All by myself...

Here are more photos from Chris' wedding. Don't compare photo of David and me to the beautiful couple in my last post. We're old enough to be their parents. Plus, we had just driven 6 hours from Chicago to Akron and arrived 30 minutes before the wedding started. We had to change clothes in the bathroom. That was after David drove us to the wrong hotel. And after I asked him more than once if he was SURE we were going to the right hotel. Our plan was to meet my sister at the hotel where my nephew Drew (who was riding with us) could get his "wedding duds" from my sister, and where we could change, primp, and make ourselves presentable. "Are you SURE this is the right Hampton Inn?" I asked David again as we walked into the hotel. We were running out of time. "Of course!" he replied confidently. "But I thought my sister said there was a Marriot across the street. I don't see a Marriot."


Well, it was the wrong hotel. It was too late to drive to the right hotel and I got mad, and then David got mad and my poor nephew had to see us fighting. It's always so awkward to be in the presence of a fighting couple. It's so...embarrassing. Sorry Drew. But the good news was that the church was only a mile or so away (which is why David thought it was the RIGHT Hampton Inn...which I later admitted that his logic was, well logical). My sister met us there and all turned out well.


I forgave David and he forgave me and now I miss him because he's in Dallas taking care of his parents for the week. And I'm realizing that after perfecting the art of being alone during my 15 years of single adulthood...I have forgotten everything. I don't know how to be alone anymore. Monday night, after David left, I sat on the couch wondering, "okay, what now?" I ended up watching American Inventor, this reality show where average Americans invent something and they get the chance to win a million dollars. The three finalists after Monday night's show were a single mom who invented a bra that has no straps in the back so large-chested women can were backless tops, a junior high teacher who invented remote controlled vehicles that kids can design on the computer, and a hunky fireman who created a contraption that you put on your Christmas tree that will douse the tree if it catches on fire. I'm pulling for the fireman because he was really cute and his invention will actually save lives.

So, as you can see, I've been really productive in my "alone time." I used to be really good at it. I'd spend time reading, writing, praying, or call up friends and get some kind of social event going. But now I just feel....lost.

Today was better. I went jogging by the lake this morning, ran errands, and read, wrote a little and called a friend. I'm working tomorrow, so that will take up most of the day, and David comes back on Saturday. Yay.

Nephew #1 gets hitched

We were all in awe of Chris when he arrived in our family. The first child for my sister, first grandchild for my parents, and first nephew for me. We spent many hours those first few months just staring at him sleeping. He was perfect. When he grew up a little he loved dinosaurs for a while, then legos, then the guitar. His hair was a dark blonde until he hit junior high school, then he dyed it blue and then bleach blonde, and then he shaved it all off and then grew it long. Every time I saw him it was a surprise. He was in a band for a while, lead worship music for his youth group, and his senior year of high school ran the 400 meters in track and won 4th place in state.

He was one of those maddening people who fall in love the first week of college (How to people DO that?!). He and Laura dated for four years (mostly) and got married this weekend, a few months after they graduated from college. (How do people DO that?!).

When he was about 2 or 3 my sister and her small family moved to Ohio. I visited shortly after they moved and slept on the couch. One morning I woke up sobbing because I realized I wouldn't get to see my sister, or my nephew, as much and I was generally depressed at that point in my life anyway. Chris woke up and crawled out of his crib. He ran into the living room in his soggy diapers. When he looked at me and saw me crying, he came over and put his head on the pillow next to mine so we were nose to nose. Then reached up and patted my cheek. I can still feel his soft baby skin and his hand on my cheek.

I haven't gotten to see him as much as I would have liked. But I tried to make it to Ohio often for football games, track meets, and high school graduation. Now he's married and starting life with his adorable bride.

They're impossibly good looking, full of life and possibilities. I want their lives to be easy and good and perfect. But inevitably they will encounter disappointment and struggles and conflict. And I will pray that during those times they'll feel God's presence more intensely, maybe even in the form of a sweet baby patting away their tears.

About a bug

David and I don't kill bugs. If we find one in the house before the cat eats it, we gently move the tiny creature outside where it belongs. Now, I don't know if we would act like this if our house was infested with, say, cockroaches. But for the harmless random insect roaming in our house, we let them live.

Call us weird. I just think we're pro-life.

Last summer we had a spider that wove an intricate web in the corner of our kitchen ceiling. We named her Charlotte, and soon we spotted little round sacks filled with her eggs. We were amazed at the number of small gnats she caught in her web -- she had a feast everytime we opened the window a crack and those little gnats sqeezed through the screen.

We let Charlotte feast in her corner web for most of the summer. She wasn't hurting anything. But soon I noticed dead gnats dropping into the dish drainer. And I started wondering what guests would think when they spotted the web on the ceiling filled with dead insects. Then I wondered about all of the baby spiders we would have building webs in our kitchen, and I decided it was time for Charlotte to go.

I told David. He reluctantly agreed. So one evening he gently captured Charlotte in a plastic cup and put her outside. Then he took the hand vac and sucked up all of the remnants of the web and dead insects and the egg sacks. It was sad.

All of this is background to what happened in the office of one of my clients yesterday. There I was, sitting around a table with 5 khaki-wearing, corporate, materialistic, conservative, MBA-holding men who I'm sure are members of the NRA. You know the type. They're cocky....they're competitive....they wear polo shirts...they communicate through PowerPoint presentations. They play golf and brag about their weekend hang-overs. Yeah, those kind of people. The VP of Marketing is the kingpin of this khaki-wearing gang. He can be curt and brash, and I put up with him because the company pays me a lot of money. Once he made me cry (but I was safely out of his office when the tears started, so no one saw me).

So we were sitting there yesterday and suddenly, in the middle of our conversation, he stomps his foot on the ground. "There! I got it!" he yelled. He lifted his large, loafered foot and there on the carpet was a squished, innocent-looking bug. Really, this thing was only a half inch long, a tiny beetle that wouldn't hurt anything. It was just crawling along the floor minding its own business when this jerk stomped on it. Everyone looked at it, laughed a little, and moved on with the conversation. Except me. I was traumatized. What did this little bug do to deserve a violent death?

I kept looking at it out of the corner of my eye. I kept thinking about how I could relate to that little bug. Being stomped on by the VP of marketing.

Then, suprisingly, I saw it move! It twitched a little, and then it pulled itself up from the tuffs of the carpeting. Apparently, the stomp had just pushed it into the rug and little damage was done. I was trying to follow the conversation, while at the same time watching the bug out of the corner of my eye. It looked injured. It limped. But then it started crawling, and after the first few steps, it looked perfectly fine. I was cheering for it in my head "Go little bug, go! Run for the hills before Mr. Jerky VP notices you survived! Go!!" The bug crawled under the VP's chair without anyone noticing...

SCORE:
Little Harmless Bug: 1
Big Jerky VP: 0

That spunky little bug made my day.

8 Random Things About Me

Apparently I've been "tagged" by my blogger friend Mrs. Metaphor. I'm supposed to write 8 random things about myself....here they are:

1. I like pickles. I'll eat a whole jar in one sitting if left alone.

2. I brush my teeth several times a day, which leads me to believe I may have a mild case of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Or maybe I just don't like the taste left in my mouth after eating all those pickles.

3. My favorite TV show when I was 12 was Starsky and Hutch (or as David calls it, "Husky and Starch"). While most girls pined over blonde Hutch, I preferred the dark, exotic looking Starch.

4. I want to learn how to speak French. Magnifique!

5. I like the smell of old buildings.

6. In high school I had a history teacher who thought she was the reincarnated Lindberg baby.

7. I read trashy celebrity magazines when I'm working out on the elliptical machine.

8. I used to have a recurring dream that a black dog that looked like a bear with an upturned snout was chasing me down a path in the woods near my house. I haven't had that dream for 20 years. I wonder what it meant.

Okay, I'm going.

I'm signing up today for my 25 year high school reunion. This was not an easy decision for me. Why? Because I've been getting that same butterflies-in-the-stomach sick anxiety feeling that I felt all four years of high school. That I'm-not-in-the-popular-crowd-because-I'm-weird-and-different feeling. That maybe I'll go to the reunion and I'll sit alone and no one will talk to me.

Which is exactly why I think I should go. Because once I get there I'll see that the really popular girls have been divorced three times, have massive hips, or the same case of bulimia they've had since high school. The boys I had crushes on will be bald and pot-bellied and working the docks at UPS. Then all of the power they have over me will be gone. I'll find out that I haven't done so badly after all.

As you can tell, I don't have fond memories of high school. Here's what comes to mind....cinderblock walls painted pastel colors, metal lockers, a wall lined with leering boys I had to pass on my way to algebra class, a taunting note stuck to my locker when I didn't attend a party where there was drinking, my sickeningly bad hair cut, outfit anxiety....every day, a stalking chap named Scott who stuck creepily weird notes in the vents in my locker and left gifts on my doorstep, bad shepherd's pie on a plastic lunch tray, weight anxiety, and basic fear, depression and embarassment.

Okay, I admit it wasn't all that bad. There was playing basketball, which I remember as mostly fun, and Mr. Nau my art teacher who I adored. I spent all of my free hours in his room working on my paintings. But really, um, that's about it. I didn't fit in...I was anxious and depressed, and my self-righteous brand of fundamentalist Christianity didn't help.

But I'm banking on the fact that one evening of dinner and dancing with my former classmates wil erase all of those bad memories. That I'll feel mature and centered and decide I like the way my life has evolved, and I'll hold my head high and see my classmates as real people who have probably experienced all of the pain I have in the past 25 years. I do know the beautiful homecoming queen has a husband with colon cancer, and the former basketball star still has bulimia and has been divorced. I want to love them in the few hours I have with them, and not remember my own pain. But think about theirs instead. I'll let you know what happens.

Now I have to go lose 10 lbs.

Out and About...

David and I tend to be homebodies. We like curling up on the couch and watching DVDs on the weekend evenings. But then we start thinking there's something wrong with us -- like we "should" be out doing something wild and crazy. Then we start blaming each other for not planning something. Neither of us are "planners." We like to just let life unfold. It works most of the time, but then there are the times we get sick of the couch and we've seen every DVD we want to see and we look at each other and say "Why didn't YOU plan something this weekend?"

My nephew Drew is one antidote to our lack of social life. He's in town this summer for a couple of internships and we love hanging out with him. On Friday night he wanted to go hear Page France....an alternative band which, of course, I've never heard of. They were playing at Beat Kitchen. So we met him at Beat Kitchen at 9:30 -- my typical bedtime(!). WE WERE OUT HEARING A BAND AT 9:30 ON A FRIDAY NIGHT! WHOO-HOOO! Okay, we were the oldest people there by about 20 years. We wore our hippest clothes and tried to look young. I even got ID'd at the door (it made my day). But still, it was obvious we weren't 20. I like when my young nephews and nieces introduce me to cool new things. Here are the lyrics to a Page France song, "Chariot":

Swing, like a chariot
At the trumpet call
When we're all unsaved,
Swing like a wrecking ball
Like the heart of god
What a mystery
Filled with the wedding feast
For the snakes and bees
With the angel teeth, swing
Come and carry us
Come and marry us
To the blushing circus king
And dance like elephants as he comes to us
Through a fiery golden ring
With a violin and a song to sing
As he brings for us our wings
Now he's one of us
Plays the tambourine
Breaks the bread for us
And sings
Will you wait for us
Will you stay for us
Will you grace us everything
You're a wrecking ball
With a heart of gold
People wait for it, swing
Like a chariot
Swing it low for us
Come and carry us away
So we will become a happy ending
So we will become a happy ending
Fire come and carry us
Make us shine or make us rust
Tell us that you care for us
We need to hear a word for us
Let your body stand with us
Or let our rags be turned to dust
Chariot you swing for us
We think that you can carry all of us
So we will become a happy ending
So we will become a happy ending
So we will become a happy ending
So we will become a happy ending

Thanks, Drew, for introducing me to this cool new band, and for hanging out with your old aunt and uncle.

Saturday night we went to see our good friend, John Judd, who played Iago in a production of Othello. Okay, I haven't seen Shakespeare in a while, and I was blown away by this production. If you're in the Chicago area, it's running until July 15 at the Writer's Theatre in Glencoe.

Finally, on Sunday night we DID stay in and watch a DVD -- The Painted Veil. Highly recommended. I loved the character of Kitty, who's transformed by living in rural China during a Cholera epidemic. At first, she's shallow and unfaithful. Why her doctor husband (played by Edward Norton) wanted to marry her, I have no idea....well, she's beautiful. But that's the only thing she has going for her. So, to punish her for her unfaithfulness, he volunteers to go to a village where there's a cholera epidemic. He drags her along, and in the course of trying to save this village, they're both transformed. It's all about my favorite things: Grace, forgiveness, spiritual love, and transformation.

Anyway, it was a good weekend, and we only spent one night watching a DVD, and a good one at that.