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 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

Praying Differently

I don’t care how much of a seasoned Christian you may be, sometimes we forget how to pray. I know, I know, fold your hands, close your eyes, bow your head.

Maybe it’s just when we’re rusty, or hurting, or preoccupied, we preface our prayers with “I want. I want. I want. Me. Me. Me. Me. Now. Now. Now.” I find myself praying like that a lot, realizing it, and feel myself forcing a mumbled thanks before continuing.

Alongside my parents, the one person who has taught me the most about prayer is Mrs. Hosley. An ageless woman who has been sentenced to a lifetime of unruly little GA’s on the second floor of First Baptist church. Mrs. Hosley taught me to pray for not just my wants and needs, but those of others. Most of those others were people halfway ’round the world. Others I would never meet in this lifetime. After reviewing the news of people working for the “home mission board” (currently the North American Mission Board) and the “foriegn mision board” (International Mission Board), she would ask us crazy, pig-tail sporting, seven year old miscreants if we had any requests. Most of the time they were things like, “Pray for my dog.”

But Mrs. Hosley didn’t roll her eyes. She heard those requests, emulating the way our Father hears even the tiniest of our hearts’ groans. Instead of leaving us to keep talking about our ailing dogs, she would ask in her peaceful tone as she crossed her right hand over the left to grasp the hand of her little neighbor, “Who would like to pray for Tori’s dog, Hastings?”

She would assign us each other’s burden, so we would learn on the most basic level how to bear each other’s loads. Or at least, so each girl would feel like she had equal speaking time.

At any rate, I’ve been thinking a lot about those early prayer lessons as I contemplate where we are now. Over Christmas Eve, Tanner’s grandfather suffered a concussion that was not diagnosed until a day and half after if occurred. Today, it has resulted in a stroke. As we sit anxiously awaiting updates, our prayers have stopped being, “please don’t let Granddad Howard die.”

As Tanner said on his last phone call to me, “Tonight, I’m praying differently.”

“I’m not praying for what I want or what I think is best. I’m just praying for resolution. For an end to his pain, whatever that end is. I just want what God wants.”

A lesson we learn over and over in talking  with God. Wanting what He wants.

Giving of Thanks 2008

My father likes to think in terms of equations; 1+1=2, and so on. It’s a language he prefers to English. Calculus is poetry to him.

I couldn’t help but think of Thanksgiving this year as a equation also. With all the additions and substractions, multiplications, divisions, and hypotenooses (hypotenoosi?) this year working together to form a mathematical sentence.

2 Parks’.

Shannon and Troy drove down to Las Cruces Wednesday afternoon ahead of the rest of the family. My mom had brilliantly suggested that I order what I needed for T-day dinner through the Sam’s Club website, and that they would pick it up en route. Tanner was recruited to star in Devon’s latest short film, and so Shannon and Troy joined us “on set” when they came into town. Later, we all ate Mexican Pizza together and discovered something had gone awry with the groceries: half of them weren’t what we had ordered….it was a bunch of…breakfast?! Apparently, there had been a mix up and we ended up with half of our order and half some one else’s. Poor Steve never saw his bacon, hashbrowns, and red chile again. 

+7 Turpins.
Mom, Dad, Craig, Russ, and Ty arrived in a rain shower the next afternoon. They brought the butcher block table we had all eaten around up until Ty was born disassembled in the back of the truck (not seen in this picture). Thanks for the table and chairs, ‘rents!

+2 Cats.
Horace and Elijah were in heaven. So much attention!

+8 episodes of “House.”
Tanner and my dad have found more common ground. There was a marathon of the medical drama series “House” on USA. We almost literally had to pry my dad away from the TV to come pray over the meal.

 +1 case of bronchitis. (poor Ty!)
After battling a 10 day cough, Ty was whisked to the doctor and diagnosed with bronchitis. He erupts into a fit of coughing whenever he laughs, and the poor kid just finds everything funny. In typical older brother fashion, Russ has gifted him with the monkier, “Bronchitis Boy.”

 

+1 sunset walk to a duck pond pull of starving ducks, and a possessed goose.
After stuffing ourselves senseless with maple-bourbon marinated turkey, mashed potatoes and gravy, green bean casserole, homemade cheesy onion bread, corn, and strawberry-pineapple-banana fruit salad, we all wadled to the duck pond at NMSU’s campus. The moment the ducks saw us, they began screeching and swimming towards us, which leads me to believe that no one feeds them and they are dependant on the kindness of strangers. Out of the millions of ducks, there was only one goose to be found. On several occassions it came within very uncomfortable proximity to my person, which I later learned was the result of my husband placing delicious morsels near my feet. Next to stingrays, I have a very unhealthy fear of geese.

+1 great round of Scrabble. Sorry Ty, “Trix” is not an acceptable word.
After the walk, we had all digested our dinner enough to not explode if we ate dessert. We returned to the apartment, ate warm apple pie a la mode and Tanner’s much anticipated banana split cake. I broke out Scrabble and played with the boys while everyone else watched more TV (House, of course. Dad doesn’t have cable, and he was relishing the opportunity to catch up on episodes). Russ beat us all, with a grand total of nearly 160 points. He’s a stratigic player and knows to finangle his way to those “triple word score” spaces. We realized halfway throught the game that the board was upside down to Ty, and could explain why he took so long making words. Despite the handicap, he did well, although we could not let him get away with the word, “Trix.” It’s a breakfast cereal. Not a real word.

+3 loads of dishes.
Not bad, all things considered.

(….and a partridge in a pear tree!)

= Giving of Thanks 2008.
Cheesy as it sounds, I have so much to be thankful for this year. I was so blessed to be surrounded by my family, husband and roommate and roommate’s boyfriend included . They are all incredible treasures.