Smile When You Say That

In my family, you only tease people you love. I've always known I was well loved. I was certainly well teased.

One of my favorite memories would have to be the night when the three boys and I were watching a Lakers game together on television. They used to laugh at me because I always watched TV with a book on my lap. Whenever the commercials came on, I'd open the book and tune out for the duration of the paid messages. I never cared what was being advertised. I always felt my reading time was precious, although I managed to find more than most people I ever knew.

Have you ever been reading a book, or involved in something, and realized that somebody has asked you a question? That's what happened that particular evening. What makes it memorable is that I tried to figure out what the question was instead of saying, "Huh?"

I mentally rewound the tape in my head and figured out what I thought I had been asked. Their three faces were all looking at me quite intently when I looked up at them. I thought I knew what I had been asked, and fairly quickly came up with an answer... an apparently inappropriate answer. I was rewarded with three very blank faces.

Finally, Tighe looked at his brothers and calmly asked, "If Mom gets Alzheimer's, how will we know?"

I never did find out what the question was. The game started back up, and the subject was never revisited, although I never forgot Tighe's teasing remark, or let him forget it.

Back to Church

We might as well revisit kids in church. After all, I was the mother trying to decide whether or not to leave the movie theatre when my son Tighe genuflected and made the sign of the cross before entering the row of seats to see Peter Pan. It's not that he'd never seen a movie. We just went to the drive in theatre, and this was the matinee. People laughed. I was so glad when the lights finally went down. We'd been to church a lot, but to the indoor theatre never.

So now we'll go back in time to when I had three youngsters. It was Easter Sunday, and we had been persuaded to spend the holiday in Grandma Harrell's one bedroom mobile home at Lake Isabella. Ben was two, Jeremy almost six, and Tighe almost nine and a half. Grandma Harrell wasn't used to the noise of children, and it's not possible to keep three boys quiet in so little space. It was blistering hot, and crowded. Ben was a very picky eater, and that set Grandma off as well, but we were closing in on the end of the visit. Stress was high. I had wanted to go to early Mass, but Grandma wanted to do an egg hunt first, so we ended up going to the noon services across the lake.

Bad idea. First off, the kids had had too much of their Easter baskets by then, so they were squirming in their seats. They also hadn't had lunch yet. Not a good time to go to church. But the biggest problem was that it was a high Mass. Now, for those of you who are unfamiliar with the idea of a high Mass, let me give you an idea. If you're familiar with scriptures, each Mass will have two readings from the Bible. One will come from the Old Testament, and one from the New Testament. A high Mass, however, goes well beyond that. Everyone stands, and the Priest reads a section of scripture, then everyone says Amen and you sit. A short prayer is said, and everyone stands up again, and the Priest reads the next section from the Scripture. During the Easter High Mass, The entire Passion of Christ is read. It takes a long time. After about the sixth reading, as everyone began to sit down, Benjamin yelled out, in a very loud voice, "AMEN!" with the clear intent that this be the last time the Priest should be requiring him to say it.

Grandma Harrell was mortified. She glared at him. She glared at me. She never entered a church with us again. However, there was a little grey-haired grandmother in front of us whose shoulders shook for the rest of the service. She would no sooner get herself under control than a prayer would end with Amen, and she would again start to laugh and her shoulders would start to shake again. I took that as comfort. John's mother didn't think it was funny, but that little Granny in front of us sure did. I have to admit it would have been funnier to me then if it had been somebody else's kid.

What Makes a Mother's Day Grand

• A husband who grills for you, and cleans up after, even covering and putting away all of the leftovers;
• Eating on the deck, and being joined by a favorite neighbor;
• Speaking to your own Mom, and laughing about the times when you were little;
• Talking to your kids, and laughing about the times when they were little;
• Hearing your granddaughter mangle the word Grandma over the phone for the first time;
• Believing that the song you did in church (When Mama Prayed) couldn't have gone much better, and that the congregation really seemed to like it; and
• Reading, relaxing and working on a baby blanket for the new grandchild due in August.

Now, if we could have gathered all the family on the decks with us, exchanging phone calls for visits, grand would have turned into awesome. But grand was good enough for me, and I enjoyed my Mother's Day to the hilt.

Thunderstorms

We've had a few of our first Spring thunderstorms this week, short but powerful, cracking and crashing through the heavens. I look forward to them every year, and stop what I'm doing to listen attentively until they pass away.

I was still a child when I realized that many people were afraid of the sound of thunder, and it amazed me. I had always thrilled to the sound of thunder, as did my brothers and my sister. From where did this fear of the very sound of thunder come? Loud noises, I guess, are strange, and reason enough to fear if unexplained. We never feared because we knew exactly what they were. My father was no scientist, but he did take the time to explain to us what those loud noises were, and he did it in terms simple enough for us to understand.

That's God, bowling with his angels. If you listen close enough, you can tell the gutter balls from the strikes. You can hear the long rolling of the ball down the lane, and the crashing into the pins. And often after the the strike, you can hear, if you listen well, the smaller thumping of angel feet as they jump up and down in celebration of a good score.

Now who could ever hear thunder, knowing exactly what it is, and be afraid of that?

Children in Church

Taking your children to church can be so exciting... You never really know what to expect. Many Catholic churches have a special place called "the crying room." Ah, the crying room. It's usually up in the front somewhere, separate from the congregation but glassed in, so you can see, but the children cannot be heard from the sanctuary.

It's a lovely thought, right? Sound comes into the crying room through speakers, and the crying children are all gathered together like an out-of-control children's choir. At least you're there, and nobody is having impure thoughts of murder while your children disrupt and you struggle to contain their exuberance and energy. With our sons coming nearly four years apart, it seemed like I had ever just graduated to the main body of the congregation, when I again had to be exiled to the crying room. There were two incidents that I want to memorialize here. Both were only funny in retrospect.

The first happened when Jeremy was tiny. Tighe had watched for months as the ushers would quietly come into the crying room with the collection basket for our offertory gifts. People would place their cash, checks, or envelopes in the basket, and then the usher would open the door and quietly leave again. Tighe liked the idea of having money so freely given. One day he figured if it was good enough for the ushers, he'd give it a try himself. When the ushers left the room, he picked up the little trash basket and followed them into the main congregation, and started going up and down the aisles, holding out the trash can and looking expectantly, waiting for money to be placed in his offering basket.

I didn't notice that he was gone right away, as I was dealing with Jeremy, but I could hear sudden laughter coming through the speakers and started looking around. Out through the glass I saw what was going on, and put Jeremy down, ready to go retrieve my wayward eldest, when the head usher beat me to it. He marched him back in the room and actually slammed the door shut as he left! He kept the trash can, too. He never smiled at me again. I was a failed mother. (His standards were very high.)

The second incident only disrupted the crying room, not the general congregation, but one man never came back to that service; at least, he never sat in the crying room again. I'm not sure why he sat in there, anyway. He never had any children with him. He was a big guy, and there's no really polite way to say this. He had a problem commonly known as plumber's crack. He would kneel down with his hips resting on the seat, leaning forward onto the front of the seat in front of him, and this wide crack would be displayed, disappearing into the drooping edge of his pants. We usually came in after he did, and I was careful to sit well forward of him. One Sunday, however, he was late. He rushed in and sank into the empty spot right in front of Jeremy. Just then the service began.

Jeremy wasn't even two yet, and inhibitions aren't strong at that age. We had almost made it to the end of the service. We were all kneeling down after Communion when Jeremy, with a loud "Wheee!" stuck his finger down the guy's crack. I had never before seen a man levitate. He was out of his seat, and out of that church faster than I would have believed possible.

Church lasted another fifteen minutes at the most, but I don't think there was a person in there who wasn't still laughing off and on when we left — except me. I do have more church stories, but we'll save them for another day, assuming the kids don't travel to Colorado to kill me first.

In the Woods

I open my door, and I'm in the woods. The sheer wonder of it nearly bruises my heart with the memories of camping trips: my own childhood travels and trips with my growing family. I stand there and look over our trees, hear the birds sing, and inside I am singing along.

How does a person contain such joy? This is the reason I quit writing in my blog for so long. It seems that each day all I wanted to do was sit down and write, "Another day in paradise. How can I describe how lucky I feel?" And so I wrote nothing, but I felt much.

The Spring rains are light this year, coming in the evening and watering my growing iris plants. They should be blooming by the time Ellen arrives a week from Monday. There are over a hundred of them, gathered in merry bands beneath the pines, beside the lane, near the steps. Their colors will add a glory to the Spring, and an extra bounty for our table.

Riches we have here, once dreamed of, but never expected. And yet, so often did I quote Robert Browning's famous line, "A man's reach must exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?"

Back in the Grocery Store

While we're doing grocery store memories, something else comes to mind. One day, when the boys were a little older, I took all three of them into the store. I was picking up kids from school. Tighe was a junior, Jeremy was a 7th grader, and Ben was a 3rd grader. I remember this only because of the circumstances below. They were going to three different schools at the time, and I had picked everyone up, which was an involved process, and still had to make a quick run for groceries before making dinner that night.

On our way into the store closest to the high school, we happened to see the president of the PTA coming out. She wasn't someone I approved of very much. Her attitude and mine conflicted in one very major way. She had chewed me out for missing a PTA meeting because Tighe had a baseball game that conflicted with the meeting. It was an away game, and I wasn't back in time for "her" meeting. As editor of the PTA newspaper, I felt that I could get the information I needed without being present for the meeting. If someone wanted something in the paper, they could call me or bring an article to me at the baseball field or drop it in my mailbox. I wasn't that hard to find. She told me, in no uncertain terms, that I had to be there. "You're doing this for your son!" I told her, "That's right. I do this for my son, not in spite of him. When he has a game, I'm there for him. I can't have someone phone in the score for me." She just never could understand that.

Our discussion and the missed meeting had been months before, and our relationship was now professional if not cordial. She stopped us as we entered, gave me some dates and times, which I wrote down, and asked some questions, which I answered. She finally pushed her cart out into the parking lot, and we entered the store. One of the boys, I think it was Tighe, looked at me with an awed expression on his face. I noted that the other two seemed to be also looking at me rather strangely. "Wow, Mom. You really don't like her, do you?"

I was so embarrassed I could have fallen through the floor. I was so sure I had treated her with respect and courtesy! "Did it show?" I asked. "Yeah. You were so polite!"

I had to laugh. In my family, you tease people you like. There's joking and laughter, jests and humor. The total politeness that you give to a professional colleague you must deal with (but would rather not) was something my boys had never before seen, at least from me.