Oh to Grace Preview

Prologue

    Amelia hadn’t seen another car on the two-lane country highway for fifteen minutes. She did see a tractor coming from the opposite direction, but the driver had turned down a rough road before she had reached him. Never one to enjoy visiting elderly relatives, she had known about this assignment for weeks but she had put it off. Now that she had a Saturday with no plans and no excuses, she made the drive to the nursing home.    As she turned into the parking lot, Amelia thought about seeing her Grandma Genny that last time. She had spent her final years in a nursing home much like this one. Remembering the smells of antiseptics and wet beds still made Amelia’s stomach turn. She also remembered how confused her grandmother had been and Amelia wondered if she would be able to get the information she needed today.
    She pulled into a parking spot and cut off the engine. After rummaging in her backpack in the front seat, she found and removed her tape recorder. She pressed RECORD and spoke into the microphone:
    Testing. Testing. It’s November 3, 2012 at 9:30 a.m. I’m sitting in the parking lot outside of the Dogwood Meadows Nursing Home. I’ve come here to interview my Great-Great Aunt Frankie. My mom told me that Aunt Frankie is a big talker so I’ve brought a recorder. This one has...two hundred hours of recording space—I hope that’ll be enough. The assignment from my creative writing teacher is to find an elderly relative and ask him or her questions about growing up. Then we’re supposed to compile all of our information into an essay that shows (sound of rustling papers)—and I quote—“a common thread throughout the narrative.” I’ve got a list of questions here but to start with I’m going to ask her if there’s a memory from her childhood that she thinks about every day. Then we’ll see where that takes us. Okay, I’ve got my coffee and my notebook. I’ve got to get this done before Thanksgiving break so...I’m going in. (click)

Chapter 1

Nobody in town could re-sole shoes like my daddy. Many a time I remember him comin’ home late of an evenin’ on account of that sweaty pile of shoes and boots in the back of his shop. Daddy always said that Nadine Henderson could make a pair of shoes last longer than what you’d think was humanly possible. She did wear a ladies’ 11 1⁄2 extra wide, so you could hardly blame her for keepin’ ‘em a good while. Why, she had to drive clear down to Nashville to get them big shoes! Anyhow, Daddy was workin’ at pryin’ up her cracked outsole when Little Jack came tearin’ in. He banged open the door so hard he knocked off the little brass bell that hung just above the header and it skittered across the floor like it were scared, too. I jumped off the barrel where I was sittin’ and pullin’ tacks off some old work boots. I scattered them bent tacks all over the shop, he scared me so. Daddy hollered at him and told him to speak up, but Little Jack could only stand and breathe hard. I still remember his big white eyes and his ribs pokin’ out the sides of his overalls. We was stuck to the floor, waitin’ for him to talk and then the words he spoke were like a bucket of ice water in my face. He said, “Mister Frank... he dead...yor boy...is dead.”     

     Matt had pitched hay since he was first able to walk. Left hand gripped above the right. Dig deep, swing high. He knew the rhythm of the motions like an experienced swimmer knows his strokes. He was a hard worker, but his mind wandered easily. He would allow his natural grace and athleticism to direct his pitchfork so he could think about the girl in town with the upturned nose and curly brown hair or the truck he was fixing or any other ideas that floated into his mind.     
     Lining the outside wall of the barn, there were tidy bundles of hay made during the hot, dry months of late summer, and Matt’s job today was to move the last of the old hay from the loft to make room for the new. With one final scoop, he heaved a forkful down just as the barn door opened and a shadowed figure entered.     
     Matt heard an unfamiliar cry of bewildered irritation. This was not one of his seven younger brothers or sisters who he had just cloaked in dry straw. This was a woman’s voice— young, most definitely annoyed. Matt slid down the ladder, his bare feet clutching the smooth sidepieces. In an instant, he was brushing hay off a young woman’s shoulders. She was in her early twenties, wearing a pale yellow dress dotted with yellow and green flowers. The dress had stylish puffed sleeves nearly as high as her chin and a nipped-in waist, flattering to her petite figure. Perched on her head was a lime green hat, bowl-shaped and perfectly suited for catching each tiny twig of hay. Matt couldn’t help but think she looked like some sort of autumnal queen with her golden crown. She noticed his amused expression as he regarded her hat, so she quickly took it off and slapped it against her leg. Her red hair spilled out of its hair pins, leaving unruly curls all about her forehead. One curl danced in front of her right eye. Matt was so struck by the force of her beauty and the afternoon sun streaming through her burnished curls that it took every bit of willpower for him to stay his desire to touch that red coil.    
     The young woman blushed, her cheeks coloring nearly the same degree of red as her hair. “I’m Anna, Ernest’s wife,” the young woman declared as she held out a small, white hand by way of introducing herself. “You must be Matt.”     
      Matt was struck dumb by her words. Sunlit dust swirled around them both. Was he standing in the eye of a tornado or still on the bleached pine floor of his father’s barn?     
      “Ernest has told me so much about you,” Anna said politely, with her best city manners. Matt stared at the small piece of straw glued to her red lips for what seemed like an eternity until he collected himself enough to speak.     
      “We didn’t ‘spect ya’ll ‘til tomorrow,” he said slowly. “I’m awful sorry ‘bout mussin’ up your clothes...Anna.”     
      Matt hadn’t intended to say her name just then, but with a pause, two syllables, and a warm rush, his words for this redheaded stranger held more meaning and emotion than all the conversations he’d had with the girls in town in his entire life.     
      “I told Ernest that I wanted to walk a little,” Anna mumbled, two hairpins between her teeth as she attempted to fix her tousled hair. “Maybe I should get on back to the house. Your mother said if I saw you I should tell you to come in and wash up for supper.”    
     “Yes’m,” was all that Matt could say. As they began to walk toward the house together, Anna introduced several awkward topics for conversation.
     “Do you like working on the farm?”
      “Yes’m.”
      “Ernest said he mostly worked with your father fixing shoes growing up. Do you ever do any shoe repairs up at the shop?”
      “No, ma’am.”
      “Ernest seems to like his job. He said you’re the one who got his truck running. Do you like fixing trucks?”
    “Yes’m.”
     “What’s that growing on the far side of the garden?”
     “Pumpkins.”
     “They’re awfully big. Are they hard to grow?”
     “No, ma’am.”
     Their awkward, lopsided conversation continued in this manner all the way to the house, consisting mostly of Anna asking questions that Matt would answer with a shy, brief reply. As they approached the back porch, Ernest swung open the screen door to meet them. He advanced on Matt with a firm handshake and an arm proudly gripped around Anna’s waist. 
     As they stood facing each other, any observer would see two brothers with different physiques and tastes in fashion. Ernest wore a thin moustache perfectly resting on his upper lip. His hair was oiled to a fine sheen that complemented his dark eyes and lashes. He was several inches shorter than Matt, with a slighter build. His charcoal suit pants were neatly tailored to show off his trim lines. Looking at his brother, Matt realized that Ernest had made a calculated effort to impress his family, and as his mother beamed at Ernest, he realized that the effect was working.
     “Good to see ya, Ernie,” Matt said as he pushed his way through the group to enter the house. As he passed his mother, she nodded in the direction of the wooden stand just inside the door, where he saw a pitcher of water and a faded blue towel. His grimy appearance must have seemed more obvious than usual, compared to this prodigal in his Chicago clothes.
     With his long legs, Matt took quick strides to reach the room he shared with his four brothers. He splashed cold well water on his face and dried it on the towel, which was now more brown than blue. Then he used the towel to wipe down his chest and arms. He ran a wet comb through the golden hair on top of his head and used his fingers, then his palms, to smooth down the browner sides. He put on a shirt and his other pair of pants, and suddenly wished he had a mirror. If he had seen his reflection, he would have noticed a muscular man of almost thirty, tanned from spending the summer in the fields. He would have paused to notice how different his eyes were from those of his brother Ernest—his pale blue to Ernest’s deep brown.
     With no other reason to stay indoors, Matt finally re-emerged from the house to join his family. Even before he reached the door, he could hear the laughter that always accompanied one of Ernest’s visits.
     “No, Anna, he’s not dangerous. He’s just...”
     “Dumb as a bucket of rocks,” George, age twelve, piped in.
      “George, you hesh up. You know that Rufus Haskell can’t hep how he is,” said Momma. 
     “He just spends most of his days mowing the medians down by the square,” Ernest continued. “It’d be helpful to the city if his push mower had a blade in it!”
     Ernest’s southern drawl was still evident, but five years in Chicago had cleaned up some of the country words and phrases from his vocabulary, like the basket in a percolator sifts through the coffee and leaves behind the grounds. Matt imagined all the y’alls and reckons sitting there at the back of Ernest’s throat, waiting to be used, when he realized that Ernest was addressing him.
     “Matt, tell the one about Rufus and Miss Bennie Lee,” said Ernest. “Anna, you’ll get a kick out of this one.”
     “Nah, Anna doesn’t wanna hear that...” Matt mumbled.
     Shy as he was in public, in his family circle, Matt was known as the entertainer. He had a natural musical ability and he was an excellent storyteller. He could amuse his younger brothers and sisters, especially George, Frankie Jane, and Della Mae, for hours with tales both true and fictional. Though unaccustomed to having a stranger present during story time, Matt eventually cleared his throat and began the story.
     “Well, it seems ole Rufus was pushin’ his mower down by Vine Street, when he saw he’d gone off ‘thout his belt. He kep a-pullin’ his trousers up and pushin’ that dang mower and stoppin’ to pull his trousers up again. He’d put on his daddy’s ole trousers that morning and everybody knows that Big Daddy Rue was so big it was easier to go over him than go ‘round him. Anyhow, Rufus walked over to the school to see ‘bout getting some rope to tie up his britches. That just happened to be Miss Bennie Lee Waddle’s first day of teaching. She grew up in Alabama and had never been, well... formally intr’duced to Rufus Haskell. He walked up to the window closest to the teacher’s desk and pounded his fist on the glass. Miss Bennie Lee was scared nigh out of her stockins by this rough-looking bag of bones. She yelled to him, ‘What d’ya want?’ thinking he was a-comin’ for her pocketbook. Rufus yelled back, ‘I’s needin’some rope—‘bout dis long.’ Right then, Rufus held up his hands to show the length of rope he was a-wantin’ and he dropped them britches down to his toes. Poor Miss Bennie Lee fainted clear away and hit her elbow on the side of her desk on the way down. When the children came in for school that morning, they found their new teacher a-sittin’ on the floor and cryin’ like a newborn baby.”
     Though most of them had heard the tale many times, by the close of Matt’s story they were all wiping their eyes and holding their sides from laughing. Only Anna retained her composure. She was unacquainted with this folksy kind of humor and considered certain parts of the story to be inappropriate.
     “That poor woman,” she said, as much to herself as to anyone listening.
     “Miss Bennie Lee?” said Momma, “Oh, she got over it mighty quick. We’ve got some real char’cters in Morgan’s Hat.” She affectionately patted Anna’s hand. “Gad night a-livin’! I’m out here a-jawin’ with you younguns and your daddy’s gonna be home and hungry ‘nuff to eat the south end of a northbound skunk.”
     The screen door slammed behind her. Frankie Jane, not quite nine years old, used the change in subjects to begin her interrogation of Anna. She liked to tell stories just like her oldest brother Matt, but there was a definite difference in how they collected their material. Matt would sit back and silently watch people to form his stories, and Frankie Jane liked to interview them, often to the point of intrusion.
     “Anna, Della Mae and me wanna know ‘bout you. We heard you and Ernest met up in Chicago, but is that your home? I mean, where did you hail from?”

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Why I Hate to Exercise

With just a few exceptions, I hate to exercise. I don’t do aerobic classes because I’m clumsy and can’t remember my left from my right. I’d rather be water-boarded than run on the treadmill for an hour. “Don’t make my go another mile! I’ll tell you anything you want to know!!” Running outside is a hilarious joke. Why should I punish passing drivers by subjecting them to the sight of me attempting to coordinate my flailing arms and legs? I could cause a four-car pileup!

My newest form of exercise, a.k.a. relentless torture, is Wii Fit. I got the game and the balance board about two weeks ago to spice up my workout routine. I decided that if I’m going to look awkward and ungainly I’d rather do it in the comfort of my own home without a trainer hounding me to do just…one…more…sit-up. 

Little did I know how much the game would become my greatest nemesis. The first day that I tried it—a Monday—I stood on the balance board as the game asked me a bunch of questions. Afterwards, it calculated my “Wii Fit Age.” I’m now on the tail end of thirty-six but the game—a small black box with neither a heart nor a soul—told me that my Wii age is 47. I was a little disappointed but chose not to give that arbitrary number any power over me. It was my motivation to improve. I worked out that first day in several of the categories and felt pretty good about it. The next day, I ran on the treadmill (Please don’t ever tell me any secrets. Now that I’ve broadcasted what my kryptonite is—running in place for an hour—they’ll know how to break me!) so that I could justify buying the aggravating machine. When I went back to the Wii on Wednesday, the first thing it asked me was “Were you too tired to work out yesterday?” That was a little creepy. I felt like I was being bullied by HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey. I started imagining the Wii contacting the other electronics in our house to strengthen its hold on me.

Wii:“Microwave and Toaster Oven, report on Abby’s breakfast.”

Toaster: “It’s a Pop Tart, sir”

Wii: “Unacceptable. No matter. We will break her yet.”

When I worked out with the Wii in our basement the following Friday, I tried a game that instructed me to flap my arms like a bird to land on these raised platforms. I felt ridiculous doing it but it did get my heart rate thumping. As I was considering how glad I was to be at home alone while making a spectacle of myself, I looked over my shoulder out the narrow window near the ceiling. I saw a squirrel sitting right by the window watching me. It sat there a full minute glancing back and forth between me and the TV screen. Eventually he scampered forward a little bit but continued to watch me. I had no idea I would ever be able to entertain woodland creatures with my exercising awkwardness but you never know how God will use your gifts.

I didn’t use the Wii again until the following Tuesday. Of course, this tyrannical video game was incensed that I had been gone for so long. It also told me that I had gained 3.5 pounds. As if this wasn’t disheartening enough, it gave me a list of choices to select the reason for my weight gain. Since “Bloating/Weight Gain Due to PMS” wasn’t a choice, I chose “I don’t know” instead. Even though it had offered this as a choice, it still had a snarky follow-up question: “Are you sure you don’t know why you gained this weight?” Seriously. It is lucky it’s not built like an anatomically correct man because at that moment I would have placed my anatomically correct knee in its Wii-Baby-Maker, a.k.a. DS-Maker.

In spite of the drawbacks for the Wii—annoying questions, completely inaccurate age-guessing and the possible robot army it is building when I’m sleeping—I’m still determined to do well enough to make it give me positive feedback. Why do I care if this electronic box thinks I’m fit or good at kickboxing? Why do I care if I'm fit? I can blow months of working out with just one week of vacation. That’s the hardest part about exercising, much worse than the actual work it involves. It’s exasperating to realize that no matter how hard I work out, there’s always tomorrow’s workout. It’s like every other chore on an endless, repetitive loop. The only thing I can do is keep doing something—even if it’s just a little something—every (other?) day. I’ll just remember the little guys who enjoy my exercising much more than I do. This one’s for you, Squirrel, you little stalker!

Labor Pains

Lately I’ve been hooked on British television show called “Call the Midwife.” If you like post-WWII era clothes and music, East End London accents, and multi-layered stories with engaging characters and plotlines, then this is your kind of show. If you don’t like graphically detailed breech births and nurses piecing together placenta in metal bowls and other bloody labor scenes in all their slimy glory, you may want to pass on this one. Being that it’s only an hour-long drama, there are moments and details of the laboring process they have to skip over or at least speed through. And there are times when the newborn baby looks a little too perfect (Where’s the cone head and smushed nose?) to have hung around a birth canal as long as the scene would suggest. Still, all in all, it’s convincingly realistic enough for me.

Watching these women labor like there’s no tomorrow makes me think about my own babies. When I had my twins nearly eleven years ago, I had no idea how it was all going to go down. There really isn’t anything that can totally prepare you for that first time so I didn’t even try. I didn’t go to birthing classes or read many books. I got spooked by all of the statistics and horror stories about twin births so I just soldiered on the best I could. I made it to 38 weeks before I was induced. After being admitted, my doctor said I wasn’t far enough along for my epidural so they gave me Stadol, a drug designed to take the edge off the pain. Instead, it made me loopy. I could still feel the contractions but my drugged up mind couldn’t process what was happening to me. My husband told me later that I asked him crazy questions like “If you were a Muppet, which Muppet would you be?” and “Did you just feel that contraction? It was a big one!” Fortunately, the drug wore off before I actually had to start pushing so I have a clear recollection of the big moment(s).

When I delivered my son three years later, I entered motherhood with a much better understanding of what to expect. I labored at home from 10:00 p.m. until we checked in at the hospital at 7:00 a.m. the next day and then continued until he was born at noon. Since I wasn’t induced this time, I was able to steadily become accustomed to the building, ludicrous betrayal of my body attempting to turn itself inside-out, a.k.a. contractions. After they gave me my epidural, I was feeling so good that I welcomed a class of nursing students into the delivery room to watch. I put my feet into the stirrups, instructed the nurse as she adjusted the laboring mirror, and gave my doctor a nod that said, “Don’t worry about anything, Doc. I got this one.” Then I started to push. As soon as I saw that little baby head, I stopped listening to my doctor—you know…that real nice lady who went to medical school—and pushed in spite of her warning that I was about to tear. Guess what I did? I pushed anyway. I pushed and I tore a very sensitive area that really should remain intact if at all possible, that is, if you enjoy things like sitting down on a chair without a foam doughnut under your rear. Suffice it to say, I was ready to take out stock in Sitz Bath technology a month later. Even with a labor and delivery already under my belt (and the stretch marks to prove it), I still had so much to learn about becoming a mom.

Now I find myself learning another motherhood lesson. Depending on how you figure it, I’m eighteen months into a pregnancy that has been just as difficult and rewarding and confusing and exciting as my other experiences. We signed our first adoption paperwork in July 2011 but conception was probably years before that. The type of pain I feel now is like that night 7 1/2 years ago when I rested between contractions that were too far apart to go to the hospital but too close together to be able to sleep or eat or think straight. It was exciting to think I would be holding my new son, the reason I was on all fours on the living room floor panting through the next contraction. But it was scary to think about the possible complications and worst-case scenarios. That’s what this adoption has been for me: The ups of seeing our little Ezra’s picture for the first time and the downs of finding out that we’re not as far into the next phase as we were led to believe. The knowledge that he’s ours but not as far as the Congolese government is concerned. The excitement of buying clothes for him but the worry that we won’t be able to go and get him before he’ll outgrow them. It’s a roller coaster ride.

I have so much to encourage me and point me to the hopefulness of our situation. I can see families that have already picked up their kids from the Congo. I can trust in the experience of our adoption agency and the amazing people who work there. I can put my hope in a Sovereign Lord who I know has called us to adoption with a full knowledge (God’s knowledge, not mine) of how this will eventually end. I can remind myself of all of this every day that I wake up in a house that holds three children instead of four but it’s not always easy. In fact, it gets more difficult every day. But I have to ask myself why we started this whole thing in the first place. Did we do this because we thought it would be easy? No. If child birth has taught me anything, it has taught me that the greatest rewards often come after unspeakable pain—either physical or in the private chambers of my heart. If that formula holds true this time, this sweet African boy will be the greatest blessing of my life.

That's Embarrassing!

There’s nothing funnier than an embarrassing story--even if it’s about me—as long as I get to tell it. There’s nothing more humiliating than finding out that others have been telling embarrassing stories about me and I’m not there to spin it sufficiently toward funny and away from devastating. I assume that’s true for most everyone. Sharing past slip-ups and faux pas are very entertaining and, I think, a very healthy way to keep your ego in check. It’s like a colon cleanse without the laxatives.

I’ve been a professional “self-embarasser” for years now but I realized that I could reach new heights as a “child embarrasser” when my daughters were in preschool and I had volunteered to drive on a field trip. As I loaded my car with my four-year olds and the three extra ones I had been assigned, I asked the question we always asked at the beginning of a car ride: “Is everybody buckle-dee-buckled?” (I think it’s my husband Brent’s homage to Ned Flanders from the Simpsons but I’m not 100% sure.) My daughters groaned, “Mommmm…” I was aghast. Had I embarrassed them? I knew it would happen eventually but I assumed it would be at a mall or a slumber party. Maybe it would be in the school drop-off line as they were getting out of our minivan and I would yell, “I love you sooo much!” They would be pre-teen, not preschool. This meant I had years and years of “Mommmm!” groans to look forward to!

The most effective method for embarrassing yourself is to do it on television. I know this because I’ve done it and have the reruns to prove it. Four years ago my family was on HGTV’s “House Hunters.” If you know the show, you know that a realtor takes a family to see three houses and by the end of the half hour episode they have chosen and signed all the papers for their new house. My husband took a week off work to tape the episode. This involved sound and light checks, costume changes, and exterior shots (but no craft service, unfortunately).

We are a very accommodating couple in most respects, so when the director said she wanted a shot of me riding through the park on my bike with my son in the toddler seat I did it. When she requested a shot of Brent pretending to look at a patient’s chart with his nurse at his office she had it. When she suggested shooting me planting pansies in a rocky flowerbed near the trashcans, I was totally cool with that. That’s why we were both completely invested in the scene that consisted of me calling for Brent’s help while struggling to stack our nuclear holocaust supply of toilet paper in the closet of our old house to highlight our need for more storage space. In an Oscar-worthy performance I cried, “Brent, can you help me?” and he came running to my side. “That Charmin looks mighty heavy, little lady.” In the “I-Can’t-Believe-We’re-Gonna-Be-On-TV” environment of that week, we didn’t question much of anything. We just went along with any idea that came to the director’s mind. (Is that how Hitler got the Nazis on board? Why would anyone sign up for that insanity unless they had been meticulously lured into it with promises of their own cable TV show?)

When our episode aired for the first time, we watched it on a giant screen in the gym at our church with a bunch of our friends. That will go down as one of the top ten most embarrassing yet hilarious nights of my life. It was a like a car accident—I wanted to close my eyes but I just couldn’t look away. We had spent hours and hours taping what would be about 22 minutes of footage (after taking out the commercials). If you subtract every sixty-second update of the riveting storyline after the commercial breaks, then it would be more like fifteen minutes. So much had been edited out and some of the parts they did use—like the toilet paper scene—I barely remembered. Not to mention the things that happened off camera, like the time that I put pantiliners inside my shirt so that I wouldn’t have sweaty armpits. Somehow one of the pantiliners slipped out and made its way to the bottom of the sound guy’s shoe. I noticed it just as they were releasing Brent and I to leave so that the crew could stay and shoot some B-roll. I was in the van with the engine running before Brent knew what had happened. Gland control of a woman in her thirties was not something I wanted to explain to the twenty-something sound guy who had just worked on an episode of MTV Cribs before coming to shoot our show.

When I look at the whole experience—embarrassing parts and all—I’m still glad we did it. I got to spend a week with Brent doing something new. We gave our kids a wonderful gift—a readily available fun fact to use at freshman mixer games. We put our city on the map, hopefully in a good way. My one regret (other than the toilet paper wimpiness and the pantiliner), was the brown capris I wore one of the shooting days. In the shot of us walking up the front porch, I look like I’m wearing a “Big Momma” fat suit. Apparently, the camera added all of the fifteen pounds to my rear. Phew! I’m just glad I got to say it instead of hearing someone else say it first. I feel so much better now! A little dose of embarrassment from time to time is good for what ails you!

Mad Skills

No matter who you are or what you’re capable of, there’s someone out there who has a talent that you envy at least a little bit. Maybe it’s a universally desirable skill like dunking a basketball or singing like Mariah Carey. Or maybe it’s something a little more obscure like the auto-tisement (Did I just make that up? Nope. I just googled it. Already there. Darn.) that said “British Voice-Over Talent, Call 555-1234.” That’s a talent you don’t run into every day.

I have a few talents I’d like to develop over the next fifty years:

1. Smooth Talker.
I know people who can talk themselves out of any ticket or sticky situation. It baffles me how they do it. I can’t say for sure but a slight disregard for authority probably helps. For me, on the other hand, I can’t pass a postal truck without checking my speed. It’s not as if I’m constantly breaking the law but if I do I will always get caught. I was feeling really rebellious the other day so I ripped the “Do Not Remove” tag from my new pillow. Unfortunately, I ripped the seam open too.

2. Great Memory.
My husband has an amazing memory. He says it’s mostly insignificant facts but I’m still jealous. My sisters, brothers-in-law and I once played a game of Trivial Pursuit with him and he won the whole game before the rest of us ever answered a question. When I’m trying to recall the name of an actor or a movie, I have to take him on a trip I like to call “Abby’s Celebrity Road to Nowhere.” It goes a little something like this: “What’s that movie? They ride in a hot air balloon…It’s got that girl with the brown hair…Oh, I know, she played the sister of that other girl who was in that movie about horses…You know the one…The father was a bank robber…” It’s painful for everyone involved.

3. Dance Like No One Is Watching.
I’ve never felt comfortable doing anything in public that even remotely resembles dancing—just walking past a crowd can be problematic. I don’t take aerobics classes, either. Just the thought of Zumba-ing in a mirror-lined room full of strangers makes me want to vomit. I’m as coordinated and graceful as a newborn moose. It would be hilarious for everyone else but I’m not that generous.

4. Inventor/Phrase Coiner.
My son constantly asks me who invented everything. Sometimes it’s something I already know or I can look up like: “Who invented basketball?” or “Who made the light bulb?” But sometimes it’s not that easy like when he asked me “Who invented swimming pools?” That got me thinking that I’d like to invent something. Imagine if I’d come up with the recipe for the Colonel’s Secret Recipe Fried Chicken. I’d be a millionaire! Or what if I’d invented Velcro instead of that old slacker George de Mestral? I’d be adored by every mom whose toddler has easy slip-on sneakers and by every boy who carries a Velcro wallet! If I can’t be an inventor then I’d at least like to coin a phrase. It would be so cool if everyone started saying a catch phrase that I made up. Like what if I had been the first one to say “No way, Jose!” or “Fiscal cliff?” I’ve got a few options I’m going to throw out there to see if anything sticks. 1) My brother-in-law should actually get credit for this one. My sister and I were talking about the stupidity of the phrase: “That’s like comparing apples to oranges.” You can totally compare apples and oranges. I could come up with about twenty ways that they’re the alike! Instead, my brother-in-law suggested that we say, “That’s like comparing apples to mustard.” I like it. Let’s see where it goes. 2) I’ve also been working on a word for the greasy spots on my sunglasses that show up when they get pushed back too far on my face and rub against my (apparently greasy) eyebrows. I like “smoodge.” It’s short and practically an onomatopoeia. My husband prefers his own phrase: “eyebrow juice.” Since he is the trivial genius in the family, he may be on to something. I guess we’ll just have to let it play out.

Christmas Cards

‘Tis the season for receiving Christmas cards. For the most part, I really love to see photos and read updates of friends from the various phases of my life: High school buddies who saw me through my most awkward stage, married couples who lived on Campbell’s soup like we did during those first years of our marriage, fellow parents whose kids are best friends with our youngsters. The mailbox holds a new treat everyday.

The drawback to the whole exchanging cards tradition is the limited amount of space we’re allowed to explain an entire year’s worth of experiences. We carefully choose a picture that projects our intended image. The kids’ faces are round with wide grins and they’re tenderly grasping hands in sibling devotion. The honest picture would show what happened just after the picture was taken. When she pinched him and he bit her and they wrestled on the carpet for ten minutes before mom had to step in and pull them apart.

With the advent of Facebook, I should be accustomed to this type of meticulous name branding but it seems more intentional at Christmas. I could post things about my life all day long on Facebook, (“I just made a cake in the shape of Voldermort for Johnny’s birthday!” or “Thank God for lattes! LOL!” or “It’s Monday :(” etc.) but you just have that one chance every year for the card. I’d love to see a card starring a mom stirring a bowl with one hand as she balances a phone on her shoulder and points to the arithmetic mistakes on her daughter’s homework with the other hand. That’s real life. Maybe I’d throw in a naked toddler running just out of the frame and smoke pouring from the oven for ambience.

I’m just as guilty as the next girl when it comes to putting on a show for the Christmas card. There are some friends—due to distance and/or busy schedules—whose only correspondence with me is that annual card. What do I want them to know about me and my family? What do I want to know about them? I wish I could sit down with everyone on our list and find out—Barbara Walters’ style—exactly what makes him/her one of the year’s Most Fascinating People. What would they share that they left off their 2012 recap? I know I would discover something new every time. These people I call Friends have talents and experiences completely unbeknownst to me. Although there’s nothing wrong with putting our best face forward when it comes to mass mail-outs, I have to ask myself what kind of card would God send us? Here’s my guess:

The holidays are just around the corner and the three angels who visited Abraham are in charge of designing the Christmas card this year. They’re scrolling through pictures for the perfect photo. This card will be sent out to everybody (and when I say everybody, I mean EVERYBODY) so it has to be perfect!

ANGEL 1: “Here’s the one with Gabriel on the slopes. Oops…he closed his eyes in the picture…”

ANGEL 2: “How about this one? It’s really festive.”

ANGEL 3: “No. Michael hates that one. Spike, the rockstar angel, is always trying to do the hair metal, back-to-back, air-guitar thing whenever any angel within fifty feet pulls out a camera. It’s getting lame.”

ANGEL 1: “Raphael looks good in this picture. He really has that ‘Hark the Herald’ thing going for him…wait a minute…never mind. His halo’s on backwards. Good grief. We’ll never pick out a card!”

After much deliberation, they take their possible choices to God’s throne to get his opinion but He has a different idea.

GOD: “This is a going to sound crazy but instead of a Christmas card this year, I’m going to send Jesus down to a tiny town called Bethlehem to be born of a Virgin.”

ANGEL 2: “What?! He’s the quarterback for our football team…”

ANGEL 3: “And the best baritone in the choir…”

ANGEL 2: “And the lead in all the musicals! We were going to do Jesus Christ Superstar this year!”

ANGEL 1: “Why would you send Him down there anyway?”

GOD: “I want everyone to really know Me. Not the watered-down version but the real, salt-of-the-earth, Creator of the Universe. It’s hard to explain so I’m going to send Jesus and he’ll live it out for me. Don’t look at me like that—it’s going to work. It’ll be messy but totally worth it.”

ANGEL 3: “Why not send just send lightning bolts and shake the ground with thunder?”

ANGEL 2: “Yeah. I like it, and so will Spike. It’ll be like the best rock concert of all time!”

GOD: “Nope. I’ll shake the earth later, I promise. But this year will be about a baby—a baby wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger. Now get going to choir practice. I just wrote a new song for you. It goes like this: ‘Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.’”

So keep sending those cards! I only wish I could say "Merry Christmas!" to all of you in person!!

Make 'Em Laugh!

There are plenty of things to stress over when it comes to parenting: multiplication tables and table manners, vitamin deficiency and sugar overload, caffeine and nicotine, the birds and the bees…I could keep going but I’m starting to feel queasy. One of the least important things to worry about is facilitating the development of a sharp sense of humor in my kids, right? But if I don’t do it, who will? Spongebob? I don’t think I want to leave something this important in his skinny, less-than capable, yellow hands.

I have a few theories about what makes a person funny:

• Most of kids’ television shows today are pretty lame. The laugh tracks and the predictable storylines make me want to rip my hair out or, at the very least, change the channel. We’ve tried to strike a happy balance in our kids’ television and movie-watching habits. We don’t want them to be totally unable to relate to their peers so we’ll let them watch a few current shows and movies (I especially like Word Girl and Electric Company. And there’s nothing better for fun family entertainment than whatever is the newest Pixar movie.). To keep things interesting, we’ll add in some episodes from The Dick Van Dyke show, The Andy Griffith show, and I Love Lucy. My girls are becoming junior aficionados of musicals from the 1940’s and 1950’s. That should wow their fellow 5^th graders. After I teach them the card game Mille Bornes and the finer art of constructing tissue cozy covers out of plastic canvas, their education will be complete. Voted Most Popular of the class of 2020? You’re welcome, girls.

• Speaking of girls, I think it’s trickier for women to be funny. I’m not blaming chromosomes or uterine lining for it; I’m blaming society. At some point, most girls are brainwashed to believe that they must giggle at every little thing said by the boys they like. This is usually done during the crucial humor development ages of 8-14. They should be making their friends laugh with witty and carefully crafted comments about their chorus teacher not giggling at fart jokes made by the baseball team. Why do you think that most successful comediennes are of the sexual orientation that makes flirting with boys negligible? Growing up, they didn’t care if they made the boys around them feel hilarious. I’m not saying you have to be gay to be a funny woman—not at all—but just think about my theory the next time you’re watching Ellen.
 
• Another important part of nurturing my kids’ love of Funny is making sure they’re open to unusual experiences. These are comedy fodder. I’ll give you two recent examples from my own life:
 
• I am the co-director for the Shining Stars, a children’s sign language/singing group at my church. We were asked to sing on a Sunday for a large group of Chinese who were coming to our building for a special service.  We had chosen “Revelation Song,” a song we’d been practicing for a few weeks. At the Wednesday night practice before “China Sunday,” one of the kids in our group informed us that in China if you stick up your pinky—something that we did about sixteen times in the song—it’s the same as sticking up your middle finger here. Whaaa? Is that for real? We asked a friend whose sister-in-law is Chinese to confirm and yes, it is an offensive gesture. Great! We scrambled to have the kids change the sign to point all of their fingers up to say “I” or “is.” Phew! International disaster avoided.
 
• We had a fundraising event at my kids’ school that involved having one grade at a time go outside and walk/run laps around the parking lot. They asked me to wear a furry lion suit so that I could encourage the kids to continue running their laps with my furry hand-waving and kiss-blowing. That sounded easy enough. At the beginning of the day it was cool outside and the kindergarteners were adequately awestruck by my appearance. As the day went on, the suit revealed to me the similarly sweaty experience of its former occupants. In other words, I began to reek. To add insult to smelliness, the older the kids got the less respectful they were of the suit. It was as if an adult wearing a full body animal costume doesn't mean anything anymore! They started trying to un-Velcro the back. They would slap me as they ran by just to see what I would do. I started fearing for my safety! I would pretend to growl at them when they were naughty but since they couldn’t hear me and my face was frozen in a non-threatening smile, it didn’t have the desired effect. Since all I could see was what was visible through two Ping-Pong ball sized eyeholes and some of the 4^thgraders would be bigger than me, I gave up after lunch. Those older kids would have to dig deep within themselves to find the will to go on. I was out!

I wouldn't be able to share those anecdotes if I had been concerned about little details like not knowing sign language or how I look (and smell) in public. Although there are plenty of other weightier things to worry about for parents in this day and age, I have to at least devote a small amount of effort to make sure my kids are funny. But truthfully, they were born with all of the funny this world can handle. My job is to keep laughing so their “funny” supply won’t dry up for lack of use. The good news is that one of the best ways to encourage their humor is the same fix-all they give us for almost everything else: Just sit down to the table for supper with them as often as possible. They'll have you shooting milk out your nostrils in no time!