Hints and Guesses

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.

At 8:15 this evening Dr. S called to put me out of my misery. The training thing didn’t work out anyway, she said, and in the end they went with the candidate with academic experience, which I don’t have. However, the assistant dean of the college of arts and sciences is actively looking for a new assistant and she’s passed my resume on to him (at his request). She was complimentary about our entire experience together (which began last week when I went over to introduce myself since she didn’t know me from Eve and then spent an hour in conversation).

So tomorrow morning I’m getting up bright and early to go over and do my networking thing again. All is not lost, and this might even be a better position for me.

On the corner of our lot sits a large beech tree. Since we’ve owned this house, we’ve had four incidents in which large branches broke off the tree. The first was during a storm (two large branches came down that time), the second was a calm, sunny day (I happened to see that one fall), the third was in light wind conditions, and the fourth was during a big storm. The fourth incident took out a power line, and our neighborhood was without power for several hours. It also almost hit a passing minivan and would have hit the firstborn’s car if his brother hadn’t ditched it in order to take shelter in the house (he parked around the corner instead of the driveway, and that saved him).

I like trees, but I have never liked this tree. It leaned over the street in front of the house and I had visions of it crashing on top of a car or two. Taking it out, however, was out of our budget, and so branches continued to fall, miraculously never hitting either a person or a vehicle. Still, I called it the Death Tree.

Until the power company decided to take it out, after the last incident. They’ve been on a tear around town lately, taking out way more trees than I thought necessary. Today they finally got to ours.

Here’s a before sequence, starting from the base (note the power lines in the first photo, and note the lean, which is worse than it looks in this photo):

Here’s what’s left of the top:

And this is what’s left of a once-mighty tree:

Negotiations are under way for how we’ll design that area of the yard.