to deliver fresh squeezed orange juice every morning, you will have a record of what you really did say in your vows.
· Have a roll of tape handy at the reception. Make sure each gift has a card firmly attached to it before the cousins start throwing them into the back of the van. Duct tape is not too extreme for this job. It saves you from trying to match up loose cards to gifts a week later after the honeymoon and thanking someone for the wrong gift. After the reception is over, nobody cares what the packages look like anymore. Use the duct tape.
· Look at it this way: The wedding ceremony is really a celebration of two people that have, hopefully, grown into adults. They will be surrounded by the folks who helped raise them and other people who have an interest in their lives; people who are very proud of them. The reception is your way to thank this extended family for being part of all this.
· After it’s all over, sit back the next evening and prop your feet up. Take stock of all that you’ve done: scouts, braces, football games, college and, now, a wedding. You’re through. Go ahead and cry.

Fannie Flamingo Forever

For any of you brave enough to return here after last week’s lame posting (about the dentist, no less) I want to apologize. I’ve been preoccupied with yet another risk. I’ve flirted with the idea of taking all the essays I’ve written since 1999 about mission trips I’ve been on and turning them into a book. Things got serious last year when a publisher literally came up to me in church and told me I could do this.

I’ve been toying with the words like an old familiar doll that you’ve played with until it’s limp and tattered. But once I started seeing it not as my own story but God’s story that gave new weight to it. And when I saw it as another risk to cross off my list, I was freed up to get serious, and if I failed, just grin over it and keep going. There is an overriding certainty that the minute it hits the bookstores I will think of a brilliant paragraph and want to rewrite the whole thing. I’ll never know until I try. I’ve been madly typing for the last 2 or 3 weeks. I think by the time I got to last week's blog postings I just ran out of words. Plus, my hands were sore.

But here you are today back at my blog risking your own precious time and giving me another chance to say something interesting.

So it’s probably time to tell you about how I got my flamingo tattoo.

It could be boiled down to the simple fact that there’s really not much to do in Cleveland. And I was stone cold sober. In fact, my daughters talked me into it.

We were on a family vacation to visit Em and Steve and the girls back when they were living in Ohio. Elizabeth came with Beaven and myself. We went to the Rock and Roll Museum. We took the girls to an amusement park. We even went to a Rib Cook-off. And then we ran out of stuff to do.

Emily and Elizabeth went into town to a mall and somehow passed a billboard advertising tattoos. Emily already had a smallish tattoo of what she hopes is the Chinese character for “shy.” Lord knows what it really says. Neither of us speaks or reads Chinese. I think she got this just minutes after her 18th birthday. She was in the market for another one. And now her sister wanted one, too. So they got off the freeway and went into the shop. Then came back to get me insisting I should join them.

You can imagine my initial reaction. But they had an ace up their sleeves. “Mom, they have one of a flamingo.” I had had a long-standing affection for flamingos by then, falling in love with them at the first church youth group fundraiser. I had written a long series of stories about the first flock. Fannie and her friends brought me many laughs and to tell the truth, my daughters were jealous of her. But they thought it would be just super cool to go get a tattoo with their mom. So I went.

We decided to go in order of who would be most inclined to chicken out so I was first. The minute we walked into the shop we should have turned around and run. It was in the run down part of town in an old building. There was a very dead plant next to where I sat to wait. The guy who did the it was named Scar or Scab or something equally scary. He went to great lengths to explain how they sterilized everything but half-way through I heard a loud string of profanities from the hall, announcing that the autoclave broke again. Did we turn and leave? No. My girls had spent the last week discussing their “gut feelings” and declared they felt in their guts that this would be OK. Over in the corner we saw a stuffed rat. Yes, a stuffed rat. Think about that one for a minute. But they felt in their gut that this would be OK. The guy got a phone call in the middle of everything and proceeded to spit out cusswords beyond what I’d ever heard. The girls’ guts were OK with that. Every clue that spelled disaster in bold capital letters was cast aside after they checked with their inner feelings.

When it came time to actually get the tattoo I knew immediately where I wanted it--on my butt. My favorite flamingo character, Fannie would insist on this, I knew. Plus it would always be covered no matter what I wore. No one would ever know. Except me. Well, yes, Beaven would have to see it the rest of my life, and I had to listen to what he had to say. Surprisingly, he didn’t say much. There’s not much to say when you’re dealing with permanent markings on your butt.

There’s something very freeing about doing something really stupid, something you will have to live with the rest of your life. I have to say that I’ve never regretted it, not a moment. Fannie Flamingo has never let me down. And I now have a reminder of our friendship that will last me the rest of my life. Even beyond, given an good embalming job.