Safari

The summer before I turned 32 most of what I had known and trusted for a lifetime came tumbling down. With the dissolution of the Kingdom, my faith lost its resting place. And, I was left in the rubble of a doctrine that had dictated so much of who I had become.

For most of the last decade I wandered a lonely wilderness. I called that time in my life a "safari." But, I can see now that it was only the beginning of my soul's long journey to a new Promised Land.

Taming the Tongue

"Death and life are in the power of the tongue..." Proverbs 18:21

Shorthand

Last night after we climbed into bed, Jim rolled over and bumped his backside against mine.

"Butt check," he declared.

I smiled in the dark. It had been so long since I had heard him say those words. When you have been with someone for 23 years, you forget to remember the shorthand you created when love was fresh and young. And, suddenly, I wanted more than anything to pull those lost phrases, one by one, from the shadows of time.

In the early days, "butt check" was used when there had been a slight stand-off between the two of us. It was used when we wanted to connect, but needed to build a bridge between his side of the bed and mine. With a simple "butt check," you could say you were sorry; and, by accepting a "butt check," you could agree to let go and move forward. A "butt check" smoothed the differences; and, it served as a gentle reminder that we were still playing on "the same team."

Some of my other favorites:

Tapping: Three taps meant "I love you." The correct response was four taps: "I love you too." One very long tap with sufficient pressure meant, "I want you NOW." Our own version of Morse code dotted and dashed us through those early years of marriage. 

Nap clothes: These were the clothes we wore on Sunday afternoon after church to unwind. Sometimes we actually slept in our nap clothes. Sometimes we watched football in our nap clothes. And, almost always we ate Italian subs loaded with hot peppers in our nap clothes. My nap clothes for years consisted of an oversized t-shirt with a Big Boy on the front. 

Buggle: The word "buggle" was born one evening after we had both worked long hours. I was exhausted to the point of tears when Jim leaned over me on his hands and knees to tuck me under the shelter of his body. He said, "Snuggle in, little bug." Snuggle became "buggle." And, so it remains a part of our family lexicon. Jayna told me a couple months ago that she didn't realize it was not a real word until she asked her boyfriend to "buggle" her, and he looked confused.

"I'll say! I am going to start a paper route right now!" This line comes from our favorite movie, Pee Wee's Big Adventure. It is used sparingly when one or the other of us is too fired up about something. It brings a sense of reality about what is important. 

"You're livin' in the 80's!" We've found this phrase to be the quickest way to de-escalate an argument. Its origins are traceable to a heated debate Jim and I were having one day when we stopped at a gas station. As I came around one side of the car, and Jim came around the other, I punctuated my point with an emphatic, "Yeah, well you are livin' in the eighties." The person one pump over burst out laughing and so did we. How could we not?

"M-M-Mayville..." When I get too big for my britches, Jim likes to remind me of the first time I navigated a border crossing as a driver going from Michigan over the bridge into Canada. When asked where I lived, I spoke up loud and answered, "U.S." The border guard rolled his eyes and asked again, "Where do you live?" I stammered, "M-M-Mayville." Ever since then, my hometown of "M-M-Mayville" carries the unspoken subtext of "You are not so tough."

Ours has not been a perfect marriage. On the contrary, there have been times when we would have called it quits if we could have afforded to split. We have lived together, and we have lived separate. And, we have grown in so many ways to be where we are today.

Once in a while though, life reaches across the differences to offer a "butt check," and we would be foolish not to accept it.

Vows

When you take wedding vows, you say... "for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health." I remember wondering even as I repeated those words what they would mean for us.

As it turned out, they meant everything.

The morning after I turned 25, Jim woke me up to tell me that he was having trouble breathing. We went straight to the emergency room. A series of tests showed that he had congestive heart failure due to a congenital heart defect. His heart was enlarged and there was an aneurism the size of a man's fist in his aortic arch. His open -heart surgery was scheduled before the end of the week.

He did recover, but that process was the turning point. Jim, who had always believed in God, began to prioritize how he wanted to spend the rest of his life. And, he put his foot on a path of service that has taken our family from the heart of the midwest to the mountains of New Hampshire to settle on the coastline of Massachusetts.

"In sickness and in health..." What does it mean for you? For me it means the familiar fear followed by a firm resolve to soldier on; it means the hospital bed intended for one that expands to hold the weight of the whole family; and it means the knowledge that the world changes without your permission.

The Forest Floor

We went lookin' for faith

on the forest floor,
And it showed up everywhere,
In the sun and the water
and the falling leaves,
The falling leaves of time.

My new header reminds me of Neil Young's song, You're My Girl.

By the way, I did not take the photo. I snagged it from the Internet. And, then I spent 48.5 minutes adjusting the title in Photoshop, uploading to Blogger, and tinkering with html. Can you imagine if I had taken the time to create nine different versions with different fonts and Bible verses--just so you could vote? I would have not the time to bake birthday cakes.

P.S. If you look real close, you will see "I love James" in the corner. 

Tiger Eyes

My brother and I used to fight over whose turn it was to lick the S & H Green Stamps my mother collected when she shopped at Musser's Market. The minty green sheets with their bold red lettering were as good as gold to our family when we lived on Goshen Farm.

The goal was to fill all the pages in a booklet with the coveted stamps. The completed booklets could be exchanged for merchandise. And, it was with the help of S & H green stamps that my parents afforded most of our camping equipment: sleeping bags for all of us, a cookstove, and a Coleman lantern.

The sleeping bags were covered in a deep blue cotton and the inside was lined in a golden flannel imprinted with pictures of Canada geese caught in mid-flight and wood ducks nestled in clumps of cattails on a marsh. Our parents zipped their bags together, for reasons we did not yet understand, while my siblings and I were happy to snuggle into the depths of our own warmth. When my sleeping bag's big silver zipper closed me inside for the night, I would feel like the luckiest girl in all of Lancaster county.

Some of my fondest memories growing up were of the camping trips we took as a family. We would load the pop-up camper and head off for a weekend. These times were extra special to us because amid the hustle and bustle of our communal life at Goshen, we were always under the watchful eyes and listening ears of others. To have our parents to ourselves was the biggest treat we knew.

We camped in places that had trails that wound through the woods and along the water. Muddy Run. Nicely's Pond. Susquehanna State Park. Many of my best childhood memories include the heady scent of new pine needles mixed with the sweet decay of old; the sight of sunbeams poked like long, yellow fingers through the leafy forest ceiling; and the mighty voice of the Susquehanna as it tumbled to empty itself in the Chesapeake Bay.

It was my dad who taught us each how to build a strong campfire. The trick, you see, is in learning how to stack your firewood in a loose pyramid over a substantial bed of paper and kindling. You need to leave enough air pockets to let your fire breathe upwards.

Around those tidy campfires, my dad and mom would take turns reading us such stories as Gentle Ben and Little Britches. We would wrap biscuit dough around the ends of long sticks and hold them over the flames until they were toasted to perfection. The doughy goodness topped with melted butter was delicious even when it wasn't completely done.

The green cookstove always sat at the end of the picnic table in our campsite. Its rickety sides protected the burners from the breeze. It was on that stovetop in a large black skillet that our mother made us the pancake men we adored. Their limbs were always fatter than they were intended to be, and their heads disappeared into their shoulders, but we gobbled them up as fast as she could make them.

After the sun set, we learned to play Rook by the light of the Coleman lantern at the picnic table while dozens of brown moths gathered over our heads to beat their protest against the night air. Later inside the camper, we would watch as my father dimmed the lantern until the mantles glowed orange through the inky dark. "Tiger eyes" we called them.

Once the "tiger eyes" burned low and disappeared, I would burrow down in the warm safety of my S & H green stamp sleeping bag to dream of a new day.

Thank you, S & H. And, thank you, Mom and Dad for lasting memories.

Hello, my name is...

The truth is...I have never been very good at remembering names. Recently, it has gotten worse. Almost every day someone will greet me by name, and the keeper of my memory vault, with stubborn defiance, refuses to release their name to my consciousness.

Perhaps, it is a function of age. I am 42 and approaching menopause. Maybe, it is the reality of a head packed too full of junk. As a habitual multi-tasker, I sometimes have to e-mail myself in the middle of the night just to make enough room in my head for sleep.

Whatever it is, I am challenged to pull correct names to my lips. It has gone beyond the point of embarrassment. It would be nearly unethical, and bordering on immoral, of me to continue on without trying to increase my capacity for name retention.

One article I read years ago suggested that when you select a word to associate with a person's face, you are more apt to remember their name. Armed with this nifty piece of advice, I headed out to a meeting of the PTO at Jayna's school. I was new to the whole PTO thing, and I wanted to make sure that I remembered everyone's name.

This is what happened. I moved through the room-- confident that my strategy would be the turning point in my history of "name-forgetting." I met a woman; let's call her "Molly," who was an artist. Her work was on display in a local bagel shop. I pictured the bagels perched on her face like a pair of eyeglasses. Molly Bagels. This was a piece of cake. (or a piece of bagel)

It was nearly a month later when I ran into "Molly" again. We both smiled in recognition. And, my mind went completely blank. All I could remember was "bagel." And, then I remembered the other details, but I couldn't pull up her name to save my life.

This tip-of-tongue phenomenon has plagued me for as long as I can remember. I am excellent about details; however, the name escapes me 9 times out of 10. And, I have decided to do something about it. Again.

This time I started by trying to better understand metacognition, or the knowledge of my own thoughts and the factors that influence my thinking. One theory suggests that all those little details, such as "bagels," are stored in the frontal lobe. One has to be certain that these reminders are robust enough to correctly retrieve the word you need from where it is stored deeper in the cerebral cortex. The stronger the triggers, the more likely you are to recall the correct name.

Here are a few other things I am doing to flex my metacognitive muscles:

1. I tell myself that I CAN remember names. This doesn't allow me to be lazy about it.
2. When someone introduces themselves, I stop. Pay attention. Too often I am busy thinking about what I going to say rather than really hearing the name.
3. I repeat the name.
4. I ask about the spelling. "Is that Ann with an E?"
5. I look for a chance to introduce the person by name to someone else.

I probably won't try to think of bagels on someone's face again.