At the family reunion this weekend, N met her second cousin J. Here’s a photo from their press conference:
Cousin C had her own sort wildness going on:
And some of the cool cats took some time just to hang tough:
In My Judgment
It is perhaps impossible to write without sounding judgmental about others’ judgment of judgmentalism; pointing out the falsely grounded and smug self-assuredness of those who condemn smugness may also render any critic himself smug–but here goes.
I am self aware enough to know that most of the many songs I have written are silly, sentimental, pathetic, boring, sub-clever, sappy, preachy, and probably ridiculous. That said, when listening to folk music I often pull remaining hairs from my head.
Last night we listened to a “live performance radio” program on which a folk musician was introduced with a glowing review of her latest album, a gospel-genre celebration of agnosticism. This singer, in songs that could have been written by any overly introspective college student, gloatingly protested all that is in fact wrong with “Christians,” namely judgmentalism and that the “Christian” heaven is “too small.”
But here was the catch, I realized not long after my annoyance at her mis-characterization of Christianity had turned into chuckles at the inevitable irony of her own judgmentalism: Her ardent denunciation of these traits of certain religious factions placed her not in some camp diametrically opposed to Christianity, but in bed with Christ himself! That is, even while she delighted in revealing the missteps of that certain “Christian” faction, her very rejection of those downfalls–and they truly are unfortunate–affirmed her even deeper, maybe even subconscious, agreement with that which Jesus taught.
During the program, we played Scrabble. With N’s help, M beat me by three points:
Old Fart Bloggers
If the problem with kittens is that they grow up to be cats, and if the problem with puppies is that they grow up to be dogs, then the problem with old people is that they turn into old farts. The definition of an “old fart” is this: a person who has strong opinions and lacks the inhibitions necessary to refrain from stating them.
Likewise, if the problem with television is that it turns viewers into mush brains, and if the problem with personal music players is that they turn listeners into public recluses, then the problem with blogging is that it turns bloggers into old farts.
And so I am an old fart. See, on my blog I pick the soup de jour. I pick the priorities. I pick the information. I pick everything–and since it’s solely my platform, I can build my opinions into fortified towers of posts, virtually unassailable.
This may sound arrogant, but one ultimate fact remains. That is, the saving grace about an old fart blogger, as compared to the necessary grace required by regular old farts, is that a blogger’s menu and venue can be set aside with but a click.
Cheesecake
For the second time today, we ate for dessert from the cheesecake that M made yesterday for our premature but perfectly timely Valentine’s Day dinner. Both times, the white piece of cake with bright red strawberry sauce drizzled over and around it on my shades of teal plate almost sent me running for the camera. But, as M said tonight, “Just enjoy it. You can’t always take a picture of everything that’s lovely.”
So I did. And it was lovely.
Here’s to you, unpictured cheesecake.
Buddy: A Character Sketch
People can be annoying, strange, or just plain old interesting. Take our neighbor, for example. I’ll call him “Buddy.”
Buddy, probably about 55, married our neighbor and moved in with her about three years ago. He at times has been so in love with his wife that he calls–yells–after her even after she has gotten into her car and started driving away to work at Walmart (he, I suppose, is a homemaker), “I love you! I love you!”
He and his wife have a dream of moving to the country; their own house was on the market for a while but didn’t sell. They’ve recounted one interesting house hunting story to us: It was a cute house, just what they wanted, and affordable, way out in the country. They loved it, but only until they saw in the yard of one of their potential neighbors-to-be a small pavilion-like cage housing two real-life tigers. “Uh-uh,” they decided. “What if a tiger got out and ate our dogs?”
Dogs, indeed. They have two of them, including one I’ll call “Ronnie.” Ronnie and his playmate bark and bark at anything or nothing when they’re outside. I’d bark, too, if I were a collie or part husky and had only a small, fenced-in lawn to call my own. Buddy barks, too. Not literally, but if we’re out back tending our garden, hanging up laundry, or retrieving our bicycles from the shed, and the dogs start barking, which is whenever they, too, are outside, Buddy competes with the racket by hollering out the back door, “Ronnie! Ronnie! Get in here! That’s not nice! Come here, Ronnie! Stop barking, Ronnie! That’s not nice! I’m going to make you come in here! Be quiet Ronnie! Get in here, Ronnie! You better listen! Ronnie, come here!” all to no avail.
Buddy sometimes talks to us out of his bedroom window. Maybe we’re out weeding, or trimming, and it’s early, say 8:00 in the morning. “Good morning!” he’ll call out of his window. “Nice day, ain’t it? I used to have a garden. Loved every minute of it, all those healthy vegetables–and the work, I loved the work. Have you been biking lately? That’s what me and my wife want to do–get a couple of bikes to ride around, save on gas. I love exercise.”
At one point he must have exercised a fair amount, although I probably wouldn’t have noticed his large, ex-military muscles if it wouldn’t have been for the neighborhood teenage kids (mainly another neighbor’s daughter) out front one day, begging him, “Make a muscle. Make a muscle!” Buddy used to be a fireman, too, as he reminded me several times after a fire truck arrived to scope out a downed tree that was resting on the cable TV wires. He also called his friends at his former fire department to find out what was going on after a house less than a quarter of a mile from us blew up. (That neighbor was going through a messy divorce, we read in the papers, and has since served jail time.)Buddy is a conversationalist difficult to walk away from. That is, difficult to politely walk away from, because he’ll keep talking to you from his porch even after you’ve unlocked your front door, paused a considerate amount of time to nod and smile, and gone inside. One morning I looked out the window to see a neighbor boy leaving on his walk to school. Buddy had him by the verbal collar and was streaming endless conversation at him. I was inside, behind glass, and I watched, trying to scream a mental text message to the boy: “Just walk away! Just walk away! You’ll never get away unless you just walk away!”
Some of Buddy’s conversations have required utmost calm in my soul. One day, just as I arrived home, I saw a fight between two white guys in their late teens just outside a house across the street. Buddy and another neighbor were in our driveway watching the fists fly; I think they were rather enjoying themselves.
“I’m going to go stop that fight,” I said, and headed off across the street. When I got there, I talked to the two guys and they stopped fighting, and then left. I noticed somewhere in the process that Buddy and the neighbor had followed me over, probably to make sure I wouldn’t get killed. Up the street were several younger boys, both white and black, who’d been watching the proceedings and laughing.
“Did you see that?” Buddy said as we walked back across the street. “I’m not prejudiced or anything, but those black boys think it’s funny when white people beat each other up.”
Another day the mail was four hours late. Buddy came over and knocked on our door. “Have you gotten your mail yet? I have bills out there that have to go today, and the mail hasn’t come yet. I’m going to call the post office.”
A few minutes later, he came back over. “They said that there’s a new person on the job, and she got confused, and she’s still on the route. That’s aggravating–I’ve got bills out there that will be late if they don’t go today. This is terrible. You’d think they’d know how to do their job.”
I politely said something like, “Yes, having a new job can be tough. Have you ever been new at a job?” He didn’t catch my drift, but that was probably OK, since the mail came just then. We walked out to check our mailboxes together.
“You know,” he said, “I don’t know what America is coming to. Things like this shouldn’t happen. It’s all because of the homosexuals, all the gays. America is in trouble. I can’t understand it.”
All of that said, though, Buddy is a helpful neighbor. He’s volunteered to babysit N (“Buddy just loves little kids,” said his wife), and occasionally he mows our front lawn (for a while we simply stopped mowing, since our mower doesn’t work well and we figured Buddy’d catch up our slack). Just now I heard the scraping of ice, so I looked out. Buddy is there, cleaning up his walkway, and spraying his iced-over windshield, it looks like with some kind of aerosol defroster. He’s wearing pajama pants and a brown jacket.
Maybe his wife’s about to leave for work.
An Average Confession
Several times in my life my averageness has been laid bare before me, indisputable even under the long shadow of my intensely tremendous self image.
The earliest average-calling came in my senior year of high school, on a day when my math teacher pulled me aside. “I wonder how you feel the class is going,” she asked. “Is it too easy? Too hard? Are you grasping the material?”
“Okay,” I said. “I have to work, but I think I’m getting it.”
“Oh, good,” she said. “I think you’re an excellent gauge for the class as a whole. I’m so glad.”
Some three years later, in the throes of unrequited love, I told a coworker about my current crush, which had surfaced two years before (and would, by the way, continue for two more years).
“You two would make a good pair,” he said. “There’s really nothing too special about her.”
And then, just the other night at a youth group meeting, the book we’re studying noted that the average age that people marry these days is 25–and when did I get married? In the same year I turned 25.
Talk about humbling!
Poll results: Whose blog is it, anyway?
Well, my first poll wrapped up today, early, since I kept moving the deadline up and up. It turns out that this blog isn’t mine, according to popular opinion. And I even voted!
Monthly “Date”
We’re learning that we have to relearn our lives, what with N in tow (or is it us in tow?).
Tonight, for our monthly date, we decided to go to a local “casual Italian and Greek cuisine” restaurant (the nicest joint in town) for dessert. You know, dessert doesn’t take as long as a whole meal, so N would probably sleep through it.
Well, the restaurant was rather busy. I scampered in to scope out the scene; for a booth we’d have to wait about fifteen minutes, said the hostess. I scampered back to the car, where N was fussing up a storm. Sitting in an idle car seat behooves her not.
Our backup plan, which we had discussed earlier, just in case of this very situation, was to go across the street to Wendy’s for a Frosty. It wouldn’t be as romantic, but we wouldn’t have to wait around.
Or so we thought. We strode into the burger barn, and M scoped out and claimed a seat while I jumped in line. And there was a line. About fifteen minutes later, a Frosty in each hand, I joined her.
Then a nice old man with shaking hands, a bus driver for the deaf and blind school students who’d been responsible for my line, asked if we charge for looks (into the car seat). (He had actually been in front of me in line, and I’d noticed that his payment for his meal was telling the Wendy’s lady that he was the bus driver. That’s a slick policy, I’d say.)
He fawned over N a bit, and went on his way. We finished our desserts, N started to cry, and so we drove home to finish our date there.
A Happily Ending Poop Saga
For about a month, the dog liberally used every inch of our front yard (and our sidewalk and stepping stones, when the yard was covered with snow) as its defecatory palace.
“I think there’s the culprit,” my dad said to me once, when he and Mom were visiting (M was in labor at the moment). We were looking out the window from our study, where my parents were arguing about which band member was who on a YouTube flick of a Beatles concert. A small dog was waddling up the sidewalk.
Then N came along, and other pooping took priority over the dog’s misdeeds.
However, the dog poop problem kept getting worse. I eventually grew certain, through occasional sightings and the quantitatively expansive evidence, that the dog belonged to the family on the end of our row of townhouses. I contemplated kicking the dog next time I saw it, or buying a bb gun to give it a reason to poop elsewhere, or calling the police, or other frantic measures, just to preserve our territory.
Just this past Sunday afternoon, then, I had a dream. I dreamed that I talked to the son of the household (in my dream it was actually one of my students) about the poop, and he cleaned it up. When I woke up, I figured I was obsessing enough over the situation that I should maybe do something about it, and so I grabbed the shovel and, fifteen minutes later, buried a paper grocery bag full of crap out behind our shed.
But finally, my friends, the outlook brightened, for just as M brought N out in the stroller for our afternoon walk, down our sidewalk came the dog, waddling. I headed straight for him, and in a firm but pleasant manner encouraged him to go home. He turned around (the poor dog was elderly and whimpered with every step) and I followed him all the way to his front door, where we were greeted by His Owner.
We conversed pleasantly, His Owner and I, and I told His Owner that I’d just spent fifteen minutes cleaning his dog’s poop out of our yard, and then praised his son’s middle school choir. His Owner, in turn, apologized profusely, told me that his son’s choir sang at the White House earlier this fall, and said that if we found any more suspicious piles of poop in our yard, to let him know.
Entertainment Quicksand
I like entertainment. An occasional movie, an occasional indulgence in The Simpsons or YouTube samplings, and an occasional donut all suit me fine. That said, our society is severely out of whack.
I learned this morning from a Sunday school classmate who is a professor of music that until the early 1900s, over 90% of people worldwide could sing in tune. In 1997, however, only 35% of Americans could do this. This comment came in the context of a discussion about prayer and how Americans have become distracted away from prayer by all of technological entertainment. My classmate’s point was that our entertainment culture has severely curbed Americans’ ability to pray or participate in corporate worship (worshipful singing in the shower has also begun to tempt God’s wrath).
Now, I’ve heard many conversations (mostly in Sunday school classes, although the debate has been national) about how bad television is. People are often quick to point out television’s horrid
and inane content, the physical and mental inactivity of viewing and the resulting obesity and dumbness (I freely tell my students at school, “TV rots your brains,” to which they protest loudly and call for mutiny), the proliferation of consumerism, the distraction from participation in social activities and from meaningful human interaction, and the fact that if you’re watching TV, you’re not doing something productive or creative (like learning to play an instrument or sing on tune).And never have I seen anyone leave any one of those conversations vowing to cut the cord.
Of course, it’s not only about television, anymore. So many things keep us from practicing our music. For example, cell phones can be great tools, but they also fatally clog communication arteries with meaningless chatter. How often do people dial up just to say, “Hey, man, what’s up?” to “friends” who aren’t talking to anyone physically around them, either, because they’re on the phone? Or, how about personal music players, which seclude individuals from others and leave little space for quiet introspection (ahem, prayer)? Or, how about computers, which can exponentially expand our ability to do any of these things, and more?
In other words, just because I have never and will never own a TV does not make me, an “Ooh, I love technology” owner of both an iPod and a computer, immune from bad entertainment practices. In light of this, here are my recommendations for me and the world, just three questions to ask ourselves when we use technology:
1. Are we cultivating meaningful relationships?
2. Are we being creative?
3. Are we accomplishing necessary tasks?If our use of technology doesn’t help us do at least one of these things, then we might as well grab a bag of chips, turn on the boob tube, and sink into musical quicksand.
At one point he must have exercised a fair amount, although I probably wouldn’t have noticed his large, ex-military muscles if it wouldn’t have been for the neighborhood teenage kids (mainly another neighbor’s daughter) out front one day, begging him, “Make a muscle. Make a muscle!” Buddy used to be a fireman, too, as he reminded me several times after a fire truck arrived to scope out a downed tree that was resting on the cable TV wires. He also called his friends at his former fire department to find out what was going on after a house less than a quarter of a mile from us blew up. (
and inane content, the physical and mental inactivity of viewing and the resulting obesity and dumbness (I freely tell my students at school, “TV rots your brains,” to which they protest loudly and call for mutiny), the proliferation of consumerism, the distraction from participation in social activities and from meaningful human interaction, and the fact that if you’re watching TV, you’re not doing something productive or creative (like learning to play an instrument or sing on tune).