Parenthetically Yours

You Had to be There

There are some things that you just “had to be there” for. The retelling doesn’t do it justice. That’s because the retelling can never satisfy the details necessary to explain why something was so funny, or epic, or sad.

For instance, all the words I could muster up could never clearly explain why it was so funny last night that my friend Lee choked on rice while laughing at Katie as she successfully guarded her tongue after burning herself and dropping a pan of brownies. You'd have to know that Lee also choked on a noodle a few months ago while sitting at the same dinner table. You'd also need to know that he'd just hit his funny bone so hard it put him in the floor with a numb arm. Epic, funny stuff. 

Also,if you happened to be at this year’s Gospel Music Association’s Dove Awards, you know that if you weren't there, you wouldn’t have been able to understand just how poignant and brutal Steven Curtis Chapman’s performance of “Cinderella” was. For those who don’t know, "Cinderella" is SCC’s song written for and about his adopted daughter Maria, who tragically died several months after the release of the song. 

If you were there in the audience, though, you would’ve known that during a commercial break, singer Donnie McClurkin came onto the stage, got our attention, and made an announcement that Aaron and Amanda Crabb were rushing to the emergency room because their two year old daughter had just fallen from a window and that it didn’t look good. We in the audience were shell-shocked. We prayed, we whispered, we prayed a again for little Eva. Then I noticed that the stagehands were setting up Steven’s band. I recognized his son Caleb tuning his guitar. There was his other son Will adjusting his drumset. Will is the son who was driving the vehicle that Maria ran in front of that fateful afternoon. I thought, “Surely he’s not about to come out and sing that song.” Sure enough. He did.

We were stunned and silent. Honestly, it was too much. Not a dry eye. In spirit, we were in two places at once: on the stage with him and in that ambulance headed to the hospital with the Crabb family. When it was over, we stood for well over a minute with a mixture of tears and applause. It was the defining moment of a show that was, quite frankly, void of meaning. But in that moment, the Dove Awards show was transcendent, and ironically, sacred. It took on a depth and weight that is never present or expected at awards shows. Even tributes and memorials come off feeling put-on and manufactured. But you couldn’t have manufactured this moment, which is precisely what made it bigger than the sum of its parts.

And that’s the miracle of Providence.

But you had to be there.

(rw)

Private Joys

I could start a new blog called “funny things Katie does” and it would have 10x the popularity of this one. The only problem is that if I posted every funny or outrageous thing she did or said, the internet might run out of hard drive storage.

Here are some recent examples:

We were having a morning conversation about our day’s schedule and she inexplicably starting talking in a deaf/mute voice, using sign language.

She’s been randomly attacking me around the house (I think she’s happy I’m home).

Retelling a story, she said, “I wanted to tell her ‘shut up you Nazi cow! I’m about to punch you in the face!’ ”

Now, some of these things might come across to the uninitiated as cruel or unusual. Unusual? Yes. Cruel? Yes. Especially when she digs her fingers into that space between my collarbone and my shoulder. Wow. That’s a sensitive spot.

Of course, I’m kidding about the cruel part, although she LOVES seeing me rattled or frightened. Some nights I’m as jittery as a newborn calf wandering around our expansive cottage waiting for her to jump out from under our kitchen table. I jerk and spin and giggle like a 4 year-old. Of course, since she lives life at 150 mph, she doesn’t always stop to consider the ramifications or possible consequences (and since I live life at school-zone speed, I stop to consider every possible ramification. I'm a real treat to live with). This means she regularly hits her head under the table, bangs an elbow into the wall, or dives into my knees. I can’t count how many times I’ve held my belly in a fit of unbridled laughter as she stumbles around the house holding her head mumbling, “O wow ow OHH…I think I really hurt myself.” Hahahaha. That shouldn't be that funny. But it is.

She also has the ability to have ridiculous things happen to her, like the time she heard a mother and daughter arguing one aisle over at Kroger. The next thing she knew is that someone walked up behind her, turned her around and slapped her in the face. The startled mother gasped and Katie screamed (with her voice rising two full octaves), “WHO ARE YOU?” The lady (with her hands over her mouth) nervously answered, “I thought you were my daughter.” Twenty feet away, dressed in nearly identical outfits, with nearly identical hair pulled up in the same messy ponytail, was the daughter looking on in horror. The two walked away from their full grocery basket and exited Kroger immediately while Katie was left standing in the baking aisle, face reddening with the slight impression of a hand on her cheek.

That actually happened.

The difficulty with this sort of revealing blog-storytelling, though, is that probably 90% of the time I find myself saying, "I wish I could write a blog about that." Usually I don't because doing so would just be inappropriate. Sometimes it's because it's, well, inappropriate. Other times it's because--well, private, funny moments are one of the eternal joys of marriage that no one ever told me about. I was always led to believe that the best things about marriage were things like sex, kids, building a home together, etc. But for me, it's the things I can never tell you. Plus, they would be silly and nonsensical out of context. They only make sense in the context of the growing landscape of us living out our vows. There are things she says and does, the records of which will never be stored outside my memory. They're for me. Only. I think that's called intimacy. 

It is a whirlwind of joy to be married to this girl.

Of my dreams.

(rw)

O Christmas Tree (stand)

I’m sitting here looking at a sad Christmas tree.  Actually, at this point, it’s only a small Fraser fir propped up against the wall. A tree doesn’t become a Christmas tree until the ornaments, lights, shiny balls, garland, popcorn-on-Trilene, etc, have all been flung upon the little bush.

Some plans fell through last night so Katie and I got all gung-ho to put up a tree. Through a series of stops and starts, we finally managed to get a tree into the house around 10 p.m. Yeah, kind of late to start trimming, but we managed to get completely off our normal schedule during the nine days we were away last week (which explains my lack of blogging lately). By the time we ended our week, we were staying up to nearly 2 a.m. and waking around 9 or later.  So, by the time we got the tree inside, we were still a good three hours from bedtime.

We found a great deal on trees from an independent farm in North Carolina at Kroger. We really wanted to support the local Boy Scouts but their lowest price was over twice what we paid at Kroger. I’m all about supporting the li’l troops, but they need to get a hint from their sister tribe and start selling cookies to raise money. Or gasoline.

We got things arranged in the house to make room by the front window because, well, you know, you gotta show off your Christmas spirit. We got spirit, yes we do! We got spirit…and here’s a shiny tree in our front window to prove it! Then I broke several mom-inspired rules by building an incredibly precarious ladder consisting of a chair, a toolbox, and a guitar amp to retrieve our decorations from the attic. It was precisely the right height and I didn’t fall. Success.

So, décor down, space secure, tree inside, coffee brewing, nativity scene in place, Ella Fitzgerald playing…the scene was idyllic. “Honey, where’s our tree stand?” called my beloved. “Uh…in the storage room?” “No it’s not.” We spent the next 30 minutes turning our 1,100 square feet upside down. How many places can a tree stand hide? Apparently there’s at least one really amazing hiding spot that it has found.

Do you know how difficult it is to decorate a tree as it’s leaning against the wall? Very. So I take off back to Kroger (it’s 10:50 at this point) and spent a good 15 minutes scouring the entire store for a simple stand. Do you know what? They don’t sell ‘em. Sure, they have ornaments, lights, shiny balls, garland, popcorn…they even have an animated Santa that wiggles around to a Brenda Lee song when you come near it. They have 200 trees out front and nary a stand to set them into (yeah, I know I ended that sentence with a preposition. Deal with it, grammar Nazi!).

So, here I sit donning my elf hat (with fake ears) waiting for the hardware store around the corner to open. I’m determined to not have a Charlie Brown Christmas tree. This little fir is going to get the best high-performance stand money can buy.

As long as it’s under $15.

(rw)

F-F-F-F-Freezing

So, Katie and I have been walking quite a bit lately. We've gone every day this week, sometimes in the evening and always in the morning. Fall mornings in Franklin are cliché: bright, crisp, and still. It's seriously something out of a Norman Rockwell painting. We love it. Of course, it's ridiculous (for us) to try to get up early enough to get a walk in, fix a quick breakfast and coffee, and for her to get to work on time. But I have to say, we've done a pretty good job of it. So far.

We had a revelation a few weeks ago that any day we walk in the morning, we are totally alert and energetic for most of the day. I would hardly call what we do "exercise," but it definitely gets the blood flowing. Now there's a phrase that makes no sense to me: "gets the blood flowing"--as if our blood has been sitting in our veins motionless throughout the night. I'm no doctor, but I'm pretty sure one of the bedrocks of biology is that our blood is always moving. But again, I'm no doctor.

 

I was the first one up this morning and put on my warmest approximation of "active" clothing (does H&M have an outdoor line?) and opened the front door. Frost. Uh-oh. This won't be pretty. Katie and I have very different temperature tolerances. I have a bit more of a laissez-faire relationship with weather and temperature. My beloved, however--any sudden change in temperature has some sort of effect on her brain where she feels like she's being either broiled or cryogenically frozen, depending upon the up or down movement of the mercury. I'm not saying she's overreacting but that her brain actually triggers her fight-or-flight mechanism. In warmer climes, she's been known to stand up and strip down to the bare necessities in a blink leaving behind a small pile of clothing on the floor as if the rapture has occurred. And in colder times, she can simultaneously ball herself up and pull a blanket across her, perfectly tucked, faster than santa eats cookies.

Knowing this, and seeing the frost, I knew I needed to start scraping off the icy residue from her windsheild. Since I'm an awesome husband, I did this without provocation or bribery. But since I'm an idiot, I did this without mentioning it. She proceeds to walk out after me, door locked behind her and says, "you've got a key, right?" Uh, no.

At 29 degrees, the Rockwellian fall morning became a frozen circle of hell as we looked around the house for an unlocked window or anything to jimmy the door with. Since the attempted break-in, though, we've been vigilant to make sure all the windows stay locked and have put extra measures in place to keep things locked tight. It's funny how in only 90 seconds I let panic start setting in. I began imagining that we may never get back in the house, that we'd freeze to death sitting comfortably in our rocking chairs on our porch. They'd make a Lifetime movie about us--the moronic couple that froze to death instead of breaking a window to get back inside. Then I remembered our landlord only lives a few blocks away and the panic subsided.

About then a friendly neighbor came outside on his way to work and saw us wandering aimlessly in the middle of the street. It's funny, the things you do when you don't know what to do. We looked like people who mindlessly meander while talking on their cellphone, except we didn't have any gadgets up to our ears. It was a confusing feeling. What do we do? Where do we go? Starbucks? Our neighbor Chuck thought we were in the beginning stages of hyperfrost-induced dementia and invited us in for coffee. As the feeling came back into our faces and other extremeties, we explained our situation and asked if he had a gift card or library card, if so we could get into our front door. He let us borrow his Kroger card. 

I love Kroger cards.

Big savings and unlocks our door.

(rw)

It's WATERCOOLER WEDNESDAY time

The (almost) thief in the night

It’s been an emotionally jarring weekend. I left town Thursday night for shows in Philly and Chicago and I was looking forward to seeing some old friends over the weekend. Katie had plans of her own Saturday night with a girlfriend and called around 10:30 p.m. on her way home. The next call came at 11:45 and her first words were, “Well, I’ve had an eventful night. The cops just left.” Someone had tried to break into our back door around 11:15 but thankfully she had locked up everything less than one minute prior. Just typing those words still unnerves me.

They didn’t get in and as soon as they appeared, they disappeared. But what they left in their wake was something entirely more horrifying. Fear. Fear of the unknown, fear of the might-have-been.

Katie and I became CSI:Franklin the next morning looking for clues and recreating the scene. She had me shove windows, doors, etc trying to determine exactly what happened. We even found a few fingerprints but were unsure if they were ours or theirs. Kind of comical actually, but we needed anything to ease our collective minds. I unintentionally provided some comic relief by throwing my 165 lb weakling of a body into the door trying to recreate the sound she’d heard. “I think you’re too little,” she said through giggles. It helped her to laugh so I decided to not be offended by her calling me “too little.” I prefer the term “too awesome.”

The most difficult aspect of all of this is the constant replaying it over and over and over in our heads, adding or subtracting bits and pieces, playing out the various what-could’ve-happened scenarios. I suppose a big (BIG) part of that is my protective nature for my wife. As much as I’m ashamed to admit it, I truly think it would feel good to kill this person. And I don’t want to do it quickly. I want this person to understand what it means to fear, to wince, to flinch. Because that’s what they’ve done to my wife. She is the bravest person I know and it’s made her jumpy. I know this is all part of the shell-shock and it will pass, but the fact that some outside source has inflicted pain on her has made me a raging lunatic inside. I mask it. Partially for me, partially for her, but I literally want them dead. By my hands.

But this is not reasonable. Or right.

The most likely story is that this person was an addict looking for money, anything, to feed the monster living within them. We live in the downtown area of a small town. There is a social services building less than a mile from our house and we often see vagrants along our streets so this is most likely the case. Do I blame them? Sure. Do they deserve punishment? You bet. Should I have mercy? Absolutely.

We can’t live in fear although it makes the most sense right now. But, as we heard in church Sunday, the thief comes to steal. We also heard that perfect Love casts out all fear. This person who made the failed attempt to break in is my enemy. Yet I’m told by Love to love him, to forgive him, and that mercy will be shown to those who show mercy. Forgiveness and Mercy is a conscious choice, one that doesn’t come naturally. My flesh wants to sink a knife deep into his chest. God’s Spirit wants my enemy, His wayward son, to come home and find rest.

And that’s the difference between judgement and mercy, the law and the cross.

(rw)

The Beautiful Ruins of Friendships

Katie and I went to a friend's wedding this weekend in Beaufort, SC. It was one of those great southern weddings among the ruins of an old church that had been burned down by the British in 1780 and again by General Sherman in 1865. I'm sure the intact church was beautiful, but the ruins are spectacular. That's the great thing about friendships. Armies and enemies may attack hoping to destroy, but in the end, the ruins are still spectacular because you can see the beauty of what was once there. 

My friends that were there were all part of my inner circle in Los Angeles that I don't see very often anymore since I moved back to Nashville. I miss all these people (they all came to our wedding in January) and words can't express how great it was to be there with my new wife and watch her walk among them so beautifully, so gracefully. Those friendships were idyllic five years ago but distance and time have warred against them, forever altering their dynamics. What remains, though--the ruins--have a new beauty that can only be appreciated with hindsight. 

No doubt the Old Sheldon Church would not exist today had it not been bombed. But had it not been bombed, there would be no ruins, no reminders of what once stood there. But since enemies tried to take it down, the ruins are there as a memorial of what once stood and is still (partially) standing today. I even suspect that the ruins have been more impactful than the original church building ever was. Ironic. Ironic but no less true.

I still love these guys and am closer to some than others (three of them were my groomsmen), but I wouldn't trade for anything what we had five years ago for what I now have with Katie. Had I not been splintered off from them I never would've met her, my truest and permanent friend. 

(rw)

A Fair-ly Good Day

I could spend all day at a state fair by myself. I’m not talking about the measly county fairs or traveling carnivals. Those are dangerous. Too many missing teeth. I’m talking about the big shows. We played at the Wisconsin State Fair a couple of days ago and I spent a good bit of the day tooling around the midway in search of nothing but discovering everything.

There are a few things that are universal at state fairs—the rides, corn dogs and funnel cakes, livestock, deep fried everything, unfortunate tattoos, mullets, and hot tub dealers—but there are a few marked differences between a fair in the north and a fair in the south. For instance, you may have a few beer vendors in the south, but in Milwaukee this week, it was every other vendor and there wasn’t a Dr Pepper within 150 miles. Maybe it’s the German and Irish influence. At any rate, from 2-4, there was a happy hour at one of the beverage trailers. Beer: $3. Bottled water: $3.50. This is the town whose baseball team isn’t named after a ferocious animal. They’re brewers.

I was searching for a corn dog and was a little disheartened when I saw a food vendor with a gigantic neon VEGGIES lit up along the midway. It advertised yummy Cauliflower, Broccoli, Tomatoes, Carrots, Zucchini, and Squash in bright red letters and I thought “Oh no…the fair is getting healthy.” My heart was relieved as I got closer and could make out the words Beer Battered and Deep Fried painted on the glass.

There was also the worst Elvis impersonator I’ve ever seen. The guy was super skinny and was giving about 80 percent. In the south, we want our Elvi (plural for Elvis) fat and sweaty. Elvis never phoned it in. Neither should you, beanpole. I stayed for three songs but didn’t recognize them so I hereby propose a new international law for Elvi that requires every third song to be “Suspicious Minds.”

There is always music at these festivals. There are the mainstage acts which consist of washed up rockers (REO Speedwagon, Styx), B-level country acts (Josh Turner, Miranda Lambert), or Christian artists. Then there are the midway bands: local cover bands and/or regional acts. We saw one of my favorites bands from the 90s, The Gin Blossoms, on the midway in Wisconsin, and as much as I hate to say it, they were unbearably awful. I suspected slight inebriation and cynicism. For whatever reason, I’d never seen more cover bands at a fair than I did this week. I know many people love cover bands, but I just can’t take them. To me, cover bands are the sound of crushed dreams and hopes dying. If I ever meet Fred Schneider, I’m going to walk right up to him and slap his face because I can’t bear to hear “Love Shack” one more time.

So, have a great time at the fair and have a corn dog on me!

(rw)

The Girl in the Window

Yesterday Katie sent me an email that simply said "Go read Dooce and watch the video." So without hesitation I went to our favorite blog Dooce.com and her post led me to a story from the St Petersburg Times in FL that is one of the more disturbing AND inspiring stories I've ever heard. It's a story about a little girl found by police in complete and utter neglect (repulsive, total forgotten neglect). It's a story about the healing hand of love and the family that adopted her. Here's the link for the video and story. If you don't want the audio or video, you can click here to simply read the story.

If ever there was a family that deserved an Extreme Makeover Home, this is it. Any of my Los Angeles friends have any connections to the producers of that show? Anyone know where this family goes to church?

Love and Hope and Faith are winning in this story. My pea-sized brain is envisioning this spreading like a virus through the internet and seeing the family cared for in a way they've yet to see happen.

Come back tomorrow for stories from the Wisconsin State Fair...but today, pray for this family.

(rw)

Default Position

Difficult people are, well, difficult. I recently had a minor run-in with a difficult human. It was more annoying than offensive--sort of like a chuihuahua. Lots of barking, little or nothing to back it up.

Of course, there will always be people who try our patience. Mean, ridiculous people. Ticket counter agents. Outsourced customer service people. Frat guys. People who don’t like coffee or kick puppies for pleasure (yeah, I put those two in the same sentence). Even yours truly has been known to say a harsh word or two here and there. What? Can it be? Yep. Apparently I can turn on the condescension like flipping a switch. Of course, it’s an unknown, unlocate-able switch. Otherwise I’d get some Gorilla Glue and affix it to a permanently OFF position. The sad thing is that I’m not even aware of it. I don’t even think I mean anything by it. It’s just an unconscious default. Sort of like my wife picking at my head and face. I swear she can’t control it. Her hands just go there anytime I’m within reaching distance.

So maybe that’s the deal with difficult people. Maybe these are just the unredeemed, default things we all do and say. Maybe it has less to do with them and more to do with how I respond (you think?). My default position is to have no grace for this. Thankfully these are the exact things Grace was designed for.

(rw)

As per the ritual, this is part of Watercooler Wednesday at Randy Elrod's ETHOS blog.

Fraidy Cat

Mrs. Neindorf was a bad teacher. She was my fourth grade teacher and, more than any other educator, had a profound effect on who I am today. She made me a ‘fraidy cat. Because of her, I still can’t pass through a dark house or alley without at some point breaking into a sprint. Or a sweat.

Mrs. Neindorf was (obviously) German and approximately 119 years old. She was intolerant, ungracious, and not to be tried. I still can’t figure out what it was in her personality that wanted to spend her days with a room full of nine year olds. Maybe it was a need to control or some unresolved issues with her parents (who were no doubt Nazis). Mostly, though, I think she was just a mean old lady that wanted to make kids squirm.

Every day she would read to us. These were the pre-video game, pre-MTV days when kids could actually pay attention for more than 3 minutes at a time, so she would read portions of various books to us day after day as we sat on the floor at her feet completely enveloped in the unfolding stories. And what kind of stories do you imagine she fed our minds? Not Encyclopedia Brown or Nancy Drew. Not Dr Suess or Ramona the Pest. No, this old bat would read gruesome ghost stories, tales of alien abductions and UFOs, and other unexplained mysteries! To kids!

Looking back, it seems only natural that my active imagination became acutely sensitive to creaks and cracks in the middle of the night. I already couldn’t sleep with any portion of my body outside the covers (except my head) for fear that a vampire would grab the exposed limb and tickle it. With his pointy fingernails. Death would’ve been preferable. Well, these midday stories did nothing to ease my childish imagination. In fact, I had such a ghastly encounter one night that I couldn’t sleep without tissue in my ears for months. I was awakened to the sound of footsteps in my room that stopped, then turned and walked away. And it kept happening night after night. I literally was scared OUT. OF. MY. MIND. Was I crazy? Was it a ghost? Occasionally this unexplained visitor would knock something over in my room and walk away. Before you write all of this off as just an over-active imagination, let me tell you. It was real. Things were bumped and knocked over often. The morning would show the evidence of the intruder. I was a mess.

I never talked about any of this to my parents because I was afraid they’d think I was nuts. I was already a little different (played music, not sports) so I didn’t want to seal my “weird kid” fate by complaining about the ghosts in my room every night. So I suffered it in silence.

That was 30 years ago. Not too long ago I was at my parents’ visiting and over a card game one night, the subject of childhood fears came up. I hadn’t thought about those nightly visitations in years and mentioned it. These were profound events that had lasting effects into my youth, that effected the way I thought of the supernatural. I still don’t like to sleep in a completely dark room. It was a BIG DEAL.

As casually as one could possibly be, my sister, while searching the hand she’d been dealt, said “Oh, that was probably me. Didn’t you know I used to sleepwalk all the time?”

No. No I did not know that.

(rw)