Run Out and Get The New Yorker and Read Anne Hull’s Article, The Strawberry Girls

The Strawberry Girls is everything that makes me love to read and write.  Take your fingers off the keyboard, go find your August 11 & 18 copy of The New Yorker,  turn to page 36 and celebrate generosity, vernacular nuance, and just damn good writing.

I absolutely love this article which made me smile audibly.  I loved the Strawberry Queen, the whole town, the author’s evident powers of observation, ear for small town conversation, and ability to take me right to Plant City, Florida.  I felt like I could have been sitting at the dinner table with Kristen and her father, hearing about a particularly difficult washing machine repair and the quaint but weighty dramas of a Strawberry Festival.

Celebrate Anne Hull’s gifts.  She didn’t win a Pulitzer for nothing.  So excited to have found her.

What You Wouldn’t Believe Even if “They” Told You

At every life stage there are others a season ahead of you who could tell you the truth about “that which you are about to enter.”  But if they did, you wouldn’t believe them.

Before preschool, would you have believed that your mother really was going to remember to come pick you up?

Before kindergarten, would you have believed how strong the smell of the throw-up removal product would be?

Before elementary school, would you have believed that some kids will be picked to be safety patrols and you might not be one of them?

Before middle school, would you have believed how many times you were going to hear Stairway to Heaven at “make-out parties” (assuming you were born around 1960 as I was)?

Before high school, would you have believed that what you did on the first day (and every day after) would go on your permanent record and determine your future trajectory?  Or so they said.

Before college, would you have believed that you weren’t the only smart kid/yearbook editor/most likely to succeed arriving on campus?

Before graduation, would you have believed that you would have many careers and not just the one that you imagined?

Before marriage, would you have believed that you would receive that many toasters or that you could wake up that many mornings with the same person (equally hard to believe!)?

Before children, would you have believed that you and your spouse would find trips to Ikea to be satisfactory, even thrilling, dates?

Before middle-age, would you have believed that your children were not all going to be on the travel soccer team and go to Harvard?  And that that would be okay, even preferable.

Before your own parents died, would you have believed that you didn’t yet think of yourself as a real grown-up?

Before retirement, would you have believed that you would have been able to buy your own gold watch long ago and that the cookies at the retirement party would be bought and not homemade?

Before the nursing home, would you have believed that you don’t recognize the face in the mirror?

Before death, would you have believed that this is only a shadow of what is to come?

It’s hard to believe!

Random High School Regrets

I regret…

Not talking to the “rednecks”

Thinking they were “rednecks”

Missing typing class in 10th grade on the day they taught numbers

Lying to a man in an Arby’s late one night and giving him bogus directions just “for fun”

Laughing when a friend wrote “all fat women are bitches” on the bulletin board when my very large math teacher left the room

Not protesting when my tiger mascot suit was made out of fake leopard fur. I didn’t want to inconvenience the seamstress. But we were the tigers!

Not eating at The Varsity every day.

Never going to Ebenezer Baptist for church.

Self-absorption.

Yo! God and Toby Keith Collaborate

Yo… yo… and yo tu. A woman in my Spanish class cracked me up this week. We’re working on preterite conjugations, and we’re beginners. She said that she’d “decided to just stick with the first person singular because most people only talk about themselves anyway.”

For sure that’s our default mode. And that’s how I pray. Me, me, me. I. Yo. Requests. Petitions. Needs. Demands. Telling God what I’m thinking, who I am, what He needs to do. UGH!

And sometimes I imagine God wanting to answer me with a rousing singing of the country hit, “I Wanna Talk about Me.” Picture him with a deep, deep voice like Toby Keith:

We talk about your work how your boss is a jerk
We talk about your church and your head when it hurts
We talk about the troubles you’ve been having with your brother
About your daddy and your mother and your crazy ex-lover
We talk about your friends and the places that you’ve been
We talk about your skin and the dimples on your chin
The polish on your toes and the run in your hose
And God knows we’re gonna talk about your clothes
You know talking about you makes me smile
But every once in awhile

I wanna talk about me
Wanna talk about I
Wanna talk about number one
Oh my me my
What I think, what I like, what I know, what I want, what I see
I like talking about you you you you, usually, but occasionally
I wanna talk about meeeeee (me,me,me,me-background singers)
I wanna talk about me (me,me-background singers)

We talk about your dreams and we talk about your schemes
your high school team and your moisturizer creme
We talk about your nanna up in Muncie, Indiana
We talk about your grandma down in Alabama
We talk about your guys of every shape and size
The ones that you despise and the ones you idolize
We talk about your heart, bout your brains and your smarts
And your medical charts and when you start
You know talking about you makes me grin
But every now and then

I wanna talk about me
Wanna talk about I
Wanna talk about number one
Oh my me my
What I think, what I like, what I know, what I want, what I see
I like talking about you you you you, usually, but occasionally
I wanna talk about me (me,me,me,me- background singers)
I wanna talk about meeeeeeee (me,me- background singers)
(I wanna talk about me- background singers)mmmm me me me me
(I wanna talk about me- background singers)mmmm me me me me
You you you you you you you you you you you you you

I can’t blame Him.

Handing Out My Own Scholarship

People can get the most esoteric college scholarships. I’ve been doing a search online for options for financing college for my son, a rising senior in high school. And I’m feeling downright negligent. Because if I were a Dress Barn employee or a “roadway worker killed in a work zone,” he’d be all set. If I’d married (or was) a Van Valkenberg (do you know any?), we’d be sitting pretty. If my son was a vegetarian or suffering from Crohn’s disease, he’d have more options. If any of us were members of the Cattleman’s Association, money would be heading our way.

I’m feeling dull and ordinary and like we’ll be paying full freight.

This reminds me of my husband’s encouragement, years ago, when I ran a marathon in the slowest time known to man. He reframed my marathon experience. I didn’t finish just before the Marines who sponsored the race went home and the tents and bananas were put in the clean-up trucks (and after the earliest finishers had finished and had two-Bloody Mary brunches). No… my husband told me that I had, in fact, “won my division” (”Breast Cancer-Surviving Mothers of Three who Hate to Run and who love ‘Leave it to Beaver.’”

So maybe my son will get a scholarship for “Guys that are Civil War reenactors who love bicycling and work enthusiastically in a restaurant and look forward to school starting again and eat breakfast at Steak & Egg with their mothers regularly.”

That’s some of what I love him for… and that beats the Cattleman’s Association vegetarian any day.

Share My Prayers?

Did you read the story (available everywhere) about Barack Obama’s visit to the Western Wall in Jerusalem and how his prayer, privately penned and stuffed into the wall, was retrieved and shared with journalists?

It raised a couple of points for me:

1) How often do we justify our own sharing of information that isn’t ours to share under the guise of journalism? I report to you the terrible thing that someone else shouldn’t have shared (in detail) and how horrific it was that it was shared. When I do it here, call me on it. Ugh… I dread that. Yet I know that I do those things that I don’t want to do and don’t do what I intend to do (thank you, brother Paul, for articulating this so well in Romans 7).

2) How many of my prayers would I want shared? Go ahead and pass along the fact that I ask God for world peace and for smooth relationships. Yet, let’s skip sharing the ones about who I find annoying and whether I can have a close-in parking space when I am going somewhere and didn’t leave home early enough.

And I’m embarrassed for you to know how many years I’ve been praying about certain challenges in my life. I once threw away 10 years worth of prayer journals because I was so discouraged to see the same requests in volume 1 and volume 3,003,427.

Bottom line: I’d love to keep the details of my prayers private many days… but I don’t mind sharing with you the fact that God has been incredibly patient with me as He has heard me praying with inconstancy, half-heartedness, lukewarm devotion, mixed motives and downright self-deceit for years and years. And somehow all that grace has made me want to please Him more and to pray better.

Baby steps. But private ones, if you please!

The Hand that Feeds Us

Some days I think of God’s hand as waiting to pluck me out of something I want and treasure, to move me over to another playground that I don’t like as much, so that I’ll have to share my toys with mean kids I don’t know.

Other days I remember that His unseen hand guides everything I do, and if He’s not leading me, I’d just as soon not go somewhere.

It makes me think of this verse in Acts 5: 38b, 39:

“Leave these men alone! Let them go! For if their purpose or activity is of human origin, it will fail. But if it is from God, you will not be able to stop these men; you will only find yourselves fighting against God.”

How much less pain and hassle we would encounter if we skipped the stuff that’s “of human origin” and just followed His voice.

Of course the challenge for all of us is seeking to have the humility that refuses to claim that we “hold the God card” and that we know exactly what His hand is leading us into and what His voice is saying. I’ve sure been guilty of being sure I knew something was “from God” and later seeing (and cringing at) my own arrogance.

1 Corinthians 4:4 says, “I may have a clear conscience but that doesn’t make me innocent. It is the Lord who judges me.”

Amen.

Tighty Whiteys

Taking this photo just made my day. I was hoping no one saw me sneak out my camera at my favorite thrift store because it’s just hard to explain why I wanted this photo so badly. I’m not even sure myself. I figured it’d be a perfect non sequitur blog post all alone, labeled simply “slow news day.”

Last night, however, I got to thinking about “whiteness” and I had the perfect illustration ready.

I went to hear Christian Lander, blogger and author of Stuff White People Like. He was at Politics & Prose, my local bookstore, doing his third reading (the first two being Harvard’s bookstore and Google’s headquarters). His blog, begun in January, is really striking a chord, and having laughed alone at home over it, I wanted to check out the buzz in person. And buzz there was. Huge crowd. Fun night. “Awareness” raised.

Made me think about a Tim Keller sermon I heard once. I wish I could direct you to the right one but I can’t. Keller was talking about how a friend (black, I think) told him that white people don’t know that they have a culture. They just think that the things they do and say and think are “the way it is.” Yet white people think that blacks and hispanics and others have specific cultures (i.e. little idiosyncratic ways about them that are not representative of some perceived mainstream, probably white). That point in Keller’s sermon caught me so off guard that I cried. I totally agreed with it, and I was so convicted of white assumptions I have.

What I loved about Lander last night was that he really does seem to be laughing at himself as he laughs at all of us. Unpaid internships, awareness campaigns, gifted children, farmer’s markets … these were a few of the white loves he skewered, kindly and humorously I thought. But I defintely went home with a lot to think about. That’s a good book reading.

I laughed at his comment that of all the spinoffs of his blog that he has seen (”Stuff Asians Like,” etc.) his favorite is “White Stuff People Like.” So in that vein, I hope you like my “tighty whitey” photo. It made my day!

Bless Her Heart

For those of you not raised in the South, let me tell you that your ears should prick up when you hear the expression “Bless her heart” for the mere utterance of it has given the speaker carte blanche to trash someone.

I’ve often observed that turn of phrase preceeding things like “…but she’s a mess” (or worse). In fact my own children were the ones who pointed out this dichotomous pairing of thoughts expressed from my own mouth.

Monday’s Washington Post had a quote by Nancy Pelosi speaking of our president: “Well, you know, God bless him, bless his heart, the president of the United States, a total failure….” The quote goes on.

And you know, I was thinking as I read it that regardless of our politics, it would be awesome if our “bless his heart” utterances really could be operative as prayer.

There’s no job I’d less rather have than president of the United States (ok, perhaps I’d less rather scrape slugs off of sidewalks, but does anyone get paid for that?).

Anyway, it’s a thankless job, and I do say, agree or disagree, current or future president, “Bless his (or her) heart!”

Really.

Life as Spiritual Exercise

Sunday night my priest was talking about how life itself is spiritual exercise. I believe the Greek word is “askesis.”  It’s the idea that we are encountering much of what we need to practice for our transformation or sanctification just by living in the world. And a trip to the MVA (”Motor Vehicle Administration” for those of you in other states with other designations for your government-run torture chambers) is the perfect opportunity to practice patience.

Why do you think they have an armed policeman behind a desk there? It’s definitely related to the concept of “going postal,” a phenomenon that arises when there is one line too many, one officious employee too many (oops, it’s break time; I mean one too few), and one piece of identification that you are lacking to transact your business (but that the website didn’t really mention very clearly).

If you truly mean it that you want to become a patient person, just say a little prayer as you head out to the MVA and step into the patience-production-lab. There is no way to survive without the Holy Spirit’s guidance. It’s just not possible.

While you wait in line you will acquire the gift of patience — or be handcuffed by the policeman just waiting for the chance to throw you in the pile of people who have threatened violence in the last four minutes.

And when I go there I am struck by the fact that I speak English and have a flexible schedule. What must this be like for the people for whom English (and triplicate forms) are a second language and who actually get their pay docked (or lose their jobs) if they are not at work on time?

The only consolation for a trip to the MVA is the fact that the truck dispensing tacos and pupusas produces what is arguably the best meal in town (and it’s under $5).