What will NY152 say today, I wonder. I turn on my computer. I wait impatiently as it connects. I go online, and my breath catches in my chest until I hear three little words: You’ve got mail. I hear nothing. Not even a sound on the streets of New York, just the beating of my own heart. I have mail. From you.
I swear I can practically smell these freshly sharpened pencils…
Joe Fox:
Don’t you love New York in the fall? It makes me wanna buy school supplies. I would send you a bouquet of newly sharpened pencils if I knew your name and address. On the other hand, this not knowing has its charms.
On Friday September 23, 2011 at approximately 5:05 am, the sun will appear to cross the celestial equator from north to south and will mark the beginning of autumn in the northern hemisphere. Day and night will be almost equal length at that time. It’s a month away…technically.
But the grandbebes are in the classroom and small children with backpacks skip along happily at very early hours these days. And, living just 2 blocks from a school, the air is filled with uproarious energy and laughter several times a day as recess comes and goes in joyful rhythm.
It is still summer, but the fall is announcing its’ imminent return.
Quotes from: You’ve Got Mail, (1998), Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan
“Adoption means you grew in your mommy’s heart instead of her tummy.” Author: Unknown
The Powers Family Journey
Dave and Tara got married in September of 2003. They were going to wait 5 years or so to have a baby because of all the traveling and plans they had. But **sUrpRisE!** They got pregnant 5 months later with Hunter Magoo. He was born 3 weeks early in October of 2004. And a joy he is!
When he was 2 1/2 or 3, they started thinking about adding to their family. As time went along, their curiosity was picqued about the hold up. Getting pregnant the first time had been a breeze. A physical exam did reveal a serious condition for which Tara went through surgery. We thank God it went well and she was whole again – pregnancy would soon follow, we felt certain.
But this is God’s story and we cannot wait to read the next chapter!
Dave and Tara and Hunter have decided to choose the next baby or small child. They have started their plans, filling out papers, having the home study, all the things needed to prepare for a new member of the family.
Remember those little wax bottles? You’d bite off the “cap” suck the 1/16 teaspoon of colored water out and then chew the wax – because gum was not always available? They still have those!
We did not dig in the dirt today.
The pool is still up. But today we officially started Pre-K for Gemma May. Once a week with Nonna and every day with mommy and daddy. She and I have been hanging out pretty much all year, but “school work” was mostly “playing school” and making crafts! Good times. Today she came with her backpack and school supplies, so grown up and so ready to read! First order of business? She made a “family’ of butterflies.” “Mommy and daddy, Gavin and me and then Guini! There we are. We are flying!”
The speed of life has at least doubled since my kids were young. And quadrupled since I was. It really does fly. A gazillions miles per hour!
There is a whole scurrying, jumping, munching, flying, plant-destroying army in my backyard and they are grossing me out.
Even though I read that once they have grown to adulthood and are thoroughly enjoying your garden you cannot win, – oh, win I intend to!
The organic method:
Water plants and then sprinkle with good old-fashioned all-purpose flour. The flour will gunk them up as they try to eat and like a large Thanksgiving dinner, will swell up in them as they drink to clean out their insides. They deserve it.
The more direct and “Jeanie-ous” idea:
Carry a badmitton racquet with me into the garden.
If God spoke contemporaneously during “Bible times,”
Will He not speak contemporaneously to us now?
I have mentioned my interest in slam poetry before. I am not the demographic for it, an unusual fan, certainly. Yet I am impressed, moved, by the talent in the thought-provoking stringing-together-of-words by these young artist/performers. There is a bold-word Paul-like quality, just speaking straight from and to the guts.
Recently Tredessa and I have been talking about art and literature and music and how we find glimpses of the one true God popping up even where people would be shocked to find Him. Like He did that day at the well.
This particular YouTube example is pretty straightforward-from-the-Christian-biblical viewpoint.
And here is Levi-he-Poet at Heaven Fest.
But I have found Him in songs, in movies, in books that aren’t Christian bookstore fare. I have heard Him in stories and wordless music, too.
Interpret.
God is still writing on the walls of this wicked and secular generation. I believe it. And we are the Daniels interpreting the signs and symbols that point the way out of darkness and into light. When we see Jesus in a movie, find Him in a deep spiritual meaning in some story or His grace depicted by fictional characters, maybe even when we hear a song by a known “sinner” that touches something deep inside – are we too closed off to believe that God is able and IS speaking to the world today through every available means? Do we think the only chance people have to hear from the God of the Universe is in our church building-boxes on Sunday morning or via Christian TV?
Hey, God spoke through an ass (Numbers 22). I think He can use the arts. Maybe even you and me.
C.S. Lewis says so much in so few words.
If only I could learn to do the same…
“A man can no more diminish God’s glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word, ‘darkness’ on the walls of his cell.”
“I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”
He speaks.
He speaks to everyone, to every human being on the face of the earth, by both general and specific revelation.
Creation testifies about the Creator. The heavens declare His glory. And whether we choose to igore them or not, our very consciences are God speaking into our awarenesses, His voice direct to something deep inside. He speaks in the church and to the church. He speaks through His Word. He speaks through the Holy Spirit and through Godly people who bear His image. By their example and words and prayer, we hear Him and are marked for life. And sometimes, He speaks to me in a still, small voice, so direct the wind is nearly knocked from my lungs. It even happened at a movie once.
They are all connected by being songs I thoroughly enjoy listening to as I drive around on a summer afternoon or evening. A little jazz, a little country, a little bubblegum pop (The Patridge Family, big smile!) and mostly oldies. Mostly.
Lovin’ summer, as always. High today? 87-sweet-degrees. Sunny and maybe a late afternoon thundershower. Drink up, garden!
There are movies I like that are in their whole own grouping.
I didn’t realize this list was so long until I actually started typing it. And I am not sure how to classify it, or what to call it.
This particular grouping – In common::
1:: They are movies that I saw with people I love when I was able to just take a break and get in to the story.
2:: They are period pieces, historical, but in a very recent sense.
3:: They have a message that touches my heart, and indeed may actually express something of the deep parts of my very soul. There is something in each that carries a sensibility I was born in to, a value I hold close to this day. And something that inspires me for the rest of my days on earth.
4:: There is almost always furniture or wallpaper or some accessory that one of my grandparents had in their houses. Or that my family owned, a hand-me-down, perhaps, or used, but useful item.
5:: And I love the characters and the colors and the accurate depiction of the time of which they speak. There is nothing worse to me than having a hippie (late 60s, early 70s) have a Rubik’s Cube (extremely late 70s) in their hands. Tsk, people.
6:: Oh, and the movie will almost always have a music track I just really love.
Basically, there is something of these movie I recognize and wholly relate to because of the times in which I have lived. Now Grace of My Heart {1996}, the quintessential inside-my-soul movie is very much like these in some ways, but is also kind of like its’ entirely whole category, so I didn’t list it. Here goes:
To Kill a Mockingbird, {1962}
Field of Dreams {1989}
Driving Miss Daisy {1989}
Avalon {1990}
Fried Green Tomatoes {1991}
A League of their Own {1992}
Corinna, Corinna {1994}
Shawshank Redemption {1994}
The Green Mile {1999}
The Notebook {2004}
More recently, Julie, Julia {2009}
To this list I am now adding The Help. {2011}
No Spoilers, no worries.
1:: Did I love it? I totally did! I saw it with Dave and Stormie, Tredessa and Ryan. First movie in a while because of a little thing I like to call Heaven Fest. I was ready, Qdoba in hand!
2:: My French teacher at Hammond High School (1976) told us many stories of her “mammy” who raised her on their North Carolina Plantation and explained that was just how “things were done.” Growing up in the 1960s, I have strong remembrances of the Civil Rights movement. At school, we watched some of Martin Luther King Jr.’s speeches and I remember the sinking feeling I got when I heard he’d been killed. The flags were at half-mast and after the pledge of allegiance, our whole school observed a moment of silence. It spoke to me in a roar.
3:: Messages…Forgiving your enemy is hard. Leaving the theater I thought that, even though the movie was about exposing the hypocrisy of white rule and unjust laws toward other human beings, even in this movie (from a book by the same name), the savior was the white girl. A rich, white girl. And – Hilly, the worst of them all, she really isn’t so different than any of us {me} when we are crusading to get our way, our rights, our own viewpoint across. I have been on the receiving end of that horrid religious superiority, and sadly, I have probably been a perpetrator. And that is sad…
Best message in the movie, though? The one that nearly made me cry every time?
You is kind. You is smart. You is important.
4:: I remember women still wearing those same netted hats to church, with gloves, when I was very small. Oh yes I do. You did not know I was that old, dod you??? The “house dresses,” the aprons, the “modern furniture”
5:: Emma Stone was awesome. So were Viola Davis, Bryce Dallas Howard, Allison Janney and pretty much everyone else. Great cast, great sets. Pretty decent accents, too.
6:: The music in this one didn’t stand out to me a lot, yet. But we’ll see as I watch it again. Maybe it was just so perfect it was part of the whole movie-loving thing. Oh wait – I do remember some Johnny Cash, a little Bob Dylan and oh, Ray Charles!! And? I was singing along to “Victory Today is Mine” in the church scene (yes, sang it in church many times in my life). Hmmm…I think it must be a great soundtrack. Now I am excited to go back and see!
I relate to the movie. I connected with it. I cried several times and a lot at the end – probably more than anyone else because of the “writing” thing. And I never cry at movies. I won’t spoil. I just loved it.
I guess if she’d passed the test and all other women between her and me had too, I’d eventually have messed it all up anyway.
But sometimes I want to ask her: was it sweet enough? Was it satisfying enough to carry you the rest of the way, partaking of the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil? You ate and you suddenly, having lost your innocence, knew the difference between them.
Of course we know the answer is that it wasn’t. It wasn’t enough.
Genesis 2.16-17 And the LORD God commanded the man, “You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die.”
Information junkie.
Once I started reading Seventeen magazine at the age of about 14 and found that I loved the center section full of facts and figures and studies and how-tos, I knew I was in to knowing, to discovering and learning and ingesting as much fact and data as I could. I’d been that way earlier, from about the age of 4 when President Kennedy was shot and I became a newspaper reader, carefully devouring the pictures and headlines, impatiently waiting daily for my dad to be finished so I could spread the large newsprint on the floor and check out the world from my safe haven: unrest on college campuses in the 60s, the scandal of Jackie marrying Ari O. Dear Abby, Dear Ann Landers and all the rest. I was hooked. In fact, in an effort to keep a holy day, my parents didn’t allow Sunday paper reading on Sunday. Oh, the agony – seeing the giant bundle, so full of world news and events, yet so far from my reach…But at 14, reading Seventeen, that is when I knew I wanted to accumulate knowledge – about anything. I craved it, I searched for it. I inhaled it.
Then I pounded the living daylights out of everyone else with the mountain of info I’d accumulated. Since we didn’t have TV for many of my growing up years, it worked perfectly with my encyclopedia and dictionary-reading enjoyment.
If I’d applied myself to actual school studies as carefully as to knowing something about everything in the universe, I’d have been a phenom.
And then, omygosh, came the world-wide-web. I know. I know.
Ecclesiastes 1.18
For with much wisdom comes much sorrow;
the more knowledge, the more grief.
I may know more about the people I know more than ever, with social media, updates, blogs, posts, statuses and the texts, o-the-texts. Yet, I don’t think I know them more. Yahoo news bites (where I sadly get most of my news these days) and google.com have made it hard for anyone to sneak up on me with information on the state of our world and its very weird people. I have read just enough to know I have read too much on too many inconsequential topics and I am worn out trying to make my own mind up.
Take a completely wholly-a-matter-of-opinion topic like how to best arrange your closet for optimum organization. You look, read, study it a bit and decide, yes – this will help me get out the door quicker in the morning. But before you have even printed the designer labels for all the new containers you just purchased, some one comes along and revolutionizes the whole thought process, and dang it – there it was in your Sunday paper, if only you’d waited!
I don’t even have time to respond and grow with info anymore. There is no time to react to it, to consume it and then let it live through me in whatever way it might have been helpful, before I am inundated with new info, a better way, here’s how, that-is-last-year-try-this. Mental Floss Magazine – Where Knowledge Junkies get Their Fix, is both wondrous and killing me.
Hang up and talk.
It isn’t just news outlets, publishers and the internet that are both feeding my addiction and killing my soul. It is the smart phone. When we all go out to dinner and spend all our time checking our messages and Twitter and FB and whatever else because we are afraid we won’t know when some one we know has purchased a Billy shelving unit from IKEA or saw the latest movie before us or that they are blue or having the best day ever or whatever, well. What a waste.
One woman recounted, recently, how romantic it felt to her when a first date turned off his phone when they sat down at the restaurant. She knew she was getting his undivided attention and guess what? They are a couple.
Am I really so important that a friend can’t have have a meal with me now without my having to check messages/FB/Twitter/etc and take calls? Really?
Soapbox on the side
Please replace this: Oh – I have to take this call.
—with—
Do you mind if I take this call?
TMI or TMC (Too Much Connectedness) ?
I don’t know. I just know my mind is worn out. And I can’t keep up. And I don’t care. And maybe it just means I am TDO (Too Dang Old).
I used to think the simplicity-kick people were just kill-joys. The most important thing I did today was color with the grandkids. With crayons. On paper. No Sunday newspaper. We drew apples, and caterpillers and kites and spiders.
And Guini was explaining to me, with our little smiley-faced spider, that it didn’t really have enough eyes. Should have eight, she shook her head. I think I knew that once…
Arriving in Chicago on a Friday night. We get real Chicago-style pizza near Midway Airport where planes fly just above our heads. Near the south shore in Hobart there is a wedding rehearsal with the other half of the family. We will all gather for a celebration of a new marriage on Saturday.
BBQs at Dan and Dawn’s, corn-holing competitions, waffle-ball in the backyard. Even the matriarch and patriarch got into the games! There was the beach at Lake Michigan and driving the old neighborhood. Remember 4995 Roosevelt Place and all the baseball dings in the side of the garage from the 3 Moslander boys? Oh, they are still there. Our giant spruce is nearly dead now, but there is the house, the one we all finally lived in together before growing up and moving away began. Schools and businesses and streets we travelled. A Vienna Red Hot at The Village Shopping Center. I could still smell J C Penney’s even though it hasn’t been there now for almost 20 years. My first real-life job was there.
Once green-grass, established neighborhoods with distinct ethnic identities, houses where people had lived for over 40 years in a thriving steel-mill industry and could be counted upon , like clockwork to be edging their perfect lawns at exactly 6:15 pm every Wednesday evening now have the signs of transience at best. Bars on inhabited house windows, boarded up openings on empty, beautiful brick homes on hills. You can buy a million-dollar Denver-type home there for $15,000, cash. So says the hand-written cardboard sign. The city waits to be revived.
But we remember our life and times.
And the vivid colors come flooding back and our hearts are warm in the remembrance. These were good times and good places. This is where we finished growing up and where our parents had to let us go. There are altars in every direction, signs that point to God’s faithfulness in our lives.
Jordan and Alise start their life as husband and wife. We dance and eat and make merry. We see old friends and catch up on 30 or so years.
Joe and Robin and their family couldn’t come this year. We are remembering them always, bringing them up constantly, missing their presence…
The boys wrestle and play pool and work out to get pumped up. I give my mom a perm, which, though a bit kinky to begin with, of course, turns out just fine. I get lots of time with Averi & Amelie Belle and they are truly the “belles of the ball!”
Southlake Worship Center – home church
We got to attend church at Southlake on Sunday. So sweet. More on that later. But Pastor Sam Abbott and congregation welcomed us fully. Rocky and Tara led worship, with a small acoustic, all-family band. It was lovely.
Back to Chicago
On Tuesday there is a trip into the city: Navy Pier at Chicago. Then an authentic Puerto Rican meal to. die. for. at Tami and Gerron’s church, provided by some ladies of the congregation. Sitting on the front stoop at the church, we get a taste of a busy Chicago neighborhood. The sounds, the smells, the accents – colorful and unique. Tami and Gerron are perfect there.
Before we part we have our standard Family-Mass, a time of worship and fellowship around Him whose mark on our lives keeps us one, Jesus Christ. It is informal, it is easy. I wish it really could be captured in a way everyone could experience it. Somehow, we just blend. We just are :: The Moslanders. The descendants of Ross and Norma Moslander, 4 generations of us, declaring God’s faithfulness from one generation to another.
In all my dad pastored in Des Moines, the Davenport, then a short time in Cedar Rapids, and a short time in Robert, Louisiana before we got to Gary, Indiana. I kinda call it home and Dan and Dawn are still there. And with all of us there, it felt like home. But home really is where my mom and dad are.
These are just a few of the moments, especially dedicated to my mom.
I swear I can practically smell these freshly sharpened pencils…
