Happy Birthday, SAM!

Every October 17th I think about the day Sam entered the world and how much joy he has brought to us in the years since then.  Today, like most of Sam's birthdays as an adult, we are separated by many miles, and I pull out actual or mental snapshots to reminisce and celebrate.  
How to tell you, Sam, how proud we have been of you all these years - the boy you were and the man you have become without inducing the gag reflex in readers?  Except for the xeriscaping, I honestly feel you demonstrate the above because you have purposed to honor God by trying to model his character.  The lines above definitely describe you, yet there is so much more....  
How thrilled we are for the start of your life with Amber.  All those years of disciplined waiting and trusting...wow, what a treasure for reward!
Your commitment to seek, appreciate, and build strong men and friends has been a delight to watch for many years.
You've invested your time in family  (cousis Alisa and Tyler here)  camraderie and encouragaement.
There were days I wasn't sure you'd make it to adulthood with your body whole and your love for your older brother intact.  But you did it!  
I am so thankful for your adult relationship with Kyle - and all the love, respect, serious conversation and raucous laughter and teasing it contains.
I thought that your many friends should know that the Sam who loves to make comic faces started a long time ago.  Here, when asked to model your new Easter outfit for the camera...
and of course, when you are doing George W...ad nauseum.....
This one is from the "Harry Carey season" of your life...I'm guessing Cobe had had enough!
The budding triathlete, warming up for the swim....
and the bike - look at the intensity on that face!
Swim time with no time goals :-)
I wonder just how many people consider you their friend, even after many years?  You have collected friends over the years, like a caretaker of prized plants, nurturing, appreciating the variety and beauty and fragrance.  You are rich, indeed.
One of the things that David and I have talked often about over the years is your tender, compassionate heart.  It seems your experiences of exclusion and ridicule have given you an eye to spot the one who feels excluded or put down and the heart to include and defend them.

We like the way your engage life with GUSTO - trying new experiences and adventures, no matter how much fear.  Oh, how I wish I had a picture of you hanging from that tree above the ravine at Croom, pushing quiet "help!"s out your throat...
That love of life is wonderful to behold :-)

So enjoy your birthday weekend with your beautiful bride and your good friends....

 

and know that we love you and are happy to be your family and friend.

Slipping in a Celebration

I was just beginning supper preparation a couple days ago when a torrent of rain, compliments of Ike, commanded my attention. Florida thunder storms are marvelous things if you're snug in your home (as I was) and lucky enough to have a covered porch (I do) to sit on and enjoy the show. I love the sound the rain makes streaming off our roof so fast that it spills over the gutters in sheets to the ground.

All the chopping and cooking would have to wait while I grabbed a glass and sat down to toast the splendor and give thanks for the joy. What sights and sounds surprise you with joy?

Whooo? me, Me, ME!

Like Michelle, who meme'd me, and Sam, I wondered how the phrase "meme'd" originated. I decided that the phrase is simply a repetition of "me", and that the originator of the chain is either spoofing the self-focus of much of the blog world, or has a research interest or financial stake in the blogosphere.

SO....in the spirit of honoring Michelle's effort to inject a little fun into our daily stresses....

1. I am an extremely SERIOUS person - according to the male members of my family. I routinely answer questions that were meant to be a rhetorical joke as if they were a straight question. I prefer to think of myself as a "contemplative intuitive" but the truth is by the average person's measure, I spend waaaay too much time imagining and evaluating potential words, choices and actions.

2. By the standards of today's production-oriented western world, I am incredibly NON productive. Mostly because of fact #1. I currently have two non-working clocks (dead batteries) on my bedside nightstand. I have tried on several occasions to think of anything I can do fast, and the only thing I came up with (after much thought) was JUDGING OTHERS. Now there's a skill you want to be sure to include on your resume.

3. I have written hundreds of notes, letters, e-mails, articles and blog posts in my head over the years while walking, running, sitting in bed that never materialized even in cyber space.

4. The best gag gift I've ever received was from my husband's sister who was my best friend for several years: She gave me a pile of fabric pieces, pinned to pattern pieces and cut out, ready for sewing, which I had given to her several years prior, in exactly the same condition. The perfect statement about my project completion record.

5. I paid good money to see to my first body-building show a couple weeks ago. Truly. To support and encourage a young friend who was competing for the first time in figure and fitness categories. I missed her first appearance on stage and sat through 1.5 hours of male body builders strutting their stuff on stage. I was not bored. They seemed, somehow, vulnerable, almost fragile, to me......how much of their self esteem was wrapped up in the arbitrary assessments of the judges?.....I think I'll ask my mom to go with me to the next show - it'll be a good time.

6. It does me no good to try to lie. I have been told this on more than one occasion. Apparently I have "an open-book face. One time, years ago, I lied to a bank teller in the drive-thru, asserting that my husband, not me, had penned his signature on the back of his pay check which I was depositing. My very loud conscience DEMANDED I confess to the teller the following week. She said she knew I had lied.

This scrupulous attention to truth-telling is my parents' doing. Case in point: Age 5 (or thereabouts) I used my mother's lipstick to doodle and write "tan" on the bathroom mirror. Like any 5 year old trying to evade a spanking, when asked directly if I wrote on the mirror with my mother's lipstick, I directly denied it. I got spanked, not for using the lipstick in said manner, but for lying about it.

For a while I was convinced that my mother did indeed have eyes in the back of her head and would know whenever I transgressed, because I couldn't figure out how she knew it was me, when I had an older sister as well as a foster sister and brother living with us at the time. It took my young brain a while to realize that I had given myself away by writing one of the only two words I knew how to write.

7. It takes me 400 words to say what most people say in about 50-75 words. Or don't say at all. During one period of my life I routinely spent hours -HOURS and sometimes DAYS - writing e-mail missives that would - at the very best - receive a quick scan before deletion by the recipient. David has nicknamed me "the amplified version" and loves to recount how he would watch our teenage/young adult sons pushing the index finger of one hand into the open palm of their other hand while they listened to me talk, waiting for me to GET TO THE POINT.

David has emphasized his need for me to pre-edit my speech so often, that sometimes now when he asks me question, for the good of our relationship, I reply "I can't answer that without free-floating." This has got me thinking about writing an article called "pearls before swine"...

About 8-10 years ago Sam gently instructed me that when talking to the male species, I should preface my comments with one short sentence stating the subject of my remarks to follow - kind of like the subject line of an e-mail. Very good advice. If I could only remember to follow it. Which leads me to #8...my memory....

The Meme'd Rules:

1. Link to your tagger and post these rules on your blog.

2. Share 7 facts about yourself on your blog, some random, some weird.

3. Tag 7 people at the end of your post by leaving their names as well as links to their blogs.

4. Let them know they are tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.

I hereby tag Robin who is so much younger than me that you probably have lots of little eccentricities I know nothing of (I'll leave Heather for you to meme) and Joanna - as long as responding to the meme doesn't keep you from posting your poetry and prose - perhaps you could just list some of the things you've already told me because you know I've forgotten them.

I would like to meme Mom, Susan & Jim, Bruce & Angie, Amber, Meagan, Jonathan & Kelsey in the interest of hearing some good stories and new-to-me tidbits, but since I don't know your blog URLs (if you have them), I have set up a family blog to which you can all post.


The photo of this owl is one of many photos I've taken at Suncoast Seabird Sanctuary, Redington Beach/Shores, Florida

Note to Self

I live in Florida. I play outside. I go to the dermatologist for skin checks. But NOT, apparently, often enough to remember all the details.

My first couple full body scans in my late 40's were made bearable by the fact that my dermatologist was a woman, and that they are over so quickly that I had to work to convince myself that the trained eye really can spot a budding melanoma that quickly. But, alas, she's been gone from the practice for several years, so when I have a strange thing on my face that doesn't go away, I take the only appointment available that will get me in before our son's wedding, and glibly say "yes" to a "full body scan" to kill two birds with one payment. The resident physician (male) will check me.

I work to convince myself that this doctor-in-training has seen enough strange blemishes to know what to do with the one on my face, and remind myself that the full body scan will be over in less than a minute. Not much in my closet besides workout clothes fits me so I'm wearing comfy yoga pants with thong undies to avoid a rear view appearance of double butt. I'll have to take them off for the exam, anyway, so what does it matter?

Well, it matters a lot as soon as the young, female assistant informs me that I can leave on my undergarments for the body check. Great.

The "barely-out-of-his-teens" resident comes in, finds out that I run and bike while he works on that thing on my face, then squats down as he does the rear view body scan to get a good close look at the backside of the running legs. Unfortunately, he also has a good close look at my thong-clad, almost 53 year old grandma butt. I am certain, that even though words are coming from his mouth that my skin looks fine, his eyes have glazed over in shock, he can't bring himself to look any higher than my thigh and so hasn't even glanced at my back.

Which is where that mole I've had for so long is. The mole my gym friend who has had melanoma worries over when she spots it just days after my exam, and each time she sees it the next couple weeks. Which is why I call to schedule another appointment - and another payment. "No, I do not want to see Dr. _____ again. I want a second opinion."

So now the strange thing on my face and the benign mole on my back have been removed, and I just had my first exam by my new primary physician - a WOMAN- yes! I wore briefs under my yoga pants.


The photo above taken at Appalachicola, Florida (panhandle)

Hovering

Underneath the surface layer of my life of ever-shifting responsibilities and schedules these past few years, I have been trying to process a tangle of grief and witnessed suffering, asking myself "the big questions" once again about meaning in life, the existence of God, what I believe, where to place destruction and suffering, etc.. One part of that process was a protracted courtroom trial in my mind. I have called witnesses to the stand and put on trial the existence of an "All-Powerful God who is Love and Truth and Who does what is right and Who comes to the aid of the helpless". In this court the witnesses came from current and historical world events as well as various philosophers, teachers, and writers through the various essays, books, movies I had engaged over the course of my life. In this court I played prosecutor, defender and presiding judge.

In the early months, during the first stage of the trial I kept running through events from my own experience which I had previously labelled "God's engagement or intervention", calling each to the stand as a potential witness of God's existence, greatness and goodness. As the presiding judge, I refused to allow Bible passages to be introduced as evidence in this stage of the trial- I determined to see what conclusions my reason would come to without the evangelical Christian framework I had lived within all my life.

Most people, upon examining my memory bank, would say I had a full file of events labelled as examples of God's engagement or intervention. Recent first hand exposure to the culture of poverty in Kolkata, India, shock and cumulative grief from witnessed conflict, loss and trauma, both around the world and in my family had obscured my memory's range of sight and left me with a truncated experience list to call as witnesses in God's defense. During each testimony the prosecutor would object and ask the judge to disallow the testimony on the basis of "coincidence", "personal interpretation" or "man's compelling desire for meaning, coherence and order. Only one experience from that list, one "witness" withstood the agnostic prosecutor's dismissive objections.

It was a chance encounter from several years before "the trial" began. A woman I had never met was the listing realtor of a house I wanted to see, and as she showed me through the beautiful home, she mentioned a personal loss. I murmured empathy, asked a question, and as we sat on a luxurious sofa in a sun-drenched home, her story of pain spilled over the edges of her professional personna like a raging river coursing over a suddenly inadequate dam.

Within a space of three months, she had lost her mother, then her father to death, and her husband of a few years had left their later-in-life marrige. She felt abandoned, alone and completely undone. The foundations of her life had been yanked out from under her, and she had not slept in months. Her unremitting pain had become a full-body garment of lead so heavy that she struggled to breathe.

For one of the few times in my life, I didn't try to fix her with words of explanation, encouragement, or instruction. I simply sat with her, looked at her and listened to her.

I asked her permission to pray aloud for her on that sofa, then bowed my head and listened, waiting for words to come, as had become my custom over years of praying daily with others. Her suffering was so great that it seemed the best I could ask for was for God's Spirit to hover over her as he had hovered over the waters at a time when the earth was formless and empty and darkness reigned over the surface of the deep (Genesis 1:2).


So I lightly touched her head and the back of her neck and her shoulders with my hand and asked God to come to her. I asked Him to hover over her as he had over the empty, dark earth, and to brood over the surface of her deep with his creative Presence, stirring the waters of her emptiness and pain with His love and peace and rest. I asked "I AM" to come and hover over her, to be WITH her; and I sat in silence, waiting and listening as slight gasp and quiet sighs came from the woman beside me.

My internal landscape was absolutely silent, devoid of intuitive words or pictures about what might be happening inside her. I was quite accustomed to "hearing" words breathed or seeing symbolic pictures displayed in the recesses of my mind as I prayed for people, but this time there were no interior markers to indicate that God might be working in the person for whom I prayed.

After some moments of silence and my whispered "amen", I raised my head and opened my eyes, waiting for her to speak. She looked at me with wondering, incredulous eyes and asked, "What did you do to me? I have never felt like this.....what happened?....what did you do?....I feel so different...like a huge weight has been lifted off me...what is this - what did you do?"

I knew that whatever had happened to her had not been my doing, and told her so. "I simply asked God to come and hover over you and touch you. Whatever happened to you is God's doing, not mine."

In a few moments we parted ways, and I went about my day. She called me the next morning to tell me, with wonder in her voice, that she had slept the night before for the first time in 3 months. She had slept like a secure child for the entire night, without waking once. Even now, a full day after sitting on sofa with me, waiting for - she knew not what - She still felt incredibly peaceful and free of burden. She didn't know the expected procedure for expressing gratitude for an encounter like that but what had happened to her was so amazing that NOT openly acknowledging and giving thanks to that God whom I had beseeched on her behalf, was simply inconceivable. So before starting her workday she set a candle on a table in her home, lit it, bowed her heart and said thank you to God.

A day later a woman appeared at my front door wanting to talk. My brain knew it was the realtor with whom I had sat and prayed, but she looked so completely different I felt I should call her by a different name. She had slept all night again, still had that mysterious sense of peace and lightness of burden and had come to thank me once more. We chatted for a few more moments, most likely prayed together again, had another brief exchange as she helped me with a real estate matter, then, like most chance encounters within two busy, non-overlapping lives, those brief encounters became the entire history of our relationship.

And so this witness, this compact exchange with a stranger whose words and actions seemed to indicate very little, if any, experience with and expectation of a Supernatural Other to engage and intervene became my most compelling witness. So many of the other witnesses I called to the stand during those days inolved only experiences or changes within me, or experiences with "church people" who would, as a natural course, attribute numerous attitudes, experiences and events to God. The prosecutor had labelled those witnesses "biased" and the judge had agreed. So at this stage of my "God on trial" trial, this lone "witness" stood against centuries of suffering and powerfully persuasive philosophers and scientists and writers who severely questioned the existence of a Supernatural Other who is always all knowing, all-powerful, all-good and who, from motives of love and care engages and intervenes in the affairs of men. This lone witness returned to the stand, again and again to whisper, "Yes. But what about me? What about that thing that happened?"

A week ago, I once again found myself in chance encounter, listening to two whose circumstances of loss and pain were overwhelming. Together, we had no answers, no hopeful courses of action, no "silver bullets" to make things right, and it felt almost impossible to envision a future without compounded stress and anguish, loss, pain and destruction.

After a fitful night of moments of sleep interrupted by flashes of heat, cold, and worry, common to this menopausal season of my life, I turned to a writer who could have been one of God's defenders in my courtroom had I allowed others in, and found him describing his struggle to process and order senseless evil, loss, and grief that had invaded his life. He reasoned that all-good, all-powerful, all-knowing God allowed evil and destruction and loss to remain as an invitation to people to choose different ways, different paths...an invitation to choose love, and from that choice, to turn evil into good. Sort of an invitation -albeit in unbelievable disguise- to become co-creator with God.
Though my inner trial still continues after all these months, albeit on a lesser scale and with a gentler prosecutor and more lenient judge, I found myself compelled to utter the words of the witness, "Oh, God, come and hover over them, over this darkness, over this vast expanse of formless deep. If You do not help them, they will not survive. If you do not help them they will all be destroyed. They belong to you., these little ones ....hover over them with Your creative power and lift them up. Brood over them and bring them rest and strength. Lift them up out of the darkness, bring them renewed power to hope, to envision, to create, to love."

And in my courtroom the witness whispers, "but what about this?

The Last Human Freedom

"We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way."

These words by Viktor Frankl, Nazi concentration camp survivor, resonated within me like the striking of a huge gong when I first heard them as a college student. The vibrations from that first articulation of the power to choose what rules my mind and how I respond to a person or set of circumstances have stayed with me throughout my adult life, surfacing and ringing again from time to time, activating and urging me to apropriate, during the most difficult circumstances and challenging seasons of my life, the incredible power of the freedom to choose my thoughts and attitude in any situation.

The circumstances of my life have been as far away from the deprivation and genocide of the concentration camps as one can get - I have had a life of loving nurture, provision, safety, health, friendship, acceptance, and encouragement. Any prisons I've been in have been prisons of my own making, my own choices.

I've placed a high value on living a life that honors God in all aspects, a life that models love, truth, integrity, personal responsibility, compassion, life-long vibrant partnership in marriage and stable families who can provide safe and nurturing environments for children. So my choices have often been choices of constraint, choices to turn away from actions that beckon with such beguiling promises of freedom and power.

Those initial and daily choices of constraint have had the effect of closing and locking doors of action and opportunity to myself that many others routinely walk through in order to cope with , bring order to, have power over or escape from the exceedingly difficult people and circumstances of life. Living -truly living - within the spaces created by those closed doors, spaces that somehow become simultaneously pain-filled and empty, has been a challenging and time-consuming curriculum for me.

Given all these deliberate choices I've made to live a life bound by honesty, integrity, faithfulness, responsibility and accountability, it seems strange that so many internal moments of my life have been lived from "the victim" stance - feeling that others were responsible for whatever current misery was pressing on me - other people's boundaries, expectations, criticisms, deprivations of my "God-given rights".

That is why, I think, Viktor Frankl's words about the last human freedom being the power to choose what one thinks has stayed with me so powerfully, and why I have spent so much time sucking the marrow from the New Testament passage in Philippians 2. To the one who feels handcuffed and gagged by powerful circumstances or people, realizing he has the freedom to choose how he views and thinks about that circumstance or person brings empowerment and liberty, even if his hands and feet must remain shackled and his voice gagged.

To the one whose rights are being trampled upon or taken from him, there is no life-sustaining stance within the pain-filled emptiness by adopting an identity of worthlessness or despair. But solid dignity and empowerment and hope comes with adopting the identity of a person created in the image of a God of love and truth, seeing oneself as just a little lower than the angels. The person who sees himself as a beloved child who has been given the rights and inheritance of a son of God can CHOOSE to lay down his God-given rights for a time, can choose to let her freedoms go, can choose self-sacrifice over self-preservation in the power of love and hope.

At key "hinge moments" in my life, simply REALIZING that, unlike the Nazi concentration camp prisoners, I CAN CHOOSE which doors I unlock and walk through, has helped me to remember who I am. Remembering I have the power to make a different choice has led to reflection about those potential choices, what they would cost, what the likely results would be, and what that different choice would say about me - who I am, what I value, what I believe. Remembering I can make a different choice has enabled me to move away from the mindset of seeing myself as "powerless victim" who is paralyzed by despair and unable to do anything other than react in unconscious patterns formed by my past.

Realizing that I can choose what I think and how I respond, is both an awesome gift and an incredible responsibility. That realization has moved me, in key moments of my life, to a position of power and full engagement, to a place of being fully human.

The photo above was taken on the Pinellas Trail, looking out over Bay Pines, St. Petersburg, FL

D Day

So a 2000 sq. ft. house that takes months and months to build can be demolished in 20 minutes with the right equipment and operator.

Wow. Noisy, but fun to watch the big machine chomp away at the house that was the location for so many fun times and happy memories. David's mom and dad bought and added onto this house for their still large family while David was away at college and in the service. We bought the home from them when Kyle was 5 and lived there until Kyle was living in Kolkata (post college) and Sam was finishing college, so almost all their growing up memories are grounded in the 102nd ave home.

David's friend, Rodney, who runs a demolition and excavation business stayed close to Isaac, explaining the process (over and over again, I'm sure :-) while Michelle and I worked the cameras. The claw operator took one giant bite through the garage door and just kept chomping. The house came apart so quickly.







As the various rooms were spit out of the giant jaw, the memories of the every day life with our two boys in the house flooded past, and I couldn't help but give thanks:

• the bedroom where Sam (first grade) "set out his school clothes" for the next day, the shirt, pants, shoes and socks each unfolded and stretched out on the floor as if a phantom child was wearing them while lying on the floor



• the back room that hosted ping pong tournaments and suffered numerous broken windows from backyard baseball



• the compact kitchen which I had avoided when the "Cullum women" crowded in to help when Mom worked her Sunday dinner magic, but grew to love and appreciate when it became my domain for baking cookies and serving hungry boys



• "the brown room" - home to so many fun meals, fun games, and lively discussions



• the bathroom to which I would banish the boys (1st-3rd grade) to tell their "bathroom jokes" to one another



• the oversize tub that David and I routinely squeezed into together to share the events of our day with one another



• "the red room" - scene of more indoor wrestling matches and ball games of all sorts than probably any home in the city - the trim board that went around the room at 8 ft height was "the fence" for home run derby. I don't regret the broken lamps from all the "boy activity" one bit.



• "the orange room" which sticks in my mind as the scene of two particularly memorable rages - one by David, one by me



• the overhead fluorescent lights in the master bedroom which I continually complained about until my 41st year brought dimming eyesight and I finally understood why my father-in-law had installed four foot fluorescent fixtures above the bed



• the entryway windows which invited me every time I passed, to look outside, drink in the strong lines of the thick oak trunk and give thanks for the beauty that surrounded me and a mother and father-in-law who had seen, helped create, and pass along the joy to our family.

I watched the walls crash down and thought of the scene in "Forrest Gump" in which an adult Jenny throws rocks at the house where her father abused her, and the subsequent demoliton of that house by Forrest, and how this house was so very different - full of so many GOOD memories, and that this day was the happy beginning of a third chapter for this home.