Category Archive

In the process of moving from JournalSpace to WordPress I’m losing my old comments. That’s sad, but I can’t recreate them. Blogger allows WordPress to import everything over including comments. So, if you’ve commented on something and the comment seems to be missing, it is, but it lives on over on JournalSpace.

But since mine is in July, I never get to.  This year my lovely sisters planned a fantastic blowout for me.  Yummy wine, incredible cheeses, fruit, vegetables and chocolate filled chocolate cupcakes.  Very elegant and very fun.

One thing about birthdays that I can’t stand is the stupid song.  It’s terrible, awful tune is hard to sing, and very hard to sing well.  So I refuse to sing it well.  This time the twenty odd people did a fine stand up job defiling that song for me.  Their rendition was awful, raucous, loud, out of tune, ugly and ear piercingly hideous.  I loved it.  The only thing I regret is that I didn’t record it so I could share it with you.  Really, it was the WORST I’ve ever heard any group sing it.

Hopefully I’ll post a list of the wines and cheeses soon.

I’m having a birthday soon.  *sigh*

So here’s a list of what I want.  It’s not comprehensive, and some of it is fantastical, please don’t assume I’m thinking anyone will get it for me.  I’m just saying I want it is all…

1. The Inside Man Soundtrack: rockin’ music  Got It!!!
2. Clinique Happy or Happy Heart ; I haven’t smelled the new one, Happy in Bloom yet, and I wasn’t fond of Happy To Be.
3.  Tuberoses, Hollyhocks, Foxglove, Bells of Ireland and Violets.  I’m not picky about colors, though I’m fond of unusual stuff.  I mean plants, not cut flowers.  I’d like to plant these lovelies around the yard to enjoy them year after year.
4. Bhangra, Original Punjab Pop.  I have no idea what they are saying, but I love the music.
5. Copper Pots & Pans, yes, all of them.  eventually.
6. A Cruise.  But the one on the 16 passenger sailing yacht.   Really, what’s the point of being at sea if you can’t hear, see and smell the ocean.
7. A Safari.
8. Nigella Bites, How To Eat, How To Be A Domestic Goddess
9. Anything by Elizabeth David
10. Tomb of the Golden Bird, paperback preferred.
11. Life at the Bottom & Our Culture, What’s Left of It
12. A good pepper grinder.  Of course I’d love an antique looking copper one, but really, just one that works.
13. God in the Dock.  I gave this book away to a heathen I hope is saved now, but I miss it dreadfully.
14. The De-Moralization of Sociey
15. Linen Sheets, In Cilantro
16. Donations in Mom’s name.  And Here too.
17. These Chocolates.  I’m dying to try the Absinthe truffle
18. Gnome Be Gone, garden sculpture at it’s best.
19. Frog Prince
20. A castle, preferrably with a dragon Got the Dragon.  Hopefully I’ll figure out the picture part of this world and will show you.  It’s cool.  Now if only I can get the Castle.
21. A trip into outerspace.
22. A ceiling fan for my bedroom

I’ll add more later.

It’s not what you might think, not Mozart, Chopin, The Ramones or even music. Nope, the sound that most calms me, reminds me of happier and sadder times, the noise that grounds me is the coal train that runs behind my home. Since I was a little girl the coal trains have run behind my home, I hear them in the morning, at night and throughout the day. Every aspect of the trains passing are dear to my ears, from the whistles that announce their approach to the distant chugging of the wheels as it passes out of hearing range. I love the way the weight of the train makes bits of the house rattle, the windows and things on my shelves.

On rainy days the lonesome call before it reaches the road runs through my body like a caress, I get goosebumps. When I can sleep with my windows open I listen for the midnight trains passing. You can hear the air rush away from the locomotive, the whine of the engine as it struggles to pull thousands of pounds of metal and ore to the electricity plant down by the Bay. The way the whistles echo so much farther at night, how so little else is sounding to distract your ears away from the urgency of the trains approach.

Occasionally something happens that is out of the ordinary. When I was little it happened twice, once in winter so we could see it from our kitchen, the train derailed. We heard it, and then we saw it. Mom, who was an explorer at heart, got her shoes on and let us accompany her to “see if everyone was okay”, or, really, to snoop. We scrambled to get ready, we had to find a way to cross the wetlands and creek that lay between our home and the tracks, less than 1/2 a mile, but significant, none the less. We kids knew how to get there, it was easy for us, we had a rope tied to a tree that hung over the creek at just the right angle to give us a Tarzan-like swing across. Mom would never make it. Plus, much more importantly, we weren’t allowed to use that rope or to cross the creek. So we had to find a ford, which we did, a bit further north and away from the rope.

Once across the accident was gloriously right in front of us. Coal chunks scattered everywhere, cars tipped on their sides spilling the earths riches out across the forest floor. The smells of the coal mixed with leaf rot, water, fall and moss to create a new smell that was tantalizingly full of excitement. I grabbed for a piece of coal, hoping to keep it, to put it in my collection of stuff. Mom would only let me look at it, it didn’t belong to me, it was the electric companies and they would be by to get it. I thought they wouldn’t miss a piece, but she would likely pat me down before I left so I dropped it after examining it closely. Mom searched for the engineer, made sure he was okay, asked if he needed anything and then we had to go back home. She promised that we would one day walk the tracks between Hall and Mt Oak.

Later that spring she kept her promise. Dad dropped us and a picnic lunch off at Hall Road by the Vets office and we took off promising to be at the other end two hours later. We were so excited, my brother Fred and sisters Martha, Laura and Anne. We explored everything along the way, including an abandoned tobacco barn full of bats and owls. There was a field where we ate lunch, and dozens of places to stop and look at things, like bones of long dead deer, rabbits, rats and whatever that one thing was. Flowers to pick, stones to kick, tracks to balance on and trees to watch in the wind. All too quickly the walk was over.

That was one of the best days of my life.

I’m half German, and a quarter Peruvian too, but it’s that quarter Irish that I most identify with. And it’s not the goofy Erin go braugh! part, or the leprechauns, it’s the green soul of Ireland that calls to me. Celtic music plays across my heartstrings like nothing else, Celtic Worship most of all. The lonesome sounds of the sea, mixed with strings and pipes are nearly enough to transport me elsewhere, to another place and time. Maybe it’s the pirate history of my Irish relatives, maybe it’s the salt air in my lungs and the poetry that runs through my head, but I feel Irish through and through.

Sometimes I don’t post because I don’t think I have anything to say. Sometimes I don’t post because I don’t know how to say any of the twenty things I want to say. Sometimes I just can’t imagine how to process what’s happening in my head to words. I’ll try to be more faithful to do this. Not that more than three people actually read any of this, but more because I am trying to be faithful to the calling I believe God has placed on my life. So, if it looks and smells incoherent, it probably is. Just look away. Hopefully the next time you stop by I will have edited or deleted anything offensive or wrong.

Hopefully too, I’ll be posting my poetry here soon.

If I could, I would introduce everyone to my daughter Amy. Only she isn’t my daughter, not really. Amy looks a lot like me and my family, she sounds a bit like me on the phone, she even has some of the same mannerisms. She is my daughter in that I gave birth to her 20 years ago. But she is even more Susan and Harry’s daughter, they adopted her and raised her, they dried her tears, kissed her boo boo’s and paid for her college. They are the ones who are eligible to write her off on their taxes. They get to hear Mom and Dad from her. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

When I got pregnant with Amy, I was a senior in High School, 17 and not too excited to be procreating. I did not choose to get pregnant, I did, however, choose to have the sex that resulted in the pregnancy. I did at that time understand that sex is how most pregnancies occur, it wasn’t surprising the way, say, opening a box of cereal to find a diamond ring would be surprising. Getting pregnant was part of the risk I took by making the choice.

Now in 1983 when I got pregnant, there were lots of choices to make. You got to choose if you wanted to abort or carry to term, then you got to choose whether you kept your baby or you gave your baby up. All the same choices available today. What we never get to do is choose what being pregnant means, it is always having within you the joined ovum and sperm that results first in an embryo and then a fetus. Now fetus always refers to, according to The American Heritage Dictionary, “the unborn young of a viviparous vertebrate; in humans, the unborn young from the end of the eighth week to the moment of birth as distinguished from the earlier embryo.” Now in that same dictionary, embryo is defined as “An organism in its early stages of development, especially before it has reached a distinctively recognizable form.” Unless it’s a human, then the definition is this piece of partisan work “in man, the prefetal product of conception up to the beginning of the third month of pregnancy.” Viviparous means “giving birth to live offspring that develop within the mother’s body”. What all these definitions mean, to get back to my point, is that in humans, pregnancy is ALWAYS carrying a baby in the womb. A human baby. That means that abortion, in humans, is ALWAYS killing a baby in the womb. A human baby. Just being clear.

32 years after the Supreme Court acted illegally as the legislative branch of our government and legalized abortion, millions of children are dead. One third of my daughter’s graduating class never even got the chance to draw breath. Not even once. One third. Dead. Gone. Why? To give women choices, or to be blunt, to give women the choice to have sex and not consider or be responsible for the consequences. (BTW - Men are now much more able to act irresponsibly towards women since they are no longer held responsible for getting women pregnant. Woo Hoo, that’s progress!) Yes, women get raped and get pregnant, it happens, now read this slowly, RARELY. Most abortions in this country are for convenience. Most abortions in the world are for convenience, unless you happen to live in a country that forces it’s women to have abortions. The reasons given for having abortions are multiple, wrong time, wrong person, wrong sex. Unless you are in immediate danger of dying, abortion is always about what’s convenient for the mother. There is no real consideration of the child. Not really.

Being pregnant for me wasn’t convenient, it wasn’t easy, it wasn’t pleasant. Giving birth was painful and harsh. Leaving my newborn daughter in the hospital and going home without her was as painful as when my mother died. None of it was nice or clean, all of my choices after that one night were difficult and painful. 18 years of pain, missing her, praying that she was okay, never knowing what she looked like, never having other children to fill in the empty places only intensified that pain. I really do understand that these are hard choices, painful, costly choices.

Making worthy, hard choices are what make humans human, the part of us that is made in the image of God. We are separated from the beasts by being made in the image of God. That doesn’t mean we are the only creatures to think, or to solve, or to feel. It means we are capable of reason. We image bearers carry within us the ability to make choices of self-sacrifice. Choosing to suffer so that another might live is a worthy choice. Amy understands this better than most people, she is very grateful that I chose her rather than me. So are Susan and Harry. So am I. I don’t regret my pain, my loss, my heartache, not at all. How could I? She is a lively, funny, beautiful 20 year old college student who brings joy to her parents, brother & sister-in-law and friends. And to me, and I might add, to my family, who shockingly are not all anti-abortion even after they met Amy. They love her, to be sure, but I don’t think they really understand that there were so very many children like Amy, lovely, wonderful, smart, funny, children, who died because it was inconvenient for them to live.

There are so many other reasons that abortion is always a bad choice, social reasons, health of the woman reasons, even feminist reasons. Did you know that the incidence of breast cancer is significantly higher in women who have had abortions? Did you know that the abortion industry is unregulated? That should scare you. A lot. Did you know that your twelve year old child can get an abortion in many states without your permission? Major surgery, possibly life threatening surgery, can be performed on your twelve, 12, year old child all without your permission or knowledge. She can’t get her ears pierced at the mall without you, but she can kill your grandchild and you never even get to know. Many, many women have long term physical effects from abortions, in legal clinics, infections, perforations, excessive bleeding, even death. The emotional and mental effects last the rest of their life. Here is another little fact: Significantly more than 50% of the babies aborted in the world are female, women are killing women to be more acceptable to men. And not just in India or China.

There are many reasons abotion is a bad choice, but the most important reason is that abortion kills a child, an innocent baby who so far hasn’t made any choices at all. Not a potential child, not the product of conception, a human, seperate and distinct from the mother and father. Abortion is the cold blooded murder of a baby.

God forgive us, we know what it is we do.

Dad and I were going to the mall three days before Christmas to meet Kiki to have dinner and do some shopping. Kiki got there first and we were still wading through rush-hour traffic with a topping of Christmas shopping frenzy. Fun. Not. Dad and Kiki were calling back and forth to see where we were and what was our ETA. When we eventually got to the mall, Kiki called to guide us to where she was parked. She’s my brilliant little Peruvian flower. She got us to her row and told us to come to where she was parked, her lights would be on. In the middle of a crazed night of consumerism, she had managed to park her car between two spots, front to back. She just parked her car between the two so she could move up or move back depending on how we got there. Woo hoo! That was a nice little surprise. She said she’d received some very interesting and seriously non-holiday greetings from shoppers wanting our spot.

At the restaurant I noticed that the bar was packed with shopping widowers. There were no women there, just men. You could almost see the “cha-chings” registering in their minds as they waited for their wives to come back laden with gifts. After watching the number of drinks downed I hoped that they were only there as pack mules and would not be driving home.

Now, here’s an interesting thing about shopping at Christmas time. There is a weird and twisted competition among people headed for the same store. It’s bizarre, we would be walking towards a store, see some others headed in the same direction and they would suddenly put on speed to get there first. I could care less who gets there first, but it was lots of fun to speed up a little and see what other people would do. If I didn’t need to actually purchase stuff, I would lurk in malls and tweak people in mock competition all season long.

Is there something about the winter solstice that causes American’s to suddenly forget how to use certain polite phrases, things like “Excuse me.” I couldn’t believe how many people, I have to assume are otherwise well behaved, act like barbarians during Christmas. My toes were bruised by all the trampling. I think I’ll get some steel-toed boots for next year.

We are staring at another monstrosity, a Christmas yard display gone horribly awry. The lawn of a neighbor is covered in a collection of Christmas and Holiday figures that seems to have been chosen for one common feature, they all plug in. It’s blinding, I put my sunglasses on in an attempt to ward off night-blindness when I look away. I see other neighbors slathering 35 sunblock on and sitting in lawn chairs hoping to get a late season tan. My mind is full of anything but Christmas cheer.

“It’s beautiful Auntie Vivian. I love it.” says my nearly 4 year old nephew, The Mancub.

“Look at the pretty colors!” says Sweetpea, my 6 year old niece. “Isn’t it lovely?”

“Yes.” I lie. “See the reindeer’s heads moving? And their legs move too.”

“Ooooh!” Both of them sigh.

Sweetpea asks me to pull closer to the manger scene. As we pull up, they Oooh and Aaah in unison. This display also glows from within.

Sweetpea squeals “Look, there’s Mary and Joseph and the baby Jesus, and the Wise Men.”

“Ooooh!” The Mancub sighs

I think the visit to the lights is going swimmingly. Then comes the question.

“So, where was everyone before Jesus was born?” Asks The Mancub innocently.

“Well, they were all here.” I said.

“But you said Jesus is God. How could they be here if he wasn’t born yet?”

Me, not seeing the trap answers “Honey, Jesus is God’s son,…”

“That means Joseph is God?” The Mancub smartly closing this little pre-school trap on me.

What follows is me trying to explain that Joseph isn’t God, the eternal nature of God and the incarnation. I try to relate how Joseph is Jesus daddy on earth, stupidly, through adoption. They know that I had a daughter and gave her up. Somehow, I think they understand this, we’ve talked about it for the past two years. I think, this is an easy way to explain. I was wrong.

“No. You know how Amy is my daughter, but Susan and Harry are her Mommy and Daddy?”

“How old were you when you gave her up?” they ask.

“17. So back to Jesus…”

Sweetpea “17 is young.”

The Mancub “Those sure are pretty lights.”

Me “Yes, it is young, yes they are pretty lights. So God wanted to send his Son Jesus…”

Sweetpea “Did Grandma and Grandpa get angry at you?”

Now I’m beginning to feel terror, Pandora’s Box is open and I can’t seem to close it. “Yes honey, they were angry. So Jesus…”

Sweetpea “Well, you were very young.”

Me “Yes. Jesus…”

The Mancub “Look, Santa’s on their porch. Is he real?”

Me “No, he’s a statue. Now, back to Jesus…”

Sweetpea “Will my Mommy and Daddy ever give me up?” I begin to hear the coming flood. “Can I live with you if they ever have to give me, (sniff) up?”

Me “Sweetpea, your Mommy and Daddy will never ever give you up. And you can always live with me. So, now Jesus…”

Sweetpea “Well, you were young.”

I chicken out and decide to run “Look! More Christmas Lights!”

The Mancub and Sweetpea “Oooohh!”