It's that time of year.
Tim could only scrape up enough money for a poem, so here goes nothing:
There was a “young” beaut named Suzi
She had two boys, then the girl made three
Her husband loved her a lot
But what has he bought?
The anniversary gift he gave her was free.
WOW!
Why is it that turning 25 years old does not seem to be that big of a deal? Twenty-one is big. Eighteen is big. Thirty is big. And the old 4 - 0 is huge. Not so for twenty-five.
But when talking marriage, 25 is big--not as big as 50, but big nevertheless. So here we are, my beloved and I, twenty-five years into this thing.
So far the occasion is huge. Are we taking a cruise? Are we having a party? Are we going to an expensive restaurant?
Nope. We are home. Together. Playing. Not working, per se.
Miracle of miracles, I have cleared off my schedule. My wife is taking a vacation day, and we will enjoy each other’s company. She will walk the dog. I will read the news. She will check her email. I will eat a bowl of cereal. But together we will play Scrabble (or more properly Scrabulous, because of copyright issues).
And then we will head off to a play. Nothing Broadway for us today. No Tony award winning productions on the docket. We will head off to the center of middle-class suburbia, to a place called the Plymouth Playhouse, to see a kitschy performance called “Church Basement Ladies 2: A Second Helping.” The original play has struck such a chord with this state’s Midwestern sensibilities that the theatre troupe responsible is offering up seconds for all those hungering for more. So off we go, later today. And it will be great. It will be cheesy, but cheesy is good, even if we’re not from Wisconsin. We will laugh. More specifically, we will be laughing at ourselves. And that will be good.
For it takes a lot of laughter to make it through 25 years. We’ve had to laugh at ourselves often and not take things too seriously to weather the storms of everyday life.
I’m eternally grateful to have someone by my side who will laugh with me (and at me when the occasion calls for that). When I think about laughter, my mind often jumps to the Hebrew Scriptures where the promised, long-odds fruit of an old, old man and his barren wife is a baby named laughter.
Life is odd. It often helps to laugh.
Thanks for our first 25 years of laughing together, honey. (Oh, did I tell you the one. . . )
(Lack of sleep plays tricks with the mind.
So here’s a little ditty I just happened to find.
Change is in the air, can you feel the wind?
I filed my extension, you should see my grin.)
April is the cruelest month
At least in the United States
We dread the ides
When we’re taxed to our eyes
It puts us all in dire straights.
April is the cruelest month
At least here in Minnesota
The days are chilly
The nights are colder
It feels like North Dakota.
April is the cruelest month
At least in my little town
The lakes we’re not using
For boats or snowshoeing
And the grass is an ugly brown.
April is the cruelest month
At least in my humble home
I’m too busy to blog
Daylight savings’ got me in a fog
My mind is on a constant roam.
April is the cruelest month
At least in my comfy chair
I sit here and fret
Think about bills being met
But still I shouldn’t despair.
For April is the cruelest month
At least up on that tree
The spotless one
Was tortured and hung
And somehow makes us free.
I just remembered that I didn't blog yesterday, thus breaking my continuous string of blogging days, and this led me to contemplate the fact that I shouldn't use "just" to modify my speech as I often do (and did early on in this sentence), because it weakens what I'm trying to say, and then tempts me to justify or explain why I do it, all of which leads me to write run-on sentences, which I think I was taught not to do somewhere along the way in my attempts at learning.
Sat down to blog. . . Fell asleep.
Woke up, remembered that my brother with the birthday went to Vegas for vacation in a Tahoe. The Chevy Tahoe is an 8 cylinder, but when it’s cruising down the freeway, four of the cylinders shut down to save on gas. This reminded us of an old high school friend, who in about 1975 took four spark plugs out of his V-8 Oldsmobile and claimed he saved lots of gas that way. It clunked and sputtered and sounded like a tractor, but it ran. Maybe he was ahead of his time.
Or maybe that was a dream.
Hey this is pretty easy blogging, the whole happy birthday gig. My brother and his oldest each rack up one more year. And tax season marches on. No energy for inspiration.
There was an old blogger named Tim
Who anxiously went out for a swim
It’s April he thought
I’ve been cooped up a lot
(To the lake he did go
Through the ice and the snow)
And now he’s in bed with the symp-
Toms of a runny nose, the chills, a hacking cough, blurry vision, and a headache
If it were a day later, this might be some cruel April Fool's Joke, but hey it's March, and the world again looks magical. The huge flakes grasping onto tree branches as they flutter down from the whitish-gray skies make even the camera shy want to be shutterbugs. I wanted to be outside experiencing and capturing all those delightful moments, but instead I stay cooped up inside playing responsible.
But for my blog I had to click at least once (or twice) to lend credence to my story. (If one squints one can find a Prov. 31 woman in the background.;)
We had a moving tribute to Pastor Paul and his family on this their last Sunday at church.
And now hours later, instead of bedtime stories I'm telling my daughter blond jokes and this was her favorite:
A blonde takes her car in to the shop because it's been running rough. After a little while the mechanic comes in to the waiting area. She asks him if the problem was fixable. "Sure," he replies. "Just crap in the carburetor." Oh, my goodness," says the blonde. "How often do I need to do that?"
My wife and I are winding down on a Saturday night by doing none other than playing Scrabulous. As is her favorite activity, she was complaining about a word that I used. I used the word "cabana." I know it sounds Spanish and maybe is for all I know, but I've seen it around on buildings by the beach and figured it would be a great choice for that spot on the board. After complaining for a little bit more she decided to look it up and sure enough, it means hut or shack often by water.
This got up reminiscing about our beloved Bolivian daughter Carla, who was a bundle of energy and continually surprised us with her candor and frankness. One evening we were engaged in a discussion about our home and we asked her what the Spanish word for ceiling was. ". . . I don't know," she said. She pondered and prodded. But it just wouldn't come. This native speaker of the Spanish language was simply lost to find this simple word which she had, no doubt, learned as a child. But it was something to rejoice about. We laughed and giggled as she simply couldn't come through with an answer.
I guess it just goes to show that life is more fun if you don't know everything.
Late Friday night we received Christina's senior pictures from the photographer. They are awesome. I'm trying to upload some to my blog, but I'm having trouble. So for now, imaginations will have to do. Wait. . . now it is working. Yippee. Now I have been informed that this is the one picture the daughter hates.
Such is life.
It’s amazing how a little germ or virus bug, probably unseeable with the human eye, can put someone down who is over 6 feet tall and has over 200 pounds of gravitational pull. It reminds me of the parable of the mustard seed. Something small can have a huge impact.
I had my first official meal this evening. It started with soup and then progressed to a shrimp and spinach salad. So far so good. I can still hear the faint churn churn, but I think I’ve made it. (I suppose I shouldn’t have stolen those French fries from my wife’s plate.)
Today is day three of my forced fast. Monday night I started feeling sick and this was sick with capital letters. Actually it should be capital letters with exclamation points. SICK!!!!!!! I think I blogged about being sick earlier this year, and even about being sick of being sick. But that was mere coughing and hacking and constant nose run and the like. I felt lousy, but I could still go to work and function pretty well although miserable.
But this week’s SICK was one that put me on my back (and on my butt). My energy was near zero, but most important (tada) I could not eat. Nothing would stay down or in and that’s no fun. Even today as I ventured into the realm of a cracker, a banana, and a piece of toast (hours apart from each other), it only served to increase the queasiness.
I’ve relearned how much I love food this week, even though on one level it doesn’t yet appeal to me. I had to put the pros and cons on a scale as I drove by each restaurant while traveling from job to job. Even the architecture of a McDonald’s building didn’t look that bad. That red and yellow lured me at some primal level. The double cheeseburgers, which I normally disdain because of their greasiness, were calling my thrifty sensibilities with “only $1.”
But I’ve survived another day. And instead of eating a bag of popcorn or a bowl of ice cream right now, I am sitting here blogging.
For now for me it’s to everything churn, churn, churn. There is a season, churn, churn, churn. I hope it’s over very soon, churn, churn, churn.
Last Monday was the final week of my Intro to Improv class at a local high school in north Minneapolis. The six of us (Dan, Peter, Amy, Emily, Roneete, and me) and our teacher Michael had ten weeks to play games together. These games stretched us by forcing us to listen and concentrate. These games and exercises were used to help our minds from straying, to keep us in the moment. It was hard. Listening and concentrating at that level, with that intensity, is tiring. We did that for almost two hours straight each Monday night.
I think it was very beneficial in many ways. Sure, it helped us as we did short improv acts, but I hope it will transfer to other areas of my life. Maybe my parenting will improve, or my reading comprehension, or my organizing, or maybe even my blogging?
What? I’m sure everyone is asking, how can there possibly be any room for improvement in any of those areas?
So maybe I wasted my time at Improv. Oh well, I got to meet some fine folks.
I was up much of the night with what I’d rather not describe. This conveniently continued throughout all of today. Blah, blah, blah.
I am so glad that I don’t get sick often. It’s only about once a decade that I feel this lousy, too weak to do much of anything. Only now at 9:30 do I have the strength to blog about it.
Zzzzzzzzzzzz . . . .
I’m truly enjoying the fact that I have no pressure to blog today.
Use your imagination and pretend that under the day March 24th there is nothing. No blog. No pictures. No comments. Nothingness. Sheer blackness. A void from Easter till who knows when.
The obligation has been fulfilled, the test has been passed. The habit has been formed???
Only time will tell.
