In Memoriam

It was just around this time last year — a couple of days ago, actually — that I became aware of a remarkable blog, Lemmondrops, the story of an ordinary young woman happily married to the man of her dreams (she said), and pregnant with her second child when a routine medical exam detected a carcinoma so big, and so complicated, that nothing could be done for it.  A number of things fried me about this woman’s case:  for starters, that her doctor said the thing had to have been growing for at least ten years, long before her marriage.  That means it was growing all throughout her first pregnancy, and nobody ever caught it?! My jaundiced view of modern medicine is founded on just such occurrences, but I find it particularly outrageous that this woman, with a two-year-old and a ten-month-old, died because of sloppy medicine.

Then there was the fact that she was Catholic.  Someone pointed out to me, when I was fretting about support, that Catholic priests had been very good to her grandmother in her last illness, and I don’t doubt that Emilie Lemmons herself received regular visits and lots of spiritual support; but what about after?  What about her husband, and her young sons?  I’ve never found the Catholic Church to be especially concerned about the survivors, and I was Catholic for thirty-one years before jumping ship.  They bother me to this day.  They bother me because of all the horrible times to lose somebody, none is worse than Christmas (though a wedding anniversary comes in a close second), and how did those little boys feel when they woke up and Mommy was no longer there?  The ten-month-old, in particular–how could he possibly understand why he suddenly felt so horribly abandoned?  And who’s been there to explain it to him, other than his grieving father and grandparents?

The last post on Lemmondrops reads, “Emilie passed away in her sleep last night,” and it was dated December 24, 2008.  I’m not sure if “last night” refers to the evening of the 23rd, or the very early morning of the 24th, but either way, in Orthodox reckoning, today is a good day to whisper a “Memory Eternal” for Emilie Lemmons, and to ask God to send His consolation to the family she left behind.  Go read her remarkable blog first.

It’s All in How You Look at It

I heard this tale many years ago, and want to get it down somewhere before I forget it, yet again.

My husband and I used to enjoy attending the Scottish Highland Games in NH, before they got too commercialized, and one of the chief highlights — for us, anyway — was the minister, Dr. John Turner, who lives somewhere in the wilds of VA.  One year, he treated us to the classic Scottish blessing that begins, “From ghoulies and ghosties and long-leggity beasties,” and ends, “Good Lord, deliver us” — there’s a good deal more in there, including a reference to “field mice and fairy mice” and the usual “brounies,” who I gather can wreak havoc if they don’t like your housekeeping.  If someone ever comes across the whole blessing, I’d appreciate it if you sent it to me.

But the object of this particular tale is from a sermon.  It seems there was a convocation between the Church of England and the Church of Scotland.  The whole conference went very smoothly while they discussed whatever clerics of these two churches discuss, but at the end, the head of the Church of England couldn’t resist slipping into his blessing:  “And finally, Lord, make us to be, not like porridge:  stuffy, dull, and unimaginative; but like cornflakes:  light, crisp, and ready to serve.”

Now porridge, or oatmeal, being the national food of Scotland, it may be imagined that the Scots didn’t take this too kindly.  But being used to put-downs from England, they didn’t make anything of it, until the head of the Church of Scotland got up to give his blessing, and ended it:  “And finally, Lord, make us to be, not like cornflakes:  noisy, superficial, and cold; but like porridge:  sturdy, warm, and comforting.”

On a snowy day like today — yes, since my last post, we have had two snowstorms, so I did jinx myself — I would like to offer my husband’s particular variation on Sturdy, Warm, and Comforting porridge (which I understand, from having read The Hills is Lonely, would make any Scot blench in horror):

1 cup almond milk (I have no idea what this tastes like with cow’s milk)

2 tbsp. raisins

a dash of cinnamon (I usually just tap the cinnamon container once)

1 packet of sweetener, or sugar to taste

Mix everything into a pot and bring to a boil, then add 1/2 cup oatmeal and cook according to package directions.  When the stuff is done, top it off with cream to taste; because we’re usually fasting at some point during the week, we’ve taken to using non-dairy creamer, and I like the Sugar-Free Hazelnut best.

Beats cornflakes cold.   

Flaky White Stuff

No, you’re not seeing spots before your eyes.  WordPress announced that it had added a new wrinkle to Appearances — you can make it snow on your blog, if you seriously want snow.  After the last two years of getting dumped on in October, and spending the next six months combatting Flaky White Stuff, you’d think I’d have acquired some sense, but I think my “Winterometer” got readjusted — here it is December 4, and outside of a few fat flakes that fell in Maine on October 18 (or thereabouts), we haven’t seen a flake or a flurry.   So I’ve added some to my site.

As to what possessed us to leave our cozy little place for the wilds of Maine — I see that I haven’t written a word about it, so here goes.  From 2004 to 2007, my husband and I attended church at a parish about 40 miles away from us, in Maine.  Greek Orthodox, which I wasn’t too crazy about, but this priest had married my daughter and her husband and we knew him to be a very conservative priest who fully understands spiritual warfare and how to go about it.  He is a great confessor.  So we started going there.

I think it was during Great Lent of 2007 that he had a priestmonk come and visit from Colorado, a Father Christodoulos, a wonderfully warm and funny man who also has a firm grasp on the spiritual life and how to live it.  I enjoyed that mini-retreat enormously, so when we got notification that Fr. Christodoulos was returning to Maine, I asked my husband if we could go to visit.  The plan was to have dinner out, attend Vespers, and go to confession with Fr. “Chris” (for the sake of getting done with this post sometime today, I’ve shortened his name).

It didn’t work out quite that way; we had dinner out, got to Vespers, joined people for their meal (I hadn’t known the parish was providing a meal), and then Fr. Chris gave a talk, which I also hadn’t known he was going to do.  By the time he got around to confessions, it was 9:00 pm, and we still had an hour’s drive back home, in the dark and cold — and there was already a long line to talk to this priest.  So we just shrugged, said, “Nice try,” and headed home.

The next day was cloudy and cold.  We went to Liturgy at our local parish, and around 3:00 I was sitting around at home waiting for it to be time to start supper when the hubster comes up and says, “What’s the schedule for today at St. Demetrios?”

“They’re having a meal at around 5:00, and then Fr. Chris is hearing confessions again.”

“Would you like to go?”

Is breathing in and out a good idea?  But instead I said, “I can’t ask that of you.  We already made that drive last night, and it’s going to be another cold, dark drive.  And I have chicken for supper.”

“Are they having supper there?”

“Well, yeah….”

“I think it would be good for you to go.  It would be spiritually healthy.  C’mon, get your coat.”

SAY WHAT?!?!?!

And off we went to Saco again.  We enjoyed the meal greatly (for one thing, there was a lot more food, since people weren’t fasting for Communion), Fr. Chris gave another talk, and then he and the priest of the parish decided to hold “Apodypnou” — Compline, to us non-Greek-speakers — which the priest of the parish would conduct while Fr. Chris heard confessions.  There was another ugly rush to the church, and I said something to the parish priest’s wife about not having been able to talk to him the previous evening — and bless her, she asked everybody to let us go first, since we did have a long drive ahead of us.

When I was done, Fr. Chris said, “What about Jim?”  He was so surprised to learn that the hubster isn’t Orthodox, but said, “Well, tell him to come over here and I’ll bless him anyway.”  Jim was floored.  I guess he isn’t used to positive attention from priests (maybe that’s where Catholics used to get the idea that they should stay under God’s radar scope??).  So Fr. Chris blessed him, and we left the church — would have loved to stay for Compline, but it was inching towards 8:00 pm, and we still had that hour-long drive ahead of us –

And that was when we discovered that we would be driving through snow.  Always dicey, but the first snowfall of the season, people still aren’t used to driving in snow, and they take crazy chances.  But Fr. Chris’s blessings saw us through the storm, which mostly covered the fields — the road was still too warm to retain a coating of snow — and we got home in one piece.

And that was the last we saw of snow, from that day to this.  Now — I hope I haven’t just jinxed the weather, so that we get dumped on every single day between now and Pascha.

:D

Well, it’s really frustrating not to be able to copy the image into WordPress, but — I have “completed” my third novel, second draft.  It has huge holes in it, but there is a beginning, a middle, and an end, and — more importantly for me — I did it in a month.

Thanks to Elizabeth, once again, over at the Garden Window — having gotten me into this fix in the first place (for which I am profoundly grateful!) by posting on her blog about this contest, she has now come to my rescue by pointing me to the directions for uploading the image.  I was hoping I could get away with not having to save it to my computer, but frankly, for bragging rights like these, it’s worth it to have the “badge” saved in My Pictures.  Never in a million years would I have thought it possible to write a 50,000-word novel in a month!!  (It does help that I’ve been kicking around ideas for two years — still, the thing would remain unwritten to this very point, if it hadn’t been for this kickstart.)

Somebody asked me if I had written about an Orthodox priest, and no, I haven’t done that.  I guess I will have to consider that for the next series.

Wishing all readers of this blog a Happy Thanksgiving — at least it will be a more relaxed one for me.   

Bite the Bullet

I’ve done it:  I’ve joined National Novel Writing Month. =:0    This evil suggestion came to me from Elizabeth, over at The Garden Window, who is also dipping into the world of temporary insanity known as novel-writing.  In this case, it may lead to permanent insanity, since the idea is to write a 50,000-word novel in thirty days.  Are we nuts, or what?!

The only good thing to say about it is that you don’t have to complete the Magnum Opus — that’s just the goal.  The real objective is to get you off your duff and start writing, and I must say that for me, it’s actually been a gift — I’ve entered text that was written but not typed, and am almost at the point where I can add new material that I’ve been kicking around for at least a year.  You are supposed to start the novel on November 1, but I wrote to the contest organizers and explained that new material would require background that I had already written, and could I pleasepleaseplease use that material, if I wrote 50,000 new words?  And they agreed.  So for me, the objective will be to put in 65,000 words total, since the old material I had on hand comes to 15,000 words.

It is a revision of the third novel in my series, Unorthodox Truths.  Those who read that first draft will doubtless be relieved to know that nearly all of it was scrapped, except for the very beginning, and the ideas I’ve been struggling to put on paper are much more realistic.  Really:  How does a man react when he learns that his wife has betrayed everything he holds dear?  I don’t know either.  Probably a mixture of rage and grief.  I do know that I want this to be a supremely Orthodox novel, so repentance and forgiveness are huge themes.

It will also doubtless tick off nearly everybody I know.  I mean, the hero — the good guy — works for the KGB, for crying out loud.  There are no good guys in the KGB, right?  (That’s why they call it fiction.)  My heroine is a former FBI agent who betrays both her country (by marrying a KGB officer) and her husband (by not telling him about a serious breach of security), despite being a rabid conservative — OK, how do you put together a conservative with living in the Soviet Union?!  As I said, it will tick off nearly everybody.  Oh, and the best part:  Both my heroine and my KGB officer are (or become) Orthodox Christians.  Which will mightily annoy the Marxism-is-wonderful crowd, if this book ever actually gets published.

Feels great to be writing again!

R Word, Part 2

A couple of people have written to me privately, asking for updates on the Big Life Shift.  I hadn’t realized it was so long since I’d posted, so an update is long overdue.

Now that we’re over the first shock — it’s actually not so bad.  The day after I wrote that gloomy assessment, I mentioned to my husband that I would need to order another skein of yarn so I could finish my head scarf for church.  ”Where’s the yarn shop?” he asked.  ”Center Harbor.”  ”Great, let’s have lunch there!”  And next thing I knew, we were driving the 50 miles up to Center Harbor, a tiny village on the shores of Lake Winnepesaukee — about half the drive takes place along the shoreline of the lake, and at this time of year, of course it was gorgeous.  I bought my yarn, we found a cute lunch place (closed for the season now, unfortunately), and had a Date.  You’d think we’d have been able to have a lot more Dates with the kids grown and gone, but his working conditions — getting up at 2:45 am, leaving at 4:30 am, and not getting home till 7:00 pm — precluded all but household chores.  Now there’s time for Being.

On the advice of our priest, he let a full week go by before beginning another job search (I think Father had more like a month in mind), and the first person he wrote to for a reference — an old professional acquaintance —  said, “Send me your resume.”  Turns out he works for an OSHA training institute, and they’re looking!  So Jim’s been spending the last few weeks updating and honing his resume, which sounds a little obscene, in this economy (our son, for example, still doesn’t have a job).

He gets up, as he said, “at the same time I would have been walking in to work”; makes coffee and breakfast; then settles down to work at the computer for a couple of hours.   Then he takes a break, either with household chores (our back door has finally been painted, after 15 years) or by going for a long run around the neighborhood.  He does all the grocery shopping and a good bit of the cleaning, and I don’t have to tell you all how I feel about that.    :D    (A side benefit:  Due to his background in public health, he actually knows how to clean better than I do.)  But I really appreciate his shopping for dinner; he’s a good bargain hunter, but so far, he’s also picked out better cuts of meat than I’ve been able to find lately.  Must come from having enough time on his hands to do it.

So…we’re shaking down with it.  I never thought there could be life after retirement, but I guess there is!

The “R” Word

Retirement.

As many of you already know, my husband’s last day on the job was yesterday, and he is the first to admit that it was tough.  I know that there are people who actively look forward to their retirement, so they can golf all day, or fish all day, or enjoy the grandchildren; we are not among them.  My husband is too active a man to enjoy reading all day, or working crosswords all day (his two main hobbies), and the grandchildren are now in South Carolina.

At least we are spared economic privation (for the time being).  Largely thanks to Ronald Reagan, Americans think that civil servants live in the lap of luxury.  That is only the case for members of Congress and very high Administration officials; the rest of us live very similarly to the rest of our communities.  The big difference is that, up till sometime in the 1970s, civil servants were ineligible for Social Security, and instead were covered by the Civil Service Retirement System, under which you accrued a certain percentage of your base salary for every year you worked.  If you left civil service at age 55, you were eligible for half of your “high three” (the average of the three highest salaries you’d earned in the period), and you accrued 2% per year after that, for a maximum of 80% of your “high three.”  Yes, it’s generous; it was meant to make up for the fact that civil servants often earned salaries much lower than their civilian counterparts.

In the 1970s, the system was changed for employees entering civil service, but people who had come on under the CSRS could opt to remain with it.  Under the new Federal Employees Retirement System, the benefits were not as good, but federal employees were eligible for Social Security.  We took a hard look at our options, and decided to stay with CSRS.  Now I’m glad we did.

But there’s such an emotional wrench to retirement.  When you are well loved, as my husband has been, people are genuinely sorry to see you go, and there’s an element of feeling as if you are abandoning people who need you.  Yet, many people assured my husband that they would not be far behind him; civil service has changed so much that people are leaving in droves.  Think that’s a good thing?  They are being replaced by people who can’t spell, can’t do accurate arithmetic even with a calculator, and have no work ethic at all.  Those idiots who shut down the federal government in 1995, then boasted that “everything worked just fine,” should have given it another three months — we’d still be picking up the pieces.

Yes, I’m hurting.  It hurts to think that someone who cared so much, and was so appreciated by the people he helped, was so little valued by his supervisors.  It hurts to see someone with so much left to give, unable to give it.  It hurts to think of him on the shelf.

Don’t let anyone kid you.  Retirement sucks.

Softening of Evil Hearts

This is the icon of the Theotokos that I saw and venerated today at Divine Liturgy.  I can’t describe the experience, except that when She arrived at the church, Her arrival was heralded by bells; and as the priest of the parish brought her in, there were many damp eyes, mine among them.

I don’t know what it is about this icon.  I don’t normally care for Western-style iconography, but Her expression is so inexpressibly sweet, and the sight of all those swords piercing her heart…  And then there’s the Troparion, in Tone 5:

Soften our evil hearts, O Theotokos, * and quench the attacks of those who hate us * and loose all straitness of our soul. * For looking on thy holy image * we are filled with compunction by thy suffering and loving-kindness for us * and we kiss thy wounds; * we are filled with horror for the darts with which we wound thee. * Let us not, O Mother of Compassion, * according to the cruelty of our hearts, perish from the cruelty of heart of those near us, ** For thou art in truth the Softener of Evil Hearts.

How could you resist this?!

I was disappointed to find that there were no paper icons available for purchase, nor any of the oil, though I was anointed with the myrrh that exudes from this icon, and have the cotton ball with which I wiped it off my forehead.  I’m hoping to bring it to the priest who chrismated me, and who is very ill.

Meanwhile, prayers for my husband would be appreciated:  He’s retiring from 40 years of civil service, and as he just said, “I feel like I’m losing my identity.”  I can imagine.

The History of Aprons

Received this from a friend today, and as I know at least one reader who is “into” aprons, I thought she’d appreciate this.  (But I hope you all do.)

I don’t think our kids know what an apron is.

The principal use of Grandma’s apron was to protect the dress underneath, because she only had a few, it was easier to wash aprons than dresses and they used less material, but along with that, it served as a potholder for removing hot pans from the oven.

It was wonderful for drying children’s tears, and on occasion was even used for cleaning out dirty ears.

From the chicken coop, the apron was used for carrying eggs, fussy chicks, and sometimes half-hatched eggs to be finished in the warming oven.

When company came, those aprons were ideal hiding places for shy kids.

And when the weather was cold, grandma wrapped it around her arms.

Those big old aprons wiped many a perspiring brow, bent over the hot wood stove.

Chips and kindling wood were brought into the kitchen in that apron.

From the garden, it carried all sorts of vegetables.  After the peas had been shelled, it carried out the hulls.

In the fall, the apron was used to bring in apples that had fallen from the trees.

When unexpected company drove up the road, it was surprising how much furniture that old apron could dust in a matter of seconds.

When dinner was ready, Grandma walked out onto the porch, waved her apron, and the men knew it was time to come in from the fields to dinner.

It will be a long time before someone invents something that will replace that ‘old-time apron’ that served so many purposes.

They would go crazy now trying to figure out how many germs were on that apron.

I don’t think I ever caught anything from an apron,except maybe a little love and caring.

Ya Win Some, Ya Lose Some

My sister’s daughter was married yesterday.  There is no way to describe what a beautiful wedding it was, in a beautiful setting — well, I felt bad that they chose to hold the ceremony at a country club, but the garden where it was held had a little gazebo, and overlooked the golf course lake.  The weather was what made the setting so striking — it was a cloudless day, brilliant sunshine, a bit chilly (around 60 degrees), and since the wedding took place at 5:30 in the evening, the golden autumn glow was in full force, and backlit everything, making it seem tranquil, serene — fill in your own favorite adjective.  I said I couldn’t describe it.        But it was almost like God’s blessing on the couple.

The bride’s grandfather, an ordained minister in the Southern Baptist Convention, performed the ceremony, and there were about a hundred guests — all of them either immediate family, or friends of the bride and groom.  Afterwards we all went into the country club and had a very tasty dinner of either chicken or prime rib (we had a choice).  The DJ was too loud — why do all DJs insist on breaking people’s eardrums?! — so the hubster and I left early, but otherwise, we had a great time.

My stepfather was there, which was a relief.  His health has been iffy these past several months, and there was a point where we thought he might check out just a couple of weeks before the wedding; but he has been a part of this girl’s life every single day of it until she left home for college, so not having him there would have put a big pall on her wedding.  He did look confused and out of it, and left early.

I did get to catch up with my brother who lives in Florida, and as always he had us rocking with laughter with his wisecracks — I won’t go into them as they were of a fairly risque nature, but they were directed at my sister, with whom he has always been particularly close, and she was almost on the floor laughing, so no offense intended and none taken.  The hard part for me was the brother who got offended at comments I made about him on this blog; when I asked, “You talking to me?” he said, “No.”  OK, well, what are you gonna do?  Then he added, “Not unless an apology is involved.”  And I said, “For what?”  And he didn’t answer.

And that was that. I mean, he already got an apology for the comments I made; what more does he want?  He seemed to think I had referred to him as a “complete jerk” because he was defending Dad’s wish to return home, but that wasn’t it at all.  My sister had a hard choice to make at the time; she made it with a lot of agonizing, and needed family support.  And she wasn’t getting it from this one brother.  To be fair, he did note that he had volunteered to spend every other weekend with Dad, something I was unaware of at the time.  But that wasn’t awfully helpful the rest of the time,  when my sister and I would have been his sole caregivers, and Dad needed (and still needs) 24-hour care.

It’s pretty silly at this point, too, because my brother seems to have realized that Dad really does need to be in a facility — I mean, he confuses my brothers with his brothers, and my sister with his sister, and is wheelchair-bound — so what’s the issue?  For me, this was the only damper on the day, but as I said, I’ve already given an apology, so — what else is there to apologize for??

Bleah.