The Tales Gifts Tell

The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light – Isaiah 9

The tree is up, the lights are lit, and the gifts are huddled beneath.

One may think of Christmas gifts as inanimate objects – things wrapped in fancy paper, tied with ribbons, topped with bows of varied sizes – but one would be wrong in their thinking.

Every gift lies quietly beneath the tree or within the stocking hung by the chimney, and while we may not hear them (with our ears) speaking or whispering, they do (in all truth) have stories to share and tales to tell.

Some gifts disappoint their recipients, of course. Who hasn’t groaned a little inside opening up that floppy package knowing full-well it was going to be socks, underwear, or a new plaid shirt to replace the ones you’ve suddenly outgrown since school started? You plaster a smile on your face, look at Mom and Dad, and beam forth with the best, “Oh, gee, thanks,” you can muster. Mom and Dad know the truth, and they certainly know the thanks is more tip of the tongue than bottom of the heart, but they accept it graciously as the morning mayhem continues.

While the practical gifts may underwhelm their young recipients, they are more than made up for by gifts that dazzle. I still remember the thrill of coming out into the living room Christmas morning so many years ago as a young lad to find a brand new Schwinn bicycle standing next to the tree – a THREE SPEED! That more than made up for the decade of underwear and socks, and my appreciation did arise from closer to the bottom of my heart.

Gifts tell a tale. Some tell us they’re here to meet our basic needs. They may not be sexy, but they have a job to do, and they tell us loved ones are watching over us. Other gifts dazzle us like lightning flashing out of the blue – an unexpected shock (like a bike), or the special something that says, “You’re the pitta to my patta!”

The gifts beneath the tree, of course, are stunt doubles. I’ve got a very nice High Definition television at home and am amazed at how well I can now discern the use of stunt doubles on some of the old shows, like Star Trek or The Rifleman. Back in the halcyon days of black and white TVs with thirteen inch screens and grainy images such details simply could not be seen. But one can sure see those personnel switches now!

Likewise, the gifts beneath the tree are low-definition stunt doubles for the greatest gift of all – Jesus Christ.

I suspect many of us are so caught up “in the moment” of Christmas morning that meditating on that first nativity is lost in the busy hum of the day’s activities: making breakfast, opening packages, getting the feast going (if hosting) or getting ready to head out to join up with family or friends.

I will confess that I have never asked God to “clothe me with your righteousness” as I’ve gotten dressed on Christmas morning. My primary goal is to remember to zip up and pray the buttons on my shirt match the button hole they’re supposed to go through!

The fact is, though, at some point of the day, it is nice to stop, pause, and reflect that while the day’s gifts may or may not delight us, they point beyond themselves to ONE who came not to tickle our fancy, but heal our wounds and tackle our woes. He does not need batteries to work, but will eventually be battered (and die) for our sake.

By the end of the Day, the house will be a mess – a disaster. It will look a bit like a proverbial tornado came blowing through while we were making merry. That, my friends, is reality’s stunt-double. No matter how hard we work to make things right, at the end of the day life can be one chaotic mess – and that’s when the gifts tell us the rest of the story.

God did not come to spend time taking care of the mess. That’s just a side-benefit of God’s real purpose: to spend time with us. That’s the tale the Christmas gifts tell in this, our valley. Merry Christmas everyone – and Happy New Year!

Note: The wax angel was a gift from a friend and has survived nearly 30 years of service (and who-knows how many moves). The angel atop our tree was a gift from my mother, who made it lo so many years ago. Both gifts are so special.

Asleep on the Hay

Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Learn from it; tomorrow is a new day – Ralph Waldo Emerson

My daughter sent a text the other day telling me that she and the family had lost power. Actually, they hadn’t lost it; they’d been disconnected. It seems their landlord had done some electrical work over the summer but had failed to pull a necessary permit or obtain an inspection. Although our daughter and her family have always been current (no pun) with their utility bills, the company (without warning or notice) cut them off (despite their being a “valued” customer).

The property owner was scrambling to do what he could to get power restored, but in the meantime, the family was without heat, lights, or the other basic necessities of life – an issue only exacerbated by it being winter. This is not a time of year one wants to go without heat – no matter who is at fault!

Without hesitation, of course, we had them come over and move in until the situation could be resolved. We enacted our own little Christmas Pageant and made room for Mary, Joseph, and baby Jesus (who, in this case, are Andrew, Jennifer, and baby Ameena – along with one of the Wise ones, their son Elijah). The set was complete, including the Innkeeper (played wonderfully well by my wife, Barb), and the requisite donkey (played by yours truly).

The crisis lasted only a day, but it was a delight to have our family together to deal with it. Like those holy refugees of old, they packed up everything they needed and made their way to our place. I had a chance to teach Elijah how to play Solitaire and, when they discovered they’d neglected to pack a bottle for Ameena (who’s almost outgrown them now that she is a year old), Elijah and I trundled off to the nearby grocery to pick one up.

Sadly, Grandpa’s not as up on Nipple technology these days as he should be, so the bottle I chose was fine, but the dispenser needed some delicate surgery to function right. Uff-da! At least I now know we have a Plastic Surgeon in the family, and the rest of the family knows I should be awarded a boobie prize for my shopping skills.

Be that all as it may, everyone survived. Around midnight Ameena alerted the world to a case of sudden dampness. Her momma was soundly asleep, so Barb and I got up to attend to Ameena who, unlike the original baby Jesus, “crying DID make.”

We got her changed (after we studied the intricacies of modern diaper design and gave it our best shot – after all, that’s what she had done!). She wasn’t quite ready to go back to sleep, however, being in unfamiliar surroundings and wanting to study her environment, so we sat together and passed the time in quiet conversation. If there is one thing I’m good at, it’s talking (and at times, acting) like a one-year-old.

Unlike my brain, the lights around our house don’t have dimmers, but over time, we turned them out one by one until we were in the relative darkness of deep night. I held that miracle we call Ameena in my lap and rocked for a while until she was perfectly at peace with the world.

I can’t help but wonder if that isn’t what God wants for us, as well: a chance to clean us, dry us, change us, and hold us safely in his (or her) lap.

When the fullness of time had come and Ameena was out for the count, I got up from the rocker (a nice change of pace as I’m usually accused of being “off” my rocker) with the child splayed out about as relaxed as a child can get, trundled to the guestroom where momma was asleep, and set her gently in her crib, covering her carefully with a blanket.

I stood over her play-pen for a moment to confirm she was safe and secure, then returned to bed for my own much-needed sleep.

I think that’s what it means to be under the loving care of One who never slumbers nor sleeps, but (who) keeps vigilant watch o’er the human race. Happy Advent & Merry Christmas to y’all in this, our valley!

Leafing Through Life

I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library – Jorge Luis Borges

The day was dry and clear, and it appeared we had few more dry days ahead of us, so I decided to go out into the back yard and rake some leaves. I say “some” because I’m not too finicky. It doesn’t bother me to get most of them and leave the rest to rot and return what few nutrients they may contain back to the earth from which they sprang.

The circle of life. That’s what it’s called. The trees receive their moisture from the rains that water the earth. Water and nutrients, for the most part, are gobbled up by the roots and get converted into trunk, branch, and foliage cells. The leaves open wide and suck in the sunshine, converting those golden rays into something – God only knows what. They also draw in the carbon dioxide the plant needs, and exhales the oxygen we lunged types need.

When the leaves fall in autumn, I find myself wondering how trees breathe during the winter. The foliage is gone. Do they simply hold their breath for several months while the sun swings low, the air chills, and the rains turn to snow and ice?

Early in life, I never thought much about trees. I would complain if I had to duck under low branches while mowing (and not always successfully either, as my poor scarred noggin will affirm). We have a gorgeous maple tree in the front yard that makes mowing a challenge, not for low branches, but because it is located in such a place that makes mowing more difficult (for my somewhat obsessive/compulsive nature). It disrupts my mowing pattern and disturbs my peace worse than the thrumming of the lawnmower’s engine.

But as I have aged, I find I don’t look at trees the same way as I once did. I’ve come to appreciate them more and more. Yes, in fall I need to rake leaves, but only because it is my nature to keep the floor of the yard clean and neat. The fault for raking lies not with the tree (doing what trees do in autumn), but with me. The problem lies in MY nature, not that of the tree.

I suspect that when I rake those dried and curling corpses from around the trees from which they fell, I am removing much of what gives life to that tree and the world around it. I wonder how many worms watch me rake and think, “There goes supper!” I wonder how many creepy crawlies watch me scrape the ground (in horror) as I destroy their homes and hiding places.

Of course, out of concern for the well-being of the trees, lawn, and other plants (having removed their meals for the year), I know come spring I will head down to the store and buy a bag of chemicals I’ll have to put down (for a healthier, more luscious yard). It’s more labor and, what’s worse, the vegetation will be dining on that store-bought stuff and thinking it tastes like, um, something else.

So we come full circle. The fertilizer I put down during the vernal time of year has come back to haunt me as vegetative cast-offs. I can choose to leave them to rot (and allow nature to take its course), or I can rake them up in what is probably one of the world’s greatest acts of stupidity (not counting war). Well, I’ve never let stupidity stop me in the past and I’m not about to start now!

So off I go to rake, rake, rake / I do it all for goodness sake / I’d be better off to jump in a lake / or hit the kitchen to bake a cake / but messy yards I cannot take / so off I go to rake, rake, rake!

I don’t know if raking (or not) is good or bad. It gets me out of the house and it gets me moving, so that’s not too bad a thing.

In due season I will go the way of all flesh; then it will be my turn to fertilize the earth and someone else can choose to rake me up (or leaf me alone), and the trees will have the last laugh here in this, our valley.

Lost With the Best of Intentions

Worry often gives a small thing a great shadow – Swedish Proverb

I’m not a worrier. By that I mean, I simply don’t fret about things. Life often throws curves, but if we keep our heads and wits about us, we can generally work our way out of most predicaments.

The other day I had to drive down to Everett to sign some paperwork regarding my Dad’s estate. I ran up the address on my phone’s map app the day before, saw exactly where I needed to go, and saved it. The next day I pulled up the location on my cellphone, hit the navigate button on the touchscreen and off we went. The trip was supposed to be about forty minutes, so we gave ourselves an hour to get there.

Why so early? Because I grew up in a home where “early is on time, on time is late, and late is inexcusable.” Now, I am not prone to judging people, but must confess that people who are chronically tardy grind my grits. So that’s why we left the house with time to spare. It’s a good thing, too.

I listened to our cellular backseat driver and arrived at the appointed place with twenty minutes to spare, only there was no there there. The address didn’t exist. Horrified, I pulled over, did a search for the company I was seeking (which is nowhere as pleasant as the company I had – my wife) and it turned out the address I was looking for was not “820 street name” but “2820 street name.” I don’t know how that happened, but it did, and we still had plenty of time to make our appointment.

So I reset the Navigator and it got us downtown to near where we needed to be but, once again, there was no there there. I pulled over into the last remaining parking spot in Downtown Everett (a miracle, to be honest) and called the office I was on the hunt for. I told the receptionist where I was and she gave me quick and simple directions, so we left the parked car and walked a single block to our destination and arrived – ONE minute early (so I was ON TIME)!

There’s an old saying that if we want to give God a good laugh, all we need to do is make a plan. I understand. Life, as I said, tends to throw us curves. But I also know that planning ahead saves a lot of grief. I appreciate map and satellite technology which, up until the other day, is generally dependable, but I also know it is anything BUT flawless.

I was driving along one day in the early days of civilian quality GPS, and the device kept asking me to return to the road I was on. The GPS showed me to be about fifty yards off the highway, but I could see clearly that I was on it AND in my proper lane. That same unit had me drive around in circles in San Francisco as it had no idea how to get me from where I was to where I was heading. So, technology has its place, but it can’t replace human reasoning (completely). I have heard of people driving into lakes or rivers simply because they preferred to listen to their cell phones than to use (and believe) their eyes.

One could say they should use more common sense, but I am convinced common sense is a myth – as real as a Sasquatch and as rare as a Unicorn. Trust me, I’m not pointing fingers here. If there is one thing I know, it is that I don’t have a lot of common sense. That’s why I plan ahead!

Planning ahead removes the teeth from many of life’s worries. Before going on a trip I always have the car or truck serviced. That doesn’t mean we won’t have mechanical problems, but it reduces the chance we’ll have problems. Each day is a journey, according to the old cliché. It’s true, so I approach each day taking care of what needs to be done so I don’t need to worry about it.

Addressing every trouble spot as best I can, I’m free to enjoy my life and leave the rest to God (on time) in this, our valley.

Halloween Cometh

You can’t come back to a home unless it was a home you went away from. Carl Sandburg

I looked out the window and saw the lighted pumpkin jack-o-lantern on the porch across the street. It is a very nice decoration; it is perfect in every way.

That’s because it’s store-bought, and before you think I’m poking fun at it or the neighbors, be assured I am not. It is quite tasteful and exquisite. I just found myself reminiscing as I stared at it across the way of how much life has changed over the past number of decades.

You’ll be reading this on or about Halloween and, I must confess, that is and always has been amongst my favorite holidays of the year. It isn’t just the treats (although my sweet-tooth has never been sweeter than it is now) or the costumed hooligans running wild on their sugar-highs, but the complete lack of expectations the day holds.

Families don’t gather to feast, watch football, and argue politics. Banks and government offices remain open for business, and we pop in to do what needs doing without fretting over people “missing out” on the holidays. Kids of all ages go door to door begging (and playfully threatening mayhem) and we feign surprise, delight, or fear as we dole out the store-bought treats (because what you could catch if you ate from many of our home kitchens is truly frightful!).

The kids stroll around, many in store-bought costumes (and I’m not putting that down), but it causes me to stop and wonder: are families so strapped for time they can’t make their own costumes? If they are, that is a sad state of affairs.

Looking through old family photos I hadn’t seen in years (after my Dad’s passing), I saw the picture of my brother in his steel-gray robot costume, fashioned out of cardboard boxes cut and spray painted and hung together with duct tape. I was dressed as a swash-buckling pirate; my dad’s hat pinned into a tri-corner pirate’s hat, and my sister’s white blouse with ruffles down the front helped me look ever-so-much like Errol Flynn or Tyrone Power. The grease-painted beard helped a lot! My sisters were a fairy godmother and a royal princess (Cinderella, perhaps).

When our own kids were growing up, we made every effort to craft costumes at home, but I know there was some transitioning to store-bought options. Our daughter loved being a pumpkin and, frankly, trying to craft a pumpkin or jack-o-lantern by hand wasn’t in our household skill-set.

Still, it was fun putting costumes together and then, at dark, walking the neighborhood with our kids and listening to the shouts of glee and terror; we had one neighbor who loved sitting still on his front porch, dressed as a scare-crow, and suddenly jumping to his feet at just the last moment putting both kids and parents into immediate cardiac arrest!

Sadly, Halloween seems to be going the way of all good things. It is still a week away as I write this, and schmaltzy Christmas movies have begun their run on the cable channels. Big box stores have had their Christmas displays up for a month (at least), and the news is “reporting” that Christmas specials and sales have begun and warning consumers that if they don’t grab their stuff now, it may be (gasp) too late, later!!!

Those things are outside my control, of course. One cannot direct the rising of the sun or hold back the tides or return the world’s ills and pestilences to Pandora and her infamous Box. No amount of weeping or wailing will restore the world to a golden age which (if we’re completely honest) never truly existed in the first place.

What we CAN do, however, is carve out space and time in our lives to remember the past with thanksgiving, and see how it might shape us here and now, today. The candy, costumes, and decorations are nothing more than props and set-pieces. What counts is taking time with those we love and crafting stories we’ll tell for tomorrow.

The pumpkin across the street is made of plastic, of course, but the memories it stirs are real. The ghosts and goblins contain the hearts of children, so I’ll embrace them forever in this, our cobwebbed valley.

Friday the Thirteenth

It’s your story. Feel free to hit ‘em with a plot twist any moment. Author Unknown

Friday the 13^th came a few weeks late for us this September past.

Now, I am not one of those who associates Friday the Thirteenth with bad luck or portents of doom. If anything, those days have been filled with blessings and all sorts of good things over the years, so I’ve never given them much thought. Besides, I don’t ponder life’s happenstances in terms of luck – good OR bad.

Life is, and we take it as it comes. If there is a correlation to be found, it is generally that we get what we expect. If we expect bad things to happen, they do. If we expect good things to happen, they do. Some of that has to do with seeing what we expect to see.

Some people look at clouds and foresee rain. Others look at clouds and see dragons or bunnies. I admire those who perceive the fanciful in cloud formations. Rain and snow are real enough for me; I’ll take fluffy bunnies and wonky doggies any day of the week!

The other day, though, was another matter. Barb-the-love-of-my-life and I went down to the local Department of Licensing to convert our drivers licenses to the new and improved “Enhanced” licenses so that we will be able to board planes or travel into Canada from time to time. The local DOL was virtually empty, so we were called up immediately. I presented my documents to the smiling, pleasant clerk, and within just a few minutes, I paid my fee and was finished.

Barb, on the other hand, was stymied. Since her birth name differed from her married name, she needed a copy of the marriage license before her clerk could proceed. We drove home, grabbed the marriage license out of our files and returned with it to the DOL, and presented it to the clerk with whom Barb had been working. The clerk admired the document but told us it wasn’t acceptable as it wasn’t a “certified” copy.

I pointed out to the clerk that not only was it an original document, but it had allowed us to make several children! She apologized, spoke with her supervisor, and informed us (with some regret) that we needed a “certified” copy of the marriage license issued by the county in which we were married.

Now, we could have gotten all hot and bothered, but the law is what it is, and while I may (personally) think it truly stupid that all the documents we brought to prove we are who we are were insufficient for obtaining the document we were seeking, so-be-it; we’d move along and send away for what we need. We’ll return when we have it (probably a week or so) and that’ll be that.

We then left there and went to a pharmacy to have passport photos taken (as our passports had expired and were in need of renewing). The clerk pulled out his camera, sent me to where I needed to stand, and – nothing. The camera battery had died and he wouldn’t be able to take any pictures for at least a half an hour. Uff da!

So we wandered over to the pharmacy counter to turn in some old, expired prescription drugs, for we were told they had a disposal/return service. Nope. Wrong again. Not only did they have dead batteries in their cameras, they weren’t part of the drug-return program advertised on television, either. Uff da x2!

We left the store, got back into the car, looked at each other, and I said, “Well, it looks like Friday the Thirteenth came a couple of weeks late for us.”

To say that life throws curves is an old, tired cliché, but it’s true. Some days it doesn’t pay to get out of bed, but when things need doing, there’s no use putting them off, and if challenges arise, we simply face them, address them, and when finished, we move on. It’s called “acting like grown-ups.”

If the worse thing to happen on a given day is a dead battery or bureaucratic snafu, that’s not bad. We have the basic necessities of life – and more. We’ve got clouds. We can see rain, or we can see dragons. The choice is always ours in this, our valley.

Tripping Into Fall

It’s your story. Feel free to hit ‘em with a plot twist any moment. Author Unknown

The weather has cooled down significantly. The grass has turned a brilliant green as it re-awakens from its summer slumbers – a final shot at life before going back to sleep for the winter. We’ve still got some flowers blooming their heads off in the yard as they don’t seem to have gotten the memo that “the seasons – they are a changin’.”

Fall is and always has been my favorite time of year. As a child, fall meant leaving those dog days of summer behind and going back to school to rub elbows with friends and buddies I hadn’t seen for a couple of months. It meant kicking through piles of leaves that littered the sidewalks – making like an NFL kicker out to “win it” for the team. It meant watching in fascination “helicopter” seeds falling from the maple trees, spinning their way to earth.

The start of school also meant new clothes! It meant jeans that were generally too long (in September; just right around Valentine’s Day; looking pretty “high water” come school-years’ end); it meant shirts with sharp-pointed collars and rich, clearly identifiable colors; it meant full-length #2 pencils (complete with bright pink erasers and perfectly pristine points of lead); it meant a completely fresh start, with clean blackboards (which would eventually become green-boards – long before the advent of efficient (but boring) white-boards and dry-erase markers).

No one ever accused me of being a scholar back in those halcyon days of yore, but the fact is I was seldom bored. I enjoyed school. I enjoyed going to classes, as well as recess and lunch. I appreciated having each day laid out in an orderly fashion – dependable in its purpose and rhythm.

I am sure there were bullies in those days, too, but I honestly don’t remember ever having to deal with them. I do recall stepping in to break up a wrestling match where one lad was definitely bullying another kid. The bully and I wrestled a bit while the unfortunate target of his abuse ran off to safety, but when we were done that was that and nothing more ever came of it. Life rolled along and was delightful in that it was primarily and blissfully uneventful for the most part.

The scariest part of living in the 50s and 60s was the threat of nuclear war. I didn’t pay much attention to world events in those days, but the Cuban Missile Crisis during the Kennedy administration was the closest thing to feeling we were going to be vaporized and become an extinct species I’d ever felt. But I also trusted in God and in the “rightness” of the American way of life and the probability that we would come through this crisis just like we had come through the past couple of world wars. So I kept the faith and never lost hope. The fear of nuclear annihilation never dominated my attention for more than a minute or two at a time.

Those days are long gone, of course. I am in the autumnal years of my life, and just as the fall betokened new life in a strange sort of way for we school-aged wee-ones, so do these present days do the same for me now.

I am able, in retirement, to spend time doing the things that energize me. At least that’s the theory. The fact is that without the daily rhythm and routine of life’s labors, work schedules, appointments, and such what-not, I’ve had to wrestle with what it means to have that so-called leisure time. Once the house is clean, the dishes done, the lawn mowed and trimmed – what is there?

Life has been good to us. God has been good to us. Retirement is not the end of work (or life, for that matter), but an opportunity to sharpen new pencils, kick new leaves, and seek out new helicopter seeds with which to be fascinated and mesmerized. As always, we are beckoned to move forward with eyes wide open lest we trip and fall (and enjoy a Pumpkin Spice Latte, if one so wishes).

Ultimately, we each are called to continue becoming what God has called us to be here in this, our autumnal valley – God’s children, each and every one.