Time for Prayer

I have a monkey mind.  I can't even focus long enough to finish a prayer in silent meditation.

This is how my mind wanders as I attempt mindfulness:

Deep breath.  Feel the breath fill up my lungs.  Feel my chest expand.  Feel my chest deflate as I slowly exhale.  Focus.

My lungs hurt. Burn a little, actually, from the humidity, which triggers my asthma.  Only in Maryland (ok, maybe all of the southeast, too) can you actually feel the air, it's so thick.)  I really hate humidity.  Is there any place to go without humidity that isn't 110 degrees in the shade?  Probably not. 

Oh, yeah.  I was praying.

My right knee is screaming because I'm sitting on the floor criss-cross applesauce style.  (Or Indian style but that's politically incorrect to say these days).  I'm too old to sit on the floor like this.

Oh, prayer.  Right.

Jesus.  What do you want me to do? Seriously.  Open my heart so I can learn my purpose.  Hear your calling.  Recognize the blessing of the Holy Spirit.

Maybe I should use my inhaler?  Where is my inhaler anyway?  I think I need to get that perscription renewed.  Ack.  That will mean a trip to the doctor's office.  Dumb, waste of time.  Just give me another inhaler.  Please and thank you.  It won't be that easy.  It never is.

Oh.  Back to prayer.  Focus.

I read Psalm 1.  Seems like as good as any place to start, followed by more prayer.

What else, Jesus?  I've resisted you for a very long time.  Apostasy.  Christian atheism as Craig Groeschel calls it and rightly so.  What more do I have to do to learn to trust you? To learn to trust in the Power of the Holy Spirit?

Does writing count as prayer?

"Mom!  Mom? Are you up there?" Thump, thump, thump.  Little feet pound up the stairs.  "You have to come see this.  Mummies are infecting the noses of the clone troopers."

Wait.  What? "Do you mean worms?"

Elias shakes his head vigorously.  His chest is heaving from rushing up the stairs, from excitement.  "Yes.  Worms.  They are crawling up the clone troopers noses and effecting them." (He means infecting but he says effecting.  It's cute.)

As Elias launches into a detailed explanation about worms infecting clone troopers and possessing them, I notice that he is pale.  There are dark circles around his eyes.  He's tired.  He is an early riser, my first born.  (He didn't inherit that trait from me.)  It's time for bed.

Prayer time over.  

Why my life should have been more like the movie Sixteen Candles, but wasn't

You know the iconic '80s film Sixteen Candles, right?  Molly Ringwald plays the character Samantha whose family, preoccupied with her older sister's wedding, forgets Samantha's sixteenth birthday.  She has a crush on Jake Ryan, Mr. Popularity, Captain of the Football team who is dating Caroline, Miss Popularity, Prom Queen.

It's all coming back to you now, isn't it?  Samantha with her individual style that is just left of center but not weird either.  She isn't a fashion plate.  She isn't a cheerleader.  She knows she will never be Prom Queen or Miss Popularity.

Unlike Samantha, my high school style wasn't just left of center.  It wasn't right of center either.  I had no style.  Like Samantha, I knew I would never be Prom Queen or Miss Popularity.  The likelihood of either of us capturing the heart of the Captain of the Football team was near impossible.  We both pouted over this.

Like Samantha, I nursed a serious crush on Mr. Popularity, Captain of the Football team himself: Duane K. Like the actor--Michael Schoeffling--who played Jake Ryan, Duane had an uncanny resemblance to the real Jake Ryan.  (I mean Michael Schoeffling.)

Like Samantha, I obsess over Duane like a "lovesick puppy" to quote Molly Ringwald's character.  I think half the girls at my high school obsessed over Duane; he was that hunky.  Just ask my friend Nicole.  

I wished. Hoped. Daydreamed that Duane would declare his unwavering love and affection for me in the halls of South Carroll HS.  Although I think he noticed my lovesick puppy ways, I think he was weirded out by it.  One day in study hall, he spit gum into my hair.  

That wasn't in the script.  

That minor setback didn't deter my affection, though.  After all, I was a lovesick puppy.  

In the movie Sixteen Candles, Samantha endures a series of embarrassing antics but ultimately gets Jake.  Although I endure a series of embarrassing antics, mostly perpetuated by my losery self, I don't get Duane in the end.  

Once Duane graduated, I never saw him again.  (I think he was a year ahead of me.  Maybe two.)  The last I heard he went off to college on a football scholarship. 

Fast forward twenty years later, it's 4:50 AM and I can't sleep.  I'm remembering my pathetic lovesick puppy ways and Duane and wondering whatever happened to that guy?

I gave into temptation and searched for him on Facebook.  (I know, I know.  I've reverted back to my lovesick puppy ways despite being happily married to Joseph for fourteen and half years. I'm pathetic.)  I don't find Duane.  I google him.  The only thing I find is his name listed on a national football foundation.  Well, duh.  He was the captain of the football team.  Beyond that, I've no clue what else he's accomplished.

A part of me doesn't want to know what he looks like now or whether he's building rockets for NASA or crunching numbers at a desk.  I want the hunky recollection from high school, not some aged guy married with kids.   (And I'm certain that he'd want me to keep my distance.  They have anti-stalking laws now. And rightly so.)

Why am I embarrassing myself, sharing this?  Because this little anecdote has the makings of a novel in it.  A love story twenty years after high school.  

I'm feeling inspired.   

Persistence

On Sunday afternoon, I went to the locally owned garden center.  All plants were 30% off.  Yeah, oh yeah!

I restocked my basil and rosemary, since I killed the rosemary.  The basil is limping along.  The original plant that is.  It's not dead.  Yet.  But it isn't thriving either.

So two new hearty basil and rosemary plants.  I also bought thyme.  The boys helped me transplant these babies in organic potting soil, which was also on sale.  The herbs are neatly arranged on our deck table, soaking up the sun.

While I was in the gardening mood, I transplanted a sweet chocolate pepper seedling.  Then I decided to get adventurous and start two more tomato seedlings and one more pepper seedling.  So far, the existing tomato seedlings are thriving.  I'm looking forward to home grown tomatoes for caprese salad and homemade salsa.  I have a recipe for peach tomato salsa that I'm eager to try.

In the process of transplanting, I managed to get potting soil all over my legs and arms.  I'm not sure how I managed to do that, but there it is.  I managed to get four mosquito bites despite wearing repellent.  That's so not fair.

Finally, I rounded out my purchases with some red impatiens and a dragon wing begonia. Very pretty.

I've taken some losses on my herbs, radishes, and onions but have had success with the tomatoes and pepper seedlings.

With gardening persistence is definitely a necessary trait or so I'm learning.

Growing my own vegatables

I still don't have any.  Vegetables, that is.

I bought tomato, radish, purplette onion, and a chocolate variety of sweet pepper seeds in the spring from Johnny's Selected Seeds.  (Love them!)  Oh and lettuce.

I thought I had the makings for a pretty nice salad.

My seedlings got off to a nice start.  This time around, I even took the time to harden them off--a step I usually skip.

After all that, my tomato sprouts are thriving.  That's about it.

Since the spring was unusually chilly, I didn't want to put out the radishes or lettuce for fear the chill would kill them off.  So I waited for warmer weather.  Turns out, I waited too long.

The intense heat from our deck fried the radish and lettuce sprouts to nothingness.   Even though our deck has great dappled morning sunlight, by 3pm, it's hot as hades out there.  The tomatoes love that but not much else.

I have one pepper sprout and one purplette onion hanging on.  I need to transplant the pepper seedling and see how it goes.  I have a basil plant limping along.  The mint is slowly growing.  The rosemary?  Long dead.

In the fall, I'll try planting radishes and lettuce again since they seem to like the cooler temperatures.  In the meantime, I'm gonna germinate another batch of tomatoes since that seems to be the only thing I'm capable of growing.

I'm imagining the bountiful harvest of sweet tomatoes right now.  Good thing I love a caprese salad.  

A trip to the zoo!

Yesterday, we gathered ourselves and drove down to the Smithsonian National Zoo.  We left just after 9 am, so traffic wasn't too bad.  It took us just over an hour.

Joseph is the picture taker in the family.  He didn't waste any time.  You meet this triceratops very quickly entering the park, and we needed a picture.  (It's not everyday one meets a triceratops).  I don't know what Ethan is looking at off camera.

The weather forecast called for a partly cloudy sky and little humidity.  They got that wrong.  The humidity was stifling and the sun was full on bright.



Joseph got some really good pictures of the lions, especially of this young one frolicking in the pool that surrounded their habitat.  There were four lions altogether.

 

 

 

There is a female lion in the foreground and a male lion against the wall, though it's difficult to see him since he blends into the concrete wall and the spotlight of sun.  Joseph didn't get a picture of the fourth lion.

A tiger looking regal.  

 


Both boys emerging from the water misters.  Believe me, it felt so good on such a humid day.

When we emerge from the Small Mammal House, we saw this:

 

Those are two orangoutangs walking on those ropes above the trees.  There are platforms at strategically placed intervals for the orangoutangs to climb on before moving along the ropes to the next platform.  They can access the platforms and ropes from their habitat.  What isn't pictured is the way both the orangoutangs helped each other.  One of the orangoutangs reached a platform first, he (maybe it was a she?) reached behind him to help the other one get onto the platform!

We were at the right place at the right time to catch this.

 

Here is another orangoutang inside her habitat.  She is playing with pooh in case you are wondering what she is doing.  That's the back of Ethan's head.  Like most of the kids surrounding him, they were enraptured with the pooh playing orangoutang.

In the same building, there were gorillas, although they were in a different room.  The gorillas were being fed by the zoo keepers.  One male ate very quickly, gobbling down banana slices one after the other.  I guess he was afraid someone was going to steal it.  Another male gorilla took his meal up to the tallest part of a tree and gobbled it down.  He seemed quite particular about not sharing it with the other gorillas.

By the time we got to the cheetahs, it was mid afternoon.  The sun was sweltering.  The humidity oppressive.  The cheetahs were sprawled on the grass of their habitat, napping in the shade.  Then, one gets up and trots over to the shade in another part of the habitat (pictured below).  Two others follow that cheetah.  Their bodies are so sleek and slender.  Did you know that a cheetah's stride is 23 feet when running at top speed during a hunt?  Yes, 23 feet!  (I know, right?)  

We tried following the cheetahs, moving along to another side of the habitat.  By the time we got there, however, the cheetahs were hiding in either tall grass or a den.  We weren't sure which.    But, we were still in for a nice treat.  In the next habitat over was another cheetah by himself (or herself?) pacing around.  Joseph caught it on video, although I'm having difficulty uploading the video to this blog.  (I'll try posting it to FB instead).  

A elephant house and the surrounding habitat was under re-construction.  We got a glimpse of one elephant hanging out amidst the construction.  No giraffes.  No rhinos.  No ostriches.  Not sure if those savannah animals were displaced during construction or what.  

We saw two giant pandas, one male and one female, in different rooms.  Both of the pandas sat with their backs to us gawking humans, noshing on bamboo.  

We skipped the bird house.  By this time it was late afternoon.  The heat was sweltering.  All of us were tired.  The boys were perilously close to a temper meltdown, so we decided to leave.  

Elias's favorite thing about the zoo was everything!  Ethan's favorite thing at the zoo?  Nothing!  I think he inherited the contrarian attitude from his mother.  

We had a good day all in all.  We'd like to return to the zoo once the construction is complete.  And I have a new family rule: no zoo visiting during the summer. It's just too darn hot.   I'd like to go back in the fall instead.  

Summer Vacation

On the second official day of summer vacation, we visited the Smithsonian Aerospace Museum near Dulles Airport.

Seeing the space shuttle Discovery was awesome!

Here is another picture for perspective.

Aside from the space shuttle, there were all sorts of planes and helicopters, ranging from early models to a stealth jet and a Concord.  The Enola Gay was there too.  It's so massive.  It's difficult to imagine that hulking plane ever getting off the ground.  Some of the early versions of helicopters were little more than a seat attached to rotors and a mechanism to steer it.  The person who flew that was seriously brave. 

Later in the afternoon, we went up to an observation tower, which was a former air traffic control tower.  Since it was raining, we could barely make out the Blue Ridge Mountains.  Unfortunately, we didn't see any planes coming in for a landing at Dulles Airport.  

We also watched an IMAX film about the Hubble Satellite, seeing pictures of the furtherest reaches of space known to man.  Some of these pictures were simply amazing.  The film also revealed a little about how astronauts train for space flight and showed actual footage of an astronaut crew repairing the Hubble.  

The boys had fun.  They were fascinated by all of the planes.  Ethan wanted to take some of the planes home.  He said Daddy could fly it home and then we could keep it in the living room.  (Oh sure, no problem.)  

Getting home was a headache.  It took two hours to drive 50 miles.  We got stuck on the Capital Beltway.  I'm glad I don't have to drive that everyday.  

Next week, it's the National Zoo. 

Rurally Screwed.

That's what I want to be.

That's what a gal named Jessie Knadler is.  Rurally Screwed.

In her memoir of the same name, Jessie K. recounts how she fled the very rurally screwed life of Montana for Manhattan at the age of seventeen only to return to that rurally screwed life, but this time in southern Virginia with her cowboy husband Jake.

See, I had similar aspirations.  I wanted to flee podunk, redneck Winfield, MD, although Manhattan wasn't my destination.  (Instinctually I knew I wouldn't survive there, spiritually speaking.  Wouldn't thrive there is what I should say.  You get my point.  Anyway.)

After I graduated from South Carroll, I fled Winfield and headed straight for southern Virginia to Southern Seminary College for Women in Buena Vista.  The college wasn't a seminary in the traditional sense.  It was a private, all girls junior college with a history dating back to 1868, not far from Lexington--home of Washington & Lee University and Virginia Military Institute--precisely where Jessie K. and her family reside now.

While at Souther Sem, I was gonna make myself over.  I was gonna transform myself from a socially awkward wallflower whose shyness came across as aloof.  I was secretly ashamed of how my dad and uncles had dirt permanently lodged under their fingernails, my grandmother's canning, the redneck trucks.   I never felt like I fit in.  I was gonna find myself a fine man who came from a long line of southern gentlemen.  Never mind that a college boy from the oh so preppy, private, very monied Washington & Lee University would have been attracted to me, in part most likely, to piss off his mother since my background no where near matched the expectations she would have had for her son.  No matter.  And forget about a VMI boy; they were way too patronizing.  (Sorry, Jessie K.)

In my mind, when I returned to podunk Winfield, no one would recognize me. They would be quietly stunned by my metamorphosis.   I had grand plans (and a rich interior life that doesn't always match reality).

I didn't last two months at Souther Sem.  I despised it there.  Here's the thing.  I went to the college because my mother wanted me to. I knew I wouldn't like it there, wouldn't fit into this monied world where we pretended rigorous academic life when in truth my seventh grade science class had been more challenging than any of my classes combined at Southern Sem.

For Pete's sake, the campus had a barn where the students could board their horses.  (To be fair, they did have an excellent equestrian team.)  You could take an equestrian class for your gym credit instead of the traditional gym class.  Not me, though.  We couldn't afford the extra fees associated with gym-class-as-equestrian-riding.

I share this with you to give you an idea of the level of gentility of this college.    

Students came from all over the South.  I think I was as "Yankee northern" as you could get even though Maryland is, technically, south of the Mason Dixon line.  Most of the students had been riding and show jumping since the age of grade school (if not sooner) or cheerleaders too stupid to attend any college but their parents, bless their hearts, couldn't condescend to enroll their precious daughters in community college.  Such a thing would be disgraceful and appearances meant a great deal.

I found the unspoken goal of finding a husband at nearby W&L University or VMI--the very goal I had, mind you--to be suffocating.

I didn't last two months.  I couldn't carry on the charade.  I despised myself.  For leaving Winfield in the first place, to think I could be better than anyone I left behind.  For coming to Southern Sem when deep, deep down I knew I wouldn't fit in.  For dropping out, that I wouldn't thrive there.  I personified self-mortification.

In February of the following year, I enrolled in community college.

What does this have to do with Jessie Knadler's memoir Rurally Screwed?  


Not a cotton pickin' thing.

But like Jessie K, we have learned not to make ourselves over in someone else's image, according to someone else's expectations.  Motivated by the belief that the self we have couldn't possibly be good enough so we transform ourselves according to the expectations that we think the other person has.  

This is a very difficult lesson to learn.

I will probably never be rurally screwed in southern Virginia or Oklahoma or Colorado, raising hens and writing in the attic of an old farmhouse because Joseph wouldn't be comfortable living in a place where people are outnumbered by cattle.  (I keep telling him that Oklahoma needs teachers too, but it falls on deaf ears.)

Jessie K. has made a life for herself on several acres with her husband and baby girl, a rescued dog and chickens.  Her memoir Rurally Screwed is engaging and heartbreaking at times.  But goodness and grace spring from that despair.

Stop what you're reading.  Set that book aside for now.  Instead, read Jessie Knadler's memoir Rurally Screwed.   It's that good.

P.S. Southern Seminary College for Women is now Southern Virginia University, a liberal arts college that "promotes the standards and values of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints."  That's so not even remotely what the college was when I was there.  For two months.  Just sayin'.