Free Music!
Now available on our personal website (ourlastname.com): An as-complete-as-it-gets collection of my numerous (and, I warn you, rather vastly pathetic) songs that I wrote and recorded prior to marrying my (obviously) better half. The music is free to listen to and download (if you want to pay, there’s a place to donate).
Wealth
There’s nothing I know of that could make me feel any wealthier than the sight of N, just after eating dinner, making a beeline to the blueberry patch and gobbling blueberries and red raspberries and even a sour cherry seed or two (she happily gives me the fruity stuff and pops the seeds into her mouth). What a glorious life!
Portraits
Mulberry Cobbler
Neither M nor I get overly excited about mulberries. However, while they are rather nondescript and bland, they are also free, and so M has used the fruit from the trees to make jam and other delights.
Last week she made a mulberry cobbler for us, for a bedtime snack.
“We can eat half of it tonight, and the other half tomorrow morning,” she said.
That sounded quite reasonable to both of us, but when we found only one quarter of it remaining, I suggested, “Let’s just eat it all now.”
“Okay,” she said.
It was a fine idea, I suppose, except that with just an eensy-weensy bit of the cobbler left, I realized that I just couldn’t take any more.
It made a fine breakfast appetizer the next morning.
Vehicular Relief
We had finally made up our minds not to continue expensive, routine, preventative maintenance on our car. At 200,000 miles and with a potentially cracked head, we just figured that the overdue if scheduled (every 90,000 miles) $600-$700 timing belt would just not be worth putting in the car and we would have to just buck up and buy another vehicle if this one would go kaput.
Most people we spoke with about it agreed with us, which turned out to be very lucky for us, as I didn’t immediately run out to get the job done–and since last night when I was rooting around in our vehicle maintenance files I found a receipt showing the car’s most recent (and completely forgotten) timing belt swapperoo from just 15,000 miles ago.
Whew!
And then my dad told me on the phone today that an article in AARP’s magazine says it pays to maintain cars as directed in their owner’s manuals.
Timing belt? Coming right up (in 75,000 miles).
Tribute to My Truck
I have entered a time of grief.
After being listed on craigslist for just several hours, my truck sold yesterday. This evening, the buyer drove for three hours from his office to haul it away. He paid me thirty-three twenties, so M scrounged up $10 change and, as we had previously discussed, wrote down the buyer’s license plate in case the cash turns out to be counterfeit (he seemed like a terrific guy).
It was time for it to go, the truck. The transmission was failing, the back bumper was falling off, the engine stuttered in the rain, and the stereo was completely dead. As my craigslist post stated, “FOR SALE: 2WD 1994 Toyota pickup with 222K miles, just inspected. 5-speed manual transmission (pops out of third and fourth gears). Runs great (in wet weather, must warm up first). The stereo doesn’t work, and the back bumper needs to be replaced (rusted out), but overall, a little workhorse. Snow chains included; bed cap optional (free). $650 or best offer.”Its life was fast approaching a “nickel and dime” era–a condition that we would be stretched to accommodate–but its small (even cute) body being towed down the driveway into a new existence marks for me the end of several eras.
I was practically given the truck in 2001 by my uncle, who had used it for hauling firewood and Amish, just after completing a year of voluntary service. Certainly I had little money at the time, but I felt rich driving around in the peppy, burgundy pickup.It continued to be my primary transportation for the next eight years, until yesterday, that truck. It chased fire engines when I wrote for a newspaper one forest fire season. It hauled camera tripods and lights when I worked as a photographer for a software company. It found itself at the homes of the broken youths I mentored.
It took M and me on our first “casual date” to see the Indigo Girls in concert, and over the next seven months accompanied me home on the many late-night treks down the interstate after our hours of conversing, biking, and even getting engaged. It carried our wedding presents. It drove me to my final interview for my current job; on the way home I stopped at a rest stop to eat my lunch and call M to tell her that I was pretty sure I’d been hired, and an old couple from New Jersey commented about all the “Tie-otas” they were seeing.And it helped move us from our honeymoon townhouse to our apartment to our farmhouse.
Already I miss it.
Church Modeling
Over the last few months I’ve enjoyed the services at a large, “high church” church. The professional organ pieces, the liturgy, the well-thought-out and intellectual sermons, the sunny sanctuary are, I find, relaxing and enriching.
This Sunday morning we visited a small country church where a friend pastors. No professional organ player there, of course, and no liturgical readings, but we were greeted more warmly than most places we’ve visited and the Sunday school discussion about Jesus for President: Politics for Ordinary Radicals was a satisfying blend of politics, pragmatics, and scriptural acrobatics based on the story of Jesus facing temptation and why he didn’t lead his mob to do great social movements.
“He should have taken over General Motors,” I said.
From my friend’s sermon I learned that in Jesus’ day the mustard plant was a sort of weed, which makes the parable of the mustard seed multifacetedly subversive rather than–this is how I always heard it interpreted–an assertion that even the smallest act of evangelism can have far-reaching ramifications.
The sermon was also about church growth–the four families on vacation cut the service attendance drastically–which spawned in me the thought that small churches shouldn’t try to be big churches.
Big churches have programs and formal services down pat: Sunday school classes, nurseries, choirs, dramas, great musicians, vacation Bible school, airy buildings, you name it. I enjoy all of those things immensely.
Small churches often think they must have those same things. This means that the small churches’ members have to fill multiple roles and perform multifarious duties that end up making church very tiring for everybody, all the while just hoping and praying that more people will come, more people to lighten the load and swell the ranks.
I say let big churches be big churches, and let small churches do things that really reflect who they are. One small church we visited ate meals together in each others’ homes after their weekly sermon-less services of nontraditional activities including music, hands-on creativity, and discussion. The leaders of the church searched within its members to find direction and evolve rather than looked to large-scale models for growth goal setting. We likely would have attended that church more had it not felt too overrun by the college campus where it met.
There’s a fine place for big churches, especially maybe for people like me who like Sunday morning to be an aesthetically pleasing, intellectual, quieting time to sit back and reflect. There’s also a fine place for small churches–as long as they are created not from a “keeping up with the Joneses” mentality but from their own organic roots.
We Defeat Ourselves
Implicit in CIA Director Panetta’s statement that the “disclosure of explicit details of specific interrogations” would be “propaganda [that al-Qaeda] could use to recruit and raise funds” and would be “ready-made ammunition” for the organization’s cause is acknowledgment that the U.S. has not been acting in its own best interest.
The debate over whether or not “harsh interrogation techniques” are okay is over, and the victors are those of us who willingly sacrifice torture’s (ever-so-slightly potential) benefits in the name of not becoming terrorists ourselves.
Not only can we claim (an albeit simple-minded) moral and ethical (I use both terms because I don’t know the difference) higher ground, we also now know–the CIA’s even said it–that doing bad things to people makes us less safe.
Birthday Bash
For her birthday this year M received several gifts worthy of excitement. I was particularly hyped about two of them because they’d been on my wish list for quite a while: a wireless router and a patio set.
It was time for it to go, the truck. The transmission was failing, the back bumper was falling off, the engine stuttered in the rain, and the stereo was completely dead. As my craigslist post stated, “FOR SALE: 2WD 1994 Toyota pickup with 222K miles, just inspected. 5-speed manual transmission (pops out of third and fourth gears). Runs great (in wet weather, must warm up first). The stereo doesn’t work, and the back bumper needs to be replaced (rusted out), but overall, a little workhorse. Snow chains included; bed cap optional (free). $650 or best offer.”
I was practically given the truck in 2001 by my uncle, who had used it for hauling firewood and Amish, just after completing a year of voluntary service. Certainly I had little money at the time, but I felt rich driving around in the peppy, burgundy pickup.
It took M and me on our first “casual date” to see the Indigo Girls in concert, and over the next seven months accompanied me home on the many late-night treks down the interstate after our hours of conversing, biking, and even getting engaged. It carried our wedding presents. It drove me to my final interview for my current job; on the way home I stopped at a rest stop to eat my lunch and call M to tell her that I was pretty sure I’d been hired, and an old couple from New Jersey commented about all the “Tie-otas” they were seeing.
