I need to get a group together to buy & share one of these… Who’s in?
“…combining his NASA experience with his love of the outdoors, he worked to create an innovative lightweight, compact, and flexible small environment in which to travel and explore the world we live in.
The result is Cricket.”
Backstory: Six days ago, I embarked on a juice fast, and unless I inebriate myself with water and need medical attention, it’s going to be quite an extended odyssey, so I might as well make myself comfortable… or, at least audacious.
I fully intended to write this first blog about how “wonderfully” my fast is going and how “serene” my soul is—because those are true, it has been going rather wonderfully and I am at peace most of the time. But today in the halls between classes, I heard the kids calling out “Sping BAKE” and my stomach rumbled in reply [they should learn to pronounce their r’s and stop torturing me with mental images of yurt-sized bread bowls—a warm bread yurt—Oh my cuss, that’s brilliant].
The point is where I began: Tonight, after seven days and seven nights, I believe the sleeping monster Hunger is finally come out of hibernation, and unhappily, though I think I may have managed to render him extremely disoriented.
I’m starting to see why Jesus went into the wilderness to fast—there is no reason I can think of for anyone to experience you or I on a fast. Ideally, we could be alone. To focus on God, certainly, but as this writer put it so eloquently, “When a whale fasts, it stinks.” Fasting is not meant to be a pretty process, and it would be nice if I could deal with my spiritual/emotional/etc. shalala without anyone else having to experience it. With that, I apologize to you all, and would also like to remind you that “I’m not Jesus, okay?!”
I want this to be a good time. A fruitful time. A prayerful time. But so far it has been a juice-ful time where I have to work so much at getting used to this new, albeit temporary, lifestyle that I don’t have time for the rest, the spiritual good stuff.
This is where the hunger comes in. I’ve been doing okay all week. A few fits of anger here and there, but nothing to the magnitude of “uprooting.” It’s been pretty smooth sailing, but now Hunger is making me really face the harder stuff. It’s forcing me to make a decision every time I feel it’s pang. It’s helping me consider long-suffering, and what it might do for a persons character, and what it might do for others. It’s making me roar to the heavens, “WHY did I decide to do this stupid thing?” Because I know now that I’ve set out to do it, I have to do it with all my might.
Aaaarrrrghhhhgrooooaaaaancryyyooouut!
Happy Spring Bake, y’all ;)
- mom
Paintings by Eric Fuchs “Hier Apollo 11”. Love them.
(At some point I will be less obsessed with NASA and my grandpa, who worked for NASA for a few decades, and during Apollo 11. It’s just that I’m realizing now things I knew about my family but didn’t think anything of as a child. Not that that should dazzle anyone that he worked for NASA… I think he was manager of food supply or something. I mean it dazzles me because he’s my grandpa and I can’t imagine him as anything else but my grandpa the way I knew him, and that is why I blog about it. Anyway, I’m not trying to give the impression he was some understudy to Armstrong or anything. Food supply. That’s all I know right now. …Maybe next week my obsession will be my paternal grandmother and raising white boys in Montgomery, Alabama during the Civil Rights Movement. Or maybe it will be about my sister coloring my hair. Who knows.)
[My Grandfather & Grandmother. We called them PawPaw & Bunny]
I remember PawPaw grabbing and pulling me onto Holly, his horse, to ride bareback & swiftly to the other side of the farm. We fell off into some leaves by the wooden shed. I remember being disturbed but unhurt.
[This is Holly, a few months before she died. She was over 30 years old. I spotted her in a field that belonged to an old friend of PawPaw’s. This lady had kindly taken Holly in when he had to sell the farm.]
I remember PawPaws trucker hats, as I would later call them. I remember his jackets. I remember how he mixed 3 or 4 different kinds of cereals into a plastic container. It was his favorite. I remember how he loved pecans. He always had a bowl of them and a tool to crack them laying on top of the pile. There was a discard bowl for the shells and bad parts. I remember him always singing, always rum-pum-pumming like he was in a marching band all day long. He had a tuba and a big drum. I remember playing dominoes at night. I cheated and wondered why no one caught me. I remember watching Apollo 13 with him. It was his favorite movie. I didn’t understand why then, but I liked it, too, mostly because I loved Tom Hanks.
I remember his house. The light post. The big crepe myrtle we climbed in. The giant gold plate on the mantle. The fireplace with real wood. The bag of blocks in the closet. The upright piano in the entry way. The metronome. Trying to play the sheet music that sat there with too many notes and signs for my inexperienced fingers to get past the first bar successfully. I remember how it smelled when you walked into the apartment that was added on at some point long before I was born. All the tile was so ugly. Everywhere the tile and carpet were ugly. I wondered why old people liked ugly floors and wood paneled walls. If I close my eyes I can smell each of the rooms. I don’t know how to describe the smells, except the bathroom. The bathroom smelled like cheap bar soap.
I remember his things. The TV with a dial you turn by hand. It had 4 channels. The typewriter. The Macintosh computer with it’s tiny screen. I remember plastic flowers in vases and porcelain figurines. The Mother Goose Rhymes book. The antiquated jack in the box that I expect gave me horrible nightmares. But the pictures! I loved the pictures and the paintings on the wall, and the way they hung all over. I remember the table with the glass top that showed a drawer full of seashells that my mother and her sister had collected when they lived on Kwajalein Island, part of the Marshall Islands. Mom told me PawPaw would take a boat to the neighboring islands where the natives were to teach Sunday school. Kwajalein is the ends of the earth to me, and I want to go there so badly. There was one shell in the drawer that had googly eyes glued onto it. I always opened the drawer to see that one. I can’t quite remember what it looked like. It had a bit of coral glued on it… I can’t remember. Mom has the table now. I don’t know where the shells are.
[Kwajalein, Marshall Islands]
I remember PawPaw’s room. The closet with the sliding mirror doors. His bed with a canopy from the ceiling. It must have been Bunny’s doing. Bunny was my grandma. Her name was really Bernie, but we called her Bunny. She died when I was about 5. She had Leukemia. I wish I knew everything about her. I remember her in pearl earrings and lipstick, but I could be making that up. I wish I could get in my red silky little girl nightgown and fall asleep around her neck like I was doing in the only picture I seem to have of us. I think she would have been my very favorite person in the whole world.
[My Bunny]
I remember the back yard. The deck. The gazebo. The roses. The garage. Once, PawPaw accidentally rolled up my neck in the station wagon window as we were pulling out. I tried to scream but couldn’t. Cherilyn told him to roll it down. I laughed about it the next day. It’s still funny. I remember his truck—the seat covers made of wooden beads. It smelled like the feed we gave Holly and the donkeys. I remember the red metal gate we opened and closed by hand. There was a chain wrapped around it with a padlock. I remember feeding the cows sugar cane. He bought a young cow with a ring in its nose. It got spooked once and jumped over Cherilyn. He sold that cow. I remember finding earthworms under fallen leaves to fish with in the pond. I remember the fishing hook shooting through my pinky one day and going to the emergency clinic on Broadway. They kept the hook somewhere in a jewelry box after they fished it out. I remember realizing the farm wasn’t a farm, just a piece of land with animals and a pond, a wooden shed, peach trees and a hay bale with boots sticking out.
[I jumped the fence with some friends once, years after PawPaw had sold the farm]
I remember PawPaw. I remember his hands. Old and stiff and needing to be held. His scratchy stubbled chin when he kissed my head. His wedding ring finger that ended abruptly at the middle knuckle, and the middle finger next to it that was only a little longer. He had stuck his hand in a mower once. I remember he liked marionettes and puppets. And children. He wrote a book of Sunday school skits to be performed with puppets. He liked writing. He published a book. When I read it, it reminded me of his truck and the farm. And him. His real name was A. C. Chance. As a boy, he decided that stood for Atlas Christopher. Atlas! If I ever have a son, I am quite determined to name him Atlas.
I remember a flat iron figure from Japan that hung on the back porch wall. I took it from the boxes when his Alzheimer’s became quite bad and they had to move him to a home. I took his Apollo 11 badge then, too.
I remember when he sold the farm.
He was my last remaining grandparent. When he passed away, I was in India and couldn’t come home.
I remember when we packed up his things and sold the house. I wish we had never sold any of it.
…It’s okay, though, because I remember everything. You wouldn’t believe some of it. I hardly do.
Typed this up for a few friends & thought you might enjoy. I love good masala chai the way they make it on the street in Bombay.
Donnabelle and Teresa, two women I live and work with when I am in India, taught me to make this. They are like a sister and a mother to me, and take care of me so well, even though they have many other far more important things to do, and their own families. Thanks DB & T!
Me and most of my coworkers.
I know I’ve appeared rather “sleepy” in my writing lately. In fact, I have written a lot, but not posted any of it yet because it’s all still rolling around my insides and I don’t trust it for the time being.
I believe these words belong to Napoleon (except his were masculine) and today I apply them to me… When I unleash my fury of words, I will be aiming to take out a few mountains.
- Brennan Manning
I’ve been wanting to write down my fish story properly this week, so here goes [pulls keyboard onto lap]…
I was about 5 years old. I still had a speech impediment and didn’t know it. I loved catching green anoles, spiny lizards, and toads. I wasn’t afraid of handling creepy things like earthworms, especially when it meant catching a fish on PawPaw’s farm.
Or rather, helping someone else catch a fish, because I had never caught one before. I had seen Dad catch them. PawPaw and Uncle Pete, too, of course… they were fishermen types. All these men collectively taught me that fishing wasn’t all the excitement I thought it was. I had to sit. I had to stay quiet. Not just for 3 minutes, either. For 10 minutes or more! I hated the stillness, but this is what it took to catch a fish, I was told, so still I would be.
I gave the fish plenty of opportunities to let me catch them. At the pond, the lake, on the dock, on a boat, I don’t know how many times. Cambryn, my big sister, caught a fish almost every time. Slowly, I felt a burden building inside of me. I had to catch a fish soon.
It wasn’t long before a camping trip presented the perfect opportunity. All my friends would be there: Anna and Natalie. Just the kids and the dads and the great outdoors. “Heck,” I thought, “I’ll even go coon huntin’ while I’m at it.” I had only heard about this from “Where the Red Fern Grows,” but camping meant trying something new, even if I wasn’t sure what a “coon” was.
Natalie and I made a “trap,” which consisted of an egg carton full of dirt, pine needles, and twigs. That night, our fathers left the food on the picnic table and there were enough raccoons for us to think we had succeeded.
Although I was excited about the raccoons, the first day had come and gone without any success at the pond, where I was really focused. Anna, Natalie, John… everyone had caught at least one fish today. Cambryn had caught two. That was hardly fair.
“Tomorrow,” I promised myself as I closed my eyes and fell asleep.
The next morning was a frenzy as everyone ate breakfast, tore down tents, and cleaned up messes. A few of the kids had already run off to fish and I heard, “Dad, look at what I caught!” one too many times, so I quickly fetched my Mickey Mouse pole and trotted off to the pond. On the way down, I heard one of the girls say they were tired of fishing and had already caught a couple this morning. My heart started pounding with fear. “Everyone but me… Everyone…”
Not only had I not caught a fish on this trip, I had never caught a fish since the beginning of time: five years. I could feel the fear and disappointment of being left behind well up in my little body, but I would suppress it for now, or one of the boys would make fun of me. I resolved not to leave until I caught a fish.
With every cast of the line as far into the pond as Mickey would go, I lost a piece of my confidence. Behind me, sounds of loading up cars with bags and coolers struck my heart like needles. The line was always loose! The red and white bobber wasn’t doing the thing it was named for! The thing it did when all the other kids went fishing…
“Season, it’s time to go!” Cambryn yelled in my direction.
Suddenly, I knew that nothing was going to change. I had seen the other kids struggle to learn things, but I was an exceptional failure… I was put here to watch everyone else so easily get the simple things that I struggled so hard for and still didn’t get. They were first class. I was only fit for second class, and I was alone.
“I’m NOT GOING,” I answered.
Dad came over and, having no idea what he was about to get himself into, told me it was time to go.
“I CANT GO TILL I CATCH A FISH. EVERYONE ELSE CAUGHT A FISH. I DIDNT CATCH A FISH.” I cried through tears and a broken heart, loud enough for everyone in the camp to hear.
My dad, my sweet, sweet dad… I don’t know how he always knew what to do. He came over and sat down, put me on his knee, and said something I didn’t expect at all.
“Let’s ask God to help you catch a fish.”
He took my shoulders and prayed a simple prayer that I don’t remember exactly, but went something like, “Jesus, please help Season to catch a fish. Amen.”
Still dumbstruck with my dad’s response, we took the pole together and cast the line out one last time. Before the hook touched the water, a fish jumped out of the pond and swallowed it.
______________________________________
I really don’t remember anything after that. I couldn’t believe what had just happened, but I couldn’t not believe it… I had seen it with my own eyes! And dad… he was probably shocked, too.
What I do remember very clearly is having a real relationship with God from that day forward. I was only 5, but I spoke to God and I didn’t just believe, I knew He was listening to me, looking at me, responding to me, no matter what it was I asked.
When I say I’ve been “saved” since I was 5 years old, what I mean is, God showed Himself real to me in such a personal way that it has carried my faith in Him for these 20 years straight. Of all the testimonies of salvation I’ve heard in my life, mine is by far the silliest… but I can honestly tell you that catching that fish proved God to me. It still does. When I remember the story, when I ask my dad, “Did we make that up? That really happened, right?” he says, “Yeah, it really happened.”
This month, God reminded me of my fish story. He’s told me I need to ask Him for something that I want. I didn’t want to ask, because it’s hard for me to ask. It’s hard because I’m still afraid the answer will be, “You don’t measure up like the others do, so I can’t give you what belongs to the first-class.”
He reminded me this week that that response is not from Him, and that fish is His proof. I ask God for things because I don’t measure up, because I never could. But, praise God, I don’t have to, because He gives grace to the humble, and provides for me even a fish, or whatever I ask. And when I get it, I forget completely why I wanted it in the first place, because the asking and receiving was so holy, because in the same moment He gave me what will pass away, He gave me what will never pass away… It’s not about the fish anymore, it’s about Emmanuel, God with us.
Life in an airstream for a year? For five? Please?
“If ye have faith and doubt not, if ye shall say unto this mountain, Be thou removed and cast into the sea, it shall be done.” Good people….have been tempted to tempt the Lord their God upon the strength of this saying….Happily for such, the assurance to which they would give the name of faith generally fails them in time. Faith is that which, knowing the Lord’s will, goes and does it; or, not knowing it, stands and waits….But to put God to the question in any other way than by saying, “What wilt thou have me to do?” is an attempt to compel God to declare Himself, or to hasten His work….The man is therein dissociating himself from God so far that, instead of acting by the divine will from within, he acts in God’s face, as it were, to see what He will do. Man’s first business is, “What does God want me to do?”, not “What will God do if I do so and so?”
-George MacDonald: An Anthology, 29
