Deanaland

The Gifted Class

2011-11-23T15:07:00.000-08:00

Skipping ahead a bit in my memoirs to the nightmare that was 6th grade. Names of people and the school have been changed, and I've intentionally left out the name of the town. Warning: this contains some material not suitable for children. It's pretty sad when something that happened to you at 11 is "not suitable for children," isn't it?

The Gifted Class
By Deana Nall

Loaded down with books, my gym bag and a clarinet, I trudged into the school building. Baker Middle School. We students called it Baker Mental School. It housed our small town’s 6th and 7th-grades. Despite its location well within the borders of the United States, the land of the free and the home of the brave, Baker functioned as an isolated, totalitarian society. There were no extra-curricular activities. Those didn’t start until 8th grade, in junior high. Baker had no sports teams, no school colors, no mascot, no yearbook and no student government. Teachers were stationed in the hallways between classes, yelling at us to “keep to the right” while we changed classes and making sure we only went to our lockers before school, during lunch, and after the day’s last bell. Going to our lockers any other time was strictly forbidden.

School wasn’t pleasant for anyone, but my 6th-grade year had dealt me an especially cruel hand. In elementary school, I had been the funny girl—the one who made everyone laugh. Upon entering middle school, I discovered my sense of humor was no longer wanted. In fact, it was annoying. My friends from elementary school had mostly abandoned me for new social circles. Meanwhile, my body had morphed from cute little girlness into absolute preteen horror. I still had some baby fat, but I was extraordinarily bony. This made for an especially unattractive combination. Other girls were already wearing bras, but my boobs were nowhere in sight. I tried to maintain some optimism, telling myself that my development was only slightly delayed. If I had known that I was to remain flat-chested until my mid-20s, I probably would have killed myself.

Ugly and friendless, I reluctantly pulled the door open and walked in. At least today was Friday. Friday was the only bright spot in my week. Every Friday after lunch, all the 6th-graders who had qualified for the gifted program met in Mr. Renner’s room. Mr. Renner was the gifted and talented class teacher and very popular with students. We did fun things in his class. We played games and had fascinating discussions. Mr. Renner had new and imaginative things for us to do in his class every week. One day, he set up a mirror on a table and had us put a piece of paper on the table next to the mirror and try to write, looking only into the mirror and not at our paper. When we drew a line to the right in the mirror, it drew it to the left on our paper. It was incredibly frustrating. After we had all given up, someone asked why he had asked us to do this.

“This is what it’s like for someone with a learning disability to write,” he said. “You kids will never have to worry about that, and now you know how hard it is for them. I know you will never make fun of those kids now that you know what it’s like.”

This was a valuable lesson to us, and we somberly digested it.

One day in Mr. Renner’s class, we were playing a history game when World War II came up in our conversation.

“Did you know some people think Hitler was a virgin his entire life?” Mr. Renner asked.

What? I thought. I had only heard the word “virgin” associated with Mary, the mother of Jesus. I thought it was part of her name: Virgin Mary. What could anything connected to Mary have to do with someone as evil as Hitler?

“What’s a virgin?” I asked.

Mr. Renner glanced at me nervously.

“A virgin is someone who has never had sex before,” he answered.

“Oh,” I said, embarrassed. If I had known the answer had anything to do with sex, I never would have asked.

The bell rang, and everyone gathered their books and began filing out the door. I was the last one, and before I could leave, Mr. Renner grabbed my arm.

“When you asked me what a virgin was, did you really not know, or did you just want to hear me say it?” he asked. He wasn’t angry, just inquisitive.

His hand was still on my arm. I didn’t like how it felt. Why was he asking me this?

“I…I really didn’t know,” I said.

“OK. Well, see you Sunday,” he said.

He released his grip on my arm and I left. He would see me Sunday because he also went to my church. I was glad he did. Mr. Renner was the most popular teacher at school, and the fact that our families mingled at church increased my pathetically-low cool factor. At least I hoped it did.

The next week, I forgot about the weird encounter with Mr. Renner. When I walked into his classroom that Friday afternoon, he gestured toward some books he had propped up on the blackboard’s chalk tray.

“I brought books that are a little more advanced than the ones in the school library,” he said. “Feel free to borrow them and bring them back next week.”

I looked at the books and chose one that had two teenage girls on the cover. After I got it home and began reading, I realized it was about two high school students who were in love with each other, even though they were both girls. I had heard about people being gay, but the concept was still new to me. In the book, the girls try to keep their relationship a secret, but an older boy at school finds out. Consumed with rage and disgust, the boy forces one of the girls into his car, drives into the woods and rapes her. The concept of homosexuality was new to me and I didn’t really understand it, but the fact that the girl in the book was raped for being gay traumatized me. The rape scene was so graphic that its words burned into my memory and it replayed in my head for months afterward. The book also included some detailed sex scenes between the girls, but the violent rape scene is what stayed with me. I knew that I had read something I probably should not have read at the tender age of 11, but Mr. Renner had said these were advanced books. Grown-ups read about different things than kids do, I reasoned. He’s just trying to challenge us to read about grown-up issues.

After I returned that book, Mr. Renner gave me a new one. It was Halloween, the book version of the popular horror movie. I took it home and began reading. The story opened with a teenage girl and her boyfriend having sex. Afterward, the boy leaves and the girl is brutally murdered by her younger brother, who had watched the sexual encounter. After the first chapter, I threw the book on the floor. I was beginning to think I was not cut out for “advanced reading.” Maybe I wasn’t really gifted and had been allowed into the program by mistake.

The next week at school, an announcement came over the loud speaker that the gifted class would not meet that Friday. Rumors were soon flying around school that Mr. Renner had been fired. I got home and learned it was true. Mr. Renner was gone and the gifted class, the one bright spot in my life, would not meet for the rest of the year.

One day, a girl stopped me in the hall.

“I just think you should know that everyone knows you got Mr. Renner fired,” she said.

I hadn’t done anything but bring the books home that Mr. Renner had described as “advanced reading.” I went home and told my dad what the kids were saying. He said he had found the Halloween book in my room, found Mr. Renner’s name written in it, and went to confront Mr. Renner. Before my dad could say anything, Mr. Renner told him he had just been fired for giving students inappropriate books to read. Apparently other parents had complained, but, because word got out that my dad was upset about the books, everyone thought I was the reason Mr. Renner was gone. The kids who had been simply annoyed by my sense of humor now hated me.

That spring was my ballet recital. During intermission, I was sitting backstage in a costume that accentuated every awful thing about my body. My hair was wound into a tight bun on top of my head, and a mob of little girls in white tu-tus swarmed around me. I felt a sickeningly familiar hand on my arm. I looked up into Mr. Renner’s face. His little girl Michelle was one of the white tu-tu girls. He sat down next to me. He had stopped coming to church, and I had not seen him since the day I had chosenHalloween from the chalk tray.

“How are you doing?” he asked.

I said nothing. I wanted him to leave. Michelle spun past us in her white tu-tu.

“Look at me, Daddy!” she said.

Mr. Renner nodded at his daughter and said, “I miss being at school. That was a fun class.”

I stayed quiet. Mr. Renner kept sitting there. He tried again.

“I didn’t want to leave, you know,” he said.

Still silent, I shifted nervously, and my tulle-laden costume crinkled in response.

Michelle spun past us again, her white tu-tu brushing across both of our legs. She stretched her arms up and executed an awkwardly floppy cartwheel. We sat quietly and watched her.

“Watch me, Daddy!” she said. “Are you watching?”

We both sat there in silence in a sea of white tu-tus.

Finally, he slowly stood up and walked away.

Roswell (incomplete)

2011-11-14T08:46:00.000-08:00

I grasped the knob of the color TV set with my 5-year-old fingers and turned it to the right to produce a satisfying “click.” As the screen crackled with static electricity, the picture gradually formed. Lynda Carter’s Wonder Woman appeared to save another day, and my Saturday morning had begun.

We had moved to Roswell, New Mexico, several months earlier for my dad to take a ministry job. Roswell was a normal, quiet town then. No conventions for alien enthusiasts yet. Just a dry, dusty town, but the view of the famed El Capitan mountain in the distance helped make up for the town’s drabness.

The TV was new in our house. We had replaced our black and white TV with this new Curtis Mathis color set and now, Saturday mornings were the highlight of my week. My parents warned us not to wake them up too early on Saturdays, but my brother Brian and I were never tempted to. We were content to watch Saturday morning cartoons in this vibrant new world of color television.

On this particular morning, my mom was out of town while my dad slumbered on in their room down the hall. Brian and I perched ourselves on the couch and became entranced in Wonder Woman’s adventures. I wanted those bracelets of hers that could deflect enemy bullets. I think Brian just wanted Lynda Carter. Suddenly, Brian yelled and jumped from the couch. I sat frozen, aware of the fact that if something was bad enough to rattle my older brother, it could be even worse news for me. But then again, it never took much to freak Brian out.

From where he stood in the middle of the living room, he pointed in mute shock at our cat, Tippy, who I thought had been curled up asleep just a moment before. She had something under her paw. Something small that moved. At first glance, I thought she had caught a mouse and was eating it. But a closer look revealed that Tippy was holding a newborn kitten in her paws while her rough tongue cleared the placenta away.

In the few seconds it took me to assess what was happening, Brian had run down the hall, kicked my parents’ bedroom door open so hard that the door knob thunked into the wall, startled our dad out of a deep sleep, and yelled, “Tippy’s having kittens in front of the TV set!”

We had known for weeks that Tippy was pregnant. I just thought it was something of a permanent condition and never imagined it would culminate in such Saturday-morning excitement. Brian dashed back to the living room and pointed at Tippy amid breathless chants of “See? See?” to my dad, who had sleepily stumbled down the hall behind him. Our dad confirmed that yes, Tippy had become an active participant in the miracle of life right there on our living room floor. And mommy cats like to be alone when their babies are born. So my dad found a shallow box for Tippy and her rapidly expanding family, and we quickly dressed and left the house, Wonder Woman forgotten.

Hobbs, Part II

2011-10-31T06:18:00.001-07:00

I don’t remember leaving the store. Later that day, I sat on my bed, grieving the loss of my first best friend. The phone rang. After a minute, my mother came into my room.

“Christi’s OK,” she said. “She just got a little bruised up.”

“She’s not dead?” I asked.

My mother looked startled.

“No, she’s not dead. What gave you that idea?”

“She closed her eyes. She looked dead.”

My mother spent several more minutes convincing me that Christi was not dead. I finally believed her.

There is a blissful ignorance that defines the preschool years. I was 3 and 4 when we lived in Hobbs, and my life consisted of playing in our wonderful four-bedroom house, playing with friends at church, playing with the neighborhood kids and playing with our dog, Snoopy. Snoopy and I spent long afternoons in the backyard. I was an imaginative child and he accompanied me on my imaginary adventures. Snoopy often played the role of a young prince who was being chased by an evil witch who wanted his crown. I had been charged with his protection, which I took seriously. We would run through the yard to escape the witch’s terrifying grasp and jump into the storage shed just in time as she whizzed by on her broom. Thanks to my valiant efforts, the witch never caught up with Prince Snoopy, and the crown was preserved.

My brother Brian was gone to school all day, and, on the days that no friends or neighbors came over, Snoopy was my closest friend. I felt such a connection with him that I didn’t think twice about lapping up some water out of his dish on the back porch on a hot summer’s day. After taking a long drink from his water dish one day, I looked up to see my mother’s horrified face through the kitchen window. She brought me in, made me gargle with my dad’s Scope mouthwash, filled a glass jar with water and showed me where she put it in the refrigerator. When I get thirsty, she said, I was to come in and get a drink from the jar and not from Snoopy’s dish. I agreed to her demands, but I still didn’t understand what the big deal was.

One day, something happened that, at least for a moment, shattered my childhood delusion that I was always protected from everything. I was walking alone down the sidewalk on our street to a friend’s house. Suddenly, a car screeched from around the corner and sped past me before its two right tires hopped up on the sidewalk about ten feet ahead of me. The car kept speeding, half of it still on the sidewalk, until it dropped back down off the curb. A police cruiser, sirens blaring, raced past me in pursuit of the car. I probably didn’t realize then that I could have died had the car jumped the curb ten feet sooner. But I did feel rattled. I walked home and sat alone and quiet in my room the rest of the afternoon. I never told my parents what happened.

Every summer, we made the 14-hour drive from Hobbs to Houston and Beaumont, Texas, where my grandparents lived. The contrast between small, flat and arid Hobbs and large, bustling and humid Houston was almost overwhelming to me. I loved the endless masses of freeways that snaked their way through the city. I loved the zoo and museums and Toys R Us, which Brian and I thought was the closest to heaven we would get in our lifetime. And I loved the frigid blast of my grandparents’ air-conditioned house after a day of shopping in Houston’s 98-percent humidity. Beaumont, where my other grandparents lived, was also an exciting escape from our southeast New Mexico norm. It was, in my mind, simply a smaller version of Houston.

The summer I was four, we were sitting down to dinner at my Houston grandparents’ house when I began to feel quite ill. We had been to the Houston Museum of Natural Science that day, and I had seen a picture of a bloody battle scene that had grossed me out a little. I did not want to eat, and the more my parents tried to push food on me, the worse I felt. I went to bed early and I remember being awakened in the middle of the night, having my robe wrapped around me, and being put into the backseat of the car. My parents drove me to a hospital, where I was diagnosed with a severe case of pneumonitis. The doctor described the illness as something between bronchitis and pneumonia, and inching closer to pneumonia by the minute. He instructed my parents to get me back to New Mexico’s arid climate immediately. We returned to my grandparents’ house, where I fell asleep and dreamed I was flying across the sky like a bird. I awoke in my bed in our Hobbs house. My parents had driven the 14 hours straight through and delirium had kept me asleep—or at least unaware of my surroundings--the entire trip.

The arid Hobbs air cleared my lungs and I was back to good health within a few weeks. It was good to get my energy back and resume my favorite activities, which still included watching the Brady Bunch. I longed for a two-story house like theirs and a stylish station wagon like the one Mrs. Brady drove. I wanted blond pigtails, an endearing lisp, and a cute name like “Cindy.” That family, I thought, had the perfect life.

I now know that my own real life was as perfect as it could have been at that point. I had a stable family and, while we weren’t wealthy, all my needs were provided for. I had a best friend and a dog, and the innocent youth that protected me from knowing too much about the real world. But the happy Hobbs years were coming to an end. My father had, once again, grown unhappy in his work situation. A church in Roswell, New Mexico, needed a youth minister. So we packed, I said goodbye to Christi, and we drove another moving truck to another small New Mexico town.

Hobbs, Part I

2011-10-30T12:18:00.000-07:00

Moving from the rental house on Birch St. in Lovington to the brick parsonage in Hobbs was a step up for my family. The house even had a fourth bedroom. A fourth bedroom! The only other family I knew that had a fourth bedroom was the Brady Bunch. I figured that if my family ever got an Alice, she could stay in that extra bedroom. Until then, my mom moved her sewing machine in there.

Hobbs was only 18 miles down the highway from Lovington, but it was a much happier place to live. The sun seemed to shine more brightly there. Most days were so clear that my mother could look out the back window to the bank sign several blocks away and tell me the time and temperature when I asked.

As any minister’s family, we plunged into the life of the church where my dad worked. This is where I met Christi, my first best friend. Christi was a brown-eyed tomboy with a clump of blond curls on her head. We made an enthusiastic pair of 3-year-olds. I spent many nights at her house and I became intrigued with her life. She had an Italian last name, she shared a bedroom with a teenage sister, she had a Chihuahua named Pebbles and her house included a formal living room that was strictly for grown-ups—no children allowed. These details added up to the fact that Christi’s life was much more interesting than mine.

My mother and Christi’s mother were also good friends, which put us together even more often. The four of us took shopping excursions to the J.C. Penney in Hobbs. This was before Penney’s became a staple anchor of the sprawling malls that had not yet reached our part of the country. The Hobbs store was on Main St., in an old row of buildings with holes from hitching posts still in the ground out front. Penney’s had a main floor and a long, straight staircase up one side of the building, which led to the children’s department. One day when the store was crowded, Christi and I sat down on the top step of the staircase. Sitting very cautiously still, I told Christi to stop bouncing around so much because she might fall.

“I’m not going to fall,” she said.

In the next moment, Christi fell. I watched in horror as Christi bounced and rolled down the entire length of that staircase. She came to a sickeningly still stop on the landing, limp and eyes closed. That’s what people did in the movies when they died. They closed their eyes. I knew my sweet friend was dead.

To be continued...

Lovington Part II

2011-10-28T07:18:00.000-07:00

My dad went to a mysterious place called “work” every morning. I don’t know when I realized he worked at our church. Our church was a red brick building with a steeple, which made it unusual. We were members of the Church of Christ, and many of our sister congregations viewed steeples as unnecessary ornamentation.

My dad was the youth minister at our church. Youth ministry was new back then and there was no training in the area yet. No books, no models of youth ministry, no Christian rock bands. My dad knew only that he had grown to hate church as a teenager and he wanted to make church more teen-friendly. He held after-church evening devotionals in which he dimmed the lights while youth group members sat in a circle on the floor of the fellowship hall and sang “Kum Bah Ya.” The church elders learned of this practice and put a stop to it, saying singing on the floor in the dark could cause something called “emotionalism,” something the Church of Christ has traditionally feared.

My dad responded by moving these devotionals away from the church building so the elders would be less likely to find out what was going on there. One night, the youth group went to a park and sat in a circle on the grass. I was a ridiculously cute 2-year-old by then, and the teen girls argued over whose lap I would sit in. Settling into the winner’s lap, with the girl’s arms protecting mine from the cool wind, I looked up into southeast New Mexico’s only natural beauty: the clear night sky. It looked as though someone had flung a diamond-studded ebony sheet high above our heads. The youth group must have worn out “Kum Bah Ya” because my dad began singing “How Great Thou Art.” The teens joined in, and when we got to the line about the rolling thunder and I still felt so safe in the girl’s arms beneath the enormous twinkling sky, I thought that if we could sing about thunder in such a beautiful setting, it may not be that scary after all.

If the night sky was Lovington’s only redeeming quality, the nearby town of Hobbs was its respite. Hobbs was the place to go if you wanted to go to McDonald’s or a doctor. I had been born in Hobbs since Lovington had no hospital. Hobbs also had a Kmart, a large car dealership and a busy business district. We drove there every week for my brother’s piano lessons. If you needed something Hobbs couldn’t offer, such as surgery or a prom dress that didn’t look like everyone else’s, you drove two-and-a-half hours to Lubbock, Texas. Lubbock was an actual city—a metropolitan oasis surrounded by dirt and cotton fields on the Llano Estacado of the Texas Panhandle. Lubbock had department stores, a giant mall and a college people had actually heard of. We made a trip to Lubbock every November, and my dad carefully corralled my brother and me while my mom made secret purchases. A month later, we opened Christmas presents that could not have come from Lovington or Hobbs. I had heard Christmas presents came from the North Pole, but I suspected mine came from Lubbock, Texas.

What I did not know then was that my parents paid for those presents with my grandparents’ money. Our church elders believed ministers should only be paid what they needed to provide for their families. Back in Beaumont, my dad’s CPA salary put my parents in a nice house, on the guest lists of charitable events and on the fringe of the town’s higher social circles. But now my grandparents paid for all the extras, such as Christmas presents, birthday presents and piano lessons. Right before I turned three, a church in Hobbs made my dad a better offer, which included a four-bedroom brick parsonage. More than the money and the house, my dad was restless. Stuck with a vocation that was not his first choice, he seemed to find some contentment in a change of scenery. We made the familiar trip to Hobbs once more, but this time in a moving truck with everything we owned. We were not finished with Lovington, however. Or perhaps it was not finished with us.

Lovington, Part I

2011-10-27T11:12:00.000-07:00

Since my coursework is the only writing I have time for right now, I decided to post some of the things I've been working on this semester. For my Nonfiction: Biography/Autobiography class, I've been working on my memoirs. Here is the first bit of a 50+ page assigment. Enjoy.

Somehow, New Mexico became the answer.

My dad was using an accounting degree he never wanted. He had music in his blood, not numbers. But his CPA father had dreams of “Hamby & Hamby” on the sign outside the firm in their southeast Texas town of Beaumont. He would only pay for college if my dad got an accounting degree. This is how my dad became a CPA against his will.

But forced careers will only get you so far. By the time he and my mom had a toddler, my dad needed another job. Something that wouldn’t kill him from the inside-out. There was only one vocation more noble than accounting to his father. If my dad went into ministry, he could escape the number-crunching and still have his father’s blessing. And a family friend knew of a church in New Mexico. So my parents sold their house, packed their stuff, and with a 4-year-old in the backseat and me tucked away in my mother’s womb, they said goodbye to all four of my grandparents. Then they set off for a drive clear across Texas.

Parts of New Mexico are breathtaking. The ancestral puebloan ruins of Chaco Canyon in the northwest. The centuries-old churches of Santa Fe. The mountains of Taos that lie under a blanket of pristine snow. Stately mesas that line the horizon beneath a massive canopy of clean blue sky.

Lovington was near none of this. Lovington sulked away in the forgotten and lonely southeast corner of the state. The town smelled of stockyards and a soon-to-close oil refinery. The relentless wind kept a fresh layer of dirt on everything. There were a few elegant homes, which were a mystery to me since I couldn’t imagine how people got rich out there. Neighborhoods of poor to modest homes filled out the rest of the town. On the outskirts, Mexican migrant workers dwelled in trailers with rubber tires on top to keep the never-ending wind from blowing the roofs away. Decades later, a Lovington High School graduate named Brian Urlacher would become the NFL Rookie of the Year and finally bring a gleam of pride to the town’s eye. But in 1971, Lovington had no one to cheer for; no future to hope in. Just dirt, wind and a horizon that was too far away.

My parents rented a house on Birch Street. I showed up a few months later, rounding us out to a family of four. My mother had grown up the child of an Army officer, and she had come of age in exotic places like Panama and Japan. Now she was the mother of two young children in a drying-up oil town that stood on the verge of being blown across the New Mexico desert at any moment. She took her circumstances in stride, however, and created a safe, happy home for my brother and me.

My memories in the Birch Street house are of gradually becoming aware of the world around me. I woke up in my crib from a nap one day and decided the crib railing would be a nice place to sit while I looked at a book. Suddenly, everything became a rushed blur as I fell backward and landed with a thud on the floor. My cries brought my mother, who scooped me up, took me to the living room couch and distracted me from my trauma with the bright color pictures of a catalog. I had learned, as all young children do, that gravity, while necessary, can be a merciless enemy.

I developed a fear of storms in Lovington. A tiny town on the broad New Mexico plains has nowhere to hide from the Armageddon-like storms that would brew in the late spring skies. A sudden gust of cool wind on a warm evening told us nature’s rage was on its way. Within minutes, the sky turned the color of a deep bruise and flashes of lightning jagged all around. Once we were watching out the window and an especially large dagger of lightning stabbed down toward the earth. For the fraction of a second that it was visible, we saw two long spikes shoot upward, like angry rabbit ears.

“That one looked like Bugs Bunny,” my mother said, in an attempt to comfort me. I was still terrified. Bugs Bunny was a harmless character who made me laugh. He would never explode out of the sky and scare me out of my wits.

Thunder was the worst. Sudden loud noises are scary enough for a child, and thunder, with its mysterious origin and with no way to make it stop, created an inescapable horror. I could close a book with scary pictures, or carefully avoid my brother’s rubber snakes, but thunder had to be endured until it was gone.

(to be continued...)

Drowning

2011-10-14T23:21:00.000-07:00

My bright idea to take nine hours this semester has resulted in this drowning sensation I’ve been experiencing since mid-August. If I survive, I’ll have 21 hours toward a 36-hour degree by the end of this semester. If I don’t survive… well, I’m trying not to make that an option quite yet.

So what has been going on with me?

- I’ve been showing up in print. A lot. That’s because I did nothing but write all summer. Well, I did do other stuff. I went to camp and Memphis and Baytown and Beaumont and the beach. But I did have back-to-back deadlines all summer. I am grateful for the work, and it’s been fun to see my stuff popping up on newsstands.

- I’m on Pinterest. If you get a kick out of me making fun of stuff, follow me.

- I’ve seen “The Help” four times in the theater. I just keep finding people who want to go see it, so I go with them. The fourth time was tonight, and I went to see it with my friend Tammy. We were both emotional wrecks by the end and we sat there and talked about the movie until the theater guy politely asked us to leave so he could clean the place.

- School. I’m taking two writing classes and one class about how to teach people how to write. So I’m using just about every spare moment I have to write for my classes. When I’m not writing, I feel like I should be writing. I love my classes and my profs are outstanding. I’m experiencing the strange combination of not wanting the semester to end and being desperate for December to get here.

- Our girls are great. Julia is loving middle school. My own middle school experience was a bit hellish, and I’ve observed her positive experience so far with a blend of relief and incredulousness. Everyone my age talks about how awful middle school was. At 40, will she be the odd one who says, “Oh, I LOVE middle school!” We shall see. Jenna is as enthusiastic about life as she was as a 3-year-old. Just a little more calm and less messy.

- I still think of my friend Kristen often. We now know she died of a coronary artery dissection, which is a rare (aren’t they always) condition that mostly affects women. A few weeks ago, I dreamed I was standing in Kristen’s backyard, where our kids used to set off fireworks at their annual Fourth of July parties. In the dream, I saw her smiling and waving at me through her back window. I hesitated, then waved back. She disappeared.

One class I’m taking this semester is nonfiction: biography/autobiography. We’ve talked about how we’re not always aware of what’s going on in our lives when it’s happening. It’s not until later that we can look back, see how things were and write about them with more clarity. In this chaotic blur of children, school, work and home, I sometimes wonder what I’m missing right now that I will see later with clarity. Right now I feel hurried and frustrated because I’m just not getting it all done. But the truth is that I have a wonderfully loving and supportive husband, two girls that we cherish, and I have freedoms that many women in this world could only dream of. I have a mind and resources that enable me to constantly learn more about and evaluate the world I live in. The people who know me the best give me room to grapple with concepts like God and church and come up with new ways to view them when the old ways quit working.

I think what I’m trying to say is that I live a ridiculously charmed life. That’s what I want to remember when I write about this later.

September writing, revised

2011-09-20T11:51:00.000-07:00

I revised my list of this month's published writing because it got longer:

ACU Today magazine
The fall issue profiles this year’s alumni award winners, and I got to write about Randy Brewer (who I sat behind in Intro. to Mass Communication our freshman year) and Dr. Nathalie Bartle.

At Home in Arkansas magazine
I interviewed a local designer and wrote a Q&A about a kitchen and bath she had done. Lots of fun!

SUCCESS magazine
I reviewed Howard Schultz’s Onward: How Starbucks Fought for its Life Without Losing its Soul. I’ve reviewed a lot of books and this is one of my favorites. Look for Harry Connick Jr. on the magazine cover.

Escentially You magazine
This is a promotional publication from Scentsy. My friend Sarah Paulk and I both wrote pieces for it. My feature is about the charitable causes Scentsy supports.

2011 Quills & Pixels
Published by The Writers’ Network at University of Arkansas at Little Rock, Quills & Pixels is a compilation of narratives by members of the UALR writing community. My piece entitled “Jenna” is included in this edition.

Tales From the South
Tales From the South is a locally-produced radio show in which people tell their stories for a live audience. It is broadcast in central Arkansas on Thursday nights and broadcast internationally on World Radio on Sunday mornings. My story “Darth Vader and the 40-lb. Feminist” has been accepted and I will read it at the Sept. 27 taping. This will be my second time on the show.

More coming in October. Stay tuned!

September writing

2011-08-27T05:31:00.000-07:00

Where to find me in print in September:

At Home in Arkansas magazine
I interviewed a local designer and wrote a Q&A about a kitchen and bath she had done. Lots of fun!

SUCCESS magazine
I reviewed Howard Schultz’s Onward: How Starbucks Fought for its Life Without Losing its Soul. I’ve reviewed a lot of books and this is one of my favorites. Look for Harry Connick Jr. on the magazine cover.

Escentially You magazine
This is a promotional publication from Scentsy. My friend Sarah Paulk and I both wrote pieces for it. My feature is about the charitable causes Scentsy supports.

Just Around the Corner

2011-07-20T21:26:00.000-07:00

On the surface, Kristen and I didn’t have a lot in common. She homeschooled while I gleefully dropped my child off at school every day. She was very careful about what she ate. I ate whatever. She loved being pregnant and wanted to have as many children as possible. I was done after two. She gave birth to all seven of her children at home without drugs. I had scheduled C-sections with each of mine.

But when it came to making friendships, having these things in common was not important to Kristen. She didn’t care about someone’s background, or what made them different from her. She met people where they were. And she certainly didn’t care about what sorority you had been in or which neighborhood you lived in. She didn’t need to know those things to know she wanted to have a friendship with you. She had the unique gift of loving people as soon as she met them.

Kristen and I had playdates at each others’ houses. Julia and Joshua, her second-oldest, became sweet little friends. She and Paul only had three kids then, and Chad and I just had Julia. In 2003, our hopes for a second child started to fade as we experienced a string of miscarriages. Pregnancy loss was something Kristen had experienced as well, and she was such a good friend to me during those months. So many people don’t know what to say, but she always did. And she didn’t just say comforting things; she said things that were actually helpful. She told me questions to ask my doctor. She suspected my problem was a progesterone deficiency. My doctor suspected the same thing. When I got pregnant with Jenna, I supplemented the hormone and that’s how Jenna got here.

Kristen and I had a mutual friend named Jennifer who was diagnosed with stage 4 lymphoma in 2001 at the age of 30. Jennifer was the mother of two young girls and for three years, she fought that dreaded disease with everything she had. On the day she died, Julia and I were on the road home after a week at camp. Kristen called my cell, and in her sweet voice, broke the news we had been dreading for so long.

Kristen was always positive; always encouraging. When it came time for us to leave Baytown and I was struggling so much with the decision we had made, she always helped me turn my thoughts to the positive. We had to go where we felt God was leading us, she said.

Kristen was one of the most spiritual people I have known. She had a closeness with God that didn’t seem to waiver—even in the face of hardship. She had a compassion for adolescent girls that became apparent to me when the two of us co-led a class for high school girls in the spring of 2004. And she had a perspective on the fragility of life that she reflected on in this 2008 post from her blog:

I've realized that if we did live with that awareness that any one of us could be gone in a breath, we would live life a lot differently. We would live more peacefully with one another and a lot less selfishly. We would live more powerfully and make a difference on this earth for good. And we would live more joyfully with one another, delighting in the good only.

Gone in a breath.

Last Saturday, Kristen was home with six of their seven children. She had gone into a bedroom to nurse her 5-month-old when someone responding to an ad about a piano for sale came to the front door. When one of the children went to tell Kristen the guests were there, she was unconscious. It was a blessing the people had come to look at the piano; they stayed with the children until help came. Kristen died on the way to the hospital, probably from a brain aneurysm.

She was extremely health-conscious. She had not been sick.

Gone in a breath.

When I was processing the shocking news of Kristen’s death last Saturday, I started looking for past emails and Facebook messages she had sent me. I found one from about a year ago that ended with this:

“Glad to hear y'all are well! Miss you, but it honestly feels like you're just around the corner sometimes.
Love you,
Kristen”

I think of the day in 2004 that Kristen called to tell me of Jennifer’s death. I don’t know why people die young. I don’t know why Kristen’s husband had to become a single father of seven children. I don’t know how their children can ever understand.

But I do believe Kristen had such a strong, gentle spirit that the lives she touched will reflect it for years to come. In that sense, Kristen will never be far away. She might even be just around the corner.

Holy Communion

2011-06-26T13:36:00.000-07:00

There’s a scene in the movie Chocolat in which Vianne, the main character, throws a birthday party for a friend. This isn’t just any birthday party, though. The movie takes place in a French village in which social and moral boundaries are strictly enforced. Vianne ignores those boundaries and invites a cross-section of people to the party. In this scene, they are all there: the morally-upstanding townspeople who exist on one side of the line; and the chocolate-shop owner, the gypsy pariah, and the misunderstood battered wife who exist on the other side. They seem uneasy at first, but the food and communion break down the walls so relationships can form. At the end, Vianne breaks down the walls further by inviting the party guests to dessert on the gypsy’s boat.

Oh, why not just watch it. You get to look at Johnny Depp, anyway.

I used the word “communion,” earlier, and I didn’t really mean “Holy Communion,” as we Christians most often use it. One way to define the word is as “a sharing.” When people eat together, they share more than food. They share their lives, their hearts, their souls.

Something similar to the Chocolat dinner party happens in the South Bronx every week, but on a much grander and more meaningful scale. Watch Sara Frazier's story here.

I remember Sara from ACU Leadership Camps in years past. The way she lives out her faith challenges me. I don’t know that I could give up what she did to spend myself on others.

But Sara’s story, as well as the Chocolat dinner party scene, inspires me. I want to open my home more to others. To people who haven’t been there before. And people who have. I want people around my table who haven’t eaten together before. When this happens, communion happens. A sharing. A sharing that can become holy. So maybe I’ve been talking about Holy Communion all along.

When I read verses such as I Cor. 12-26, John 13:35, John 15:12, James 2:1-12 and Romans 12:10, they tell me that the more a church body can blur class distinctions, social boundaries and clique lines, the more it will look like Jesus. And I believe this can begin around anyone’s table. I’m going to try it with mine.

Ministry Life: The Parsonage

2011-06-06T18:29:00.000-07:00

I recently discovered Dan Bouchelle’s blog, Confessions of a Former Preacher. He got out of ministry a while back and uses his blog to chronicle the good, the bad and the ugly of life as a minister. It provides interesting insight into a role that is often misunderstood.

I’m getting dangerously close to 40, and I’ve spent all but eight of those years living in a ministry family—either as a minister’s daughter or wife. The ministry life is a unique experience, although it never seemed that way to me as a kid since it was all I had known. But there were some aspects that I knew made me different from my friends; things that occasionally reminded me that I sometimes lived in a very different world than that of my peers.

One of these aspects was…the parsonage.

Between the ages of 3 and 11, I lived in no less than five parsonages, or houses owned by a church for their ministry staff to live in. Six, if you count the house a church rented for us while the real church parsonage was getting a facelift. I never knew house-hunting as a young child. We just moved to a town and into the parsonage of whatever church was employing my dad as their youth minister.

It never bothered me that we didn’t get to choose the houses we lived in. Again, it was all I knew. My brother Brian and I still got to weigh in on important decisions, such as who got which bedroom and who the bathroom would be named after. (The bathroom name had to do with a rule my brother put in place and enforced. Whoever used the bathroom first in a new house got the bathroom named for them. We lived in houses with a “Brian’s bathroom” for years. On moving day at the last parsonage, I made it a point to use the bathroom before Brian did. When I proudly announced the news to Brian, he replied that he had changed the rule. So another three years using “Brian’s bathroom” for me.)

I liked all the houses we lived in. Most of them were nicer than what we could have afforded on our own. The first, which was owned by Taylor St. Church of Christ in Hobbs, New Mexico, had four bedrooms. It’s still the only four-bedroom house I’ve ever lived in. My mom used the room for her sewing machine, but as an avid “Brady Bunch” fan, I dreamed of our family getting an “Alice” and giving her that room. It was even near the kitchen, so it would have been perfect. Here I am (left) in the Hobbs house with friends at one of my birthday parties. Those of you who were at ACU when I was may recognize the blond girl in the red shirt. That's Christi Ravanelli Kerbers, my Hobbs bff.

The second church-owned house we lived in was owned by Country Club Rd. Church of Christ in Roswell, New Mexico. (Yes, THAT Roswell.) The house was OK, but after we moved in, something wonderful happened. Our church had a lovely new church building and the elders were convinced that the teens were going to destroy it and did not actually want teens hanging out in the building. (I’m sure that youth group felt deeply valued by those elders.) So the elders had our two-car garage converted into a teen room for our youth group. I was five, and having a huge space to run around in inside our house was fabulous. That’s when I realized cranky old elders weren’t all bad.

Then we moved to Big Spring, Texas, for my dad to work at 14th and Main Church of Christ. That’s when we moved into the house the church rented for us. I don’t remember it being that bad, but my mom says the elders’ wives who came to the house on moving day were mortified at what their husbands had rented for us. All I cared about was the huge tree in the front yard that was great for climbing, and the fact that a girl my age lived next door. That’s all 6-year-old kids want. A tree and a friend.

Then we got to move into that church’s actual parsonage. It was a much nicer brick house a few streets away. Here I am with my mom in that house:

Just a couple of months ago, Brian and a friend visited Big Spring and drove by this house. They stopped to take a picture and the current owner (14th and Main sold it long ago) came out to see what they were doing. Brian explained that he had lived there as a kid and she invited him in to look around. I was completely jealous. I loved that house and would love to see it again.

Then back to Lovington, New Mexico, where we had lived before Hobbs. The first time my dad worked at 3rd and Central Church of Christ, my parents had owned our house. But this time, we moved into the parsonage. This church actually owned two. We moved into the one across the street from the church while we waited for the preacher to finish building a house so he could leave the nicer, bigger parsonage open for us across town.

Living across the street from our church was a novelty that I probably would have gotten tired of eventually, but for the short time we were there, I thought it was cool. Here’s my dad, brother and me in the kitchen. This was 1979, if you couldn’t tell.

Being on time for things had never been so easy. My dad walked across the street to work every day. Church started at 9 a.m., so we walked out the front door at 9 a.m. After church, Brian and I just walked back across the street and didn’t have to wait for my parents to finish talking to everyone. That house had a large classroom building in our backyard, and we quickly got used to members of the youth group opening our gate and walking into our backyard for Bible class every Sunday. And, if my parents had an evening church function Brian and I didn’t particularly want to attend, they left us at home. (It was on one of these nights that Brian and I, ages 12 and 8, watched “Carrie” and scared ourselves to death. Our parents had no idea.)

The preacher finally finished building his new house and we got to move to the nicer parsonage, where I spent 4th, 5th and 6th grade. Then we moved to Beaumont, Texas, where the church had no parsonage. I was 11 and got to go house-hunting for the first time.

There are drawbacks to living in church-owned housing. The elders at each church had different rules. At one house, I couldn’t put posters up because they didn’t want holes in the walls. At the next house, the elders were fine with posters but they didn’t want our dog in the house. It was hard to keep up. When we moved into our Beaumont house, I asked my mom—out of habit—if the elders would mind if I put posters up. “This is OUR house,” she reminded me.

We only lived in one parsonage that was part of the church facility. In this kind of parsonage, establishing boundaries can be difficult. Other than a drunk banging on the outside door of my bedroom one night (it was a door we didn’t use—my dresser was in front of it), I don’t remember unwelcome visitors. But I have friends who have lived in parsonages who have nightmarish stories to tell of church members/staff/elders dropping in at all hours, or using the key to get in when the minister’s family is gone “just to check on things,” or church members who feel that paying for the house through their contributions entitles them to walk in any time without knocking, or just the general feeling of never being “off the clock.” I don’t know if my parents experienced any of this. I kind of liked being close to the church building and feeling as though we were in the middle of everything.

Parsonages can also do ministers a huge disservice by not allowing them to build up equity. Going from a parsonage to buying a house of our own in 1983 was not easy since we hadn’t accumulated equity with any of our previous houses. This is one good reason many churches have sold their parsonages in recent decades.

Chad has only been employed by two churches, and both of them have been parsonage-free. I like that. As an adult, I like picking out our own houses. But as a kid, each parsonage was a new adventure and, at least for a while, home.

June. Bring it.

2011-06-02T08:14:00.000-07:00

After years of thinking “I should get a professional website,” I finally got a professional website! World, meet www.deananall.com. I did it all by myself at Wordpress. The basics are there now, and I’ll be expanding it as inspiration allows.

My friend Judy has been in Rwanda for the past couple of weeks, teaching English in a public school. It’s been a fascinating journey and you can read about it here.

It’s the beginning of June, which means it’s getting hot outside, the girls are almost out of school, and I’m devouring another fabulous issue of Texas Monthly. This month features something I particularly love: a great rock ‘n’ roll story. The downside is that truly great rock ‘n’ roll stories don’t typically end well and Bill Haley’s story is no different. The man recorded what is considered by many to be the very first rock ‘n’ roll song (“Rock Around the Clock”), and he had a prolific music career after that song, but his life took the sadly predictable route of many rock legends. In 1981, he died lonely, broken and possibly mentally ill in Harlingen, Texas. Haley’s widow kept silent about him for decades after his death but finally opened up for this story, and it’s worth the read.

Something unique about the end of this school year: this baby girl is graduating from kindergarten. Jenna has never ceased to amaze us. Born after a string of devastating miscarriages, the girl hit the ground running and has never stopped. She is a blessing to us in so many ways.

Julia had a great first year of middle school. She loves being a percussionist, Quiz Bowl team captain (they came in 3rd out of 15 teams this year) and, judging from her diverse group of peers, she seems to be a friend to everyone. She has also recently become an official member of her dad’s youth group.

Here's a look at our summer: ACU Leadership camps (my favorite week of the year), horse camp for Julia, mission trip to New Orleans for Chad and Julia, Anime Blues Con in Memphis for Julia and me (this is a culture Julia has become part of that I don't quite understand, but I'm working on it. I hope going to Blues Con will help.), and a week on the Texas Gulf Coast for the four us for my birthday. If I have to turn 40, I might as well do it in one of my favorite places with my three favorite people.

Back to School

2011-05-10T07:01:00.000-07:00

I just finished my first year of graduate school. I have 12 hours, which means I'm 1/3 of the way there. So what was this year like for someone like me, who never felt all that academic and vowed to never go to school again after I got my bachelor's in 1994? Allow me to reflect:

Things I have loved about graduate school:

- I have loved being in the classroom again. For me, being in a learning environment and having parts of my mind opened that I didn't know were there has been a phenomenal experience. Here's something weird: As each semester has come to a close, I've actually been sad that my classes were ending. I never experienced this as an undergrad. Not that my classes weren't great then, but I was operating in survival mode most of the time.

- I've had amazing professors. Some of the best I've ever had. The faculty in the Dept. of Rhetoric and Writing at UALR is nothing less than outstanding.

- I've met the coolest people in the world. When I started the year last August, I was scared to death. I was sure I would be surrounded by people who were tons smarter than me. But instead, I've made some great friends. We are in different stages of life, but all on the same page by trying to reach a common goal. I've had the chance to get to know people of all ages and backgrounds. Here I am with Lauren when she came to hear me read at Tales from the South a couple of months ago. My other school friends Susan and Linda also came that night. And my church friend Tracy and Julia and my dad.

Lauren got an awesome publishing internship in Denver this summer. Go, Lauren!

- I've had a wonderful support system in Chad, Julia, Jenna and my parents. I could not even consider taking this on without their help. It's so easy for a wife and mom to feel guilty for doing something like going back to school. It feels selfish, in a way. I was feeling this way about a year ago when I told Chad, "I think I should just take a few classes." He said, "No, I think you need to do the whole thing." I'm so thankful for his and everyone else's support.

- I love the example I'm setting for my girls. Years ago, when my mom got her master's, I made an almost subconscious mental note: "I guess I could do that, too, someday." And now I am. I like to think that my girls are making the same mental notes.

- School has been good for me on a deeply personal level. My attempt to find a place to fit here in AR has been pretty rough at times. School and I have been a natural fit.

Things I don't like about graduate school:

- There's just one. How much it costs. UGH. I can't even talk about it.

Going back to school with the goal of finishing is a massive undertaking. Over the past year, Bono's voice has been running through my mind: "It's not a hill, it's a mountain, as you start out the climb..." It's true. You can't kid yourself into thinking it's easier than it really is. But I'm a third of the way there now, and I think I'll keep climbing.

Darth Vader and the 40-Pound Feminist

2011-04-11T09:41:00.000-07:00

The West Texas summer heat gave way to a frigid blast of air
conditioning as my mother and I pushed through the glass doors into
TG&Y. The shining floors and fluorescent lights always prompted a
quickening of my pulse. The late ’70s were the pre-Walmart years in
Big Spring, Texas, and TG&Y offered a glorious array of everything my
7-year-old mind could think of. TG&Y carried such a varied assortment
of goods that my friends and I referred to it as “Toys, Guns and
YoYos” or the more risque “Turtles, Girdles and YoYos.” That day, my
mother, an avid seamstress, needed to shop for fabric. Which gave me
at least 20 minutes to soak in the wonders of the TG&Y toy department.

Of course I could pore over the bright color pages in the toy section
of the Sears Wish Book any time I wanted to. But the TG&Y toy
department is where those pictures came to life. Gleaming Magic
8-Balls with answers to my future floating in dark blue dye. Plastic
buckets of Slime containing worms, bugs and eyeballs. Lite Brites and
Shrinky Dinks and cans of Silly String. Bicycles with their brand-new
rubber tire smell. Row after row of pink boxes showcasing every kind
of Barbie imaginable.

With so much to look at, deciding where to go first would have been a
vexing decision. But this was 1978, and the Star Wars craze had swept
through my hometown and left mobs of galactic rebel-wann-bes in its
wake. I was one of them. The previous Christmas, I had received the
Death Star Space Station, which was one of the most coveted Star Wars toys on the market, second only to the Millenium Falcon. I played for hours with my Star Wars toys – constructing endless storylines that
ranged from the Rebels hatching elaborate plots against Imperial
forces to Princess Leia and my lone Tuscan Raider becoming entangled
in a clandestine, star-crossed love affair. In this cosmic fantasy
world, I was no longer a 40-pound second-grader who cowered in the
corner of the gym during dodgeball tournaments. I was the ruler of my
own embattled galaxy. Depending on my mood, I could topple Darth Vader from his reign of terror. Or I could pack the Death Star’s trash
compactor full of droids so the Imperial force could use them for
scrap metal to soup up their tie fighters. I could bring Obiwan Kenobi
back from the dead. Or have Darth Vader kill him as many times as I
wanted him to. In my bedroom, complete with a Holly Hobbie bedspread
and matching curtains, I had created my own alternate universe in
which good and evil sparred in a never-ending battle.

My breath catching in my throat, I entered the Star Wars toy aisle.
Proud black boxes lined each shelf as far as my eyes could see. From
inside the boxes, tiny Han Solos and Luke Skywalkers and metallic
droids peered through plastic windows. I always stopped to survey the
action figures first. Kenner, the toy company that produced and
marketed the Star Wars toys, was always introducing new action
figures, and I had to see if any of them were worthy of my wish list.

But Kenner had recently come out with a new line of Star Wars figures.
They were the same classic characters, but bigger – more like
Barbie-doll size. I already had Princess Leia, her rooted brown hair
wound into its trademark cinnamon-bun shapes on each side of her head.

But next to Leia on the shelf that day was another Star Wars character

that caught my eye. Darth Vader. Enrobed in his signature black cloak,
the Dark Lord of the Sith peered at me from behind his sheet of clear
plastic. I picked up his box and stared into his menacing mask,
intrigued.

Suddenly, the box was snatched out of my hands. Startled, I looked up
to see a boy who appeared to be close to my age.

“You can’t have that because you’re a GIRL,” he spat angrily. “Here,”
he said, grabbing Princess Leia’s box off the shelf and thrusting it
at me. “You have to play with this one. Because you’re a GIRL.”

I felt frozen in a state of shock and confusion. This had never
happened to me before. My parents weren’t exactly burning piles of
bras in the front yard, but they had certainly never communicated to
me that I couldn’t have something or couldn’t do something because of
my gender. Barbie dolls and Matchbox cars and Star Wars action figures all co-existed peacefully in my bedroom. (Except for the time the
Stormtroopers kidnapped Barbie and tormented Ken with vicious ransom notes.) The fact that I was a girl had never determined what I could or could not play with. I did not like this boy. And I especially did
not like the way he kept saying “girl” like it was a bad word.

At a loss for what to say, I decided to act. I calmly took Princess
Leia from the boy and placed her back on the shelf. Then I snatched
the Darth Vader box from the boy’s hands, clutched it to my chest, and
glared.

Hard.

His voice jumped up an octave. Maybe two.

“But you’re a GIRL!” he screeched. “You can’t have Darth Vader! He’s for BOYS!”

Oh, my. This boy wasn’t going to go away easily. I took a step to my
right, where the light sabers were hanging. This wasn’t going to end
pretty, but it was going to end.

Before I had to take such drastic action, his mother appeared. Much to
my relief.

“Come on,” she reached for his hand. “It’s time to go.”

“Mom!” he yelled, grasping for her to support his evil chauvinist
cause. “Tell her she can’t have that! She’s a GIRL!”

“Don’t be silly,” she replied, becoming my instant ally. “She can play
with whatever she wants.”

As the woman led her son away, he never stopped shrieking. They
disappeared around the corner and his indignant cries grew more and
more faint until I could no longer hear them.

As the welcome silence fell over the Star Wars toy aisle, I realized I
was still clutching Darth Vader to my chest. I pulled the box back and
lifted it so his mask was at my eye-level. I knew this ruthless cyborg
did not approve of rebel activity. But staring at his shiny, black
plastic mask, I thought I caught a congratulatory nod. Our work was
done here. I placed him back on the shelf and turned to leave. Darth
Vader and I had won this battle together.

Beaumont, Back in the Day

2011-04-10T11:47:00.000-07:00

By Winston Hamby and Deana Hamby Nall

Beaumont Enterprise guest columnist Winston Hamby and his daughter,
Deana (Hamby) Nall, both have memories of teenage culture in Beaumont
from different eras. Winston is a 1953 graduate of South Park High
School and Deana graduated from Beaumont Christian High School in
1989. Recently, they sat down to talk about coming of age in the same
town—three decades apart.

D: Where in Beaumont did you live in the ’50s?

W: In South Park on Pipkin Street. Then we moved to Concord Road,
which was Voth Road back then. We only had one car. We would drive
downtown to the Goodhue Building to pick up my dad from work every
day.

D: Where did you and your friends hang out?

W: Pig Stand #10 on Port Arthur Road and Washington Boulevard. There
was another Pig Stand on Calder, but that was the Beaumont High Pig
Stand.

D: So if the South Park Pig Stand was #10, were there nine others?

W: No, just the two in Beaumont at that time.

D: Do you remember where my hangout was in the ’80s?

W: Rogers Park?

D: That was part of it. We hung out on Dowlen Road.

W: Oh, that was your drag.

D: Did you have a drag?

W: Pearl and Orleans, but after they were changed to one-way, it
became Pearl, Crockett, Orleans and College. We made a rectangle.

D: We just drove up and down Dowlen. When we got to Whataburger, we
turned around. When we got to Rogers Park, we turned around again. We
would drive up and down for hours—use up a whole tank of gas.

W: I used to worry about you out there.

D: We were just going out to see and be seen. The rule was to act
bored, but it was really a lot of fun.

W: One night I went out there in our red and gray van to see what you
were up to.

D: I called it the “Hambymobile.”

W: I pulled into Rogers Park and I saw you sitting on the hood of a
car with some friends. You were holding a Bible in your lap and I felt
bad for thinking you were up to no good.

D: Dad, I never had a Bible in Rogers Park.

W: You didn’t?

D: No. I did read the Bible, just not in Rogers Park.

W: I wonder why I remember that, then.

D: Wishful thinking, I guess.

W: We had a Bible class at South Park High School in the ’50s. There
was a huge cheating ring in there.

D: Did you learn anything in that class? I mean, you were a preacher’s kid.

W: I can’t remember.

D: What was the West End back then?

W: It was fields. Where West End is now was a town called Amelia that
was five miles from Beaumont.

D: So Amelia was its own town?

W: Yes. I didn’t go out there much. I didn’t leave town very often.

D: Oh, we did.

W: Where did you go?

D: Louisiana. A lot of us would go across the state line on weekend
nights. There were a couple of clubs in Vinton where we would go line
dancing. I didn’t even like country music, but we had a blast out
there.

W: I just took dates to the Jefferson Theater and the Pig Stand on the way home.

D: Which movies did you see there?

W: Oh… “Singing in the Rain” with… what’s his name?

D: Gene Kelly.

W: Yes.

D: How did I know that and you didn’t? I wasn’t even born until 1971.

W: What were your generation’s movies?

D: Tom Cruise was big in the ’80s. I saw “Top Gun” on opening night at
the Gaylynn a few years before it closed. I liked movies, but I liked
music more. What were you listening to in the ’50s?

W: Jo Stafford, Vic Damone, Pat Boone. Bing Crosby was phasing out but I still liked him. And Glenn Miller. There was Elvis Presley, but he
took some getting used to because he was a little weird at first. I
also liked Spike Jones and his satirical renditions of popular music.

D: I remember Spike Jones because we had a record when I was a kid.
There was a song about a horse race.

W: Oh, yeah. “Beetle Bomb.”

D: The music in the ’80s was all about pop and hair bands.

W: I didn’t like hair bands. I thought they were too “hippie.”

D: “Hippie?” When I think of hair bands, “hippie” doesn’t exactly come to mind.

W: I saw hippies wearing them in the ’70s and I didn’t like them.

D: Dad, hair bands were not something you wore in your hair. Hair
bands were rock bands in the ’80s made up of members who had lots of
big hair. Like Ratt and Poison.

W: I do remember Rat Poison.

D: Ratt and Poison. They were two different bands.

W: Oh. They probably sounded the same.

D: You know ’80s music better than I thought. Did you listen to
records or the radio in the ’50s?

W: Both. I listened to Gordon Baxter on the radio. He was hired and
fired by just about every radio station in Jefferson County.

D: He lived across the street from us on Redwood Drive in the ’80s.

W: Yes. He was quite a character.

D: Where did you eat in Beaumont in the ’50s?

W: The Golden Arrow was nice. Their worms were better than most.

D: Worms?

W: They always had worms in their salads.

D: And you kept going back?

W: Yeah. We just ate around them. We also ate at the Enterprise Café.
I loved their breaded veal cutlets and cream gravy. And I liked
Shelton’s and Motor Lunch.

D: Motor Lunch doesn’t sound appetizing in the least.

W: I ate there when the Pig Stand and Shelton’s parking lots were
full. There was also the Seven Seas restaurant toward Port Arthur. It
had the same manager as the Golden Arrow.

D: Did Seven Seas have worms in their salads, too? Since it had the
same manager?

W: I couldn’t tell. The lights were pretty dim. They kind of blended
in with the tomatoes.

D: We had Novrozky’s in the ’80s, across from the mall. That was a fun
place to hang out. I loved their hickory burgers.

W: Are they still open?

D: I don’t know. Mr. Gatti’s was right next door to it. It’s closed now.

W: In the ’50s, I liked Phelan’s Coffee because of its slogan: “Good
to the last drop.”

D: That’s Maxwell House.

W: It is?

D: Yes.

W: Oh.

D: Why do you think Beaumont was such a fun place to come of age in
the ’50s and ’80s?

W: For me, it was just where I lived. There were a lot of fun things to do.
D: The ’50s and ’80s were eras of optimism. I think that made those
decades seem more carefree. Plus both decades had the best music and
cars of the 20th Century.

W: I drove a ’39 Buick. And I never missed a driveway.

D: Oh, I put cars in ditches all over Beaumont.

W: I know. I had Bra-K Wrecker Service on my speed dial.

D: It’s hard enough learning to drive. And Beaumont has ditches all
over the place. They were unavoidable.

W: Well, you made it through your teen years alive.

D: We both did.

W: I’m glad we both spent our teen years in Beaumont.

D: It was a fun place to be a teenager. I think we are lucky.

W: I think so, too.

Hope for Hyperemesis

2011-04-08T11:29:00.000-07:00

Some of you know that Julia, Jenna and I are survivors of a debilitating and life-threatening pregnancy complication known as hyperemesis gravidarum. If you don’t know what that is, you can click here for more information. That’s the website for the HER Foundation, which was started by my friend and fellow HG survivor, Kimber MacGibbon. Kimber was a guest on the Dr. Phil show a couple of years ago for a segment on HG. She has put a lot of work into the HER Foundation and made it a valuable resource for HG sufferers, their families and health professionals.

For years, many HG survivors have believed more research should be done to find a cause and cure or at least lessen the devastating effects of HG. Recently, our prayers have been answered: The Department of Maternal-Fetal Medicine at the University of Southern California and the Department of Medicine at UCLA are conducting a study to identify the genes and risk factors of HG. I’ve been contacted about this study and have agreed to participate in it.

The study still needs participants. They need women who have had HG, and they also need a control group of women who have been pregnant with no HG. For the control group, they need women who have NOT had HG and who have had at least two pregnancies that went beyond 27 weeks.

If you are not sure if the nausea/vomiting you experienced in pregnancy was morning sickness or HG, this can help you out.

Please consider being a part of this study. This research could provide the answers that HG sufferers and their families have needed for years. For some women, the HG becomes so severe that they must terminate (very much wanted) pregnancies to save their own lives. This was not the case with me, but it could have been and it is a reality for many women.

If you live in the U.S. and are interested in participating, either as an HG survivor or non-HG participant, please contact please contact Marlena Schoenberg Fejzo, PhD at nvpstudy@usc.edu or 310-210-0802.

Here’s more info on the study:

Help Find a Cure for HG

HG Genetic Study Needs Participants!

USC & UCLA are close to meeting their goal of 1,000 participants. The goal of this study is to understand the etiology of Hyperemesis Gravidarum so we can develop better treatments and improve the quality of life for patients suffering from HG and their offspring. (More information... or contact nvpstudy@usc.edu )

Current 2007-2012 Study: Genetics of Hyperemesis Gravidarum (HG)

This study is designed to identify individuals affected with HG, to study epidemiologic factors via an online survey, to collect DNA samples from saliva through the mail at no cost or travel for you, and to search for genes and risk factors that may be potentially associated with this condition. To be eligible, you must have suffered from HG and had treatment for your HG that includes i.v. hydration, TPN or other form of non-oral feeding (ie nasogastric feeding), OR both, and are able to recruit a friend with at least 2 pregnancies who has NOT suffered from HG to serve as a control. If you live in the United States and are interested, please contact Marlena Schoenberg Fejzo, PhD at nvpstudy@usc.edu or 310-210-0802. Download the USC/UCLA Consent Form (804 Kb PDF) for more details about the study.

Identification of genes and risk factors that contribute to HG will lead to a better understanding of the causes of severe nausea and vomiting of pregnancy, and should be a first step toward the development of more effective treatments or a cure for this devastating disease. To learn more about why Marlena is devoted to finding the cause of HG and information about participating in the study watch Marlena's youtube.com video here.

Identification of genes and risk factors that contribute to HG will lead to a better understanding of the causes of severe nausea and vomiting of pregnancy, and should be a first step toward the development of more effective treatments or a cure for this devastating disease.

How Others See Us

2011-03-11T06:56:00.000-08:00

Back in the summer of 2002, as the news media was gearing up for the one-year anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, I got an idea. There was a mosque in Baytown, where we were living at the time. Why not go talk to the leaders and members there to find out what the past year had been like for them and then write it as a feature for the local newspaper? So I did. In a way, it was one of the more unnerving things I have ever done. It was six Muslim men -- one of them was the imam (or leader) of the mosque -- and me. A Christian woman. I felt so outnumbered that I was shaking as I sat down to talk to them. But they were so gracious. They spoke of the fears of retaliation they had experienced over the past year, and the relief they felt when Christian members of the community had actually reached out to them during that time. One even left a note on the front door of the mosque: "We're all in this together," it said. They appreciated me coming and the imam called to thank me after the story came out. I was so moved by the experience that I got permission from my editor to write an opinion column to reflect my own feelings about that meeting and the local Muslim community. I learned from those men. In a time in which suspicion and outright hatred was directed at their religion, they showed me that they, like me, just wanted peace and healing.

There is so much to be learned from people who don't share our convictions. Or who used to have our convictions. I recently came across this blog, which is written by a woman who was once a Christian minister’s wife. She is now divorced from him and no longer a believer. Much of what she writes is sad, but insightful as well. I find her “Top Six Killers of Christianity” especially interesting. I'm intrigued by this quote of hers:

“As an atheist, I am told I am miserable, hopeless, terrified of death, immoral, was never a “True Christian”, etc, and none of it is true. I may occasionally sound miserable on my blog, but that’s because my blog is my outlet. Most of the time, I am a pretty happy person with more hope now than I had as a Christian, and I’m not afraid of death. Christians don’t realize that the labels they give to people are dehumanizing and often wrong, and really, very arrogant and assuming. It’s very off putting.The thing is, Christianity has good potential. I don’t know if I’ll ever become a Christian again, but like Ghandi said, “I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.” I don’t know if I entirely agree with that, but close enough. The good Christianity could offer: community, support, humanitarianism, etc. Unfortunately, all it’s become is a club for those who can’t afford a country club membership (or for whom a country club membership isn’t enough).”

Christians need to be aware that for all the good we do, we also present an ugly side. Usually without meaning to. (Although some Christians put the ugliness out there intentionally and couldn’t care less because they believe they are “contending for the faith.”)

Here’s an article I found this week that felt like a punch in the gut: “Why Evangelicals Hate Jesus.” As put off as I was by the title (of course I don’t hate Jesus!), I kept finding truth as I read it. We as Christians are not good at PR. Outsiders see us in a very negative light and to be honest, I can’t blame them.

“But Jesus was radical,” some will say in defense. “He made people uncomfortable by preaching the truth. We are called to do the same thing.”

Yes. But.

You will not find in scripture that Jesus was a jerk. He loved others and practiced what he preached. We cannot be jerks and glorify God at the same time.

Chad and I just finished reading “The Unlikely Disciple” by Kevin Roose. Roose was a student at Brown University who decided to go undercover as a born-again Christian for a semester at Liberty University. Yes, Jerry Falwell’s school. What Roose observed and experienced that semester ranged from hilarious to deeply disturbing. It made me question how my own convictions are viewed by others and if my beliefs cause me to act lovingly toward them or not.

Christians need a good, hard look in the mirror on a regular basis. Are we really being Jesus to others? Or are we what Phil Zuckerman describes in “Why Evangelicals Hate Jesus”:

"And as is the case for most White Evangelical Christians, what they are ignoring is actually the very heart and soul of Jesus's message -- a message that emphasizes sharing, not greed. Peace-making, not war-mongering. Love, not violence."

Tales from the South

2011-03-11T06:05:00.000-08:00

I submitted my most recent blog post, "The Power of Prayer, or The Day My Hair Exploded", to Tales from the South a couple of weeks ago, and I found out earlier this week that it had been accepted. (I've been DYING to get on Tales from the South -- this was my 5th attempt to get something in.) Tales from the South is a radio show that broadcasts every Thursday at 7 p.m. on KUAR, Central Arkansas' public radio station. The other selected writers and I will read our pieces in front of a live audience at Starving Artist Cafe in the Argenta District of North Little Rock this Tuesday evening, and the show will be broadcast later in the week. I am a surreal combination of excited/nervous/nauseated. Should be fun!

The Power of Prayer, or The Day My Hair Exploded

2011-02-23T09:54:00.000-08:00

I was born with thick hair. Women who have thick hair understand this is both a blessing and a curse. When thin-haired women complain about their fine, flat hair that won’t do anything, we have no room to join in. Our hair does plenty. And usually without our consent.

We thick-haired women learn early in our lives that peace with our hair is best kept if we allow it to do what it wants. Years ago, I quit trying to part it against its will, or maintain a long, straight, shiny, curtain of hair flowing down my back. My hair does not like to do these things. And I’m OK with that.

Also early in life, I discovered a key problem with thick hair. It’s hot. Not hot in a sexy kind of way, but hot in a sweaty-masses-of-hair-matted-against-the-back-of-my-neck-in-the-dead-of-a-Texas-summer kind of way. So in hot weather, I put it up. This works best if I can twist all my hair onto the back of my head and secure it with a large clip. They don’t actually make clips that can handle my hair, so I buy the ones that are available and use them until my hair breaks them. I’ve had clips pop into pieces right off the back of my head. I’ve had them sadly and quietly crumble into a defeated pile of wire springs and plastic teeth on my bathroom floor. I sweep up the remains, apologetically brush them into the trash, and head to the store to purchase the next victim.

One Sunday morning about 15 years ago, Chad and I were sitting in a worship service at A&M Church of Christ in College Station, Texas. It was summertime, and I had hot-rolled my hair and secured the curls with a large clip on the back of my head, safely and comfortably off the back of my neck. Wearing a floral summer dress, I thought I looked quite elegant. (Vanity tends to be a downfall of mine that has resulted in all kinds of public disasters, but I refuse to give it up.) At the end of the service, a hush fell over the congregation of 1,200 as the closing prayer began. As the prayer leader earnestly implored God for blessings and healing and other things that truly mattered, I felt something begin to move in the back of my hair. As the springs emitted tiny pops and my hair began to loosen, the horror of what was about to happen in this silent, reverent gathering hit me. This hair clip was going to give up the ghost, and it was going to happen.

Right.

Now.

My prayerful thoughts turned from the sick and the hurting to my own dire situation.

“Please, God, please,” I begged. “Keep this clip together until church is over.”

The prayer leader continued on as I felt the tension growing in my hair. If I could only make it to the end, the imminent explosion could happen in a much less noticeable manner. The leader’s “amen” was my finish line, and I focused on it, willing my clip to stay intact with every ounce of mental energy I could muster.

Finally, the prayer began to wind down. The leader uttered the long-awaited “amen,” and in the second of silence that followed, my hair clip exploded with such force that I heard gasps. I cautiously opened my eyes to see tiny springs and pieces of plastic teeth raining down on the people all around me. I was afraid the people sitting behind me had received the worst of it, so I turned around to face a wide-eyed woman, frozen in her seat.

“What was that?” she panted. I think she thought she had been shot at.

“My hair clip exploded,” I meekly explained.

There were several pieces of the clip that never made it out of my hair, so I brushed them out when I got home. One more tiny spring fell out and pinged its way across my bathroom floor.

Then I got in the car, drove to the store, and brought home a bag of my hair’s next victims.

Love Rescue Me

2011-02-17T07:05:00.000-08:00

This past Friday night, Julia and I went to U2charist (or, as I like to call it, “Bono Church”) at First United Methodist in downtown Little Rock.

Go here to find out what U2charist is.

I found out about a Little Rock church hosting a U2charist not long after I wrote this blog post about how my favorite church songs, at least right now, are not in church. My more meaningful worship moments are in my times alone with my iPod.

With the exception of Third Day, you won’t find any music marketed as Christian on my iPod. No Chris Tomlin, Kari Jobe or whoever is popular in that genre right now. This is for the same reason that I don’t read much Christian lit. Not that I have negative feelings toward finding inspiration in those things. But for me personally, I’m drawn to finding spiritual meaning in less obvious places. So I listen to U2 and Muse and Norah Jones and Lisa Loeb and Sting and Seal and Paramore. And it’s in there. You just have to listen for it.

Of course I’m not the only one to have discovered spiritual meaning in secular music. This is how U2charist came to be. Finally, I didn’t have spend these moments alone with my iPod. I could experience this type of worship in a corporate setting with others who are wired more like I am.

When Julia and I walked in to the gym at First Methodist, the lights were dim, candles were lit and bread and those fancy goblets for communion (We silly evangelicals typically don't know the names of things in liturgical churches.) Before the service started, U2 music played through the speakers, including “Where the Streets Have No Name” and “The Saints Are Coming,” a remake of a Skids song that U2 did with Green Day to raise funds for the devastation left after Hurricane Katrina. It’s also a favorite of Julia’s.

Then Michael Mattox stood up and welcomed us to the service. He’s the senior pastor at the church. Worshiping in a new way challenges us to think differently, he said.

“That’s what the service tonight is all about,” he said. “Learning to sing a new song.”

The service opened with “With Or Without You.” The church worship band played it. I knew the band was going to be playing a few of the songs, which bothered me at first. I’m just partial to Bono’s voice. Those of you who have a Bible study routine where you have your favorite chair, your favorite pen, your favorite coffee, etc., will understand this. Bono is my coffee. I’ve read enough about the man to know where these songs come from, and his voice is one of those things that helps point me to God.

But the band was great. They had put a lot of time into learning these songs. And the main vocalist was no Bono, but the dude has some PIPES.

Next was a time of prayer with the U2 music video “Magnificent.” This is my favorite worship song right now. It reads just like a Psalm:

“I was born, I was born to sing for you
I didn't have a choice but to lift you up
And sing whatever song you wanted me to
I give you back my voice from the womb
My first cry, it was a joyful noise”

And the video, filmed in Fez, Morocco, depicts a white veil being lifted to reveal a beautiful city and beautiful people. Could it mean freedom for the Middle East? Or freedom from the things that veil our hearts and souls? U2 leaves it to us to interpret.

The service continued with a reading of Psalm 40 (“I waited patiently for the Lord; he turned to me and heard my cry”) and then a prayer of confession based on the U2 songs “Acrobat,” “A Sort of Homecoming” and “Love Rescue Me.” This was followed quite naturally by the song “Grace” (“Grace makes beauty out of ugly things”).

After a prayer of joy and concern, Rev. Mattox introduced a U2 video that was almost taken out of the night’s line-up. I’m glad they left it in. U2’s June 5, 1983, performance of “Sunday, Bloody Sunday” at Colorado’s Red Rocks Amphitheatre was included by Rolling Stone magazine in its list of “50 Moments That Changed the History of Rock ‘n’ Roll.” But what does this song mean for Christians? It’s a call to end complacency and to stand up against violence—especially violence that has been carried out around the world in God’s name. Not just in U2’s native Ireland, but anywhere.

Then we recited the Lord’s Prayer and Rev. Mattox read Jesus' words from Matthew about letting our lights shine. This led into the offering, all of which will go to Heifer International. U2’s only stipulation with allowing their music to be used like this is that funds be raised for one of the U.N. Millennial Goals.

After “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For,” in which Bono acknowledges faith and its ability to exist alongside doubts, we moved into communion while we listened to “One,” and then we watched the concert video of “American Prayer” (a Bono/Dave Stewart/Pharrell Williams collaboration written in the hopes that Americans, and American Christians in particular, will respond to the international AIDS crisis).

The whole thing lasted about an hour. Rev. Mattox said the church will have more U2charists in the future. I hope so. This kind of worship is what works for me right now. And I know, believe me—I KNOW. Worship isn’t supposed to be about me. I get that. But sometimes you have to find your own way to God when the old ways just don’t work anymore. These songs are not new to me. But they are new in this context of worshiping with others. It works, so I'm going with it.

1 I waited patiently for the LORD;
he turned to me and heard my cry.
2 He lifted me out of the slimy pit,
out of the mud and mire;
he set my feet on a rock
and gave me a firm place to stand.
3 He put a new song in my mouth,
a hymn of praise to our God.
Many will see and fear the LORD
and put their trust in him. – Psalm 40:1-3

White Girls Don't Get Married in Black Churches

2011-01-25T08:53:00.000-08:00

“We are just two people. Not that much separates us. Not nearly as much as I’d thought.”—Skeeter Phelan in The Help

I love my hometown of Beaumont, Texas. I haven’t lived there since 1993, but I still feel a connection to it and I always will. Memories of stately oak trees heavy with Spanish moss, the crushing humidity, and the sweet/toxic mix of magnolia blossoms and oil refineries in the air are as fresh in my head as they were when I was young. The Hamby family has lived there since the Great Depression and no matter how long I’ve been gone or how much it changes, it will always be home, in a way.

When you truly love something, you are forced to acknowledge its negative aspects. And Beaumont has a big one.

I don’t know if I noticed the great divide between the races when I moved there with my parents in 1983. But a line was there. A line that divided the town according to the skin color of its residents. There were white parts of town and black parts of town. If black families began moving into a white neighborhood, that neighborhood was suddenly considered to be “going downhill.” There weren’t many black people in my church or school. I didn’t think about it much. It’s just the way things were.

One day in 9th grade, I overheard a classmate tell someone that the reason she was in our private school was because her parents didn’t want her being around black kids at a public school. I was surprised to hear this and later shared what she had said with a close friend of mine.

“Oh,” my friend said. “That’s why I’m here, too.”

That’s the problem with growing up in a place like Beaumont. There are things you don’t see; questions you don’t think to ask.

In high school, two of my friends transferred to a large public school. My school got out before theirs did, so some days I would drive over there and hang out with my friends after school. It didn’t take me long to notice how self-segregated this school was. There was a white parking lot and a black parking lot. My friends told me there was a white section and a black section in the cafeteria. Beaumont schools had desegregated years earlier, but that line was still in place.

I know other towns have lines. But when it's in your own town, it becomes personal.

Beaumont also had a “whites only” country club. This wasn’t written anywhere, but everyone knew the only people with dark skin inside that building were wearing uniforms. There were black funeral homes and white funeral homes and black debutante balls and white debutante balls.

But what grew to bother me the most were the separate churches. This led to perhaps the most scandalous thing I’ve ever done. When I was planning my wedding in 1993, I wanted instrumental music in the ceremony. Having come from a family with deep Church of Christ roots, this was pretty nervy in itself. The leaders of my home congregation didn’t even have to think about it. Absolutely not, they said. Other congregations in town with whom my family was connected said the same thing.

Then I thought of 11th Street Church of Christ. They had a new church building that was much prettier than my own church, which carried an appalling theme of brown and burnt orange. The preacher there was an old friend of my dad’s. His name was Brother Randolph. I called him up.

I explained my predicament. I wanted instrumental music in my wedding and a church that would let me have it.

“Deana, I think the world of your dad and we would love for you to get married here,” he said. “And I don’t care what kind of music you have.”

So on Aug. 14, 1993, I packed that black church full of white people and blasted Handel’s “Music from the Royal Fireworks” out of the church P.A. system. It wasn’t without criticism. And not so much about the music. After the invitations had gone out, a few people pulled me aside and wanted to know why I was getting married there. I explained that I wanted instrumental music and a center aisle. And no burnt orange.

But it was more than that. I wanted, if for just a couple of hours on an August evening, to make that Beaumont line a little blurry. In Beaumont, white girls don’t get married in black churches. But I did. I’m sure it did nothing to improve race relations in that town, but I’d like to think it meant something. It meant something to me.

We had a beautiful wedding, and Brother Randolph didn’t even charge us to use the building. I’m sure comments about my getting married in a black church were whispered behind my back. I truly didn’t care.

I finished reading The Help on MLK Day last week. The Help is all about the line, just in a different town. The line that divides people in many communities, including the one I live in now. It’s amazing to me that something like the Berlin Wall, which hundreds of people died trying to cross, can crumble to pieces to unite a country while this invisible line between the races can still exist in schools and churches and communities across America.

I don’t know how to fix the line. I think no one does. But talking about it helps. That’s what The Help is about. Telling our stories leads to better understanding, and I think better understanding can blur the line. Maybe, eventually, the line could even disappear.

When Julia was in kindergarten, I walked into her school cafeteria the day after MLK day. She was sitting with her sweet friend Simeon, and the two of them were talking and laughing and having fun. It’s kind of a shame, I thought, that Martin Luther King and so many others fought and sacrificed for black and white children to go to the same schools, and now these kids don’t even know it. To Julia and Simeon, there was no line. They didn’t even know there was supposed to be one.

But on second thought, isn’t that how MLK would have wanted it? For the races to get along in a way that seemed like the most natural thing in the world? For the line to be not only gone, but forgotten as well?

Snow 2011

2011-01-09T15:30:00.000-08:00

Jenna saw the snow coming down today and said, "I need hot chocolate." Except we didn't have any. So (after a phone call to my mom) I made some from scratch. It's the best hot chocolate I've ever had:

1/4 cup cocoa powder
1/3 cup sugar
4 cups milk

Combine cocoa powder, sugar and 1/2 cup of the milk in a saucepan. Heat to just boiling, then add rest of milk. Heat without boiling. I melted some leftover candy canes in it and added a dash of my french vanilla coffee creamer. Super yum. Swiss Miss, it was nice knowin' ya.

My Bathroom Saga

2011-01-07T08:19:00.000-08:00

Over the past few years, I’ve been decorating my bathroom. I do these things gradually. I could never have my own decorating show on HGTV because it would turn into a years-long series just to do one room. So by the time we sell this place to move into a nursing home, it should be perfect. Anyway, here’s the story of my bathroom.

When we moved in, it was yellow. Which is great, because I like yellow. I had a yellow bathroom in our Baytown house. It’s warm and bright and makes me think of sunshine and lemon meringue pie. But after a while, I decided to break up the yellow a bit with some black. Like these candle holders and some other pieces I picked up here and there.

Then came the youth group garage sale last spring. Someone walked up with a box of donations and something caught my eye. “Is that Waverly toile?” Before the person could answer, I had jumped up, grabbed the roll of fabric and claimed it as my own. It was a remnant of toile that has made the rounds in the homes of several people at my church. And the very last bit of it was mine. It was an odd-shaped remnant, and my mom and I turned it into this:

But the story doesn’t end here. A few months later, my mom, a garage-saling guru, called me one Saturday morning. She was at a garage sale and had found a comforter, pillow shams, drapes and valances in the Waverly toile that Target sold for a while. In the very same toile print as my remnant. They had been in a woman’s guest bedroom that was never used. The woman wanted $20 for all of it. I put the curtain panels on my garden tub:

The comforter and valances are part of my bedroom project, which is still underway.

Here’s the vanity. I bought the “N” while shopping with my bff Carol in Waco last fall, the day after we went to the U2 concert in Dallas. (I almost yelled, “Carol, do you want a ‘P?’” across the store but stopped myself when I realized how it would sound. Now I wish I had.) The picture frames came from Target’s One Spot a few years ago and the black-and-white pics in them are of the girls on some of our Arkansas adventures.

So there's my made-over bathroom. The most important thing is that I can still sit in the bathtub and watch "16 and Pregnant" on the bedroom TV.

My Favorite Church Songs

2010-12-14T07:39:00.000-08:00

My favorite church songs are not in church.

They’re just not. Maybe one day. But right now, my favorite church songs are on YouTube and my iPod. Here are two of them:

Magnificent by U2

This is probably my favorite song from “No Line on the Horizon.” Bono has said the lyrics were inspired by Cole Porter and Bach. To me, it reads a lot like one of David’s Psalms. The song is about "two lovers holding on to each other and trying to turn their life into worship," according to Bono. Right now, no song connects me with God like this one:

Magnificent
Oh, magnificent

I was born
I was born to be with you  
In this space and time
After that and ever after
I haven't had a clue

Only to break rhyme
This foolishness can leave a heart
Black and blue  

Only love
Only love can leave such a mark 
But only love
Only love can heal such a scar 

I was born
I was born to sing for you  
I didn’t have a choice
But to lift you up
And sing whatever song you wanted me to
I give you back my voice
From the womb my first cry
It was a joyful noise
Oh, oh

Only love
Only love can leave such a mark
But only love
Only love can heal such a scar 

Justified till we die
You and I will magnify 
Oh, the magnificent 
Magnificent

Only love
Only love can leave such a mark 
But only love
Only love unites our hearts  

Justified till we die
You and I will magnify
Oh, the magnificent 
Magnificent 
Magnificent

I love the video, too:

I’ve recently discovered Blind Willie Johnson. Johnson was a Texas-born blues and spirituals singer and guitarist. His life is a mystery: conflicting stories abound concerning his birthplace, how he became blind, how many wives he had or even if he was legally married to any of them. He was poor his entire life. He seemed to go back and forth between women, which were clearly his weakness, and wanting to serve God through preaching. He spent his later years in my hometown of Beaumont, where he preached on the streets to anyone who would listen. After his house burned down in 1945, he lived in the wet ruins of his home until he contracted malaria and died.

Between 1927 and 1930, Johnson made 30 record sides for Columbia Records. One of these is “Dark is the Night, Cold is the Ground.” Johnson was a master of the slide guitar (today’s slide guitarists are still trying to figure out how he played the way he did), which he features on this song, but his voice is actually the heart of the song. There are no discernable words, just Johnson’s voice. Combine what we know of Johnson’s life with the raw emotion in this song and you know this is music straight from a broken man’s soul. It’s Romans 8:26 put to music. I found a video someone made for this song on YouTube:

What I learned about myself in 2010

2010-12-08T06:42:00.000-08:00

1) I’ve reached the age where jumping rope makes me wet my pants.

2) Graduate school isn’t so scary after all.

3) I like sushi.

4) A long-distance friend of mine recently told me that not only can you pray for God to bring people into your life, you can pray for him to remove people from your life. (In a healthy way, not an Ananias-and-Sapphira way.) I’ve been intrigued by this concept lately.

5) When you have a migraine, that whistle sound on the Febreze commercials can make you want to commit violent acts.

6) Even when both your kids are in school all day, there still isn’t enough time in the day.

7) When my dad was diagnosed with cancer a while back, my best friend from preschool, whose husband has survived two types of cancer, called me out of the blue to offer some much-appreciated words of wisdom. And my best friend from elementary school, who lost her own dad to cancer several years ago, sent me a very sweet and thoughtful message. One friend lives in Connecticut, the other in Boston. Friendships are not limited by time or space.

8) My dog has no concept of personal space.

9) I am so over the little Christmas village Chad and I began collecting pieces for years ago and I want to get rid of it.

10) I am a much better student in my late 30s than I was in my late teens/early 20s. Back then, I was just trying to survive. Now I'm trying to succeed. Makes a big difference.

11) The stay-at-home mom of a preschooler stage of my life is over. I did it for ten years. It was great and I have wonderful memories of it. But I'm not pining for more babies. That ship has sailed, hit an iceberg and sunk to the bottom of the ocean.

Fall 2010

2010-10-09T17:42:00.000-07:00

On Aug. 19, three people in our house started school. I dropped Jenna off for her first day of kindergarten. Chad drove Julia to her new middle school. And that evening, I drove to the first class of my graduate program.

There are a few reasons why I decided to start my master's now:

1) Window of opportunity. Julia leaves for college in seven years. We don't want both of us in school at the same time. If it gets too close to time for her to go, I'll keep putting it off. Then Jenna will be starting around the time Julia finishes. After Jenna's done with school, I will think I'm too old. So now or never.

2) Although I work at home, I don't work every single day. Now that my house is empty during the day, the idea of spending time at home alone with my thoughts was a bit daunting.

3) I want my girls to know they can go to grad school someday. My mom never said it, but when she got her master's in 1993, she was communicating to me that I could do that, too. Of course Chad already has his (almost two), but I want to show them that a mom can do it, too.

So I started this semester on my master's in professional and technical writing. It's in the Dept. of Rhetoric and Writing at the University of Arkansas-Little Rock. Phenomenal faculty in that department. Right now I'm taking Technical Style and Editing (which I had a lot of as an undergrad) and Theory of Rhetoric (which I've never studied before and is full of abstract concepts, but fascinating nonetheless).

Now there's a fourth reason I'm getting my master's that I didn't really think of before. It has been so good for me personally. I remember as an undergrad when something finally clicked. I took a basic newswriting class and I realized I loved journalistic writing. That part of my brain just woke up. I felt myself becoming something and I haven't been the same since. I've felt this way starting grad school. Parts of my brain are waking up. I'm thinking about things in ways I haven't before. I'm thinking about things I didn't even know existed before Aug. 19. I'm studying under wonderful professors and meeting new people in my classes. For ten years, I was a stay-at-home mom of preschoolers and that was a great experience that I wouldn't have traded for anything. I'm a little sad that those years are gone forever. But I'm looking forward to what's next for me.

I'm also not in house church this semester because of a conflict with my night class. So I'm out for this semester, possibly next semester, and maybe even after that. It's weird to say this, since I'm married to someone on the staff of a church that really emphasizes house churches, but taking a break from house church has also been good for me. I've made some relationships through house churches that I'm thankful for, but after being in five house churches in four years, I was ready for a break. Chad and the girls are involved in one right now that they seem to really like. I think house churches are and can be good, I just realize it's not for everyone all the time. Here's an interesting article I found about the small group/house church concept.

One last note: Check out the blog of our friend Nancy, who was diagnosed with ALS last summer.

Laura's House

2010-09-08T07:17:00.000-07:00

I was probably about nine years old by the time I got to the end of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House book series. Finishing The First Four Years (which, despite its title, is the last book of the series), I noticed one final illustration on the page across from the story’s end. It was an oval glass plate with the words “GIVE US THIS DAY OUR DAILY BREAD” etched into it. I recognized it from the chapter about the fire that destroyed the Wilders’ house and most of their belongings. A neighbor had gone into the burning house through a window and thrown the plate, along with some other dishes and silver, out into the yard. This plate was one of the few possessions Laura and her husband Almanzo had left after the fire.

According to the words printed beneath the sketch of the plate, the Wilders had kept it for the duration of their marriage and it was found among their daughter Rose’s things following her death. The plate was now on display, it said, at the Laura Ingalls Wilder Home and Museum in Mansfield, Missouri.

There’s a museum? And this plate is there? I had just devoured this book series and felt, as many Little House fans do, that Laura was my friend. She lived in such a different time and place but we seemed to have so much in common. And there was a place I could go to see her stuff? I ran to find a map to see how far Missouri was from New Mexico, where my family was living at the time. But it was too far. We did take one long trip every year, but it was down to southeast Texas to see my grandparents. Driving to rural Missouri wouldn’t really make much sense for us.

But I never forgot it. When I was asked “What’s one place you’ve always wanted to go?” My answer was Mansfield, Missouri.

(Sidenote: I’m a fan of the Little House books. Not the TV show. I’ll save that rant for another blog post.)

Decades later, my husband and I moved our family to Arkansas. A couple of years later, we went to Branson, Missouri, for a marriage conference. In the hotel room, I used Mapquest to calculate the distance from Branson to Mansfield. I nearly passed out.

“Mansfield is one hour from here!” I told Chad.

Our schedule was too tight to make it on that trip, but a few months later, as summer was winding down and we were trying to plan a last-minute trip somewhere, Chad said, “Let’s go up to the Ozarks and get you to Mansfield.” So 30 years after I found out about this place, I was finally going there.

Allow me to throw in some LIW history here. Laura and Almanzo tried farming on the South Dakota prairie for nine years after they married in 1885, but were only met with a series of catastrophes. They both contracted diptheria, and Almanzo suffered a stroke soon afterward that left him crippled in one leg. He was only 29 and had to walk with a cane for the rest of his life. They lost crops to the brutal Dakota weather. But worst of all, just a few days before the devastating fire, they lost a 12-day-old son.

So one day in 1894, the Wilders loaded everything into a buggy and set off to start over somewhere else. They had heard about fertile farmland in the Ozarks of Missouri. As they rolled into Mansfield, Laura said, “This is where we’ll stop.” So they did.

Laura and Almanzo had $100 from the sale of their Dakota farm. They used it to buy a hilly piece of land a mile from town. The land included a ravine with a rock-covered ridge, which gave Laura the inspiration for naming the farm. Financially, times were still hard for the little family. At one point, they had to move into town and rent a house until the farm got a little more stable. But eventually, and piece by piece, the Wilders were able to expand their farm and build a farmhouse out of natural materials found on the farm’s land. They lived there together until Almanzo’s death in 1949, and Laura continued living there until she died in 1957.

The house has been preserved as it was at the time of Laura’s death. It’s one mile from the town square, and I recognized the towering rock chimney from the highway as soon as it came into our view. We stepped into the museum behind the farmhouse. I was so happy to be there, I thought I was going to melt to the floor in a blubbering mess. But I kept it together and started looking around. This small building (they are raising funds for a new, larger one) is crammed full of priceless artifacts from the Ingalls and Wilder families. It's a Laura fan's Smithsonian. Pa’s fiddle is the first thing you’ll notice. Pictures of the family everywhere. Clothes Laura wore. The handwritten invitation to Ben Wordsworth’s party she describes in Little Town on the Prairie. The namecards she picked out at the print shop in the same book. The slates she and her sister Mary bought on the way to school in On the Banks of Plum Creek. And the oval glass plate, which embodies the values that Laura and Alamanzo lived out through their 60-year marriage: Horrible times are survivable, and survivable with courage and grace.

One wall contains—under glass—some of Garth Williams’ original sketches. As much as I love Laura’s writings of her life, I don’t know that the Little House books would be what they are without Garth Williams’ illustrations. Using only pencil, charcoal and ink, Williams illustrated the series with rich drawings of vivid characters and scenes. His rendering of the house fire in The First Four Years still chokes me up. Williams was commissioned to illustrate the new editions of the books in 1947, and he traveled to each of the places the Ingalls family lived to recreate the most accurate likenesses possible of their lives as pioneers. When I read the books, I don’t picture Michael Landon or Melissa Gilbert. I picture the characters as Garth Williams drew them.

Another wall displays copies of the Little House books in different languages. It’s still amazing to me that this aging farm wife sat down to write stories of her childhood in her rural Missouri farmhouse and she became an internationally-known author who was loved the world over. These books, printed in Japanese and Arabic and German and probably 30 other languages, are a testament to Laura's global acclaim as an author.

Most of one side of the museum is devoted to Rose Wilder Lane, Laura and Almanzo’s daughter who was a legend in her own right. She was a writer, an activist, novelist and political theorist. She, along with Ayn Rand and others, helped found the American libertarian movement. A world traveler for much of her life, Rose was the oldest American Vietnam War correspondent.

After taking in the museum, we toured the house. Having memorized the floor plan of the house as a kid (when you’re this obsessed with someone who’s still living, you are a stalker. Since Laura’s dead, I’m simply a “buff.”), I knew exactly what each room was going to look like. Her kitchen is painted yellow, which inspired me to paint my kitchen yellow in our Baytown house. Her Blue Willow dishes were set out on the dining room table. And as we came out of her bedroom into her office, I knew exactly what I was going to see to my right. The simple wooden desk where she wrote half of the Little House series. She used pencils and five-cent tablets of writing paper and, never one to waste anything, wrote from edge to edge on both sides of the paper. Some of these original manuscripts are under glass in the museum.

Then we toured the “rock house,” which Rose had built for her parents in the ’30s when she decided her parents should have a modern house. Laura and Almanzo lived there for eight years (that’s where she wrote the other half of the series) but, unimpressed with modernity, moved back to the farmhouse and never left again.

On the way out of town, we stopped by the Mansfield cemetery. Laura died more than 50 years ago, but people are still leaving flowers and letters on her grave, like this letter we found there from a couple in Arizona. It's reassuring to know I'm not the only Laura-stalker out there.

I’ve always regretted that Laura and I were not alive at the same time and I never had a chance to meet her. But now I’ve been to her house. I know what her kitchen looks like when the sun streams through the windows on an August afternoon. I know what it feels like to step out onto her front porch on a hot summer day, the way she did to collect fan letters out of her mailbox. I’ve stood on the edge of the ravine and looked across to the rocky ridge, which Laura must have done thousands of times.

So in a way, I think I finally got to meet her.

Laura Ingalls Wilder in the ravine at Rocky Ridge Farm in 1900 at the age of 33. The dress is on display at the museum.

Jenna is 6!

2010-08-26T04:39:00.000-07:00

Our Baytown friends will remember that Jenna was not easy to come by. After losing three pregnancies and then struggling through the first several months of my pregnancy with Jenna (I get notoriously ill when I'm pregnant), a friend at church told me "Girl, when this baby gets here we are going to throw a PARTY." And they did. I had a fabulous baby shower and we still have so many blankets and pillows that our sweet friends there made with their own hands. It usually takes two people to have a baby, but, with a lot of prayer, our entire church family in Baytown got Jenna here. That's something I'll always remember about our time in Baytown.

Here's something I wrote a while back about Jenna (with her age updated):

"Blue eyes, my baby's got blue eyes. Like a deep blue sea on a blue, blue day." -- "Blue Eyes" by Elton John

Jenna was born six years ago today. Eight-and-a-half pounds. A golden sheen to her head that promised blond hair. Blue eyes.

At least I tell people they're blue. There really isn't a word to describe the color of her eyes.

But I'll try.

I learned to scuba dive in 1993. And I learned something about it right off: scuba diving is a big hassle. So much heavy, awkward equipment is required for breathing underwater. The tank by itself weighs 80 pounds. Then there's the weight belt, which must be adjusted just right so you won't float to the surface or be stuck on the ocean floor. Then you have the BCD, the fins, snorkel, mask and wetsuit. Once you get all that stuff on, it's hard enough to remain upright, let alone walk normally.

But once below the surface, the oppressive gear becomes your key to the underwater world. You swim around weightless, holding out fingers as curious fish swim up to them. Your teeth clench around the regulator that, on land moments before, was uncomfortable in your mouth. Now it's the only way to get air into your lungs. The sound of your constant inhaling and exhaling is a reminder that you're doing something humans weren't made to do. You are living, thriving, underwater. The hassle, for the moment, is forgotten.

It took us a long time to get Jenna into this world. I got pregnant, then miscarried. Pregnant again, then blood one morning. Pregnant a third time, but then more blood. We started thinking adoption. Then I got pregnant again, and this one held. I got very sick, was placed on home healthcare, and then developed gestational diabetes. Then, one Thursday morning, the previous year-and-a-half faded as I finally looked into her eyes.

And I remembered the circle of light.

Thirty feet under the ocean's surface, it's easy to become disoriented -- to the point that you can lose track of which way you're supposed to go to reach air. As a scuba diver, you learn to look for light. Light means surface. When you find the sunlight piercing the blue mass in which you are submerged, you slowly swim toward it, exhaling all the way. Surrounded by varying shades of watery blue, the circle of light expands and seems to pull you toward itself. You keep swimming up, up, up -- until you think your lungs can't expel any more air. But the bubbles keep coming from your mouth, and you keep moving toward the light.

Then you reach it and you burst through it into air, light, life.

That's what color Jenna's eyes are.

17th anniversary

2010-08-14T07:42:00.000-07:00

I met Chad in the Bean at ACU one day at lunch. I was with a big group of people and we were sitting at a large round table. Chad was the only person I didn’t know and we ended up sitting right next to each other. He was from Alaska, he said.

Chad was a freshman, and I was a sophomore. He was kinda cute – all my friends said so – and he seemed like a nice guy. We tried to date for a couple of weeks, but it just wasn’t working for me. I was trying to take a break from dating. I had made several bad dating choices in a row and had decided to give that part of my life up to God, since I had made such a mess of it. I promised God I wouldn’t date anyone seriously for a year.

Plus Chad got on my nerves.

He was so nice. Really, he was. But he seemed to be trying too hard. I started avoiding him.

A school year went by. Then a summer. Then school started again. And there was Chad. Would I like to go out Friday night? Sure. OK.

I remember sitting on the couch with my roommate. “Aren’t you going to get ready for your date?” she asked. “It’s just Chad,” I replied.

Then we went out. We had a great time. I liked being with him. He smelled good. So we kept going out. We kissed. His arms felt good around me. They felt right around me.

“You know what I was thinking?” I said one night after we had been dating about three weeks. “I was thinking that I don’t want to date anyone but you.”

And that was it. We were a couple.

That year was fun. I was dating Chad, living with two of my best friends and working as a reporter for the campus newspaper. He came home with me for Thanksgiving and spring break. We had fun together. We kissed. A lot.

We had to be apart for that summer, while he went home to Alaska to work. In August, I flew up there to see the sights and hang out with Chad and his family for a couple of weeks. Chad, his sister Gina and I were all supposed to come back to Abilene together.

While I was in Alaska, Chad’s sister Gina was in a car accident. I was standing in Chad’s parents’ kitchen when they got the call from the highway department. She was in ICU for two days before she died. What a nightmare. My head still gets swimmy when I think about those awful days. Did all of it really happen? Of course it did, but it’s still so hard to fathom. She was 19. She and Chad were only 11 months apart.

We went back to school without Gina – shattered over the loss that was too great for Chad to even talk to me about. It’s hard for me to write about this time because I don’t remember much. My brain has shut it out. I do remember crying in the shower every morning for months.

Then something happy happened. We got engaged. It was a relief to have a wedding to focus on instead of our grief. We got married on Aug. 14, 1993.

That was 17 years ago. A major career change, two kids and three miscarriages later, we’re still here. Chad is my best friend – the “other side of me,” as Michael W. Smith sings. He knows what I need when I’m too proud to voice it. One morning, when Chad had gotten up early and our oldest daughter Julia had climbed into bed with me, I heard Chad in the next room, having his morning quiet time and whispering an earnest prayer. For me. How loved and protected I felt, hearing a great man of God lift me up in prayer.

Marriage isn’t always fun, they tell you in premarital counseling. And it’s true. One of the worst moments of my life was when Chad was holding me in our bathroom seven years ago. I was losing our second child and it hurt – physically, emotionally – it was excruciating. But Chad was there, his arms still so strong around me.

The good times in a marriage are fun and make good memories. But the hard times are the ones that really solidify your relationship. That’s when those vows really mean something. It’s when you have the chance to truly cherish each other.

I’ve been asked when I knew I was in love with Chad. I’m not really sure. Love changes and deepens over the years until you’re not sure what “love” really meant when you said it early in your relationship. But I do have one memory. We weren’t really dating yet, but I was aware that Chad was not getting on my nerves anymore. I had to help with newspaper distribution after Chapel one day, but I rushed back into the coliseum because I wanted to find Chad. He wasn’t there. I was so disappointed that it surprised me. I stood there, in the emptying coliseum, suddenly shockingly aware that if I kept running away from this guy, I could lose him forever. That’s when I knew that I always wanted him to be there.

And he is. And we still kiss. A lot.

This is the clique that never ends...

2010-07-19T21:07:00.000-07:00

Two Aprils ago, Chad and I attend the SHIFT youth ministry conference at Willow Creek in Chicago. I went to a session about female adolescent social culture. The presenter’s info came from Queen Bees and Wannabees: Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends, and the New Realities of Girl World by Rosalind Wiseman. The movie Mean Girls was based, in part, on this book.

I haven’t read Queen Bees. I got a lot of info from it at the conference. Besides, when it comes to female adolescent social culture, I lived it. I knew this book before it was even written. I knew in 5th grade, when my best friend suddenly turned on me. And I knew in 7th grade, when I moved to a school where the girls in my grade were entangled in a rigid social structure. I knew who the queen bee was, I knew who her sidekicks were, and I knew to stay out of everyone’s way.

An old-school book that vividly illustrates the ugly inner workings of a girl clique is Judy Blume’s Blubber. I remember this book surprising people when it came out. Can it really be that bad, they asked? Oh, yes, it can.

And now I have an 11-year-old daughter who will be starting middle school in a few weeks. She’s already been exposed to some mean-girl activity. I need to read Queen Bees with her. And Blubber, for that matter. I remember walking into the whole clique thing completely unprepared, and I think arming our girls with as much information as possible will help them navigate the approaching years a little more successfully than I did. Knowledge is power.

But at some point, I’ll need to teach my girls something else. The whole girl clique thing? It doesn’t end. Girl cliques become mom cliques.

Queen Bees author Rosalind Wiseman was asked to address this topic, so she applied her book’s philosophies to adult women. You can read it here.

This article was a real eye-opener for me because I just want so badly to believe this stuff isn’t real. Surely no one wants to live in perpetual junior high. Surely no adult excludes or looks with disdain upon someone for living in the “wrong” neighborhood or for being a single parent. Surely, surely not.

But it’s all around us, I’m afraid. And I spend so much time pretending it doesn’t exist that when I do actually witness mom-clique behavior, I’m stunned by it. I was with a group of moms a while back (let me clarify – not moms from my church) when someone mentioned a divorce-in-progress of someone they all knew. One woman snapped to attention and enthusiastically pleaded for more details with an eager grin on her face.

Just like she was 13. Except she was in her 30s.

See why I find this so unsettling?

Something stood out to me when I read Blubber as a kid and I still believe it is true. Cliques are rooted in insecurity. It’s obvious in adolescent cliques, and even more obvious, at least to me, in adult cliques.

Wiseman’s description of mom cliques places them in school settings, but these exclusive clusters are everywhere – even in our churches. I heard one woman remark the other day (again, not from my church…she was speaking generally) that mom cliques are the “hardest groups at church to break into.”

Honestly, why does it have to be this way? And am I a freak for just wanting to be friends with everybody? (See “Floaters” in Wiseman’s descriptions.)

Clique members in Christian circles may justify their own clique-ish behavior by pointing out that Jesus formed his own clique. Which he did, essentially. He handpicked 12 guys, kept them close and no one else was invited to be part of this group. (Until the addition of Matthias, after the “Judas incident.”)

But let’s think about the reasoning behind the creation of this group. Jesus had a short time to establish his ministry here on earth. He needed that close group to be mentored by him so they could continue his ministry after he was gone. We should be careful when equating our own social needs (and whatever insecurities are wrapped up in those needs) with the mission of the Son of God to save mankind.

I mean, please.

Jesus’ handpicked group of friends served a purpose. By loosely summing up Christ’s teachings, I can conclude that the rest of us are called to:

1) Get over ourselves,
2) Love others, and
3) Treat others the way we would like to be treated.

Simple concepts, don’t you think?

Elevations

2010-07-15T10:39:00.000-07:00

A sweet friend sent me a check and said "Buy something fun." So I went straight to Target and bought these ridiculously impractical shoes:

I love them. And I'm wearing them soon. As soon as I figure out how to walk in them.

Doppelganger

2010-06-14T21:46:00.000-07:00

I’ve been on the campus of Abilene Christian University this week. I went to college here, and I always love coming back.

ACU has changed a lot since I was in school here. The short, skinny trees from back then have grown up and filled out and now shade the campus. Evidence of technological updates is everywhere. But emblems of the school’s history remain. Most of the original buildings are still here, including McKinzie Dorm. Built in 1929, the building was old long before I got here. It was already aging when my aunt lived there in the late ’40s. But there it still stands, grand and stately in the face of the progress that surrounds it.

The Bean is still here, too. ACU’s cafeteria has undergone a number of facelifts over the decades and looks nothing like the Bean I knew as a student. Today, as Jenna and I were eating lunch, I pointed over to the west side of the cafeteria.

“Daddy and I met for the first time right over there,” I told her.

She seemed somewhat impressed. This is the girl who thanks God regularly for “Mommy and Daddy getting married” in her prayers.

I can’t come here and not reminisce about choices I made—and events that came about as a result—while I was a student here. After first meeting in the Bean one day at lunch, Chad and I dated one fall until I ended it after a couple of weeks. He was the right guy at the wrong time. Which made him the wrong guy at that particular point in time. I avoided him for several months. I wanted him to forget me and move on to someone else. One Friday morning that spring, I got up early and headed to the Bean with my stack of newspapers. I had an 8 a.m. news reporting class, and we were quizzed every Friday on that week’s current events. I liked to leave the dorm early on those days to walk under the canopy of a usually-stunning sunrise (one good thing West Texas scenery has going for it) and study the week’s newspapers in the Bean. On this Friday, I had made it to Wednesday’s headlines when I heard a voice. “Is it OK if I sit here?”

It was Chad. The freshman who had tried to date me a few months back. I gave my consent and he set his tray on my table. But I was annoyed. Then he showed up the next Friday. He had strength training class at 8. He had to carb load, he said. I was still annoyed. I have an important class to study for because I’m majoring in something important—mass communication, doesn’t that sound important? I’m going to have an important job and an important future and I have no intention of including him in it, I thought. Can he not see this?

Seemingly by coincidence, Chad and I kept meeting up every Friday morning. My irritation began to fade. If I wanted to avoid him that badly, I would have avoided the Bean on those mornings. But I found myself stepping out of the dorm into the brilliant Friday sunrise, wondering if he would be there.

Now I picture the two of us sitting at that table in the Bean on a Friday morning during the spring of ’91. I freeze the scene in my mind and consider all that hung in the balance during those moments. My future, his future, and the very existence of our children sat suspended in the air around us, breathless and waiting. Waiting to become reality or vanish into nothingness.

I want to lean over to the ear of that other me. I want to tell her that he’s the one. He’s the one she’ll spend that cozy beach honeymoon with. He’s the one who will be her constant. He's the one who will wrap their daughters in the kind of love only a godly father can give. He’s the one who will hold her in strong, comforting arms as she loses yet another pregnancy. He’s the one.

Today in the Bean, with Jenna staring at me quizzically, I whispered, “You chose well.”

Where I'm From

2010-05-20T12:30:00.000-07:00

The June issue of Texas Monthly features pieces by Norah Jones, Sissy Spacek and other notables about their Texas roots. I got inspired to write my own "Where I'm From," and here it is:

Beaumont, Texas, was my home long before I lived there. I was born in New Mexico and, with the exception of the 2.5 years we lived in West Texas, I lived in the Land of Enchantment until I was almost 12. But we always came back to Beaumont. My dad had grown up there and my grandparents still lived in the house on Concord Road they had bought in the early 1950s. We moved around southeast New Mexico a lot, but Beaumont was my constant. In New Mexico, I had a new house, school and town every few years. But down in Beaumont, humidity always draped the town like a too-heavy blanket you could never take off. My grandmother’s driveway was always covered with wet magnolia leaves. The trees always sat as still as a painting on breezeless summer nights. When things in your life are ever-changing, it’s nice to retreat to a place that never does. That’s what Beaumont was for me.

By the early ’80s, we had moved to Lovington, New Mexico, after living in the hilly West Texas town (yes, there is such a thing) of Big Spring. I loved Big Spring and hated leaving it. This had been the roughest move of my childhood. Languishing in New Mexico, I came to associate not just Big Spring, but the entire state of Texas, with being happy. If we could just get back to Texas, I thought, life would be good again.

Then it came. A job offer for my dad in Beaumont. We weren’t just moving across the state line. We were moving to a town so far into Texas, it was almost out the other side. We bought a house just down the street from my grandmother’s leaf-strewn driveway a few weeks before Hurricane Alicia gave us a proper Gulf Coast welcome.

But the storm was minor compared to transitioning into my new setting. Moving from a rural New Mexico town to a mid-sized Texas town wasn’t without its bumps. I was enrolled in a private school where it seemed to me that everyone’s dads were doctors or lawyers. The fashion trends that were cool at my new school were unheard of back in Lovington. My social adjustment was nothing less than brutal.

But it was Beaumont. I may have been the “new kid,” but I had grown up here. I had waded in the pool at Combest Park as a toddler. I had attended family dinners at Don’s Seafood, one of Beaumont’s most celebrated restaurants. My last name was on the sign outside my grandfather’s accounting firm on 11th Street. My family knew or was related to most of the Church of Christ folks in town. I may have had trouble fitting in at school, but as far as I was concerned, I was home.

I took summer classes for kids at Lamar University. I went to rock concerts at the Montagne Center. I skated in circles for hours at Rainbow Roller Rink. I worked for a solid hour on my make-up and hair just to hang out at Parkdale Mall and hope to see (and be seen by) someone interesting.

Beaumont was a great setting for coming of age in the late ’80s. Dowlen Road was the place to be on the weekends, and teenage drama unfolded up and down that road every Friday and Saturday night. My high school sweetheart and I would make out at Rogers Park, break up a couple of blocks down at Whataburger, and make up in the grocery store parking lot across the street. Sometimes all on the same night. I can’t listen to Billy Idol’s version of “Mony, Mony” without smelling the combination of exhaust and cigarette smoke that hung in the muggy air on those Dowlen nights.

By the time graduation was near, I was making plans to go far away to college in a dry, wind-blown, West Texas town. My boyfriend was staying.

“There’s something about this town,” he said. “I just can’t leave it.”

I knew what he meant. But we broke up and I left, anyway. And I learned something. Hometowns have a way of never forgiving those who leave them. My unchanging Beaumont changed. Over the next several years, my high school closed down and businesses sprang up where square miles of solid trees had been. My widowed grandmother sold her house of 40 years and moved into a retirement center on the interstate. During one trip back, I realized something with a shock: Beaumont had forgotten me.

At one time, both sets of grandparents, uncles, an aunt and a number of extended family had lived in Beaumont and been members at the same church. Now I just have one aunt and uncle living there. After they’re gone, I doubt I’ll ever go back.

Sometimes I think of former classmates who have stayed in Beaumont and are raising their kids in the same town we grew up in. These thoughts bring a tinge of jealousy, which gives way to peaceful acceptance. Beaumont was home to me the way it was back then; not the way it is now. In my memory, damp magnolia leaves still carpet my grandmother’s driveway. Dowlen Road is alive with headlights, booming stereo systems and teenage drama on a Saturday night. The Gaylynn Theater is packed for the opening night of “Top Gun” and I’m there in all my 14-year-old awkwardness, giggling and swooning over Tom Cruise with a pack of my friends. We’re in a line that wraps around the side of the building, too caught up in our youth to notice the stifling humidity or our looming adulthood. We were having fun being young, and Beaumont was our home.

That’s where I’m from.

Update on us

2010-05-08T06:09:00.000-07:00

What’s being going on with us:

- I’m starting grad school in the fall. I’ll be working on a master’s in professional and technical writing at University of Arkansas at Little Rock. I’m equal parts excited and scared. My friend Tracy is currently working on her bachelor’s at the same school. I tried to talk her into a pledging a sorority with me. No luck.

- Julia is about to graduate from elementary school. She starts middle school in the fall.

- Jenna is about to graduate from preschool. She starts kindergarten in the fall.

- Chad isn’t doing anything. I mean formal-education-wise. He spent 1990—2000 getting as smart as possible and there probably isn’t much left for him to learn.

- Meanwhile, our dog is not so smart. He got into something last week (while Chad was out of town, of course) that caused him to start foaming at the mouth right when I was getting the girls to bed. I thought only rabid dogs did that, and I thought I was going to have to go all Atticus Finch on the poor guy. My dad came over to stay with Jenna while Julia and I rushed Ranger to doggie ER way across town in the middle of the night. The vet gave him a shot and $210 later, he was fine.

- This is the first weekend we’ve had to ourselves since… we’re not sure. Possibly some time in February. We are celebrating by getting some things done to the house that we’ve been wanting to do for a while. Like getting our pretty new bathroom faucets out of their boxes in the garage and actually installing them.

- We are also planning a transformation for Julia’s room. It’s rather elementary-school-looking right now, and she really wants a 6th-grader room. I just might post before, during and after pics.

- Chad and I have just over a year to go before we turn 40. Instead of jumping off a bridge to prevent this from happening, I decided we should have a big old honkin' party. It will be some time between August and November of 2011 and it's coming to a church gym near you. Great music and lots of Church of Christ people attempting to dance. It will be great fun.

Convictions

2010-04-07T10:25:00.000-07:00

Recently I ran across the Bible I had when I was a kid. It’s dated Christmas of ’81. I was ten years old.

I used this Bible in junior high and high school until I got a new one when I graduated. Let’s take a look.

Here’s my name, written all swirly and with a very 1980s paint pen.

My parents’ message to me in my dad’s handwriting.

For some reason, I highlighted several parts of Psalms 116, 117 and 118.

Now here’s what I think is one of the most interesting finds in this Bible. Inside the back cover are my handwritten words: “Why should Church only use vocal msc. and not ist?” Meaning, “Why should the church only use vocal music and not instrumental music?” Then a list of verses.

I remember this. I was in a Bible class in 7th grade – a class taught by a couple who was teaching us to defend our faith. Or “How to prove to your friends that they are going to hell because they don’t go to your church.” Great way to be popular in junior high.

Quick re-cap for those unfamiliar with Church of Christ traditions. Traditional Churches of Christ don’t use instrumental music in worship. There is no mention of instruments being used in worship in the New Testament, so they believe it is not authorized by scripture. Yes, David wrote the Psalms on harps and lyres and whatever else he could find out there in the sheep pasture, but the Psalms are in the Old Testament, so it doesn’t count. And yes, trumpets and harps are mentioned throughout Revelation, which IS in the New Testament, but not in the context of how worship was to be done in the early church. So it doesn't count, either.

The flagship verse for proof-texting this point is Ephesians 5:19. It’s at the top of the list my list of verses, and I even underscored it in the text – as I’m sure all good CoC kids did.

I think this notation in the back of my Bible is funny because I no longer believe using instruments will keep anyone out of heaven and I haven’t believed that in a long time. I started questioning it in high school and as I grew and studied over the years, I finally let it go completely. Of course I loved the a capella music I had grown up with, and I still do. It’s an important part of my heritage and the church culture I grew up in. But it has nothing to do with my salvation.

Since 2006, we’ve been part of a church that uses instrumental music in worship. Probably the most difficult adjustment to that has been the fact that my kids can no longer run around on the stage after church. Too much expensive equipment up there. By contrast, our old church just had a podium and a couple of chairs up there. Much more kid-friendly.

To be honest, it’s been so nice to let it go. Not a capella worship per se, but the debate over it. My kids aren’t being taught in Bible class a concept that, despite that list of verses I fervently wrote down in 7th grade, is not backed up by scripture. Not that our new church is perfect. But my kids can scratch the music debate off the list of things that could get in the way of truly defining their faith.

As Forrest Gump says, “It’s one less thing.”

I still love those old hymns. One song I know I want at my funeral is "Softly and Tenderly" sung a capella. That music is a big part of who I am. It's just not part of where I'll be in the afterlife.

Deana's Greatest Hits, Part II

2010-03-30T20:23:00.000-07:00

Until I have time to write something new, you get to read my old newspaper columns. This one stars Jenna, The Amazing Awake Baby.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Don’t Worry, They’ll Stop Crying One Day
By Deana Nall
Baytown Sun

Published January 05, 2005

“So how is the baby sleeping now?” As the parents of a 4-month-old, we get asked this question a lot.

We obsess over this because households containing little ones tend to be a little chaotic. In fact, the word “chaos” comes from the Latin word meaning “I have small children.” So we pray for moments of calm and order, and it would be nice if they happened in the middle of the night. Babies, unfortunately, are born without the knowledge that nighttime is when one is supposed to sleep. So we parents long for our infants to reach that nirvana that is known as “Sleeping Through the Night.”

Generally you’ll get one of two responses when you share the fact that sleeping at night is not a priority for your baby. One is “Oh, our little angel was sleeping through the night when she was just a week old. We sure got lucky!” The other one is “Our child is almost 19 and hasn’t slept through the night yet!”

Neither is very encouraging.

Our own sweet Jenna, who has ocean-blue eyes, pink cherub cheeks (on both ends) and a smile that completely melts our hearts, had us pulling out our hair for the first three months. Then it happened! She started sleeping seven or so hours in a row. We had made it! But I’m afraid she has regressed. We’re back to getting up with her at least once a night. Maybe she’s insecure. Maybe she just enjoys our company. I don’t know. I’m too tired to figure it out.

But I would like to offer what expertise I have gained in a handy guide I’ll call “Sleep and Your Infant” or “You Know It’s Bad When Both You and Your Baby Are Crying at 2 a.m.”

First, you could try learning to live without sleep. But be warned: You will start doing things like looking around the house for your child’s pacifier for 20 minutes before realizing it’s been in your hand the whole time. Not a good way to function.

So you may have to resort to something all parents dread. It’s called “Letting Them Cry it Out,” and it’s not for the faint of heart.

Here’s how it works: When your baby wakes up and starts crying, don’t do anything. The idea is to let her learn how to get back to sleep independently. Think happy thoughts. Try not to watch the clock. When it’s been so long that you think your child’s lungs are going to rupture, burst out of bed and run into her room. Discover that her diaper is quite toxic. Get her cleaned up, fed and back into bed. She will resume crying immediately.

Go back to bed, feeling awful that your child was crying for a legitimate reason and you forced her to lie in her own excrement for a ridiculous amount of time. Get used to being consumed by guilt. As a parent, it’s your lot in life.

After a while, your baby will get quiet. She has either fallen asleep or climbed out the window to go live with another family. I like to check to make sure it isn’t the latter. Now you can go to sleep. And hang in there — that’s the most important thing. As my mother always says (and this also applies if your child should ever swallow something weird like a quarter or some cat food), “This, too, shall pass.”

Ghost of Blogs Past

2010-03-12T20:19:00.000-08:00

I was reading through some old blog posts from five years ago and found the one that got my husband in trouble with the elders of the church we were working with at the time. Turns out if you play Bunco for money, you don't admit it in the local newspaper. Who knew?

Outta my way, it’s Bunco time
By Deana Nall
Baytown Sun

Published May 11, 2005

Usually, I’m a loving wife and mother whose schedule revolves around taking care of my family. Unless it’s the second Tuesday of the month, then my husband and kids can eat Spaghetti-Os off the kitchen floor for all I care. I’m playing Bunco.

A few people — all men — have asked me, “What is Bunco?”

Well, I’ll tell you. Bunco looks like a dice game. We try to roll sixes, and when six comes up on all three dice, that’s a Bunco. You have to watch it, though, because other players can grab your Bunco away. This can get ugly. If your wife comes home with a little skin missing, this is why.

But Bunco isn’t about the dice. In reality, Bunco is the heart of Baytown’s mommy culture. It’s a chance for moms to do three things we don’t get to do very often: 1) Leave the house with the family still in it, 2) eat food we didn’t cook, and 3) talk at length with other grown-ups.

I’m a seasoned Bunco-ite, having played with the same group for the entire five years we’ve lived here. Before that, I played for a couple of years in another town. In that Bunco group, we played for prizes.

Here in Baytown, we cut to the chase. We play for money.

I was a bit hesitant to play for money at first. I’m a minister’s wife who comes from a long line of ministers’ wives. In fact, I can’t seem to get away from ministers. I wouldn’t be surprised if my cat got ordained one of these days.

Anyway, “playing for money” is one of those things some people think women married to ministers shouldn’t do, like smoking, getting tattoos, or using rough language, such as “That bites,” or “I voted for Kerry!” My views changed, though, the first time I played Bunco. I won 20 bucks. That would clear up anyone’s moral dilemma. I’ve never looked back.

Another great thing about Bunco is that it brings together women from different walks of life. My group has Catholics, Baptists, teachers, a soccer coach, a nurse, stay-at-home moms and work-from-home moms. We don’t see much of each other outside of Bunco, and it’s fun to meet up every month to find out what’s been going on in everyone’s lives. We’ve had births, new houses, promotions and college graduations.

We’ve endured a lot together, too. Just in the last year, our group has gone through a divorce and the serious illness of a child. And last July, we lost one of our members to cancer. We aren’t just about rolling dice. We’re about helping each other get through the times in which real life can become a little too real.

Oh — and we’re also about food. We all take turns cooking for Bunco night. You know how some women politely turn down dessert, saying, “Oh, none for me, thanks.” You won’t find those women at Bunco. It’s our night off and, by golly, we’re going to live it up. Cheesecake? Chocolate mousse? Twinkies? We don’t care. Just bring it on.

Well, I hope I’ve helped clear up some of the mystery of Bunco. The best piece of advice I can give a Bunco husband is that on Bunco night, stay out of your wife’s way. She’s got somewhere to go.

Home

2010-03-02T19:50:00.001-08:00

We've been in our house three years now. We still love it. Here are some recent pics:

Our bedroom. The table at the end of the bed is the first piece of furniture my grandparents bought when they got married in 1928. (The newspapers under the table are clips I'm getting together to apply to a master's program in writing at UALR.)

Our bathroom. I love our bathroom because it's yellow. After my string of miscarriages in 2003, a friend helped me paint our bathroom in Baytown bright yellow. It's such a bright color that helped lift me out of my sadness that year. When we first looked at this house and I saw the yellow bathroom, it pretty much sealed the deal for me.

Bathtub in said yellow bathroom. Want to know how many episodes of Gilmore Girls I've watched in this tub? Too many to count.

If there's one thing I'm not crazy about in the house, it's the color on our bedroom wall. It's a little dark for my optimistic nature. We might change it someday, but I do kind of like the way our old furniture looks against it. This is my grandmother's old dresser.

My other grandmother's old rocking chair.

Where I work, blog and Facebook. On the top shelf is my college diploma on the left, the award I won from the Texas Associated Press on the right, and my dad's old Brownie Hawkeye camera in the middle. (I guess you never notice all the fingerprints on your laptop screen until you take a picture of it.)

So that's part of our house. It isn't perfect. It's almost too little, and I'm sure it will feel more so as the girls get older. It has popcorn ceilings and probably builder-grade everything. And we don't care one bit. We feel so blessed to have a house, jobs and everything we need to take care of our girls. I really can't imagine living anywhere else.

One more thing: I love the flowerbeds. Even though my tulips were foolish enough to pop out of the ground right before our snow/ice days. We'll see what happens in a few weeks. I'm still holding out hope.

The "Eat" part of Eat, Pray, Love

2010-02-11T20:10:00.000-08:00

I just finished reading Eat, Pray, Love. It took me more than a month to read it; not sure why. If you’re reading it and you find yourself turned off by the author’s self-centeredness or other unbecoming qualities, hang in there. I kept reaching the point at which I was repulsed by this woman’s life choices, and then I would turn the page and connect with her in such a way that you would have thought we were soul sisters.

Anyway, let’s talk about the “Eat” part. This part of the book chronicles Elizabeth Gilbert’s four-month stay in Italy. Really, it chronicles everything she ATE during her four-month stay in Italy. Part of her quest in “finding herself” (after a divorce, then another horribly failed relationship and the resulting depression) was to re-learn how to experience pleasure, so she chose to eat her way through Italy while learning the native language. I read this part of the book while on my Florida trip, and I craved pasta the whole time I was there. (We did go out for pizza one night, which helped.)

I love food. I’m sure most people do. There are things I have eaten that I will never forget. Crawfish etouffee in New Orleans’ French Quarter in 1991. Ribs in a watermelon glaze at Houston’s Hard Rock Café in the late ’80s. The bacon-wrapped scallops Chad and I ate on the first night of our honeymoon on South Padre Island in 1993. Halibut (that I caught myself off Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula) deep-fried and dipped in ketchup. The ginormous Panamanian shrimp stuffed with crab that I ate at a fabulous Cuban restaurant in Sarasota, Fla., just a few weeks ago.

(My friend Judy ordered the same thing.)

And then there’s the bread a woman at my church used to make when I was a kid in Lovington, N.M. That bread may still be the best stuff I have ever put in my mouth.

I love food.

I ran across a Web site a few years ago run by some religious nut who proclaimed the love of food as the downfall of man. To glorify it as our culture does is sinful, he said. God designed food to sustain us and we have made it into an idol. Gourmet cooking is sinful. Food Network is sinful. (He mentioned the evils of Food Network a number of times.) To be honest, the more I read it, the more it made sense. We Americans make a huge, unhealthy deal out of food and it shows in our lifestyles, health statistics and obesity rates.

But still. Food.

Does God really give us food only to sustain us? Because I think food can mean more than physical sustenance. It can be a spiritual experience, as I blogged a few months ago.

In the February issue of Real Simple magazine, Laurie Sandell writes about coming to peaceful terms with food after growing up with a bad cook for a mother and never having become a good cook herself. Once, in the middle of a therapy session, Sandell’s therapist asked her what was in her refrigerator.

“Food is love,” the therapist said. “You have to fill up your refrigerator if you want your life to change.”

Interesting. It made me wonder what was in my fridge. So I took a picture.

A few observations:

- I have leftovers. I have more food than I can eat. The majority of people in the world today do not. And I have too much. It’s a reminder of the fact that I am ridiculously blessed.

- I have lemon curd. A few months ago, I didn’t know the stuff existed. Then my friend Adrienne taught me how to make crepes. Friends are a blessing, and friends who teach you how to cook something new are even more of a blessing. Lemon curd tastes like the inside of lemon pie, which makes the crepes just about perfect.

- I have apple juice. I don’t drink it, though. I don’t drink juice of any kind. It messes with my blood sugar. But Jenna drinks it. I’m blessed to share my life, house and fridge with an energetic, apple-juice guzzling 5-year-old.

- The can of whipped cream is a Julia thing. She likes to squirt it straight into her mouth. I do not do this. Again, blood sugar. But it’s a reminder of the funny, original and creative child my 11-year-old is turning out to be.

- I have salmon. I cooked it the other night in a brown sugar/Dijon mustard glaze. I grew up thinking I did not like seafood, and I would have never learned to love and appreciate it had I not married an Alaskan. One great thing about getting married is that you not only bring a person permanently into your life, they bring parts of their world with them. I’m a southeast Texas girl, but Alaska is a big part of my life because of Chad. And that’s really cool. And yummy.

Sandell’s therapist encouraged her to fill up her fridge, even though she lived alone. She filled her fridge and felt compelled to actually do something with all the food. So she signed up for cooking classes. Now she has dinner parties and cooks for friends.

“It’s empowering to feel as if I am able to nourish others – and myself,” she writes. “I’ve discovered through cooking that I can show profound caring and, yes, love in a way that pizza delivery – even from a really good brick oven place – just cannot match.”

I think having food compels us to share it with others…to invite people into our homes and have them eat with us. This can enrich our lives and grow our experiences. Which can make us more complete. To me, this is what Sandell’s shrink was getting at.

Back to the “Eat” part of Eat, Pray, Love. Not surprisingly, Elizabeth Gilbert gained 23 pounds in Italy. To her, this was a good thing. And even though food led her to new people in her life (and vice-versa), the relationship most significantly impacted by her Italian food adventure was with herself.

“I came to Italy pinched and thin. I did not know yet what I deserved. I still maybe don’t fully know what I deserve. But I do know that I have collected myself of late – through the enjoyment of harmless pleasures – into somebody much more intact. The easiest, most fundamentally human way to say it is that I have put on weight. I exist now more than I did four months ago. I will leave Italy noticeably bigger than when I arrived here. And I will leave with the hope that the expansion of one person -- the magnification of one life – is indeed an act of worth in this world. Even if that life, just this one time, happens to be nobody’s but my own.”

2010-02-07T20:02:00.000-08:00

I saw this in Hastings tonight while Julia was picking out a CD. The book of Genesis in comic book format. It could be the freakiest thing I've seen in print in a long time. No details left out. There's even a warning for young readers. With good reason. Let's just say there are a lot of boobs in Genesis, and I don't mean idiots. Whatever happened to Adam and Eve with strategically-placed animals and trees?

Home

2010-01-24T18:48:00.000-08:00

Florida was lovely. Many stories to tell. Some of which will never be told. In the meantime, check out the blog of my new friend Karen.

Perfect Parenting

2010-01-21T10:54:00.000-08:00

I read this article in Christianity Today a couple of weeks ago and I’ve been wanting to blog about it. Now that I’m on vacation in Florida, I have time. So here it is.

After I was diagnosed with depression last February, my younger daughter started having night terrors and my older daughter’s math grade dropped to a B. Of course I thought it was all connected. I had never been depressed before. Jenna had never had night terrors before. Julia had never made a B in her life. It took a therapist putting her face close to mine and saying in a clear, louder-than-normal voice: “Sometimes 4-year-olds have night terrors. Sometimes 10-year-olds make Bs. There’s a good chance these things have nothing to do with what’s going on with you” before I could start to believe that my depression had not somehow seeped out of me and wound itself around my children’s inner psyches and had contaminated their sleeping patterns and school performance.

Jenna’s night terrors eventually went away and Julia’s B went back up to an A before the next report card came out. I had fallen into a trap most parents find themselves in: I had given myself too much power over my children.

What parent hasn’t done this? My heavens, when you bring a child in the world and you have 18 years to shape them from helpless, cooing blobs into fully functional adults, you’re going to feel a crushing weight of responsibility. The question is this: What do we as parents do with this crushing weight? Do we let it flatten us? Or do we forge control over it so we can parent on our own terms?

The Christianity Today article mentions Judith Warner’s book A Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety. I read this book when it came out several years ago. I didn’t agree with everything she said, but she did a thorough job of pointing out how obsessed American mothers are with their children. Warner became a mother herself while living in France before moving back to the U.S. Upon arriving in the U.S. as a mom, she could not believe how stressed out American mothers are – especially compared to the European mothers she had been around in France. American mothers homeschool. We put our children on special diets. We put them on waiting lists for prestigious preschools while they are still in the womb. We sign them up for loads of activities. We slather them with sunscreen and refuse to let them out of our sight. And there's a chance all of it is making us crazy.

While protecting our children is a good thing to do, and what we're supposed to do, isn’t it possible to go overboard? Will obsessing over our children’s welfare actually mold them into what we want them to be, or will they become whatever they want to be, regardless of our hand-wringing?

The answer to this question has been difficult for me to navigate because, believe me, I have been known to be a neurotic parent. When Julia was a baby, Chad had to drag me away from her crib on a number of occasions because I wanted to sit there and make sure she breathed all night. She’s 11 now and her sister is five, and I’ve formed a parenting philosophy that I’m still working on. But here’s the heart of it: I want my children to be who they are, and not necessarily who I want them to be. I don’t want them to vote the way I do if they grow up, examine the issues and come up with different convictions than the ones I have. Of course I want them to have deep spiritual connections with God and to accept Christ as their savior, but I believe they don’t have to stick to my own exact set of spiritual beliefs to do that. I want them to be happy and healthy and to make wise choices, but I know I can’t hand them those things. And to be honest, doesn’t growing up mean finding your own way, learning from mistakes and discovering who you are on your own terms? That’s what I want for my children.

It’s also personally important for me to have an identity apart from being a mother. And this one is tough. It’s something I sometimes have to fight for with every ounce of energy I have. But I see moms who completely lose themselves in their children and I just don’t think it’s healthy for anyone. I believe maintaining this identity gets easier once kids are out of the baby/preschool stages.

The reason I like the Christianity Today article and the Judith Warner book is because of their common message: Parents need to chill out. And as pointed out in the CT article, especially Christian parents. Of course, instill values your children. But know how and when to step away and let them grow. Read that last paragraph in the article. Its words hold more truth than I even want to admit.

Not that it’s easy. You know when I’ve had a vacation during which I got to spend five days with friends in an island condo? Never. But when the chance came up and it was time to leave this past Tuesday, I cried outside the airport because I had to leave my children. But I still got on the plane. I had to accept that they would be fine in a single-parent home for a week. I had to stop worrying that they might miss me. We should all step away from our kids once in a while. It’s good practice for later.

I still wander into worry over last year’s depression affecting my children. I still cringe when Jenna says, “Remember when you used to cry a lot?” But the truth is that I’m glad they saw me depressed. I’m glad I am unable to project an image of a perfect parent to my children. I hope it showed them that I am real. Because truthfully, that’s all I want my girls to be when they grow up. I just want them to be real.

Awful Library Books

2010-01-13T10:52:00.000-08:00

From my new favorite blog, Awful Library Books. Go "check it out!" Ha!

Under a Spell

2010-01-08T06:46:00.000-08:00

Julia has qualified for the school spelling bee, so we're spelling a lot around here. The event is Tuesday and she's nervous, but I think it will be a great experience for her. She's following a family tradition of spelling bee participants: My brother Brian was the runner-up in the city-wide bee in 4th grade and I got pretty far in the regional bee in 6th grade. (I came in 9th out of 33 after missing "consentaneous.")

Here's an interesting blog post on unhealthy social environments in churches. Youth ministers constantly fight cliqueishness among the teens, and the problem can seep into all age groups in a church. I especially thought the comments were insightful.

It Might Get Loud

2010-01-03T21:58:00.000-08:00

It happened in 9th grade. That’s when I got weird.

At least according to my friends. That’s the year I quit listening to the ’80s pop that was saturating the airwaves at the time and set my dial to the local classic rock station (KWIC 108 The Rock in Beaumont, TX). I got into Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Rush (which my brother had turned me on to), Queen and other bands that my friends thought were just… weird.

I even started reading Rolling Stone magazine. (A habit that would have been stopped immediately had my parents thumbed through just one issue.) I got quite an education from that magazine. For one thing, rock stars cuss. A lot. But I loved reading about musicians and their music. I loved reading the stories behind their songs.

I used to fantasize about being a writer for Rolling Stone. A rock ‘n’ roll journalist. I still think it would be cool. To immerse myself in this energetic, toxic, ever-expanding art and find out what fuels it – what makes it tick. I’m fascinated by the fact that all music is connected. Sit down with a music history professor and he can trace any artist’s music back for centuries and across the continents. Music is an infinite science. It’s basic and complex at the same time. Only seven notes exist in the musical alphabet, but there is no end to the stories that can be told through those seven notes.

This is why, at Redbox the other night, my heart skipped when I saw that “It Might Get Loud” was available. This is a documentary featuring three musicians from three generations, three countries and three distinctively different styles of rock. Jimmy Page from Zeppelin, The Edge from U2 and Jack White of White Stripes. These three guitarists sit down and talk about the passion for their art and the factors that influenced their styles.

I hid away in my room and watched the film, hanging on every word. Jimmy Page telling about the house his family moved into when he was a child. The previous owners left a guitar behind and he decided to learn how to play. The Edge opening an old box of tapes, popping one into a player and an early sketch of "Where the Streets Have No Name" flowing out of the speaker. (That part got me teary.) How Jack White accumulated so much music equipment as a teen that he moved his bed out of his room and slept on the floor, surrounded by drums and guitars and amps.

And speaking of weird, Jack White is WEIRD. But he’s intensely creative – probably more creative than the other two combined. Out of the three, I’m least familiar with his music, but his voice and perspective intrigued me the most.

There are “artists,” many of whom exist in the pop genre, who produce music to fuel their own fame. But then there are the true artists – the ones who make music because they don’t know how not to. Page, Edge and White are three of these, and “It Might Get Loud” is an enlightening glimpse into the concepts, experiences and influences behind their music.

One more thought: I recall hearing rumors that Jimmy Page has basically been reduced to a slobbering invalid by years of drug use. Not true. The man’s actually looking pretty good. He’s one of the lucky ones.

When I Was on WIC

2010-01-02T15:22:00.000-08:00

It was a spring day in 1998. I only took the pregnancy test so I wouldn’t have to worry. I knew it was going to be negative, and then I could get on with my life. As soon as I took it, the control line appeared. I waited a while. Still one line.

“Just what I thought,” I said, and set the test down on the bathroom counter.

After taking my contacts out and brushing my teeth, I reached for the test to throw it away. But now there were two lines. A microscopic Julia was forming right inside my body. I nearly passed out.

We had been married almost five years, and I had wanted to get pregnant for a long time. But Chad was in the middle of grad school. I had a job that paid $20,000 a year. We needed to wait until Chad graduated and got a job to even think about starting a family.

But that second line changed everything. I wasn’t going to get to be a stay-at-home mom. Not when I was making our only income.

Julia was born in January. One Sunday at church, the wife of another graduate Bible student came up to me.

“You should get on WIC,” she said, and then, after noticing the look on my face, “We did it after Abigail was born and it was a big help. It’s nothing to be embarrassed about.”

WIC (Women, Infants and Children) is a federally funded program that began in 1972. It provides food, nutrition education and referrals to health and other social services at no charge. The program serves low-income, post-partum and breastfeeding women and infants and children up to age five.

I had never been on government assistance. No one in my family – except possibly during the Great Depression – had ever been on government assistance. I don’t like to think that I considered myself above such a thing, but I did.

But money was tight. My pregnancy had been fraught with complications and my hospital stays and time away from work had drained our savings. Anything I could get would help. So I applied at the WIC office and qualified.

I had to take Julia to the WIC office every few weeks for the staff to check her health and for me to take nutrition classes. I usually went there from work, which meant I was typically wearing a suit. To say I stood out from all the teen moms in there is an understatement. I saw them pass looks among each other – looks that said, “What is she doing here?”

But I never felt weird about being there. The staff was so sweet and they loved on Julia and were so friendly to me. Even when I discovered I had known one of the WIC employees in college, I still wasn’t embarrassed. I was just doing what I needed to do to take care of my family.

Money was still tight. I remember pushing Julia around the mall in her stroller, going into Sears, looking at all the pretty little baby dresses and wishing I had $15 to buy one. But WIC helped a lot. We never had to go without anything we needed. And even though we were technically living in poverty, I have the sweetest memories of that time. We never make a trip back to Abilene without driving by the little house we lived in back then. We didn’t have much, but life was simple. I miss it, in a way.

Chad spent his last year in grad school teaching biology at one of the local high schools. His income rescued us from poverty, and our WIC days were over. I’ve always been grateful to my friend for referring me to WIC and helping me change the way I viewed government assistance.

What I Learned in 2009

2010-01-01T11:12:00.000-08:00

1) If there’s something I don’t like doing, and I stick with it long enough (like working out), I might actually start liking it.

2) I’ve known this for years, but I remind myself every so often: Spend all the money you want on mascara, but the best kind there ever has been and ever will be is Maybelline Great Lash (the pink and green).

3) When I lose too much weight, I start looking scary. Check out this pic of me from Jenna’s birthday party in August. I needed to be eating those cupcakes, not giving them to 4-year-olds. I’ve put a few pounds back on since then and I look more normal.

4) It’s possible, when you’re trying desperately to improve a situation and do the right thing, to really mess up a friendship.

5) How to make hummus.

6) How important it is to me to feel as though I am part of a church family.

7) I need to blog more.

8) How to make crepes.

9) Having a dog can be fun and provide a sense of comfort – especially if you’ve had a crappy year.

10) How to save tons of money grocery shopping.

11) My husband is a good, godly man. (I already knew that, but it bears repeating.)

12) I always want to be open to God bringing new people into my life, regardless of my stage of life or how busy I am.

That’s it for now.

Out of the Closet

2009-12-26T21:05:00.000-08:00

I've lived with the shame for some time now. I knew it was time to get it out there for the world to see. For at least the past year, I've had a walk-in closet into which I cannot walk.

Just look. My laundry hamper can't even sit level. I suspect there are shoes underneath it.

So today, I dragged it all out. Every. Single. Thing. It all came out of my closet.

While I was in there, I ran across an old friend. I knew he was in the closet. I hide him from my children in there. It's......Darth Vader. My Darth Vader action figure carrying case I've had since I was a kid. Let's take a look inside.Impressive, huh?

I also ran across a few magazines that have my articles in them.

Finally, my closet was completely empty.And guess what I found? An electrical outlet. Never knew it was there. And we've lived in this house almost three years.

Now, I like to think of myself as a somewhat intelligent woman. I read. I appreciate the fine arts. But let me tell you something...

...I love clothes. Oh, my holy goodness, how I love clothes.

And shoes. That's my laundry hamper full of my shoes. I truly didn't realize I had that many.

I found my "I'm due in January!" T-shirt from my pregnancy with Julia. She's almost 11. Keeping it.

My mother's Guatemalan skirt. She bought it when she was a teenager in Panama. It's beautiful, but because my mom was just a teensy little thing back then, I can't wear it. But I'm keeping it.

Who does this to hangers? And why? And why do we have one? I got rid of the hanger (but I kept what was hanging on it.)This is my ACU shirt that I had to wear when I worked there in the late '90s. I have no need for it now. It's gone.

The beautiful Chinese gown given to me by my sweet friends Serene Goh and Bernadette Lee at my bridal shower in college. This gown has moved all over Texas with us and now to Arkansas and I will never part with it. Ever.

My floral-print Zena jeans from 9th grade. That I can still fit into. I wear them every time I need to dress up as someone from the '80s for a party. Which has been twice in the past year. Keeping them.

Three hours and four Gilmore Girls episodes later, I was done and my closet looked like this:

I got rid of piles of stuff. And I found clothes I had forgotten about. Which is like getting new clothes for free. I feel like a new woman.

Next up: The crap closet. I mean the craft closet.

Wintering

2009-12-26T13:47:00.000-08:00

This is the 600th post of my blogging career. Just thought you should know.

We had a nice Christmas here in AR. Because just about everyone we’re related to has moved here since August, we didn’t have to go anywhere. My brother Brian paid us a surprise visit, which is always fun. The girls loved the stuff they got (although I’m still looking for something I bought for Jenna in early December that I apparently did a great job of hiding) and I got a new coat, new Bible (first time I’ve had a new one since 1992), the new Norah Jones, WHBM gift card, etc.

I’ve been dreading January coming back around because that’s when all my non-fun started last year. So I’ve decided to combat this by going to Florida for a week. Of course this couldn’t happen had a very sweet someone not invited me, but it just so happens to fit perfectly in with my plan. My goals until my trip are to:

1) Wrestle the laptop away from Chad and the girls so I can work on my novel while I’m there. I can call it research. I’ve decided my main character should go to a condo on the beach for a week, and I really need to write that part while I’m there so keep it as accurate as possible.

2) Wrestle the camera away from Chad so I can Facebook my very first January beach vacation.

3) Go swimsuit shopping. In the wintertime. Another first.

The weekend before my trip, we are traveling to Houston for Chad to run in the Houston marathon. He ran the half-marathon back in 2004, and he has always wanted to run a full marathon. The girls and I will be there to cheer him on with Harold, our marathon tour guide.

I’m still working out on a regular basis. I’ve been doing this for almost a year now, which should make #3 up there on my list somewhat easier. Chad gave me new workout clothes for Christmas, and there was a time that I would have taken offense at such a thing. But I’m married to a guy who understands that looking good while working out is just as important as the workout itself. Bless him.

Starting Points

2009-12-16T07:49:00.000-08:00

Yet we cannot accumulate friends like so many trophies. Friends are not objects to be found and collected. Our calling isn’t so much to find friends as to become friends to others. I am not even sure it is possible to “find” friends. Instead, we befriend others, and in the befriending, worthy companions are mysteriously born. As imitators of Jesus we are here to grant to others the gifts of safety, attentiveness, compassion, empathy, accountability, truth-telling, loyalty, distance, time, forgiveness, spiritual care, and selfless love. In offering such graces to others, friendships emerge. - from Pilgrim Heart by Darryl Tippens

On one level, I'm right on board with this concept. Darryl Tippens (my former professor and elder) puts into words a process that I've believed in most of my life.

I've never viewed friendships as something to be collected. I've never had more than a couple of close friends at any time in my life. (I understand this is consistent with my astrological sign. Not that I believe in that crap.) I never tried breaking in to the popular crowd in high school. I didn't pledge a social club/sorority in college. If a relationship can't develop naturally, as described above, I'm going to move on to something else. I don't believe in trying to break into tight social circles. It’s just not me.

When I think of the significant friendships I’ve had in my life, they all involved a starting point. When I moved to a new school in first grade, a girl overheard a boy being rude to me. She didn’t think that was right and she decided to be my friend. Lori and I were inseparable through that year, 2nd grade and even after my family moved away in 3rd grade. She’s now my Facebook friend and I’m continually amazed at all the things we still have in common, despite the fact that we haven’t seen each other since I last visited her in high school. (I'm the one with the broken arm in the photo.)

Then there’s my bff Carol. She’s the kind of person I probably would not have been friends with in high school. But we met a few months after high school, when we were just starting college. The same weird guy liked both of us at the beginning of that year and it gave us something to laugh about. We’ve stayed friends for years and she’s the one I can talk to about anything. We rarely miss a week of talking on the phone – even though we haven’t lived in the same town since 1993. (That's the two of us at the U2 concert in Dallas two months ago.)

And there’s Lois, probably my most unlikely friend. We were born a half-century apart, for heaven’s sake. When I first walked in to Missouri St. Church of Christ in Baytown nine years ago as a young mom and minister’s wife, I didn’t think “She’s my kindred spirit” the first time I met her. I just thought of her as one of the elders’ wives. Then I organized a weekly moms’ group at church and asked her to be our speaker at one of the meetings. We had been having decent attendance at those things but on Lois’s day to speak, no other moms showed up. Lois and I sat and talked for an hour. We connected on a level that our age difference simply could not touch. Six years later, at our going-away party, she described it like this: “I forgot how young Deana was and she forgot how old I was and we just became friends.” But didn’t the space between our ages cause us to be too different? People have asked me that. Let’s see. Here’s the only difference I can think of. I read about the impact of World War II on American culture and society in my high school history book. Lois lived it. And to me, that made her even more interesting. So the age thing didn’t matter. In fact, I think it made us better friends. Lois was a librarian for years and one thing we share is a love of books. I told her when we moved away that our friendship reminded me of that of Anne’s and Diana’s in Anne of Green Gables. Two kindred spirits with completely different backgrounds who came together and connected on a truly unique level.

All of these relationships had what relationships must have to form: a starting point. If Lori hadn’t cared that Daniel was rude to me, or if Carol (who went to college in the same town she had gone to high school in) was content to stay with her high school friends and not let anyone else in, or if 15 moms had shown up at that meeting and Lois and I never got to talk that day, those three women would be distant memories, if that. Instead, they each hold cherished places in my heart. Because we extended starting points to each other. I wasn’t looking for a new best friend when I met any of these people. It just happened, as the Tippens’ book describes.

Same Kind of Different as Me, a book I just finished reading, illustrates this concept beautifully. Two men who were worlds apart in every aspect of their lives came together and one extended his hand to the other. It was a reluctant hand, but it counted. Their resulting friendship went on to bless both men in ways neither of them could have envisioned.

Having moved around a lot, I’ve become something of a pro at showing up somewhere and making friends. At least I thought I had. What I’ve learned is that the older you get, starting points are harder to find. Someone who hasn’t moved to a new place in their mid- to late-30s may not understand this, but it’s true. Because of time constraints, busyness and life in general, or maybe just because existing relationships are too comfortable, people get more stingy with their starting points. This is what I think the paragraph from Dr. Tippens’ book doesn’t quite grasp. You can be a friend to others all you want, but if they are not offering you a starting point, you will get nowhere. You’ll end up sitting on the couch for three New Year’s Eves in a row, staring at Dick Clark and Ryan Seacrest and trying to figure out why, after a lifetime of having had at least a couple of friends everywhere you had lived, you have suddenly gained citizenship on the Island of Misfit Toys.

Starting points aren’t always the springboard for some match-made-in-heaven relationship. There have been times that I’ve found myself at a starting point with someone that needs to be an ending point. I’m a big believer in people having boundaries and protecting themselves from relationships that could be unhealthy and exhausting. But can’t there be a middle ground between trying to be friends with everyone (which will wear you out) and shutting everyone out (which could make you the Unabomber)?

I can see why it could be more comfortable to just pull up the welcome mat and become the embodiment of that Emily Dickinson poem (“The soul selects her own society – then – shuts the door…”), but I just don’t interpret that as being Jesus to others.

We could leave the welcome mat out there and see what happens. I’m willing to see what happens.

Lately.

2009-12-04T08:33:00.000-08:00

Here’s what’s been going on with me lately:

- My parents moved here in August. They keep our kids overnight for free. My mom gives me her extra coupons. Life is pretty sweet.

- Chad’s mom moved here a couple of weeks ago. That situation is going to be somewhat more demanding of us, but we can do it.

- I went to Dallas in October and saw U2 with my bff Carol and her husband Patrick. I haven’t blogged about it because I don’t even know how to write about how great it was. Seeing U2 was in the top three of my bucket list. So after I write an award-winning novel and go bobsledding with the U.S. Bobsled Team, I can pretty much die happy. My only disappointment with the concert is that Bono didn’t propose to me. And I was counting on him to. I think he was waiting for a more intimate moment. Or it could be that we’re both married to other people and he doesn’t know I exist. But I’m trying to stay positive.

- Speaking of writing novels, I’ve been working on one for the past several months. Good writers don’t divulge too much about their works-in-progress, so if you want to know what it’s about, come to the book-signing.

- I've taken some time away from being involved in Chad's youth ministry. I kept getting signs that maybe I shouldn't be involved in it. This was very strange to me, especially since I thrived in it at our old church. I've really missed being around the kids. They IM me on Facebook and tell me they miss me. I'm thinking of easing back into it. We'll see how it goes.

- My depression is at bay for now. I spent most of this year getting my mind around some circumstances I once thought I couldn’t live with. With the help of old and new friends and with the unwavering support of my husband, I’m almost OK. Just do me a favor. If you ever see a sign outside a church that says “WE’RE TOO BLESSED TO BE DEPRESSED!”, go to Sam’s, buy however many dozens of eggs you want, and (at night and wearing dark clothes) throw them all at the sign. Because whoever put that sign up is stupid. And you’re doing them a favor by letting them know that.

- I'm thinking about grad school. The thought of me getting a master's is exciting and overwhelming and downright scary all at the same time. Should I start this fall? When I'll have a new middle-schooler and a new kindergartener? Should I wait a year? Should I never do it and lie on my death bed at 80 (after the novel and bobsledding thing) and let my last words be "I should have gone to grad school."?

I'll get back to you on that.

Have it your way

2009-11-15T18:10:00.000-08:00

Fast-food marketing is getting weird.

Not just weird. It’s getting violent. It’s bearing arms. It’s getting angry.
Here’s the angry Whopper from Burger King. BK isn’t limiting such an intense emotion to their hallmark menu item. BK is actually encouraging customers to “go angry on any sandwich.”

Then there are the weapons of mass destruction. Quiznos has cornered the market on using weapons in fast-food marketing. Try one of their “toasty bullets.”

Or if that’s not enough, have a “torpedo.”

“At least the fast-food industry has left natural disasters alone,” you’re probably thinking. Oh, but you’re wrong. At Taco Bell, you can peruse an entire “Volcano Menu.”

Here’s their description of the “Volcano Taco”:

“A crunchy red corn tortilla shell, filled with seasoned ground beef, crisp lettuce, shredded cheddar cheese and toped (sic) off with our new cheesy, molten hot lava sauce.”

“Molten hot lava” didn’t work out so well for the people of Pompeii. I can’t imagine that it would work well for a taco topping, either. Of course this is the same establishment that offers half-pound burritos and pressures customers to have a “Fourth Meal.” Because Americans don’t eat enough, I guess.

I have to hand it to chains such as Subway, McDonalds and Fazolis, whose food offerings aren’t quite so threatening. Chick-Fil-A is also refreshingly peaceful (although their illiterate cows that “promote literacy” are offensive in themselves.) The most intimidating menu item at Jack in the Box is probably the “Extreme Sausage Sandwich.” But don’t let Wendy’s fool you. I was there with Jenna a couple of weeks ago, enjoying the fact that I wasn’t surrounded by advertisements for food involving violence, weaponry or catastrophic acts of nature.

But then I read my French fry box. And you know what? It made a pass at me.

Advertising their spicy chicken sandwich, my box read “…because we want to satisfy your burning desire.”

Excuse me? My burning desire is none of your business, you twisted piece of cardboard perversion.

Personally, I don't want my food to be angry or prone to violence or sexual harassment. I want my food to be happy and peaceful. And I definitely want it to stay out of my love life.

I also want the Chick-Fil-A cows to learn how to spell, but that's another blog for another time.

Leading the blind

2009-10-28T13:56:00.000-07:00

Nov. 2 UPDATE: Brock and Sarah won! Thanks so much for your help!

Just a quick plug for our friends Brock and Sarah. They are trying very hard to win a contest so they can have new window treatments for these big honkin' windows in their house. They are neck-and-neck with the competition and they need your help.

1) Go to the Facebook fan site for Blinds Galore and become a fan.

2) Go to the photo of their living room windows and click "like."

That's it! Everyone who voted will be entered into a drawing for a $10 gift card if Brock and Sarah win. And Brock and Sarah are even sweetening the deal by entering everyone who posts the following to their Facebook page, blog, or Twitter into a drawing for a $25 gift card.

"Help my friends Brock and Sarah win blinds for their house by voting! It's free and takes only seconds:

(1) Go to http://tinyurl.com.../yjps9yt and become a FAN,
(2) Go to: http://tinyurl.com/yfqpk4l and click "LIKE" below their living room picture

Everyone who votes will be entered into a drawing to win a $10 gift card IF THEY WIN!"

From Brock: "Thanks everyone for your help! Only 5 days left in the contest! Whew! BE SURE TO COMMENT HERE WITH A LINK to your post OR EMAIL ME WITH A LINK so I'll know to enter you into the drawing if we win!"

2009-10-20T19:56:00.000-07:00

My Favorite Holiday Traditions:

1) Baking Christmas cookies.
2) Drinking hot chocolate by the fire.
3) Making fun of all the collectible silliness in the Hallmark catalog.

And my catalog came today! So here we go.

Who doesn't love the oddities that are the Willow Tree figurines? And now we have the official Willow Tree nativity scene.

"Faces? We don't need faces! We have the Christ child!"

"Dear family and friends: Greetings! What a crazy year it has been! Last year, Dad got a promotion, Mom got into Junior League and the twins got into Princeton at age 12. This year, for reasons still unknown to us, we have become blubber-insulated flightless water fowl who have been commemorated on a Hallmark Christmas ornament. We now eat our weight in fish, shrimp and krill every day. At least we mate for life, unlike our neighbors, who unfortunately divorced last year. And at least we have faces, unlike those Willow Tree freaks."

Santa snuggling with a deadly animal. Hey, kids! Don't try this at home!

(I guess if Santa had another one, he'd be BI-POLAR. Ha!)

This adorable Rudolph lights up, sings and says "Don't cover my nose!" These things aren't cute. They are annoying. They're the kind of things you put up after the holidays hoping its batteries will be dead by next year.

Instead of spending jillions of dollars on collectible crap from the Hallmark catalog, why not buy something from the Heifer International Christmas catalog? Like a flock of chicks for $20. Protein-packed eggs can make a lifesaving difference in the life of a third-world child. Or how about a goat for $120? Or a water buffalo for $250? You don't really have to put them under your tree, and they can help third-world families A LOT.

Besides, I'd rather look at a water buffalo than this weirdness:

Talitha koum

2009-10-07T11:49:00.000-07:00

I went back to Compline a few weeks ago. Because of other things going on, I hadn’t been in a while. But I felt like I needed to go back, so I went.

Compline at Little Rock’s Christ Episcopal Church has been my “church away from church” this year. If you’re having trouble connecting with God at your own church, you need to connect with him somewhere. So that’s what I did. And I became one of “those people.”

You know. Those people I’ve never understood. The people who run into church just as it starts and run out as soon as it’s over. That’s never been me. Church has always been the hub of my social life. Of course it’s church, too, but it’s also a place to see friends, catch up, etc. But now I understand “the church runners.” Compline was not social hour for me. It was a place to go away and be with God since I couldn’t find him anywhere else. I figured out how to time my drive from Bryant to downtown so I would be walking in the church’s big red doors just as the Compline bells were ringing. But I didn’t run out as soon as it was over. I waited a bit for the aisle to clear so I would have a straight shot to the door. Then I ran. Except for the priest and his wife who I said “hi” to if I saw them, I didn’t want to talk to anybody. And I definitely didn’t want the church custodian to show up, mop in hand, demanding to know who left the puddle of espresso eyeliner and Maybelline Great Lash mascara on row 7. So I ran in and spent the 15 minutes of Compline soaking in as much God as I could. Then I ran out.

A number of things helped me get through my clinical depression of 2009. Having a place to go like Compline was a significant one. I’m doing a lot better now. And I’m in a new house church that meets on Sunday nights, so Compline is going to have to become a thing of the past. At least for now.

But I had to go back one more time. If you spend enough time asking God for healing and he comes through, you don’t want to be like the nine lepers who went on their way. You want to be like the one who came back. So I that’s what I did. I sat there amid the candlelight and ancient words, trying to focus on my gratitude to God for lifting me out of a darkness that I never want to experience again. But I was distracted. I was hungry. I found myself wanting the choir to sing louder in case my stomach growled. We got to the Lord’s Prayer, which I always recite with the choir—making sure I’m paying attention because the Episcopalians lop off the end of the prayer and I have to make sure I stop reciting in time. But I was still hungry. Just as I was about to get annoyed with myself for not eating before I got there, I realized something. I think God was telling me to eat.

He’s done it before. After Jesus healed the not-dead-but-asleep girl at the end of Mark 5 and Luke 8, he told her caregivers to get her something to eat. And he’s told me to eat before. One other time.

August 10, 1992. The waiting room of the ICU at Anchorage’s Providence Hospital. It was a Monday evening and I hadn’t eaten since breakfast the day before. Chad’s sister Gina had been in a horrible accident that morning and we were keeping vigil at the hospital as she clung to life by a thread. A thread that would slip out of her hand two days later.

Of course there was food at the hospital and restaurants nearby. But I was too traumatized to eat. Every bone in Gina’s face is smashed and she’s in a coma and I’m going to eat? It was unthinkable for me to experience some kind of comfort while Gina lay in such a state, her distraught family and friends around her.

But not eating for a couple of days isn’t so great on your body. I was getting weak and my hands were starting to involuntarily draw up. Sign of a potassium deficiency, I think I heard somewhere. Still, I wouldn’t eat. I sat in the waiting room while the visitors streamed in and out. Then something shook me out of my haze. A man and his wife were standing in front of Chad, who was sitting next to me. I heard, “You need to go take her to eat something.” The man was holding a twenty-dollar bill out to Chad.

I didn’t know this man. But I knew about him. He and his wife and baby were leaving for Russia soon to become missionaries. They were supported by a church in Anchorage—the church where Chad’s family had a number of friends. This man and his wife did not know Gina, but they heard what happened and they came. And now he was holding money out to Chad. Money for me to eat. I knew, by the way they dressed and by their chosen vocation, that twenty dollars was a lot of money to this family. We had money. I could have gone to eat if I wanted to. But the man insisted.

I’ve blocked a lot of memories from those dreadful three days out of my mind. Or at least tucked them away so that I have to work to retrieve them. But the image of this missionary holding a twenty out to my husband is clearly etched in my memory. God was telling me to eat. So I did. Chad took the missionary’s twenty and we went to some restaurant and, surrounded by talking, laughing strangers who were oblivious to the nightmare we were walking around in, I choked down some food. I felt better and stronger and didn’t have a problem eating after that. Which was a good thing, considering what the rest of the week would bring. I’ve never forgotten that man and his wife and what their seemingly simple gesture did for me. I remember his name and by Googling, I’ve found him in the mission field in Ukraine. I pray people are blessing him and his family the way he blessed me that day.

Back to September 2009. In Compline; stomach still growling. God has healed me and now he wants me to eat, the way Jesus healed the girl in Luke 8. So I did. On the way home, I stopped by Jason’s Deli and got a spinach veggie wrap and some black currant tea. I walked into the house with the Jason’s Deli bag and Chad’s eyebrows went up. “God told me to eat,” I said, sitting down at the table.

And this husband of mine who has been so supportive through my ordeal, who never left my side and understood or at least pretended to understand what I was going through...He didn't do anything. He didn't ask how much it cost, or if I thought it was wise to eat out for dinner after we had all eaten out for lunch that day. He didn't roll his eyes. Nothing. I married a good man.

Her spirit returned, and at once she stood up. Then Jesus told them to give her something to eat. Luke 8:55

Awkward...

2009-09-28T07:24:00.000-07:00

Awkwardfamilyphotos.com is having an awkward couples photo contest. I submitted this one. You didn't know I was a circus freak on the side, did you?

Fame!

2009-09-24T06:17:00.001-07:00

One reason I'm glad I never became a movie star:

Because when you become a movie star, sooner or later, your likeness is going to get molded into a hunk of plastic and sold somewhere. Oh sure, you'll get a nice cut of the profits. But is it really worth it?

Oh, well. I'm still going to see the human versions of these hunks of plastic in New Moon on opening night.

Looking for a job?

2009-09-13T19:55:00.000-07:00

Having been either a minister's kid or minister's wife all but a few years of my life, I've heard of some pretty ridiculous expectations churches have of their ministers. This one may take the cake. All I can say to this church is... GOOD LUCK.

I deleted any contact/location info.

8/10/2009—Position: Pulpit/Youth Minister (Part-time)

Contact:
Date Open: 8/10/2009
Dead Line: September 9, 2009
Qualifications: see below
Marital Status: Preferred Married
Position Expectations: see below
Salary Range: $25,000
Notes: Evangelist/Youth Minister
Job Description
• The (name of church)is hiring a part-time evangelist/youth minister to serve the congregation in (name of town). He and his family will be required to attend and worship with the congregation. The position will consist of 20 hours per week with preaching and teaching responsibilities required.
Minimum Qualifications
• Preference will be given to the successful candidate who is a graduate of or attended a Church of Christ educational institution.
• Preference will be given to the applicant married with child(ren).
• The successful applicant must be a Christian for 10 years or more.
• The successful applicant’s immediate family must place membership with the church.
Responsibilities
• This position is a part-time position consisting of 20 hours a week.
• The position will require 10 hours per week as youth minister and 10 hours per week as the evangelist.
• You are required to preach every Sunday morning.
• You are required to teach the teens on Sunday morning and Wednesday night.
• The position requires activities with the youth group, aside from worship times.
• The position requires a daily journal of all activities. This is for review at the business meetings and/or by elders.
• The position has no benefits such as sick leave, insurance, vacation or holiday pay.
• He must make available office hours for counseling, individual/group bible studies, etc.
• Here is a list of some activities that are required but not limited to:
o Visitation with church family & community
o Teen Devotionals
o Preaching
o Teaching
o Vacation Bible School
o Monthly teen activities
o Individual Bible Studies
• If you can not full-fill a monthly obligation, you will be required to make up the time the following week. This is to be approved by treasurer of the church.
Compensation
• $25,000 per year paid bi-weekly.
• All applicable taxes will be deducted.
Application Information
• You must have 3 letters of reference. Two of those letters need to be from congregations in which you have attended or worked.
• The successful candidate is required to have a background check (BCII) if he has lived in (state) his whole life. If out of (state) for less than 5 years ago, an FBI check is also required. Both of which can be completed at any sheriff’s department or school district office.
mit a resume.
• Deadline is September 9, 2009.

Here is the Church

2009-09-09T15:19:00.000-07:00

Over at Mike Cope’s blog a few days ago, I read about Kevin Roose and his book “The Unlikely Disciple: A Sinner’s Semester at America’s Holiest University.” To write this book, 21-year-old Roose left Brown University to go undercover as a born-again Christian at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University. I want to read the book -- as soon as Jenna is safely tucked away at preschool so I can have a few uninterrupted moments. For now, I’m chewing on a quote from the book in which Roose describes how this experience changed his view of church:

“I used to define church as a series of events — the sermon, the worship music, the collection, the altar call. Now, when I think of church, I think of George, the elderly man in the choir who greets me with a ‘hello there, Mister Kevin’ every week. I think of Mac, the sixty-five-year-old tenor who always updates me on his son and daughter — an engineer in Gary, Indiana, and a sales representative in Charlottesville. On Wednesday nights, I think of Campus Church as the guys I sit with — Jersey Joey, Paul, Eric, Zipper — instead of the laser light shows or the fog machines.”

Growing up in the Church of Christ, church never meant laser light shows or fog machines to me. But church has always meant people. My whole life, I was willing to put up with overly conservative elders, silly rules, stomach-churning potlucks and questionable auditorium décor. Because I loved the people. Church was always my extension of home. I remember Sam Jones, an elder at the church we went to when I was in preschool. He was an old rancher who looked as though he had been squinting into the southeast New Mexico sun his entire life. I remember the change he fished out of his pocket for me every time he saw me. And I remember him crying in our front yard the day we moved away. I remember Sister Willoughby, who taught my 3rd-grade Bible class and got me so interested in the life of Paul that I forgot to be upset that I was the “new kid” that year. I saw her years later and told her that every time I think of Paul, I think of her and how she made those stories come alive for me. I remember elders at our church in Abilene – Bible professors whose names are known the world over in Church of Christ circles and who could have gotten away with carrying an air of prestige around with them. But these most humble of men came to our tiny house when Chad and I were newlyweds to pray with us over his parents’ divorce. And later to pray us through my devastating illness in 1998. I remember two beautiful women who, after I miscarried while on a church trip in Colorado, intercepted me from Chad after he brought me back to our condo from the ER. I was groggy from the anesthesia and could barely stand up. They got me out of my bloody clothes, cleaned me up and got me to bed. I remember people who loved our children as their own. I remember hoping I had ministered to others the way these people had ministered to me. These people were my church. A few were my close friends, but a lot of them weren’t. They were just people who saw me and others through the eyes of God. They still do. They are scattered across the nation – some into other countries – and they are my faith community. This is what church means to me. And it’s what I think it should mean to everyone.

Building community in Christ doesn’t have to mean going to extreme measures to make room for tons of new people in our lives. It doesn’t have to mean spending all of our spare time with others or being everyone’s best friend. If you asked the two women who ministered to me the day of my miscarriage who their closest friends are, I’m sure I wouldn’t make the top ten or even twenty. We didn’t have to have that kind of relationship to be united in Christ. Being a faith community – a family of God – simply means being Jesus to each other. I’m glad Roose saw this. I wish we all could.

Mom Crack

2009-09-04T17:02:00.000-07:00

I’m playing Fantasy Football this year. Wait! Don’t click away! You’re still at Deanaland. I still know utter Jack about football. I fully intend to keep knowing utter Jack about football. If football (and most other organized sports, for that matter) disappeared off the face of the earth, I wouldn’t even notice. I’m just going to draft some players at random and see what happens. My team is called the “Desperate Housewives.”

Since moving here in 2006, I’ve noticed (because it’s impossible not to) the consignment-sale trance most women around here are under. I know all these moms at my church who act like their normal, typical selves most of the year. Until one of these sales comes around. Then they begin pulling out clothes. And pricing them. And volunteering at the sale. And shopping. And blocking off the same week on next year’s calendar so they can do it all over again. I’ve managed to bypass all of this so far. I don’t like getting caught up in any kind of hysteria unless it was my idea. Plus I have trouble picturing these consignment sales without conjuring up images of bargain-crazed women smacking each other with their giraffe-print bags to snag a couple of Gymboree outfits. Not unlike the Cabbage Patch Kid insanity of 1984.

Then I went to house church Tuesday night, where my friend Regina handed me a pass to the workers’ half-price sale for the consignment sale that’s currently underway here. So I went to the sale last night. Now, I’m not planning on letting these things take over my life on a regular basis. But last night, I sort of started to get it. These consignment sales are like Mom Crack. I walked into the old CompUSA building in West Little Rock with a handful of other women. The sales are heavy on baby stuff, and that’s where the other moms headed. Leaving me free to check out the size 6 and size 14 girls’ stuff on my own. I got Julia some cool shirts and even a pair of Abercrombie corduroy pants for just a few bucks. (Yes, we boycott Abercrombie like all other decent Christian parents. But these pants were four bucks. I had to make an exception here. It’s easy to boycott something when you can’t afford it anyway.) And I got Jenna a cute Kelly’s Kids Christmas outfit and the FREAKING CUTEST hot pink and black tweed suit. If you see a cute blond kid at my church looking like mini-CoCo Chanel in a few months, that’s my kid.

But then. THEN. I found the mommy clothes. They had clothes for me, too! With all the baby-obsessed mommies a safe distance away in the infant section, I had the mommy clothes all to myself. Including a stunning Mica dress with the tags still on. Tags that said “$160.00.” This dress is now mine. For nine bucks. And for another nine bucks, I scored an Ann Kenar little black dress. I’m getting dizzy again just thinking about it. For a total of $51 bucks (including tax) I got two outfits for Jenna, pants, sweater and two shirts for Julia (three of her things are Abercrombie – which I promise to resume boycotting soon – and Aeropostale) and two FABULOUS dresses for me. I can see why the whole consignment sale thing could get addictive.

So that’s my fun lately. Hey, if I'm going to dabble in Mom Crack, at least I'm going to look good doing it.

Four No More

2009-08-26T06:01:00.000-07:00

We had a mostly quiet family of three until five years ago today when Jenna exploded onto the scene. I tell people that when she was born, she hit the ground running. I know there was a time when she was tiny and helpless and had to be lugged around in her infant carrier. But I don't remember that. Jenna has always been a blond-haired blur of joy and energy.

Most of the photos we have of her look like this:

Jenna loves life. I guess a lot of people do, but Jenna really embraces the whole Carpe Diem thing. For her, there is something to rejoice about in every moment of every day. And she cracks us UP. Just two days ago, she stepped on the scale in our bathroom, read the numbers, yelled "YES!", put her arms up in a victory "V" and danced an elaborate dance of triumph all around our bathroom like she was in a Jenny Craig commercial or something. I don't know where she got this because this is definitely not how her dad and I react when we weigh ourselves. But something about those numbers really made her day.

Our Baytown friends will remember that Jenna was not easy to come by. After losing three pregnancies and then struggling through the first several months of my pregnancy with Jenna (I get notoriously ill when I'm pregnant), a friend at church told me "Girl, when this baby gets here we are going to throw a PARTY." And they did. I had a fabulous baby shower and we still have so many blankets and pillows that our sweet friends there made with their own hands. It usually takes two people to have a baby, but, with a lot of prayer, our entire church family in Baytown got Jenna here. That's something I'll always remember about our time in Baytown.

Here's something I wrote a while back about Jenna (with her age updated):

"Blue eyes, my baby's got blue eyes. Like a deep blue sea on a blue, blue day." -- "Blue Eyes" by Elton John

Jenna was born five years ago today. Eight-and-a-half pounds. A golden sheen to her head that promised blond hair. Blue eyes.

At least I tell people they're blue. There really isn't a word to describe the color of her eyes.

But I'll try.

I learned to scuba dive in 1993. And I learned something about it right off: scuba diving is a big hassle. So much heavy, awkward equipment is required for breathing underwater. The tank by itself weighs 80 pounds. Then there's the weight belt, which must be adjusted just right so you won't float to the surface or be stuck on the ocean floor. Then you have the BCD, the fins, snorkel, mask and wetsuit. Once you get all that stuff on, it's hard enough to remain upright, let alone walk normally.

But once below the surface, the oppressive gear becomes your key to the underwater world. You swim around weightless, holding out fingers as curious fish swim up to them. Your teeth clench around the regulator that, on land moments before, was uncomfortable in your mouth. Now it's the only way to get air into your lungs. The sound of your constant inhaling and exhaling is a reminder that you're doing something humans weren't made to do. You are living, thriving, underwater. The hassle, for the moment, is forgotten.

It took us a long time to get Jenna into this world. I got pregnant, then miscarried. Pregnant again, then blood one morning. Pregnant a third time, but then more blood. We started thinking adoption. Then I got pregnant again, and this one held. I got very sick, was placed on home healthcare, and then developed gestational diabetes. Then, one Thursday morning, the previous year-and-a-half faded as I finally looked into her eyes.

And I remembered the circle of light.

Thirty feet under the ocean's surface, it's easy to become disoriented -- to the point that you can lose track of which way you're supposed to go to reach air. As a scuba diver, you learn to look for light. Light means surface. When you find the sunlight piercing the blue mass in which you are submerged, you slowly swim toward it, exhaling all the way. Surrounded by varying shades of watery blue, the circle of light expands and seems to pull you toward itself. You keep swimming up, up, up -- until you think your lungs can't expel any more air. But the bubbles keep coming from your mouth, and you keep moving toward the light.

Then you reach it and you burst through it into air, light, life.

That's what color Jenna's eyes are.

August

2009-08-25T07:13:00.001-07:00

One kid down, one to go. Julia started 5th grade last week and Jenna is closing in on preschool week after next. Then I'm confident that this huge amount of work I've been getting will completely dry up and Ranger the Westie and I will be sitting around staring at each other all day. Because that's how life works.

Over the last few months, I've been processing this from a minister's family perspective: Viewing church as your church family vs. viewing church as your husband's/dad's workplace and seeking out a community of faith elsewhere. I'd love to hear thoughts from other ministers' family-type people.

BTW, I'll have an article in an upcoming special issue of Success magazine. Because writers are usually the last to know when their stuff is published, I'm not sure when it's coming out. I'll keep you posted.

16 years!

2009-08-14T07:27:00.000-07:00

I married the greatest guy ever 16 years ago today. What I remember about that day is burning up in my dress in the Beaumont, TX, humidity, the awe-inducing size of my hair (my hair was so huge, Chad had to say one set of vows to me and and then repeat them again to my hair) and how much we absolutely could not wait to ditch the reception so we could get to the hotel (oh, stop. You were no different on your wedding day).

I don't even know how to describe what an incredible husband, father, provider and supporter Chad has been to me and the girls. And not just during the fun times. Ever since I've been stumbling around in the not-so-wonderful world of clinical depression this year, Chad has not only been my rock, he has worked every bit as hard (and many days, harder) as I have trying to pull me out of it. There have been SO many days where he could have said "You're no fun anymore" or "You're not the person I married" and he would have been absolutely correct on both counts. But he has never left my side for a second.

Today I'm reposting something I wrote about our marriage several years ago:

I met Chad in the Bean at ACU one day at lunch. I was with a big group of people and we were sitting at a large round table. Chad was the only person I didn’t know and we ended up sitting right next to each other. He was from Alaska, he said.

Chad was a freshman, and I was a sophomore. He was kinda cute – all my friends said so – and he seemed like a nice guy. We tried to date for a couple of weeks, but it just wasn’t working for me. I was trying to take a break from dating. I had made several bad dating choices in a row and had decided to give that part of my life up to God, since I had made such a mess of it. I promised God I wouldn’t date anyone seriously for a year.

Plus Chad got on my nerves.

He was so nice. Really, he was. But he seemed to be trying too hard. I started avoiding him.

A school year went by. Then a summer. Then school started again. And there was Chad. Would I like to go out Friday night? Sure. OK.

I remember sitting on the couch with my roommate. “Aren’t you going to get ready for your date?” she asked. “It’s just Chad,” I replied.

Then we went out. We had a great time. I liked being with him. He smelled good. So we kept going out. We kissed. His arms felt good around me. They felt right around me.

“You know what I was thinking?” I said one night after we had been dating about three weeks. “I was thinking that I don’t want to date anyone but you.”

And that was it. We were a couple.

That year was fun. I was dating Chad, living with two of my best friends and working as a reporter for the campus newspaper. He came home with me for Thanksgiving and spring break. We had fun together. We kissed. A lot.

We had to be apart for that summer, while he went home to Alaska to work. In August, I flew up there to see the sights and hang out with Chad and his family for a couple of weeks. Chad, his sister Gina and I were all supposed to come back to Abilene together.

In happy, fun dating relationships, you would think horrible things aren’t supposed to happen. But that's not reality. While I was in Alaska, Chad’s sister Gina was in a car accident. I was standing in Chad’s parents’ kitchen when they got the call from the highway department. She was in ICU for two days before she died. What a nightmare. My head still gets swimmy when I think about those awful days. Did all of it really happen? Of course it did, but it’s still so hard to fathom. She was 19. She and Chad were only 11 months apart.

We went back to school without Gina – shattered over the loss that was too great for Chad to even talk to me about. It’s hard for me to write about this time because I don’t remember much. My brain has shut it out. I do remember crying in the shower every morning for months.

Then something happy happened. We got engaged. It was a relief to have a wedding to focus on instead of our grief. We got married on Aug. 14, 1993.

That was 12 years ago. A major career change, two kids and three miscarriages later, we’re still here. Chad is my best friend – the “other side of me,” as Michael W. Smith sings. He knows what I need when I’m too proud to voice it. He knows when I need a break from the kids. He washes dishes. He changes diapers. One morning, when Chad had gotten up early and our oldest daughter Julia had climbed into bed with me, I heard Chad in the next room, having his morning quiet time and whispering an earnest prayer. For me. How loved and protected I felt, hearing a great man of God lift me up in prayer.

Marriage isn’t always fun, they tell you in premarital counseling. And it’s true. One of the worst moments of my life was when Chad was holding me in our bathroom three years ago. I was losing our second child and it hurt – physically, emotionally – it was excruciating. But Chad was there, his arms still so strong around me.

The good times in a marriage are fun and make good memories. But the hard times are the ones that really solidify your relationship. That’s when those vows really mean something. It’s when you have the chance to truly cherish each other.

I’ve been asked when I knew I was in love with Chad. I’m not really sure. Love changes and deepens over the years until you’re not sure what “love” really meant when you said it early in your relationship. But I do have one memory. We weren’t really dating yet, but I was aware that Chad was not getting on my nerves anymore. I had to help with newspaper distribution after Chapel one day, but rushed back into the coliseum because I wanted to find Chad. He wasn’t there. I was so disappointed that it surprised me. I stood there, in the emptying coliseum, suddenly shockingly aware that if I kept running away from this guy, I could lose him forever. That’s when I knew that I always wanted him to be there.

And he is. And we still kiss. A lot.

Back.

2009-08-11T06:25:00.000-07:00

I’m back. Mid-summer 2009 will be remembered as one of the crazier times of our lives. We went to Houston, Baytown, Abilene, Lubbock, Fort Worth and then back to Little Rock over the course of two weeks. We came back with a mother-in-law and a dog. The mother-in-law went back. The dog stays.

Ranger is a westie who belonged to our friends Brock and Sarah. Their son Brooks is getting pretty mobile and his wise parents decided that was enough excitement for their house. So they put Ranger up for adoption and we nabbed him. I haven’t had a dog since I was in high school, so it has been an adjustment. But he is so sweet and fun and cuddly and not nearly the trouble I thought he might be. He loves going places with us and one of our favorite things to do is to take him shopping at Petco. We’ve traditionally been cat people and cats HATE riding in cars. So putting an animal in a car who actually wants to go somewhere has been lots of fun.

Yeah, he's pretty great.

Also during our “let’s do everything at once” summer, my parents moved here. They’ve been here a week now. They live just a few minutes’ drive from us, which is great. My mom and I went grocery shopping together this morning. It was fun. (And she was SO impressed by my couponing skills. Saved $60 at Kroger, by the way.) And are we taking advantage of the free babysitting? YOU BETTER BELIEVE WE ARE.

And ten weeks this fall, I'll be going to another church on Wed. nights in Little Rock. That knocks me out of Refuge (our weekly teen activity), and I hate missing that, but I'm looking forward to getting to know some new people over at Fellowship. I'm also getting ready to teach the 5th and 6th graders at our church during the fall quarter. I really like teaching this age. They are fun kids, plus I get a chance to get to know them better before they move up into the youth group.

Now Julia is getting ready to start 5th grade next week, and Jenna will start preschool a couple of weeks after that. I’m staying busy with different writing projects and with the local chapter of American Christian Writers, of which I am vice-president. This means that if our president Lana Clifton is assassinated, I will immediately be sworn into power. So be careful, Lana! I’ve got enough going as it is.

Disclaimer

2009-07-29T08:47:00.000-07:00

My mother-in-law is here.
We have a new dog.
Chad is leaving town on Saturday.
My parents are moving here on Saturday.
My bitter ex-shrink sent me a bill for a thousand bucks.

I'll blog again when all of this goes away. I knew you would understand.

The Prequel

2009-07-14T05:44:00.001-07:00

I'm in Houston at my parents' house. They are moving in a few weeks and I've been rummaging through their stuff. I came across this photo:

My dad joined the army after college and was stationed in Panama's Canal Zone. His mother kept worrying that he was not attending church while so far from home, so he had a friend snap this photo one Sunday morning as proof that he was. The girl walking by in the background is my 15-year-old mother. She and my dad had not met yet. Now they've been married for 46 years. Pretty cool, huh?

Mountains

2009-07-03T22:35:00.000-07:00

After several posts in a row detailing my vanity, shallowness, allegiance to fashion and the horrible things I did in my youth, I feel compelled to write something with just a tad more depth.

Lately I’ve been spending time in the Psalms. Just today, I read Psalm 69 and it just about ripped my heart out. Partially because I have identified so closely with it over the last several months. And also because of David’s utter despair coupled with his complete trust in God. Two seemingly opposite concepts that, in this Psalm, are seamlessly woven together. David was great at pulling that off.

Next week I'm leaving town for about 2.5 weeks. I’m going to help my parents get ready to move here and visit Baytown while I’m in the area. Then we’re driving from there to ACU, where Julia will go to Learning to Lead and Chad and I will lead a group at MPulse. We’re stopping by Lubbock on the way back (which you Texans know is not on the way at all, but we’ll make it work).

So those are the reasons for my being gone half of July. And truthfully, I could use some time away.

A number of people who know me are aware that this year has been pretty rough for me. I haven’t gone into specifics on my blog, but you can find traces of it here and there.

Also this year, I’ve started working out. And the only way I can make that bearable is to have music pouring into my head the whole time. Mostly the Twilight soundtrack, but also some vintage stuff, such as U2’s The Unforgettable Fire. That album is one of my all-time favorites and every time I listen to it, it sounds as fresh and new and gripping and convicting as it did when I first heard it in the mid-’80s.

The other day I was walking through the neighborhood with Bono’s voice streaming through my earbuds, and I had one of those DUH experiences. After listening to this album for almost 25 years, I heard something that had managed to slip by me all this time. In the album’s title track, Bono sings “And if the mountain should crumble, or disappear into the sea…” I’ve heard it a zillion times. But a realization hit me and nearly stopped me in my tracks. That’s the second verse of Psalm 46.

Psalm 46 is inscribed on the memorial to the victims of the 1947 Texas City Disaster. On April 16, 1947, a ship loaded with 2,300 tons of ammonium nitrate (the same highly explosive fertilizer used in the Oklahoma City bombing, except that was only 2.5 tons) exploded at the docks in Texas City, Texas, killing at least 581 people and injuring more than 5,000. The blast shattered windows in Beaumont, a town 90 miles away. It even registered on a seismograph in Denver. The blast is still the nation’s worst industrial disaster. For the people of Texas City that day, the mountains crumbled and fell into the sea.

I met several survivors of the blast in 2003, when I wrote a series of articles about the disaster for The Baytown Sun. One survivor is an elder at the church we worked with in Baytown. His 13-year-old brother was killed after riding his bike to the docks, where a large crowd had gathered to watch the ship’s fire that would result in the explosion later that morning. Larry was 15 then, and all those decades later, the sorrow of that day’s events is still carved into his face. Journalists write a lot of stuff that they forget about. But some stories stay with you. The Texas City story has stayed with me.

Larry loaned me a book of survivors’ accounts to use in my research. I took it to the library to piece my articles together. Going over the survivors’ stories was the most heart-wrenching research I’ve ever had to do for an article. I had to keep getting up from my desk and walking away from the book for a few minutes because the grief and devastation in those stories was so overwhelming. Much of it was too gruesome to include in my articles. A woman who was a young girl at the time told of debris from the blast hanging in the trees of the neighborhoods near the docks. She said she learned to walk with her head down to avoid seeing human remains that had been blown into the branches and were left hanging there. She told of a T-shirt that was found in a tree near her house. When someone climbed up to get it down, they found a human ribcage inside it. There are accounts worse than that – accounts I could not bring myself to type.

The Texas City Disaster made international news. Celebrities like Jack Benny and Frank Sinatra performed in fundraising campaigns to help the people of Texas City in the aftermath of the blast. Survivors still gather on anniversaries of the blast to remember the ones they lost and the day that changed their lives forever.

This was a horrible tragedy. But the truth is that there are mountains crumbling and falling into the sea all around us. Sometimes it’s something that makes national headlines and results in some memorial being constructed somewhere. But sometimes the evidence is much less noticeable. It could be a “fine” that is really just a lie. Or a tear-streaked Compline program. Or a cryptic Facebook status or blog post.

For me, on a deeply personal level, “Mt. Deana” crumbled and fell into the sea about five months ago. God is working through several people – some who don’t even know it – to pull me out and put me back together. It’s a terribly difficult process, though. I would rather have skipped the whole thing altogether.

The great thing about Psalm 46:2 is that there has to be a verse 1. And that verse says “God is our refuge and strength, an ever-present help in trouble.” You can read this and know it’s true, but I’m sure most of us have lived it and experienced its truth. When something you thought was a solid foundation, such as the view you’ve had of church your whole life, crumbles underneath you and heads for the sea, God’s always there. In fact, he created that sea. He’s bigger than it is.

I told my house church the other night that my life right now is kind of like the book of Jonah. No happy ending I can put on it at this point. But I’m going to my homeland to breathe some refinery fumes and eat some decent Tex-Mex. I’m going back to my alma mater to hang out with middle school kids for a week. I’ll see a lot of people I’ve missed, and that’s always good. I’ll come home, turn 38 and try to have a better year. I think that’s all I can do right now. Which is OK, because God can do the rest.

Misadventures of a Misspent Youth, Part III

2009-06-22T12:48:00.000-07:00

Here’s yet another installment of shameful things I did as a kid. Except in this one, I really wasn’t a kid. I was 19 years old. Which by some definitions of the law made me a legal adult. (Meaning I could vote or join the military, but I couldn’t pick up a case of Cuervo at the store. Not that I ever tried. I don’t even know what Cuervo is. Really.)

It was the fall of 1990. My sophomore year in college was well underway. Then something notable happened. A dating relationship I was in ended rather badly. I don’t mean “badly” as in having an unpleasant conversation and deciding to part ways. The kind of “badly” I mean is more like the way WWII ended badly for Japan. Or the way that little volcanic eruption ended badly for the people of Pompeii. Or the way a few dishonest business decisions ended badly for Ken Lay. The way this relationship ended badly was of biblical proportions. Ask anyone who knew me then. It’s true.

What made this situation worse than it had to be was that after it ended badly, it kept ending badly. The guy (let’s call him… oh, I don’t know. Wait, I’ve got it.) Dick Cheney started being mean. Just plain mean. He talked smack about me to people I was friends with. He folded up my photos and sent them back to me through campus mail with an ugly note attached. Once, when my bff Carol and I walked past him, he yelled the “b” word at me. (OK, there is a little more to that story, but that’s the version I like to tell.) All of this silliness was BUGGING me. I just wanted to get on with my life. But I also wanted to get him back for all the harassment.

One weekend, I came up with a plan. Something that wasn’t illegal or even that big of a deal, but something I knew would annoy Dick Cheney and give me a nice sense of satisfaction. Dick Cheney happened to be what we then called a “metalhead” or “headbanger.” If music didn’t have people screaming and farm animals being slaughtered in it, he didn’t like it. On this weekend, I knew Dick Cheney was going to be out of town. So all day Saturday, I kept calling his phone and playing Debbie Gibson (someone he found particularly annoying, but didn’t we all?) on his answering machine until I filled up the entire tape. When I called one last time and only heard a “click,” I knew the tape was full and my work was done.

But you know, this still didn’t quite do it for me. He had been SO MEAN to me. I had to do something else. I thought long and hard about sugar in his gas tank. Oh yes, I did. But rational thought prevailed and I decided to do something less destructive. One night, my friend and I saw Dick Cheney’s car in a campus parking lot. (Once again, I must emphatically declare that this friend was not my bff Carol. Carol would never dream of participating in something so juvenile and… well, illegal as what my other friend and I did that night.) Let’s call my friend Marilyn Monroe. Just for fun.

So Marilyn Monroe and I spotted Dick Cheney’s car. I said, “Hey, let’s steal his gas cap. In a few days we’ll put it back. Just to mess with him.” So we did. Stole his gas cap. A few nights later, we spotted his car again. We opened the gas tank cover to put the gas cap back, and wouldn’t you know it, he had bought a new one. So we took that one, too.

Marilyn Monroe put the two gas caps in a box and they moved around with us from dorm to apartment to apartment over the next couple of years. Then we graduated and Marilyn Monroe took them home to her parents’ house in Missouri. (Where her perplexed mother discovered them one day.) Marilyn Monroe and I had talked about waiting 20 years or so and then mailing them to Dick Cheney from some random address in a random state. I’ve stayed in touch with Marilyn Monroe and just about every time we talk, she says, “You know I still have those gas caps.” And now it’s been 19 years. So I have a year to figure out if I should mail them to Dick Cheney or not. I’m not the type to hold a grudge, especially over a relationship that ended so long ago. But I am just obnoxious enough to think that mailing the gas caps to Dick Cheney would still be pretty funny.

In tha HOUSE

2009-06-17T05:33:00.000-07:00

Jenna goes to free Baptist daycare (also known as VBS) for 2.5 hours this a.m., and I'm using the time to clean the house like a madwoman. Julia is going to help me. (She's still asleep and has no idea, the poor kid. HA HA) I was going to make a list to check off as I go, and I decided that going public with it would be more motivating. So today I'm going to see if I can:

empty all the trash
clean the bathrooms
clean the wood floors
sweep and mop the tile
fold some laundry
check Facebook a few times (might as well be realistic)

before I leave to get Jenna at 11:40.

UPDATE: I did everything but the wood floors. And folding laundry. Hey, I'm pacing myself.

Guess!

2009-06-10T21:26:00.000-07:00

And now for Part Deux of my internationally-acclaimed blog series “Clothes That Changed My Life.”

Part One featured my Wal-Mart Miracle Shoes. (Moment of reverent silence, please.) Now let’s move on to… my Guess jeans.

Guess jeans were all the rage in the mid- to late-’80s. They weren’t just the “in” thing to wear; they were a requirement. Especially at a yuppie school like mine. I don’t think I can stress enough that you JUST HAD TO HAVE THEM. For social survival. Ask anyone who was in high school during that time. It’s true.

Like everything else that was all the rage in the ’80s (like the Porsche, Michael Jackson concert tickets and cocaine), Guess jeans were expensive. They ran about 50 to 60 bucks, which was a lot of money for a pair of jeans back then. It was even more money to my minister dad and teacher mom. They didn’t just hand me incredibly overpriced jeans. I had to work for them. I had to make good grades. Which I did. To get Guess jeans. Because I HAD TO HAVE THEM.

So I made the grades and my mom and I went shopping. Now you didn’t just go buy any old pair of Guess jeans. They had to be the tapered leg with the zippers at the ankles. And they had to be the tiniest size you could possibly fit into. They had to be painful to wear. Because this was the ’80s and your jeans were supposed to look like you had been poured into them. I actually knew girls who carried pliers in their purses so they could pull their jeans back up after going to the bathroom. I did not personally do this. Well, I did pull them back up after going to the bathroom. But I did not use pliers. This paragraph just took a rather awkward turn. Let’s move on.

I had a close friend who could fit into the very smallest size of jeans that Guess made. And I hated her for it. Because that’s what girls do. They hate their friends. Ask any female. It’s true. I had to settle for the second-smallest size Guess made. I pouted briefly and then got over it. Because now I had them. Guess jeans. I would now be complete.

On some other blog somewhere, maybe a blog belonging to someone who seeks deeper meaning in things, this story would now take a turn like this: I would say that after I got those jeans and wore them for a while, I learned that I was still not truly happy and that true joy does not come from material things. Then I would quote a few Bible verses, watch Pat Robertson and turn in for the night.

But not at Deanaland. I’m here to tell you that those Guess jeans made me very happy. And it wasn’t a silly, shallow teenage girl kind of happiness. This was a happiness that came from the very core of my being. There was nothing like pulling those things out of the dryer while the ankle zippers were still hot. Just putting them on meant my day was going to be a little better. Especially if I put them on with my pink Hard Rock Café shirt (New York City), pink scrunchy socks and white canvas Keds. Those jeans got me dates. They got me glares from the popular girls who knew I looked better in my Guess jeans than they looked in theirs. Those jeans were not just something to wear. They gave me purpose.

I wore those things through the last half of high school and then they went with me to college in 1989. During the fall of my sophomore year, I was hanging out with some friends when I went to sit down on the ground. And with that, my beloved jeans gave up. I almost heard them say “We cannot do this for one more second” as they ripped along the bottom of the back right pocket. (The pocket with the upside-down triangle logo.) Thankfully, I was wearing a long (Guess!) shirt.

My Guess jeans may have been done with me, but I wasn’t done with them. When I got home, I took a pair of scissors to them, ripped them up and wore them a few more years. Finally, around the time I got married, they had to go. They had served their purpose. They died a valiant death.

I’ve had lots of jeans since those Guess jeans. I’ve loved a lot of them, including my current favorites, my Lucky jeans. But my high-waisted, tapered-leg Guess jeans will always hold a special place in my heart.

Update

2009-06-09T08:25:00.000-07:00

My Whole Entire Life Story still had us living in Baytown, so I updated it.

Teen-aged Deana Strikes Again

2009-06-02T08:13:00.000-07:00

Inspired by the comments on my last post, I have now decided to pull out a deep, dark moment from my past and post it for the world to see. What you are about to read, my friends (and/or stalkers), is an account of the most dishonest moment of my life.

First, a disclaimer. Let me assure you that I have been an unbelievably honest person my entire adult life. I’ve left stores without paying for things on the bottom rack of my cart because I forgot they were there. And I have always marched right back inside to pay for them. I have corrected cashiers who have mistakenly tried to give me too much change. I even found a $20 bill on a street in my neighborhood one day in 2005 and took it directly to our church to contribute it to the tsunami relief fund. I’m certainly not perfect and I have my weaknesses, but I am not dishonest. Making stuff up and passing it off as truth is just not part of who I am.

But there was a day long ago that it was. That was the day all honesty flew right out the window into the refinery-scented air of a town called Beaumont, Texas. I was a junior at Beaumont Christian High School in the spring of 1988. I had a teacher who I will call Mr. ZXCVBNM for the sake of this story. I liked Mr. ZXCVBNM at first. He was a nice guy and told funny stories. But we students soon realized Mr. ZXCVBNM was out to get us. He was almost obsessed with finding reasons to give kids detention. His big hang-up was candy and/or gum. If you had your purse open and he glanced inside and saw a pack of gum, you got detention. If he could prove you had any kind of candy or gum on your person, you got detention. If you had Skittles at lunch and were just chewing up the last mouthful on your way to his class, you had better swallow it before you walk through the door because, believe me, you were getting detention.

One day our class had gone to study hall in the library. I was sitting on the floor with some friends and we were studying. One friend offered me one of those jumbo cinnamon-flavored gummy bears. It was still in its wrapper and I was going to save it for later. But I was in the middle of writing something down when my friend handed it to me, so I rested it on my knee until I could get to the end of my sentence to put it up.

But I didn’t move quickly enough. Mr. ZXCVBNM walked by, saw the gummy bear, and I was busted. But instead of detention this time, he had another idea. Handing me a razor blade, he told me to scrape all the dried-up gum from underneath all the chairs and tables in the library.

Naturally, I was not happy about this. As I sat under a table scraping off wads of gum, something occurred to me. This teacher had just handed me a razor blade. If I were to somehow accidentally hurt myself with it, he could get in big trouble.

Now for another disclaimer. I was not a cutter. No one even knew what that was back then. In those days, the most self-destructive thing I had a habit of doing was skipping a couple of meals on Friday so I could slide into my super-tiny Guess jeans for a date on Saturday. And that was out of sheer vanity. (Oh, how I loved those Guess jeans. I’ll blog about them later in my “Clothes That Changed My Life” blog series.)

So this was not the self-mutilation you read about. This was simply vengeance. Situated beneath a table and out of everyone’s sight, I sawed back and forth on my left thumb until I had a pretty convincing three-inch long cut. I placed the cut strategically because my story was going to be that my right hand slipped while I was scraping and cut my left hand. I got it looking the way I wanted it, said nothing about it at school, went home and showed my dad what had happened.

That’s all it took. My dad freaked. He called the school. Didn’t they know I was in my ninth year of piano? Didn’t they know I was considering a college career in music? What if I had cut a tendon? What kind of teacher hands a kid a razor blade?

So yes, Mr. ZXCVBNM got in trouble. He even pulled me out of class the next day and yelled at me for getting him in trouble. And he didn’t even know the cut was not an accident.

I waited until the guy got fired (the year after I graduated, he got caught in the locker room in a compromising position with a 16-year-old girl) before I told my parents what I had done. By then, everyone was so disgusted with him that my parents really didn’t care.

Yes, I did a bad thing. But do I feel bad about it? Not really. I feel worse about not feeling bad about it, if that makes any sense.

And I still don’t think teachers should give kids razor blades.

Spinach

2009-05-31T19:49:00.000-07:00

Today I was meeting with some people and we were asked to share something we regret. I shared something but kept a few other things to myself. Including one thing I will now share with you. I didn’t want to mention it today because I’m still trying to get to know people here and the last thing I need is for them to think I’m a COMPLETELY HORRIBLE PERSON. Although quite a few people from church read my blog, so they’re going to find out anyway. Oh, well.
It was my freshman year of college and I was home on a break. The guy I had dated through much of high school had a new girlfriend. I thought she was sort of a skank, and she had called me at work and harassed me once. Plus she was dating my ex, and that’s a perfectly good reason not to like someone, right?

So one night, my friend and I were hanging out and we decided we should do something somewhat vindictive toward this person. Because I did not like her. Because she was a skank dating my ex. I feel like I should give this person a name for this story’s sake, but I don’t want to use her real name. I think I’ll go with BLARGH because I don’t know anyone named that and that way no one I know will get mad at me.

DISCLAIMER: The friend mentioned in this story was NOT my bff Carol. Carol is too sweet and good to ever dream up anything like what I’m about to describe. My accomplice in this story was a friend from high school with whom I’m no longer in contact. For this story, I think I’ll call her SMOOSH because I don’t know anyone named that, and…well, you know.

SMOOSH and I wanted to do something obnoxious to BLARGH, but nothing destructive. Nothing that would really get us in trouble. After poking around in SMOOSH’s kitchen, we came up with a giant, Sam’s-sized can of spinach. We opened it (we had to saw it open with a knife because we couldn’t find the can opener) drove over to BLARGH’s house and dumped the spinach all over the back of her car. Then SMOOSH and I decided we should split up and pretend we hadn’t seen each other all night. Because if someone knew we had been together, it might be easier for us to get implicated in this totally obnoxious and immature (but funny… I mean, come on) act. So SMOOSH dropped me off at home and she went to her house.

I hadn’t been home very long when I got a call from my ex. What the heck – I’ll use his real name. Jason was FUMING. He knew it was SMOOSH and I who were responsible. Did we really think we could get away with this? Didn’t I know this was vandalism? Didn’t I know BLARGH’s dad was a cop? I vehemently denied the whole thing, told Jason he was delusional and hung up.

Then I started to worry. I called SMOOSH and let her know Jason was on to us. We knew we had to come up with a way to make people think we had nothing to do with this. I told her I would come up with something and hung up. Then genius struck. I had the perfect idea. My parents weren’t home. I went into the kitchen, got an egg out of the refrigerator, went outside and threw it against the back window of my car. Then I went inside, got a snack and turned on the TV.

After a while, my parents came home. Somebody had egged my car, they said! You have GOT to be kidding. I ran outside and feigned surprise and shock. Who could have done this? I went back inside and called Jason. You will never believe this, I said. Someone egged my car. And was it HIM? HUH? WAS IT?

No, it wasn’t him! He swore he had nothing to do with it. Then he said, “You know, it sounds like someone knows we used to date and they’re just trying to mess with us by getting BLARGH’s car and your car.”

That makes sense, I told him. That must be it. We hung up and that is the last SMOOSH and I ever heard about the incident.

But you know what? Come to think of it, I don’t really regret what SMOOSH and I did that night. I still think it’s pretty funny, actually. Not sure what that says about me.

Free the "E"

2009-05-23T17:26:00.000-07:00

During the ridiculous amount of time I’ve spent reading Stuff Christians Like, I’ve come across something I’ve wondered about for years. The blog’s author describes the fascination some churches have with adding an unnecessary (and incorrect, from a language perspective) letter “e” to the end of church names. You know, like Cross Pointe, Life Pointe, etc. (There’s also the phenomenon of church titles losing the space between words, such as LifePointe, but I’ll complain about that some other time.)

This superfluous “e” epidemic is not limited to churches. A neighborhood near us is called “Westpointe.” There’s also “Midtowne Little Rock,” one of my favorite places to shop.

So where did this come from? What does this extra vowel communicate that a word without it would not? Is it supposed to be convey a more upscale image? Do those of us living in Forest Cove and Sunset Meadows live in the slums because we do not live in Westpointe and therefore do not have the luxury of a completely unnecessary letter at the end of our neighborhoods’ names?

My first run-in with the superfluous “e” happened in college. I was writing for the campus newspaper, and every fall we reported who had been chosen to serve as grand marshals of the Homecoming parade. Except, according to the alumni office, they were not grand marshals. They were “grande marshalls.” Because I know all of you are as obsessed with language as I am, let’s painstakingly dissect this.

First of all, “grande” is not a fancy way to spell “grand.” It’s a Spanish word meaning “large.” It’s also a title of honor given to the highest class of Spanish nobility. Which has nothing to do with an alumni weekend at a small Christian college in the middle of Nowhere County, Texas.

Now for the other word. “Marshall” (with a double-l on the end) is someone’s name. As in Thurgood Marshall, who served as associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1967-1991. The word “marshal” (with one “l”) has 12 definitions, one of which is an official charged with the arrangement or regulation of ceremonies, parades, etc.

So clearly, “grand marshal” was the correct and appropriate term. But here was the problem: the alumni office insisted on “grande marshall.” It was even embroidered on the purple sashes the grand marshals wore in the parade. At the same time, the newspaper adviser (also the head of the journalism department) insisted on “grand marshals.” So if I spelled it wrong to keep the alumni people happy, our adviser counted off for it as a spelling error. If I spelled it correctly to keep him happy, the alumni people got upset. So how did I handle this? I’ll tell you how. A few years later, after I had graduated and while Chad was in grad school, I got a job in that very same alumni office. One of the first things I did was spend $80 out of the Homecoming budget to have new sashes made with “Grand Marshal” embroidered on them. This, my friends, is the kind of extreme I will go to in order to preserve the English language.

Back to “pointe.” “Pointe” is not a fancy way to spell “point.” It’s a French word meaning “a position on the extreme tips of the toes.” If you’re a young girl taking ballet, around the 6th grade or so, you will begin learning “pointe,” which is how to dance in toe shoes. It’s very difficult and takes years of training. So that neighborhood near my house actually means “West Advanced Ballet Class.” Advanced dance training is hard work. It’s not a place I want to live. And “towne?” It means nothing whatsoever. No entry in my dictionary.

Unfortunately, I’m all too painfully aware that people will spell things the way they want to. But as for me and my house, we just say no to the extraneous “e.”

Stuff Christians Like

2009-05-18T09:03:00.000-07:00

This has got to be my new favorite blog: Stuff Christians Like.

I might be soulmates with the guy who runs it. He even makes fun of Precious Moments and Willow Tree. I think I love him.

I might come up with my own list of stuff Christians like. Also watch for more posts in my "Clothes/Shoes That Changed My Life" series.

Here's Jenna helping me make French toast this morning. See that face? I wake up to that every day. It pretty much makes life worth living.

My Favorite Shoes Ever

2009-05-15T11:21:00.000-07:00

I try to be aware. I try to be “wide awake,” like Bono on U2’s The Unforgettable Fire album. I try to be conscientious of the world around me. I try to be as well-read as I have time to be. I know the world is a broken, hurting place.

But I have been known to have moments of profound vanity and shallowness.

That’s why this post is all about really cute shoes.

Gather around and let me tell you the story of my Favorite Shoes Ever.

It was spring of 2006. I was in the Baytown Wal-Mart getting our weekly load of groceries. I don’t know what compelled me to walk down the shoe aisle. I’m not a snob about that kind of thing; it’s just that Wal-Mart isn’t exactly known for having cute shoes.

Then I saw them. Did my eyes deceive me? Extensive beading, braided wedge heel, long ribbons that tie around the ankle… was this for real? There was only one pair, and when I looked more closely, this one pair was in my size. Were these shoes worth adding 20 bucks to our grocery bill for that week? You bet they were. I snagged them like they were the Holy Grail. Because really, they were. I’ve never seen anything else like them in the Wal-Mart shoe department. People are always surprised when I say where I got them, because no one else has ever seen anything like them at Wal-Mart, either. I’ve tried to find them online with no luck. I consider this event to be a shoe miracle.

I must admit they are quite uncomfortable and I can only wear them if I’m not going to be out long. But as all women know, that doesn’t matter. Because they are so cute.

I get compliments on them all the time. Just yesterday, Chad and I were having a lunch date and a group of waitresses (not one, but a GROUP) came by to check out my shoes. It’s kind of like being famous.

Now let’s behold the cuteness. A moment of silence, please.

O, Wal-Mart miracle shoes, shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Thou art more lovely and more... cute.

Is it OK to love a pair of shoes this much? We sponsor a child in India through World Vision. Doesn’t that make it OK?

I know these shoes won’t last forever. I know one day they will completely fall apart. (I mean, come on, they’re from Wal-Mart.) When this dreaded day comes, they will get a tearful burial in the backyard. But I will never forget them. These are the shoes I will tell my grandkids about.

Church according to Jenna

2009-05-13T05:44:00.000-07:00

We went to a new house church last night and boy, does Jenna know how to make a first impression. The kids were all playing Simon Says and when it was Jenna's turn, she said, "Simon Says... TAKE YOUR CLOTHES OFF!" Fortunately, adults intervened and everyone stayed fully clothed.

This is the same kid who flashed our old house church one night. One couple never came back. Not kidding.

Girls' Weekend

2009-05-04T13:19:00.000-07:00

My bff Carol and I just had our super fun girls' weekend. She got here Thursday and left Sunday afternoon. We had SO much fun. After being "new" for almost three years in AR, it was so great to get to hang out with such a good friend that I've known for so long. (Notice how careful I was not to say OLD friend.) Carol and I met in the fall of 1989 (almost TWENTY years ago) during Welcome Week at ACU. I was 18 and she was 17. We were just kids! We were great friends that year, then roommates for two years, I found her a husband and we were each others' maids/matrons of honor. And we've managed to stay friends even though we haven't lived in the same town since 1993. (Maybe that's WHY we've managed to stay friends. ha ha)

Here we are as college sophomores in 1990.

Until last Thursday, Carol and I have only seen each other for a couple of hours in three years. In September 2005, my family evacuated to her house during Hurricane Rita. Despite the natural disaster that prompted our visit, we had a great time. (Even though both families got quite ill that week.)

Then we moved to AR, then Carol got pregnant with their third child and had some complications, then she had Katie, then the mother of her husband Patrick was diagnosed with cancer, and she passed away last November. I went to Texas for the funeral and Carol and I decided we should get together some time when something bad is NOT happening.

So she flew in Thursday and we ate out a lot, talked a lot, laughed a lot (Carol laughed so hard at Capriccio Grill that she had tears running down her face. And that was before we even got our drinks) and ate out some more. Saturday we shopped before going to stay at the Peabody. The next day we slept late, skipped church (oh yes, we did) and went to lunch at Cheeburger Cheeburger. Then back to the airport and back to real life.

We had so much fun that we didn't really care that it rained the whole time she was here. When I got home, Chad said, "You two should do that once a year." I said, "Once a year? She's coming back next weekend!"

Not really. But that would be cool.

Shift and Chicago

2009-04-23T11:58:00.000-07:00

Tuesday, Chad and I flew to Chicago to attend Shift, a youth ministry conference at Willow Creek Community Church. We've sat in some powerful sessions about how to reach teens in a messed-up culture. A major emphasis at this conference is the need to try new ways to minister to this generation instead of relying on what has always worked in the past. Teen culture is constantly changing, and those who minister to them have to be flexible in order to keep up.(Hence the name "Shift.") I think this is a great philosophy. I've witnessed ministry being carried out only because it worked in the past. With teens in an ever-evolving culture, that form of ministry simply does not work.

But here's something about youth ministry that does not change. This is what every youth ministry conference, book and seminary class could boil down to: Teens need adults in their lives who are not afraid of them. Some people think I'm trying to be funny when I say this, but youth ministry is basically mission work. The culture is different, the language is different, the clothes are different, the customs are different - even the food is different. Teens need adults who are not afraid to dive right into all the "weirdness" and embrace them for who they are and where they are at that time in their lives.

There are two other things teens need, and this didn't come from a book or a class -- this is what Chad and I have witnessed firsthand. Teens also need:

1) Fathers (or father figures)
2) Boundaries

Think about all the teens you know who are really hurting and they probably have an emotionally or physically absent father and/or virtually no rules. Kids with no rules like to brag about how great they've got it, but the truth is that boundaries give kids security. And about fathers -- there is no end to the damage the absence of a father can cause. We've seen this over and over in our youth groups, kids we've met at camps, etc.

Adolescence can be an awful time in someone's life. Freud even suggested adolescence is nothing more than a temporary mental illness. But teens are reachable, and they need adults who will not give up on them, but meet them where they are.

But we haven't JUST done conference stuff while we've been here. The last two nights, we've gone downtown to eat Chicago-style pizza and shop on Michigan Ave. Such fun. Other than Houston, I haven't been in a major city since my trip to NYC in 1986. (I feel like such a RUBE all of a sudden.) We've eaten pizza at Giordano's, ridden the train with a bunch of drunken Cubs fans and walked probably five miles up and down Michigan Ave. Oh, and did I mention our kids are not with us? They are back home under the care and supervision of my parents. Suckers!!

Spiritual Stories

2009-04-12T19:57:00.000-07:00

Everyone has a spiritual story. Even the people who think they don’t believe in anything. We all have a spirit, and those spirits are constantly writing away on their own autobiographies.

I love hearing people’s stories. In Baytown, I got to hear and write people’s stories on a regular basis for the local newspaper. What a humbling responsibility it is to take something as precious and intimate as someone’s personal account and turn into a written work. So many times, I sat down to write a feature and prayed that I would be somewhat capable enough of a writer to honor these people who had shared something so special with me. I wrote about survivors of the 1947 Texas City Disaster. I wrote about families devastated by Alzheimer’s Disease. I wrote about people whose homes were washed away by Carla and Alicia, the area’s most notorious hurricanes. I wrote about a dear woman at our church who had come from Mexico at 16 with nothing and eventually became Baytown’s first Habitat for Humanity house recipient. I loved hearing and writing people’s stories of strength, courage and hope in the face of adversity.

Because of the kind of writing I mostly do now, I don’t get to hear people’s stories as much as I used to. But I still wonder. Sitting in the sanctuary at Christ Church during Compline earlier tonight, I wondered about the people around me. I know why I’m there, but what brings them there? Is it the intimate, distraction-free time in God’s presence? Is it the pure voices of the Compline choir? What is it about their circumstances that calls them to seek out their Creator amid candlelight and ancient words? Is it a desire for communion with God? Is it guilt? Is it because they understand the word “sanctuary” to mean more than just a room in a church?

I wish I could write their stories.

Some people might call that nosy. But I like to think of it as being intrigued by the human experience in general. Maybe that’s a more positive way to say “nosy.”

I recently read Anne Rice’s spiritual autobiography. What an incredible story. And she tells this intensely personal account with such honesty – an honesty that ranges from sweet and reminiscent to heart-wrenching and brutal. Best known for her series of vampire books featuring the vampire Lestat, Rice spent her early years growing up in New Orleans as a devout Catholic. In college, Rice walked away from both the church and God, a process she calls “a catastrophe of the mind and heart.” For nearly four decades, Rice lived without faith. Then a series of events brought her back to God and to the religion of her childhood. “Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession” details Rice’s journey through the beauty and wonder of a developing faith, the excruciating loss of faith, and the joy – and pain – that accompanies a faith rediscovered and reborn.

Rice is remarkably candid in sharing this intimate process. More candid than I think I could be. My own spiritual auto-bio would stop abruptly with “TO BE CONTINUED” and a lot of blank pages to follow. And a fair amount of curse words thrown in, to be honest. Because, as Rice clearly illustrates, having a relationship with God has its seasons of hurt. Even for those of us who never lose our grip on our faith. Sometimes we are the foolishly enthusiastic Peter attempting to step out on the water, and sometimes we are the debilitated one having to be lowered through the roof to our Savior. Sometimes we reach out like the bleeding woman, hoping for a life-changing brush of his garment as he walks by. And sometimes we sit in a dimly-lit church with the choir’s reminder of “Quia viderunt oculi mei salutare tuum” – “For mine eyes have seen thy salvation” – and wait for a heavenly hand to get on with it already and turn the page to the next chapter.

I miss writing other people’s stories. Maybe one day I’ll sit down to write my own.

More signs Jenna has been on the computer too much

2009-04-06T12:09:00.001-07:00

Today at lunch, I had just prayed and ended it with "In Jesus' name, amen."

Jenna: What's Jesus' name?

Me: His name is Jesus.

Jenna: What's his password?

Me: I don't think he has a password.

Jenna: I think he does. I think it's "jelly."

Me: Jelly?

Jenna. Yes. Jesus Jelly.

Sacrifice

2009-04-04T07:56:00.001-07:00

I've been looking at the newly-released photos of the MLK assassination over at Life magazine. This is the one that grips me every time I look at it. Here is this black man -- the brother of the owner of the Lorraine Motel -- whose grandchildren and great-grandchildren will have rights he never had. Because of this blood he's cleaning up. It's just chilling. I think I could stare at this photo for a month and still not get all the ramifications of it. I wonder if they can award Pulitzer Prizes this long after a photo has been taken.

MLK

2009-04-03T21:14:00.000-07:00

There are things worth living for.

Then there are the things worth dying for.

He knew the difference.

January 15, 1929 - April 4, 1968

Go here to see previously unpublished photos of the aftermath of the MLK assassination. Some of them are the most moving photos I've seen in a long time.

Spring Break

2009-03-26T11:06:00.000-07:00

This is what spring break does to Jenna's room:

But don't worry, there's an "after" picture:

The last couple of years, we've been fans of not going anywhere for spring break. It's nice to actually take a break instead of packing up the family and exhausting ourselves on a long road trip. So we are staying close to home this year. Besides, I just really didn't have it in me to plan a trip this year.

But we did go to Wye Mountain, where daffodils are blooming by the thousands. We had to leave suddenly when Jenna needed to potty and didn't like the looks of the port-a-potties. I was so proud! A girl after my own heart.

And the girls and I spent yesterday afternoon hanging out in downtown Little Rock. Here are the girls on the trolley. (Jenna loved it. Julia, on the other hand, is getting too cool to think this kind of thing is fun. Don't know if you can tell from the picture.)

And last weekend, I threw a Twilight DVD release party at church. (It was in the teen room, but attendees were mostly made up of lovestruck moms like me.) We had refreshments (don't worry -- it was black cherry Kool-Aid):

And people like the Williams women had fun swooning over Edward:

So that's it. A peek into our boring spring break lives. Hopefully soon I can review one of the books I've been trying to get read.

Spiritual Confession

2009-03-17T08:56:00.000-07:00

No, not mine. Anne Rice's spiritual confession. Right now I'm reading her auto-biographical "Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession." It chronicles her journey from growing up Catholic to completely losing her faith to finding it again. I'm about halfway through it and it's both fascinating and heart-wrenching, so far. I've never read anything by her before -- I never got into her vampire series. I'll probably post about the book when I finish it.

This book is the result of a trip to the library with the girls last week. I've finally ended my period of Twilight mourning. You know, when you're so sad you've finished the series that you don't want to read anything for a while. For me, this lasted for several months. Unless you count Maureen (Marcia Brady) McCormick's "Here's the Story," which was like every other child star's auto-bio you can imagine. ("I was a child star and as soon as the show ended, I got hooked on drugs." Blah, blah blah...) SO depressing. Eric Clapton's auto-bio was depressing, too, but it was at least interesting.

I also got "Sundays in America: A Yearlong Road Trip in Search of Christian Faith" by Suzanne Strempek Shea. It's Shea's account of visiting a different church every Sunday for a year. And I got "Riding the Bus With My Sister" by Rachel Simon, which is the true-life story of the author's relationship with her mentally retarded sister. I know I'll have something to blog about after reading that one. One of my closest childhood friends was a mentally-retarded woman who went to my church. We played with my dollhouse, swam in her pool and had a great time together. Most of the time I forgot she was my mom's age and I was shocked when I got old enough to realize there was something "wrong" with her. I just thought she was a grown-up who lived with her parents and was a lot of fun.

Now I just need TIME to read all this stuff.

A Shield Around Me

2009-03-07T13:58:00.000-08:00

Psalm 3 has been in my head lately. I memorized it in 8th grade and it’s managed to stay in my head all these years.

A psalm of David. When he fled from his son Absalom.
1 O LORD, how many are my foes!
How many rise up against me!
2 Many are saying of me,
"God will not deliver him."
Selah [a]
3 But you are a shield around me, O LORD;
you bestow glory on me and lift [b] up my head.
4 To the LORD I cry aloud,
and he answers me from his holy hill.
Selah
5 I lie down and sleep;
I wake again, because the LORD sustains me.
6 I will not fear the tens of thousands
drawn up against me on every side.
7 Arise, O LORD!
Deliver me, O my God!
Strike all my enemies on the jaw;
break the teeth of the wicked.
8 From the LORD comes deliverance.
May your blessing be on your people.
Selah

When I committed this Psalm to memory at age 13, I was trying to arm myself with scripture. Actually, I was just trying to get through each day. It was the worst year of my life. Take the typical 13-year-old issues, add some not-so-typical 13-year-old issues, and, just for fun, throw in a heapin’ helpin’ of physical awkwardness – and you’ve got one hell of an adolescent nightmare. I hated walking through the doors of my school every morning and I hated every second I was there. Church wasn’t much better. Most nights, I went to sleep praying I could wake up as someone else. Maybe as some Latina chick named Veronica in the Bronx. Or in an African hut on the other side of the globe. Anywhere but where I was would have been fine.

I tried to stay positive. Really, I did. I tried waking up to music with good, motivational messages like “Don’t Look Back” by Boston (a song that turns my stomach now). But whatever mood those songs put me in was shattered the second I walked into my school.

So I looked to scripture. I had read about POWs who had endured their ordeal with only the scripture they had memorized before being captured. They didn’t see a Bible for years and could only rely on the words in their memory. This inspired me to memorize more scripture, so I opened to the Psalms. My eyes fell on the third one, which looked short enough to remember. And its words spoke to me – sometimes in different ways, depending on what was going on. Some days I really liked the concept of God as a shield. Some days, verse five made it easier for me to get out of bed. And some days, I pictured God breaking the teeth of the wicked. Violent as it was, that image provided me with a lot of comfort. Just knowing he could do that.

And really, really wishing he would…

That year never got better. In fact, it got remarkably worse at the end of the year. But the words of Psalm 3 stayed in my head, and I like to think now that it kept me going. It kept me getting up, getting dressed and trudging into a school (ironically, a Christian school) in which I was grimly outnumbered by my foes.

I don’t really remember the words to that stupid Boston song. But I remember the words of Psalm 3.

Now I spend time regularly with teens, and some of them who may be hurting as much or more than I was at 13. Over the years, I’ve offered the words of the third Psalm to them with the promise “This Psalm will get you through ANYTHING.” I hope it helps them the way it helped me.

Sometimes we want answers from God that never come. We can hurt deeply for a long time without knowing why. But focusing on God’s presence, protection and power can make it bearable until deliverance comes at last.

Better!

2009-03-01T20:25:00.000-08:00

So who's tired of looking at my Wii-injured eye? I AM. Therefore, I'm updating my blog to push that photo down a little. Incidentally, my eye is much better now. I can use my eyebrow pencil without crying.

Some recent excitement (that doesn't involve bleeding or bruising... yet) is our lovely new toy. Some friends sent us a Target gift card a couple of weeks ago and I knew exactly what we needed. We needed to pulse. We needed to chop. We needed to blend, shred and liquefy. We needed an Oster 12-speed blender/food processor combo.

Ta-da!!

There is no end to the fun we can have with this new toy of ours. The first day, Julia and her friend Angel came home from school and we made Thin Mint milkshakes. Oh, YES. They were grand. The next day, the girls came home and we looked around the kitchen for stuff to make a milkshake with (since all the Thin Mints were consumed the day before.) We found bananas, chocolate ice cream and a Hershey bar. So we made Banana Chocolate-Chip milkshakes, which were even better than the Thin Mint ones.

But at this point, I started to get a little nervous. I got a gym membership a month or so ago, and I realized that daily milkshakes might undo everything I was getting accomplished at the gym. So I decided I should fire up the food processor attachment and make something healthy. My friend Katie gave me a recipe and, a quick trip to the store later, I was enjoying hummus on wheat pita bread with roasted red peppers. YUM. (OK, a different kind of "yum" than the milkshakes, but still yum.)

We're excited to see what all this thing can do. The other day, Julia pureed some fruit, poured it into a cup, froze it and later said it was the yummiest thing she had ever eaten. This appliance is life-changing, I'm telling you!

Just so you won't think I'm spending all my time blending things or getting socked in the head by the Wii remote, here's my latest article from Arkansas Life magazine. It was a lot of fun to research and write (I got to interview some Arkansas celebrities, including Jancey Sheats -- a Baytown girl) and it helped get me motivated to start working out regularly. Hey, if I can do it, ANYONE can.

Safe distance

2009-02-19T10:46:00.000-08:00

You know all those warnings that come with the Wii, like "have plenty of space around you... don't stand too close to anyone or anything..." Well, this is why:

Tuesday afternoon, Jenna was playing Wii when it was time to pick up Julia from school. I had told her not to start another game, but she started one anyway. I decided not to fight it and thought I would put her shoes on her while she played. So I was putting her shoes on her while she played baseball and she must have knocked one out of the park because her Wii remote and my eyebrow made contact with so much force that I didn't know what had happened for a few seconds. Then I heard a combination moaning/sobbing sound, which I then realized was coming from me. Then I drew my hand away from my eye and saw that quite a bit of blood was involved. At this point, poor Jenna FREAKED. She not only hit Mommy and made her cry, but made her bleed, too! She was devastated. So, while choking back sobs and running to the bathroom, I was yelling, "Don't feel bad! It wasn't your fault!" Because really, I shouldn't have been so close to her while she was playing. In the bathroom, I frantically grabbed a wad of toilet paper while dripping blood all over the sink and counter. (Which I had to clean up before house church that night, lest anyone think really weird things are going on at our house.)

I got Jenna in the car and drove with one hand to the Julia's school while keeping the almost-soaked toilet paper wad on my eyebrow. Julia got in the car and her mouth dropped open. I must have looked like I had been shot. When I told her what happened, she said, "I've always told you Jenna was strong." (Julia has been the victim of Jenna's brutality -- intentional or otherwise -- for 4.5 years.)

Two days later, I've got an inch-long gash under my eyebrow and a bruise covering my eyelid. Make-up and strategically-placed bangs help cover it up pretty well. I probably should have had it checked out to see if it needed a stitch or two, but Chad was out of the country (which he says is proof he did not do this to me) and I had to do two phone interviews as soon as I got home with the girls. If it scars, I'm hoping it will just make me look cool.

Belonging

2009-02-15T18:45:00.000-08:00

We went back to Christ Church tonight for the Compline service. Compline is a traditional prayer service that you can learn more about here.

Compline is like no other Sunday night service I’ve previously attended. For one thing, it’s so quiet. Jenna tried whispering to us between songs and she may as well have been yelling, it was so quiet in there. It was kind of like a funeral, without all the sadness. The service is sung by the Christ Church Compline Choir, which is unaccompanied, but so different from the a cappella singing Chad and I grew up with in the Church of Christ. The two are worlds apart musically, and many of the hymns we grew up singing spoke more to each other (“Farther along, we’ll know all about it”) than to God. The Compline choir sings centuries-old prayers, like this one by John Milton:

“Lord, for they tender mercy’s sake lay not our sins to our charge; but forgive that is past and give us grace to amend our sinful lives; to decline from sin, and incline to virtue, that we may walk in an upright heart before thee this night and evermore.”

The service also had “Versicle” and “the Collects,” new terms to me. And another profound difference was the absence of social interaction. No one stood around talking after it was over. That’s not what this time is for. It’s more of an intimate time between God and the faithful. I like that. I just wish that it hadn’t been so short. Compline typically lasts 15-20 minutes, quite a switch for those of us who are used to settling in for at least an hour of church. Even 4-year-old Jenna whimpered “But I don’t want to go home yet.”

Lately I’ve been thinking about what it means to belong somewhere. As a minister’s kid, I moved around a lot growing up until we finally settled in Beaumont, TX, when I was 12. Beaumont was my dad’s hometown. His parents had moved there during the Depression. There have been Hambys in the Beaumont area since around 1930. I remember riding down 11th Street and seeing my last name on the sign outside my grandfather’s accounting firm: “HAMBY, FUNCHESS & WHITE.” The sign reminded me that I had roots in that town. I belonged there. It was my home.

Beaumont is a very different place now, but I’ll always think of it as home, in a way. All four of my grandparents are buried there, in a cemetery thick with grand oak trees strung with Spanish moss on the banks of the Neches River. My parents will be buried there someday, too. I’ll always find my way back to Beaumont because that’s where “my people” are – living and dead.

Now I live in another state where, except for a great-grandmother from Pine Bluff and some distant relatives associated with Harding, I have no familial connections. It’s nice here. I like it. I can see staying here for a long time. Belonging here is another story, though. I guess I don’t have to feel like I belong somewhere to like living there. It’s a feeling I’m not used to, though. I don’t know how to get used to it.

But tonight, in that church I’ve only visited on one other occasion, I belonged. We all did. That entire roomful of strangers. The man behind us who muttered all the words to the service along with the officiant. The woman on the kneeling bench who was oblivious to everyone around her. We clung to the common thread of being sinners who long for upright hearts; who reach upward to a Father who ever reaches down to us. Maybe church is only supposed to be about one relationship – that relationship that sin should sever but there, amid the candlelight and ancient words, is whole and complete.

I probably could get used to that. I just need more time, though. Any churches out there with three-hour Compline services? That would be a good start.

Like Mommy

2009-02-07T16:25:00.001-08:00

Every morning, if there's not a mad rush to get out the door, Chad and I like to enjoy a longish kiss before he takes Julia to school. This usually takes place in the kitchen while I've got a dishrag or cereal bowl in my hand. It's not like we're shoving the dishes off the table like in that scene from "Fatal Attraction" (although that might be fun some time). It's just a nice little moment to share before we're apart the rest of the day. A moment that rarely happens without Julia's complete mortification.

So yesterday, I was leaving to go somewhere and Jenna ran up to give me a kiss. As I bent down to kiss her, she closed her eyes and tilted her head to one side.

"What are you doing?" I asked.

"I want to kiss like a mommy," she said.

I have a 4-year-old who wants to kiss like a mommy. I don't know how I got on this train, but I need to back it up. And fast.

25 Things

2009-02-04T06:22:00.001-08:00

I posted this on Facebook, but for those of you who missed it, here are 25 random pieces of information about me. Enjoy!

1) My Garfield lunchbox got stolen in 6th grade at Taylor Middle School in Lovington, New Mexico.

2) Once in college, a girl had done something pretty vindictive toward me. So I called her (before Caller ID), told her she was fat and hung up. Pretty immature for a 19-year-old, I know.

3) All my life, I have had a deep, inexplicable fear of being alone in a swimming pool. If it’s an indoor swimming pool (which makes the water darker) it’s a lot worse. My fear is not of drowning. It’s too weird to tell anyone, really. But it’s marine mammals. Large ones. I’m afraid I will brush up against a humpback whale or something. The very thought is making my heart beat faster as I type this because it freaks me out so badly. In my logical mind, I KNOW marine mammals cannot survive in heated, chlorinated water. And even if they could, and if they somehow got into a swimming pool, I know they would not do anything to hurt me. This is what makes it a phobia, people, it’s completely illogical. I’ve even forgotten about this phobia and gone swimming by myself, only to get halfway across the pool and completely freeze up with the most dreadful feeling of fear that I’ve never experienced in any other situation. I’m fine, though if anyone else is around, even if I don’t know them. They don’t even have to be in the pool, just where I can see them. I probably need therapy, meds, the whole bit. To make it weirder (as if it needs to be), I’ve never had a traumatic experience involving water or a large marine mammal.

4) My dad was a youth minister and when I was in late elementary school/early junior high, I had a habit of developing mad crushes on the guys in my dad’s youth groups. To the point of sobbing myself to sleep if one of them ever brought a girlfriend to church.

5) When I was about nine, I had a dream in which I saw a white van turned over on the side of the road. Since then, I’ve always been leery of traveling in white vans. Our church in Baytown had one and I was never comfortable going on long trips in it.

6) I have never mowed a lawn in my life.

7) I believe my deceased grandparents (dad’s side) have spoken to me in dreams.

8) My best guy friend from high school was best friends in college with the guy who is now married to my husband’s sister’s best friend from high school.

9) I love my husband’s blue eyes. And his dark hair, especially when it starts getting too long and curls a little behind his ears. (But then he always gets it cut, because it bugs him.)

10) Everyone seems to think I need to write a book, but I think I’m too ADD to do that. I like writing magazine and newspaper articles and then never having to think about them again.

11) A guy in my dad’s youth group accidentally killed my gerbil when I was in 6th grade.

12) I’ve always wanted to bobsled. Like in the Olympics.

13) I’ve never wanted a new car – even as a teen , when everyone does – because I figured then (and now) that I could never have one.

14) I have recurring dreams about Princess Diana in which we go out to lunch and complain to each other about our mothers-in-law.

15) I love my C-section scars and would never dream of doing anything to reduce their appearance.

16) I can truly say that I never want to be rich or famous. Money complicates things, and I was famous in one small town for four years and that was enough. A nice and fun experience, but enough.

17) I was on WIC (Women, Infants and Children – a government assistance program) after Julia was born.

18) I’m still in touch with the mother of the guy I dated all through high school.

19) Juice can give me a headache within minutes of drinking it, so I never, never do. Something’s probably up with my blood sugar. Apples do the same thing. But candy bars don’t bother me at all. Go figure.

20) I had the ultimate budget wedding. My dad had lost his job and my grandpa gave me $1,000 for the wedding, and that’s all we had. My mom can find bargains like nobody’s business, plus she’s a great seamstress and she was able to make my dress. So we still pulled off a nice wedding. I’ve been to much more elaborate weddings and they are certainly nice, but I’ve never regretted anything about mine.

21) There are two things I love so much that I rarely talk about them because I don’t want people to think I’m crazy: music and Laura Ingalls Wilder.

22) I wish I could have been a journalist back in the old days of counting headlines and setting type.

23) When I was three, I drew all over the family dog (who had a light brown coat) with a bright pink magic marker. My parents had to take him to the vet to get it washed out, and I didn’t see my markers for a month.

24) In high school, I was able to lose weight very easily, and I used to go for a day or so without eating just to see how little I could get. Knowing what I know now, I could have easily slipped into anorexia and I’ve always been thankful I didn’t.

25) I hated dolls when I was a kid. If I ever got one as a present, I threw it into a box in my closet. By the time I was ten or so, I had a box full of poor, sad, unwanted dolls.

Growing up CoC

2009-01-27T07:59:00.001-08:00

What an amazing bunch of comments I got on my last post. I heard from my bff, THREE Episcopal priests (including the one I met briefly at Christ Church last Thursday), two extremely helpful explanations of the meaning of "IHS" (growing up CoC, I was told that it meant "In His Service"), two of my sweet Baytown friends and several who discussed their upbringing/current membership in the Church of Christ.

Although the struggle I mentioned in that post has more to do with this, my post opened an interesting discussion about finding God outside your own church traditions. Having stepped out of the traditional Church of Christ upon moving here in 2006, I carry mixed feelings about things I encountered in my 35 years as a CoC member. I believe my dad's comment shows a beautiful way to come to terms with beliefs with which people are raised with which they eventually grow to disagree.

I'm reposting his comment here:

Deana:

God bless you in your continued search to more like Christ in Spirit and in Truth.
My dad's CoC generation of the early 1900's experienced the aftershocks of what I call the, "early fallout from the Restoration Movement."

My generation dealt with the aftershocks of my dad's aftershocks.

Now, in a like manner, your generation is dealing with the aftershocks of my generation's aftershocks.

Strangely enough, each generation will have aftershocks of previous generations. I call this, "growth." In other words, I believe you are experiencing a continuing Restoration Movement. This is good, but there will be aftershocks. There will be fallout. There will be conflict within your soul. The way you were raised, our traditions, the things you have learned along the way, those things you will encounter on your path to eternity...all of these plus whatever else will accompany you on your journey. I believe that all of this is good.

I think that many in each generation believe that the Restoration Movement (whatever this is) is complete...that there is no more restoring to be done. God forbid.

Growing up in the Church of Christ and being a CoC minister for 28 years brought many experiences. Some beautiful and some bitterful (not sure "bitterful" is a word but if not, it should be.)

Now at age 73, I still am a rather traditional CoC type. But I believe I grew in my Restoration much further than my dad's generation. Yet each generation may have been where it needed to be at the time.

But I graciously accept and condone your Restoration growth which exceeds my Restoration growth.

I see it all as a continuing saga. None of us will ever feel the complete fulfillment of peace, love and joy until that Day when we see Christ face to face and hear those blessed words, "Faithful servant, enter herein..."

Open Doors

2009-01-22T11:32:00.000-08:00

I didn’t tell anyone where I was going today, except Chad. More about that later.

I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about church and relationships and how those two things should fit together. And how they should fit together in my own life. It’s caused me to reevaluate and redefine some things. And it’s caused me to have a pretty rough couple of weeks. I ended up in a place that didn’t feel so good and before I knew it, I had worked myself up into a full-blown spiritual crisis.

So today, I wanted to go find God somewhere.

Like other people who grew up in Sunday School, I learned early on that God is everywhere. He’s with us all the time. He’s in our hearts. I get that. But I wanted to find him where I hadn’t looked for him before. In a place apart from my own religious traditions.

I remembered the ancient (by American standards, anyway) Catholic churches I visited as a child in Santa Fe. These buildings – some a couple hundred years old – stand open every day to welcome people in for prayer, whether they are Catholic or not. They didn’t care that I was an 11-year-old Church of Christ kid. They even let me light a candle to a saint I had never heard of.

I wanted to find God in a place like that. A place with ornate stained-glass windows and heavy wooden doors and people in robes who say things like “Eucharist” and “Maundy Thursday” and “diocese” and swing metal birdcages around with incense wafting out of them. A place with kneeling benches and stone floors and a general air of holiness. Surely there are places like that in a city like Little Rock.

So I googled.

And I found one. Christ Church Episcopal. It’s downtown, near the Capitol. Christ Church is known for its stone building with red doors. Sort of like a spiritual Elizabeth Arden. They keep the red doors open on weekdays for people like me to come in and pray. So I went.

I walked in through the red doors and instantly regretted wearing boots. It was so quiet in there, and my boots on the tile floor made it impossible for me to sneak in. I sat toward the back and an official looking man approached me. He apologized for all the activity going on in there at the time (some people were working on something at the pulpit and a janitor was mopping the floor) and offered to show me to the chapel. He took me to a smaller room off to the side – a room with marble floors and wooden kneeling benches.

“Stay as long as you like,” he said as he left.

I was kind of disappointed he wasn’t wearing a robe. I guess they only do that on Sundays.

I looked around the room. Stained glass, of course. Candles and a gold cross engraved with “IHS.” (What does that mean? There’s so much I don’t know.) Red prayer cushions dented by the knees of the faithful. Except for the city sounds outside, I sat in silence and took in a couple of Psalms, as well as “The Book of Common Prayer” in the book rack in front of me. Then I just tried to be there and be still – something so hard for me to do. I tried to focus on letting God in through all my senses. Breathing him in and letting him be… enough.

And I knew that in his infinite enoughness, God still gives me a wonderfully comforting husband who doesn’t act too perplexed when his wife cries for a week straight. And friends who pray from hundreds of miles away. Friends whose prayers really work. And two girls who continuously bring me joy. I am ridiculously blessed.

I wrote earlier that this process has taken me to a place that did not feel good. But it did today. Today, it led me to an open door.