Thoughts on economic mercy

I've been enjoying the discourse on a young friend's FB post. Here are some thoughts they've inspired which are not intended to rebut anything anyone has said there, but are merely where I am as a result of their wonderful sharing. I have struggled of late with my inner longing to make radically different decisions than those which it seems my bride and I often choose.

God blesses us with many gifts in a variety of forms, and we take each one out of perspective and make it into something other than God intends. This certainly includes the gifts of personal responsibility and financial success.

• One way we misuse these is as an excuse to judge others' perceived shortcomings, to provide them with answers that "worked for us" that also just happen to be less demanding of us than living according to the grace and generosity of the Gospel. We tend to think that others are like ourselves, and that is largely true and very misleading, because there are many reasons why others may be unable to apply the answers that worked for us. 
• Another misuse of these gifts of God is to apply them to a different end than God intends, to a different goal than living our own lives in the grace and generosity of the Gospel. It is shortsighted, we say, to not build up our 401K to our target goal for our retirement, to not make our home down payment fund a high priority, to fail to invest in our future. We might even couch these decisions in terms of stewarding God's gifts - a valid approach when we're being accurate about that - when we're really making some of these goals into golden calves. Sometimes our approach to stewardship is too closely rooted in attempting to provide for our own security, as we gather more than our day's supply of manna. Of course, for Shabbat it's two days' supply, but we have lots of things which we rationalize are more important reasons than Shabbat for hoarding more than our daily bread. 
• One other abuse of God's gifts is to try to force them on others, especially those who have not accepted that they are God's beloved ones. Dare I try to legally force everyone to be generous to the poor in the name of economic justice? I must be generous, and must call others to be generous, but when I compel their generosity by force of law I rob them both financially and spiritually. This tendency has the same roots as every other overreach of power throughout history: even when primarily rooted in good-hearted desire for our brother, there is another root drawing malnourishment from our lack of humility and insistence that we will impose on others what we are convinced is best. So:
  • To what degree do we who believe in the scriptural mandate to care for the poor have a responsibility to compel our fellow citizens to do so through our legal institutions?
  • Is it right to ensconce in law those loving actions which God in his grace blesses us with the freedom to choose for ourselves in his Spirit or to reject?
  • When I make the government into the provider of people's needs, do I undermine the Gospel?
  (Those questions could inform another lengthy post.)

I know that I cannot share the Gospel with a starving person except first in the form of bread, and I have no bread to offer lest I appropriately steward it according to God's desires. But the purpose of my stewardship is not to fill up my storehouse so that I can be generous from it later.

Jesus never said, "Blessed are the rich, so strive to be like them." I don't care what 5 or 50 things rich people do that I don't, even rich Christians who are trying to help me be as successful as them. The rich have no corner on either generosity or (by any means) divine wisdom.

Now, the Holy Spirit? There is the One for me to heed, with regard to both my own decisions and my encouragement of others.

Thanksgiving 2013

A post started on Wednesday as indicated, but never finished due to time constraints:

I find myself needing to give thanks for things that aren't as I would have them, but are blessings even as they have turned out.

• Family members with whom I am now only united in the Holy Spirit, when what I long for is time in their physical presence.
• Friendships that have gone in a very different direction from what I intended, including some which have ended.
• A married life that is very different from what I might have chosen for myself, often very frustrating but, more importantly, overflowing with great love as we continue to grow together.

Busy, busy

Today is going to be crazy, but if I do it right tomorrow will be a semi-relaxing Thanksgiving day!

Oh, who am I kidding?

Today's word

borborygmus \'bor-buh-RIG-muss\ - intestinal rumbling caused by moving gas

Another word that I'm sure that I knew before, which always lies just beyond my reach when I'm groping for it.

Stress has strange effects

Our oldest daughter is experiencing her first bout in some time of a severely painful recurring health issue that she has been dealing with since she was a preteen. She is planning on being here for Thanksgiving dinner for the first time in a few years.

I can't help but wonder whether these two things are related, whether her body is rebelling against the stress of coming here and being with me. I don't especially have a reason to believe this is the case, but I'm thinking of how I feel - or maybe, since it has been so long since we've even talked, I should stick in the past tense: how I used to feel - when I was going to be spending time with my step-father. Of course, since the late 90's that has probably had more to do with him being an unrelenting judgmental redneck than any other unrepentance he had over the rest of our history, and neither of those conditions applies to my relationship with our daughter.

Today's word

There's no reason I'd post a link to yesterday's very common WOTD except for its unexpected relationship to a number of words with which I'd have never guessed it shared any etymological heritage.

2013 Day of Romance

It was a really nice day, even though we were both really tired by the end and therefore left a little early. My wife had woken up at 4 a.m. and not slept much thereafter, and I hadn't slept very well in general Friday night, awaking several times convinced it was later than it really was. We had to be up early to be down in Norwood in time for the start of the day's proceedings, and we wanted the dog to get bathed and trimmed this weekend, so he ended up taking a shower with me in the morning. I was still in pretty good shape time wise even after taking the extra time to clean him and get him mostly blown dry.

After getting the car defrosted - and a couple other false starts out the door for sunglasses and what all else - we were on the road just a few minutes later than I'd been hoping for. We're getting to know an increasing number of the couples in the larger community, particularly from down south. I think they especially appreciate when couples from Dayton find it worth their while to make the drive down for things like this. At any rate, I wanted to be early enough to say hi to a few of them before we got started, especially as we had seen several couples the previous week and were looking forward to seeing them again. In fact, all three of the presenting couples from the Weekend were there today.

We got there about halfway into the meet and greet period, but by the time we got checked into the event and placed our food on the snack table, we ended up with just a few minutes to grab a bite or two and a hug or three. The presentations seemed fresh even though we were somewhat familiar with the material. Still, I could tell that my bride was hitting the wall not long after lunch. Since we had plans to eat at a nearby Italian restaurant, we decided to stick it out through the remaining presentations explaining the basic concepts but to leave before the final two, a survey and a wrap-up that we can probably undertake on our own.

Today's word

forfend \for-FEND\ - 1. to ward off : prevent  2. protect, preserve

I've certainly heard this one before, and generally know it from context. I would have expected a different, more-common etymology for the prefix based on the first definition and example.

In progress

I'll be developing this potential lyric as thoughts come to me . . . 

I don't want to spend my life
watching actors playing roles
competition for the goal
of capturing attention

I'm not going to get excited
when the plots do twist and turn
as the characters all learn
lessons sometimes dubious

I don't want to sit beside you
while the screen just flickers on
waiting for the light to dawn
that our time is worth much more

I don't want to idly watch
inertia claim another toll
it sucks the life out of my soul
the things we're settling for

Refrain? Bridge? 1?
There's unspeakably more to life
I need there to be more to me
than hours wasted day by day
grey nights sucked dry of all glee

Refrain? Bridge? 2?
We have only finite moments
And once they've finally all retired
I don't want my heart to cry out
For opportunities expired

Sleep interruptions

Twice in the night I was awakened by the light from my wife's phone as she looked at it for something - perhaps nothing more than the time - plus when got up to use the toilet during the night. I woke again, of course, when her alarm went off and, in a momentary panic, I thought at first that it was mine and that she was late for work. Woke again when she let the dog into the room with me, and when she kissed me goodbye. I can't really complain about that last one, though, as it is a custom we have nurtured together. And at least I wasn't back to sleep when she subsequently texted me about her paycheck being wrong.

Today is tired.

Arithmetic refreshers needed

Both from today:

The bag of Sun Chips proclaimed that they contain "30% less fat than regular potato chips." The copy writer went on to explain that potato chips have 10g fat/oz., and Sun Chips have 6g fat/oz. Umm, I'm pretty sure that's 40% less fat.

A Washington Post article on the state of mental health care in Virginia, in the wake of the tragedy involving the state Senator's family, says that the commonwealth "has just 17.6 beds per 10,000 people, 40 percent of a target of 50 beds per 10,000."  Umm, no, but I wouldn't have quibbled with them had they said 35 percent.

I suppose these are both "rounding errors"?

Double take

It was a fascinating and insightful article, containing a wealth of insight gained at great personal expense, offered from a longing to help others recognize when they might be in harm's way. And then, right near the end, it nearly knocked me from my seat. I had to do the math and check the author's bio to verify that it wasn't written by someone I know.

Dysfunction?

What to do when two coworkers are amiably agreeing that the same dysfunctional behavior in which a good friend's husband engages on a regular basis is actually an appropriate way for the one of them to behave?

Keep my mouth shut unless my opinion is solicited, I suppose.

The thing is, even if another family member is the one with the primary problem, there are things we can do that will help create an environment that will make it easier for them to deal with it versus things that make matters worse for them. Healthy people seek the former, within reason. Unhealthy people are unwilling or unable to consider which category their interactions fall into, no matter how those around them may be affected.

I may have a right, in my home and when dealing with an adult son or daughter, to behave as I wish according to standards that society would generally hold as reasonable. But when that son or daughter has challenges, forcing on them things that should work for most people is a rather short-sighted approach.

Songs I lie

There are songs of praise and worship that I sing with all my heart, yet know in my mind as I do that I have always, always fallen short of them in my life. We sang one last night:

Lord, you are more precious than silver
Lord, you are more costly than gold
Lord, you are more beautiful than diamonds
and nothing I desire compares with you.

Another springs immediately to mind:

Refiner's Fire,
my heart's one desire is to be holy,
set apart for you, Lord
I want (choose) to be holy,
set apart for you, my Master,
ready to do your will.

Yet, when the rubber meets the road, I find that I frequently choose other things than those I know best please God, that would allow me to be like a tree planted close to the stream, whose roots would take sustenance from their proximity to the source of their life. I protect the idols I must smash to remove their influence over my life. I insist on acting as if God is depriving me of good things, things I value and treasure - often inappropriately - rather than trusting that every good thing in my life is from God and turning it all back over to him knowing that God will not deprive me of anything that I need. I want what I want, which is sometimes to embrace the world's attitude toward myself and the people and things around me.

It seems that Advent will be timely for me once again. Perhaps my heart should enter into this season a bit early this year.

I know I'm being picky . . .

. . . but even though I agree with the point the author was trying to make about Donovan McNabb's dismissiveness of Sprint Cup drivers as athletes, when she says that they analyze the movement of vehicles moving traveling at 200 miles/hour, and goes on, "That is light years faster than NFL sack artists J.J. Watt or Clay Mathews travel," I am done reading.

Can't we all agree not to use "light year" to describe anything other than a very large distance? Please? If what you're describing can't be converted to some outrageous number of feet, miles or microns - please note the lack of per hour, minute or second -  you can't use light years, even though that astronomical distance unit appears to contain a unit of time.

I wish they'd had the awareness of human nature to call the damned distance something else, actually.

Oh, another misuse today that I sometimes see and always hate: "mother load" instead of lode.  I know that mothers carry a heavy load, but that's not what the term means. This one wasn't from a professional writer, at least, but rather a mother.

Cardigans

A FB friend of a young friend who is nearing 30 lamented in a comment that "it's time to buy some cardigans." One thing that pleased me about becoming a grandfather at such a young age was that I felt free to wear a cardigan when I wanted. I've always liked them, and in fact had worn them previously, but finally felt like I had an quick rejoinder for anyone who accused me of stodginess: "Hey, I'm a grandfather. Why would I worry about how old a sweater makes me look?"

Today's word

phosphene \FAHSS-feen\ - a luminous impression due to excitation of the retina

It's safe to say that I'm way more familiar with the phenomenon than I am with the word.

150 year anniversary

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that this nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth. - Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg, PA, November 19, 1863, as subsequently autographed and signed by Lincoln

Catching my breath

My goodness, what a whirlwind weekend. Literally.

Friday I left work early for a change, necessitated by needing to go set up the supplies for the Marriage Encounter weekend at Maria Stein. It isn't often enough that we get to support couples who are working on their relationship together in this special way, and I love it! I wish we could be a presenting couple, but that's just never going to be possible for us. At any rate, we agreed with the couple who was delivering the supplies to be there by 5:00, which meant leaving home by 3:45. We were picking up our dear friends who were going to help us set up, and killed two birds with one stone by dropping off something else that we each needed to deliver for one of the couples making the weekend.

When we arrived, we spent about ten minutes on the lookout for the couple bringing the supplies before discovering that they'd already delivered them to the main room. We called them to find out they'd left already, but there was another couple from their circle who was coming up to help us set things up. We turned out to have a a couple issues with the power:

• We had three large pots to get going, one, each for regular and decaffeinated coffee and another for hot water for tea and hot cocoa. There were two power strips, but heating up any two pots at the same time on either of them would trip the breaker on the power strip.
• Also, heating three pots on the same building power circuit would trip the circuit breaker. And, of course, all of the outlets to which we had access were on the same circuit.

Through trial and error, we finally figured out that we could run one coffee pot on each power strip, and when one of the pots was finished we could then heat the hot water on the same power strip as that coffee pot, which at that point would be mostly resting. The issue then was that we knew that they would need to repeat this exercise on Saturday and Sunday morning, so we needed to talk with the presenting team who would be there all weekend about how to make it work. So we waited around for them to get back from dinner, then headed out for a late supper of our own at the outset of the drive back home. 

Saturday we tried to sleep in a bit, thwarted by our four-footed family member. Still, we kept a mostly relaxing morning. I forewent my planned afternoon bike ride due the overcast and windy conditions, instead concentrating on cleaning up the bike room so that we'd have someplace to store the supplies at the conclusion of the Weekend. It was quite a chore, but even with the supplies in place looks way better now that I have my old bike frame and assortment of bike wheels and old tires and tubes out of there, along with having everything more organized.  We could actually have one of our circle couples meet in there for dialogue again if need be. By the time I was finishing up with that, it was getting close to the time we wanted to head over to the Family and Youth Initiatives dinner at one of the local parishes. Unbeknownst to us, a couple from our circle was being recognized for their years of dedicated service to the organization. We were so glad to be there for this occasion!  We had one eye on our phones for news from the primary supply circle as to whether they were going to have anyone available to help. When we didn't hear anything before we left the dinner, we made a point of lining up potential help from the other couples from our circle in attendance who might be available to help on Sunday.

We bid on a gorgeous sleigh decoration that was filled with other very nice Christmas-themed items, which ended up going for $300, double where Teri had dropped out of the bidding, though it was probably worth more than that in total. The woman who got it had that determined look in her eye that indicated she didn't intend to leave without it, and at one point in the bidding her husband just shook his head and handed her his wallet. Our friends who had been honored at the event also left with an equally expensive item: a gas-motorized mobile bar stool. I should have taken a picture. I can't wait to take a seat on it at our next circle meeting at their house!

It was good that we made those arrangements for extra help before we left. On our way home after the event we received a message from the main supply circle indicating that they had no one available to go up on Sunday. I suspect that if we have two Weekends next year we will probably leave our trainees on their own for Sunday, too. Having been there to unpack and set things up on Friday, we were pretty aware of what packing up would entail.

After I sent them an e-mail before Mass on Sunday, my wife called the younger couple from our circle who had indicated they would be available to help on Sunday. We hadn't been home all that long when the phone rang, and the caller id indicated it was them. However, I couldn't find a phone, and my wife wasn't where she could answer one. Finally she got to a phone before I did, which was exactly in the place she'd tried to yell at me that one was while I was trying to get one from two places where one should have been. This is a frequent frustration of mine when the phone rings, as in our house we seem to have a habit of not returning phones to their charging bases. I know that I do this, too, sometimes. But I use the phone so much less that I don't perceive myself as being as guilty of this, and I was definitely not the culprit this time. Things got pretty unpleasant between us after the call was over, and that was largely my fault. Finally we each retreated to separate activities, and eventually - during the long drive north - the episode blew over.

We knew there was rain in the forecast, and heavy wind. I was hoping that we might tour the prayer and meditation gardens while waiting for the end of the Weekend, but it was too windy for that when we arrived, though dry. We'd had a strong tailwind out of the south on the drive up.  We were able to meet with a young couple we'd been praying for throughout the weekend, then started packing up the supplies. By then it had started raining, and while I was packing the van the wind suddenly picked up dramatically, blowing items across the driveway. Storm sirens soon began to sound. So we had our second unanticipated delay of the weekend at the retreat center while we waited out a pair of tornado warnings. As a result, we ended up stopping for supper on the way home, as opposed to cooking a very late meal on our arrival home. After all, we had all of the supplies (supply bins, large coffee pots, coolers, Mass kit, etc.) to carry into the bike room from the van, too.

Except for a brief time early Sunday afternoon that I need to learn from, it was a very nice (if exhausting) weekend.

Today's words

Just as I was lamenting the lack of decent WOTD material:

conurbation \kah-ner-BAY-shun\ - an aggregation or continuous network of urban communities

I might have guessed at this one in context. I wonder how this would compare to the word I've heard used to describe much of the northeastern seaboard: megalopolis. 

homologate \hoh-MAH-luh-gayt\ - to sanction or allow; especially : to approve or confirm officially

I wouldn't have guessed this one.

WOTD speculation

The latter part of last year and most of this month have both been marked by a dramatic drop off in the number of words-of-the-day on Merriam-Webster's site that are not already firmly established in my vocabulary. I was pleasantly surprised at the beginning of this year when the quality of WOTD's suddenly rebounded. Now it seems to have quickly eroded once again.

I wonder if this is an annually rotating assignment? If so, whoever has the end of the year does a poorer job with it than his or her coworkers do.

Dust blindness?

Maybe, just as there are people who are physically incapable of seeing the difference between red and green or between blue and yellow, there are people who are incapable of distinguishing between "dusty" and "clean."

I suspect I may be married to such a person. I've long been frustrated by being the only one in my home who seems to notice the presence of dust on surfaces, or dust bunnies along the floor molding or behind doors, or dirt accumulation in the corners of the stairs.  But last week I learned that I may also be the only one in the house who notices when a surface is already clean.

We've been having trouble with our new television and broadband service (from a company that the federal government broke up in the 1980's). The technician was scheduled to come out late Thursday afternoon to have a look at it. I had commented on an earlier evening how dusty the house - and particularly the entertainment center - was looking. When I was home for lunch, I got out the duster and cleaned up the area, as well as some other spots that I noticed needed the attention. I also swept the stairs, which had been getting increasingly grungy. These things needed to be taken care of anyway, even if we didn't have company coming over on Saturday evening.

Later in the evening I asked my wife if she'd noticed that the technician hadn't had to contend with a layer of dust. With dawning comprehension, she replied, "Oh, you dusted at lunch time? No wonder it didn't look that bad when I did it!"

Of course, I suppose this could just mean that I did a terrible job, but I don't think so.

Finally, a new word

First one in over a week:

gormless \GORM-lus\ - lacking intelligence : stupid

I've seen this before and knew it in context. When I saw it by itself I felt like a gormless dunderhead over my inability to recall its meaning.

Annoying typos I've seen lately

(including at least one I've made repeatedly despite very much knowing the difference) 

I put a few (not of these) on a Facebook post once, and got a bunch of comments with others' most hated, mostly very common ones. I'm not by any means trying to list the most common or simplest spelling errors people make, nor the ones that drive me crazy(er).  These are just a few that I've run across lately, most of which (except for the last two) strike me as a matter of people overreaching their vocabularies:

• adverse for averse
• regiment for regimen
• unchartered for uncharted
• peek or peak for pique
• access for assess
• aloud for allowed
• it's for its (which I'm including only since I have done it with annoying frequency, usually when I'm in a rush or teal deer-ing)
• pretty much anything my third or (honorary) fourth daughters misspell in every other FB post. Especially sware for swear. 

Expectation is the root of all heartache? Shakespeare?

NOT! (On both counts.)

Yet I saw this quote, which someone apparently has alleged to be from Shakespeare, shared on FB by a young friend - well, the 20-ish daughter of a good friend of ours.

Now, we're a couple decades into the internet age, and (most of us) have learned that there's a lot of crap zipping around via e-mail and the web, and the mere fact that something comes to us electronically has stopped filling us with the wondrous, false sense of inerrancy that it used to have. So apparently people have started misattributing their nonsense to respected people in an effort to restore their ability to seem profound. But hey, the internet also offers the discerning eye an easier way to do very quick research. You don't have to read all of Shakespeare's work for yourself before you can call "b.s." on someone. A simple Google search on the suspect phrase leads to this link (among the many misattributions to the once-dubious-but-now-highly-respected William).

Well, of course, my simple, "Not Shakespeare" comment (without hyperlink) yielded the appropriately skeptical reply at some point overnight (since this family lives on the West Coast): "Who is it by?"

Here's how I responded:

Who knows? Some wannabe who was aiming for the profound and missed the mark, who figured that putting the Bard's name on it would make it sound more universally true. Try telling this short-sighted, simplistic crap to someone who has just buried a piece of their heart: their parent, best friend, spouse, or child.

Now, do our expectations cause conflict and pain sometimes? Sure. Often even. But "the root of all"? Not even close. The truth is: heartache can easily be completely avoided by simply not loving. The price of love is hurt. It is not love if you are not willing to experience the hurt, just narcissism with the trappings of something better. It is the willingness to bear the heartache of it that is the test of love, and which makes it worthy of our aspiration.

If anyone tells you less, don't cast them out of your life, but neither entrust your heart to them.

The epidemic

I saw two completely unrelated Facebook posts last night that both underscore a growing trend. My nephew posted a link to an article lamenting singers who blow out their voices by using them inappropriately at too young an age. A younger friend posted a link to a video with the latest AMAZING marriage proposal. (Now that girl is really lucky, right?)

The trend is the lengths to which we must go in order to feel truly special. It takes fame, worldwide uniqueness.

We live on a planet with over 7 billion people, increasingly connected by the internet. If we only feel truly special by comparison to others, and especially if the standard is singular uniqueness (I suppose that's redundant), it's going to be pretty tough to get there.

But even to a lesser degree, the issue of taking our value primarily from comparison with others has become a rampant problem. When we don't believe - or struggle to believe - in God, we are unable to find our value simply in relationship with him. The Creator of the universe loves me!

(Oh, but there's nothing special about that: he loves everybody!)

As much as I disdain that show . . .

. . . , I don't know which is greater:

• my concern that you don't agree with me about its offensiveness 
• my annoyance (and what underlies it) that you'd rather watch that tonight than finish spending the evening together

Oh, yeah. How could I forget to mention THAT one?

In reflecting on tumultuous autumns at the end of this post the other day, I somehow forgot about that worst autumn of all, of my own making, as we were waiting to learn the extent of my consequences. It has taken eighteen years for that to start feeling at all like anything less than a terrifying thing I'd rather not have in my neural pathways anymore. It wasn't technically autumn when we got the word that we'd have to report it, just after getting back from Labor Day weekend in Maryland. The following weekend was wretched, as we knew I was in grave jeopardy. I'm glad Waterworld was so awful, because I'd hate to have such terrible memories associated with a movie I'd want to see again! That drive-in is gone, too.

Anyway, it would take another ten weeks to find out that I'd have to move out, another couple months thereafter to be evaluated and accepted into the treatment program, another two years before I was completely back home - a good deal of which delay ended up being outside of our control. I'm glad that I've learned that I don't have to be in control of everything, though I do still have to be reminded of that from time to time.

The gift of thankfulness

This annual exercise in which a number of my friends are engaged isn't a matter of God needing our gratitude for his goodness.  Rather, it is a reminder that we need: that all that we have has come from God, so as to replace any sense of entitlement or resentment in our own hearts with an appreciation for the abundant blessings we have.

I have never engaged in the public FB thank-a-thon, and I wish that I could say that is because my life is so full of gratitude that I don't need to express it so demonstratively. On the contrary, I often read my friends' expressions of gratefulness with a bit of a resentful spirit. "Oh, how nice that you can be thankful for your (dad, mother-in-law, childhood, etc.). Must be nice."  Which is, of course, exactly the opposite of what my friends are hoping to inspire by their sharing.  But my reaction is by no means their fault, and I find that I am starting to look for the kernel of commonality that I can find in each thing they share. I may not have a dad for whom I can feel mostly thankful, but I am grateful that my dad did take me in and try to make me his own, and that I learned so many things from my step-father that I am able to take on a lot of tasks that would otherwise be beyond me. My mother-in-law may have gone to her grave without forgiving me, but she made every effort not to express that to me, and my fatiher-in-law was genuine in his acceptance and forgiveness of me. My childhood memories may have a continual undercurrent of dysfunctions and pain, but there are many very fond ones, too.

So I thank you, God, for this life with which you have blessed and continue to bless me. I pray that you would help me to be less attuned to my regrets and more in touch with the many ways you reveal your presence and your love.

Today's word

I love it when I know both the meaning and the pedigree of what is probably a fairly obscure word for most of the population.

Today's word

eristic \ih-RISS-tik\ - characterized by disputatious and often subtle and specious reasoning

So, is there any point in putting lipstick on an eristic pig?

Autumn 1972, and so on

Dad had a business trip scheduled to Pittsburgh, and for some reason it made more sense for him to drive than to fly, I guess. He never completed the business he was going there for. At some point as he neared his destination, he lost control of his VW bug and drove off the road. Only the combination of a guardrail and the rear-engine weight of the bug kept him from careering down a tall, steep cliff-side embankment to his death. I remember very clearly the adults discussing afterward that a normal car would have gone over the side. He almost died anyway.  I don't remember anyone saying so, but knowing him I can say that he was certainly not wearing a seat belt, and I'd be stunned to learn that he was totally sober.

Mom went to to the hospital in Pittsburgh to which Dad had been transferred due to his life-threatening condition to tend to him, leaving us in the care of her aunt, who was in her late sixties. She ended up being gone for about a month. This was my first year of junior high, and I was having no difficulty at all adapting to the tougher level of classwork that kicks in around that point. I had considerable problem, though, with one of the junior high teachers, a nun who was either in the wrong profession to begin with or who had stayed in it too long, in my now grown-up opinion. She taught reading, and in my personal disdain for her I didn't do a bit of homework in her class while mom and dad were gone. She sent several notes home to my parents, but they grew increasingly crumpled in the bottom of my bookbag until mom brought dad home, at which point I was in the most trouble I'd ever been in.

[Until the following year, I was always in the more advanced of the two classes in each grade in my Catholic grade school. That would end because of this stubborn personality clash with this particular nun. Our classes split up differently for Math/Science versus for English/Reading, with the music and PE classes being all together (I think). My English teacher was so frustrated with the way things worked out with my "demotion" that he took me somewhat under his wing, and I became the first student from the "lower class" to receive the English award at graduation. One more junior high note: I'll never forget our excellent math teacher, who drilled the commutative and other properties into us by verse: "The ORDer of the ADDends, does NOT afFECT the SUM," is the only one I can recall now.]

Dad lost muscle control of one eye because of this accident. It was a strange introduction to the precision of legalese: he had an accidental death and dismemberment policy that would have compensated him for a loss of sight in either eye, but not for the use of the eye. (Not that that would have made his life any better.) He wore a patch over his glasses' lens for the rest of his life. As it happened, we got at least a few months respite from his alcoholism, as our family doctor told him that his chances for recovery might be better if he didn't stifle his healing through the continued presence of alcohol in his system. He'd eventually see a neurologist who would tell him that the nerve was permanently damaged and would never recover no matter what he did, after which his drinking resumed with a renewed determination over what he viewed as his lost drinking time and his now crippled life.

Two autumns later, during my freshman year of high school shortly after Dad died, I'd develop an unbearable unrequited crush on a classmate who would later become, in college, my closest friend for a while. Three years after that crush, my H.S. senior year, was that Thanksgiving weekend. In another two years, my then closest friend and I would turn back from the precipice of a developing set of feelings for each other, out of respect for a relationship she was already in - which was the right decision for both of us, btw. More recently, my mom (2001) and both of my wife's parents (2008 and 2010) died in the fall.

Whenever I make even the most laudatory of observations about the season of autumn, these types of memories and feelings are never very far from the surface.

More on the pursuit of happiness

I started developing this post in response to a friend's FB post from the other day that has stuck with me, and then realized that I simply had to have written on this topic before. Sure enough. So just a thought or two.

Our friend posted that, from now on, she is simply going to do what makes everyone else happy. And a friend of hers objected that no, she owed it to herself to seek her own happiness.

Oh, no, and no!

If we will simply focus on being the person we should be, on doing things that allow us to respect ourselves, our happiness (and sometimes sadness and every other appropriate emotion along the way; see that previous post) will occur as a natural consequence. But the single greatest thing we do to interfere with the emotions we wish to experience more frequently is to make them our goal. On the other hand, I find that when I make my goals to be thankful for the many blessings in my life and to spend time with the One who loves me most, my life tends to be more full of joy.