Farewell Fair Calico

We basked in her benevolence.
Enjoyed her eccentricities.
Whistled, and she came.
Endured her yowling twilight.
Appreciated her manners.

Lucky, the Martha Stewart of Catdom, is now a memory.

Year's Turn

Sunshine strikes bare filigree. Branching glory contrasts dark clouded background. North of the tree a thick, bright bow bends, its spectrum hues nature’s unassuming display.

Our lighted decorations will soon come down, find their boxes, sleep through storms, soft rain, infant greenery, warming days, straw weather, musty leaf-turns, frosting cold again, until they are re-required along our roofs and window frames.

Birth Day Remembrance Comes of Age

At four a.m. a dream and strange sensations. Bright morning. Nervous, steady husband. Phonecalls. “You would do this Christmas Day. Meet you at the hopsital.”

Birthing room. Monitors, cords. Parents bearing gifts. Merry nurses. Not so bad, yet.

Dad in waiting room plays Atari games. Tim teaches doctor with pregnant wife how to hook it up.

Mom helps me walk. Waters gush. Pain, in earnest, begins.

Laughter, excitement surround my bed. Strange new form of consciousness while climbing (riding?) a contraction to its peak, its crest. Beginning to flag. Wave a white flag. Tim’s hand constricted by my strife.

On his three-inch TV screen, Barney Miller. Somehow I don’t follow the plot. Evening labors into night. A very great need to PUSH.

Decision to move to delivery. Intense pain as moment nears. Doctor, nurse, my cheering section: Mom, my brother, a good friend, Tim. The audience breathlessly waits.

A moment like no other, sending small person out from my body. Giant relief. Silence.

Time frozen as doctor, there, grasps baby, my baby, clears passages. She cries.

Indecision over name evaporates. Victoria. She’s Victoria. Gripping her daddy’s finger.

Three minutes past midnight. I’m a mom.

Scintillating Night Life

Tim and I attended the company holiday dinner and got our picture taken.



The two free drinks hadn’t quite relaxed us yet. As the evening progressed we had more fun. One of Tim’s co-workers stopped by to shoot the breeze regarding Dr. Who. A friend of hers in England got her interested in the updated series, and in a BBC spinoff, Torchwood. We all agreed Torchwood’s plots are rougher and raunchier than the Doctor’s adventures.

From there, Tim and I had the round table to ourselves. The other TV station people and their spouses/partners/dates grouped in corners, laughing as they spread garlic butter on warm bread. I leaned against Tim’s arm, more content than I have been other years.

I am shy; Timothy is ever-willing to describe his engineering feats up at transmitter sites in painstaking technical detail. The station people love him, though. I’ve heard different ones remark how honest and moral he is. Come to think of it, they love us, in a sense. The couple still together since forever. We’re predictable. We drink our free drinks once a year. I smile. Tim offers great puns. And they don’t have to take more of us than they want to.

After a while and before dinner orders were made, the station’s intern receptionist arrived with her University roommate and sat across from us. The two of them ordered and ate like only students can. It was fun to watch them enjoy the spread. Then came the gift exchange. People received hot-dog makers, winding flashlights, bottles of wine.

Tim’s boss stood up before the end to ask for stories, from the past year or before. Several employees have been with the company since the beginning, almost 20 years now. They took turns remembering good times and crazy stunts.

Tim stood to share a bit about switching to the new, digital transmitter. I chuckled when someone called, “Make it a short one, Tim.” The words carried the same affectionate tone another of his fellows had used, saying to me before dinner, “We get to have Tim the other half of his life.”

Here’s the T-shirt I want for Christmas:

Of a Monday

It’s all right, it’s difficult; I’m happy, I feel dumb. Such are emotions amid the chapter of figuring out what to do, as a writer, as a mom with kids mostly grown. Last week I gained the littlest bit more confidence. As if the jungle in which I’ve floundered these past months is opening to reveal a path. I think I may see the way ahead, sort of.

And, right, there’s a difference between knowing the path and walking the path.

In church David Crabtree continued teaching 1st Samuel. Things came up as he spoke and in discussion afterwards, about the troubling, intersecting stories of Israel’s first two kings, Saul and David. There’s a lot I could try to recapture, but I’m working to restrain a recent sermonizing streak. Mainly, there’s confusion and concern over how God treated Saul compared to David. What were Saul’s great sins, next to those of his successor, David, the adulterer, the murderer, the man after God’s own heart? Do we know Saul’s eternal destination? (I lean toward not knowing, and the possibility he was not destined for damnation.) Could his main problem be he would not accept his role in history? There’ll be more to ponder in coming weeks.

The relevance for me involves accepting my God-given role. I’m not talking, as I used to years ago, about systemizing a plan for ministry to the world, with the attitude, “I’ll ask, and I’ll receive the goal I’ve visualized.” As David C. said at church, it’s fine to try and change life’s details, but they may not change. The path may not open.

There the real wrestling begins, the work I’ve come to see as a deed of the heart. It includes toiling, inside, to decide whether or not God is a good writer/producer. If God is good, God has always, in every detail, been good and has worked for the good of those for whom the story of our reality was written. Do I trust God's authorship enough to keep following, wherever this tale may lead my favorite character(s)?

So far, I conclude with growing confidence the God-story is a good one, even if my bit-part within it remains very small.

A Real, Good Yoke

Life gets slightly crazy, as Christmas lights glow on our fragrant tree and a fire crackles behind its tempered pane.

I hum along, wondering about Matthew 11. After church I asked Jack Crabtree what he thinks prompted Jesus to say, “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.”

Jack’s answer (reworded here by me) included a review of Jesus’s reaction to the Pharisees’ teachings. Jesus came right out with it lots of places: he was pissed. His anger flamed, not because those rabbis, often referred to as scribes and Pharisees, taught The Law and the Prophets (Old Testament), since Jesus based his theology on the same scriptural books. What ate him up was understanding the real Jewish law was not the problem. From its inception, the covenant with Israel included many provisions for people’s screw-ups. Sacrifices abounded. They were rituals, yes, but for those Jews who began to get it, they became snapshots of mercy. God asked them to be righteous, while providing ways for them to answer back, “I want to be. I see I’m not. God, help me. Thanks for salvation shadows in bloody offerings.”

Apparently what happened by Jesus’s time, though, was generations of Pharisees had been working hard adding in all sorts of qualifiers and sub-rules to insure they could follow the Law flawlessly. That way, they’d be able to consider themselves worthy of eternal life. A nice idea, one lots of people have tried (me, oh, me, too). It wasn’t, however, the point of the sacrificial covenant. To make it work, adherents had to ignore aspects of reality about themselves. They proposed ways to justify divorce and dishonoring their parents, thinking they’d found loopholes, failing to see it was time for a heartfelt slaying of a pigeon or two.

So if you there in first-century Palestine followed a rabbi as his student (disciple), you likely took on a pretty hefty load, or yoke, of teachings about how to become worthy before God. Your teacher’s practical applications list was miles long. When you failed, when you sinned, the dirty looks and reprimands came down hard. You sensed inside, even when your master praised your weary toil, something was still quite wrong here. Tainted works for the righteous God? It led to confusion, despair.

Then, Jesus. He offered a different yoke. His teachings weren’t burdensome; they were real. He fulfilled the old covenant by making it deeper, truer. And so he could tell people, “Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.”

Good Friends, Good Cheeese

I stopped by Laura and Geoff’s place yesterday and received a tasty gift. I came bearing videos for Laura, who’s been sick in a more heavy-duty fashion than I was (poor kid).

These two are the people with whom we view Dr. Who adventures on Friday nights. We also all share an affinity for Wallace and Gromit. Yesterday Geoff grinned toothily, hiding something behind his back. It turned out to be a wheel of this:



Woohoo, Wensleydale! You can read more here about this (exceedingly good, we’ve determined) cheese and its rescue by our crackin’ animated duo.