Tamandiversary

Hey. It’s been awhile. How are things?

Things has been on the busier side of relaxed this week, as Tanner has launched into Operation: Apartment Cleanse in preparation for the arrival of his family, my brother, and our friend Trevor this week.

I’ve been super tired, but for some reason, my brain wouldn’t let me sleep today. I suppose one of the perks of being a pedestrian is that walking is really conducive to clearing your mind; resolving things; pondering. Maybe that’s why I woke half an hour early, just to begin the walk to work.

Today, our deli catered the funeral of a little girl who drowned in a swimming pool this week in El Paso. All I did was make sandwiches for her bereaved family, but I can’t stop thinking about her, the situation. My coworker, Scott, went to the church next door to deliver the food, and came back crying. He saw the tiny casket, and her weeping family. He started again as he told me, I could tell he was thinking about his own daughter.

I have to wonder about God’s plan when it comes to children dying. Not doubt, but wonder. My perspective is so sheltered, so blinded, so tainted by what the world tells me, or really just how limited my brain power is. Putting all notions of the “Age of Innocence”  and predestination to this or that, I have to believe that God knows each heart, no matter how small, and that His judgement and mercy and grace are perfect. He knows what to do, and thats really all I can tell myself.

It’s just the funny thing about perspective and the farther you get in life. The more I learn, the less I know.

On the note of getting farther in life, Tuesday was my parents’ 30th wedding anniversary. Tomorrow is Tanner’s and my first. Again, with my sheltered viewpoint, when I look at our past year, learning to cooperatively coexist and think of someone other than yourself every second of every day, and multiply it by thirty years…well, kudos to you, Mom and Dad. I’m beginning to understand the struggle to pledge oneself to another, in a world that tells you to only think of you. I also understand the overwhelming rewards. I’m so grateful to the example, and the inspiration, they are to Tanner and I. Here’s to many, many more years of marital shenanigans!

The Curse of Convenience

I have a grudge against those pre-made pizza crusts. You know those shells, all you have to do is throw on some sauce and cheese and shove it in the oven. Darn their convenience.

I developed this hatred at an early age, around the time I was trusted with the oven. I felt accomplished, making lunch for all my siblings. The pizza was complete, I took a pot holder from the nearest drawer and grabbed the searing hot pan.

The pot holder I rummaged for was one of those lacy ones, designed less for holding pots and more for protecting surfaces, so I burned my fingers pretty good.

I guess I have my grudge priorities mixed up. All this time, I really should be hating lacy potholders.
Nevertheless, I still can’t stand those pizza crusts. Nothing should be THAT easy.

Mind Your Manners.

To the two middle aged men who came in to the deli today:

I apologize, I wasn’t aware you were my long lost uncles. You didn’t have deep southern accents, so why else would you feel the need to call me sweetie?
Clearly, because I am a female twenty-something who waitresses as a living, I must be too much of a bimbo to become uncomfortable when you call me unnecessary pet names, shout above each other, and make sexual innuendos when I am I simply trying to take your order.

Yes, I am married. I did not ask your opinion on whether or not that was a good or bad decision, it is none of your business whether or not our wedding was a “shotgun” wedding.

I treated you with courtesey. I even referred to you both as sir, though neither of you acted the part. Do me a favor, will you? Mind your manners. And eat at Metropolitan next time.

Sincerely,
Amanda

Paulanka….

…is what Caroline has affectionately renamed our dog.

In the nearly two months we’ve had Nana, she’s made tremendous progress. When she first came to live with us, she slept on the couch all day, and wouldn’t eat, drink, pee or poo until we went to bed. While we asleep, she tore apart our blinds covering the windows in the living room, so we had a crazy dog for all the world to see. We couldn’t get her to walk on a leash, and had to carry her outside where she woud sit (read: save peeing for our carpet!) and stare at us with terrified eyes. Everything was a struggle.

 

Bit by bit, we’ve gotten her to walk on a leash outside. Outside, actually, is where she transforms from the cowardly lion into a real dog. She’ll chase us up and down the courtyard outside, run after birds and tennis balls, and return when we tell her to come. She’s come to trust us more through lots of play outside, and is now better about her indoor habits (she’ll eat and drink in front of us, only “go” when we take her out, etc). Lately, I’ve gotten her to accompany me to Milagro, although the automatic doors at Toucan’s freak her out.

 

 

Not to say that we still don’t have some problems, but Tanner and I are quickly learning not to leave things we value on the floor after we go to bed. She is the Midnight Chewer Who Chews at Midnight!

 

What’s in a Name?

Aren’t baby name books fun to read? Shannon and I used to pour through them when my mom was pregnant with Russ, Craig, and Ty. Just for shiggles.

Not that we’re trying, but Tanner and I have always loved the name “Sidney” for a girl (“Sidney Lynn”, to carry on his family’s three generation tradition of giving  the middles names of Lee, Lane, and Lynn. Don’t even think of copying us either).  So while burning time on the internet today, I looked up the meaning. It means, “A city in Australia.”

No duh.

Tanner means, “a man who tans hides.” His middle name, Lee, comes from Old English “leah“, meaning “meadow”. I like to think his name means “Man Who Tans Hides in Meadow.”

Concieted person that I am, of course I researched my name in depth. According to behindthename.com,

AMANDA

Gender: Feminine

Usage: English, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Finnish

Pronounced: ə-MAN-də (English), ah-MAHN-dah (Spanish, Italian)  [key] 
Created in the 17th century by the playwright Colley Cibber, who based it on Latin amanda meaning “lovable, worthy of love”. It came into regular use during the 19th century.

Apparently Cibber wasn’t terribly successful, or popular, within his lifetime.

 

He wrote some plays for performance by his own company at Drury Lane, and adapted many more…receiving frequent criticism for his “miserable mutilation” (Robert Lowe) of “hapless Shakespeare, and crucify’d Molière” (Alexander Pope). He regarded himself as first and foremost an actor and had great popular success in comical fop parts, while as a tragic actor he was persistent but much ridiculed….he was frequently accused of tasteless theatrical productions, social and political opportunism…and shady business methods. He rose to herostratic fame when he became the chief target, the head Dunce, of Alexander Pope’s satirical poem The Dunciad. Cibber’s poetical work was ridiculed in his time, and has been remembered only for being bad.

 

His invention, my name, Amanda, first appears in his play, Love’s Last Shift.

The central action of Love’s Last Shift is a celebration of the power of a good woman, Amanda, to reform a rakish husband, Loveless, by means of sweet patience and a daring bed-trick. She masquerades as a prostitue….and seduces Loveless without being recognized by him, and then confronts him with logical argument. Since he did enjoy the night with her while taking her for a stranger, it has been proved that a wife can be as good in bed as an illicit mistress. Loveless is convinced…The play was a great box-office success and was for a time the talk of the town, in both a positive and a negative sense. Some contemporaries regarded it as moving and amusing, others as a sentimental tear-jerker, incongruously interspersed with sexually explicit  restoration comedy jokes and semi-nude bedroom scenes.

In short, my name was invented for a wife who plays a hooker to dispell the Feminine Virtue myth.
I wonder how much of this my parents knew before settling on my monkier….

Access Panels for the Rich and Famous

Tanner says that when and if we ever build our own house that there will be access panels to everything. Pipes. Electric. Air conditioner. Everything.

This statement was prompted by an episode on HGTV, featuring luxurious bathrooms across the country. One showcased a beachy bathroom with an in ground Infinity bathtub. Tanner cringed. “How is anyone supposed to fix a leak on that thing?” he cried in outrage. “Every home should have access panels. Someone could make millions putting access panels into homes like that…I should do it. I’ll make millions.”

The Glove That Never Made An Error

The past week has been a sort of surreal, contemplative adventure. I especially have a bad habit of letting my days all run together in a monotonous drone. It was all interrupted last Thursday.
Tanner’s mom, Jo, called us that morning to inform us that Granddad Howard had taken another “turn for the worst.” Tanner and I went to work that evening and gave our employers the heads up that we might have to take a time off on short notice to travel to Portales. “It could be tomorrow, it could be six months from now,” I told my boss, Eric.

After work that night, I received a phone call from my sister. “I just thought you should know,” she prefaces, “Dennis Lihte died this morning.”

I suppose my reaction probably wasn’t that different from anyone else who loved Dennis, altough I’d like to think it was. I imagine that everyone had a flood of emotion rush to their tear ducts, a flash of a million memories in their brains. I returned to the couch and tried to exlain to Tanner who Dennis was, where he might know him from, what he meant to me. I was just  incredibly dumbstruck.

The next morning, the phone rang.
Jo.

“Who is it?” Tanner grumbled.
“It’s your mom, babe.”

He rolled over. We both knew what the call was about. I harassed him about it for a few more hours, but I understood why he didn’t want to get up, why he didn’t want to call back. Just like if I don’t open my phone bill, I don’t owe money. If he didn’t call back, Granddad Howard was fine.

He eventually did call. Granddad Howard had died that morning in a totally painless and peaceful way, as far as anyone can tell. The funeral was that Saturday. Immediatley, Tanner started telling his mom we would figure out some way to get there. We’d walk if we had to. Jo said it wasn’t necessary, Tanner’s dad was paying for our rental car.

I had a long drive ahead of me, which is nice when you have a lot of thoughts to sort out. How were the Lihte’s? How were the Powers? Why had everyone picked this week to die?

As we drove through the mountains in Ruidoso, the scattered thunderstorms nmroads.org had warned me about turned into a full blown hailstorm. Sheets and sheets of rain and hail fell around us as we crept along at 15 mph. In a situation that normally would’ve scared me out of my mind behind the wheel of a car, I felt strangely at ease. It was beautiful.

We arrived in Portales around 9pm and met up with Tanner’s family at Grandma Betty’s house (Tanner’s great-grandmother), where everyone was eating and telling stories about Howard. The stories continued over the weekend as more relatives and more food arrived. People weren’t talking just to talk. They wanted to share how they were going to remember Howard. No one felt the frail frame of a man weakened from chemotherapy was an appropriate way to commit him to memory. Obviously in comparison to everyone else, I knew little about Howard. My favorite memories of him were silly ones. Once, shortly after Tanner and I got engaged, we travled to Mulehsoe to spend Christmas with his family. When we arrived, no one was home but Granddad Howard. He sat us on the couch opposite the fireplace and told us he would build us a nice romantic fire…which constituted squirting lots and lots of lighter fluid onto newspaper. Another time I overheard him telling his great grandson Baylor how he was going to slice off his ears with his pocket knife and make ear soup.

All weekend long, everyone kept on saying over and over how much Howard adored his wife Marjorie, Tanner’s grandma. Tanner told me once about Granddad Howard’s nightly habit of smoking cigars and drinking huge glasses of Sangria out of the back porch. One night he’d had too much Sangria, wandered into the living room and started dancing in front of Marjorie. “I love you! I love you ! I love you!” he sang. “Get away from me, you ol’ drunk!” she laughed.

Jo, of course, had a way that she wanted to remember her dad. “He would always give-give you whatever he had. Everyone always had new clothes, new cars, before he even thought of himself, “she said, “Remember, Tanner? He always drove that old truck while everyone else had a new car.” She shook her head, “Anyway, I don’t remember what is was now, I just remember I was really sad, like, really, really depressed. I was in my room, and I was crying, and he came in with his old baseball glove. ‘JoLynn, this is my most prized possession. The only material thing I love in this world. I want you to have it.’ He said, ‘That glove never made an error.”

The night after the funeral, Tanner, Tabor and I made our way out to the back porch while everyone else slept. We passed around a bottle of Sangria and talked more. Comics. History. Stephen King. Family scandal. Everything eventually came back to Granddad Howard. Some of these stories were the best, because they didn’t deify the man. They were stories about his temper, crude humor, mistakes as well as triumphs. More Sangria. Tanner looked thoughtful as his thoughts turned to heaven.

“Granddad and I were looking over the corn harvest this one time, and he told me that he believed that maybe God saved a slice of heaven just for you. A space designed for you. A space He knew you would love and that you could share with Him. ‘This is my heaven,’ he said, ‘to watch things grow. To plant and hope and watch the harvest.”

¹ “Let not your heart be troubled; you believe in God, believe also in Me. ² In My Father’s house are many mansions; if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. ³ And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you to Myself; that where I am, there you may be also.” -John 14:1-3

Withering into Eternity.

There is a family of four that eats at the deli every Sunday morning, they are favorites of all of us that work there. Recently, the mother died after several years of battling cancer. Eric catered her funeral for free in exchange for all those years of loyal patronage. Her husband, “Sam,” clearly loved his wife. The most vivid memory I have of her was in her last months, being gently led by her elbow to her seat opposite her and Sam’s children.

In keeping with their tradition, Sam and the kids still eat Sunday lunch at DG’s. Today, I made chit chat with Sam as I took their order. “I have a strange question for you,” he said, “you’re what, early-mid twenties, right?”
“Yes,” I reply, “I’m twenty-one.”

He proceeds to tell me that there’s a girl in his office that’d he’d like to ask out, but he’s afraid she’ll turn him down because of their difference in age. What do I think? I tell him that maybe I’m not the best person to ask, since my husband is eight years older than me. I tell him age shouldn’t be as much of an issue as personality, beliefs, goals, etc. Not that it doesn’t have its place. A twenty something will have different priorities than a thiry something, a forty something, a fifty something.
I wanted to tell him what I really thought.
I think, Sam, that your wife just died. I think you have two kids who are approaching young adulthood and need your example. I think you should find a hobby. I think I ought to get back to work. The more I think about it, the more I think this is none of my business.

But I keep those thoughts silent. “I’m not looking to get married tomorrow,” Sam says, “I just really want to go out. I have had a rough month.” In the end, I tell him he shouldn’t agonize over the age difference. Keep it simple. The worst she can say is no.

I talked about it later with Caroline and Tanner. Caroline felt this was totally natural. Sam’s wife’s death didn’t come as a surprise at all, and that he had time to get closure with the notion of her death. Tanner understands the loneliness factor but was taken aback at how soon Sam was looking to date.

I keep running the conversation around in my head. I have this vague idea of mortality to begin with, but even trying to imagine a day where eventually Tanner, as I know him in this fleshy light, will be gone. This body will be gone. Everything I know will eventually wither and fade. That ticking crocodile called Time is after us all. Yet in the midst of all this death, I have to try and understand a word like eternity, a perspective I am training to see. I am withering into eternity. Dimming into light.

Jolly Green Giant

I always knew Tanner has a knack for houseplants. But he’s impressed me over and over about how dedicated he can be to his small crop of jalepenos and cilantro. Here’s our makeshift indoor garden….

Tanner lovingly waters the garden.
(Table look familiar? It’s a butcher block my parents gave us. It used to be our old dining table. We ate around it up until Ty was born. Can you imagine seven Turpin’s crowded around it?)

From left to right: jalepenos, cilantro, and garlic.

My favorite part, my tulips are blooming!
(Thanks to my husband who tends them, waters them, and transplants them into bigger containers…I only call them mine because I bought the bulbs)

New Dog. Again.

Last Wednesday, Tanner and I stopped by the animal shelter “to look.” I think we both knew we were going to adopt that day. And we did.

The thing is, our criteria had slightly shifted. It’s very likely that parvo virus is still alive in our apartment, so we had to choose an adult dog. We picked up a two year old mixed terrier named Nana. She is the most timid animal I have ever seen. It’s going to be a huge challenge trying to teach her to live with people (house breaking, leash training, etc). Right now, she has just shifted from hiding place to hiding place.

Nana is an excerise in patience. Which is hard to two dog owners who only want to romp with her.

She likes underneath the table best.