A scarf from Paris

Happy Birthday to me!  I usually love what I get and fret a lot over what I give because it never seems like enough or like it’s personal enough or fun enough or clever enough.  Some of my favorite gifts of all time were things I never expected in this life or the next.  Here’s a short list:

• A homemade sock dog
• A Russian made linen bag
• A sagebrush ‘Christmas tree’ decorated with a red chile garland
• A tambourine
• A raw sheep skin
• A paper weight
• A handmade kick spindle
• A container full of gift wrap and ribbon and cards and tape
• Steak knives and placemats and Eiffel Tower note paper
• Eiffel tower notecards (see a theme?)
• A spinning wheel
• A hand written, historical story

See what I mean?  So, help me out, here.  Let’s talk about gifts and gift-giving and traditions (or lack of them) and what some of your favorite gifts were and why. 

And thank you!

P.S. To those of you who worry about such things….it’s a broken pencil….

You can attach things to them like spice racks and gun racks and medicine chests.  You can lean things against them like ladders.  You can paint them different colors and add different textures and make them look like something they’re not with a mural or grafitti.   You can decorate them with ideas.

Some are in houses.  Some are in skyscrapers.  Some are around individual properties.  Some are relics of a former building.   Some are in my head.

Walls can be made from wood or wood and sheetrock and insulation and siding or strawbales or mud or brick or concrete and steel or leather or polypropolene ….or thoughts…..or words.

I built a wall.  At first, it was in my mind.   Then, it began to affect my behavior.  It couldn’t be touched or seen with the naked eye, but it quickly became tangible when it involved averting the eyes, waiting to go out the front door until the neighbor was inside, refusing to make any overtures or thanks for what I considered annoying solicitude.  It became an obsession, my wall, to watch my neighbor’s house and wonder if they were watching me.  And the sign on my outer wall said, “No Trespassing.”

Then my neighbors moved away.  There was no one to watch.  No one put our trash out when we were gone.  No one cleaned up our yard when we didn’t have time.    No one told us when there had been a robbery or when the water was brown.   No one sent over chicken curry balls. 

I no longer needed my wall.  I knocked it down.  I went outside without looking to see if I’d have to visit.  I picked up my own branches and swept my own driveway.  And I sighed for what I’d lost because of that wall.  There  might have been paradise on the other side.  There were certainly guardian angels.  Now there’s just a vacant set of blue walls with peeling paint and unblinking eyes. 

My wall had locked doors.  No welcome mat.  Like a wall in a prison.  Now I am bereft of neighbors more generous than I. 

Lord, I won’t learn from this unless you do it.  Please do it.  Be the Door in my wall.  Let me be the door keeper in Your house.

I see another cliff on the horizon. Intuition tells me that the next one will be 100 feet, but this one feels high enough.

What a rare and blessed privilege has been mine to work among these teachers, chidren, administrators, support staff and families.  As I leave, the annual teacher training is occuring:  people coming from all over the country (and in some years, around the world) to learn to implement the classical Christian education model.  These people will meet “my” people and take away valuable information and fond memories.

As a privileged insider, I’m taking something so deep that I don’t know if I can put it into words.  Superficially, these look like godly Christian people.  And that’s correct.   Like saying stars twinkle.

Like only seeing the surface of the moon through a telescope.

I’m taking the fearful prospect of a recurrence of cancer.  I’m taking the grief of  losing a mother suddenly.  I’m taking the giddiness of learning of a pregnancy and the sadness of a miscarriage.  I’m taking the grievous expulsion for blatant disobedience and the lovliness of diligent scholarship attended by godliness. 

 I’m taking the daily observation of three and four generations of Christians, working with and for each other.  I’m taking the juniors’ and seniors’ brotherly interaction with the first and second graders–I’m taking a family, learning together and caring for one another. 

I’m taking mental portraits of highly qualified teachers who come back year after year after year–who could have far more lucrative positions if they taught publicly.  I’m taking the fear and grief of a sixth grade boy waiting outside the principal’s office……and emerging twenty minutes later, face shining with tears and a new resolve to do better.   I’m taking mothers planning their daughters’ weddings, sending their sons off to the military, wondering if this child will get a job or this will finish school or that will return from the brink.

I’m taking snakes and frogs and rocks and crayon pictures with hearts and princesses.  I’m taking broken arms and inhalers and epipens and tums and band aids with smiley faces.  I’m taking bake sales and plays and speeches.  I’m taking lacrosse games in bitter spring afternoons, slam dunks in the field house, perfect volleyball assists.  I’m taking Mock Trial and a personal letter from Judge Clarence Thomas. 

I’m taking tears and anxiety and pride and raucous laughter.  I’m taking love.  Lots and lots of love.

Above all, I’m taking each individual’s humble, gracious, fun-loving, God-fearing response to every actual life event.   I’m taking the fervent prayers.  This is beautiful beyond description.

And it was all there for me to mine day by day.  Now, by God’s mercy, I’ll also be growing like them, watered and nurtured by all I’m privileged to take away.

Thank you, Logos.  God’s continued blessings, always.

 

This is my husband.  He loves to ride his bike.  Yesterday, he rode 45 miles to a car show.  I met him there…..with the truck….

We have pretty rough winters, here, so we don’t ride for months and months, and when the days finally started getting pretty, he got out his favorite two-wheeled transportation……and the tire was flat.  Really flat.  He had to patch it….which didn’t work.  Then he had to break down and buy an inner tube….which did.

Last Sunday, the weather was exquisite and we were invited out to our good friends’ for a light evening meal.  Because they live in the country 20 miles away, my Sweetheart , who’d been aching to ride, decided to make this his maiden 2010 voyage.

Over here, on the far right side,  about the middle of the grey house, is where he realized he’d forgotten to hook up his brakes after he’d installed the new inner tube.  There are still marks on the road where his left shoe cleat that hooks into the toe clip was dragging along the pavement, sending a July 4th style shower of sparks to the amazement and possibly horror of passersby.  That slowed him to hyper-space. 

Just beyond that and to the right, after the tree, is a triplex with a fairly steep driveway and lawn.  Straight ahead of him was first a stop sign and a busy street, then a street light and an even more busy street.  He opted for the lawn.

This slowed him down from rocket blast to careening, which didn’t seem adequate to him at the time.   So he made a quick decision–and an even quicker left turn, hopped off the curb and blazed across the street to an even steeper driveway, where his progress finally came to an uneventful halt.

He breathed heavily for the space of about three minutes, thanked God and attached his brakes.  He also arrived safely and in time for hors d’oeurves.

I try not to panic whenever I think of it.  I try not to think of it at all, actually.  But there’s no one in the world I’d rather be with in an emergency.  Not even Jack Bauer.

 We’re moving home.  Probably August.  Details to follow in the evening news.

I love farmer’s markets!  Who doesn’t?  And a farmer’s market on a sunny day after months of drizzly, grey skies…..well!

Now, here’s my farmer’s market tale for this lovely day:   Ten years ago, when my son was first married, he and his lovely wife, Beka, owned a used book store.  They even lived in the back of it and–amazing us all!–birthed their first child there!  It’s the romantic sort of story of which pulitzer prize winning novels are made.  The men would gather on weekend evenings to drink wine, smoke good cigars and talk about……books.  Joe Brandybuck would smile and sleep and eat and grow strong.

And Bek would make cookies!   She made wonderful chocolate chip cookies that soon became the highlight of the store.  The cookies had a perpetual, devoted clientele–and Beka had a little pocket money of her own.

Fast forward to 2010.  A family who’ve read Beka’s family’s magazine for years is suddenly inspired.  How can the young girls learn about money:  planning, earning, saving, tithing, paying bills, buying materials and preparing a product?  She remembers the very article where Beka describes her entrepreneurial experiment, reads it to her girls again and gets out the chocolate chips and flour! 

The girls bake, package, make signs and rent a space at the local farmer’s market.    They choose a patriotic theme, fill the change box, set out generous samples and…..

            Voila!

This one’s for you, sweet Bek!

So let us begin this brief economic primer with these inspirational words from Dave Barry:

“The question is: What can we, as citizens, do to reform our tax system? As you know, under our three-branch system of government, the tax laws are created by Satan. But he works through the Congress, so that’s where we must focus our efforts.”

When it comes to Congress and out of control spending, we don’t need an election so much as we need an intervention. And when we get that intervention, we can count on a great deal of bluster and anger from those who occupy the cushy slots of the Republic. They just don’t want to be sat down and told to knock it off already with the fiscal insanity.

But because this is about power, not money, they just keep going with the grasping. Milton’s Satan would rather rule in Hell than serve in Heaven, and the same kind of tiny hearts are performing the same sort of priority calculus now. This kind of character would rather be a dear leader commandante in a banana republic than a well-off nobody in a prosperous nation who had to be content with minding his own business. Bossing around a bunch of miserable serfs is far to be preferred to letting them just go off . . . and do things on their own without permission. Managed misery is better, they stoutly maintain, than unmanaged happiness. And so the graspers are doing their level best to get their fingerprints on everything, regardless of whether it makes any sense or not. Watching the evening news out of Washington night after night leaves the intelligent observer agape. Lily Tomlin put it well. “No matter how cynical you get, you can never keep up.”

But after a while, you begin to wonder if it is you. Maybe water does flow uphill. Maybe we can spend ourselves rich, and why didn’t mankind discover this sooner?

So let’s review some basics. Getting soaked is a disincentive for whatever it was that you were doing that got you soaked. What is the economic difference between a tax and a fine? Make that a tax debt of 10K and a fine of 10K. The fine is a tax for having done something wrong, and the tax is a fine for having done something right, but apart from that, what is economic difference? When it comes to incentives and disincentives, there isn’t one. If you fine somebody 10K for a safety infraction at the factory, it is because you want them to stop it with the safety infractions. If you tax that same factory 10K for making a profit, what is you want them to stop now? And why do all our smart johnnies with fifty pound heads feign surprise and astonishment when that starts to happen?

Ronald Reagan saw it right. Despite the handwaving chutzpah, the governmental mindset remains simplistic — “If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.”

Given that the elementary economic principles here are something that you should be able to explain to a fifth grader, we also need to remember our biblical basics. Refusal to see these things, and the corresponding refusal to act on them, does not indicate an intelligence problem. It is a spiritual problem. Free markets cannot be owned and operated by slaves. If we have a nation dedicated to the service of false gods, and we do, it is neither possible nor desirable for us to have economic liberty.

Free markets are Holy Spirit markets. They are kind of like CostCo. You can’t shop there unless you are a member. If a nation wants to be free of economic lunacy, then it will not be enough to read Hazlitt, Bastiat, or Smith. If a nation doesn’t want economic chains, the text to read would be John 3. Ye must be born again.

Douglas Wilson – April 23, 2010

http://www.dougwils.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=7584:holy-spirit-markets-are-kind-of-like-costco&catid=129:obama-nation-building

                     9:55am — Many glass panes in the green house complex were broken by golf balls.  Police investigation continues.

                     6:24pm — An officer transported a dog to the shelter that was tangled in some wire and stuck under a house on West Palouse River Drive.

                     7:21 — Officers responded to a report that two children were taking money out of the fountain in Friendship Square on South Main Street.

     It’s hard enough when children engage in criminal activity, but add lampposts and animal shelters…..   Hard times.

http://thurstonrepublicans.com/news/chairmans-corner/137-support-rob-mckenna.html 

Some in this representative government actually do still represent us.   Rob McKenna is one of them.

The announcement by McKenna, a Republican, angered Democratic Governor Chris Gregoire, who said McKenna did not consult with her, House Speaker Frank Chopp or Senate Majority Leader Lisa Brown, all Democrats, before making his decision.

“I don’t know who he represents,” she said.  “He doesn’t represent me.”

…..Gregoire said she didn’t learn about McKenna’s intentions until Monday morning, when she read an article that listed him among attorneys general who planned to sue.  She said she called McKenna immediately to ask if it was true.

Gregoire said she told him “then get ready to represent me, because I will legally oppose what you’re doing.”

Question:  Who actually represents the people of the United States?

(Excerpts from an AP article by Rachel La Corte – 3/23)