Re-Drawing the Calendar

Whoever came up with this calendar was a real bozo. It probably was some Roman emperor so I guess he’s dead as a doornail and I’m safe calling him a bozo. You really gotta be careful who you call a bozo nowadays, people get pretty touchy.

At any rate, whichever bozo arranged things this way never had to close out the year end books and return Christmas presents the same week. As a recovering accountant I have always dreamed of re-doing the calendar.

All the holidays are in the wrong month. Like Christmas. I’ve been reading that Jesus wasn’t really born in December. In all probability he was born in the spring when those shepherds were outdoors watching their flocks. Shepherds don’t keep their sheep in open fields in the winter, I guess. Makes sense to me. The December date was picked when early Christians got nervous because the pagans were having a blast celebrating the winter solstice in mid-December and they wanted to have some fun, too. So they promoted Christmas to a major holiday and invented Santa Claus and malls.

Christmas belongs in spring. We’d have to give up snowmen and reindeer pulling sleds. But we could have some great barbecues.

The other advantage of moving Christmas to spring is to get more time for the accountants to get stuff done. We don’t need any fun holidays in December to distract anyone. The accountants need for all the worker bees to be in the office and have their minds on end of the year adjustments and getting the data correct. For myself, when I was working in accounting, I never really minded working on New Years Day. That holiday never meant much to me since we’re not what anybody in their senses would call party animals. I never stayed up late and I never cared about the football games. I actually wanted to come to work on January 1. It was my best day of the year. I was always the only person in the building. I had all the numbers to myself and they couldn’t jump around on me. Plus-- here’s the heavenly side of it—all the year-to-date calculations were so easy on January 1st. Can you imagine anything nicer?

Valentines Day is in wrong place also…strapless dresses to the high school Sweetheart Dance in snow? July 4th in such heat? I say we should get the holidays out of the extreme weather and into times we can really enjoy ourselves. Here’s my suggestions:

January- Let’s turn Martin Luther King Day into something more. Maybe an international brotherhood day when people of different cultures can celebrate our differences and eat each other’s exotic foods. Every holiday has it own food. November and December have turkey. July has hotdogs. Maybe January could have eggrolls, baklava, pizza and fried chicken.

February- I guess we could leave Valentines Day here but it can get pretty icy and all those high school kids are driving to the Sweetheart Dance in the dark and the girls are wearing next to nothing to this dance. What happens if there’s a wreck and she has to stand outside and flag down a ride?

March – Currently, March does not have any holiday. That’s a waste. Move Christmas here. We’ll have more time and better weather.

April- Does anybody really know how we time Easter? I think it has something to do with the moon. I used to think it keyed off Passover (the Last Supper was a Passover meal). But, last year, I think, Passover happened after Easter. I asked all the preachers and Jews I know and nobody had an answer. One word of caution, however: keep it away from April 15. We don’t want anyone traveling out of town when they need to be doing their taxes.

May- only has Mothers Day and Memorial Day. Memorial Day is OK here but it rains a lot in May. Let’s move Mothers Day (see September)

June- nothing here but Fathers Day yet the weather is perfect for picnics. Move Labor Day to June. Maybe we could even move the presidential election to June. June is too great a month to waste on vacations.

July- I propose we eliminate holidays in July and August. The weather is far too horrible then.

Aug- we don’t need any holidays here. The weather is awful. However, my ex-sister-in-law always takes August 8th off work. She declared this her own personal holiday when Nixon resigned and she hasn’t missed a celebration since that year. There’s no reason you couldn’t do it, too.

September- We could move Mothers Day and Fathers Day to September and call it a generic “Cool Parents Day” or “Respected Old People Day”. That way we could celebrate the grandparents who are raising children while the parents serve time in jail.

Oct- Nothing much happens here except for Halloween. The weather in October is far too nice to waste it. We could move another holiday here. Maybe Mothers Day or Fathers Day.

Nov- Keep Thanksgiving in November. We need the fallen leaves to decorate the table.

Dec- we could keep this month free by moving Christmas to March. People could use the entire month to balance their checkbooks. Or take some time to learn how to cook Baklava.

Now, these changes are only a start. Send me your suggestions and we’ll consider them. I say 2006 is the year we re-vamp the calendar to make some sense. It’s time for a few well-considered changes. I’ll admit I haven’t put too much thought into this but someone needs to. Our calendar is a mess.

Christmas Colds

It’s time for my annual Christmas Cold. The few times I’ve gone to the doctor for this, they would always refer to it as the common cold. I always take exception to the word “common.” I never feel like the cold I have is common. Indeed, it always the worst cold in the world; it’s the one that will kill an elephant, it could destroy entire civilizations and render armies helpless. It is the Cold From Hell, the Mother of all Colds, the Queen Cold. It is anything but common.

And I know where I get it: Christmas shopping. I’m walking around a crowded Wal-Mart, innocently pushing my cart, watching women scream at their kids, doing my best to stimulate the American economy and all these people are BREATHING on me! I considered wearing a surgical mask and maybe even gloves to create a barrier from germs. I decided I would look too much like Michael Jackson so I dropped the idea. I open the restroom doors with my elbows, hands held high like I’m going into surgery.

There is no time in the year that it’s worse to have a cold than Christmas. There’s all that shopping, cooking and cleaning. And all those distant relatives to be NICE to. And, at Christmastime, even your own family expects you to be nice to them. Talk about an energy sapping event. And how do you feel? Like a walking corpse. Like a mutilated and rotting, walking corpse. Your head feels like a block of concrete and weighs a ton. Your eyes itch and your nose burns. Moving hurts, sitting still hurts. Breathing hurts. Swallowing, coughing, bending hurts. Watching TV hurts.

So what do you do? You run right back to the store where all those people who infected you to start with are and you line up to buy medicine. Except you don’t know what to buy because there are 12 billion choices and you know deep in your heart that none of them will actually work. But, you pick out about five of them anyway and throw them in the basket. You load up on chicken soup, Seven Up and popsicles; cold season is the one time of the year a grownup can buy popsicles guilt-free. Then you add any home remedy your mother ever used, like Mentholatum. (Actually, Mentholatum works wonders. The smell your body emits after a good rub down with this stuff will announce to the world that you are seriously dying and get you a modicum of sympathy. Or, at least, a clear walking path) You get throat drops and cough drops. Aspirin, Alka-Seltzer, eye drops. Five boxes of Kleenex.

Then, when you get to the checker and unload this basket full of enough drugs to cure Finland, the checker says in a cheery voice that “It looks like you have a cold.” So you sneeze on her and hope she gets it. Immediately the store intercom begins a recording of “Peace on Earth, Good Will to Man.”

Out of the Mystery Comes the Magic

I’ve been trying to figure out this Christmas thing for years. It’s easy enough to separate it into three distinct holidays, neither one related to the other. There’s the Celebration of the American Economy with an orgasmic frenzy of buying gifts and expecting gifts. There’s the Great Family Reunion when people are drawn to spend time with the folks they grew up with whether they actually like them or not. And then there’s the Celebration of God’s gift of a Messiah to humanity. The first 2 are easy to grasp but it’s the last one I am still trying to figure out.

The Celebration of the American Economy comes right at the end of the year when it’s convenient for the boss to give you a little extra bonus for the year’s work. The newspapers keep track of whether this is a good year for the stores or a bad one. And if you haven’t bought enough you feel like a traitor. People spend money they don’t have on things nobody needs.

This new generation- the one they call “X,” is so computer oriented that I started getting emails from my kids with excel spreadsheets of their Christmas requests. My step-mother came to the rescue a few years ago when she decreed that she already had everything in the world she needed and so did we; she donated money to a charity instead and suggested we do the same. It changed our Christmases forever. Now, instead of checking things blandly off our spreadsheet there is the mystery of guessing which charity we “got.” Our family puts a lot of thought and imagination into these contributions. One year Elizabeth gave Beaven a donation to breast cancer research. What in the world does a man care about breast cancer research? Elizabeth calmly pointed out that Beaven has five females that he couldn’t live without.

The church is at it’s best at times like Christmas. In our congregation where we think of each other as family it’s fun to see all the grown up kids return home. And you can’t beat the drama of a church at Christmas. Last year they had a fantastic tableau of the Nativity scene. We even had a real baby Jesus. And Baby Jesus was just as quiet and angelic as they come. The whole congregation was in awe at the sight of him lying there so peacefully with his parents. Then the shepherds came up the aisle to escort the children up to see the baby Jesus. I caught my breath to see Evan Gray dressed as a shepherd. The last time I had seen him was when he returned from Iraq. Evan had been part of the initial invasion, driving into Baghdad in a convoy carrying a shoulder mounted missile launcher. You just gotta appreciate God’s sense of humor in that one. God has given humans the ability to go from invading army to humble shepherd in the blink of an eye.

That same Christmas Eve they passed out candles. Since this was billed as the “Children’s” service we thought nothing of giving each grandchild their own candle. Neither girl, ages 3 and 5 last year, had much experience with candles beyond birthday cakes. I watched Sarah waving her candle around in the excitement of it all and worried about her setting fire to the hairdo in front of us. I was calculating how much hairspray the girl had on and how flammable it was when Sarah spilled hot wax on herself. She let out such a scream of surprise and pain that I’m sure it carried all the way over to the Baptist church across the street. Somehow, she must have jerked her candle when it happened and threw some of the hot wax over to her sister because three seconds later Elisabeth screamed out even louder, a scream for the Methodists two blocks down. These were screams that no amount of hushing or shushing was going to penetrate. So Steve took them out of the sanctuary just as the organist started “Silent Night”. Such are the memories that make family lore. But I digress.

I readily confess that the Messiah/Savior/Emmanuel part of Christmas is a mystery to me. I’ve spent considerable thought trying to figure it out and it just plain old doesn’t make any sense. The whole idea of God sending a human to take the heat for my sins is so incredible—not that I’m ungrateful, mind you. But it just seems so illogical and inefficient. Couldn’t God have sent a detailed memo instead?

And what’s worse, it doesn’t seem to be working. We’re at a place in our world where folks aren’t getting along. I guess we never have. I don’t understand that either—and it frankly makes me pretty mad that we can’t. Now suddenly God just expects me to just forget about all that and be lighthearted because he sent this Jesus guy and it’s all going to work out. This thing just doesn’t make sense any way I look at it.

But, of course, I’m not supposed to use logic. That’s why we call it Faith. Christmas is the time we suspend logic and go in faith. In the middle of this mystery we are presented with magic so profound that we have to accept it. It’s a gut feeling. Christmas has to be celebrated from your instincts; you never make it if you put too much thought into it. Children who have never seen snow or reindeer suspend their experience and believe. We don’t understand mystery or magic either one. But the magic helps me accept the mystery. I had a young friend tell me once that there is no such thing as magic. But what else would you call it if not magic? When the sights and smells and sounds bring an emotion that you can’t describe. When the music of Christmas-- the harp, the zimbelstern, the bells, the French horn, seep into the very pores of your skin and travel through your heart all the way to your toes and bring tears to your eyes.

Out of the mystery comes the magic. I can’t explain it any better than that. It doesn’t really explain much but somehow it’s enough for me.

Getting ready for Christmas

Decorating for Christmas was interesting this year. Since we’ve moved into a smaller house I had to make some hard decisions on how to fit everything in. Like most people we’ve acquired Christmas decorations that have become part of the family. And, even if you only see them for a few weeks a year, they’re such a part of the season that you can’t imagine a Christmas without them. I gave some things to the kids and had to decide which others to keep or store. Do I still set out Fluffy’s bowl? The dog died 15 years ago but I continued to set her Snoopy dish under the table and hang her collar on the tree. We always enjoyed having Fluffy with us in spirit at Christmas. Hearing her collar jingle brought her back to us again for the holidays. She was our favorite of all the dogs we’ve had. She was infinitely patient with the girls while they were growing up. It wasn’t unusual to see Fluffy walk into the living room wearing their underpants on her head, a quiet sigh in her eyes. But now we have a whole herd of dogs and it’s time to move on. I sent the Snoopy bowl home with Emily.

The two decorations I couldn’t give up were the tin toy horse that was my Daddy’s when he was a boy. When my step-mother gave it to me she said it had never missed a Christmas with us and it never will. At the other end of my father’s lifespan is a ceramic pieta of Mary holding Jesus. My grandmother made for him when she was in a nursing home at the end of her life. The idea of Grandmother making this craft when she wasn’t a “crafty” woman and making it for her son always touched me.

But my favorite decoration to set out is always the Nativity Scene. It’s grown a little each year as we add new pieces to the crowd visiting the baby Jesus. It can’t compare to the elegant ceramic one the church sets out in the Narthex each Advent.

No, our nativity set at home is a humble assortment of several sets with missing pieces all combined into one. We’ve ended up with several angels of all sizes and shapes. It’s a little old and worn; after all, it’s survived two little girls. A lot of the delicate parts of the animals are broken. A couple of camel legs and most of the lambs’ limbs are gone. The angel’s wings, of course, have suffered also. But I’m not sure I really trust a nativity set with a complete set of angel wings. That usually means that children haven’t been allowed to touch it. We all need to touch the Nativity and make it our own. We need to move the sheep and shepherds around a little bit. We all need to hold the Baby Jesus.

And the snowman in our Nativity is also showing his age. Emily made it in kindergarten almost 30 years ago. He’s made out of some sort of soapflake clay-like concoction. He was white years ago but has turned sort of brown with age. One side of him has a black splotch where an advent candle got too close to him. His nose has ended up nearer his chin than the center of his face. And his head falls off if we move him at all.

Emily is always embarrassed when I bring him out to put in the nativity. She can’t understand why I insist on including him every year. Her main argument is not his appearance; she claims that snowmen do not belong in Nativity scenes.

That’s where she’s wrong. The snowman is us: he’s you and me. I’ve always thought we should include something from our modern day in with the usual ancient characters. We belong there, too. We stand by the shepherds and watch for the Messiah. We’re just as awed and puzzled as the others. Sometimes we’re brown from age and have trouble keeping our heads on tight. But, make no mistake, we’re there alongside Mary and Joseph.

I hope you have a Merry Christmas this year. Don’t forget your snowman.

Our Backwards Thanksgiving

You might notice I missed a week and I will explain.

We had a very backwards Thanksgiving this year. We celebrated by mumbling a few words of generic thanks, eating lots of food and having great family time on November 24th. The real Thanksgiving came a week later.

On the Thursday before-- the regular Thanksgiving-- we vowed we would eat sensibly and offer fewer desserts than our usual “a pie apiece”. I would set out more vegetables and fewer carbs. It sounded like a great plan and all agreed to it.

The ‘pie apiece” thing got started years ago when we polled the family for their favorites and ended up with so many different requests that we ended up with as many pies as people at the table. This year we vowed to eliminate the chocolate cake and apple pie. That took us down to the spartan (at least we thought so) array of merely three pies, one plate of cookies and pumpkin bread. Plus we were going to use Cool Whip instead of real whipping cream. Is that a sacrifice or what?

Then, we eliminated mashed potatoes and all the fattening casseroles we usually make. And, for the coup de grace of sacrifices, we declared NO rolls. None.

Then my kids came. Emily showed up with a double recipe of macaroni and cheese and Elizabeth sneaked in yeast rolls. I made a second cherry pie and the girls went out and bought a cake. By Thanksgiving morning they had decided against the salad. By the time Steve came on Friday someone had bought real whipping cream for the pies and made mashed potatoes. In short, we ended up with pretty much the same thing we eat every year. In fact, when we sat down to eat on Friday we realized we had two different types of gravy. A meal with two gravies? One thing our family is good at is eating.

One vow we did keep was to exercise—a new tradition we unwittingly acquired is using the chain saw a lot on Thanksgiving. A few years ago I had intended to start a tradition of taking a gorgeous family photo on Thanksgiving for our Christmas cards. But the last two photo sessions were interrupted by a disaster of some sort. Last year it was a tree falling on our house. This year it was cleaning up after an overachieving beaver. I think I need to face the fact that getting both of our girls together with the son-in-law and the grands is always going to lead to a disaster of some sort.

All of this played out within the framework of Emily wearing a heart monitor. There were 4 or 5 leads glued to her chest with wires running to a device the shape of a cell phone clipped at her waist. She had gone to a new doctor a couple of months ago who noticed extra heartbeats. “You probably don’t even notice them yourself.” And Emily really didn’t except for the dizziness and sudden loss of energy she would occasionally experience . She thought it was anxiety attacks.

But by the morning after Thanksgiving weekend Emily’s symptoms of rapid heartbeat and dizziness had increased and the doctor slapped her in the hospital and scheduled the procedure to fix it on Wednesday. Our family has always been fairly healthy so this was new turf for us. We couldn’t get a feel for just how serious this was. On one hand the doctor and nurses acted like it was a routine and common procedure. On the other hand, they had Emily sign for permission to implant a defibrillator during the procedure if the cause of the problem turned out to be heart disease. We weren’t really sure exactly what they were going to do. One explanation was a little ‘zap’ to the heart to regulate the rhythm…another sounded like they were going to electrocute a few bad cells. I just wasn’t sure about anyone messing with my kid’s heart. By Tuesday night she was getting dizzy by just sitting up. It was frightening to me that something supposedly routine was escalating so rapidly. Our family had never had a serious medical crisis. Nobody has even been in a bad car wreck.

Beaven and I took care of the grandkids while Steve stayed with Emily. It had been a long time since I took care of little girls on a 24/7 basis. It was kind of like riding a bicycle but this time the bicycle was going a lot faster than I remembered . I discovered you can buy peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in the freezer case at the grocery store. I went the wrong direction getting in line to pick Sarah up at school and faced the wrath of the SUV moms who corrected my mistake without pity.

Everything turned out just fine. The ‘fix’ worked and Emily could feel an improvement as soon as she woke up. There was no heart disease. It gave us all a lot to be thankful for.

It all reminded me of the song I learned in Guatemala a few years ago:

Gracias Senor, por el dia tan lindo de hoy.
Gracias Senor, por la vida y la salud.
Vengo vengo a ti Senor
Vengo yo a ti Senor
A mostrar mi gratitude.

(Thank you, God, for the day so beautiful as today.
Thank you, God, for life and health.
I come, I come to you, God
I come to you, God
To show my gratitude.)

Tom

Cooking a turkey is one of the most overrated efforts in America. Years ago, housewives with too much time on their hands began doing weird stuff like sewing it together. It doesn’t need that.

There is only one precaution. Remember to check it inside for those little bags of parts. God only knows what they are-liver and hearts and gross stuff. Some people know how to use them but I don’t. You don’t have to know what to do with them, just remember to take them out or you will cut into the turkey at the dinner table to find it and be publicly humiliated - probably in front of your mother-in-law.

The whole process starts at the store when you have to pick one out. I’ve never done any fancy calculations about weight. I always just bought one the same size as all the others. You’re feeding an average size crowd so buy an average turkey. Don’t get one too small or you won’t have enough juice for gravy. Don’t get one too big, either--you don’t have an oven that big and surely you have enough sense not to invite that many people.

Bring it home and wash it. This is not only for cleanliness. You want to be sure to check for all those little bags. Most important, however, is that during the washing of the turkey you get to know it. This is your honored guest for the big meal. His name is probably Tom. Call him by name. I never figured out why people would cook a male turkey named Tom when it is the big breasts they want. Maybe the toms are larger. I always call mine Tom no matter what sex it is.
Introduce Tom to your children. Have him wave his wing. Show the kids how he runs on his drumsticks. Enjoy yourself . This is the last quality time you will have with the children this whole day. This is the last smile they will see on your face. Explain to them that you are going away on a trip and another mother who just looks like you will be here for a day or so. She may say and do some shocking things and her face will get very red while she screams at everyone. Explain that you will be home after she leaves, probably on Saturday.

Here is my recipe for cooking turkey:
Read on the bag how long to cook it and what temperature to use. Stuff an onion and a celery stick up his butt and throw him in the pan. I’m not sure the onion and celery help the turkey but it makes the room smell nice. Do NOT cover the pan. Rub a little margarine on the top. Salt and pepper. Make a mental note of the time. Put it in the oven. Go away and forget about it. Turkeys have been doing this for years. They know what to do.

How to Stay Married

Yesterday Beaven and I celebrated our 36th wedding anniversary by spending most of the day apart. Not that this is our secret but, in a way, it is. Anyone who has lasted 36 years together considers themselves war veterans of a sort. And there’s a certain amount of comfort and security in knowing you’ve past the test, many tests, in fact, and can weather whatever else comes your way. By this time you don’t really have stars in your eyes anymore. You probably couldn’t see them without your bifocals anyway.

Our marriage started off in a kind of weird way. Somehow at the wedding reception the keys to the trunk of his car got separated from the ignition key. He had the ignition key, could start the car and drive off for our honeymoon. But he gave the key to the trunk to someone to load our suitcases and couldn’t find that person. Everyone was waving us off for our grand exit, throw the damned bouquet, catch our plane in time, yada, yada. I was a little suspicious that they really just wanted to get back to their champagne. I didn’t care, though; I was married and it was a magical evening. It didn’t take 30 seconds for the magic to wear off. As we found ourselves alone for the first time in our 2-hour old marriage, Beaven was in a panic. He could get us to the airport but he couldn’t get into the trunk to get our bags. He was thinking about a week in Mexico City without luggage. Before we got even a block away from the reception he was using words I had never heard him use before. I began wondering who this horrid man was that I had just married.

It all worked out and we had a great honeymoon, came home, went back to night classes for a couple of years and had two children. For the next 20 years or so we put our marriage into a kind of suspended animation that comes with raising kids. So when the youngest went off to college we looked at each other and wondered who was this person we were married to. We went into counseling. The next thing I knew we had separated. This startled everyone, including us. But it all worked out eventually. And here we are married for 36 years and having the life we envisioned back when we first started.

Along the way we’ve had a lot of examples of the ways we are different from each other. We took a cruise once that offered gambling. I won forty dollars on the slot machine and told him to go get me one of those buckets.
“A bucket? What for?”
“So we can take it up to our room and take it home.”
“Take it home? You’re supposed to put it back in the machine and see how much more you can win.”
We stood there for the longest time and looked at each other with new eyes and wondered who this person was and how did we get married to somebody like that.

But I watched him take care of his Daddy during the last years of his life. I’ve seen him with his grandchildren and wondered anew where this man came from. I’ve watched him move furniture and marveled at his strength at age 65.

Now I’m going to tell you our secret. Building things. I remember distinctly when we both realized we wanted to be married to each other. We were in the swimming pool at the Riveria apartments on Live Oak in East Dallas. The rest of our friends were in the pool drinking Salty Dogs and talking while Beaven and I were in our own little world discussing swimming pools. I think it was me who said, “Let’s build a pool together.” Once we agreed on this idea we realized we’d have to have a house and a marriage. The rest fell into place. But the die had been cast: marriage was thus defined in our partnership as a building project. Something we would work on together.

Since that day at the Riveria apartments we have indeed built a swimming pool together as well as a couple of houses and more re-modeling projects than I can count. Sometimes “building” was no more than hiring a contractor and agreeing on the design but more often than not it was picking up a hammer and shovel and doing it ourselves. At our house right now we’ve just finished a playhouse for the grandkids and are about to install our fourth toilet in what has now become a “compound” of a variety of buildings out here in the country.

Every couple I talk to has their own criteria for what builds a good partnership. For some the test is wallpapering. For some, it’s canoeing together. But I think the greatest exercise a couple can do to keep their marriage sound is pull electrical cables. We have pulled miles and miles of cables in our 36 years. He gets at one end in the attic and I’m usually in the house at the other end of where the cable is supposed to end up, watching for it through a hole about 2 inches wide as he tries to feed it through ten feet of twists and turns with me yelling to him to “Push. No, pull it up a bit. No, push, push, push!” Yesterday’s project was our greatest feat and, to be frank, it would have stopped most couples cold.

We had to feed 70 feet of heavy, thick underground electrical cable through a 50 foot pipe then through a hole under a concrete pad for about 18 inches. This was mostly underwater, too, since it rained just enough to fill the hole with water. Then we had to turn the cable up and back into a hole 4 inches up through another concrete pad and into our barn. At times Beaven was in a kind of foxhole in the ground with his arm extended into a hole under the concrete, through the water and upwards to where the water line stopped and he met the air. We stopped at one point to measure his arm and it lacked about a half an inch to match the distance we needed to cover. It was so tantalizingly close that we knew if we just kept at it we would succeed. We worked on this for about 2 days, taking periodic breaks and wondering if it would all be worth it. The second day our muscles were so sore we could barely move. The foxhole had become a mudhole by then and Beaven’s hands were covered with scratches. I found one of my ears had mud caked on it. In the end, when it finally did work, we secured the wire then went inside to rest. This time when we looked at each other we knew exactly who we were looking at. I looked over at my partner and said, “That was really fun, wasn’t it?” And he agreed with me. It really was.

Earning the Right to Sing the Song

I have always loved listening to a really good song sung with enthusiasm. There is a certain drama to music; it can stir feelings inside you that you had previously underestimated. And one of the most dramatic songs I can think of is the one they call the national anthem of the civil rights movement, “Lift Every Voice and Sing”. For sheer drama it’s the best. I’m old enough to have watched the civil rights movement as it passed by me in the newspaper headlines or on TV. But I was a mere observer. I have to admit that in the 50’s and 60’s I was preoccupied with growing up and going to school. As much as I love “Lift Every Voice and Sing” I never earned the right to sing the song. And, in fact, it is a difficult song to sing. It changes tempo near the end and always throws me for a loop. But for sheer listening pleasure, nothing can beat it. The Garland church organist sometimes sneaks it in on the Sunday before Martin Luther King Day. So few notice it or remark on it that I sometimes feel like Margaret has given me a private concert that day. It’s simply one of the most stirring songs around.

So the moment I had been waiting for came the other day watching Rosa Parks’ funeral. I knew there would be no other time that I would ever be able to hear this song sung quite like I could hear it from the original leaders of the civil rights movement, probably a thousand voices joined in the song they have sung probably a thousand times gathered together in one place-the Metropolitan AME Church in Washington DC. And it was a magnificent sound. The words bear a second look, though, especially when thinking of the death of one of the great women of the movement.

Lift every voice and sing till earth and heaven ring,
Ring with the harmonies of liberty.
Let our rejoicing rise high as the listening skies;
Let it resound loud as the rolling sea.

Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us;
Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us;
Facing the rising sun of our new day begun,

Let us march on, till victory is won.

I never earned the right to sing the song. But the people who did were at that funeral singing it with feeling. I noticed most of the members of the congregation were singing it from memory and with great enthusiasm. The passing of Rosa Parks was not so much a declaration of victory over the enemy of bigotry as much as it was a celebration of the advances that have been made by sacrificial people like her-- people of dignity and grace. Only one face was strewn with tears, the rest were composed. Gray was the dominant hair color. These warriors had learned to compose themselves 50 years ago.

When Beaven and I bought our first house in Oak Cliff a black couple moved in next door. Beaven’s initial fears that it would ruin the neighborhood were met with the fact that the husband was a lawyer who graduated from Harvard. And the wife ended up as one of my best friends. Their son, Marc, was born the same week as Emily. And they played together in our back yard until the year the Rangers moved away. The last I heard from them was when she was elected to the Dallas school board. It was Carla Ranger who educated me on what it was like to be black in the 50’s and 60’s. She earned the right to sing the song.

She told a story of going to a sit-in. She was partnered with a black man and they went with a white couple to a restaurant and all four quietly sat down together at a table. That’s all they did—sit down. The owner came to their table and held a gun to the black man’s head and told them he would shoot them if they didn’t leave. As hard as it is to believe I know this happened because Carla had no reason to lie to me. She told stories of her husband Marcus being taunted and abused by the white boys in Fort Worth where he grew up. This was real and it happened to friends of mine. She was part of the movement Rosa Parks helped start. And I wonder if the youth of today, both black and white, fifty years after 1955 have any realization of the sacrifices made to bring us all to where we are today.

Stony the road we trod, bitter the chastening rod,
Felt in the days when hope unborn had died;
Yet, with a steady beat, have not our weary feet
Come to the place for which our fathers sighed?

We have come over a way that with tears has been watered;
We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered,
Out from the gloomy past, till now we stand at last

Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast.

I once attended a special service of Thanksgiving at Perkins School of Theology on the SMU campus. It was to commemorate the graduation forty years ago of its first black student, the now-famous Rev Cecil Williams, pastor of Glide Memorial Church in San Francisco. I had heard of him and the famous choir from his church. To tell the truth I went more to hear the choir than to honor his graduation. He had a few interesting stories to tell about being the first black student and the choir was dependably fantastic.

At the end of the service I found myself holding the hand of the black lady next to me as we stood and sang “We Shall Overcome.” It gave me the strangest feeling in my gut—not to hold this woman’s hand or to sing the song—but to realize this was the first time in my life I had actually sung the famous song myself. Where had I been all these years? Why had I never been in a place or situation where this song was sung?

God of our weary years, God of our silent tears,

Thou hast brought us thus far on the way;
Thou who hast by Thy might led us into the light;
Keep us forever in the path, we pray.

Lest our feet stray from the places, our God where we met Thee;
Lest, our hearts drunk with the wine of the world, we forget Thee;
Shadowed beneath Thy hand may we forever stand,

True to our God, true to our native land.

I never earned the right to claim a place in the choir to sing either of these marvelous songs. I was only an observer. But it made me wonder what cause is out there now that I should be joining. What is important enough for me to risk? Victory is sweet but it is sweetest to those who risked something to gain it.

A friend I made while working on the Gulf Coast during the Katrina recovery ended up in seminary.  Upon ordination her first church call was to a church in Ferguson, Missouri and her first day at work was the week Michael Brown was killed.  She stepped right into the riots and hasn't looked back.  I know she's been in more demonstrations for racial justice than she can count, knows the recipe for the antidote to tear gas and has been arrested at least once or twice.  And I've decided I don't really trust a preacher who hasn't been arrested at least once. Erin Counihan has earned the right to sing the song.

And here is the question I leave you with today. What needs to be changed in our world today that you would risk something for? I’m not sure I want to die without ever having risked something to make a change in our world. It is the risk that makes the gift precious.

Convertibles

I always wanted a convertible--a red Mustang convertible. The only person I know who has never admitted an urge for a convertible is Beaven and that doesn’t really count because he’s terminally practical. But the urge got really strong during a small mid-life crisis I had a few years ago. Actually I’ve had more than one of these crises spaced throughout my life until I got medicated. But this time the dream wouldn’t go away.

My best friend in high school had a white Pontiac convertible and we had a blast in that car. We would take it to the top of the Greenbriar Lane a block from my house. She would slip the car into neutral and we would sit up on the seat back while she steered with her feet then coast all the way down the hill. It was a 2-block trip and just the right speed-not too fast or too slow. We pretended we were beauty queens in a parade and waved at people we passed. It’s amazing we didn’t get arrested or killed.

A few years ago it was time to get me a new car and you can imagine what happened. I wanted the convertible. For the first time in our lives, we could get pretty much whatever car we wanted. The kids were grown and gone. We had a little more money available. I knew exactly what I wanted. How much easier could it get? Men always want a pickup. I know very few men who haven’t owned at least one pickup in their lives. It seems to be a rite of passage for them. Men get their pickup, shouldn’t I get my convertible?

I’m not sure men and women should shop together. The one time I bought a car by myself, it took 15 minutes. With Beaven, it takes about 15 months. First, he has to pore over about 50 consumer magazines. Then talk to the guys at work about their experiences. Comparison shop on the Internet a week or so. Go to the auto shows. Check with the credit union. Then discuss it with the guys at work some more. By the time we get to the car dealer, I’m usually tired of the whole ordeal. All I care about in shopping for a car is its color and I always want red.

This time once we got to the dealer Beaven took me right to the biggest and heaviest sedan they sold. It was a grandmother car. Drab, spacious, sensible. Beaven always wants sensible. The only problem was I didn’t want a sensible car. In the throes of a mid-life crisis you don’t want anything sensible. He gave me over ten reasons why I didn’t need a convertible. His ten reasons made sense but didn’t change my mind.

“I just need to get this out of my system,” I said. That’s when he hit upon the most inventive idea I think he’s ever had. He suggested I rent a convertible for a week and see how I felt then. So, I did exactly that. I rented a red Mustang convertible for a week.

My whole personality changed when I was driving that car. I drove faster. I ran yellow lights, something I never did in my sturdy little compact. “Get out of my way. Can’t you see I’m driving a hot car?” People looked differently at me when I was behind its wheel. I swear men would smile at me in that car. And I felt differently about myself. I had more confidence. I felt prettier. I WAS prettier.

This was a little hard to do, since I was sweating like a pig. It was June and the temperature was already in the hundreds. Not only did the sun beat down on me with vengeance; the air-conditioning flowed uselessly into the sky above me. I turned all the vents directly toward me and hovered close during stoplights but I was constantly soaked with perspiration. Yes, I wore sunglasses; the glare was blinding. My hair had that windblown look. It was also twice as dirty from the road pollution. And friends with long hair were blinded by their own hair anytime I drove over 10 miles an hour. We generally drove in silence because we couldn’t hear each other over the road din. After getting the radio loud enough to hear while driving, we would get blasted anytime the car stopped. Once, it started raining while I was on the freeway. I had to find an exit and put the top up. Every stop at the grocery store or post office required putting the top up. God, I loved driving that car!

Beaven thought I would get it out of my system after the week. I didn’t. But I knew better than to fight it. We bought the Grannycar- the sensible sedan with all the options he suggested. But there were two options that I insisted on. Only two: “It has to be red. And I want a sun roof.” Women my age have the capacity for a mysterious festival of emotions that leave their men in a state of constant fear. When we found out a sun roof wasn’t an option on that model Beaven took it to a custom shop to have one made for my car. After all that effort I felt like I needed to accept the Grannywagon.

I still pined for the convertible. But I could open the sunroof for a while and that would usually settle me down. After the wind blew a few papers out onto the freeway and got a good cover of dust on everything and the sun beat in my eyes, I was usually ready to close the roof. The urged passed. In the meantime my grandkids loved it.

Travel

Travel does not bring out the best in people. The first really big vacation Beaven and I took was to Alaska. We kept adding and adding options until the trip was far more complicated than usual. It had a whopping twelve days in Alaska, including five days in the interior and seven days on a cruise at sea. We were thrown together with 1,200 strangers who were, to put it mildly, pretty strange. By the time the trip was over we had been on a crowded bus over 20 times as well as a train, trolley, tram, ocean liner, kayak, raft, motor boat, canoe, and a helicopter. Yes. Let’s all go on vacation and REELAAX.

The first day I was ready to throw Beaven overboard. The second day I wanted to sink the ship and all 1,200 people I was travelling with. By the last day, I was ready to jump into the ocean myself.

Part of our trip was two days on the train. Beaven loves trains. We were looking forward to this being the highlight of the trip; a quiet and peaceful ride through beautiful scenery. Wrong. A woman we later dubbed the “Moose Lady” sat three rows back. But her voice projected so well that we could have sworn she was directly behind us. Not only was she loud; she had a grating accent that was part screech and part nasal and a whole lot New York. Moose Lady carried on a four-hour non-stop monologue of moose jokes. In between the jokes, she would call out the window “Here, moosie, moosie, moosie!”

We knew that the following day we would get back on the train for not four, but eight hours. The thought of repeating another day with the Moose Lady sent us into earnest prayer. Knowing what a sense of humor God has, I was not surprised to see the Moose Lady gone the next day and replaced by the Cackler.

The Cackler had a laugh that was even louder than the Moose Lady. Where the Moose Lady depended on projection, the Gackler went for sheer volume. Instead of dumb moose jokes we were treated to every detail of every member of her family’s life. A lot of details I didn’t need to know. As interesting as it was, it was distracting. The conductor finally asked her to hush.

Another one of my prayers that God apparently got a laugh out of was that we would have quiet dinner partners on the ship. I knew we would probably be assigned to a table for eight for the entire cruise. I didn’t really want to spend my time with a bunch of loudmouths telling me how smart or successful they are. Instead, we ended up at a tiny table for four with a very nice but boring couple. The most interesting conversation we had was his story about installing gutters. I almost fell asleep in my Baked Alaska several times.

The trip did include one of the most awesome things I’ve ever done in my life. It was a flight on a helicopter to a glacier. The glacier itself was surreal. It reminded me of what the moon must be like. The surface was total deserted and gray from pollution but had deep, frightening cracks that went God Only Knows how deep. And inside the cracks was a gorgeous azure blue. This was a popular spot for tours so it looked like the opening scene from MASH with helicopters coming and going. And the flight in the helicopter to get to and from the glacier was a carnival ride in itself. I was a little distracted however because I was scared to death of the height to start with and couldn’t stop noticing how young the pilot looked. I’ll bet the guy wasn’t a day over 14. I kept watching his face for any sign that he was old enough to shave. I kept thinking “Please, dear God, just a little stubble on the chin.”

On Sunday, the last day of the cruise, there was a worship service on board the ship. I figured there might be maybe 12 people, thinking most people aboard were shallow and materialistic and not interested in worshipping God in the slightest. I was surprised to see the room filled to its 200 capacity.

As we stood and sang the first hymn, I became aware of the gentle motion of the ship beneath my feet. I was reminded of how vast and powerful the ocean is compared to even a huge boat like ours. This ship was over 10 stories high-a regular floating hotel. Yet the ocean was bobbing it around like a cork. Then I looked around at the people in the room with me and realized, “We are all in the same boat together.”

This included the couple at dinner who didn’t meet my standards for conversation; it included the Cackler and yes, even the Moose Lady. We are all in the same boat together. Even on dry land.

Washing a Possum

I washed a possum in the washing machine once. It wasn’t on purpose. I really don’t care how clean the neighborhood animals are. And I rarely invite them into my home for social functions. No, it was totally by accident. Years ago the house we lived in had the washer and dryer in the garage. And we lived close enough to a vacant field that we occasionally harbored wildlife. I guess I left the door to all the wrong things open. Our friend must have wandered into our garage, fallen in the washer and started on a good nap when I came to add a few clothes, shut the lid and start the machine. No, I did not grab him and say “looks like you need a dusting off old boy, hop in.”

And I certainly did not realize what had happened when I opened the machine the next morning. Half-asleep, I reached out to move the wet clothes into the dryer. I was stopped by the strange odor. My clothes don’t normally come out of the washer smelling like the landfill. Then I saw what appeared to be either a very large rat or a very ugly cat. And a very dead one. After examining this sight for about a billionth of a nanosecond, I slammed the lid shut and went inside the house to write my husband a note. It read something to the effect that I loved him and would do anything in the world for him and hoped he felt the same way about me because there was something dead in the washer and would he please get rid of it. Then I left for work.

I wasn’t a completely liberated woman at that stage of my life. God help me, I probably will never be that liberated. I’ve always agreed with the great television sage, Suzanne Sugarbaker from Designing Women, who decreed that “the man always has to kill the bug.”

When I talked to Beaven later that day, he assured me that the possum was gone from my life forever and went to heaven in a very clean condition. But that wasn’t the end of the story.

My brother was in the Navy on a nuclear submarine at that time. They were on a secret mission somewhere at the bottom of the Indian Ocean. Each family member was allowed to send him two letters which would be radioed to him. The rules were very strict: no more than 50 words and you couldn’t send any “coded” messages. This sounded simple but, actually, the 50 words was a real challenge. That’s not enough for a real story. But I wanted to use every word available and send a little bit of “home” to him. And to cap it all off, my life at that time was actually pretty boring. The most exciting thing that had happened to me in months had been Super Panty Day, when the youngest had finally gone all day with dry underwear. I couldn’t really expect Doss to get excited about that. Somewhere between “We’re all fine.” and “Take Care, We love you” I had to give him something interesting. So I included the sentence: “I washed a possum in the washer today.”

Somewhere in the Indian Ocean, in the middle of the night, my brother was summoned brusquely from his bunk to see the Captain. I’m sure he was concerned and intimidated at the same time. The captain handed him the cable to read and demanded an explanation. “Allard, you know you can’t receive messages in code” My brother read the letter, threw back his head and laughed. “Captain, this isn’t a code, it’s just my sister. She probably DID wash a possum in the washer.”

Maybe in that quirky message I sent more of home to him than 50 words could say.

Becoming Peaceful

I decided that I need to be a little more peaceful. After all, here I am in the wilderness surrounded by trees and birds with quiet dirt roads leading to nowhere. What better setting for a peaceful life? So I bought a bunch of books about being peaceful and began to read up. I decided I’d be peaceful, dammit, if it killed me. Somehow that didn’t work.

A couple of weeks ago I was mad at everything because Chad Kueser got hurt in the war. I went to church to pray for his healing but I forgot to pray for myself. Chad is doing fine. But I was still mad.

Then World Communion happened.

We don’t always have a worship service as great as we had this year. Some years and in some churches World Communion Sunday is just a footnote to worship as usual. The year of 2001 certainly wasn’t a good year for World Communion anywhere. On that date in 2001 the United States began the invasion of Afghanistan. Think about that one for a sec. Our country began a war on World Communion Sunday.

But this year was different. All you had to do was visit my church that day.

I can’t imagine any church ever had as much diversity in one sanctuary as we had in Garland, Texas that morning. We had a panoply of colors: colors of clothing and colors of skin. It was a living stained glass window.

About a year ago we committed to share our sanctuary on Sunday evenings with the South Asian Presbyterian Church. This is a congregation of about 40 people who live all over the metroplex but who want to be Presbyterians together and needed a building for worship. It was just the most natural thing in the world to let them use ours. We discovered them to be mostly from Pakistan. And one of the first things we decided was that we would share world communion Sunday together.

So on October 2nd we had a bunch of people from Pakistan in the sanctuary with us. They dressed in the traditional dress of their country: gorgeous saris for the women and flowing robes for the men. Their pastor had been installed the week before and our church gave him a very decorative stole with bright colors. But it was our pastor who “stole” the show, wearing an elegant shimmering aqua sari they had given her in return. You just have to feel sorry for male pastors at times like this; women pastors really have more options when dressing up.

Another international touch came from the Mbaku family who were born every bit as Presbyterian as I was but in French Cameroon. They wore their traditional African robes, with matching robes for married couples. Gwen and Geoffrey wore emerald green with intricate gold embroidery; another couple was dressed alike in orange. Gwen’s mother, Martha Domanju was in a bright blue robe with matching hair wrap. The Mbaku boys had matching robes of gold. Other friends of ours who came were Esther Nkwenti and Mercy Tatang in bright robes and head wraps. And there were another assortment of about 4 relatives I didn’t recognize who were wearing African robes.

We were still hosting a few relatives from the Hurricane Rita affected areas so even among the wasp-y looking folks you couldn’t tell who were “family” and who were just in town visiting because they had been evacuated. That was the part I liked: you couldn’t tell who was a refuge and who was somebody’s sister so we just treated everyone like family.

On top of it all, we were going to renew our covenant of friendship with the churches in the Norte Presbytery of Guatemala. So the communion table was covered in a bright woven fabric in Guatemalan style. The liturgy for the day was a group effort that included the Guatemalan churches and the South Asian church. We had songs in Spanish and one in Urdu, which is basically unpronounceable except for “Hallelujah.” Everybody could sing Hallelujah.

I looked around while we were singing in Urdu to see this gorgeous mosiac of faces and colors with some slightly bewildered gray haired white folks doing their best to take it all in. And, bewildered or not, they were making it.

At the end of worship our pastor ask for Mrs. Domanju to come forward and we presented her with a peace candle for her to take home to her church in Cameroon when she leaves next week. It originally came to us from Russia.

Funny, isn't it? When I was a kid we spent a lot of time worrying that Russia was going to blow us up. Now they're sending us peace candles.

All of this left me thinking maybe we might figure this peace thing out. I have lived long enough now to have seen a lot of changes in the world. Certainly when I was growing up my church never had worship like this.

Two generations ago Martha Domanju couldn’t have come to spend a couple of months with her daughter because there was no airline service between our countries. Maybe even two generations ago Gwen and Geoffrey couldn’t have come to live here and raise their boys here. Certainly two generations ago we never would have shared our sanctuary with a group of Pakistani Presbyterians. And two generations ago we wouldn’t have had members of our congregation with solid personal friendships in Guatemala. My grandmother had a lot of friends in her church but she never had any friends whose last name was Nkwenti or Tatang or Velasquez or Rodriguez.

I’m still mad about this war and I still disagree with it. But every once in a while I noticed the progress we’ve made. At these times it seems like we’re getting a little closer to finding the Kingdom of God right here under our noses. I constantly struggle with the idea that God has eternity to continue the vast creation God has envisioned for us while I only have just this one lifetime. I get in a hurry and forget to be peace-full.

Every Sunday we pass the Peace of Christ. On October 2, 2005 we lived inside of it.

My Life with Big Tex

Going to the State Fair is one of our family’s greatest traditions. Beaven and I both go back three generations in fair history – all the way back to the Centennial of 1936. When he was a kid Beaven used to live a few blocks from the fair and remembers climbing over the fence at one of the remote corners to get in free. A few years ago we bought one of those fund raising bricks and had it installed along the walk by Big Tex. We took the grandkids there to see it on Monday and I think we have the next generation hooked. While Beaven was in line for a corny dog Sarah plopped herself down directly in front of and below Big Tex and spent a good bit of time listening and watching. She is absolutely convinced he’s real.

Going to the fair with Beaven is something new to our marriage. For years he would go because his job required him to be at the fair grounds televising stuff and I went separately with the kids. It’s also just a lot more fun at the fair without the men. They tend to slow us down with side visits to see the tractors and trucks. The women I like to go with always know the reason we’re there: food. It’s the equivalent cost of a really fine restaurant and, in it’s own way, is haute cuisine. I like to follow a set route each year and move with a vengeance that only Sherman marching across Georgia could match: We’ll start at the pizza stand by the parking lot and aim for the Museum of Natural History, eating our way across the Fair. I usually don’t stop until I’m about to throw up.

I used to go visit the alligator in the Natural History museum but they got rid of him when he broke. This was my favorite part of the fair after the food. It was in a dark room and had benches to sit on with a looped tape recording of nature sounds. Of all the chirps and tweets on that recording there was one certain bird whose call was magic to me. It had a way of making me feel safe and secure. My whole day, midway included, was put into a better perspective. The call of the Chuck Will’s Widow can make me feel like I’m sitting around the campfire after a day’s hiking. I can become totally at one with Gods creative genius. It’s that single note of purity and innocence in the midst of chaos and sham. That bird’s call can return me to the calm of the womb. Since very few people ever visited the alligator I could lie down on the bench in the dark and listen to the soothing nature sounds as long as I wanted. It made for a small spot of peace and quiet in the midst of the heat and noise.

I remember one year particularly, when the girls were in middle school. Middle school is a time when they liked to think they didn’t have parents; that they were dropped here from above or that they were adopted and that I wasn’t their real mother, Oprah was. My only role was to drive them to the fair and then disappear. I was thus gloriously alone that year and could do and eat whatever I pleased. I’m not sure about the details but I think it was something like a Belgian waffle with coffee, a corny dog and coke, a Rueben sandwich with extra sauerkraut and a beer, a couple of tamales, cotton candy, nutty bars and Jack’s French fries. That killed about an hour and then I felt the need for a rest. I stopped at a park bench in the shade on the route to the alligator and lay down for a nap. What woke me was the sound of my daughter’s voice: “Oh God, that’s so pathetic. Pretend we don’t know her.”

It’s not just the kind of food or the amount you eat at the fair that’s magical; it’s also the way you eat it. Fair Food should be eaten with enthusiasm. Neatness counts against you. Neatness says you were able to take your mind off what Big Tex is saying long enough to pay attention to the little drip that fell from the corner of your mouth onto your shirt. It is my firm belief that Fair Food inoculates you from most of the common diseases the winter will bring. Once you get a good layer of root beer, mustard and catsup on your hands as a base coat; then add fluffs of cotton candy and snow cone juice plus a few animal fibers and chicken feathers then top it all off with assorted sneezes, coughs and droolings from the kid in line ahead of you, then you’ve just taken in most of the germs you will be exposed to in the coming school year; maybe even your lifetime. And you know that at some point during the day you will lick your fingers but because it’s the Fair, God gives these germs a special dispensation and they don’t make you sick. Trust me on this one. My kids were never sick.

As far as cerebral offerings, the Vita Mix machine is a standard. How often do you get to watch someone make bread, soup and ice cream in the same machine? Or try a fake tattoo. Get a really wild one like “Born to be Bad.” Wear it to church the next day. Try to time your visit to Big Tex to hear him talk. Watch for the Marine Corps band.

One last tradition: On the way out the exit, scout out a deserving looking kid who is coming in and pass along your left-over coupons. They’re only pieces of paper and you’ll never use them again. And the smile you’ll get in return will last you the rest of the week.

The Difference between Men and Women

One day last week I discovered that men and women think differently. You can imagine my surprise when the Nobel prize for social insight did not arrive on my doorstep the following day.

With Hurricane Rita on her way to Texas and predictions that it could reach as far north as our humble little abode in the woods, I thought I would go over our emergency preparedness. I was planning to be gone for most of the weekend so I showed Beaven where the candles and matches are kept. A couple of hours later he began in the middle of a paragraph, as older people often do, especially those who have been married a long time. Spouses sometimes work under the assumption you have been inside their heads listening to their thoughts up until now. “You know, I could turn off the main breakers and move the generator up to the garage breaker and it should backflow into the house…” I realized then what I had known all along: he wasn’t going to have anything to do with candles and matches; the man was going to restore power to our house if it failed.

This is the way it’s always been with us: I settle down for a long day without electricity or heat, gathering up blankets and candles, extra water, a few good books…Beaven goes into a frenzy of figuring out how to fix the problem. One year we had an ice storm that knocked out our power for 3 days and he paced around saying “I know how to fix that transformer if I could just get up the pole.” He did, in fact, climb up the telephone pole once to attach a second line to our house. But that's another story for another day; just trust me when I say he wasn't being dishonest, just impatient.

I sometimes tell people that I married the last good man. Translation: he can fix just about anything in the world. Install a toilet? He can do that in his sleep….not just fix it, install it. He put a sink and toilet in our garage the other day and I’ll swear it was more out of boredom than necessity. How many people feel the need for a john in their garage? Run cables for electricity and/or TV or computers? Simple to him. He can fix a car or a children’s toy with ease. Our granddaughter’s first sentence was “Grandpa fix it.” Where I am a master of improvisation, Beaven wants specific tools and lots of them, preferable two in case he can’t find the first one. He is used to being able to fix anything that’s broken, provided he has the right tools.

On the other hand, I can make a workable skillet out of aluminum foil or a decent cup of coffee with a tin can and a candle. Women may have advanced since cave days, owning Cuisinarts, espresso machines and panini grills but we can still cook on a rock if we need to.

I think one of the most basic differences in our sexes is that men take action to change their situation, employing all the proper tools to help them work efficiently and faster while women quietly endure or improvise until it’s all over.

This comes from the difference in our bodies. Men have far more strength than women so they are used to solving problems. Women, from centuries of powerlessness, most of which is directly caused by lack of physical strength, have learned how to ride out any storm and merely endure to survive.

Men change their situation; women endure it. This leads me to believe firmly that, like roaches, women will emerge from a nuclear holocaust and all the men will be gone. They will have been pulverized into dust while they’re running around setting up ladders and running cables.

This may not be the bad news it appears. The human race will survive. After all, we know how to freeze sperm now. We really don’t need men anymore except for opening jars and killing bugs. And you can buy a gizmo that will open the jars for you.

Becoming a Snowflake

If you have turned into one of my regular readers whom I promised a weekly bit of humor I have to apologize for not turning in an assignment last Wednesday. It was my intent to post something weekly. It was my intent to write stories of my adventures out here in my little bit of paradise in the East Texas woods where the highest drama comes from the police scanner or my dogs barking at night. I intended to tell cute stories of my granddaughters coming to visit or the wonders of what the stars out here look like at night or watching the puppy chase a butterfly. But that was before Chad Kueser got his legs blown off in Iraq.

I’ve known Chad most of his life. I think he was about the third grade when his parents joined our church. I’ve watched him grow up. Like most of the people in our congregation I can tell more than one funny story of what he did as an average teenage boy in Garland. My favorite is the story of a high school youth retreat when Chad got caught climbing on a second story balcony after curfew, holding onto the railing with one hand and holding a banana in his other hand. Every church family has kids like Chad and adults who cherish their fun-loving and enthusiastic ways. The ironic moment I remember is the last time I saw him I hugged him and told him he had grown too tall for me to reach him.

I’m pissed. I’m incredibly sad. But I’m also confident that Chad will regain his health and go on to have a great life and be a fantastic husband and father. So I’m not sad for Chad. He’s got one of the best networks possible. He’s got his wife and parents there with him in the hospital in Maryland. He’s got a sister who has taken his kids to her house and enrolled them in school near her. He’s got a church family that includes three members who now live in the DC area close by him, who will be an extension of our church family for him. Chad may not know one of our members, Ila Hitt, but she has called his parents daily since we received word of his injuries. Ila has been a military wife since Viet Nam with her husband also being injured there. And she has a son in the military. Ila knows the military support systems and what Sandy and Dick need right now and she will make sure they get it. So there are a lot of positives to this story. Chad has all his bases covered. But he still doesn’t have his legs. And that really pisses me off.

I was against this war from the beginning but they didn’t ask me. I can’t figure this thing out. Most Americans are not mean or greedy people. Does my president think I’m so stupid that I haven’t figured out there was absolutely no reason to get into this war? Or is there some big secret that I don’t know and they can’t tell me for some reason? It has to be one of those two reasons because I honestly can’t figure out any other.

I fired off an angry e-mail to a friend and she forwarded it to her son in the military who grew up in our church with Chad. Matt McCormick cautioned me:
“Tell Jane not to be mad at President Bush so much as thankful for the medics, corpsmen, helo pilots, and others that kept him alive and are going to keep working to return him to as "normal" as is possible. It may not be the emotion that you feel strongest, but I know it's where I would want the focus of my friends' emotions were I in the same situation.”

So, I went to Half-Priced Books. I thought if I lost myself in a good book I might feel better. Instead I found myself in surrounded by six-foot high cases of books on Military History and World Wars. By this time I was ready for consolation from any place I could get it. I found a book on the Holocaust by Elie Weisel. I knew it wouldn’t cheer me but thought it might provide some answers, some insight into why humanity has to act so badly or how we can rise above the bad actions of a few. I walked a little ways and found myself in the American History section with biographies of presidents. I will say one thing in George Bush’s defense: I do believe he has good motives. Maybe that means I think he’s stupid. But I don’t think he’s a mean spirited man who deliberately sends young men into harm’s way just for his ego’s sake.

Our Parish Associate is careful to remind us that we should pray not only for the hurt soldiers we know and love but also for the Iraqis. The newspapers and TV keep tabs on how many soldiers have died in this war but nobody tells us how many Iraqi men, women and children have died or been injured. They have their own Chads. War doesn’t affect just our own families but innocents on the other side as well. And, as hard as it might be to accept, I know that God loves them as much as us.

I couldn’t help but think of the line Rhett Butler delivers in Gone With the Wind as he and Scarlett O’Hara watched mothers and fathers reading the list of dead and injured:
“I’m angry. Waste always makes me angry. And that’s what all this is—sheer waste.”

Our minister preached a great sermon Sunday. She told the story of a conversation between two birds.  One bird, called a coal mouse and the other bird was a dove:

"Tell me the weight of a snowflake," a coal-mouse asked a wild dove.
"Nothing more than nothing," was the answer.
"In that case, I must tell you a marvelous story," the coal-mouse said.
"I sat on the branch of a fir, close to its trunk, when it began to snow -- not heavily, not in a raging blizzard -- no, just like in a dream, without a sound and without any violence. Since I did not have anything better to do, I counted the snowflakes settling on the twigs and needles of my branch. Their number was exactly 3,741,952. When the 3,741,953rd dropped onto the branch, nothing more than nothing, as you say -- the branch broke off."
Having said that, the coal-mouse flew away.
The dove, since Noah's time an authority on the matter, thought about the story for a while, and finally said to herself, "Perhaps there is only one person's voice lacking for peace to come to the world."

I don’t know what I can do with my anger. I guess I could march if I found one. I could write my leaders if I thought they would listen to me. Matt sounds like he would prefer for me to just be thankful for medics and helicopter pilots.

Our church had a special prayer service for Chad last night and that helped a lot. We have a congregation that understands what the term “church family” means. I think most of us consider ourselves an aunt or uncle to Chad. We all needed a hug.

Maybe I could be the 53rd snowflake or the three-millionth. The 3,741,953rd one got all the glory in that story but there were lots of snowflakes in between the first and the last. And the snowflakes in the middle were just as important.

Certainly I can write letters of encouragement and love to Chad and his wife, Beshka and to Sandy and Dick. I can pray my guts out. I can write angry letters to my government. If you think of anything else I can do, please, for God’s sake let me know. We have got to stop killing and maiming each other. I’m not sure I know why we’re in this war but for whatever reason; it’s not worth it.

Your Fairly Faithful Correspondent,
The Pissed Snowflake

“Perhaps the secret of living well is not in having all the answers but in pursuing unanswerable questions in good company.”
-Rachel Naomi Remen


Ps- the snowflake story comes from a book Anne Clifton used in her sermon. (Synchronicity: The Inner Path of Leadership by Joseph Jaworski page 197).

Elvis and the Septic Tank

I’ve got to tell you about Elvis coming to fix our septic tank. Of course it’s not the real Elvis. I happen to know very well that the real Elvis is dead as a doornail. In fact this guy’s name isn’t even Elvis to start with. The man really does have his own name. A very nice WASP-y, easy to pronounce and respectable kind of name. But I’ve called him The Blonde Elvis for so long that Beaven and I sometimes forget his real name. I live in fear that someday I will call him Elvis to his face.

I call him the Blonde Elvis mostly because he has blonde hair and it’s styled in the same 50’s pompadour Elvis had in his prime, complete with the sideburns. He’s definitely not young-- somewhere between 35 and 85; it’s hard to tell with these outdoors men what with the sun and the smokes and the moonshine. He reminds me of Elvis in his country drawl, his down home manner and his stories of going to Las Vegas. He loves to go there to gamble. He saves up a little money and takes Linda (“this old gal I live with”) to Las Vegas where he wins a little money, wins a lot of money, then loses it all and comes home with a good story to tell.

East Texas is full of men like him but this guy just seems to hold all their endearing eccentricities all together in one loveable package. We started a construction project over a year ago and like most projects, it’s grown and moved around like an amoeba changing shapes and moving in directions you didn’t plan to move. Along the way we have met more individual tradesmen than we ever thought we would. Elvis seems to be a composite of them all. They are honest and hard working men. They are skilled in a no nonsense and no-frills way. They are practical and ingenious. And they all smoke like a chimney and want to tell you about their heart attack.

To be real honest, our Elvis is not even a really a good looking man in the way Elvis was but he has a very graceful way of moving. He has to be pretty coordinated cause I’ve seen him do things with a bulldozer that I can’t do with my glasses on.

We met Elvis a couple of years ago when we needed a driveway up to the new barn. He is cheap and easy to work with. Besides, a visit with him is just about the best live entertainment in Wood County.

The first thing he told us between the many cigarettes he smokes is how he had a heart attack a few years back and the doctor told him to quit smoking. Of course he didn’t and even bought a store he christened “The Smoke Shop”. He showed me his card with pride: one side advertises him as a dirt contractor and the reverse side tells me to run by the Smoke Shop to buy my smokes, chews and snuff. He lets Linda, (“this old gal I live with”) run the place to give her something to do with herself. He buys the smokes in Dallas at Sam’s and resells them out there in the country. Last year, after paying taxes and giving Linda a little something, he turned a whopping $7 profit.

I called him at home once and heard a man’s graveled voice but found out I had Linda on the phone. I think Linda has been smoking up the profits herself. But as he says, “it keeps her busy.“

He once confided to Beaven that he has three ex-wives right there in the same tiny little town. He said, “You’ve heard the song ‘All My Exes Live in Texas’? well all MY exes live in Winnsboro.” I wouldn’t think a town that small would be big enough to take on that particular project but maybe they have a club or something. Maybe they even invite Linda to their meetings.

One of my favorite stories to hear him tell is about the day one of his helpers ran into a train with his bulldozer. I spent a few minutes wondering just how anybody can possibly overlook a train then realized that the point of the story was only that he was a little low on funds because he had had to go out and buy a new bulldozer. Elvis takes special pride in the fact that he doesn’t carry insurance on his vehicles. He said that no one was hurt but the train was really beat up. The helper was shouting at the train engineer to look at what he had done to his dozer and the train engineer was shouting back to look at what he had done to his train. They exchanged no more than dirty looks and remounted their respective vehicles, rolling off into the sunset. I don’t know who had to pay for the train.

My favorite experience with Elvis was the year we called him out for some work in our field and he ended up fixing our septic tank. Beaven loves for this guy to come over because it gives him a chance to do all that men talk and scratching and spitting stuff they do together. So we called Elvis and he brought both his bull dozer (the new one) and his backhoe plus his helper, Rusty (not the one who ran into the train.) I think Rusty was in charge of shoveling things. I never saw Rusty use any of the equipment but the shovel.

When they arrived at 10 am it was obvious that Elvis was still a little high from the night before or maybe he had had a six-pack for breakfast. Whatever. As Beaven put it, “he wasn’t feeling any pain.” Right off the bat he got his bulldozer stuck in the mud out in the field. When he drove up on his big blue backhoe to tell Beaven about this they got to scratching and spitting and Beaven happened to ask him if he knew “a good septic tank man.”

Elvis asked right off the bat what county we’re in and was relieved that we’re in the county that doesn’t require a license because he failed his test for the license. Well, this kind of made me a little nervous about the kind of skills or lack thereof that someone who would fail this kind of test would have or not have. But he assured us that he didn’t fail the part about putting in a septic tank. Nosiree, he failed the part with those big scientific words like “biodegradable.” And, to be honest, he did know some numbers that sounded really technical like “3 inches of fall for every 8 ft of pipe.” Technical septic tank terms like that. Just don’t say “biodegradable” to him. The one time I did, he gave me the East Texas version of a dirty look. But they’re so polite here that a dirty look is really quite endearing.

Anyway, here we are in the backyard standing by the offending area that for the last month has smelled slightly “off” mostly because we had to unscrew the lid to the tank so that the toilets would flush properly. We were worried that we were looking at a brand new system. I had nightmares of trying to pay thousands of dollars for the latest “aerobic” septic tank system that I knew Beaven would want. Beaven merely wanted the name of a professional company who might give us a quote. Instead we got Elvis and his backhoe…along with Rusty and his shovel.

Right there in the middle of the technical part of our talk of septic tanks and whatnot Elvis starts the motor on his backhoe and starts gently scraping dirt off the lid. All of this took place a mere inches from my back porch and double kitchen window that I love so dearly. A cigarette dangled from his lips the whole time, which I thought was daring of him considering the alcohol fumes coming from his mouth. But I don’t know why I ever worry about his abilities--I swear the guy could have threaded a needle with this huge machine, sober or not. He and Rusty kept calling out measurements and questioning the size of our tank and looking for the edge of the lid. Finally he popped it off like you might open a beer in church—very gently and quietly, no fuss or fanfare.

I’ll spare you too many details of the inside of my septic tank even though it really wasn’t that unpleasant. But we immediately knew that our problem was tree roots. The trees had been so starved for moisture during this two-year drought that they had grown up, under, around and in between the heavy concrete lid that covered the tank. Then they kept growing around the top of the tank and finally into the lateral lines. Roots were the culprit. They had the pipe plugged up solid. We were so amazed at nature’s resourcefulness that we forgot we were dealing with raw sewage--until Elvis called out to Rusty to move a pipe: His instruction to “Reach in there and pull that pipe out.” was met with an astonished “Huh?” Rusty had reached the limit of what he was assigned to do as the shovel-man. Elvis charged us $50 and gave us far more than our money’s worth in sheer entertainment.

We moved out here permanently last month and decided to have the latest and greatest new septic system installed, the aerobic one Beaven wanted for years. This time we called a terribly professional team with freshly ironed shirts and clean hands. And, except for the time they started shooting snakes in the creek, things were almost too tidy for words. I kinda missed Elvis.

Roommate Horror Stories

I’m starting to hear the annual “first semester of college roommate” horror stories. For most freshmen this is a person they have never met and probably don’t have a thing in common. Anybody who lived in a college dorm has a ‘roommate from hell” story. I could tell how they matched me with my first roomie. She was about the only other Presbyterian in the dorm. Other than that, we really didn’t have anything to base a friendship on. But we also didn’t have any conflict to build a horror story. It was all very civilized if a tad boring. Two Presbyterians in the same room tend to be very tidy and studious. She had a boyfriend on campus and mine was in Michigan. We rarely even saw each other. By the second semester we had each made new friends and gone our happy but separate ways.
But the memorable one was assigned to me my second year. This is the thing about roommates—unless you pick one yourself you never know who you will get. After the boring but nice roommate I thought I’d just go for the luck of the draw and that’s when I got the lesbian. Lesbians have never scared me much. As the old saying goes, some of my best friends are lesbians. I had no problem with her being lesbian as much as the fact that she was really messy. She wasn’t at all as tidy as the Presbyterian. (You have to remember this was 40 years ago when anyone out of the mainstream scared people to death. Come to think of it, they still do, don’t they?) But back in 1966, all the girls sat around chattering in alarm at the idea of having a real live lesbian living in their dorm. Then they all said they were locking their doors at night. After a minute I realized if I did this I was locking myself in with her. Not to worry. We weren’t each other’s type anyway. After all, she was messy and I am tidy. There are some differences you just don’t overcome.
Elizabeth’s first roommate provided an education the college didn’t intentionally offer. The first night she watched Roommate line up various medications she took for STDs. Then Roommate and her ugly boyfriend (Elizabeth’s word, not mine. I never saw him.) were always asking Elizabeth to leave the room “for a while.” Elizabeth said it was bad enough that she had ugly people doing “it” in her room on weekends while she was gone, she wasn’t about to go sit outside in her car while they got it on during the week.
We drove Emily to Arkansas to help her move in for her first semester living with a total stranger. We felt pretty good about this since University of the Ozarks is a Presbyterian college. Emily entered a room that was bare to the walls and within an hour we left for lunch with it decorated to suit her personality, which at that point in her life looked slightly (how shall I put this?) “edgey.” As I remember it she was about to enter her Kurt Cobain phase. She put up posters of frightening rock stars: Nirvana, Jimmi Hendrix and Janis Joplin. REM and Michael Stipe decorated the other wall.
We left the room with her half totally decorated to look like someone recently released from a home for disturbed youth. We returned to find her roommate had moved in while we were gone and immediately left. I wasn’t surprised she left quickly. This girl had a tidy blue gingham bedspread with a matching rug on her half of the floor. A collection of fairly serious books lined up neatly on the shelf. And her wall sported only one picture: a calm and serene looking Jesus Christ. It looked like Emily might as well have drawn a nun for a roommate. I stood there looking first at the picture of Jesus and then at Emily’s side of the room. This looked like a pretty interesting combination of personalities. I wondered how they would adjust to each other.
The next time Emily came home she went immediately to the back of her closet where we keep our picture of Jesus. “Aha!,” she held it aloft in victory, “My Jesus is bigger than her Jesus!”
We’ve had this picture of Jesus for years. My daughters, I’m a little embarrassed to admit, stole this picture from our very own church during the move from the old sanctuary to the new one. Jesus had lived in the basement of our old sanctuary for years and years. As a result, he had gotten very tattered and slightly mildewed. The girls insisted that nobody would miss him. Once home, we couldn’t figure out how to get rid of the picture after the novelty wore off. I mean, just how do you get rid of a picture of Jesus?? It’s like the flag, only worse. At least the VFW will tell you how to get rid of an old flag that’s past it’s prime. Not so pictures of Jesus. You certainly couldn’t burn Jesus like you would a flag. And you don’t just throw it in the trash. I can only imagine how it would look to see Jesus poking out of our trash can. I figure people who do that go straight to hell without any negotiating.
So the two girls each had a picture of Jesus in their room for that semester. I’m not sure where Emily put hers—in between Jimmi Hendrix and Kurt Cobain maybe. The two girls ended up great friends. At the end of the semester it was time to redecorate and Jesus came home to live with us again.
We’ve recently moved but in all our packing we never found Jesus. For the life of me, I can’t remember what we did with him.

Fires

It’s mid-August and typical Texas August weather. Everything is hot and dry. When I walk through the dead grass it makes a crunchy sound. We’re under a Burn Ban here in Wood County. That always means one thing: the fire department is watching me.I don’t dare light a single match for my oven. Not a candle. Not even the wooden matches you use when you’ve smelled up the bathroom. Not me, at least. I’ve gotten a reputation around here.

When we bought this place it have never been inhabited that I know of. It was part of a larger piece of land and it doesn't look like there had ever been a house on it. Most folks in this part of the county have been on this land for generations. I have noticed that there’s mostly two families. If you’re black you are kin to the Pruitts and if you’re white you’re probably a Cobb.

For the first few years we didn’t have any equipment and came here to camp. It was cool to have your own private camp ground. Finally we had a place we could bring our girls to camp without having to make reservations for a campsite. We brought out an old Lawnboy mower and started clearing off a small piece of our 23 acres. We did this so many times we could have been a commercial for Lawnboy mowers. That mower did anything we asked it and lasted far longer that we thought it would. The place was so overgrown that we didn’t really know what we had. After our first year of clearing we discovered we had a creek.

I married one of the most obsessive compulsive engineers God ever created. And with a German heritage to boot. When Beaven built something we didn’t mess around. When it came time to deal with the creek he insisted on a bridge that would support a parade of elephants and last the ages. So we put down four 8X8 railroad ties to span the creek with 2X6 treated lumber as cross beams. Once we had this we could cross onto the larger side of our land and continue clearing.

I personally hate cedars. They’re some of the nastiest, prickly, water-sucking trees around. About the only thing they’re really good for is to provide shelter for birds and to burn in campfires. And even the campfires are an iffy proposition. Burning cedar logs put out a snap, crackle and pop that can be amusing at night but sometimes it will be an small explosion that send hot coals onto your clothes or body parts. I have many a sweatshirt or coat with a burn hole in it from the cedar. The cedars were the first trees to go. I wanted to make room for the few pines we had, to nourish them, love them and encourage their lives.

In the process of clearing out cedars one hot August summer I had a huge pile of dead cedars and decided the efficient thing would be to burn them. The mark of a good Girl Scout is being able to light a fire with one match and that day I was very proud of myself because it just went up like crazy with one match. While I was standing there congratulating myself on what a great Girl Scout I was I noticed the fire was spreading. I tried to stomp it out but the flames were too hot to get close enough. I never noticed before how much hotter a fire is when you're wearing shorts. My Girl Scout troop had only camped in the winter. There wasn’t much wind, which was fortunate. It wasn't spreading "like wildfire" at least. I ran to get Beaven.

I have noticed that Beaven’s response to most situations is to utilize the biggest tool he can find to fix the problem. So for this he got out our old Ford 8N tractor (a collectors item but not much on firefighting). I'm not sure what he thought it was going to do to help but he drove the tractor over the grassfire for a few times while I was beating out the flames nearest our neighbors pasture. Finally I went to call the fire department.

My map skills are the worst in the world. Anyone who has ever been anywhere with me can tell you that. Add this to being in a total state of panic and my directions on how to get to our house were useless. I finally agreed to meet them at the gas station about three miles away.

One they got to our house I was relieved to see they had a huge tank of water on the truck. There’s not exactly a fire hydrant in front of our house out here. They did pause at the edge of our bridge because they weren't sure if it would hold the fire truck. They stopped at the creek and said they couldn’t cross it. I told them it was sturdy bridge, that we had built it ourselves and his response was something like “Lady we have 2,000 gallons of water on this truck.” Then another fireman got out of the truck and looked under the bridge for a while and said it was worth a try. When they crossed safely , Beaven and I would have high-fived each other if our pasture wasn't burning up.

After the bridge test, the fire was a cakewalk. They drove around a little and sprayed water everywhere and it was out. They drove back across the bridge without a care. I made huge glasses of iced tea for everyone.

The interesting thing is that this grassfire gave out enough heat to germinate the pine seeds on the ground and ,years later now, we've ended up with a tiny little forest out of the deal.

The next fire was smaller and I almost got it out by myself. Again it was Old One-Match who got a fire going that spread faster than I could stomp it out. I ran into the house to get the fire extinguisher and Beaven looked up from his paper. "Nothing”, I told him, “I've got it under control.” By the time I gave up and called the fire department I just told them I'd meet them at the gas station this time. But you could see the flames from down the road so they might have been able to find it even without my directions.

Then the third time, I swear this one wasn't my fault. It was another hot and dry day. I was only mowing. Mowing. How can you start a fire while you're mowing, for God's sake? Beaven told me later after a long deliberation over whether he wanted to stay married to me; the red hot muffler on the riding mower had probably caught the tall dry grass on fire. Whatever. I was riding along minding my own business and all of a sudden I was in the middle of a circle of flames all around the mower. I jumped off before the thing exploded or whatever gas engines do when they catch fire. And this time I went straight to the phone. After a few sentences of explaining who I was and where I lived the dispatcher handed me the final insult, "Yeah, lady, we know where you live."

Now the reason Beaven says I've set fire to the place four times, not three, like there's any difference between the numbers, is that the guys had to come out a second time for this fire. This fire was on the opposite side of our first few fires and was close to the other neighbors. Where we are grass and meadow they are all old oaks and thick decaying underbrush. Once a fire gets in that kind of terrain there's no telling how long it can smolder only to burst into flames later.

We had sent the firemen home after another round of huge glasses of iced tea and more profuse thanks. We took some time to look at the mower. The wheels had melted so we decided to wait until the next day to tow it off. We had even gone in and had nice relaxing showers ourselves. We were about to go out to eat for a little celebratory post-fire dinner. It had become a tradition of sorts. We made one last check of the blackened pasture and off in the distance we saw the bright orange flames that can ruin dinner plans fast. This time the fire dept didn't mess around. They brought in a bulldozer and cut a dirt line that encompassed the fire and then some. I can't remember exactly if they did the helicopter with the bucket of water thing. You'd think I would remember a thing like that.

We get annual solicitations from the Winnsboro Volunteer Fire Dept for their fundraiser and we are huge contributors. They bought a new truck last year and I suspect we paid for most of it. I still get a knot in my stomach whenever I see the colors orange and black together. I have flashbacks every Halloweens.