Berry's Mom

Afterthought Heel

2012-02-08T23:41:00.000-05:00

I had promised a pair of hand knit socks for my friend Peter, so when inspiration struck a few weeks ago, I decided to challenge myself by making them with a new kind of heel construction. The yarn I chose is a self-striping yarn, and making the usual heel flap/turn/gusset type of heel would totally mess up the self-stripes. So I decided on the Afterthought Heel first described by Saint Elizabeth Zimmerman, and subsequently well documented by the likes of the Yarn Harlot and others.

The concept goes like this: knit a tube the full length of the sock -- leg and foot. Put a toe on it. Then go back to where the heel should be, cut into the stitches so that you have live stitches on two needles (or three if that's the way you knit socks), and put another toe there. Voila! A heel! Not very elegant, but it fits well. The bonus is that if it wears out, you can cut the whole thing out and replace it with a new toe... er, heel.

For people like me who turn a little green at the thought of Cutting Into Perfectly Good Knitting, you can cheat a little by figuring out where the heel will go, and when you get there, using scrap yarn to demarcate the heel stitches. Finish the tube with toe, then go back and pull out the scrap yarn, put the live stitches on needles, and knit the other toe-which-is-actually-the-heel.

What follows is not intended to be a full tutorial on how to make an afterthought heel. You'll have better luck with one of the links above. This is just me bragging about having something new actually work out the way I hoped it would.

Want to see some photos? Okay, here goes...

Here I am partway down the leg. When I got to where the heel will go, I used a piece of yellow scrap yarn and knit across 32 stitches (that's halfway across a 64-stitch tube). Then I went back to the beginning of the same row and knit those 32 yellow stitches again with the gray sock yarn. Then I went merrily on my way, finished the tube, and put a toe on it.

Here's the finished tube, with the yellow scrap yarn clearly showing where the heel will go.

Carefully noting the right side of each of the 32 stitches, I used a needle one size smaller and put it through each stitch on one side of the yellow stitches.

Then I did the same on the other side of the yellow stitches, approaching from the other side. (I think this was a mistake, as half the stitches were on the needle backwards.)

Then I carefully picked out the yellow yarn, stitch by stitch, leaving live stitches on both of the needles.

Here's another view of the process, with me holding the stitches a bit apart so you can really see.

When all the stitches were out, here I was with 32 live stitches on each needle (albeit a bit twisted here and there, but it's easy to straighten them while knitting the first row.) I knit three rows with all of the stitches, then started making a "toe," which is really where the heel goes.

Here's the finished product before blocking, but since it looked the same after blocking, I'm not bothering with another photo. Yes, it's a bit wonky and won't lie completely flat, but it fits ever so well!

I would have preferred that the heel be completely dark gray, but there wasn't enough of that shade left, so I made do with the next-lighter color. So many of the zillions of socks I've made (using the heel flap-and-turn technique) are too big around the ankle; these fit really well, so I think it's definitely a technique worth repeating.

I'm also inspired to try short row heels, which I suspect will fit equally well. Excelsior! And stay tuned...

2012-01-12T01:00:00.000-05:00

Christmas 2011: The Knitting Edition

It was a big knitting season for Nonna. Once I started a sweater for Owen andsaw how quickly it went together, I thought “I could make one of these forViking, too.” And once I decidedto make something for Viking, I realized I’d better make something for all theother grandchildren as well. Afterall, we were going to be opening gifts together at Christmas. I didn’t want anyone to feel left out!

So The Great Knitting Marathon began in mid-October, andfinished a day or two before Christmas. Here are the results, in order of age.

This is Viking wearing his dinosaur sweater, "Steggie," found at the wonderful Knitty web site, a great source for all manner of patterns.

Next oldest is Owen, a mere three weeks younger, who received the same sweater in different colors. We weren't together at Christmas, but his Mom sent me these photos.

Note the snazzy two-tone zipper!

Owen has an unusually large head (all those brains!), so this hood is only going to keep the back of it warm.

Both of these dinosaur sweaters were made from Cascade "Pacific" (40% superwash merino, 60% acrylic), a lovely soft washable wool that should be just the right medium for outdoor wear on a three-year old boy.

Branching out, I determined that Odin Jedi, 19 months, was ready for a big-boy sweater.

This is an Ann Norling top-down pattern that I have used several times. You need an advanced degree in math to figure it out -- it has many style options (pullover, cardigan, V-neck, round neck) and every imaginable stitch gauge. For him I made a V-neck cardigan, Perry Como style, outlined in contrasting (but not very...) blue yarn at the sleeves, bottom, and neck/front edges.

Instead of buttonholes, I tried sticky dots of Velcro, with the buttons sewn over it on one side. I have a feeling it won't work very well; Velcro and wool don't mix. I have a standing offer out to his mother to send it back to me and I'll do it right, with grosgrain ribbon under the bands and real buttonholes.

This sweater was made with an equally lovely and washable wool, but I didn't save the ball band so I can't tell you what it is. Might be the same Cascade "Pacific," but I guess we'll never know.

Norway is 10 months old and definitely ready for a girly sweater.

This the Little Vintage Smock, a pattern in the 7th "Little Sublime Hand Knit" book.

I used some Baby Ull yarn by Dalegarn (Dale of Norway), 100% wool, washable.

Because if you've got a girl who eats cake with two forks, you'd better be able to wash her sweater! I think there will be a matching beret in her near future, when she turns one year old in February.

The youngest of our five grandchildren is Utah, six months old at Christmas. He hasn't yet grown into the sweater I made for him when he was born, so he didn't get a new one.

Instead, he got a spiffy hat, also a pattern from the 7th Little Sublime book, "Little Bertie," made from bits and pieces of leftovers.

Sorry, not a good photo of his lovely Mom, but a good shot of the hat! Do you recognize the darker blue from Norway's smock? The lighter blue is from a sweater I made for Viking when he was born; the brown is a nice sock yarn, and the white is, you know, just some ol' white that I had lying around.

When he turns one in June, he might be ready for another Nonna sweater. Meanwhile, this will keep his ears warm in the Washington winter.

Now I'm ready to knit something for myself! (Well, after Anne's birthday gift and Norway's beret and the socks I promised to Peter...)

Keep the Creativity Rolling

2010-02-09T13:28:00.007-05:00

In January, one of my Facebook friends posted a challenge: she would make something for the first five people who replied, on the condition that they would make the same offer on their Facebook page. I wanted something from her, so I posted the offer to make something for five others and had five takers within hours.

This is the first of my 2010 "Keep The Creativity Rolling" projects. It's the Noro Silk Garden scarf first offered by Brooklyn Tweed on his blog in the Fall of 2008. It was all the rage that winter, though this is the first time I've made it.

I was proud of myself for scoring two different skeins of Noro Silk Garden when it was on sale a few years ago, but when I went to make the scarf, I learned that the pattern calls for two each. And of course when I went back to the store, willing to pay full price, they didn't have either of those colorways in stock. Oh well.

So this scarf is made from three different colorways, two at the first half (left side of photo) and one at the second half. I had to do a little cutting and pasting to be sure that the second half didn't end up with the "stripes" being the same color, but it worked out okay and I hardly wasted any.

Specifics: 4 50 gm skeins of Noro Silk Garden, 2 each of 2 colorways
Size 8 straight needles
Gauge: who cares? It's a scarf!

Cast on 39 or 41 stitches, knit 2 rows in K1P1 ribbing. Change to other colorway, K1P1 ribbing for 2 rows. Continue until you run out of yarn, alternating colors every 2 rows. Slip the first and last stitch on the second row of each color for a nice smooth edge. Finished scarf will be about 5" wide (unblocked) and about 7' long.

Excuse Me? I Thought We WERE a religion!

2009-09-02T21:35:00.001-04:00

I am stunned, appalled and very disappointed with the managerial decision at the UU World to publish a FULL PAGE advertisement by the Freedom From Religion Foundation in the Unitarian Universalist denominational magazine. This organization is not merely atheist or agnostic — they are ANTI-religion. We have absolutely no business carrying their advertising in our denominational magazine.

I am deeply offended by the ad copy, which suggests that anyone who believes in God thinks that fairy tales are true, and that such a belief is tantamount to slavery. And furthermore, I am embarrassed that people in my congregation will see this. I have worked so hard to help my congregation claim and own their religious feelings and feel GOOD about being religious people. How can I explain this?

If this bothers you as much as it bothers me, please send a letter to the editorial board of the UU World and tell them.

Bluegrass Bliss

2009-07-11T23:04:00.002-04:00

Wow. Too weekends in a row with fabulous music -- outdoor concerts, free to the public, the whole "kids and dogs" scene from last weekend replayed today.

This was "Bluegrass on the Grass," the 14th annual Bluegrass festival sponsored by Dickinson College on a big grassy, shaded lawn outside one of their beautiful old stone buildings. There were five Bluegrass bands, each playing a set of about 45 minutes, and each coming on twice. We were there from before it started (1:00 p.m.) until the last screams and accolades were over about 9:15.

Not only was it threatening rain when we arrived, the radar showed that we were due to be hammered by thunderstorms throughout the afternoon. It did rain a little bit now and then, even enough to warrant some umbrellas going up (including ours), but not much rain materialized until about 7:30 when it really did pour for a while. But by then the die-hards were not about to leave, as the Dismembered Tenneseans were playing and nobody wanted to miss them. We huddled under our umbrella keeping out heads dry, though our perimeters got soaked, but the music was so good who cares?

The bands varied in musical styles and appeal (though it's hard to go wrong with Bluegrass music). But by far the best were the Steep Canyon Rangers, from Asheville, NC. Five guys wearing suits (!) who were brilliant instrumentalists and really good singers. In their first set, they sang an a capella piece that sent chills down our spines "I Just Got to Heaven and I Want to Look Around." Their second set made the rain stop (I am not kidding about this). By then people were a little more lubricated than the afternoon crowd, and there was wild dancing on the pavement in front of the bandstand -- sopping wet kids leaping and pirouetting in bare feet, rhythmic clapping from the audience, screams and whistles and standing ovations for every piece. I tell you, these guys were GOOD!

I'm planning my winter calendar around their next appearance in this area.

I'm a Sap for This Stuff

2009-07-05T22:11:00.003-04:00

Just home from the Independence Weekend/Summerfest concert, a perfect ending to the holiday weekend. (Weekend? What weekend? I had a wedding rehearsal Friday afternoon followed by the rehearsal dinner, wrote a sermon Saturday morning, conducted a wedding Saturday afternoon followed by a lovely reception, preached Sunday morning and had a meeting Sunday afternoon.)

I’m a sap for these concerts. As soon as they start up with the Sousa marches I’m snuffling and choking up. Guess I’m a patriot at heart. Thank God it’s easier to be a patriot now than it was during the Long National Nightmare of the past eight years!

This is the 32nd annual Summerfest concert by the Harrisburg Symphony, held on the lawn of the Benjamin Rush campus (yes, that Benjamin Rush) of Dickinson College. Everyone for miles around comes over to the lawn with their picnics, their children, their dogs, beers and babies. Duane and I exchanged solemn vows: I promised him that I would never wear a full-length red white and blue dowdy cotton dress with stars on the bodice and stripes on the skirt, and he promised me he would never wear a similar T-shirt (especially with star-studded suspenders).

It’s a great evening for people-watching, and it’s pretty much impossible to sit anywhere without being within calling distance of someone you know. (Having lived in this town of 18,000 for 12 years, we see familiar faces everywhere we go. I like that.)

We saw a 7th grader from our congregation holding hands with her boyfriend, whom I met for the first time tonight when she came running over to me: “Judy! You wanna meet Joe?” I feel like I already know Joe from all the things she’s written about him on her Facebook page, but it was nice to shake his hand. He is apparently oblivious to the Facebook exposure.

Children ran up and down the little hill on the lawn over and over and over and over and over again, repeatedly. Some kids rolled down rather than running. Dogs cadged food wherever they could find it, and the fireflies graced us with their own languid version of fireworks as the sky darkened. Lovely!

It Seems To Me I've Heard This Song Before

2009-05-06T21:37:00.005-04:00

This is my son-in-law's sock, carefully crafted to custom fit his unusually shaped feet.

This is my son-in-law's other sock. Or maybe it's my son-in-law's sock on drugs.

Wait a minute! Haven't we been here before? [Blogger doesn't seem to have a way for me to link to an earlier post on my own blog, so scroll back to May 24, 2008.] Some dogs never learn. Or maybe some dog-owners never learn. In any case, it looks like I have another summer project.

A Renewal of the Spirit

2009-03-21T11:08:00.002-04:00

I have been longing to write about a big event in my life. Okay, it’s a bigger event in other people’s lives, but surely the birth of one’s first grandchild is worthy of claiming as BIG!

My daughter and son-in-law live in a large eastern city where they have jobs that expose them to some of the seamy and scary aspects of life — he is a clinical social worker and she is a second grade teacher in the public schools. (Yes, their jobs are sometimes sources of joy as well, but that’s not my point today.)

So they are understandably cautious about having their son’s name or photograph appear on the world wide web, even on an obscure blog that I’m pretty sure hardly anyone reads. The point is, they are private people.

I’m honoring them by not posting my fabulous grandson’s name or photo except for this:

You’ll have to extrapolate from there — he is a wonder, very beautiful (the time will come when “handsome” is a better word, but at two weeks old, he’s simply lovely!), mellow, serious, curious. When I visited last week, we mostly just sat around looking at him sleeping. Baby Television, the most entertaining thing we could find to watch.

On the Sunday after I reluctantly came home, I preached about our first UU Principle: direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder, affirmed in all cultures, that calls us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces that create and uphold life. Here are the last few paragraphs from that sermon:

“A renewal of the spirit. An openness to the forces that create and uphold life. And how better to open oneself to the forces that create life than to put oneself in the presence of a brand new baby?

Many of you know that I spent a good part of last week in the presence of a brand new baby, my grandson ____. And this is the place where words fail me, because his presence in my life is such a mystery and wonder, yet such a gift. So I will try to tell you what it was like to be with him.

I can’t take my eyes off him. Even when he is sound asleep, I just want to look at him. I hold him for hours, doing nothing else but holding him, that solid little package that settles right in to the curve of my body. I feel his warmth, his vitality right through his clothes and mine — he is so alive.

Yet at the same time he isn’t altogether here yet. Two weeks old (three weeks tomorrow), not able to focus his eyes yet, he is still making the journey from somewhere else to here, still in the process of arriving. It will take him another two months to fully get here, able to focus and see, to start organizing his sensations and making meaning of what he sees, hears, smells. This is one of the miracles of watching a new baby come into the world: to watch it organize its understanding and begin to make meaning, make patterns out of what now must surely be random and puzzling events.

I think we will know that he has fully arrived when he begins to interact with his surroundings — smiling, cooing, recognizing faces and places. Right now he is still in some in-between place, making his way slowly and carefully into this life.

I am moved close to tears witnessing his patience and courage. That may seem like a strange word to apply to a two-week old baby, but “courage” is the word that comes to me when I think about this journey that he is on, all by himself really, though people protect him and feed him and move him from place to place. His most important tasks are ones that he has to do all by himself: looking, hearing, wondering, putting it all together. He is awake for long stretches of time, patiently looking around, moving his tiny hands, pursing his lips and trying out what it feels like to have a body.

As I watch him making his way into this life, I find myself noticing the similarity with what it must be like when people are making their way out of this life and going on to some other mystery. They have to do it by themselves, and it takes great patience and courage. Other people can keep them company, hold their hands, give them sustenance and comfort. But eventually they have to go on by themselves; no one else can go with them. I find this thought comforting — that we leave the way we came, quietly, with courage.

Mystery and wonder. And we are the privileged witnesses to it all. Thanks be to God.

Amen.”

The Gift of the Wise Dogs - a Christmas Tail

2008-12-23T19:32:00.003-05:00

I'm still alive, though you'd never know it from this blog. There's so much else to do that blogging seems self-indulgent. But I want to give a gift to my readers, all seven of you. So here's the story that I will tell tomorrow evening at our Christmas Eve service. It's the latest in a long series of stories I have written to tell for the Children's Moment at my church; all of them are about my dogs Berry and Maya and their adventures.That's Maya on the left and Berry on the right.

"The Gift of the Wise Dogs"
(with apologies to O. Henry)

This is my dog Maya’s favorite toy. (Show ripped up, slobbery toy.) That is, it’s her favorite toy now that her really favorite toy is gone.

Her really favorite toy was a soft stuffed pig with a squeaker in it; we named it Miss Piggy. It was pink and cuddly (well, not so cuddly once she had slobbered all over it) with a really cute little piggy nose and pointy ears and a curly little tail. But what Maya loved most about it was the squeaker.

She would throw Miss Piggy around and pounce on it and mash it between her jaws — anything to make that squeaker squeak. In fact, she loved it so much — she loved it so hard — that she finally ripped it open by mistake and pulled out the squeaker. And then it wasn’t long before she punctured the squeaker with her sharp little teeth, and then it wouldn’t squeak any more. It was an accident!

But even without the squeaker, she loved Miss Piggy! She still threw it around and slobbered on it and held it between her paws so she could lick it and chew on it. By the time she gave it away, it was hardly recognizable as a pig any more, though it still looked like a favorite dog toy.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. You must be wondering why Maya would give away her favorite toy.

It happened like this. Maya wanted to give Berry something very special for a Christmas present. This is Berry’s first Christmas without his friend Sappho, who died last Fall. Maya knew that Berry would be missing Sappho a lot this Christmas, and she wanted to give him a thoughtful gift that would show Berry that Maya really loved him and was paying attention to him.

She thought and thought about it. You know how hard it is to give some people presents, right? They seem to have everything they need or want already. Berry doesn’t play with dog toys any more; he’s too old and dignified to do that. And he has all the clothes he needs — his matching blue collar and leash.

But wait! That leash of his was starting to look really dirty, and it was coming apart near the bottom, where Maya had accidentally chewed on it for a long time one boring afternoon. Maybe he would like a new leash to go with his collar!

Yes, that was the perfect idea for a Christmas gift! A nice new blue leash that would match his collar. But where to get one? Maya doesn’t drive yet, and she doesn’t have Internet access to buy one on line. Where could she get a leash for Berry for Christmas?

We take the dogs to the park every morning for a nice romp, and some days, if we’re lucky, we find other dogs and their owners there. Naturally, the owners talk among themselves while they are keeping an eye on the dogs. And don’t you think that the dogs talk among themselves as well? Of course they do!

One morning in early December, Maya noticed a new dog at the park. He was beautiful, with a shiny light brown coat, white feet, and pointy, stand-up ears. While Duane and his owner were getting acquainted, Maya struck up a conversation with the dog.

“Hi there,” she said to him. “My name is Maya and I’m one and a half. I’m from Labrador. What’s your name?”

“My name is Ralph,” he answered. “I’m four, and I’m a boxer.”

“Oh, I’ve never met a boxer before,” Maya said. “How interesting! Do you box?”

“No,” Ralph said. “Boxing is for people. Me, I just run around and play with toys. Especially squeaky toys.”

“Nice leash,” she said. “Where did you get it? I need to get a leash pretty soon.”

“Really?” asked the dog. “Do you like this leash? I hate it! I think it’s a terrible color. Blue doesn’t go with my coat at all, and my eyes are brown, too. I even have a red collar, so I really should have a red leash, don’t you?”

Maya was starting to put the pieces together. “Oh, yes,” she said. “A red leash would look great on you! You should ask for one for Christmas!”

“Funny you should say that,” Ralph replied. “I think I’m getting a red leash for Christmas. I heard my Mom and Dad talking about it just last night when they thought that I was sleeping.”

Now Maya was really getting excited! But she didn’t want Ralph to know how excited she was, so she tried to play it cool.

“So… what will you do with your ugly old blue leash when you get the red one?”

“I guess we’ll keep it as a spare,” Ralph said. “I’d rather not ever wear it again, but you never know when you might need a spare.”

“Ummm, Ralph? Would you consider getting rid of it? I mean, like, giving it away? To me?”

“What’s in it for me?” he asked. He wasn’t about to give away something for nothing.

“Well,” said Maya, “you said you like squeaky toys. Do you like them even after the squeaker is gone?”

“Yeah, I like them okay. Once the squeaker is gone, I like to chew them up and rip them to shreds. That’s fun!”

Maya gulped. She didn’t like the idea of Ralph ripping Miss Piggy to shreds. But it was worth it if it meant she could get Berry a beautiful new leash — well, almost new. And now that Miss Piggy’s squeaker was gone, she really wasn’t all that much fun to play with anyway. Maya could get along without her, she decided.

“Listen Ralph,” she said. “I’ll trade you my favorite squeaky toy for your blue leash, okay? The toy doesn’t have a squeaker any more, but you can tear it up if you want to. Its name is Miss Piggy.”

“’Miss Piggy,’ eh? So, it’s a pig?”

“Yes, of course it’s a pig! A pink pig, with pointy ears and a cute little curly tail.”

“Sounds good to me,” Ralph said. “I like pigs.”

So the two dogs made a plan to meet at the park that night and make the switch. Maya can get out of the house if she needs to, and Berry would never tattle on her. And sure enough, Ralph kept his promise, and that very night the blue leash was hers, and Miss Piggy was gone.

She could hardly wait to give her present to Berry! Their plan was to exchange gifts when Duane and I were out at a party shortly before Christmas, and Maya was counting the days! She loves Berry very much, and she wants him to know that. When she gave him the leash, he would be sure to understand how much he means to her.

Finally the day arrived. We went off to the party in a snowstorm, leaving Maya in her crate with a Kong full of peanut butter. Berry stays loose in the house when we go out, because he’s such a good dog that he would never get into trouble. But we’re not so sure about Maya, even when she means well. Accidents seem to happen all around her. So we put her in her crate where she — and the rest of the house — will be safe while we’re gone.

When he heard the car drive away from the curb, Berry unlocked Maya’s crate and let her out. “Are you ready for your present?” he asked.

“Oh boy! Yes, I’m ready! What did you get for me, Berry?” Maya loves presents!

“You’re really going to like this,” Berry told her. “I looked all over the Internet for it, and finally I found just the right one on eBow-wow.” He held out a small package.

As she ripped it open, she kept saying “What is it, what is it? What ever could it be?”

And then there it was, the perfect gift: a new squeaker for Miss Piggy.

Maya burst into tears. “What’s the matter?” asked Berry. “Don’t you like it? I thought it would be just the thing! You love Miss Piggy so much, and she needs a new squeaker. I thought it would make you happy, and here you are crying.”

“Oh, Berry, I do love it. It’s the nicest present you ever could have given me. It’s just… well… Miss Piggy is gone. I don’t have her any more. I traded her for your present.

“And my goodness, I need to give you your present right away! You’ll love it!”

She went to the place where she had hidden the blue leash and held it out to him. Solemnly Berry accepted it, with a strange smile on his face.

“It’s perfect, don’t you think?” Maya said to him. “I think it will match your collar just right. Put it on, Berry, and let’s see how it matches.”

Only then did Maya take a closer look at his neck, and she realized that he wasn’t wearing his collar.

“Where’s your collar, Berry? What happened to it?”

Berry continued to smile that strange smile at her, and then he leaned over and gave her a slobbery dog kiss. “Let’s put our presents away, Maya. We won’t be needing them for a while, but we have the whole evening to spend together just enjoying each other’s company, and that’s the best gift of all, don’t you think? I love you, Maya, and there’s nothing I want more than just to spend this lovely evening with you at home, looking out the window at the snow.”

“But Berry, I don’t understand. What happened to your collar?”

“I sold it on eBow-wow so I'd have some money to buy the squeaker, Maya,” he said. “Now settle down here beside me and let’s enjoy the snowstorm.”

And do you know what? It was the best Christmas that Maya and Berry ever had!

Some Bad Words Were Said

2008-05-24T22:33:00.006-04:00

A few days ago I discovered in my stash one hank of Suri Alpaca laceweight yarn (Cherry Tree Hill , Foxy Lady colorway) that had been given to me as a gift. Since I’m knitting to challenge myself, and since I’ve been intimidated at the very thought of knitting lace, I decided that now is the time.

I searched the web for a wide scarf pattern or a stole that could be made with one hank of this gorgeous yarn, 440 yards. Found just the thing, a small stole in Interweave Knits Fall, 2006, called the Swallowtail Shawl. Using my new swift and ball winder, I wound the hank into one promising-looking ball o’ yarn.

I spent the rest of the evening with another (practice) yarn and size five needles, figuring out how to read the pattern and how it worked. I ended up with a swatch big enough to see the lace pattern and correct enough to convince me that I was ready for The Real Thing. I just had to get some decent lace needles; the ones I was practicing with are plastic and snub-tipped; I knew that they would be impossible with that incredibly tiny, fuzzy yarn.

Meanwhile, just to see what it would be like to work with, I knit up a bit of a very simple pattern recommended for laceweight, called Eye of Partridge Laceweight Shawl. (I found it on someone’s blog and didn’t keep the address – I’m sorry for this egregious breach of knitterblog etiquette.) I knit just enough of it to realize that my initial instinct had been correct, and I should use the Suri Alpaca for the Swallowtail Shawl. Just have to get me some nice Knitpicks pointy lace-knitting needles.

And then the impossible happened. [Drumroll…] My puppy got into the little project, which I had left on my knitting chair, and very quietly turned that one ball of laceweight into an inferno of tangles and chaos that stretched into two rooms and out into the upstairs hall. And she did it while I was right in the room with her, looking at my computer instead of at her.

Some very bad words were said. Words that no minister should know. They were said a lot, and quite loudly. Then I mentally said a sad goodbye to my yarn (can you imagine untangling such a mess?) and then thought “Wait! This is blogworthy!” So I gathered up the mess and put it on my chair, took a few in memoriam photos and here we are.

I think I will just set this mess aside for a few days in case someone can give me a tip about how to restore this eyesore to a ball of yarn. I do have an end – a place to start. But oh my goodness, is it even possible?

Widespread Credit

2008-02-18T21:51:00.002-05:00

I was away from my church for four Sundays in a row. I’m not sure how that happened, and I don’t recommend it, but there you are. Three of those Sundays I was “off” (doing something else responsible – it’s not all bon bons…) and one of them I was conducting worship at a neighboring church whose minister is on sabbatical.

Finally yesterday I was back where I belong, and glad of it! I was on my own, because my co-minister hubby (the mastermind of our cranky sound system) was preaching at the same neighboring church. But I was so not on my own! It was a wonderful team effort which went absolutely seamlessly and left even me with my mouth hanging open.

I was preaching about Philip Pullman’s trilogy His Dark Materials, from which the movie “The Golden Compass” was made. I thought that if the fundamentalists were making such a fuss about it, then I’d like to know more. I saw the movie and read the entire trilogy, which I loved! I found most of his values very compatible with my own and with Unitarian Universalism in general.

Part of my team yesterday was the lay Worship Associate, who signed on with me because she thought it was cool to go see a movie as sermon prep. She loaned me a DVD containing an interview with Philip Pullman and a thoughtful analysis of the book which I found extremely helpful. I love it when Worship Associates take the initiative to do some real work behind the scenes.

Another important part of the team was our new Music Director, who just started on January 1 and is taking the congregation by storm! He’s a fabulous pianist, has a terrific singing voice, knows a lot about choral conducting, and arranges music at the drop of a hat. He had written an arrangement of “Bring Many Names” which was very beautiful. It involved a soprano solo, a tenor solo, and a lovely part for a child (the 11-year old daughter of the soprano, who has a very sweet voice) as well as the whole choir. They brought down the house!

One of the many ways he is whipping our choir into shape is getting them to look presentable when they sing. Yesterday they all were wearing black pants and either black, white or gray tops (or some combination thereof). Imagine my surprise to see them when I walked in wearing a black suit and a black-and-white striped blouse, and the Worship Associate had on a black suit as well. Serendipity, but it looked very put together.

Here are the last few paragraphs of the sermon:

So as Unitarian Universalists, what are we to make of these thrilling stories with their myriad levels of metaphor and myth? How are we to reconcile the various interpretations of Pullman’s work with his own statements of belief?

There is an observation that the definition of a liberal is one who can hold two conflicting and contradictory beliefs at the same time. In my experience this is true, and although it’s a characteristic that gives the absolutists a reason to criticize us liberals, I believe that the complexities of modern life require us to have some familiarity with and take some comfort in ambiguity. There is plenty of gray, and shades of gray, between those absolutes of black and white which many people believe are the only options for understanding how the world works.

So I think that we, as religious liberals, can take away meaning and significance from these stories whether we believe in God or not, whether we experience God as parent, creator, forgiver and lover, or whether we don’t need God in order to celebrate life. Although fundamentalists have seized upon the books’ attacks on the institution of the church and the way it has attempted to organize society, I’m not convinced that that is the most important aspect of the story.

Personally, I find myself much more drawn to his truthfulness about the positive message of the story of the apple (or the marzipan) in the Garden of Eden. Pullman believes that the Biblical story of Adam and Eve is a tremendous source of spiritual oppression, because it blames human beings for their natural tendency toward pleasure and curiosity, making them feel guilty instead of joyful about their awakening into authentic awareness

I have always thought that Eve should be acknowledged as one of the great heroes of humanity, for her bite into that apple marked the beginning of true human consciousness, the onset of intellectual curiosity, the opening of our eyes to both the beauty and wonder of life and to its capacity for evil and suffering. This is what it means to be a grownup.

Our focus as Unitarian Universalists is on the way we live our lives in this world, here and now, with all the clarity and clear-sightedness that we can muster. What happens before birth is a mystery; what happens after death is also a mystery, despite some people’s assertions that they know. Our focus is on life after birth, not life after death. And a brief interlude it is. As my colleague Kendyl Gibbons has said, “We have such a little moment, out of the vastness of time, for all our wondering and loving. Therefore, let there be no half-heartedness; rather, let the soul be ardent — in its pain, in its yearning, in its praise.”

This life may be the only moment that we have. But what a gift it is, this life that encompasses work and love, pain and failure, brokenness and wholeness. May we be worthy of this life and all that it holds for us.

Amen.

And then, of course, we sang "For All That Is Our Life."

Silent Poetry Day

2008-02-02T20:41:00.000-05:00

In honor of St. Brigid's Day, the blogiverse once again celebrates Silent Poetry Day. Here is my favorite all-time poem (for now...)

The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free

Wendell Berry

The Best Recipe in the Best Recipe Box Ever!

2007-12-30T14:48:00.000-05:00

The hilarious women over at Mason Dixon Knitting are running a contest to discern the best recipe box and the best recipe ever. Here’s my recipe box, not as old as some (dating back only to 1967 when I, a blushing bride, started collecting handwritten recipes on 3x5 cards). It is duly dented and stained (not to mention getting a little rusty) from years of service.

I suspect that this unassuming box contains the Best Recipe Ever Penned By a Kid, namely my daughter Anne when she was about seven years old. Here’s a picture of it, so you can see it in its original technicolor, scratched-out glory.

And here’s the recipe itself. What’s in italics is on the pre-printed card:

Here’s what’s cookin' Yummies Serves ?
Recipe from the kitchen brain of Anne Gxxxxxxxx

Whipped cream, chocolet chips, marsh mellows, chocolet powder.

Squirt whipped cream into a pan. Mix in chocolet powder. Set aside.

Put marsh mellows into another pan. Put the pan in the toester oven untill marsh mellows are melted. Put them in a bowl. Dump w. cream mixture on top. Sprinkle on choc. chips as desired. Choc. chips may be melted with marsh mellows as desired. EAT!

“Yummies,” (a poem by Anne G.)

A wonderful treat you’ll want to eat
Though your parents will debate
‘Cause they will hate
this wonderfully wonderful thing

This recipe remains untested (to my knowledge).

Is This the Face That Launched a Thousand Ships?

2007-10-21T20:50:00.000-04:00

Dear Diary – It’s been a long time since I’ve written, but I’ve been busy. You know -- start-up of the church year, getting ready for sabbatical, going on sabbatical, travel in foreign lands, hot air balloons. Like that. Oh, and getting a puppy.

Lordy, lordy, what ever possessed us to say yes to the offer of a puppy? (A free purebred Labrador Retriever – how could we say no?) And how did we ever live without her? Friends, let me introduce you to Maya. In keeping with the poet theme (Berry is named after Wendell Berry), we chose the name Maya because she is a black female. Maya is now 3 ½ months old, utterly un-house trained, a wild banshee much of the time when she is awake, but so cute when she’s asleep. (Does this remind you of having children?)

Berry walked around stiff-legged for several days when she arrived at the end of August, pretending she didn’t exist by looking the other way. But she adores him, and persists in kissing him over and over until he either relents and starts playing with her, or growls at her to let her know enough is enuf. He is going through a second puppyhood, suddenly chewing on sticks and playing with toys that he has ignored for years. The house is littered with dog toys, and with ripped up bits of god-only-knows-what. I’d be lying to say that the vacuum cleaner is doing double-duty; fact is, we are living in an incredibly messy house.

Today was Wastebasket Day At The Parsonage. You don’t really want to know what was in our wastebaskets; even less do you want to see it all over the carpet in my home office, or find it underfoot when you walk through our kitchen. Neither do we. But when she scampers past with something in her mouth that we’re pretty sure shouldn’t be there, we have no choice but to laugh, drop everything and follow her. Usually it’s too late.

If you want to be re-introduced to Joy, get a puppy.

More to follow, about lots of subjects. Hey, I’m on sabbatical for another six weeks, and I want to tell you about traveling in Greece and Turkey, and taking a balloon ride at sunrise in the next county to here. One of my sabbatical projects is to get back up to speed on the blog. Stay tuned.

Socks for My Son-in-Law

2007-08-03T11:27:00.000-04:00

I have a wonderful son-in-law. I would love to knit him some socks, as I have for everyone else in my family. (In 2006 I knit fourteen pairs of socks, as well as various other things. It was The Year of The Sock. Now I can't stop...)

I think he would love for me to knit him some socks, but he has repeatedly told me not to, as he is so hard on socks (and on all of his clothes) that he says they would be ruined in an instant. The issue is general wear and tear, AND extremely sweaty feet.

So I made him a Christmas stocking last year when everyone else was getting hand knit socks, but hey, how many years can I do that?

I would like to hear from knitters how they have resolved this dilemma. Surely other men have sweaty feet? Even women? What would be a good material to use, and are there some knitting tricks that might cause a pair of hand knit socks to last more than a few wearings? they don't have to last forever, but you know... a year or so would be nice.

I am very open to suggestion!

The Light of the World

2007-07-25T20:43:00.001-04:00

Every Sunday at the end of our service, we end by extinguishing the chalice flames. (Yes, plural, because we have a children's chalice as well as the "big" one.) When we do this, I usually say something like this:

"As we extinguish our chalice flames this morning, I invite you to take their light and warmth into your own hearts, and go out to LIGHT UP THE WORLD with them. Because you are the light of the world. Then I invite you to return next week to rekindle these flames together in community." I use a snuffer to extinguish the flames. Then I say "Go in peace, return in love."

The congregation is well trained. They won't budge until I say "Go in peace, return in love."

I absolutely love to say "You are the light of the world." I always hear the refrain from "Godspell" when I say it -- "if the salt has lost its flavor, it ain't got much in its favor, you can't have that fault and be the salt of the earth," and "You got to live right to be the light of the world." I usually look right at someone who I KNOW is the salt of the earth, and I say it to them as though I believe that these words will carry them through their week.

Reading PeaceBang reminds me of this moment in our service every week, and how I really do believe that my congregation IS the salt of the earth and the light of the world. I tell them that every Sunday, just in case they need to know.

Flying Solo

2007-07-08T17:30:00.000-04:00

I have renewed appreciation for my colleagues who manage their Sunday worship services week after week all by themselves. Today I was flying solo, and it was quite an experience!

I share my ministry with my husband, each of us conducting worship with a Worship Associate each week. The one who isn’t preaching is either teaching in RE, guest preaching somewhere else, doing some other kind of work for the District or the UUA, or participating in worship here as a member of the congregation. When I’m preaching, I always appreciate having Hubby nearby to help with the recalcitrant sound system, greet folks with me, and handle all the little details I tend to forget.

Today’s service was planned weeks ago (before General Assembly) with a Worship Associate who warned me that there was a tiny chance she wouldn’t be able to be here today, as she was participating in an academic conference that ran Sunday through Tuesday. Sure enough, they scheduled her to deliver her paper at Penn State (a 2-hour drive away) at 1 p.m. today.

Hubby was scheduled to teach in RE this morning, but our DRE managed to arrange a switch so that he could assist me with the service. We had planned a service which would allow the congregation to experience six different ways of participating in Joys & Sorrows, so that they could actually feel how well it can work even when done differently from the way we always do it. (The good part was that there was no sermon to write four days after returning from a two-week trip to the Pacific Northwest. The bad part was that it was very complicated, involving a large number of props, furniture moving, and an unusual order of worship.)

So yesterday morning Hubby comes down with a killer of a summer cold, and he’s utterly miserable. He bailed on the wedding I was conducting last evening (where he would have been a guest), and this morning I suggested that he might prefer to stay home from church – a suggestion to which he readily agreed in his croaky voice.

So here’s the scene:

I leave home at 9:30 (earlier than usual), all clean and pressed and tidy in my linen skirt and blouse, and find the front door of the meeting house unlocked (for Lord knows how many days… fortunately we are in a friendly little village). After opening the sanctuary windows and turning on the fans (we are not air conditioned, and it was predicted to be in the 90’s today), I move a table into the sanctuary on which I set up flowers and a vase (for the kids’ sharing), stones and a bowl of water. I lug in a 50-pound bag of sand for the Joys & Sorrows candles and get someone else to round up some scissors to open it so I can scoop out many handfuls of sand into the bowl we use for candles. (I’m wearing a white linen skirt.)

As I’m doing this, I notice the 6-year old son of one of the musicians (who are practicing right in my pathway) heading out the door of the sanctuary with all of the prayer request slips in his hand, slips which I had copied and cut yesterday and disbursed in the pew racks along with sharpened pencils. I catch him in time, and ask him to put them back, three in each box, which he cheerfully does.

Then it’s on to the sound system, which dates back to the 1950’s and is powered with vacuum tubes. Of course I can’t make it work, so I call Hubby on the cell phone from the control room (located nowhere near the sanctuary, and deep inside the concrete walls of the building) to ask him to walk me through the setup. He can only pick up every third word, so every time I have a question I have to leave the room and walk 20 feet toward the front door so he can hear me. Meanwhile, the musician with whom I am to sing a song wants to rehearse; I tell her I can’t until we get the sound system figured out. Hubby reminds me of the peculiarity of one switch, which has to be jiggled just so in order to put sound into the sanctuary, and it works, thanks be to God. By now it is 10:15 and the service starts at 10:30.

I put on the lapel mic, needing to secure it with a paper clip to my now soggy linen blouse, since those little clippy things always disappear. I pray that the batteries won’t run out, since the mic makes a very rude noise (think amplified fart) when that happens and it is, shall we say, an impediment to serious worship.

Now that I am ready to rehearse, I can’t find the musician, but she shows up momentarily. She looks slightly frazzled. I tell her I need to sing this song for my own sake. (We are going to sing “Comfort Me” as part of an inclusive prayer.) Our voices sound wonderful together, and I am immediately comforted. Her son and daughter interrupt us in the vestry where we are singing, and I banish them, hoping their grandfather can keep them from further mayhem. When we finish rehearsing, I find the grandfather outside the vestry door waiting to see if his crutches are in there. They are. I feel terrible.

Usually the ministers and Worship Associate stand outside the sanctuary door for about ten minutes before the service and greet people as they enter. Today I have about three minutes left. Someone wants to tell me how the collection bin for the food pantry has disappeared, and give me an announcement. I tell her “later.” (Fortunately, she is totally cool with this.) I have scarcely had time to check in with the pianist (one of a stable of four—how I long for the day when we have ONE consistent pianist on staff!), but we have e-mailed about the service and I trust her. She is playing the Music for Gathering, it’s 10:30, I take a deep breath and enter the sanctuary.

The entire service went absolutely like clockwork!!! The thrown-together quartet (guitar, mandolin, violin and recorder) did a perfect job on “Be Thou My Vision” for the prelude. Okay, the kids didn’t have much to share (as one Mom said later, “Who’s going to have any sorrows? It’s summer!”), but I got my point across with the two colors of flowers by adding some red ones for “sorrows unspoken.” And without Hubby there, I had no “down time” to sort through the prayer requests while he was leading something else.

After they were collected, I whispered to the musician “Keep playing” while I sorted through the twenty-four requests (I had been expecting maybe seven or eight), and then wove them into a prayer interspersed with verses of “Comfort Me” (sing with me, speak for me, comfort me). This was such a powerful part of the service for me, speaking a heartfelt prayer on behalf of people I love, and hearing them sing “comfort me” right along with us.

There were statements of joy from parents for their children keeping them on track, for “being love with the most wonderful man,” for special vacations spent with family, for appreciation of the spectacular beauty of this area where we live, admiration for a relative whose life will always be difficult.

And there were statements of grief at a child’s deteriorating health, at the loneliness felt after moving here, at upcoming surgeries, a mother’s Alzheimer’s causing her to forget her daughter’s name, an alcoholic father-in-law, toxic neighbors, and more.

To have twenty-four people (out of maybe seventy-five) requesting inclusion in a communal prayer was stunning to me. It’s a reminder of how hungry these folks are for the balm that corporate prayer can bring, even if they would never use those words themselves. And I found that at coffee hour I was able to connect more authentically than I usually do with everyone, just feeling that we had all shared from our hearts with great trust and compassion.

I am always, invariably, energized by conducting worship, and today was no exception. I loved this service, though I did get a few comments during the coffee hour that it was “interesting,” which I always interpret as veiled criticism.

Nevertheless, it was powerful and meaningful for me. At the end of his book Preaching, Fred Craddock writes, “…there is at least one person in the sanctuary listening, one person who, because of this sermon, may have a clearer vision, a brighter hope, a deeper faith, a fuller love. That person is the preacher.” That was my experience today, despite the sand and the sweat and the six-year old boy.

P.S. At G.A. I attended the Excellence in Worship workshop on Joys and Sorrows, with today’s (already planned) service in mind. I was astonished at how closely the presenters’ plans matched my own, though I did pick up a few good tips which improved on my ideas. If anyone wants a copy of my manuscript from today, I will be glad to share. (I’ll need your e-mail address.)

Education at Starr King

2007-05-29T15:53:00.000-04:00

There’s a flap going on over at PeaceBang about a story told by a Starr King graduate in a sermon recently published in Quest. She wrote of an all-school meeting where it was announced that the term “brown bag lunch” would no longer be used, as it was a painful reminder for some of a skin color test used by light-skinned African Americans to discriminate against African Americans who are dark-skinned.

Insert full disclosure paragraph here: I am a graduate of Starr King School. I am also the current President of the Starr King Graduates Association, a position which puts me on the school’s Board of Trustees ex officio. I am a 63-year old white woman, and a cradle Unitarian.

I read the story in Quest as a story about learning about another example of oppression, an oppression that we white people would be unlikely to know about at all, but which is another painful chapter in African American history. The point is not whether or not the term “brown bag lunch” is used at the school; the point is that the school is deeply and very seriously committed to learning about the myriad oppressions that people have suffered under and continue to suffer under. This story is one example. At Starr King, we believe that the ability to recognize and address oppressions is important in one’s preparation for ministry. Being present to suffering without turning away; crossing thresholds; encouraging speech in those who have been silenced; calling forth people’s inherent strengths — all these are significant tools in the work of building a better world.

ECO work (Educating to Counter Oppressions and Create Just Communities) runs through the entire life of the school. Of course Starr King is an academic institution whose responsibility is to teach and to grant graduate degrees to those preparing for a life in religious leadership. People study theology, world religions, sacred texts, the practical arts of ministry, and many other areas of inquiry that you would expect in a respected seminary. And woven into the matrix of life at Starr King are deeply serious commitments to be what we want to see, to shelter prophetic witness in the world, to counter white supremacy, and to work for the common good.

At Starr King, we seek to advance liberation, healing, and the establishment of a just and sustainable society by enabling people to gain the knowledge, experience, skill and religious understanding they need to address widespread and subtle (and often not so subtle) forms of oppressions, be they related to race, gender, gender expression, age, physical ability, class, or myriad other categories in which some people are diminished at the hands of others. Please believe me when I say that I am incredibly impressed with the seriousness of this work. There is nothing frivolous, “PC,” or dilettantish about it. Starr King is bending its efforts to addressing a wounded world and bringing to it the healing powers of love and understanding.

Those who wish to know more about this extraordinary and very serious educational effort are encouraged to visit the Starr King web site. (Note: that page contains links to longer documents describing the ECO work at the school.)

And to answer PeaceBang’s query: yes, our world is filled with grace. It is the grace of courage in the face of adversity; it is the grace of a love which overcomes all obstacles; it is the grace of heartfelt commitment to be a community of interdependence, connection and relationship; it is the grace of forgiveness.

Blogger Woes

2007-05-21T21:21:00.000-04:00

Okay, in the post below? Just make "left" into "top;" middle is still middle; and "right" becomes "bottom."

Please, someone, teach me how to do this! (I guess I could start by previewing the post, since obviiously it appears differently than when I'm composing it...)

Knitting to gauge

2007-05-21T21:14:00.000-04:00

Last weekend I took my first-ever knitting class. I’ve been knitting for 45 years, but never took a class before. I learned by what my mother and grandmother taught me, by reading patterns over and over again until I “got it,” or by asking any sympathetic knitter I could find – usually the owner of the local yearn store. (Nice typo! Of course I meant “yarn store,” but it’s always a “yearn store” for me as well.)

About two years ago I decided to get serious with my knitting and challenge myself to try things I have never tried before. There are so many beautiful patterns out now, and such wonderful materials to work with; I wanted to make something (many somethings) with my own hands that were lovely, complicated, and appropriately difficult. I felt it was time to stretch my mind and try something that I knew would be hard for me, but not impossible. I know the importance of keeping those synapses firing as I age, and this is a fun way to challenge my brain cells while producing something beautiful and useful.

Here’s the reason I knew it would be difficult. When I was a junior in high school, we took IQ tests. (We probably had taken them earlier as well, but this is the year that I remember.) When the results came back, I was called in to the principal’s office and told that I would have to take the test again. No explanation was given; this was all very buttoned up and hush-hush. So I took the test again. What I learned later (my mother had her ways of finding out what was going on) is that I had scored so much lower in the Spatial Relations part of the test than the rest of it that they assumed there had been a mistake in the scoring. Second time, same results. This girl is abysmal in Spatial Relations.

So knitting and sewing are challenging for me. It takes a huge effort for me to look at a sewing pattern, for example, which is printed to show the garment inside out, and figure out what it’s supposed to look like when it’s finished. It’s a little easier with knitting, for some reason, but there are still plenty of spatial challenges. Oh, and math challenges, too. Did I mention that I was pretty much a Math Moron after seventh grade?

So last weekend I gave myself a Saturday and hied me off to The Mannings (left photo -- click on it to enlarge), which I am told is the largest and oldest yarn store in the country. And it happens to be right here in central Pennsylvania, off in the middle of nowhere. Isn’t this bucolic looking? Wouldn’t you just like to move in and spend the rest of your days knitting there? I was enthralled!

My class was on gauge, a knitting essential which I have pretty much ignored for the past 43 years. When I got serious about knitting two years ago, I realized I was going to have to pay attention to gauge if I wanted things to fit, and this three-hour class gave me all sorts of good reasons to knit swatches and figure out gauge – not just for the increased likelihood that things might fit when completed, but also as a way to try out pattern stitches and see how the material behaves.

I’m about to launch into Elizabeth Zimmerman’s Baby Surprise Jacket, a classic that has probably been knit by every serious knitter since the 1950’s. It’s a real spatial relations test! And while gauge probably doesn’t matter all that much for a baby sweater, I am using unfamiliar yarn (Sirdar Tango, which knits up sort of like terrycloth) and I needed to do some experimenting to figure out what size needles to use.

In the middle is a photo of my first swatch, using size 5 needles. (You can enlarge this by clicking on it, too, but who would want to do that?) Way too big! The fabric was floppy and loose, just generally unsightly and unsatisfying. Furthermore, look at how it bulges on the sides. (This is a 6” swatch, much bigger than I really needed to make it, but I have plenty of yarn.) I tried out some stripes, and learned that two rows (bottom) or four rows (top) of contrasting color look okay, but three rows (middle) looks downright weird.

On my next swatch (right photo), I used an edge that I learned from sock knitting: knit to last stitch, put yarn in front, slip last stitch as if to purl, and on the beginning of the next row knit that stitch through the back loop. It makes a tidy edge that stayed tidy through being machine washed with a load of towels and jeans. The gauge was nearly right with size 3 needles. So I’m knitting the sweater with size 2’s, and now I know that it won’t shrink in the washing machine and dryer, for which the Mom of this not-yet-born baby will thank me. I’m a firm believer that baby clothes should be completely washable.

Stay tuned for photos as I sweat my way through this simple but not intuitive pattern.

And if anyone knows how to post a blog entry with the text wrapped around the photos, instead of having them all appear at the top, please let me know! (Does anyone else find Blogger very difficult to work with?)

Back in the Swing

2007-05-14T21:53:00.000-04:00

After THREE MONTHS of silence, I find myself wanting to get the ol’ blog going again. Herewith, a photo of the socks I made for my sister-in-law for her March birthday. I loved these; wish I could have kept them for myself.

Pattern: Jaywalker, from Grumperina. Not too difficult to knit, and snazzy!

Materials: Austermann “Step” – 75% superwash wool, 25% acrylic, with aloe vera and jojoba oils embedded in the yarn. Very soft, nice to work with and to wear. The colorway on these is “Grass Green.”

I’m feeling very rusty about downloading and prepping photos, but photos on blogs are where it’s at, so I will persevere. Stay tuned for more.

Blogger Dork Apology

2007-02-14T23:01:00.000-05:00

Okay, I'm still a Blogger Dork. Just tip your head sideways to see the correct version of the previous photo, and cut me a little slack.

Happy Valentine's Day!

Happy Valentines Day, Sort Of

2007-02-14T22:46:00.000-05:00

Today has been a day rich in reflections on the meaning of Valentine’s Day in BlogWorld. I was particularly taken with these thoughts by The Yarn Harlot, who dazzles me with her insights and terrific writing.

I had the idea a week or so ago as to how we might celebrate Valentine’s Day at home, which is a darned good thing since the roads are covered in glare ice over 6" of snow, and our car is completely plowed in. A good night to stay home.

My plan was that Berry’s Dad (who is a fabulous cook, and who makes dinner every night anyway) would come up with a special menu for a Valentine’s Day Eve Dinner; my job would be to set the table in the parlor and make a nice flower arrangement. (Note: we have a perfectly good dining room, but dinner in the parlor is something very special, involving a pretty little antique card table, a special tablecloth, and an unusual setting for a celebratory meal).

So I got all dressed up. That is, my special tight jeans and a necklace and earrings with the turtleneck and fleece jacket which are de rigeur on these very cold days. I took a shower and got all spruced up, even putting on makeup and eye liner (which I haven’t worn since high school—thank you PeaceBang!)]

When I sauntered downstairs, Berry’s Dad greeted me in the kitchen with the terse words “Dog puke.” He was too busy with dinner to take care of the after-effects of Berry eating his dinner too fast. So there I am, all fancy in my eyeliner and tight jeans, crawling around on the kitchen floor cleaning up dog puke. I will spare you the details—pet owners understand these things.

The menu:

Appetizer course: martinis (made with Tanqueray Ten, a real splurge) and a plate for each of us consisting of one superbly cooked crab cake, four shrimps sautéed in garlic and gin, and three lightly steamed asparagus spears drizzled with truffle oil. All to die for.

Entrée: lamb chops with caramelized carrots (from our garden) and onions; roasted sweet potato, white potato and onions with tarragon; and some weird kind of mushrooms.

Salad: (yes we do it the European way, with salad after the entrée): spinach salad with roasted pecans, avocado and goat cheese, and a Balsamic vinegar dressing.

First dessert: lemon tart made with Meyer lemons picked from our lemon tree which lives in Berry’s Dad’s study in the winter and outside against a hot brick wall in the summer (we brought it with us from California ten years ago and it is thriving!) paired with a lovely Masala wine.

Second dessert: Decaf espresso and LOTS of chocolate truffles! BD had made truffles last night; I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I had bought a dozen truffles from our church youth group, who were making and selling them as a fundraiser for their annual social action project. But what the hell—you can’t have too many chocolate truffles!

This dinner was a great excuse not to attend the meeting of the Finance and Fundraising Committee, which is struggling to put together a draft budget to submit to the Board tomorrow night. They need to learn how to do this by themselves. Pass the truffles…

Being Friends

2007-02-07T22:57:00.000-05:00

I feel so lucky to have J. as a friend. We met in the park about two years ago, walking our dogs. Those early-morning accidental meetings gradually led to deeper and more honest conversation about our lives (interspersed with picking up dog poop and commenting on the weather, the ducks in the creek, and the strange characters who hang out at the park at 7 a.m.)

One day I was telling her about the loneliness of ministry, especially in a small town like this where NEARLY ALL the cool people are already in one’s congregation. Since one can’t be friends with one’s members and still minister to them with integrity, there is quite a bit of self-sacrifice involved. She immediately blurted “I’ll be your friend!” and indeed she has been ever since.

We went to Weight Watchers together and provided the support (and the sarcastic commentary) to keep each other on track with the program until I reached my goal and she came close to hers. We have joined a book group together, through which I have met other cool women who are not in my congregation. We have done confession and contrition, and told each other some of our most important stories. And with her I always feel that there is so much more that is possible between us in the way of a rich and rewarding friendship. All it would take is more time.

We are both busy – I with work in ministry, and she with landscaping her yard, maintaining the house she lives in and more than one rental property, travel, writing, and artistic endeavors. Sometimes weeks go by without our seeing each other (because she doesn’t have the dog any more, and who in their right mind would come out to the park at 7:00 a.m. when the temperature is 19 if they didn’t have to?)

By dint of careful planning and persistence, we managed a full 4 hours together today, and I am feeling replete with gratitude for having such a friend. We went to a brief talk given by a Dickinson College professor who is a member of my congregation, and I was delighted to see about 20 other members there to cheer him on. Then we went out for dinner, followed by a long soak in her hot tub and a wonderful conversation, after which she drove me home (it being 19 again by 8:30 p.m.)

When I was younger, I took my friends for granted. I met them mostly through my children or through work. Good people, interesting people, with whom I had a lot in common. It was easy to make friends, and the circumstances of our lives threw us together frequently enough that friendships were easy to maintain.

Now my children are adults living elsewhere, and the very nature of my work precludes friendships except with colleagues, who by definition don’t live here in my town. I am very fortunate to have Berry’s Dad living under the same roof, who is both colleague, friend and life partner. Many of my single colleagues are not so lucky, and I hold their loneliness in my heart with considerable empathy.

But I am a woman, and I long for women friends. I am so grateful to J. for her outburst of affection and support when she said “I’ll be your friend!” and for the way she has stuck by me ever since.

Tonight in her hot tub I was talking about our eventual move back to the west coast when we retire, and how painful it will be to leave both the folks in my congregation whom I love, and my family members who live at least in the same time zone: my married daughter (whose husband I adore) and my two brothers and their wives and families. But I neglected to tell her how much I would miss her, and how much her loyal friendship has meant to me.

J., you know who you are. And I am here in front of God and everybody to tell you that I love you and I am so glad we are friends! Thank you for your friendship, which has meant more to me over the past two years than I can ever tell you.

What I Forgot To Say

2007-01-30T22:25:00.001-05:00

I got so excited last night being able to post a photo of my knitting that I completely forgot my knitting blog etiquette, which is GIVING INFORMATION. So here is the information about the sock, along with another photo for your drooling pleasure.

MATERIALS: Tess' Designer Sock Yarn in an unnamed colorway which is a very subtle shading between pale blue and pale green. (You can hardly see the green in real life, so don't bother looking for it in the photo. Just believe me that it's beautiful.) This is called "Super socks and baby yarn," 80% wool and 20% nylon, supposedly machine washable and dryable. (I'll put washable hand knit socks into one of those mesh bags in the washing machine, but I would never put them in the dryer no matter what the label says.) I got this at the Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival last May, which was a knitter's paradise if I ever saw one.

The pattern for this sock is Hedera. It took me a while to figure out the pattern (my first real lace) but eventually I realized that I was really only keeping track of five stitches over three rows (four really, but two were the same), and suddenly it seemed possible.

I knit a lot of this sock on airplanes and in airports between Baltimore and Seattle. What a joy to see it evolve! On the way to Seattle, I was sitting next to a businessman whose wife (not with him) is a knitter. This guy must love his wife a lot, as he was very enthusiastic talking with me about knitting, and he even pointed me to a yarn shop in my mother-in-law's neighborhood which I never would have discovered. He was duly impressed with the sock. I was duly impressed with him.

Knitting Content at Last!

2007-01-29T23:02:00.001-05:00

Here is the sock that I made for my daughter for her birthday last week. Yes, that's "sock" singular. I started it only nine days before her birthday, and knew I would be hard-pressed to finish even one sock to get it in the mail to her on time. By staying up until 1 a.m. thenight before themandatory trip to the Post Office, I managed to finish it. She will get the second one soon, once I finish the next pair of gift socks--recipient to remain undisclosed in the extremely unlikely event that she reads this blog.

At last, I have a knitting blog!

Twelfth Night

2007-01-07T21:40:00.000-05:00

Okay, technically tonight is Thirteenth Night, but it’s close enough. Tonight we experienced the perfect ending to the Christmas season.

I have to begin by telling you that we live in a town of 20,000; by any count, that would be a small town. But oh, what a history! George Washington mustered the troops here to counter the Whiskey Rebellion (this was years before the Revolutionary War). St. John’s has been here since Washington’s day (though he worshipped at First Presbyterian, across the street), and it is as proud of its history as the entire town is. The Twelfth Night pageant is a long-standing tradition well-known in this community, and I was dazzled by the professionalism, the costumes, the pageantry, and the skillful music. We may be a small town, but we do pageantry Big Time! (We were told that 130 members of St. John’s, all in full costume, participated in this event.)

This was a performance of a medieval Twelfth Night banquet, with resplendent costumes, live music, a boar’s head and a Yule log. For years, people have been telling us that we Must See This, but we have never managed it until this year. It was fabulous, delightful, stirring, moving—a wonderful celebration to close out the season, instead of letting it die with a whimper, falling silently to the ground like the needles from the Christmas tree.

St. John’s sanctuary, which seats probably 400, was packed for the 5:00 p.m. performance, the third performance of the day. I loved just sitting there under the wood-beam ceiling, looking into a chancel which is 1/3 the depth of the entire sanctuary, walls painted the color of raspberry sherbet. Everyone in the audience was dressed up, with an expectant and excited air about them.

The pageant began with a sprite (a little girl perhaps five years old) skipping in with a lit candle, symbolizing Christ’s light entering the world. Once the Christ candle was lit from her taper, she was followed by a snare drum and two bagpipers processing up the center aisle, then four beefeaters (yeomen of the guard) in perfect gin-bottle costumes. The chain mail-wearing guards came up the side aisles at the same time.

The idea of the pageant is a play within a play. The master and mistress of the manor, along with their entourage of pages, lords and ladies in waiting and all the invited guests, assemble to witness the nativity play. So after the yeomen of the guard and the armored guards, we have the lords and ladies (who, incidentally, are the church choir) sashaying up the aisle and greeting the other guests (that would be us in the audience). They sing and dance courtly dances.

A trumpet fanfare introduces the boar’s head, flanked by torchbearers and followed by the huntsman, cooks (these are the second- and third-graders all in aprons and wonderful floppy cook’s hats, carrying wooden spoons) and other attendants. The herald sings the boars head carol.

Next comes good King Wenceslas, who has the most stunning bass voice I can imagine, accompanied by his page, a winsome girl with a lovely untrained voice. They sing their song and take their places among the guests. After them come the revelers—jesters, magicians, jugglers, clowns, and the children of the manor. Clearly these are the best parts, played by the older elementary school kids in whimsical jester caps and bright overshirts, throwing candy into the audience, tripping each other up, and playing pranks. As they assemble, everyone sings the wassail song.

Then come the woodsmen bearing the Yule log, with several very small children sitting astride it. One of them sucks his thumb while ringing a bell with the other hand. We all sing Deck the Halls as the Yule log is put into place. It is followed by the Bishop, a small child behind him hefting his cape, who is greeted warmly and respectfully by the Lord of the Manor.

Now all the guests are assembled, and the nativity play begins with the Lord of the Manor reading from the Gospel of Luke. Mary and Joseph walk slowly down the side aisle and up the center, and by the time they get to center stage, a baby has appeared for them to hold and adore. Tonight’s baby was about six months old, and he was fascinated with Mary’s hair, which hung attractively outside of her blue hood, and which he stroked reverently for a long time before succumbing to sobs which no one could quiet until one of the manor guests took him away from Mary and brought him to his real mother in the audience.

After Mary and Joseph came the shepherds (no bathrobes and dishtowels, but rugged woven cloths tied over their heads, and staffs which could have come right out of 1st century Palestine). As the shepherds kneel around the (wailing) baby, a star appears at the back of the hall. This is one of those beautiful illuminated 36-pointed stars called a Moravian Star, suspended from a curved pole carried by a beautiful boy dressed in gold. The three kings, of course, follow the star and lay their gifts at the feet of Mary, now bereft of crying baby, who is presumably contentedly suckling at the breast of his real mother in the audience.

All of these arrivals in the nativity are accompanied with song—not the traditional Christmas carols, but arrangements of medieval music and other seasonal music that is probably unfamiliar to most of us but that sounds really authentic. Once the nativity scene is complete, all sing with devotion, hands raised in adoration of the holy child.

The sprite reappears to reclaim the light, and as she skips back down the aisle she is followed by the whole entourage. The Beefeaters reappear, marching smartly to the front of the sanctuary and positioning themselves at the ends of the pews. At the command “Hats!” they doff their perfect Beefeater hats and proceed to take the collection in them, which will go to a local interfaith organization to help the disadvantaged. Following the collection, the entire cast reassembles for a final photo op (no flash allowed), and then they process out the side door to partake of a huge pie that came in with the boar’s head—I swear this pie was a good 24” across, and might have contained four and twenty blackbirds for all I know.

The audience, which was not invited to share in the pie, left through the sanctuary doors into a night of rain. It would have been more charming if it were snow, but it’s been in the 50’s and 60’s all week, so rain was what we got. I was between tears and elation all the way home as we walked through the raindrops.

I love my church and I couldn’t imagine being anywhere else, but I have to admit that I was envious of St. John’s and all the resources it can muster to put on this fabulous pageant. The children who grow up in that church must look forward every year to their own progress from Yule-log riders to cooks to pages to jesters, and then finally as adults to sing in the choir and wear velvet hats that look like cushions, and bodices draped with faux jewelry. My practical side says “What kind of a Christmas season do they have with all those rehearsals?”, but the spectator in me says “I love this!”

Perhaps the reason I enjoyed this so much was that I could be just a spectator, not having any responsibility beyond finding a ten dollar bill for the collection and fully enjoying myself. Call it a minister’s holiday if you will, but pageantry in church is what I love the best.

The Pretense of Accident

2007-01-07T13:30:00.000-05:00

PeaceBang's experience of running into a veterinarian congregant when her kitty was so sick prompts this reflection:

I'm just home from church, where I conducted an intergenerational service based on Sharon Salzberg's story (told to the ministers at GA last summer) about following "the pretense of accident." It was about intuition, following up on hunches, paying attention to our dreams, trusting our gut... things like that.

I wouldn't attempt to weigh in on whether it's God's hand or Pure Dumb Luck or something else, but I will say that WHEN it happens, follow through! Go there!

Right after the Buddha was enlightened, the first person who saw him was so taken with the radiance of his face and the power of his being that he asked "Who are you?" The Buddha replied "I am an awakened one." (Or perhaps "I am awake.") The person shrugged his shoulders, said "Well, maybe," and turned away.

That guy missed out! What if he had followed through, said "No, really, who are you?" or "If you're awake now, what were you before?" or "Am I awake?" or "How did you get that way?" Think how his life might have been changed if he stuck with his hunch that the Buddha was someone really interesting and special and he should stick around.

Listen to me--I"m inspired by my own sermon. Guess that's a good thing, eh?

Berry on Christmas Eve

2006-12-29T20:28:00.000-05:00

Actually, I have been alive and functioning reasonably well for the past month. But, you know, it was December. Need I say more?

To reassure my friends in Blogworld that I still exist, herewith the story I told on Christmas Eve. But first a bit of introduction...

For the past two years, I have been telling stories about our dog, Berry, for the Children's Moment at church. Usually Berry drives off in our pickup truck (wearing a baseball cap and sunglasses, so no one will recognize him) and Has Adventures (which always, conveniently, have a message that ties in with the topic of the service that day). Often his adventures include other real dogs of our acquaintance; the only made-up characters are Bob and Rover, the gay couple.

Next November, when I am on sabbatical, I hope to polish up these stories for publication by Skinner House. (I have not queried them yet about this; it's just a dream at this point.) My intention is for worship leaders to use them in any way they wish, as jumping-off points for children's stories. If anyone wants to use the story below (unlikely before next December, right?), feel free.

This particular story is the result of some collaboration among my UU minister colleagues. A query was posted on our list-serv about what a contemporary nativity story would look like. Out of several responses, I was DAZZLED by one submitted by Chip Roush (whom I don't know, but who is my current hero) describing the birth of a baby at Wal*Mart. I took this story and adapted it to be used as a Berry Story for Christmas Eve.

This version is what I used to compose the story in my mind. As I told it, I embellished it here and there for lively telling. Here it is, courtesy of Chip Roush, me, and Berry: (sorry, it's long...)
********************
Berry Witnesses Something Unusual
(Christmas Eve, 2006)

Berry has been watching the packages appear under our Christmas tree, some with his name on them. He was feeling worried that he hadn’t gotten around to buying anything for us.

So one night earlier this week, he waited until we were asleep, and then unlocked the back door and went out to the truck in the garage. He put on his baseball cap, but not the sunglasses; he thought it would be too dangerous to drive at night with sunglasses on, and he just hoped no one would recognize him.

After putting on his seat belt and backing the truck out of the garage, he headed for Wal*Mart. “I know my Mom and Dad don’t like Wal*Mart,” he said to himself, “but where else can I go this late at night? And I’m sure to find something there for them. Wal*Mart has everything.”

Even late at night, the parking lot had a lot of cars in it. Berry was glad, because that meant the store would be crowded and maybe no one would notice him.

He was looking at the games and toys (people toys, not dog toys), thinking that Duane and I don’t play enough and maybe we need some new toys, when he heard a voice coming over the loudspeaker: “Attention, Wal*Mart shoppers! A baby has just been born in the rest room near the front entrance of the store. If you’d like to purchase a gift for this new family, our infant supplies are in aisles 17 and 18. There is a 10% discount on diapers, if you buy a case. Thank you for shopping at Wal*Mart.”

Berry wasn’t about to buy any diapers or baby supplies, but he was very curious about this new baby, so he slowly and casually strolled to the front of the store. There was already a small pile of gifts accumulating just outside the bathroom door, right under the star in the “Wal*Mart” sign.

Inside the women’s bathroom, the baby’s mother was lying on some fluffy new blankets and quilts that still had the price tag on them, holding a sleeping baby in her arms. A man sat on the floor near them with a big smile on his face. He reached out to Berry, so Berry went over and lay down next to him, where he had a good view of the baby.

Pretty soon several people came in carrying mops and sponges and buckets. They were speaking in a language Berry didn’t understand, but one of the words they kept repeating was “niño.” They seemed to be quite shy, but also very excited.

The man got up off the floor and spoke to them. “I’m sorry, but my wife just had a baby here and she’s resting and the baby is sleeping. Would you mind coming back later to clean the bathroom? We’d prefer not to be disturbed right now.”

One of the men replied, “Oh Senor, we came to see the baby. Our shift just started and we were going to work when we heard the announcement on the loudspeaker about your baby. We just want to see the baby. We are far away from our own families and our own babies, and we miss them so much! We send money to them, but it’s not like being there with them. Please, may we just look at your baby for a little while?”

All the workers crowded around, pointing at the baby and smiling and murmuring about “ el niño!” among themselves. Berry didn’t understand their words, but the joy on their faces was unmistakable, as well as the longing they said they had felt for their own children far away.

"Feel free to stay as long as you like," the man said. "My name is Joe, and this is my wife, Mary, and this is our son. We haven't decided what his name is yet; he came earlier than we had expected."

"Oh Senor," the man said to Joe. "We would like to stay longer, but we need to get to work now. If we do anything wrong, we might get into trouble, and they would find that we don't have the right papers to be working, and then they would send us back to our country and we would be in big trouble. We don't want to call any attention to ourselves. We have to go now."

He gestured to his co-workers, and they gathered up their mops and brooms and backed out of the bathroom, blowing kisses at the baby and his mother, with sad looks on their faces.

It wasn’t long before three young men came bursting into the bathroom with a great deal of chatter and excitement. They kept exclaiming how special this baby was, and how honored they were to attend his birth. The man finally got them to calm down, and they explained they’d received text messages on their cell phones, announcing that an uncommon birth was happening beneath the star in the Wal*Mart sign at the front of the store. None of the three knew who had sent the text message, but they were all elated to have gone in search of the baby, and now they had found him.

“So who are you, anyway?” one of them asked the baby’s father. “What are you doing here?” Berry had been wondering the same thing.

“Well, I’m Joe,” the man said, “and this is my wife, Mary. And this is my son. We don’t have a name for him yet. We weren’t expecting him quite so soon. We’ve been living here in Pennsylvania with Mary’s sister after we lost our home in New Orleans in Hurricane Katrina last year. Now FEMA finally came through with our check, to replace our house and belongings, but they told us we had to pick it up in person, in New Orleans. We didn’t have enough money to pay for hotel rooms, so we’ve been living in the van for the trip south. When Mary began her labor, I got off the Interstate at the very first exit, and she insisted on coming into the store for the delivery, where it would be warm.”

“Well, this must be one special baby, that’s all I can say!” exclaimed one of the young men. “Everyone in the store is talking about it. This is the best thing that’s ever happened in our town!”

They stayed a while longer, talking among themselves and with Joe and Mary, until one of them said “We’d better leave now and let these people get some sleep.”

As they left, each young man knelt down beside Mary, and handed her a gift, to help raise the child. The first man gave her a small collection of gold coins, each worth several hundred dollars, which they could easily trade. The second gave her his Blackberry, and explained that he would continue paying for its internet and telephone service for the next 18 years. The child would have the world at his fingertips. The last man offered a plastic folder, which he said contained a paid-up health insurance policy, with well-baby care and a prescription benefit. Mary began to cry at this gift, and Joe fell to his knees, to embrace the man.

“You people have been so kind to us!” he said with great emotion. “Everyone has been so kind! I can’t tell you what this means to us, coming after such a difficult year and such a terrible loss. How can we ever thank you?”

“Just keep the kindness going,” one of the young men said. “If you have the opportunity to help someone else, just do what you can for them. Keep the kindness going.”

One of the other young men added, “And teach it to your son! How many people have told you tonight that he is special? Well, you teach him that ALL people are special, that everyone deserves love, and that he must do his part to keep the love going all around the world.”

Then the third young man spoke. “When you get home to New Orleans, you are going to see a lot of grief and suffering. Just remember that people have a deep well of goodness in them, and when they help each other and stick together, miracles can happen.”

Berry was thinking, “Dogs, too. Dogs have a deep well of goodness in them. I’m a good dog. My Mom and Dad tell me that all the time.” So after the young men left, Berry stayed with the family while they rested a while longer. When they got up to fold their blankets and gather up all the gifts at the bathroom door, Berry stood up with them and went with them to the parking lot.

He stayed with Mary at the van as she settled onto the back seat, making a comfy bed with some blankets and pillows. She lay down with the baby at her side, and Berry stood guard while Joe went back into the store for all the other things.

“You’re a good dog,” Mary said to him. “I don’t know where you came from, but it was such a comfort to have you with us tonight. Now you go home to your house, and we’re going to drive home and start up our new life with our new baby, and who knows what will happen? But I will never forget you. You’re a very good dog.”

Berry watched them drive away in their old van, and then he got into the truck, which was parked nearby. He put on his baseball cap, but not the sunglasses, and fastened his seat belt. As he drove home through the dark streets, he pondered all that he had seen that night, and wondered what to make of it. Maybe it had been a miracle. He couldn’t wait to tell Sappho all about it.
**************
What was fascinating to me was the way the congregation got very quiet when they figured out what this story really was. (I think it was at the part where Joe introduces himself and his wife, Mary.) Up until then, there had been a lot of laughter and high energy. But at that point they got very quiet, and by the time the story was over, several folks had tears on their faces.

Even though it's December 29 now, the loveliness of the season lingers with me, and I hope with all of you as well.

Shabbat Shalom

2006-12-02T22:46:00.000-05:00

Last night I went to the Shabbat service at a nearby Reformed Jewish synagogue. A UU friend and colleague had been invited to preach, so I went to be part of his claque (not that he needs one). It was a lovely experience.

We got there really early. (Have you noticed how the first-time visitors at church seem to get there either really early or just as the service is starting? This is clearly an interfaith practice.) That gave me plenty of time to Soak It All In before the service began.

The sanctuary was gorgeous. I’m not enough of an expert to describe the architectural style; let’s just say that it was Old. There were stained glass windows (geometric, not representational) on both sides, and also (this is the coolest part) in the ceiling, lit from above. The pews were comfortably cushioned, the carpeting was thick and attractive, the lighting was good, and the whole place was clean, clean, clean.

What I loved best was watching people greet each other. They were so happy to see each other! Lots of hugging and cheek kissing between genders and generations. People were well dressed but not showy. Everyone greeted each other with “Shabbat Shalom,” (May the peace of the Sabbath be with you.)

There was a fixed liturgy which we followed along in the prayer book. The parts written in Hebrew were sung by the cantor (a woman with a lovely, clear, unselfconscious voice, not at all operatic or over-trained, just a great voice). Many in the congregation knew the songs and sang along soto voce, even though there was no musical notation. The rabbi read other parts of the liturgy, and the congregation responded. I actually find a fixed liturgy like that rather boring; I was thinking “Boy, the Rabbi gets off easy—all he has to do is write a sermon, and the rest of the service is already done.”

But I did love the way the service praised the Sabbath itself. There was a song about Queen Sabbath, and a lot about how the Sabbath is a holy time of rest. Of course I know that, but can you imagine one of our services praising Sunday morning? This felt different, as though the Sabbath itself were a worthy object of worship.

Ant that’s the point, of course. Because it is. Just imagine ending your work week with a time for reflection and prayer in a community of people who love you, before going into your weekend of play/chores/whatever. It felt so different from ending one’s weekend with worship on a Sunday.

I remember having a similar feeling one Friday night when visiting a colleague whose partner is Jewish. The candles were lit, the meal (which was completely prepared before sunset) was served and enjoyed, and then the three of us sat around the table and talked for a long time. When I finally left, it was clear that the dishes weren’t going to be washed that night. It was beautiful, communal, and relaxed. I felt that my thirst had been slaked. It was a lovely evening.

In Barbara Brown Taylor’s book Leaving Church, she writes about keeping the Sabbath (once she has stopped being a parish minister) by sitting on her porch and doing nothing. No reading or writing, no prayer, just sitting there. This was a very healing practice for her after a difficult time in her professional life.

I want that, too. I want there to be a regular time in my life when I don’t have to produce anything or be anywhere or meet anyone’s expectations. I just want to be quiet and notice life happening all around me.

I hope I live long enough after I retire that I will be able to do that and realize that I’m doing it.

The Dearly Departed

2006-11-18T22:34:00.000-05:00

This morning I conducted a memorial service for a woman I never met. It was one of those calls out of the blue. Last Sunday I got home from church before Berry’s Dad, so I was the one to retrieve messages off the phone machine. Because we share one position in ministry, it’s a challenge sometimes to balance out who does what. Our understanding is that whoever answers the phone or gets the message takes up the task. Tag, you’re it!

So I got the message from the funeral director that a woman had died in a nursing home. Her daughter, who was from out of town, said that she had been a Unitarian Universalist, so the funeral director looked in the Yellow Pages for a UU minister and there we were. I could hardly say no.

When a person dies at 92, they are unlikely to have throngs of friends left. Furthermore, her husband and her son had already died, leaving just the woman and her daughter as the last family members. Not even any aunts, uncles or cousins. When I met with the daughter yesterday, she told me that her marriage was ending, and I ached for her. How many important losses at a time can one person sustain?

The location for the service was creepy: a typical funeral home, all hushed carpets and gas log fireplaces and huge displays of flowers. While I was waiting for the service to begin, I took a cruise through the Coffin Room (they probably have another name for it) to check out the goods. The least expensive was a $395 wooden box to be cremated in. But of course, you could spend a lot more on a cremation coffin — this gives new meaning to the term “money to burn.” The “permanent” coffins ranged in price from around $2,000 for a tacky model to well over $6,000 for a bronze number with all sorts of cushioning and embroidery. What are these people thinking? Dead is dead — it’s too late for cushions. When I die, just put me in the wooden box (or better yet, a muslin bag) and send me into the flames. Ashes to ashes.

I think I chose the wrong metaphor for the service. Several times I suggested that as long as there were people to remember her, M.G. would never die. But with only one daughter in her fifties and about twenty friends in the neighborhood of the eighties, that remembrance isn’t going to last long. I need to come up with better metaphor for the next time.

The woman was born the same year as my mother — 1914. She was a stay-at-home mother, did a lot of volunteer work, played bridge, kept a lovely home and a gorgeous garden. Clearly cut from the same cloth as my mother; I felt that I understood her life even though we had never met. I think I would have liked her. Some of the photos that her daughter had on display showed that certain sparkle of the eye.

There was a guest there who had been to another memorial service I conducted several years ago, that one for a woman who was a member of my congregation, whom I knew well and loved. Even though there is more sadness in the death of a loved one than a stranger, I prefer to conduct services for the former. I can draw upon my own memories of the person, that look in the eye, that tone of voice, all the times I have been with her. She died with a copy of the latest biography of Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Mind on Fire, clutched to her chest, as though to say “See, I am an intellectual!” I don’t think she managed to read a word of it, but just having the book in her possession was important to her.

On the phone, the funeral director told me he had quoted a fee of $150 for this service. I told him that my minimum was $250. For $150 you get someone in a robe or a clerical collar who plugs a name into a boilerplate service and offers little comfort beyond “going home to Jesus.” I spent probably seven hours on this service, between telephone calls, a meeting with the daughter, looking for suitable readings, writing the ceremony from scratch, and spending an hour there this morning. At $35 an hour, that’s a bargain.

I know this sounds crass. But this is what we do to keep a roof over our family’s heads and food on the table. (Or in my case, a new winter coat.) How do you put a price on comfort and solace? What is my kindness and sympathy worth? This is time taken from my personal life, not from the ministry my church already pays me for. I think I’m worth $35 an hour. Or more.

Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes

2006-10-16T21:13:00.000-04:00

It’s been a long time since I’ve posted on the blog. Life just goes on, one foot in front of the other, and nothing seems especially blog-worthy. We’re all busy and working hard; I find myself thinking “Is this topic worth someone else’s time?” Maybe this one is…

Yesterday was our second intergenerational service of the year. We are doing one for each of the seven UU principles, as the children begin their five week unit on each principle. Yesterday’s was the second principle: justice, equity and compassion in human relations. Or in the children’s version: "we believe in kindness and fairness for everyone." (Drop me a note if you’re interested in how we are doing children’s religious education this year; it’s an experiment, and it seems to be working beautifully so far.)

I thought it was a good service, and many of the adults did, too. My criteria for a successful intergenerational service are (1) were the children paying attention? And (2) was there anything in it to feed the adults?

I had two girls act out a children’s book called The Other Side, in which a fence divides the black and white neighborhoods of a town. A black girl and a white girl have each been told by their mothers not to go over the fence, because it’s not safe on the other side. So they make friends through the fence, and spend the summer sitting on the fence talking and dreaming of the day when the fence will be taken down.

My homily talked a little bit about the civil rights movement and how Unitarian Universalists—both black and white—were deeply involved. Then I told them about the famous “blue eyes, brown eyes” experiment done in a small-town third grade Iowa classroom on the day after MLK Jr’s assassination. (You can read more about it here.) (A Google search under "blue eyes brown eyes" will get you lots more information.) I was surprised to see many heads nodding in the congregation; lots of our folks knew about it. I asked the kids “Who is in third grade this year? Who is in second? Who is in fourth? This story that I’m going to tell you happened with children about your age.” That seemed like a good way to get their attention. I’ll be very interested to hear what the kids had to say about this. It seems to me like a very hard and painful lesson.

I ended with a Berry story. I have been telling stories about my dog Berry for two years now, and I have quite a collection of them. A year from now, when I will be on a short sabbatical, I hope to get them published by Skinner House, the in-house publishing arm of the Unitarian Universalist Association. They are all stories suitable for telling in UU churches to UU children to illustrate UU principles. (Is this a best-seller in the making?)

Most of my Berry stories involve Berry and other real dogs; the only made-up ones are Bob and Rover, a gay couple. Yesterday’s story was about Cherie and Angel, miniature poodles who live next door who are very yappy and unpleasant. Berry can’t stand them, but despite his dislike for them, he can tell when they aren’t being treated with fairness and kindness.

Today was a real day off: gardening, laundry, eating dinner out (where we ran into a Presbyterian colleague and her husband) and a lot of knitting.

I still hope to make this into sort of a knitting blog as well as everything else, but we have to work out the camera issues first. Stay tuned. Now I’m off to knit socks.

The Philadelphia Orchestra

2006-09-28T23:31:00.000-04:00

Berry’s Dad and I have a tradition that each year one of us surprises the other with a wedding anniversary getaway. This year it was my turn to be surprised, finding myself in Philadelphia (a two hour train ride from home) for three days.

The highlight of the trip (so far…) has been the Philadelphia Orchestra, which plays in Kimmel Hall, a new and gorgeous gathering space with several theaters, the largest of which is Verizon Hall, shaped like the inside of a violin, and made all of wood as a violin is.

We got two hits of fabulous music today, because the smart folks at the orchestra have opened the final rehearsal to the public at noon. So we arrived at noon along with all the musicians in their jeans and T-shirts, and heard a precise and detailed rehearsal of the Shastakovich Symphony #5. The orchestra is recording it, so the conductor, Christoph Eschenbach, was paying minute attention to each measure (“no crescendo, no crescendo!” or “I want these notes on the violas to be longer”).

We also got to see, up close and personal, the dancing style of the violin soloist, Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, my new crush. I’m not that big a fan of the violin, but watching (and hearing) her play the Bach violin concerto #2 was sheer joy, especially as she was wearing corduroy jeans and a floppy green sweater, and her hair was still wet from the shower.

Tonight it was a different story. At the noon rehearsal we sat as close as possible to the front, so that we could see facial expressions and hear every word of the conductor. For the “real” concert, we were sitting in the second balcony, with a fine view of the whole stage—the big picture as compared to up close and personal earlier in the day.

Nadja (I love her so much, surely I can call her by her first name?) was wearing black pants (I knew she would wear pants) and a raspberry-colored cardigan sweater over her black top, and the hair was somehow under control. But she still danced. Man, did she dance! I will never hear the Bach violin concerto the same way again, now that I’ve heard it with her embellishments and her full-body style.

The Shostakovich blew my socks off! It was the biggest orchestra I’ve ever seen: 15 violins, 20 violas, 10 cellos, 8 basses, five percussionists (timpani, cymbals, all sorts of drums, triangles, etc.), four trombones, four trumpets, two flutes, an array of reeds and woodwinds I couldn’t see very well, two harps (yes, TWO!), a piano, a carillon—probably about a hundred musicians. And you know you’re listening to a top symphony orchestra when the conductor can get them to play so softly that you could hear a pin drop, an intake of breath, a sigh at the end of a passage. Getting 100 musicians to play loud is a snap; getting them to play pianissimo is an art.

When Eschenbach came out and mounted the podium, I realized that he was conducting without a score! During the performance, when I wasn’t distracted by the person crinkling paper, whom I wished to garrote, I was thinking about what a piece of teamwork I was watching. Without a score, the conductor had to rely on the musicians to do what they were supposed to do—come in on time and play the right notes. No way could he give everyone their entrances. He was paying attention to the nuances – the dynamics, the drama (of which there was plenty!), the feeling tone. From the rehearsal, watching the interplay between musicians and conductor, I sensed that they love working with him and they would do anything he wished. He seemed to be a gentleman and a gentle man, not the prima dona that one expects in a major symphony orchestra conductor.

When it was over, the audience was on their feet in an instant. I’ve never heard so many calls of “Bravo! Bravo, Maestro!” as I heard tonight, my voice among them. This concert hall has seating above and behind the orchestra, so that they see the musicians and the conductor face to face. One of the ushers this morning told us that those seats are reserved for “friends of the maestro” (translation: really big donors). It would have been even more of a thrill to sit in those seats and see his face, but watching the body language of all the musicians was thrill enough for me.

I must remember how important it is to feed my soul with experiences like this: live music, art, beauty in all her seductive ways. There is so much slogging in front of the computer screen; I have to remember to get up and get out now and then, to keep the joy in my heart.

"I'm Sorry That You're a Jerk"

2006-09-20T23:17:00.000-04:00

With the Jewish High Holy Days approaching, I have been ruminating on my almost-annual sermon on forgiveness and starting over, or whatever similar theme I can link to this important time in the Jewish year. Because of certain public events and smaller ones in my own congregation, I am going to focus this year on the issue of apology and how it relates to forgiveness. The title is “Who’s Sorry Now?”

Part of the impetus for this is the astounding monologue titled “sorry” in Ntozake Shange’s play For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf. One woman says:

one thing I don’t need
is any more apologies
i got sorry greetin me at my front door
you can keep yrs
i don’t know what to do wit em
they don’t open doors
or bring the sun back
they don’t make me happy
or get a mornin paper
didn’t nobody stop usin my tears to wash cars
cuz a sorry.

There are two people in my congregation who need an apology to happen between them, and my fingers are crossed that it will happen with a slight nudge from their minister (that would be me). If it does, it will be good news. (I haven’t quite figured out how to address that one in the sermon.)

And then there’s the Pope, whose non-apology to the Muslim world has my jaw on the floor. Here’s the way my local newspaper quoted him: “I am deeply sorry for the reactions in some countries to a few passages in my address at the University of Regensburg, which were considered offensive to the sensibility of Muslims.”

Hello? Mr. Pope Sir? (Or is it Rev. Pope Sir?) What kind of an apology is that? You just said “I’m sorry that you’re a jerk.” All the cute red hats in the world aren’t going to get you out of this unbelievably insensitive gaffe, this second slap in the face to Muslims.

In my book, a sincere apology begins with these four words: “I’m sorry that I…” It can’t be any other way, because any other way puts the blame squarely on the other person, with the speaker (let’s call him the Idiot Non-Apologizer) taking absolutely no responsibility for what has happened.

By saying “I’m sorry that I…” the offender takes ownership of what happened because of his or her action. It’s an acknowledgement of wrongdoing, it names what happened and identifies the result. Hopefully the subsequent conversation is about how to make things right again.

I think that insincere apology is one of the sicknesses of our current society. It pays lip service to the concept of healing a relationship, while actually doing more damage and getting the aforementioned IN-A off the hook. What’s the medical term for when medical care actually makes the person sicker? It’s like that.

Pope Benedict, you’ve got a long way to go.

Eat This Book!

2006-09-16T21:30:00.000-04:00

I just finished reading a truly delicious book, Barbara Brown Taylor's Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith. It's one of those books that fell into my lap at exactly the right time. I wrote on the blog a while ago about hearing Terry Gross interview Taylor, and falling in love with her before I even knew who she was.

Who she is: Episcopal priest, was on staff at a large suburban church in Atlanta as one of several clergy, then left for her own smaller church in rural north Georgia. Writes for Christian Century, and is a nationally recognized preacher. (Man, would I love to hear her preach some time.) And I tell you, this woman can write, too!

Here are a few tastes:
On entering the priesthood: Being a priest seemed only slightly less dicey to me than being chief engineer at a nuclear plant. In both cases, one needed to know how to approach great power without loosing great danger and getting fried in the process.

A priest is someone willing to stand between a God and a people who are longing for one another's love, turning back and forth between them with no hope of tending either as well as each deserves.

On moving away from the cacophany of city life and the dissatisfactions of ministry in a large urban church, and moving into a rural environment, and a smaller, more intimate church: The sounds outside my windows were no longer car horns and traffic helicopters but migrating geese. Like them, I had left my old home when all the food was gone.

She works her butt off as the only priest in this congregation (which by UU standards isn't all that small--probably a few hundred). Eventually she grows bone-weary, and finds that she is crying all the time. This is a deeply moving story of a pastor who discovers that she can be closest to God on her own terms, and not leading a church. While her descriptions of her growing sadness in ministry are... well, sad... they are beautifully descriptive of what we parish ministers know all too well: the transference that makes us think we are more powerful than we are, the compassion fatigue, the irritation with all the crazy-making pettiness of the church narcissists, the numbing awareness that no matter how much we do, it is never enough.

Here is one that blew me away: Along with the difficult people were the people whose feet I would have gladly washed if I could have gotten them to take their socks off. Unlike the difficult ones, these people did not ask for much from me. They tended to be givers, not takers, and if they asked for help then I knew that their resources were truly exhausted. I am not sure that I served Christ in them as much as I met Christ in them, but either way they were not the problem. The problem was that I wanted everyone to be like them.

A good mantra for survival in parish ministry: The people you think love you don't love you as much as you think they love you, and the people you think hate you don't hate you as much as you think they hate you.

I would like to share much more of this delectable book with you, but even more than that, I would love to have you go out and buy your own copy, and mark it up all over as I have. In a book like this that doesn't have an index, I make my own index on the end-papers, jotting little notes and page numbers for the wise words I find therein. It makes it a lot easier to go back and find the quotations I know are in there somewhere. My copy of this book has the end papers covered in handwritten notes.

There is sadness in watching her gradual realization that the parish is not the place for her any more, but there is also joy in being present to her discovery that her relationship with God improves a great deal once she gets out of the church. Here is my all-time favorite quotation from the book: On the twentieth anniversary of my ordination, I would have to say that at least one of the things that almost killed me was becoming a professional holy person. I am not sure that the deadliness was in the job as much as it was in the way I did it, but I now have higher regard than ever for clergy who are able to wear their mantles without mistaking the fabric for their own skin. As many years as I wanted to wear a clerical collar and as hard as I worked to get one, taking it off turned out to be as necessary for my salvation as putting it on.

You can go here to take a look at it, but of course you will buy it at your local independent book store, noting that (a) when you figure in the shipping costs, it is NOT less expensive to buy it on line, and (b) your local bookstore owner can get it for you just as fast as you can get it on line. You will understand the economics of supporting small local businesses where you live, as part of your effort to keep the local economy healthy and diversified, and to encourage sustainable living in all of its forms. Amazon.com, Powells, and Wal*Mart are not your friends.

Bon apetit!

What I Did On My Summer Vacation

2006-09-14T22:34:00.000-04:00

I'm still alive, but too busy and tired to post anythng pithy. Instead I will post a photo of where I wish I still were (though not at 10:30 p.m., which it is now). Tomorrow or soon I will give you a book report of a truly superb book. Stay tuned.
Meanwhile...

Trying again with a shorter post

2006-09-07T13:33:00.000-04:00

This time I just want to put up someting short, to see if I can get the lines closer together. This paragraphi s written in Lucida Grance, size small.
This paragraph is in Verdana, which is actually a font I like a lot, also in size small.

Now I'm going to try posting a photograph. Wish me luck!

This is a picture of when it's okay for a minister to wear a baseball cap. Take that, PeaceBang!

MY MOTHER'S HOLLANDAISE RECIPE

2006-09-07T13:16:00.000-04:00

There's a famous story in my family about the recipe my mother generously handed out, a recipe for home made Hollandaise sauce. Whenever she gave it to anyone, she would say "Any idiot can make this!"

I heard this story from my sister-in-law, who is no idiot, especially in the kitchen. Yet she never could get my Mom's recipe to work. And whenever she called my Mom to inquire about what she might be doing wrong, the conversation would go something like this:

"Hi Mom. You know that Hollandaise sauce recipe you gave me?"

"Oh yes, the one any idiot can make?"

"Um... yes, that one."

"Well, what about it?"

"Well... I just wanted to thank you for it."

How can you ask for help without admitting that you're worse than an idiot?

That's the way I'm feeling today about creating this blog. No matter how user-friendly the software is purported to be, it is not friendly to me. I have spent hours today trying to figure out how to create a posting that looks the way I want it to, paste in photos, create links, etc. Finally in the very fine print somewhere, I saw that much of what is available here isn't supported by Safari, which is my browser. (Or maybe it's the other way around...) Anyway, why don't they tell you that right up front?

So I started all over again with Firefox, and am now slogging my way thorough unfamiliar blogging software with unfamiliar browser software. I feel like a kindergartener who somehow landed in a fifth-grade class in Tokyo without having learned to read yet, and knowing not a word of Japanese.

My blogging sisters (PeaceBang and Miss Kitty) have assured me that I will figure it out eventually. I hope they are right. I hope I figure it out before I throw the computer through the window and put out a contract on whoever wrote the instructions.

(But you see, I have figured outhow to do bold!)

Stay tuned. And I might pull this post if it ends up sounding too whiny.

I promise more interesting posts later, when my hair grows back in.

2006-09-05T23:07:00.000-04:00

WHERE I DRAW THE LINE

This week's Newsweek has a brief article about how the newest trend is to include dogs in wedding paties. Not as guests, mind you, but as "best men" or ring bearers or even as (get this) bouquets. Yes, some brides come down the aisle carrying a little lap dog rather than a fistful of flowers. (Though I guess in that case the dog doesn't qualify so much as a member as a member of the wedding party; more like, well, decoration.) One wedding planner in (where else?) Los Angeles was quoted as saying that 40% of her weddings now involve dogs.

My hubby tells me that he did a wedding once with a dog as ring-bearer. I think I could (barely) tolerate that, but I draw the line somewhere this side of dog as bridesmaid or best man. Come on, is this a solemn rite of passage or a circus? I refuse to add the gravitas of my role as clergy celebrant to this kind of side show. To me it speaks of disrespect for tradition, grandstanding (and God knows there's already enough of that at weddings), and not the slightest comprehension of the meaning of the ritual.

OTOH, the time will probably come when dogless brides will want to jump on the doggie bandwagon and will have to rent a dog just the way the groom rents a tuxedo. We could rent Berry out as a best man--he's already the best dog there is. And boy, could we teach him a lot about weddings!

2006-08-29T22:41:00.000-04:00

I CAN ALWAYS COUNT ON TERRY GROSS

Yesterday as I was running errands, I tuned into the last part of "Fresh Air." Terry Gross was interviewing a softspoken woman who had apparently left the Episcopal priesthood in order to teach. At that moment the conversation was about how differently people treat her now that she isn't wearing a clerical collar and they don't know she's clergy. She said "At last I know how people talk when they don't think there's a minister around!"

Terry asked her whether the ordination of gay bishops was worth a possible split in the Anglican communion. She tried to dodge the question at first, while coming out strongly in favor of gay biships and gay people in general ("all are children of God, who am I to judge," things like that). Terry was as relentless as I've ever heard her in pursuing an answer to her original question, and finally the woman said yes, she did think it was an issue worthy of a possible split. She said "The Episcopal church didn't split in the 50's over the issue of integration, though it could have. That was an issue worth splitting over, and I think this one is, too."

Meanwhile I'm parked in front of the cleaners not getting out of the car, because I want to find out who this woman is whom I already love. Turns out it's Barbara Brown Taylor, of Christian Century fame. She has recently written a book about her experience of leaving parish ministry, called (appropriately) Leaving Church.

So I swung by the local bookstore (the last independent bookstory in the county) to see if they have the book. The owner, with whom I am on first name terms because I'm a good customer, said he'd order one on spec because he's sold her books before, and if I don't want to buy it after I see it, someone else will.

I can count on Terry Gross to introduce me to some fascinating and wonderful authors. About a year and a half ago I had a similar experience tuning in part way through her interview with a man whose political views are like mine, but whose religious views clearly aren't. Turns out it was Jim Wallis, whose book God's Politics was creating quite a stir at the time. I devoured that book and came away with a new respect for what Christianity is really about (at least according to Jim Wallis).

Now I'm going to go read some Rebecca Parker on the post-apocalyptic age and how we can live in it.

2006-08-26T19:27:00.000-04:00

FIRST, A PLEA

If someone who reads this knows more about blogging than I do (that would be probably most people on the planet), please get in touch with me if you're willing to help me learn. I just wrote a long post and lost it in Preview mode. Dang! I need to learn about formatting, adding photos, etc. as well as not losing my deathless prose.

And now back to our previously written entry... again.

WHY I HATE GOING TO THE GYM (and what I'm doing about it)

I hate going to the gym (Curves). Not because of that sleaze-bag Gary Hevin who owns the company and is anti-choice. I've taken care of that. When I learned that some portion of my monthly fee was going to support clinic protestors and people who tell lies to frightened pregnant girls, I did some soul-searching and decided I needed to stay strong and healthy for the cause. So I figured out how much of my $29 per month was going to the company (about fifty cents, or $6 per year), and committed to give much more than that to a pro-choice organization that I wasn't already supporting. (I thnk I must own Planned Parenthood by now.) I chose the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice and got a brief essay published in one of their booklets, and was inspired to do a Fathers Day sermon on men's role in the pro-choice movement. Also, I wear my pro-choice T-shirt to work out whenever possible. Take that, Gary Hevin!

No, I hate to work out because it's such an interruption in my always-busy day. It takes about 45 minutes for the workout and stretching, 10 to walk back and forth from home, and at least 15 to shower and dress afterwards. I also hate it because I get really sweaty. And because they play terrible music and stupid games there. I have a reputation among the staff for being a killjoy die-hard because I refuse to play their stupid games; I just want to finish my workout and get out of there!

On the other hand, it's close to home, cheap and convenient, and when I work out regularly my cholesterol level goes through the floor. Plus (here's the best part) my husband told me today that when we went kayaking in Maine a few weeks ago, I kicked his butt. He had a terrible time keeping up with me, and I was just cruising along enjoying the peace and quiet. How's that for an incentive? (He's younger than I am, too.)

Here's what I'm doing about hating to go to the gym. I read this suggestion in today's paper: dedicate your workout to something that's important to you, like world peace or someone you love. (I won't do it for myself, but I'll do it for world peace.) I dedicated today's workout to the grandchild that I hope will some day join our family (still just a gleam in my eye), because when that child gets here, I want to be around for a long time! If getting sweaty and enduring stupid music for an hour will help, then so be it.

Two other saving graces: one is Sundays. Sunday is a day of (relative) rest for most people. For me it's a major work day. But at least the gym is closed. The other is a digital camera I read about today which has a slimming feature guaranteed to make you look ten pounds lighter. Now if they only made one that would keep my cholesterol down.

2006-08-23T20:27:00.000-04:00

Generosity

Today I've been washed in visions of generosity--not directed toward me, but toward the people in town who are often forgotten, marginalized, or disdained, and who are overwhelmed with problems.

It started with a member of my congregation who has been having a very rough time this summer. I will protect her privacy by not giving details, but believe me, it's been rough. Last Saturday she went to a local non-profit called The Samaritan Fellowship, which gives limited, short-term aid to people at the end of their rope. They agreed to give her $500 (their maximum) toward her mortgage payment. However, they also told her that an additional $1300 would be coming through us, her church.

Turns out that the person who interviewed her was so impressed with her pluck and general determination to straighten out her life that he decided to make a personal contribution of his own money to pay the rest of her debts. He made a contribution to our church, so that he could get a tax deduction, and then we used his contribution to pay off the rest of her mortgage and her heating bill. (She has no idea about the personal contribution.)

He and I have talked several times to work out the logistics of this, and he told me about another organization in which he is active here in town, which is a representative payee for people who can't manage their own money--the mentally ill, or elderly people whose children are ripping them off. Whatever their income is, it goes directly to this organization, which pays the person's bills (rent, utilities, etc.) and then gives the person some regular allowance for the rest of their expenses. They will also set some aside into a savings account for people who need a cushion against unexpected losses in income due to illness or whatever. They charge a $30/month fee, or nothing if the person can't manage the fee.

What impressed me about him, this generous benefactor, is that he was so quick to credit others for the wonderful generosity they exhibit in their creative efforts to help those who need to be helped. Most of these folks are mainstream Christians (Presbyterian, Lutheran) who do this to serve the Lord, and do it with tremendous generosity of spirit. I am in awe.

I have often found fault with the good citizens of this community for their closed-mindedness, their political conservatism, and other characteristics which I don't personally embrace. This has been an eye-opener for me, and I am humbled.

2006-08-22T23:00:00.000-04:00

Berry's Mom

BOOKS I READ THIS SUMMER (FWIW)

Isabel Allende's "The Infinite Plan." Not one of her best.

"Abide with Me" by Elizabeth Stroudt. This is a wonderful read if you like reading about ministers. Personally, I love minister novels. This one takes place in a small town in Maine. Not only does the author understand ministry, she totally nails small towns.

"Mr. Emerson's Wife," by Amy Belding Brown. I think she jumped on the "Ahab's Wife" bandwagon, but she did it well. A lot of the stuff we know about Waldo, Lidian, Thoreau, etc. filled in with the author's conjecture about why Waldo must have been so difficult to live with, his real feelings for Margaret Fuller, and what really happened between Lidian and Henry.

"Your Blues Ain't Like Mine," by Bebe Moore Campbell. This SUPERB novel is a loose adaptation of the story of Emmit Till, with strong and nuanced backstory about all possible characters: the murderer, his wife, the parents of the murdered boy, the Black community in that Mississippi town, the white newspaper editor who is sympathetic to the Blacks, and a lot of other well-developed characters. It really helped me to understand the violent and desperate reaction of poor whites to the threat of integration in the South of the late 1950's. A must read!

"Trans-Sister Radio," by Chris Bohjalian. I have never read a novel on this subject--straight woman falls in love with man not realizing that man is transgendered and is already on the way to becoming a woman. (I am not giving anything away here; this is all on the jacket.) A lot about the woman's soul-searching ("If I still love her/him after his/her surgery, does that make me a lesbian?") and also a lot about the small-minded reaction of the townspeople in Vermont where said woman is a 6th grade teacher. A poignant and fascinating story.

I managed these in three weeks on the coast of Maine, with reading time interspersed with a lot of knitting (or was it the other way around?).

My apologies for the way this post is probably going to look funny (she says before previewing it). My blogging skills are very new and unpolished, not to mention non-existent!

2006-08-19T15:46:00.000-04:00

The Wedding Hound

I went outside after lunch to dump the compost, and heard the strains of a bagpipe coming faintly from the Catholic church across the street. Having lived here for nine years, I know this can mean only one thing: a wedding is about to emerge through the doors of this venerable and lovely shrine.

Now, I'm a minister, right? I've seen a zillion weddings from the inside. You'd think I'd be tired of them by now. But no, I can't resist standing there in my shorts and tank top, empty compost bucket in my hand, tearing up at the happiness evidenced across the street. All it takes is one look at an emotional mother-of-the-bride embracing her new son-in-law, and I'm a goner. (This is no doubt influenced by how I'm crazy about my own son-in-law, and how happy I was at my daughter's wedding.)

Wait, I've gotta go have another look...

There's a table on the lawn where refreshments are being served, and the bridesmaids are going around among the guests handing out wands (well, wooden dowels, actually) with bright ribbons hanging from one end, and ribbons tied in a circle with silver bells attached to them, and tiny wind chimes. Guess there is going to be some kind of sendoff!

The bride is wearing the usual... (lovely slinky cream-colored wedding dress, floor-length lace train). The groom is wearing a kilt and knee socks (nice!) and a cropped black jacket with silver buttons on the sleeves. But best of all are the bridesmaids. They are wearing brown knit scoop-neck cap-sleeved tops and beige skirts. I am sure the tops are silk knit and the skirts are probably linen... Finally, a bridesmaids dress/outfit that you can ACTUALLY WEAR AGAIN! And they aren't wearing matching shoes, either. The mother of the bride is wearing a long, full-ish brown skirt and overhanging top (she's a bit on the full-figured side), made from the same fabric as the bridesmaids' tops. What a nicely put-together bridal party!

Instead of bouquets, the bridesmaids each carry one humongous white hydrangea blossom with its stem wrapped in white silk ribbon (except for one bridesmaid who is carrying a baby instead; he is wearing shorts and a shirt made from the same brown fabric).

Everyone cheers as the bride and groom emerge (again!) from the church; this time she is carrying a bright red bouquet (which, frankly, I think clashes with the rest of the color scheme).

This is what ministers do on a Saturday afternoon instead of writing their sermons... They pass judgement on other people's weddings. This one gets an "A"!

2006-07-13T16:41:00.000-04:00

Bruised from Stem to Stern

Here's what to do after neck surgery: stay home and don't let anyone see you. I look like I've been run over by a truck, with a very fat neck and horrendous bruises all over my neck and chest. This is one of those (many) times when I'm so glad to have a co-minister partner who can step in when needed. He's taking over for me on Sunday so the poor congregation doesn't have to be subjected to this sorry sight, and I can recuperate in peace without frettig over what to say on Sunday.

Guess I don't have to fret over what to wear, either. Comfy shorts and a sleeveless shirt that buttons down the front. (No pulling clothes over my head for a while--too scary!)

Time to go take a nap.

2006-07-08T19:52:00.000-04:00

My Second Post... Foolin' Around

Husband came home and with a flick of the fingers he got the photo in the right place (my profile). What he did bore no resemblance to the instructions from Blogger, but I guess I can't complain. Much. I wish someone would use me as a test case when writing instructions for the computer. I'm pretty intelligent, but computer use is not intuitive for me, and I have a hard time figuring things out. And it doesn't help that (a) I use a Mac and (b) I use Safari (which Blogspot apparently doesn't support). Fortunately I have Firefox loaded in my computer as well... one more thing to learn.

I think I will eventually delete these first posts (assuming I can figure out how to do that), but first I want to try a few things.

2006-07-08T18:44:00.000-04:00