Hints and Guesses

Growing up, I rarely went to sleep right away because we were made to go to bed so early. No one else we knew went to bed at the time we did.

So it was in the dark I lay awake. I made up stories about the people who lived in the curtains. I read books (sometimes forbidden books!) by the dim glow of my alarm clock. I listened to them fight, her sharp, clear words alternating with the indistinct drone of my father’s voice. I dreamed of running away. I stared at the lights of the power plant in the distance. I listened to the bullfrogs croak by the cow pond. The dark was my time.

In this story, there is a boy and a girl. The Girl meets The Boy at a conference, where some small connection is established. They meet again a couple of months later, where there seemed to be some more minor interest. And then The Boy came to seminary at the same school where The Girl worked.

Imagine The Girl at home with her cats one fall evening. It might have been a Sunday. It may have been a school night. Whatever the circumstances, she receives an email:

Someone *you know* likes you. And they’ve come to us to admit it.

Here at TheSpark.com we launched a web site that is revolutionizing crushes, dating, and affection. At least it makes the whole thing a little easier and a lot more exciting. And it’s not so *serious*.

The way it works is simple: Come to our site and list the people you know with whom you’d like to go on a date, just for fun. If you pick someone who picks you, you get notified.

You might match today - you received this e-mail because someone has already chosen you for their list.

http://www.thespark.com [FYI: this site is no longer active.]

Just click on the picture of me, Pimpin’ C.

-Pimpin’ Cupid

So The Girl goes to the web site, curious to find out who it might be. She must have entered twenty different names of men she knew. Not that she was interested in any of them, but she wanted to know who had sent that email.

And then she waited. And waited. And waited some more.

And after an hour, she received another email:

Pimpin’ Cupid here, reporting that you’ve just been matched with the following individual:

The Boy

Since you chose each other, it’s clear that there’s some chemistry. Where to go from here? It’s up to you.

-P.C. and the boys at TheSpark.

Well, well, thought The Girl, but she had little time to think about it, because it suddenly dawned on her that each of the men that she had put on her list had received an email exactly like the first one she had received, and that if any of them put in her email address…it was too awful to think about. She immediately went back in and deleted them all from her list.

It wasn’t long before The Boy sent an email:

Hey Girl!!
Pretty good guess, eh?

The Girl responded:

Indeed! An excellent one…but that beer drinking Pimpin’ Cupid threw me off track for a moment.

The Boy wrote back:

Well, your comment that you and E had a “lot to talk about” on the way home from the conference was a clue. I’m pretty intuitive. Plus, the invitation to join 6 degrees earlier in the week.

Now, here The Girl was puzzled. E and The Girl had driven to and from the conference together, and only once during their hours of conversation did she refer to The Boy and The Girl, and then only in the most oblique way. And six degrees was a web site that connects people…that whole six degrees of separation thing, so you can see how you are connected to other people…she’d invited a lot of her friends to join (think very early social networking—would you think someone was interested in you because they invited you to be their Facebook friend? That’s what I thought.). So whatever intuition The Boy had was wrongly directed.

So The Girl wrote:

As a matter of fact…well,  never mind.

The Girl decided not to burst The Boy’s intuition bubble.

To make a long story short, The Girl and The Boy exchanged emails over the next couple of weeks and kept to the same level of socializing as before, which puzzled The Girl. Why send an email like that and then do nothing?

Around this time, The Girl experienced a spiritual crisis, the nature of which we will not get into now. Suffice it to say that one day The Girl prayed for a dream. Once before in her life a series of dreams, unbidden, had resolved her entire childhood. So she thought that God could send her another to give her an answer to her spiritual crisis.

About a week later The Girl in fact had a dream, and she knew it was THE dream, but she didn’t know what it meant. And she went about its interpretation all wrong, forgetting that dreams are meant to be symbolic, not literal. She had no idea what it meant.

The next day was church. At the end of the sermon, the congregation had some directed small group prayer time, and the direction seemed to allow The Girl to share her dream and get some answers. The Boy was one of her prayer partners.

Under normal circumstances, The Girl didn’t like to tell her dreams at all. Somehow it seemed too private, and she was afraid of accidentally revealing something about herself that she didn’t want other people to know. But that day she threw caution to the wind, told her dream, and was brought up short when The Boy said he thought he knew what it was about.

Well…here she’d had her dream, and here she had someone to interpret it, and suddenly she didn’t want to know anything about it. The other prayer partners prayed, and then she fled to a private room. She wept, and she couldn’t stop weeping. She prayed, too, for peace, and for the strength to hear whatever The Boy had to say, because she knew that he wouldn’t tell her unless she asked, and she was going to ask.

Which she finally did, after potluck. The Boy seemed reluctant to tell her, perhaps because she seemed reluctant to hear. (The Girl has no idea what he told her that day…all she can remember is that it wasn’t as bad as she feared.) But what he said seemed helpful, and she couldn’t help but think that his helpfulness indicated some other level of interest.

They then had a short conversation in which they alluded to (without actually mentioning) their recent exchange of emails…and the vagueness beget more vagueness.

Later in the afternoon, H, The Boy and The Girl ended up at The Girl’s house and spent the afternoon talking. Somehow, while The Girl was in the kitchen getting hot chocolate, the conversation turned to dating. The Boy said that when he came to seminary, he had decided not to date. Again, she was puzzled—not anxious, just puzzled.

Finally, resolution arrived the next day. The Boy called and spent a good half hour talking about other things before asking, “What did you think about what I said yesterday?”

The Girl asked The Boy to repeat specifically what he was referring to (she’d had enough with the vagueness by this point), and he said, “My decision not to date while in seminary.” She said that it didn’t bother her at all (and it didn’t). The Boy seemed confused, and asked, “Why did you send me that Pimpin’ Cupid email?”

It was then that the light of revelation broke and the full extent of the situation became clear: The Boy thought The Girl had sent the first email, and The Girl thought The Boy had sent it. They had both been operating under different assumptions. The Girl was horrified to think that The Boy thought she had sent that email, since she would never have done that.

The Girl and The Boy are still friends, but they are each married to different people. They have never discussed this incident from that day to this, although that may be about to change. The Boy eventually broke his rule about dating while in seminary, but it must have been OK since he ended up marrying that Other Girl.

The Girl never did find out who sent the original email, but she suspects it was someone very much like her—throw in a bunch of email addresses and see what comes up. Dead fish, if you ask me, but you didn’t.

Find more Weekly Anamnesis here.

Sixteen years ago a fire destroyed nearly every physical artifact of my childhood and young adult years. Much to my surprise, last week I discovered something I’ve carried through moves overseas and back, one divorce, and one remarriage.

About eighteen years ago, I wrote these words for the Adventist Review* in response to the question “If you are still an Adventist 10 years from now, why?”:

“The church must allow absolute freedom to explore the doctrinal foundations of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, whether they number 22, 25, 27, or 28. My belief in the church is worth nothing if I am not permitted to question, to examine logically, or even to disagree. My questions may disturb more staid, conservative Adventists of all ages, but the blind obedience of adolescence is no longer enough. The church must shed its traditional fear of intellectual thought and let its members search for the truth that it claims to hold.”

It was a brief blurb in a sidebar, and if I remember correctly I wasn’t the only young adult invited to answer that question. I didn’t keep the magazine; all I have is half a ripped page, with an ad for Kettering College of Medical Arts on the reverse.

You might notice that my passionate** answer doesn’t directly answer the question***; we’d just had a guest speaker who spoke as I’d never heard an Adventist speaker speak before. Old ideas new to me and challenging to others; during the Sabbath afternoon session, the union conference president rose and spoke against the guest speaker. Some of the speaker’s words still ring true for me today.

I believed those words when I wrote them, and I believe them now, although in a different way. The blind obedience of adolescence is at least that far behind me****. I don’t have a belief in the church, but I still have ideas about what I’d like the church to be.

I’m tempted to wonder if the church is listening, if the church has moved beyond that place of fear. But that’s the wrong question; “the church” is an institution, and institutions don’t listen. People do, at least some of them. I don’t know how; when the shouting gets so loud, I can hardly hear myself think. That’s when you’ll find me moving off to the side, looking for the others.

*For which issue, I cannot yet say. It was likely published some time in 1991.

**At least that’s how I read it; I can still conjure up the emotions I felt when I wrote it.

***Yet the editors printed it anyway. Even I was surprised.

****Some might say I was never blindly obedient. You may not have been paying attention.

If you live in the Berrien Springs or Michiana area and need 4-cubic-feet bags of coarse vermiculite for your Square Foot Garden, call Baroda City Mills at 269.422.1495. They just might have it.

There are many things to like about the new job I begin tomorrow.

The hours, for starters: M-Th 11-7 and F 11-3. The world is run by morning people. I am not one of them. To be offered a job with these hours is a gift.

I also live close enough to the new job to walk to work. It’s 13 minutes one way. And the sun is returning, and spring is on the way.

It would be simple enough if I just wore my work shoes to walk to work. I tend to wear comfortable shoes for work, but they’re not really intended for that kind of walking (on the road part of the way), and I can pretty much guarantee that my feet would be hurting after a couple of days of this.

I don’t want to wear my real walking shoes. For one, dress pants are too long to wear flat shoes. In addition, they’re just ugly.

You’d think this would be easier, but I’ve tied myself up in knots over less.

Any ideas?

My primary housekeeping project for this month is to declutter, clean, label, and inventory our laundry room. The room has held much clutter but no surprises until today—a nearly full one pound bag of dried shiitake mushrooms. No idea where it came from or how long it’s been there.

I can’t imagine that they could have gone bad (although I trust my readers will tell me if they think otherwise), so I aim to make a small batch of cream of mushroom soup tomorrow. We’ll see what happens.

You’ve been dying to know more about the products that fill (and fulfill) my life. To meet the demand, I’ve created The Be Like Ducky Store (also seen in the sidebar). Yes, you too can be like Ducky! You’ll (eventually) find it to be a handy guide to what to get yourself for your birthday (especially) or Christmas (when necessary). All proceeds go straight to the Ducky Plastic Surgery Fund.

We’ve had a great time already in the day and a half I’ve been here in Arizona. Yesterday there was some juggling and balloon-animal making (I am clearly better at making balloon swords) and two episodes of Series 1 of Doctor Who. Today, a holiday, there was more Doctor Who, The Princess Bride (new for both The Girl and The Boy, and it was a hit), and later a late afternoon visit to the Desert Botanical Garden, where the sun set and the moon rose before we left the owls and jackrabbits behind.

However, as exciting and fun as all of this was, nothing can top something The Boy casually tossed off. Farts are funny, you know, to children, and after The Girl let one off in the car, I (for no good reason) suggested that they learn how to say “fart” in several other languages.

“How do you say “fart” in Spanish?” I asked her. She began to tell me how she didn’t know, but then a small voice piped up from the back seat.

“Fartita,” The Boy said, thereby creating an instant classic.

For a more uplifting take on the day’s events, visit Thursday Drive, where she is too hoity-toity to talk about fartitas.

This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body…

While I can’t recommend it to others, the Gall Bladder Diet seems to be working well for me.

The Gall Bladder Diet requires one to consider the potential for future pain from every bite of food one eats. Does it contain fat? If yes, think long and hard before eating it; in fact, the default response should be “What? Are you crazy?”. If no, still think about it, as one might still be wrong.

I’m taking some pants in to my tailor next week.

By 11 o’clock this morning, this Starbucks chai was the nicest thing anyone had done for me all day:

Then came a picture from a young friend (annotations mine):

Until this:

Then I made my own chai:

My house is not a haven of peace and order. “Whose is?” you ask, and I nod my head in agreement. But I’d still like one. At every turn, there’s some reason why I can’t move forward with my plans.

The piano stands in for a number of obstacles. When we bought this house, the previous owners left their piano behind (the house was previously owned by the mother of my stepchildren). At the time, the boys were still taking piano lessons, and she got another piano for their new house. So wherever they were, they could always practice.

Well, no one’s taken piano lessons for the last three years, and it’s only been played a handful of times in that time period. The more time passes, the more I want to get it out of the house. It dawned on me this year that I own bookcases that could occupy the piano space, and since I still have books in boxes, I really wanted to set up those bookcases.

Have you ever moved a piano? It’s not such an easy thing if the piano is up half a flight of stairs in a split-level house. We’ve had numerous conversations about moving it. We even have someone who wants the piano. Unfortunately, no one is as motivated to move this piano as I am. I told my husband that I wanted it out of the house by the end of September. I don’t think he believed me, until yesterday.

Yesterday I rolled the piano out of the way, vacuumed the floor, set up the bookcases, and unpacked fifteen more feet of books. Then Stepson #2 rolled it back to sit right in front of the bookcases. My husband came home, took a look, and then tested the weight of the piano. “That’s about half as heavy as I expected it to be,” he said. “I think I could move this down the stairs with one other person.” I rolled my eyes.

Now that the bookcases are out of our bedroom, I can put a dresser in there that we’ve had sitting in the garage for the last couple of years. It’s mostly refinished, but I can assure you that the longer it sits out there, the less likely it will be to ever get finished. It’s going in this weekend.

This leads to further reassessment of our bedroom. I don’t know whose idea it was to put in the pink carpet, but it was not a good one. We’re not going to be able to replace it anytime soon, so I will continue to pretend that it’s not there when I make decorating decisions. We’ve got a nice Heywood Wakefield headboard, along with the aforementioned coordinating dresser. That, and the custom Elfa closet configuration are the best things about our bedroom. The carpet has to be replaced, I want to put in new window dressings, and we’ve got to replace the ugly ceiling fan. And then I might paint and try some wall decals.

In my twenties, I latched onto a fantasy that one day I would confront Sue on Oprah.

I imagined telling my story in front of the whole country. Who could fail to sympathize? And Sue would never be able to show her face in public again. This time, everyone would know exactly what kind of person she was, and she’d never be able to hurt anyone else.

I held onto this fantasy for a few years, until the day I asked her “Why? Why would you do that to your children?” At that moment I realized that there was nothing—nothing—she could say that would ever make any of it better. And inexplicably a big chunk of the burden I carried melted away. Just like that. I haven’t seen that part since.