More noticing

Work duties found me driving the spine of Whidbey Island between Clinton and Oak Harbor today and as is my wont, I starting right in noticing things. And not all of them involved places where I might someday put my kayak in the water although, admittedly, that was my overriding intent. (Found some good ‘uns, too!)

Some of the notable non-paddling-related items:

In addition to the many deer crossings, I saw a warning sign that read “Otter Crossing.” Wish I’d had a camera.

At least three people who were apparently quite entertained by the sight of this old geezer rocking out while singing along with the sound track from Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dream Coat. Glad to provide your smile for the day.

A guy who was totally into his role as a sign-waving Statue of Liberty, using a rotating sign to advertise for a tax preparation service. It’s not always the job; sometimes, it’s what you make of it.

Some of the most drop dead gorgeous salt water views I’ve ever seen. Seriously.

An apparent penchant among the islanders for quirky mailboxes, including polka dots, stripes, floral patterns and one that was a dead ringer for a hobbit house.

And my favorite for the day, spotted right along the highway hard by the turnoff at Tomchuck Road, a hu-u-u-uge, bright pink mailbox emblazoned with Love Letters Only in a large, bold hand.

I hope that one gets lots of use.

Academy Awards

I was at the gym for much of the Academy Awards show this evening, then at the store and in the shower. The upshot is that I basically saw the very beginning and the very end, along with odd snippets here and there.

There were some great movies this year, not all of which I’ve seen. I suppose it’s time to get off my ample caboose and go see Argo and the one with Jennifer Lawrence (I know, terrible that I can’t recall the name but you know which one I’m talking about). Maybe Lincoln but I admit to being a little tired of revisionism and I’ve heard things.

Of the bits I saw, my  favorite was when Chris Terrio won for the Argo screenplay. This guy was just so clearly thrilled and humbled and felt so validated. And even when he got up again as part of the crew of Argo when it won the Best Picture Oscar, he was still bubbling over, hugging Clooney and just overwhelmed.

I’ve never done any screenwriting, of course, so I can only imagine what it’s like to do the work, much less to have your work recognized as the best of the year. But it seems to me that creating a story whose translation depends upon the vision and sensitivity and talent and hard work of so many others has to be the ultimate professional leap of faith.  And this guy was just so appreciative. Forget the tuxes and gowns and the snarky inside jokes. This guy’s reaction to the congratulations of his peers made the evening for me.

(Oh, yeah, Silver Linings Playbook. Gotta see that one.)

Talkin' wit me bro

My brother re-introduced me recently to the fine and arcane art of letter writing. His first to me was a sort of omnibus of topics and ran to a half dozen pages and my response is seven pages and building. I will most likely have to just cut it off and send it long before the ideas run dry, so he won’t think I’m stiffing him.

I’ve only been a regular letter writer twice in my life and the recipients of those strings of epistles both read this blog with some regularity. My point being that the folks with whom I exchange letters tend to be the keepers. Or at least, among the keepers.

I’d forgotten how much joy there is to be found in exchanging thoughts on topics important to me with a person who will respect them enough to read them openly and respond thoughtfully. 

 

Oh, and speaking of communicating, we’ve just passed both 300 posts and 5000 ‘hits’ on this little blog. Thanks so much for being with me!

Why I like pencils

I really do prefer pencils to pens, and I figure most of you are just burning to know why. After all, people tend to try to emulate their blog meister. So with the weight of your followhood bearing down on my shoulders, I figure it’s only right to let you understand the basis of my preference.

So, without further ado, I like pencils because:

·         Pencils are easier to chew than pens.

·         The unpainted, plain wood ones look good and feel nice.

·         The lead breaks if I press too hard and this forces me to write more gently, which is better for my “crazy hands.”

·         I enjoy sharpening. There’s nothing better than a newly sharpened Number 2. Plus, it’s an excuse to walk down the hall.

·         Pencil erasers work (I use the Pink Pearl) while pen erasers…not so much.

·         I can use pencils with erasers as drumsticks when I’m bored.

·         I can write marginal notes with pencils without ruining the book forever.

·         Most people don’t use pencils much these days, so I get my own box.

·         Pencils don’t leak in your shirt pocket while you’re teaching in front of twenty-five people who are all wondering whether they should say something.

·         With a pencil, I’m not tempted to click the retract button incessantly which I understand  annoys people around me.

·         You can tell when a pencil will be used up before it happens.

·         And the big, big reason…drum roll, please…

·         I’m used to them and I’m a creature of habit.

Shoes of the Fisherman

You all know the Pope has announced his retirement, in a move that – as one priest reportedly said – demonstrates that the papacy is not about power but service. He has decided that the frailties of age no longer allow him to properly serve the church he loves and the God he worships.

I wonder if the next pontiff will find it in his soul to be as faithful a servant. Because if ever there was a time the church needed a servant on the Throne of Peter, that time is now.

I grew up in the church and although it’s been a long time since I found solace or even reason in its ministrations, it’s nevertheless part of my being, somewhere near the core of my world view.  In fact, my departure from the Church, although it coincided closely with my realization that the God of my fathers was an apocryphal image, was not part and parcel of the same growth process.

My liberation from the God myth came about as I learned adult discernment, as I read and pondered and gradually realized that “God” – at least the carefully constructed and precisely defined God represented in the Baltimore Catechism – was just not likely. This is my take, not necessarily yours and we can argue ad nauseum without coming to consensus and still be friends.

My departure from the church was more of a practical decision. I was increasingly unable to reconcile the teachings of the church with the world I saw around me.  Certainly, that doesn’t make me unique. The pews of Catholic churches have become less and less strained as folks who believe in social justice have voted with their feet.

I have friends and family who are still devout members of the church and a cousin who’s a priest. I know through them that there is a congregation of good people who truly believe that the Bible is the word of God and the church is the conduit of God’s communication with the faithful. But in order to be a useful medium, the church needs to craft a message that’s coherent, compassionate and sensible. 

The choice of the Pope matters more today than possibly at any time in the past. The church has reached a crossroads at which its very existence as an instrument of good is being questioned by its own adherents. Perhaps alone among the world’s religious leaders, the Pope’s pronouncements can move hearts and governments alike. But only if the message makes sense to those receiving it.  

The Church in which I grew up no longer exists. In fact, the Bing Crosby, “Bells of St. Mary’s”  church probably never existed. Not really. But for this brief moment, thanks to the selfless abdication of a man who thinks of himself primarily as a servant, to God and Man alike, the church has an opportunity to truly become what it has always claimed to be.

Look, I don’t believe the College of Cardinals are waiting with baited breath to receive my sage advice but just in case someone in the Sistine has his ear to my wall, here goes.

Choose a Pope who’s attuned to the world. Who understands that of faith, hope and love, the greatest truly is love. Who will take immediate affirmative action to help the church shed itself of ideas that simply won’t play in a global discourse that is, well, global. Who understands that Leviticus was written in and for another time, and that the greatest abomination on the part of God’s church is a failure to listen to the needs of its flock. And speaking of abominations, that the abuse of a child by a priest is one, and that a grown man’s love for another grown man, or a woman for a woman, is not.

So long as the church preaches exclusion, more and more people will be driven to exclude it from their lives. And what its enemies have tried to accomplish through the centuries, it could very well bring on itself.

Anyone who’s paying attention knows that the Catholic Church is at a tipping point. Change now, come into modern times and it may become the agent of social change that it should always have been. Or it can continue down the path of outmoded arguments and indefensible proclamations and reap the ultimate sanction - irrelevance.

State of the Union

I watched the President’s speech this evening and I suppose I ought to comment on the range of huge topics he addressed but I can’t.

Alright, make that, I won’t. This is mainly because this evening, I’m just plain politicked out. I’ll be back in that realm another time.

But before signing off, there was one person in the State of The Union audience that I would like to mention here.  Her name is Kaitlin Roig and she was a teacher at Sandy Hook the day a maniac walked in and started shooting.

In the first seconds of the horror, Ms. Roig herded her fourteen charges into a restroom, barricaded the door with a shelf unit and urged them to be very, very quiet.  And then, as the shots continued to ring out, she swallowed her own fears and directed her total attention to the children’s needs, keeping them calm lest they make enough noise to attract the unwanted attention of the monster.

You can find a video on the Net of Ms. Roig being interviewed by Diane Sawyer shortly after the Sandy Hook massacre. It’s about four minutes long but if you’re like me, this one quote will tell everything you’ll ever need to know about Kaitlin Roig.  “I told them, ‘ I love you all.’ I wanted the last thing they heard not to be the gunfire.”

When the firing was done and the police came to bring them out of hiding, Ms. Roig had the presence of mind to challenge them to slide their IDs under the door. And when they found a key and opened that door, they found this 29-year old woman still shielding “her kids.”

We have a lot of problems in this country. They won’t all be easy to resolve and some of them are likely to get worse before they get better. But tonight I am reminded that there are still adults who in extremus will swallow their own fears to secure the safety of other people’s children.

That’s the real state of our union. At least I’d like to think it is.

Messages to my audiences

To all my blog buddies: I’m doing well with ramping up my gym work, and I’ve gotten to the point of major sweatitude on a near-daily basis. The good news is this means you can rely on my blogs continuing for the foreseeable future. The bad news is that you can rely on my blogs continuing for the foreseeable future.

To the Buff Bobby who smirked at me at the gym today: I’m not sure a guy who has “dishonor” misspelled in permanent ink on his forearm is qualified to smirk at anyone, anytime. (Two n’s, really?)

To the several people at the gym, including some with very fit bodies, who smiled non-judgmentally  in passing today in spite of my current planet-like status:  Thank you!

To Mary, and also One and also Two: I will get there, I promise. SID

To the folks who happened to be within visual range of my sweaty, bloated, unshaven corpus today and so many other days: I am so. So. Sorry.

White stuff on the way

With our daughter at college in Boston, it’s a bit disconcerting to learn that the area is expected to be walloped with a blizzard in the next couple of days. They expect two feet of snow and major disruptions.  The thing is, I know Two will be safe and warm and fed. I don’t expect any adverse outcome for her from a little – or even a lot – of snow.

There are people in the Northeast who won’t be as lucky this weekend. And my thoughts go out to them this evening.

Headlines

I’ve always loved headlines. Especially the ones that don’t necessarily convey the intended idea. So I went trolling through some of the internet news sites to see if I couldn’t stock up on ambiguousness…er, ambigution?  Ambiguitude?

Anyhow, I did manage to find a few headlines that I felt might be open to question:

·         “Man walks out, home explodes” makes one wonder what he had for lunch, does it not?

·         And then there’s “Ice-fishing house explodes.” - Please say it was the propane tank…

·         “Manatee released after two years” -  Did it not get a phone call and a court appointed lawyer?

·         “McDonalds angles for more variety with Fish McBites”  - What’s next – Fries McStubbies? Tiny cheeseburgers? (Never mind, they already have those.)

·         “Outrageous photos of Kim Kardashian see-through skirt” – First, let me just say E-e-e-ew! And aren’t any photos of this talentless famous-for-being-famous troll outrageous?

·         How about “Car Salesmen Confessions?”  -  How do you respond - well, duh?

·         “When does your wife get social security?” – Do I really want to know?

·         And the one we could absolutely have done without – “Honey Boo-Boo’s parents reveal ‘random hookup’ romance.”  - Please, for Gawd’s sake, don’t think about this one. Just walk away…

Grown daughters

When Daughter One was still in a crib, Mary had to go out of town for a few days on a sales trip and I had my first taste of being a single parent. Which should have been fine. Mary and I had never been real dogmatic about our division of roles and with the exception of breast feeding, I was comfortable with all the chores attendant upon raising small children.

So, while Mary was a bit conflicted at the idea of leaving her baby with a mere male, I was anxious to prove my mettle and so I sent her off with a kiss and a promise to keep our daughter and the house in original condition. I had plans for a park visit, play dates with the toddler across the street and plenty of reading time. I had taken the first day, a Friday off and Mary would be back Sunday evening. What could go wrong?

I started to find out about two hours after Mary left. I’d been feeling a bit off, nothing specific but then I went to prepare a bottle for my little girl and I was still okay until the merest whiff of sweet-smelling formula made its way to my nostrils. At which point, with neither warning nor reaction time, my just-consumed breakfast undertook an explosive relocation.

This may well have been the worst flu I’d ever had. I won’t go into detail here; let’s just say I didn’t spend much time in a standing position that weekend. It’s amazing how many critical household chores one can accomplish with actually standing upright.  At my request, our nurse neighbor called me every hour or so to make sure I was awake and continuing to care for One. And the weekend was ve-e-e-e-ery long.

The last couple of hours before Mary was due home, I was counting minutes. So imagine my dismay when at the appointed time she walked through the door totally green at the gills and proceeded to advise me that she shared my malady and had actually begun her own purging process on the drive home.  We got through that flu alive and One never did catch it, so we counted at least that as success.

Fast forward twenty-two years.

I flew in from elsewhere today to find Me Beloved stricken with a bug at least as virulent as the one that laid us low way back then. She’d kept nothing down all night, was bedbound and generally out of commission. With me out of town, she could have been in a bind just to care for herself.

Not to worry.

Daughter One happens to be home for a visit and she is no longer reliant on us for bottle feeding. She totally stepped up and nursed Mary, did the cleaning and some laundry and picked up Dear Old Dad at the airport.

Grown daughters are the best!