song
By the time I was my daughter’s age, I’d been singing in a choir for at least six years. I contemplate this as I watch her make corporate music with her classmates today—praying that similar seeds of interest and affection would likewise get lodged deep within her ready heart and take root. Their voices are sweet, innocent, self-conscious. How long until she learns to sing with abandon, I wonder? How long until she discovers the thrill of giving herself over to the experience? How long until her joy in the glorious moment overpowers her fear of what other people think? I...
Read Morehe gives and takes away (though not necessarily in that order)
In loving memory: 1993-2010 We got them almost on an impulse. Though I’d been desperate for a cat for at least a year, their actual acquisition was, well, not exactly planned. That seems to be the way things go around here. They fulfilled their purpose with incredible success—bringing me comfort at a time when I needed it most. Deeply depressed and struggling through my first year of marriage, I knew, I just knew, I would feel better if I only had something I could hold. Turns out, I was right. That seems to be the way things go around here. Both incredibly affectionate and...
Read Morewhat remains
The day began innocently enough as far as epiphanies go. After a slow start due to a late night the evening before, we were finally all up and moving—moving tubs and bags and boxes up from the basement to be dug through and sorted and stored or gotten rid of. I was nearly jubilant as I plowed through the last ten years worth of stuff (which had heretofore been accumulating en masse all over my basement, already a pit to begin with) trying to determine what were keepsakes and what was simply not worth keeping. Baby clothes, teething rings, books, baskets, tennis shoes, clothes out of date,...
Read More>on (not) singing
> Normally, my mail doesn’t make me cry. Normally. But today’s mail was an exception. Today’s mail contained the season brochure for The Toledo Masterworks Chorale, and it pressed on a tender spot in my spirit I have gone to great lengths to avoid over the past several years. This blog began as an effort to avoid that tender spot. And I’d done pretty well, as of late. But tender spots always seem to be found, somehow. Someone presses on them by mentioning the unmentionable, asking the unaskable, or mailing you a brochure that gets delivered right into your hands and...
Read More>our last days of summer vacation
> If my dear friend Bob thought it strange that we spent part of our last spring break in Indianapolis, he will be completely flumoxed by the fact that our summer “vacation” was spent in Springfield, Illinois. The kiddos in front of the state capitol building. (Should that be capitalized? I’m too tired to care…) It was one of the most beautiful domes (from the inside, of course) that I’ve ever seen. Hangin’ with the Lincoln Family at the White House. I HIGHLY recommend the Lincoln Presidential Museum. Very, VERY well done. Yep, that’s corn....
Read Morea letter to my fifth grade self
After eyeing it for months, I finally picked up What I Know Now: Letters to My Younger Self (edited by Ellyn Spragins) with a gift card I received for my birthday. I was immediately transfixed and began thinking of all the different ages at which I wished “I’d known then…” I picked fifth grade for an obvious reason—my daughter begins fifth grade a week from today, and my mind is swimming with all I want her to know about all there is to know. At ten, I was painfully self-conscious, boy-crazy beyond belief, and immensely insecure. My love-hate relationship with attention...
Read More>in memory
> There are some who would insist I was one of his pets–that I only got the parts I did because he “played favorites.” I don’t know that this was true, but what I do know for certain is that I wanted desperately to please this man, and still, to this day, wrestle with conflicted emotions regarding my inability to do so. My high school theater director died yesterday, and my emotions remain conflicted. Make no mistake–I am very sad to hear of his passing. Many of my best memories of high school, if not most, were orchestrated by and filled with this man and...
Read Morethings that last
She is not my oldest, longest friend, but she is perhaps my dearest. Ours was a friendship forged out of coming of age together—struggling together (as we still do now, come to think of it) to discover who we are, what is important, and where we fit into God’s greater plan. Hol and I met the weekend of freshman orientation, as did my husband and I, and we have all been friends ever since. We schlepped through the valley together, ate smuggled-in homemade meals by candlelight in the Haven, sang in the Chorale, toilet papered upper classmen. We took long, meandering walks, stayed up...
Read More>an unlikely turn of events
> They were not exactly fast friends. Already five when she was first introduced into his home, Max’s first response was barely short of indifference. To him, she was basically another, albeit hairless, lap cat. But then she started moving. And life for poor Max has never been quite the same. “Relax, Max,” we have gently intoned ever since. But despite the fact cats sleep twenty-two hours out of a day, Max is not exactly a relaxed creature. When our daughter became mobile, it finally sent him over the edge into full-fledged neurosis. A living, breathing, moving stuffed animal is...
Read More>home freezing home
> There are two kinds of travelers. There is the kind who goes to see what there is to see and sees it, and the kind who has an image in his head and goes out to accomplish it. The first visitor has an easier time, but I think the second visitor sees more. He is constantly comparing what he sees to what he wants, so he sees with his mind, and maybe even with his heart, or tries to. If his peripheral vision gets diminished…his struggle to adjust the country he looks at to the country inside him at least keeps him looking. It sometimes blurs, and sometimes sharpens, his eye. Adam...
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