The Miracle of the Baby Formula

 When my youngest child needed formula at the age of two months, I picked the cheapest of the well-known brand names, because we really couldn't afford formula but didn't have a lot of choice in the matter. Our nearest grocery had quite a variety, and all the name brand ones were largely the same price except for the one which went home with me. I was pleased and felt triumphant at having found a good deal. 

Em was happy with it, and grew and thrived, so all was well. The price stayed the same and we worked it into the budget, but I was still looking forward to the day when we didn't need to buy it any more. 

When that day came, I ceased to put it on the grocery list, but I still had to venture into the Baby aisle at the store for something else the next week. Probably diapers--as my dad was fond of pointing out, with babies you just keep one end full and the other one dry. When I got there, there was a stocking clerk and a manager there looking at the formula selection with some consternation. I overheard the manager asking how long that formula had been at that low price, because it should have been just the same price as all the others. How long had they been losing their profit on it? 

I knew the answer to that, and I suddenly knew why as well. Once again, I had clear proof that God was looking out for his children. So I just smiled, and quietly picked out my diapers and went on my way rejoicing.

Love, Spud

For Want of a Mop

Some of us were discussing last night the old neighborly habit of borrowing sugar or eggs or what-have-you. And it took my mind back to the day several years ago when I truly, desperately needed a mop.

On a Thursday afternoon I was doing laundry and getting ready to host a small Bible study in my home that evening. Two ladies with whom I had been meeting for some time were coming, along with a guest. My husband was out of town at a conference, and whenever Stu left town, something, without fail, would go hideously wrong. This time, it was the sewer line. When the washing machine drained itself, all that water came up through the powder-room toilet and into the front hallway instead of through the sewer line like it was supposed to.

I ran to the garage to fetch our mop, but quickly realized that the Swiffer-type mop which I owned was thoroughly inadequate to the task. I needed a MOP--and a real old-fashioned one, not this pathetic new-fangled thing. So I ran out my front door, turned left, and started knocking on doors. One neighbor after another confessed that the Swiffer-type mop was all that they had also. Good grief. We are all so modern!

I finally in despair knocked on one last door, and my wonderful next-door neighbor (the one who lived to the right) had not one real mop but two, and marched over the lawn to my house with both of them in hand, and helped with the clean-up. Bless her chatty old Italian heart. I owe her so much.

By the time the other ladies arrived to study a couple of hours later the hallway was restored to its usual dry self, but the man with the giant motorized plumbing snake had arrived also, and was reaming out our sewer line through the access in the pantry with an alarming level of noise. We valiantly decided to go through with the Bible study anyway for the sake of the guest, and sat around the corner from the pantry in the living room, cheerfully bellowing at each other in order to be heard above the sound of the motor. I don't remember the passage for the evening, but the guest reminded me years later that she clearly recalled my explaining the Ark of the Covenant through the din. It was an evening none of us could ever forget.

Love, Spud

POP!

Acts 2:24

I came across this verse referenced in a book I was
reading, and even though I’d seen it many times
before, this time it really caught my attention.
”But God raised him from the dead,
freeing him from the agony of death, because it was
impossible for death to keep its hold on him. “

I looked in other versions to see what word they used
instead of agony, and found pains, pangs, and suffering.
None of these things are good things! Death is not
meant to be a good thing. Romans 5:12--sin entered
the world through one man and death through sin, and
in this way death came to all people because all sinned.
So death is this big bad repercussion that we all earn,
and it is meant to be an agony that we all go through. 

But it was impossible for death to keep its hold on Jesus.
Not even possible! Like trying to keep carbonation from
rising to the top of your glass of soda--or your champagne.
Or like trying to keep an air-filled ball submerged in a
swimming pool. It can’t stay down--it just goes POP
up to the top and freedom. 

I love the fact that Jesus was irrepressible--he just could
not stay dead. Of course, this is because death came for
all people because all sinned. But Jesus never sinned so
death had nothing it could grab onto, and so it couldn’t
keep its hold on him. Not. Even. Possible. Honestly, that
kind of makes me laugh--ah HA Death! 

So what about us? Yes, we die, because we are part of
sinful humanity. Even though the sins of Christians are
forgiven--put away as far from us as east is from west--
the fact remains that we did sin, as all humans do. So
death waits for all of us regardless. 

But the Bible talks in Revelation about two deaths. We all
go through the first one, but 20:6 says that the second has
no power over us, because we are God’s children and
Jesus’ sisters and bride. He presents us washed clean
and pure, so the second death has nothing to grab onto.
Once we go through death once, we never go through it
again. We will be irrepressible, like the bubbles in
champagne. I love this thought--it fills me with gladness.

Love, Spud

Legacy--Dad

My dad was a man of many passions. He loved travel, history, machines, cars, woodworking, gardening, pie, old hymns, flirting with children, the Ohio State University Buckeyes, and my mom--not necessarily in that order. But one thing that he really loved was a good story. Consequently I have much more material on my dad than on my mom. The trouble has been deciding how much to leave out, as he had a full life with lots of stories. 

Dad claimed that he was born leaving Michigan, and to be honest I have no evidence to the contrary. He was the son of a veterinarian, and a housewife who loved to sing hymns as she worked, but it all fell apart during the Depression. Grandpa could find plenty of work, but nobody could afford to pay him for it, so his veterinary career went by the wayside. He spent a few nights sleeping in Grand Central Station and looking for work of any kind during the day, and finally landed as post as a federal meat inspector. A good steady job, but he had to travel a lot for work.

His wife, my grandmother, soon fell ill with an illness that plagued her for the rest of her life, and she died when my dad was around twelve. But since she had been ill for so long, and her husband was constantly on the road as an inspector, Dad and his older brother had been farmed out (literally) when Dad was still quite small to Aunt Ottie and Uncle Henry's farm. Ottie and Henry had seven children living, and so they barely noticed two more little boys added to the house. 

Dad was the youngest of the nine cousins, and sort of became everyone's roly-poly pet. His nickname was Itty Bitty Teeny Tiny Earl Tommy Tiner Baby, and he tagged along after the eight older ones and thrived. For the rest of his life, he considered all those first cousins to be siblings, and I was relatively old before I recognized that they were not in fact aunts and uncles of mine, but cousins instead. They were very close, and we paid lots of visits. 

The kids all fought every morning for the honor of taking that day's milk down the road to Aunt Susie (after whom I was named) because the person who delivered the milk invariably got a lovely home-baked treat fresh from Aunt Susie's oven. Dad became a really good baker himself, living on that farm, specializing in pies and Christmas fruit cakes. Another feature of Dad's childhood was, surprisingly, embroidery. Dad broke an ankle at some point, and Aunt Ottie declared that no one on a farm could lie around all day with nothing to do, so sewing and embroidery it was until he was up and about and into mischief again. 

Dad, his  brother, and his dad moved to Piqua at some point before high school, and he graduated early in order to join the navy. Uncle was already on a ship in the South Pacific, but World War II ended before Dad could get out of basic training and onto a ship of his own. He did join the army later and spent a tour of duty in Korea, as a cook for the army. He found out that war wasn't all it was cracked up to be, and for the rest of his life didn't like Fourth of July fireworks as they reminded him too much of the sound of the guns. 

After the army he went to Ohio State, traveling home on the weekends to be with his church and his future bride, and they were married while he was still getting his second degree, in agricultural economics. There was a problem though--Mom was determined to not be married to a farmer; so he ended up working as a sales manager (for seed corn, naturally) for a while, and eventually ended up working for the air force. Ellen and I were born during the sales job, and Tom later on during the air force job. 

Dad designed the house we built on the hill above town, and Ellen and I helped to the degree that people in elementary school could. My hands were the smallest, so it was my job to stuff insulation into the cracks around the window frames. The house was largely done all by us, with the exception of some things like the basement digging and the cement walls, the framing, and the plasterwork. Otherwise, it was very much a family affair. Grandpa Martin did the wiring, Uncle James worked on duct work, and it came together in about two years, in time for Tom to put in his appearance. 

Most of my memories of growing up with Dad center on the fact that he was what you could only call jolly. He was constantly humming, whistling, beating time to his singing. He was one of the few men I know who actually laughed until he cried, and it happened often. I think my son inherited this personality. Not that Dad wasn't serious when seriousness was called for. He somehow managed to always be on the governing board or a committee of our church, and that gave him no end of frustration. It was a case of duty calling, I suppose, because he certainly didn't enjoy that experience, and yet it persisted for decades. 

Dad also had a history of heart attacks. I'm not sure now how many there were, but there were quite a few. That must had been very scary for him and Mom, as his own father had died of heart failure before I was even born, so I never met either of those grandparents. When we met with the pastor of the church to work on Dad's funeral, we were read an interesting document about Dad and his heart which he had penned to be given to us after his life was over. Apparently at one point it became apparent that Dad's heart was not going to last. He spent some time desperately begging God in prayer to let him live long enough to see Tom graduate, and God came through. As he slept, he saw a golden light come into his chest and rest on his heart, and he knew his prayers had been answered. Sure enough, his heart healed up significantly from that point on, and he died much later of something else entirely. Our own little family miracle. He ended up seeing all his grandchildren, and that made him happy too. 

Dad loved to travel, and as a result I ended up visiting a majority of the states. We were always short on funds though, so I'm not sure how he managed it. I suspect he took out hefty loans from the Bank of Uncle James, and there was some evidence to support this. And one more thing Dad loved--battlegrounds. We never saw the things that would appeal to children, for the most part, but we did see a LOT of battlegrounds. It was part of his love of history, because an awful lot of recorded history involves battles, so there we went. When I finally, in my fifties, voluntarily went to visit Valley Forge, I knew that my Dad would have been proud of me. 

And that's another thing about Dad. He was immensely proud of all three children and all four grandchildren. And he let us know it. This man of great enthusiasm was enthusiastic about US, and it made all the difference in the world to an awkward child's aching heart. He was proud of Mom too, and even occasionally managed to sneak in a hug when she thought nobody was looking.

When I was a new mother, I was working a job that gave me one weekday off every week. From the beginning of my motherhood until the kids were in school, there would come a knock on my door in the mid-morning on those days off, and there would be the proudest Grandpa in the world, come for a visit. He was with me one day when I was lugging around my two-year-old non-mobile child with a bunch of bags of equipment in a medical building (another feature of my weekly day off was an endless round of specialist doctors for my son), and I was pregnant again at the time. I could tell by his reactions that he was distressed that this had become my reality, but I was oddly comforted that there was one other person in the world who had a small clue what my life was like at that point. Proud Grandpa was also Understanding Grandpa. That helped, emotionally.

Once Mom became a victim of dementia, Dad stuck pretty close to home. Those were some lonely years for him, but he didn't feel like he could leave her alone. The one time that he did go to an appointment without her, Mom left the house and wandered, crossing a busy road and getting picked up by a policeman who saw her looking vague and endangered. He never left her side again unless she was in someone else's hands. 

When Mom died, he was broken-hearted, because she had been the love of his life for more than fifty years. At the same time, he was freed. After a time of mourning, he set off cross-country in his car and visited all those cousins he hadn't seen for a few years. He was on the road quite a bit there for a while, catching up with his "siblings". He also did the other thing that Mom would never let him do, and grew a most luxuriant white mustache. He looked just like Wilford Brimley and I loved it. 

Mom had this little finger wave she would do to say good-bye. When Dad was in the hospital post-stroke and she had been gone for nearly four years, I paid a visit. He wasn't really aware of what was going on and who was who. As I went to leave, without even thinking about it I did that little finger wave. His face lit up like the sun and he did it back, and I realized that he was disoriented enough to think he was seeing his beloved wife once again. It made me sad, but I was glad that I had made him happy.

My dad had a big happy life, and I am sure as I can be that he's still having one. Someday we'll meet again, and I'm sure about that too. See you later, Dad. 

Love, Spud

Legacy--Mom

In the interest of providing a little history for my daughter, it's time to talk about her maternal grandmother. Some of the more important bits can be found in the August 2019 posting "Ambivalence", and so I won't repeat them here. I'll get to Grandpa next time.

My grandfather was born in a little place called Buzzard's Glory. The last time I went by, decades ago, there was little more than a crumbling wall of a brick building, so there probably isn't even that any more. Granny, my mom, was born in Dawn, which was one street long but had a church and a school for all that. They moved to Versailles sometime in her childhood, and that's where she went to all but the last year of her schooling. 

My mother was the oldest of four, with straight blonde hair and big blue eyes, and childhood photos often featured an enormous bow on the top of her head. She was a child of the Depression, so she knew how to get by with not much, which turned out later on to be a good thing. Her weekly chore was to walk to the store to get the family's ration of oleomargarine. It was white, and came with an orange capsule of food dye, and she would be the person to mix it all up so that the white oleo resembled butter, but fooled absolutely nobody.

They moved to the town where I grew up right before Mom's senior year of high school, taking her away from her good friends, an occasion for bitterness for the rest of her life. She had taken the secretarial classes in high school, and went right to work. She wanted desperately to go to college, and she would have been quite successful there, as she was extremely intelligent, but there was no money for her to go. This was another cause of bitterness, as her younger brother went to college with the rationale that he was the boy. Her younger sister went to a school for the deaf, and the very youngest was sent to college in her turn but wasted the opportunity, skipping class to run around with her friends instead. 

At some point in the first couple of years after high school Mom dated a man who later became a lawyer, and her mother used that against her when she complained about not having money later in life, saying "You should have married that lawyer!". Thanks Grandma, very helpful. But in a couple more years she married my dad. The way he put it was that he was the Sunday school president and she was the vice-president, and they just kept it that way for life. Dad was smitten with Mom to the end of his days, despite ups and downs and fierce, noisy arguments.

They dated and were married in a time of wide skirts, tiny waists, and adorable shoes, and went to live in off-campus housing on 12th Avenue in Columbus (the upstairs apartment of a family named Gump) while Dad finished his master's degree. Mom hopped on a bus and worked downtown as a secretary while Dad was in classes, and loved every minute of it. And in her spare time, of course, she typed up Dad's thesis. You can still view it from the Depository at OSU.

After graduation, they moved to Findlay where my sister and I were born, and when I was five we all moved to Piqua. We went to the church where Mom and Dad had met, and Mom had a wonderful, true, soft little voice for singing hymns. Sometime in those first couple of years back in Piqua, I think they came close to divorcing, although I don't know if my siblings even know this. I remember Mom taking my sister and me with her to an office which I recognized much later in life as that of a lawyer, and Mom cried and cried in front of him. Shortly after this my grandmother pulled me aside and told me that if my parents split up that I was to make sure to tell them that I had to go live with her. It didn't impress me at the time, but I put the pieces together later. 

My baby brother was born a little while later, and I have always wondered if he was a reconciliation baby, but I'll never know. We were living outside of town at that point, in a house Dad designed and built himself. We never had more than two pennies to rub together, so it wasn't the house they wanted, but it turned out to be a great house anyway. And there was room on our property for a substantial garden. Poor Mom--she had told dad before she married him that she wouldn't be a farmer's wife, and she never was, but thanks to that garden and the even larger plot down the road, she still spent all her summers canning, freezing, and otherwise bitterly processing produce. But technically, Dad was a military contractor, not a farmer!

Mom had two great loves in life--big cities, and books. Dad was thoroughly allergic to big cities, but he shared the love of books. I grew up with lots of books in the house and a well-worn library card. We kids didn't really own much in the way of kids' books, but I made up for that later. Mom was like I am, or perhaps I am like she was; if we weren't doing anything else we had a book open in front of our faces, and always carried one with us wherever we went. I still do.

When I was in junior high school, Mom was diagnosed as diabetic. I suspect she was diabetic several years before she knew it, as looking back I can tell that a lot of her behavior was that of someone who just wasn't physically well and took it out on everybody else. Taking it out on others took several forms, none of them good. Once she got treatment things got better, fortunately, but then her own mother died. Mom always accused her mother of "digging her grave with her teeth" as Grandma loved food and didn't let her own bad health slow her down any in the gustatory department. Mom considered it a form of suicide, and was bitter about that too. 

Once I was in college, as my college years overlapped with my older sister, funds went from "tight" to "pretty much non-existent". So Mom went back to work, using those faithful old secretarial skills, and was a happy woman at last. By the time we three were all out of college, she had that income but not as much to spend it on, and life got much better. She and Dad went to the UK twice, and in fact were stuck in Scotland at one point as they were over there on 9/11. Nobody could leave. Ah, what hardship, to be stuck in Scotland! And Mom, for the first time in her life, finally got to indulge in shopping for shopping's sake, and not as a dire necessity. One time my little family went to visit for the weekend and managed to miss taking one of the suitcases. Mom joyously put on her shoes and took me out to buy a small boy some pajamas and clothes to replace what had been left behind. I don't think I could have made her happier if I'd tried. 

In her last years, the doctor put her on progressively more restricted diets in an attempt to control her increasingly severe diabetes, and Mom got thinner and thinner. This was yet another cause of bitterness, as Dad could still have whatever he wanted, and was as large as ever. It really did not seem fair. And then dementia set in, little by little. It showed up in her cooking, as she began to leave crucial ingredients out of dishes she had been making for decades, and also in an unfortunate paranoia that had Dad as its focus. She was convinced he was hiding things from her, and that he was moving her bookmark in the book she was reading. Or trying to read, at any rate, as her vision was nearly gone by then--the final bitterness of one who lived to read. So she would hide her book when she wasn't reading so he couldn't get at it and move that bookmark. Of course what really happened is that she just forgot what had happened in the plot last time she read it. 

There is a trend, here, and it probably wasn't difficult to pick up on. Mom was a bitter woman. Of course, she had plenty of reason to be, and I understand that. I wish I could have changed her life for her, sent her to college and waved a fairy-godmother wand to fix all the frustrating events of the years, but of course I couldn't do that. I wish I could have known her as a young woman, and given her the female friend that she never had by her side during her married years. I wish I could sit down with her now and ask for some happy stories to mix in with the sad ones. Mom was baptized at the local Baptist church in her sixties, and I know that the pastor there would not have baptized her if he hadn't been certain that she was a believer. It's my consolation, the hope that God is making everything wonderful for her to make up for the years the locust has eaten. I do hope that indeed, and that someday we'll be able to sit down together and marvel that all the bitterness is gone, and never to come again.

Love, Spud

Protected

I am very conscious that God has protected me numerous times throughout the years. Today is my birthday, so the fact that I have lived this long seems to be an appropriate topic for rumination.

Some of the protection has been physical. I did not manage to die of measles at age seven, hard though I tried, and an attempted abduction during my freshman year at college did not succeed. And I really did take candy from a stranger in a car when I was about six. Nothing came of it, and I'm not sure I ever did tell my parents.

Two instances involved cars. While driving back home to Columbus from my hometown one night, I found myself surrounded by semi-trucks. They hemmed me about before, behind, and beside for about an hour. I eventually pulled off the highway and stopped, went to turn off my car lights, and discovered they had never been turned on. God bless those truckers, who guided a young woman through the dark.  

The other automotive adventure was on a day when I was driving the other direction--from Columbus towards my hometown--and I was suddenly in a fog bank. I couldn't see a thing, so I went to slow down and pull over until it should pass. My car had other ideas, and instead of slowing it sped up and shot right through the fog and came out the other end. There was no visibility whatever and it was a terrifying few minutes, but it was out of my hands. I've always wondered what was getting ready to slam into my car from behind had I slowed down as planned. 

I guess I should also include the two or three times that the master cylinder went out and my cars lost their brakes, and yet I was not in an accident. Well, not much of one. One of those times I did rear-end the person ahead of me at the stop light, but there had been a very heavy snow the night before, and all I did was knock some of the frozen muck off her bumper. I was less than three blocks from the repair garage when the brakes deserted me that time, so I just coasted on in and walked to work.

Some of the protection has been spiritual. It was all the rage, when I was in high school, to play "Stiff as a board, light as a feather" at slumber parties. And it featured at the one slumber party that I was allowed to attend. One by one the girls went into a trance, and the rest of us chanted the name of the game and lifted them up into the air with only two fingers from each of us underneath them. When it finally came to my turn, I just couldn't go into a trance. I started the countdown from one hundred as the others had, got all the way down to one, and started counting up again. The other girls gave up on me at that point. I've always been amazed that I was unable to participate in this, in retrospect, occultic activity.

I'm aware that there are several more examples, but those are the ones that spring to mind right now. But the burning question has always been: Why? Why me? I'm not complaining, heaven knows, but I'm curious anyway. Bad things happen to good people on an hourly basis, and I'm not necessarily even all that good. Why have God's hands been keeping me from peril for all of my life? I have no good answer for this. I'm nobody important, and I don't do anything of import either. I'm not even a particularly good example of a Christian, although I do try. Maybe I've been preserved from harm for the sake of my family, or maybe, and this is my favorite theory, because it just gives God pleasure to rescue me again and again, to see if I'll notice. Like a little game, just between us. "I see what you did there, God!". 

I'll never know, in this life, why I have been so very protected. All I can do is be grateful every single day that it is true, and that I have another day during which to notice His kindness and grace, and let him know that I appreciate it. Thank you, God, for looking after me. Keep my eyes open to Your grace.

Love, Spud.

Ambivalence

Once upon a time, there was a girl named Nellie. She grew up and married a farmer named Ben. I have seen a photograph of her, and she looked a lot like me, with the same facial shape, curling brown (no longer!) hair and a lack of height. I love that photo--Nellie is standing with her feet planted firmly on the ground, and the reins to a large horse in one hand and her small daughter (my grandmother) in the other. She looks strong and capable.

Great-grandmother Nellie outlived her husband, and then went to keep house for her daughter and her grandchildren. My mother was among those grandchildren, and learned everything she knew about cooking and cleaning and managing a household from Nellie. This is because my grandmother Keitha was a working mother. Whether or not she needed to be a working mother was a subject for debate, but the fact of the matter is that Grandma really liked to have a paying job, and had one paying job or another for most of her life. I have no idea what my grandfather thought of this--he never said, at least not in my hearing.

But I do know what my mother thought of it, and it wasn't favorable. Mom thought that her mother should stay at home and BE a mother to her children. She loved Great-grandma Nellie but wanted her own mother to be at home. Well, Grandma Keitha would have been miserable at home. 

So when my mother became a mother, she stopped working for pay and stayed at home with her children, as she thought was right and proper and the best thing to do. Unfortunately, my mother also really loved working, and once we children emerged from toddlerhood she didn't really know what do to with us. We had become uninteresting. So she was miserable too, as her mother would have been.

This came out in all sorts of ways, including the fact that I was never really "mothered". There were plenty of repercussions of this later in my life, especially when I left home for college and discovered just how little I knew about life, being a socialized person, and even about basic manners  and hygiene. She didn't like to be touched, and once we were past early childhood had never touched us without anger, so I was a little stunted and starved.

With two daughters in college, Mom had to (!) go back to work, so our much-younger brother had a very different upbringing from mine, and didn't experience the same unhappy atmosphere. I think it also helped that he was a boy, and so Dad took a lot of responsibility for his parenting. 

So after all those long boring years of wearing a cotton house-dress and slippers, which got replaced every couple of years when they wore out, Mom had to wear suits and heels (oh she did love those high heels!) and make-up as though every day was Sunday. She had income of her own and that was the end of the years of scarcity of funds, and there were fewer people at home on which to spend it anyway. Mom was happy.

Of the two of us, my older sister was the one who learned to cook family dinners and do all the house-running activities. She went as far in the 4-H sewing projects as you could go, eventually tailoring her own suit. I was as entrenched as possible in school in music and theater and dancing, which left precious little time to learn all the domestic arts. My still-single sister and I were as different from each other as we could be.

Eventually, I married and had two children of my own, but I could not stay home with them as money was extremely tight. Even with my income, every month came down to the penny, and we did not waste any of it. There were no dinners out, cable television, new cars. For several years, most of the kids' clothing was second-hand. Everything had to last as long as possible. Finances got better by the time both kids were in school full time. So when it might have been possible for me to stay home with the kids at last, there was no longer a need for it.

To be honest, I'm not sure I would have been a happy stay-at-home mother either. I always thrived in the work environment, and on days off I was stymied by the need to play with my kids. I still don't really know how to play, but fortunately they both loved to be read to (a thing I never experienced myself once I could read) so I had that activity with them, and I made it a policy that my lap was always open. I have never turned down a cuddle, even now that they are both adults. 

The whole reason to get into all this is to explain the ambivalent relationship I had with my mother. Stu and I moved into a two-story house twenty-some years ago, and when my parents came to see it I was happy to see that they were pleased with it. Until my mother hissed at me how it was unfair that I had the husband and house and children, as it was my sister who deserved it. 

That shocked me, and devastated me, and it was many years before I was able to put the pieces together and figure out where that angry remark had come from. It wasn't until I finally understood my mom's relationship with *her* mother and grandmother that I was able to forgive her and let go of the hurt. 

It took sitting down with a large pile of seemingly unrelated facts to start to understand my mother, and once I put them all together and realized what her outlook and experiences had been, I came to peace with so much more than anyone knows. I did love my mother, and I wish I could have known her as a friend before motherhood happened to her. I hear she was a sparkling person with her own forays into community theater, who loved to go to the movies and dancing. I remember her becoming so alive the year that Dad was in an officer training course, and she was suddenly part of the Officer's Wives Club. When it ended, she deflated again. 

Mom wasn't a terrible person, she was just not suited for the role that life handed her. Bless my husband, who insisted on showing her love in ways she probably secretly yearned for but didn't know how to ask for. I tried to make her last years happy, on the times we visited, and by talking every Saturday night on the phone. The last time I saw her, she confided that she was certain she would not live out the year, and she was correct. Nothing made me happier afterwards than the realization that I had made her laugh a couple of times during that last meeting, a difficult accomplishment during her intermittent dementia. 

It was a gift from God that I was able to understand and forgive, and show her the approval that she had rarely shown me. Only having known the love and approval of God made me capable of examining my past and letting God blow the chaff away. I hope I get to see Mom in heaven, so we can start over and do it better next time. And I hope that my own kids will be willing to forgive any damage I have inadvertently afflicted on their own sweet selves. Family is a gift, and God is good.

Love, Spud.

Ode to my daughter

Remember her? You can read all about my child in the post from August of 2009. She's no longer that teenage girl-child, but a professional woman in a house a few miles away. In some ways life has changed, but in other ways it is just the same. She is still entrancing, and one of the most fun people I know.

But where she always had to have red shoes growing up, now they are gold. And she used to come to visit me at the library where I worked, but in recent years I paid a visit to the library where she worked instead. I've now retired, and she is starting out with a real live master's degree to make her undoubtedly unique mark on the world. 

I once heard an illustration of a duck in the water--it looks serene and calm gliding through the water, but underneath it's paddling like mad. That has always been true of me and I have a suspicion that it's true of her too. Unfortunately, that's the way life often is. May she experience extended periods of real calm, as unlikely as it is. 

I have been honored beyond measure that she often reaches out to me for conversation, consolation, confession, recipes, and shared delights. She is a woman of faith, and really tries to live a life according to it. She is an artist, a writer, a rescuer of cats, and an adventurous woman with so many friends. Rosie, I am prouder of you than you will ever know. Long way you wave.

Love, Spud

Beginnings

In other words, how I came to be. The truth is, I was a result of a failure of communication between my parents. Without going into uncomfortable detail, my mother took an action that made my father think that Mom was already expecting, so he ceased the use of preventive measures. My mother observed the lack of preventive measures and assumed that Dad had decided it was time for another baby. But did they discuss this with each other? No, they did not! Therefore, here I am. A happy accident, so to speak. 

Dad told me years later that he regarded me as someone whom God decided just needed to be. I've no objection to this, and try to avoid letting it give me the Big Head. 

On the night I was born, Mom woke Dad and informed him that it was time to go fetch the car out of the garage and bring it around to the front for the trip to the hospital. By the time he got himself clothed and the car fetched, it was too late. So he ran to wake up the lady next door who had already had five of her own, thinking that she'd know what to do. Well, that was a mixed success. This was in the days of Twilight Sleep birthing, and women didn't have to experience the nitty gritty of actually being aware of what was happening to them as they gave birth. Chris did successfully deliver me, but was so repulsed by the experience that she never had another one.

I was caught in a dish towel (I was not a large baby) and placed in a laundry basket to await the ambulance which was on its way. Dad always claimed that the ambulance staff initially picked up the wrong laundry basket, but I suspect that particular detail is apocryphal. Mom and I were hauled off the to the hospital, where I was deemed unsanitary, since I'd been born at home, and thus not allowed to stay in the nursery with the other babies. So Mom had to keep me with her, which I'm sure did not make her happy, but she was just accidentally ahead of her time.

An interesting side effect of emergency home birth is that nobody knows, really, what time I appeared. They were all busy, and nobody looked at a clock. 

My younger brother and I got to musing a few years ago about the timing of my conception, but as regards the calendar. It would have been just about the time of the OSU/Michigan game, which is still a landmark occasion in our family every year. My brother posited that I was a celebration baby. Thanks to the modern miracle of the interwebs, I was able to find out the score for the year before I was born. Alas, I appear to have been a consolation prize.

Love, Spud

Temporary

Job 14:1-2. I’ve been thinking lately about how everything is temporary. I drive by a spot where a house used to be, and now all that’s left is the sidewalk going to where the front door was, and the driveway stopping where the garage was. Otherwise the entire lot is covered with grass. Neighbors and OSU chop down lovely big old trees and I mourn every time. I love a good tree, and they’re supposed to last for a very long time, but in reality they are only temporary.

People, shockingly, are temporary too. My parents, three of my pregnancies, an old boyfriend, my senior prom date, Mark, Chuck--all gone, and many more to follow. If I die first, then I can pretend that Stu will go on forever, and it’s unbearable to think that he might have the nerve to die before I do. Thinking about this, I felt like I was stuck in Ecclesiastes. It was depressing. Something deep inside me feels like this is just wrong.

Many times I am able to get through bad situations with a semblance of sanity because I put them in the perspective of time. You can do, or put up with, just about anything if you know it’s temporary. So temporary can be a good thing too.

Thinking about all the things that are temporary naturally led me to thoughts of things that are permanent. Funny, there isn’t nearly as much on that list. There are two passages that come to mind--I Peter 1:23-25 and 2 Corinthians 4:17-18.

Everything we see is temporary. Everything. Even Planet Earth. Things we can’t see are forever. If the eternal things are evil, that’s a situation totally devoid of hope, and a perfectly valid reason for panic and despair. But if the eternal things, like God, are good, that’s wonderful. Actually, wonderful is much too mild a word, isn’t it? To be honest, I can’t think of a word in English that stands up to the task of describing permanent total goodness.

Did you ever look up the word “forever” in a big concordance? It takes up about four columns, and a lot of that is from Psalms and Revelation. Some of the Forever verses are about evil beings being tormented forever. Many more of them are about Good--Jesus having glory and dominion forever, God living forever, the two of them reigning forever. Permanent Good. And us, and those fellow believers that we have lost, being found by God, and never again having to say of a bad situation, “I can endure this, it’s only temporary”.

Love, Spud

Happy Easter!

Disciples: "Jesus?!? We thought you were dead!

Jesus: "April Fools!"

There are only so many places I can tell that joke, but I love it anyway.

To be honest, I'm largely posting today so that Blogspot doesn't decide I've gone and died or something, and take my blog away. I know that it's been a long time. But I will retire in roughly a year, and I really hope to get back to writing on a more (wouldn't take much!) regular basis.

My goodness life has changed. Give me a year, and I'll tell you all about it.

A Sigh of Relief

There are days when I have doubts. I just do. I read widely, and sometimes I just get influenced by the opinions of those who don't believe in inerrancy or verbal plenary inspiration or the historicity of most of the Old Testament. Lately I've been reading a scholarly tome that insists that there is no evidence whatsoever for enslavement in Egypt or the exodus or even the twelve tribes of Israel, much less the glories of Solomon's reign. The authors did say at the outset of the book that if you read it, your faith will be tested, but what good is a faith that doesn't stand up to a little testing? And they're right, of course. But still.

 And sometimes I read things by Bible experts whose words and lives I respect, but they seem to be blind in certain areas, and I wonder who is blinder, me or them? It has to be me, right? Because they do this for a living and have been interpreting the Bible for decades whereas I am a rank amateur.

And sometimes when I have been praying ardently for justice, or truth, or wisdom, and it just doesn't come, then doubt is right on my tail, because I know that these things are dear to the heart of God and surely if he was going to give us anything we ask for it would be justice and truth and wisdom. Right?

 So the darkness of doubting begins, and my soul grieves, and I feel as though someone has pulled up my anchor and I might drift away.

 But then a funny thing happens. I find myself telling God all about it. Wait! Why am I doing this? Don't I doubt that you exist?

 And in my times of deepest pain and loss, when reason tells me that God is either not there or clearly not on my side, I find myself screaming and shouting and shaking my fist at him. Oh, I give him a good earful, that God who might not be real. But when the doubts pass and the painful situations pass, I come to my senses and realize that he was there all along, waiting patiently for me to get it out of my system and stop throwing my pitiful little tantrum.

Because that's the thing, isn't it? Even when I'm in doubt and pain, I must know deep down that he IS there to hear, or I wouldn't bother to scream at him. Ipso facto, and all that.

 This morning's teaching was on the 14th chapter of the gospel of John. The teacher was discussing the Holy Spirit, and how he teaches us and reminds us all things. I suddenly got an image in my head that made me marvel and chuckle at the same time. People around my must think I'm loony--I often chuckle at the most inappropriate times when one thought leads to another and then where I end up delights and tickles me. That happened again this morning. I got a little picture in my brain of me wearing a leash, like a little dog, and the leash was the Holy Spirit. No matter where I wandered, where I tried to hide, how far I went in the wrong direction, that leash stayed attached. The other end of that leash was in the hand of God.  

And he never let go. 




Love, Spud

A link, for once

This is really good. I'd felt this, but couldn't put it into words.

http://rachelheldevans.com/blessed-are-the-entitled

Love, Spud.

Fussy Babies

In honor of Joshua Paul Micron Keebler

My dad was a short, round, jolly man who dearly loved to sing. We always claimed that he couldn't carry a tune, but that wasn't entirely accurate. He could carry his OWN tune, but he couldn't carry anybody else's. If anyone else was singing and he joined in (which of course he would), he would invariably sing a perfect fifth off from the rest. It gave family sing-alongs a kind of Gregorian flavor, but we were used to that.

Dad loved to sing--and his favorite audience was babies. Anybody's babies. Like me, he never met a baby he didn't fall instantly in love with, and neither of us could ever resist a flirtation with a small child, whether we knew them or not. But the song we all remember the best was the one he would always sing to babies who were offended! outraged! furious! and otherwise howling their heads off. And since one of my babies was earth-shakingly colicky, we heard it a lot. It went like this:

Aaaaand a bye oh bye and an oh bye oh and a bye oh bye oh bye,
aaaaand an oh bye oh and a bye oh bye and an oh bye oh bye oh!

Over and over and over. Five notes. If he'd managed to get his hands on a crying baby, he'd rock and pat and sing this at the top of his lungs. Without fail, every baby he did this too succumbed to sleep. I can't explain it. Was there some primitive part of their brains that actually found this soothing, or were they merely terrified into quietude lest he do something worse? We'll never know, but it worked. Before long, the baby would be in that snuffly sleep characteristic of the recently screaming.

Joshua, you'll never know what you've missed.

Aaaaand a bye oh bye and an oh bye oh and a bye oh bye oh bye,
aaaaand an oh bye oh and a bye oh bye and an oh bye oh bye oh!

Love, Spud

Requiem for a Stealth Van

(For the history, see 6/15/2010, and 6/27/2008)

It's true--the red behemoth is no more. She gets traded in Monday for something much less colorful and exciting and (we sincerely hope) unreliable. Poor Emily! She has been in tears over this. She loved that decrepit old thing with an odd passion, and as far as we can tell it was reciprocated.

We got it one summer at an auction, and I was thrilled that it was scarlet and gray like any proper Buckeye van. The love affair lasted only about a year, and then the long string of lemonny problems began, most of them severe, mysterious, and unsolvable. But we kept faith, and kept it running until a week ago, when it just had one expensive failure too many, stranding my daughter--although in a good neighborhood, which I call a considerate death.

But between those two dates was a lovely thick sandwich of adventure. Maxie took us to the beach, the cabin, grandparents' houses, and lower upstate New York. She took a full cargo to school for several years, an even fuller cargo of middle school girls to cell group events every other Friday for three years, and then an equally full cargo of high schoolers to Tuesday night Bible study. I used to refer to them as my 800 pounds of hair dye and hormones.

Besides her really amazing collection of dents and dings, she was missing the right passenger cup holder--a victim of a very small girl dragging her very large backpack over it for a year. So we filled up a square tissue box with popcorn, and shoved cups down into it. All the popcorn got loose one night, and I'm not sure we ever did find it all. But it should have gone well with the full gallon of milk which spilled into the back one day. That was in high summer, and it wasn't very long before the Stealth Van was a smelly Stealth Van. It got stuck in snow twice one weekend on a middle school retreat in the hills, and all the crazy little ladies got out and pushed with everything they had--and she broke free. That was also about the time the hauntings began. The inside lights would randomly flash on and off at night, especially if it had been raining. Unfortunately she pulled that trick one Friday night when I was driving all those tweenaged girls back from a haunted house, and scared the bejeepers out of them. What a good time.

Once I got a new car and turned the van over to Emily, she promptly decorated it with magnets and decals and bumper stickers. She's now just as energetically decorating a hand-me-down Toyota Camry--stodgy, dull, and reliable. Em will make her mark on it, and it will be uniquely and obviously hers, and soon not nearly as dull. But oh, it will never be Madame Maxime, Stealth Van.

Rest in peace, baby.

Love, Spud.

A response to Tim

Is salvation easy? For a long time, my dear friend Yoko insisted that it was TOO easy, and that was why she could not accept it. It made no sense to her whatever. Surely so great a something required a much greater action than the simple humbling yourself before God and asking for it. But oh how hard it is to humble yourself and admit you need it. She found out, after a prolonged and noisy fight with God, that it was indeed that simple. And that hard. And so incredibly worth it! We won't any of us know exactly how worth it salvation really is until we are in the consummated kingdom, but we get some pretty good tastes of it here.

Following Jesus can also be difficult, but it isn't nearly as hard as I once thought it would be. As a new Christian I tried dutifully to read the Bible, only to find that I was horrified by what I found there. Turn the other cheek? Go two miles for each one asked? Love people as He loves them? It was too much! I couldn't possibly do any of those things, and some of what was asked just didn't seem reasonable at all. This is what Gary Delashmutt calls the backwards wisdom of God. God says all sorts of things and asks of us all sorts of things that just seem foolishly backwards to those of us who grew up in the "real" world, having our minds set like concrete by its standards. But a funny thing happens to those who walk with God for very long--they find their perspectives changing. I certainly did. I won't claim that I see things through God's eyes on a constant basis, but I do it more than I used to, and I hope that I continue to understand the world more and more like He does.

One problem is that the world is full of counterfeits. I understand that Tim Keller has written a book about this recently, and I'll have to get my hands on it some day, but Philip Yancey wrote one years ago called "Rumors of Another World" that expressed it very well. Yancey focused on a handful of big things in life that originally showed the hand of God clearly, but have become subtly and thoroughly corrupted by the world. God's design is still there, but it's hard to pick out, like you picked up the wrong pair of glasses and everything is blurry. But wear those glasses long enough and you begin to adjust so that things look right to you.

The thing I find hardest in the Christian life is spending time with people outside my own household. When I am in a group situation, the biggest thing on my mind is when I can go home again, which is possibly a minor form of agoraphobia, but is much more likely just sin. I want to go and surround myself with books and papers and my own loved ones. I just want to read and research and write and periodically teach, and while these things are undoubtedly useful, they probably aren't enough. They have nothing to do with loving others, and everything to do with what interests me me ME. I do go to gatherings, and meet with other believers, because I know I should, and I have to admit that I do frequently enjoy people--at least for a while. Mea culpa.

The older I get, the lighter I find the yoke. Some days I find it heavier, when I realize how little of it I am bothering to bear and suddenly take the full weight upon myself. That can be fatal, and is thoroughly unnecessary, but I do it anyway. But things that I once considered impossible are now comparatively natural and easy a lot of the time. Brother Lawrence has helped, with the little book "The Practice of the Presence of God". He had such a simple way of looking at things. Just fix your eyes on God and do everything you do out of love for Him, and all the worries melt away. I wish I could say it's that easy for me, but there have been days when I have been able to function this way, and then the yoke is light as air.

A lot of it boils down to trust. When the yoke starts to chafe and feel unbearable and circumstances threaten to choke me, I fall back on the trinity prayer. I realize I'm dragging in yet a fourth author, but I have to do it. I encountered the trinity prayer in a fiction book by Elizabeth Goudge. It consists of three sentences of three words each: "Into Your hands, Lord have mercy, You I adore". While I have little use for formulaic prayers as a general rule, I have yet to find the circumstance that this prayer does not apply to, and when I pray it from the heart, that yoke gets so light it almost floats away.

The road is narrow, and I know I need good company to walk along with me. And the more I make sure that I have asked God to be the one closest to my side the more He polishes those glasses for me so I can see the way.

Love, Spud.

In Which I Am Orphaned

Anyone who reads this (you few, you brave) will know by now that I lost my remaining parent last week. It wasn't at all unexpected, but still, it was as wrench. When I got the call to come quickly (not a real possibility, since I lived 90 minutes away), I got out of bed, packed a small bag, and ran for the car. As I was putting my little bag in the back seat, my favorite verse from Psalm 119 popped into my head, so I took it as a message and turned it into a prayer: "God, You are good, and what You do is good". It was a comforting message to have received, and oh so true. Sure enough, I was only half-way there when another call came, this time to say that Dad was gone. And there it was--my status as a parentless child come to pass.

It's an odd feeling. I'm suddenly a member of the oldest generation in my family, and in another week there will be no old home to go back to. The dining room table and blue-trimmed dishes will move into my own house, and every day I feel more and more like I must be my own mother, because look! Here are her things! Those are her blue-veined little hands stirring the batter! And those are her white hairs on my head! Stability, nostalgia, family history, and the old homestead will be where *I* am. As I said, it's an odd feeling.

I'm generally okay with this turn of events. Dad had not been himself for about a year and a half, and after his stroke just after the New Year things had gone downhill with regularity. Dad had no concentration for reading, watching television, or even extended conversations, and his frustration at not being able to do anything, even putting on his own clothing unaided, was difficult to watch--because there was nothing I could do about it. He had been increasingly depressed since Mom died nearly four years ago, anxious about the constant dialysis, and just not having any fun. Quality of life was gone, and I couldn't restore it, not for all the wishing in the world. Heaven knows I tried, but some things are just beyond us.

So when he took that last gasping breath, what did I feel? I was sad, of course, but I was also tremendously relieved that he no longer had to suffer physically or emotionally. And I felt horribly, deeply guilty for feeling relieved! I'm supposed to want him to live, but he was so miserable I just wanted him to be all better--even if that meant death.

It catches up with me at odd times, like when we cleaned out his mailbox and found the Father's Day card that I had sent, but it didn't arrive until half a day after he had gone into the hospital for that final 24 hours. And at dinnertime on Saturday, because I had called my parents every Saturday night for decades. I suddenly had no one to call. And every time something amusing or wonderful happens and I go to file it away in that corner of my brain labeled "Things To Remember To Tell Dad Because He Would Enjoy It" and I am brought up short by the realization that I can let that corner be renovated into something else now.

So I am likely to cry buckets when my kids graduate, and when Emily gets married, and especially if/when she has children, because my parents won't be here to witness these things that they would have so loved to see. That's a lonely feeling. Fortunately, I have a tendency to weep at things anyway, so Emily won't think a thing about it except "There goes Mom again". Mom the family weeper, that's me.

But I am sure of one thing: God IS good, and what He does is good, and I will see my parents again. We are not meant to live forever on this earth, and there is a time to let go and be transformed into something new. I can't begrudge my parents that, only be glad that someday I'll go there too. Not soon, I hope, because I am vain enough to think that my own children need this particular parent for some time yet. So I weep when I can't help it, and then sit up straight and go on with life, and rejoice in all the moments that are ours together, and all the moments to come.

Love, Spud

Stealth Van Strikes Again

Or rather, has been struck. When my daughter had been gone less than 10 minutes last night and my cell phone rang, I knew instinctively that there was trouble. Sure enough! She told me that she'd been in an accident, and that she had hit someone. Then a kindly male voice interrupted and said "No, no, I hit YOU--let's get it right!". Needless to say I dropped everything and high-tailed it over to where she was. It was alarming to see an ambulance parked there, with its lights on, but it turned out they were just passing through and thought they'd stop to see what the bother was, and help block the lane from traffic.

Turns out the kindly male was exactly correct. Em was stopped at a red light and he plowed into her from behind. The stalwart van has need of a new bumper, perhaps, but that's it. The little silver sports car that ran into it, however, may be a goner.

We had quite a wait for the police, and we had a reasonably good time while we waited, trying to figure out why we looked familiar to each other (never did decide) and chatting with the EMTs, who were happy to be dealing with nice, live, uninjured people. The only physical injury was a cut on Emily's thumb, and it had us mystified until one of the EMTs pointed out that it would have been exactly where the long fingernail on her index finger went when she clenched the steering wheel on impact.

Even the policeman seemed to be in a good mood, and we got it all over with in the space of a little over an hour. A nice, friendly accident, for a warm summer's evening. The only thing missing was ice cream all round.

Praise be to God that no one was hurt, Emily doesn't seem to be traumatized, and the valiant and indestructible van took it like the pro she is. What's one more dent?

Love, Spud.

Why is it?

...that whatever we decide that we really,really like, the manufacturers promptly discontinue? Recent deaths include sugar-free Tang, sugar-free Mentos, turkey sausage links, McCains roasted potatoes, whatever bra my daughter likes at Vickie's Secret, hot and spicy Chex mix, baked quesadilla chips, and a host of other long-gone and well-loved products.

...that the inverse is true also? Whenever my family decides they love something and I find it on sale I'll buy a large quantity, only to discover that they suddenly don't like it any more.

...that the weather reports are always wrong until THIS year? Yup, every single blessed inch of snow that was predicted showed up. Why could they not have been wrong again, per usual?

...that every time I sent for the registration materials for a master's degree, I found myself pregnant? I'll be fifty this year, and I'm still terrified to even contemplate getting that degree.

...that everyone sneers at and makes fun of that old standard, green bean casserole, but every time I take a big double-batch to a potluck not a spoonful comes home again?

...that I can sit in my comfy old rocker for an hour, but it isn't until five minutes before I have to get up that the cat jumps up into my lap?

...that I have managed to stay married for nearly 23 years? We have absolutely nothing in common. I'm a lark, he's an owl. I like main roads and direct routes, he likes back roads and as many corners to turn as humanly possible. I like veggies, he must have meat. I'm a technotard, he's a technogeek. When vacation time rolls around, I say "At last, some time at home!". He says "Where shall we go?". I'm all about books, he's all about television. I like quiet, he likes background noise. In other words, I'm an introvert, he's an extrovert. It's extraordinary that we ever got married to start with, and it's a miracle that we have stayed that way.

...that a mutual love of God and family can override all those incompatibilities? It's grace, that's all. Sheer grace.

Love, Spud.

Parents, do not exasperate!

The talk this morning in church was on parenting, and how to not "exasperate your children" so that they then go and do unwise and rebellious things in reaction. I mused that it's so easy to parent with the Ghost of Christmas Past. We parent, by and large, instinctively. That is to say, we parent the way we were parented unless we make a concerted effort otherwise. It's not a deliberate thing. The way your parents raised you is the method that you know, and therefore your default setting. Without the least intention in the world, your mouth opens and you hear your mom's (or your dad's) words coming out, and they sound right and proper because they are so familiar. Familiar things are so comforting! Well, they are to us, but unless you had parents of gold I guarantee that they aren't nearly as comforting to our offspring.

Mind you, I'm not saying I had really horrible parents, but like everybody else they had their parental faults, and they passed those faults unerringly along to me. I have to struggle HARD sometimes to seal my lips and not say some of the more damaging things that I was told. Most parents lean either to the side of grace or the side of truth, and neither of those in extreme are good. The best path is down the middle, and it's so dreadfully hard a path to see, because most of us never had a map of that particular road. So we go mindlessly along, blithely traveling the road which looks familiar, even though we know darned well it leads right off a cliff. My own parents veered a little heavily toward truth (or at least truth as they saw it) and so in response I have often veered a little too far towards grace.

So what's the fix? Here's the bad news--there isn't one. We will always struggle--always--as long as we and our children walk the same earth. But here's the good news--there is help, and its very large help. As Christians, we are new creatures in Christ, and as new creations we can do a new thing. It isn't enough to hear my own words and be appalled and wonder what deep pit they came from. The new thing is to parent with the Holy Spirit by my side. Parenting must be done mindfully and prayerfully. If I find I am NOT struggling, then I know I have a problem. There's really no excuse for doing as you were done to. While I don't want to turn this into a sermon, because I am no wise a great and wonderful parent, I am living testimony that bathing situations and decisions in prayer and supplication makes a great deal of difference, and constantly watching what I do and evaluating the effects with painful honesty has made a difference too. But I can't do it alone. I need God, every single day, doing it with me, reigning in my instincts. Often times just recognizing that phrase before it leaves my mouth, and tasting how it formed me when I heard it the first time, is enough to keep it inside, and change it to something more helpful.

But I don't do this alone--God is raising my awareness all the time. He does it because He loves me--and He loves my children even more than I do. Even more than I want it, God wants me to train up my children the way they should go, and wants me to do it while inflicting minimal damage. I need to daily cast off the Ghost of Christmas Past and do a new thing. Hallelujah! He makes it possible.

Love, Spud.