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Personal blog of christian
writer & fallible mom
Katy McKenna Raymond
in Kansas City, Missouri

Katy is represented by
Greg Johnson at
WordServe Literary

Read more Katy at
LateBoomer.net

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Recent Posts

• Try
• Becoming Brenda Starr
• Off Beat
• Scattered
• That’s It
• So I’ve Finally Signed With An Agent. Now What?
• The Spoon
• Sciatica
• Sweetheart
• A Woman’s Train of Thought Has No Caboose
• However much we own, we are all still living on borrowed time
• After all, when restaurants shrink portions, they don’t shrink prices.
• As with everything in life, balance is key.
• Slow down, you move too fast…
• Yeah, I know. I have issues.

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E me at katy @ ngenius.com

Honest To Mom (#110)

I've got a big food-prep week ahead of me. Scott turns 26 tomorrow, and of course next Sunday is Father's Day. Besides that, I'm throwing a bridal shower for my niece Erin next Saturday.

So today I hit the store and spent a gazillion bucks, give or take. When you get up around a gazillion, I've found, quibbling over a few cents here or there loses its meaning. But I sure felt like quibbling when I unpacked my groceries and found that I'm one Lunchable over the line.

I can count the number of Lunchables that have entered this household on one hand. I did the math when they first hit the market and decided No Way. A couple of crackers, three slices each of pepperoni and cheese-like food product, and two cents worth of green jello? For How Much Money? I don't think so!

Unbeknownst (How I love that word!) to me, the lady behind me in line got a little too close too my stuff and her Lunchable fell over onto my 5-pound roll of ground beef. Hey, it happens, but darned if I didn't get charged for it.

Carrie's packing up her clean laundry to head back to Columbia. She usually avails herself of whatever groceries she finds interesting in my fridge and pantry. I couldn't wait to give her the good news that she'd fallen into more serendipitous fortune that she'd anticipated.

"Guess what, Care? I ended up with a Lunchable that I don't want. You can take it with you when you go."

"Um..." she hesitates to answer while she scopes the thing out. "You can save it for when Kev gets home from New York."

"I thought you loved Lunchables? You used to beg for them when you were little."

"It's just that after today, I'm going to start eating healthy."

This line always makes me chuckle, no matter who says it. Even if it's me telling the whopper, I laugh. Today is no exception.

"I would say I'm going to start eating healthy RIGHT NOW," she says, and I'm thinking I must have my deaf ear pointed toward her because her voice sounds so garbled, "but my mouth is CLEARLY full of M&Ms."

I'm so glad we had this little talk.

---

Baby Bust-A-Move! (#111)

Doug and Carrie and I are going to a wedding tonight, and we're pretty psyched. Brad is the son of our great friends, Bruce and Page, and it'll be fun to see him get hitched to Bethany.

The reception will be held in Kansas City's old Union Station, a fantastic landmark downtown with enough architectural interest to keep us gawking all night. Who knows? There may even be dancing...

Just in case, I've been spending the morning busting a few moves, dancing along with my new Internet instructor. If this kid isn't the best teacher on earth, I don't know who is!

Do you think Doug will be able to keep up?

---

Well, Duh! (#112)

We are getting absolutely pounded here with torrential rains and 70 to 90-mile-per-hour straight-line winds. The weather guy I was watching until my roof nearly flew into my back yard hadn't even MENTIONED our county as being in the path of the storms. But then I looked out the window and saw an acre's worth of trees in a suspiciously horizontal position.

Right now I'm thinking about my daughter's boyfriend, who's getting a Master's in meteorology. I hope for as long as I know him I never hear him say what I just heard a Kansas City weatherman say.

"After the rest of these storms pass through, the threat of severe weather will be significantly diminished."

---

And Brother, It May Be This Very Day! (#113)

Do you remember that old televangelist theme song that went, "I feel like something good is about to happen..."?

Last night, while discussing a hopeful business proposition, I turned to Doug and said, "Ooooh, maybe something good's gonna' happen..."

He said, "Mmmm-hmmm."

Then I said, "Well, of COURSE something good's gonna happen. We just don't know when..."

Our eyes met before I delivered my finale, "Or to whom."

He laughed. "Umm...Katy, that's not exactly the Oral Roberts way of looking at the concept."

I know, babe. But my way does have the ring of the mysterious about it, wouldn't you agree?

---

Vanished (#114)

Kevvie is on the east coast with three friends, on his ten-day summer road trip. Yesterday he called from his beach-towel perch at Virginia Beach. I did not realize the beach was on the agenda, which is probably just as well.

I hyperventilated just a little when he told me where he was. You see, our family took a trip to Virginia Beach once, when Kevvie was three. He fell in with a group of little boys who'd dug a large hole in the sand with their plastic shovels. They were attempting, I guess, to end up on the other side of the whole wide world in China, or maybe just at the Go-Kart joint across the street. Who can say with three-year-old boys?

The boys and Kevvie joined forces, and shovels, within three feet of where Doug and I sat. But we must have turned our heads once, perhaps toward each other, perhaps to whisper quick sweet nothings or gaze into each other's sun-kissed eyes. After all, we'd only been married eleven years that summer--we were practically newlyweds.

And in that instant, Kevvie disappeared. The other little boys were still kneeling over their cavernous hole, concentrating on their work, oblivious to the fact that one of their number had gone missing.

I cannot express the terror that filled our hearts in that moment. We began shouting out our son's name, and Scotty and Carrie raised their voices along with ours. Our fears instantly drew our eyes to the edge of the deep, where the most horrible danger resided, but then our minds quickly processed all the other very real possibilities, including The Invasion of The Baby Snatchers.

Within seconds, we alerted a lifeguard to our dilemma, and described our child in as much detail as we could. I had already grown nearly hysterical, and could only say that Kev's color-block swimming trunks were "orange, or maybe purple, or are they turquoise?" The lifeguard must have thought I'd lost my senses completely, but the trunks really were all those colors. "And he's tiny and fragile, but with the most enormous blue eyes and beautiful long lashes..."

How could I live without those eyes?

In another thirty seconds, a whole string of lifeguards up and down the beach had been notified and scanned their areas for a little lost boy. By the time one of them located our wandering son--who'd been innocently looking for the hole-digging buddies he'd misplaced and headed out in search of them--he was the distance of several blocks down the beach. Still hoping to find his little buddies, still dreaming of digging himself a big hole to somewhere.

"But, Kevvie," I said, "we told you to stay right beside us. Why did you go on such a long walk?"

"To find my friends," he said, and it was hard to argue with logic like that.

So I answered the phone and it was my Kevin. He's finally found his friends on Virginia Beach, perhaps right where he left them seventeen summers ago. As you might imagine, his eyes are still beautiful, the lights of my life, but they don't shine only for me anymore.

Who knows where he and his friends will end up? Will they dig their way through the center of the sand, until they reach the other side of the world? Or will their journeys keep them closer to their homes, far from the risks of the ocean's edge?

All I know is that my little boy has completely disappeared in everyone's eyes but his father's and mine. And that in place of a baby, a grown man embraces the waves of this life, his friends close by his side.

---

Road Trip (#115)

"And Abraham went out, not knowing where he was going." Genesis 12:4

Every time I read this Scripture, or hear it preached on, I wonder if maybe a female writer sneaked in among those who chronicled the events in the Old Testament.

What if the story of Abraham were taking place today? I can just picture his wife Sarah--a prolific blogger who would take advantage of every free wi-fi spot along their journey--opening a blog entry with that same tongue-in-cheek line.

Because you see, when I read that line I automatically substitute my husband's name for Abraham's, just to put myself in poor Sarah's shoes. Or sandals. Whatever.

"And Doug went out, not knowing where he was going."

Doesn't exactly have that mystical, ethereal feel to any more, does it? There's a bit of a thud in the word "Doug," especially, I've noticed, when you say it out loud in a sentence that ends with "not knowing where he was going."

I'm married to a man who, when we get to the end of our 700-foot-long driveway and he's presented with the choice of whether to turn to the left or the right, often makes no choice whatsoever. Don't get me wrong. He doesn't sit there flumoxed, trying to decide between left (church) or right (Starbucks). He intends to end up at church, but he turns right anyway.

This past Sunday, I let him drive the wrong way for nearly a mile before I said something. I wanted to see how long it might take him to self-correct, how long it might take before his internal GPS kicked back in. Finally, I couldn't take it anymore.

"Where are you going?" I asked.

"Church."

"Why did you turn this direction?"

"Well, I thought I'd go a different route today."

"Oh, really? And which route might that be?"

There's only one other way to approach our church, if one doesn't pursue the correct and logical path, which requires turning left out of our driveway. We both know this, but the man is attempting to pretend that he made a conscious choice to turn right, which he did NOT.

"I think I'll take The Ricketty Bridge."

When you live in the boonies, you attach your own names to landmarks that remain unnamed in the general vernacular because these landmarks are so...horrible. If Cass County, Missouri, road crews were honest, they'd put huge warning signs on any road that might lead an unsuspecting driver to attempt to cross the frightening wooden-planked wobbly one-laned contraption that our family has nicknamed The Ricketty Bridge.

"Warning!! Extremely hazardous Ricketty Bridge ahead!! Turn back while you still can!!"

But they are not honest. And neither, sometimes, is Doug.

"You didn't plan to take The Ricketty Bridge," I say, "and you wouldn't plan to take it on purpose, because you know how much I hate it."

He says nothing, but I notice his foot moves to the brake pedal to begin slowing down for what will soon become a radical change of direction.

"I'll turn back the other way," he says. As we make our way down the right path, he adds, "You know what? Now that I think about it, I'll bet the roadblocks are up at The Ricketty Bridge. I'll bet the flood waters washed it out last night."

Sometimes, what we try to pass off as faith is simple misguidedness and--of course--what looks to others like misguidedness might indeed be genuine faith. It's not always easy to tell which force is operating until you travel a ways. Or until your spouse speaks up.

I know one thing: faith is not the same thing as automatic pilot, which is the direction-determining device I find myself using most often.

So I won't hold it against Abraham--or Doug--for going out, and not knowing where he was going. As long as a fellow keeps stopping to ask for directions, and stays honest with his wife, a few wrong turns in life won't mess him up too badly, I guess.

But I still like to think Sarah came up with that opening line. "And Abraham went out, not knowing where he was going."

Yeah. She would have made some blogger.

---

Freak Out! (#116)

In my nearly five years of blogging, I think I've managed to refrain from pointing you, my dear readers, toward any on-line quizzes, tests, personality analyses, or nutty "Which Crustacean Am I?"-type games.

Then again, I'm not certain I've avoided linking to quizzes here at fallible. I wouldn't know how to search my archives to find such references. My idea of searching archives is to think to myself something like, "I remember after Scott graduated from college he and I went to a writers conference in Michigan, and it was Spring because I wore my periwinkle windbreaker and Scott hadn't grown his hair long like Jesus yet so it must have been April of 2002." Then I go to April, 2002 in my archives to find my entry about the conference.

The only way I could ascertain whether or not I'd ever linked to a quiz would be to remember doing so. Memory (my own) is my little system for getting around on a computer. Not much of a system, you say?

Hummmph. I thought I was making out just fine in this world until Rebecca led me down this primrose path. If you've got a couple minutes, please take first the SQ test, and then the EQ test. Finally, graph your results on this page, and then read the analysis and--if you're anything like me--weep.

I'll tell you my bizarrely freakish scores after a few of you weigh in. Frankly, I am shocked. And more than a bit dismayed.

And grateful I have a hubby to change those pesky lightbulbs for me! Now, if he'd just stop trying in vain to explain to me how electricity works, I'd be a happy woman.

---

The Quest For Immortality, Mama-Style (#117)

Just got off the phone with my mom, not to be confused with Doug's mom, although honestly some days the lines get blurred. And not only the phone lines, either...

Mom has always referred to the retirement place where she's lived for the past three years as The Funny Farm, because of the seemingly contagious levels of Alzheimers and other forms of dementia contained therein. I don't think my mother has dementia at all, but as you know if you've read here for long, she's crazy just the same.

Doug's mom refers to her assisted living facility--where she's lived for one-and-one-half years--as The House, which is what she's called every residence she's ever occupied. She'll invite us over to her small apartment by saying, "Why don't you come over to The House later?" At first, I figured she was confused, and still thought she was living in the home she'd owned for 35 years, but no. She likes thinking of it as The House.

I know it's irreverent, but I take my cues about these things from my mom. To me, both establishments are The Funny Farm.

So Mom called from her Funny Farm to ask an important question. She felt sure I'd know the answer.

"You remember that photograph of you girls and me, where I've got on the big yellow corsage?" she asked.

"Was it at someone's wedding?"

"No, no, you all know how much I hate yellow. None of you would have made me wear a yellow corsage...You know, I've got on that white dress with the pleats and the flecks and my hair looks good..."

That did narrow it down a bit.

"Yeah, I know the picture. What about it?" I asked.

"They gave me an award that day, remember? It was at a luncheon and I invited you girls because they told me I'd be getting an award..."

"Yeah, Mom, you were voted The Woman of the Year."

"I know THAT. But what was the organization I belonged to? Who gave me the award?"

This all happened maybe 15 years ago, so I'm a little fuzzy on the details myself. I remember her being a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution, but if they'd given an award, wouldn't it be called Daughter of the Year? Then it came to me.

"Wasn't it the American Business Women's Association? The ABWA?" I asked.

"That's IT! Okay, that's all I called you for. I'll let you go now."

"Wait a minute, Mom. I'm curious why you needed that bit of trivia..."

"Well, Little Betty died last week, you know. The whole time she lived at The Funny Farm, she didn't look like much to me. Frail and old and sick..."

By now, I'm chuckling to myself. "And?"

"Did you catch her obit in yesterday's paper? That woman belonged to every organization in Kansas City! It took up a whole column and a half!"

"So..."

"So I'm writing my obit. Not the way they'll write it up at the Kansas City Star when the time comes, but you know, the highlights."

"Make it a good one, Mom."

"Oh, I will," she said, with more determination than I've heard her use in years. "I will."

Finally, the woman's got something to live for!

---

Let The Children Come To Me (#118)

Sometimes, when I think about my childhood and how it must have affected how I look at life and relationships and faith and God, I get discouraged. But then I remember something that astounds me no end, how all through my youngest years I felt God's gentle hand on my life.

When I was seven and Liz was six, she paid particular attention to the homily at Mass one Sunday. It was the only time she'd ever professed to get much out of a sermon, so I confess I was fascinated to know how it had affected her. As soon as we got home, she hatched her Bible-verse-based plan.

"We're going to pray for three days straight," she said, evidently wanting to give God the benefit of the doubt since he might not recognize our voices at first blush. "You heard what Father Jacobowski said. Whatever we ask for, we'll get. All we have to do is believe, and I believe. Do you believe?"

Quite the evangelist, wasn't she?

"Sure I do. But what should we ask for?" I said, ready as usual to follow my younger sister anywhere. By that time, we knew there were plenty of starving children in Biafra, wherever that was, who needed God's help. Maybe Liz had in mind some heavy-duty prayers for them. Prayer would surely help them more than the days the kids at St. Elizabeth's School ate nothing but rice for lunch to free up a few grilled cheese sandwiches for frail Biafrans.

"Bikes. A red one for me, and a blue one for you. With baskets on the front, and tassels on the handle bars. They're going to land in the garage by Wednesday at the latest. The Bible and the priest said so."

"But we already asked Mom and Dad for bikes," I said, "and they said no."

"That's why we're asking God," she answered. "The Bible says He won't say no. If we ask for it, we'll get it. That's the way it works."

So we prayed together, she and I, for three nights running--the first and last times we ever raised our united voices to beseech the God of heaven for any reason whatsoever.

Wednesday morning, still in our nightgowns, we sneaked out the back door to the garage. The garage door often stayed open all night. Our family didn't own much of value, not even a car, so thieves didn't worry my parents.

Liz figured an open garage door would make The Miraculous Appearance of the Red and Blue Bikes in the Garage on Grand Avenue that much easier for the Almighty to pull off. Her only concern was that squirrelly Ernie Hagen across the street or Scary Larry down on the corner might get to our new bikes before we woke up and pull a bike heist.

"Wouldn't that be a gyp, after we did all the praying?" she asked, and I had to agree it would be a terrible gyp.

We skittered across the driveway, hanging on to every shred of our sketchy belief system (because Father Jacobowski emphasized how large a role our individual and collective faith played in this transaction), and peeked inside.

No shiny new bikes. Just a wobbly scooter and a rusty red wagon, as usual.

Liz was mighty ticked off at God after that. She thought they'd had a deal. Looking back, she probably decided right then that I was the weak link in matters of two or three gathering together and asking for stuff. Oh, well. But at that moment--because He'd clearly said no and that was something, after all--God got my attention. l really appreciated that He wasn't into cheap trickery and going over the heads of parents who were trying pretty hard to do the right thing. I also found it intriguing that He couldn't be manipulated by little kids, the way lots of adults could.

Yeah. This was a God worth getting to know.

When I was around eleven, my mother announced to me in no uncertain terms that she was dying of breast cancer.

"Have you been to the doctor?" I asked.

"No, and I'm not going, either," she said. "He'll just tell me what I already know. I can feel the lumps."

So I did what any faithful Catholic girl would do: I said a Novena to St. Jude, the Patron Saint of the Impossible. (Most of the stuff that required prayer in my young life felt impossible, so I tended to by-pass more wishy-washy saints like St. Anthony, Patron Saint of the Lost and Found, and go straight for St. Jude, who could obviously get the job done or God wouldn't have given it to him.)

Every morning and every night I prayed, waiting for something definitive to happen with my mother. Eventually, I knew, she would become ill unto death or she'd mention to me that perhaps she'd been mistaken and wasn't quite dying yet after all.

Months of prayer turned into a year or more, with no claification from Mom about the state of her bosoms. Finally, I could bear the suspense no longer and asked, "So, what ever happened with the cancer thing?"

"Oh, it was nothing," she said, way too nonchalantly considering what she'd put me through. "Too much coffee, I guess. I'm fine, except that these varicose veins might kill me..."

Was there a patron saint for varicose veins? I didn't know, but I do know that during those months of praying for my mother not to die and leave me responsible for all those kids, I grew very close to the Lord.

On my 12th birthday, I asked for a Bible. My parents looked at me like I was from outer space, but they got me my very first Bible which, while it languished largely unread, still brought me great comfort. Because you see, by then I knew for certain that God had called me out of darkness into His marvelous light. I knew that he'd made me for a reason, set me apart from my mother's womb for His purposes.

I didn't know what that meant exactly, still don't completely. But I felt the truth of it in my soul.

It took a few more years before He really got ahold of my life, before I understood that He wanted more than my desperate prayers. He wanted my heart. Even now, it's a process of learning to trust Him more, especially when circumstances often conspire to bring back the feelings of those early frightening times.

My faith is still a clumsy one. I ask the wrong questions more often than not, and pray prayers that fail to get to the crux of the matter. But God knows my heart and hears my cries and loves me more than I can yet imagine, every bit as much as when I was a little girl hoping for a blue bike and proof that God is good.

As strange as it sounds, to this very day I've never owned my own bike, but that's OK. It stopped being about the bike a long time ago. The blue bike got my attention, and a wonderful Savior kept it.

But to think my life with Jesus started when my sister and I peeked into that empty garage which, as it turns out, wasn't really empty at all.

---

Blogger Reveals All! (#119)

After my last blog entry, some of you may think I'm pretty hopeless in the old faith department. And I don't know, maybe I am. I'm very big on praying for God to protect my friends and loved ones when I can't, and also overly-convinced of my own personal responsibility to make sure that everyone is very, very safe at all times. Like God really needs me to step in if He isn't in the mood or something.

I learned to feel responsible for people at a young age, and I haven't quite recovered yet.

When I was nearly two years old, my four-year-old brother died, just two days after open heart surgery to repair a congenital heart defect. I don't remember him, and yet I've always known him as the single most influential person in my young life. From the stories I've been told and the photographs I've seen from that period, I pretty much sat in a corner and took care of my dolls for the next couple years. I didn't smile or talk much or ask for anything, which was a great relief to my mother, who already had a demanding six-month old (Hi, Liz!) by the time Patrick died.

My parents hung on for dear life for many years, my father turning to alcohol and gambling and my mother to yelling and screaming. Trust me. It was a lot of fun.

I always took up for my father, and wished to defend him from the pain my mother inflicted, even if he did do her wrong big-time. He had his first heart attack when I was twelve, convincing me even more that it was my responsibility to take care of him. I'd already witnessed my grandfather's first heart attack when I was eight, so this emotional caretaking role was nothing new for me, but still.

By that time, my Aunt Cathy's husband had been decapitated in a drunk driving accident, with him playing the role of the drunk. He left behind a wife and three little kids. Not only that, but my father's uncle Frank had eaten with us one evening when I was six or so. He drove himself home and then dropped dead, inspiring in me a lifelong fear of my mother's cooking.

Three of my first cousins died in their 20s and 30s--one of AIDS, one in a car wreck, and one by his own hand. After that, the good times really started rolling.

The morning Mom and Dad and I, along with my brother John and sister Bridget, were to leave for a month in Scotland in 1976, my grandfather evidently wasn't dealing too well with the stress of his only child (Mom) flying over the ocean. So he dropped dead to prove his point. Right after Mom had just finished feeding him a lovely breakfast of bacon and eggs. Another pattern emerging, hmmm? She didn't cook for company that often, but when she did, whoa, baby!

And then six months later, around the precise time Doug and I hopped on a plane to honeymoon in Jamaica, Doug's dad had a heart attack. He survived another three months, but I don't think I've ever quite recovered.

I know, I know. Stuff happens. It happens to everyone. It's the fabric of our lives, and all that. But evidently I'm one of those people for whom stuff--because it happened too early and too often--made a weird and lasting impact.

I don't often tell you stories like these, dredged up as they are from my long-ago past, but I guess I'm in the mood to tell it like it is. Or was. Because, well, this is why I am who I am, why I'm nervous about planes, trains, and automobiles. And heart attacks. And Mom's home cooking.

If you'd like to share why you're as weird as you are, feel free. This is an equal-opportunity-for-nutty-commenters blog!

---

I’m All Shook Up (#120)

I'm hoping that we know each other well enough by now that I could take the liberty to ask for some prayer. I'll tell you up front that I feel awkward asking, but for some reason (depression?) a bunch of circumstances seem to have conspired to stress me out pretty thoroughly.

Tomorrow, Carrie comes back through Port-Au-Prince on her way home from the orphanage in Haiti where she's just spent two weeks volunteering. The orphanage itself is in kind of an outlying village, and I haven't been too concerned about her being there, unless you factor in disease, witchcraft, and etc. There's always that darned "etc" to factor in...

But Port-Au-Prince frightens me no end. And, since Carrie arrived on the island, a fresh warning against US citizens traveling to Haiti has been issued by our State Department. And all non-essential US government employees and the family members of essential employees have been ordered to evacuate. She'll be moving from orphanage to Port-Au-Prince (2 1/2 hours in the back of an open pick-up on a terrible road) sometime tomorrow, and then boarding the plane for Miami. We should hear something from her when she arrives back in Miami--the last place from which she contacted us two weeks ago.

Late tonight, my son Scott and his bride Brooke are embarking on a road trip to the Grand Canyon. "I'm a little nervous," Scott has admitted, "about driving a stick shift in the mountains. I've never done that before...." Scott is rarely nervous, so don't imagine that when he claims to be nervous, I don't very nearly have a conniption fit.

Kevin leaves with three friends on Sunday morning. Road trip to NYC, Washington, and I'm not sure where else because frankly, I've been in too much denial to make the whole thing "real" by asking a lot of concrete questions. Ten days of highway-intensive driving--that's all I know for sure. Every mother's dream for four twenty-year-olds. As soon as he gets back, he's moving out. He's already hauled a couple loads of stuff, so this is the empty nest coming home to roost.

Okay. Very weak metaphor. But you get the idea.

Then there's my mother-in-law, who's been in the hospital since Friday. Hard to say what's wrong exactly, except she's weak and disoriented and claims she hasn't eaten anything for a month and doesn't intend to resume eating now. She lay in her bed at her assisted-living apartment, unable to even lift her head for two days, until her friend arrived to take her to the beauty shop. The nurses where she lives hadn't noticed that she'd missed meals for days, and hadn't bothered to call her children or even check her blood pressure, which was 70/40 when the paramedics arrived. Sheesh.

So I'm stressed out. I'm trying to take things in stride, but not succeeding too splendidly at the moment. All prayers are appreciated, for the missionary daughter, the road-trippers, and the naughty mother-in-law. Oh, yeah. And for me, too.

And if you'd like to add a request that I come up with some fascinating blog fodder very, very soon, be my guest!

I love you people.

---

New Millenium Survey, A Tad Late (#121)

I've been concentrating on some other writing projects recently. I hope you'll forgive my lack of serious blogging. I'll come up with something fascinating to write here again soon--I promise.

In the meantime, here's something I'm wondering: When you refer to the year in which you find yourself, 2005, how do you express that concept in words?

I find myself saying "two thousand five," but realized recently that I keep hearing others say "twenty-oh-five." That sounds wrong to my ear, but then I remember that "nineteen-ninety-nine" was the norm rather than "one thousand nine hundred ninety-nine."

If I revert back to the old song lyric "In the year 2525 (twenty-five twenty-five), if man is still alive, if woman can survive..." I guess I have my answer, but it still sounds wrong to me. Even "two-oh-oh-five" sounds better than "twenty-oh-five."

So how do you say 2005? Enquiring minds and all that.....

---

Something I Couldn’t Help But Notice (#122)

Did you know that handsome young men, when frequenting Panera's or other wifi-enabled establishments, will actually smile at old ladies provided those old ladies have an open iBook on the table?

I'm no fool. I know they don't love me because I'm beautiful, but I get a kick out of their smiles just the same.

---

God and Garage Sales (#123)

How I approach garage saling is just like how I hear from God.

First, I plan my route. If I'm headed to a specific destination on a Thursday, Friday, or Saturday, I know just which streets to travel in order to put myself in the optimum situation for spotting garage sales. Then I allow myself an extra hour or so, so that I can hit as many as strike my fancy on my way.

But limits must be imposed if I'm to have a successful venture. I don't just assume that all garage sales are ones at which I should shop. On the way to my destination, I drive in the right lane, limiting myself to only turning right into neighborhoods and then turning right again to get back on the main road.

Sometimes, like today on the road with Doug, a beautiful sign will point left, screaming delicious words like "multi-family, antiques, collectibles, everything must go!" in handwriting large enough to read from two blocks away.

Doug will nearly screech to a stop in order to get into the left-turn lane in time, not realizing that this isn't how it's done, not knowing that my contentment and peace has been broken. "But the sign says Big, Huge, Humongous Sale," he says.

"So what?" I ask. "The sale will still be going on when we turn around to go home. If we stay the course on the right side of the road, we'll be much better off in the long run."

"So you want garage saling to be peaceful?" he asks.

Yeah. I really do.

I trust that God, who is a God of order after all, understands my self-imposed parameters. If there's something on the left side of the road that I am meant to purchase, it will still be waiting for me later, when I can enter the neighborhood from the right lane. God and I understand each other completely when it comes to garage sales.

I am not frantic, I take my time, there is no hurry. And more often than not, I'm satisfied--if not thrilled--with the results.

When I pray, it's tempting to treat the process like the opening of garage sale season. It's tempting to come before God and say, "I'm open to every possibility in the universe, Lord. Shall I be a butcher, a baker, or a candle stick maker? Should I live in Ireland or New York or Belton, Missouri? Should I give my time to my church, another ministry, or my mother? Should I turn to the left or the right or spin around in circles until I'm too dizzy to follow any directions at all?"

Instead, before I pray, I've got things narrowed down a bit. I've got something of a plan, a map laid out, a strategy, a method in mind by which to understand His focused leading when it comes.

Sure enough, if I resist jumping from one side of the road to the other, eventually He leads me where He wants me to go.

And oh, the treasures that await me there!

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What Do You Want To Do Today? (#124)

So finally it's Saturday, the one day of the week I rarely feel guilty. Well, okay, technically I don't often feel guilty on Sunday, either. Except occasionally when I skip church and I'm not sick at all but only exhausted or stressed.

Sunday, you'll understand if you've ever been Catholic, is a Holy Day of Obligation, with a strong emphasis on obligation. I was raised to believe that you put in your time at Mass unless you were certifiably, irretrievably dead. And sometimes, even then. But I digress.

I don't feel guilty on the weekends--and especially on Saturday--because if I were a member of the traditional workforce, I'd probably get Saturdays off. If my mother calls me today and asks what I'm doing, she won't expect the answer to be "working," so I won't need to couch my response in terms that make her think I'm actually accomplishing something worthy of a paycheck.

If she calls from 9-5 on Monday through Friday, she's trained herself to say, "Are you writing?" to which I always answer, "Oh, yes, it's coming along nicely now..."

She never asks what I mean by "nicely," or what the definition of "it" is. She doesn't want to know that much, which is fine with me.

I've pretty much decided that unless forced to by some terrible financial misfortune that I can't foresee at the moment, I'll never work in someone else's office again. I make a terrible employee, one who requires reams of scrap paper and cases of post-it notes just to keep up with the pieces of poetry, potential book titles, and tidbits of character analysis that pop into my head at any given moment.

Even though I've made my choice and know it's the right one for me, the guilt rages.

I've become friends with a woman recently whose two daughters are both in college. Her mother has Alzheimer's and is in a nursing home, where Mary visits her several times per week. Invariably, the employees at the facility question Mary on what she does with all her time, since she holds no outside-the-home job.

"I'm here, am I not?" she responds, which usually silences them. I suspect if she ever gets in the mood, she'll just tell them she does nothing, and leave it at that. She doesn't feel compelled to defend her choices, only to live with them.

Unlike me, Mary feels no guilt about choosing to be a life-long homemaker. She doesn't feel the need to be making an income (however small) in order to prove something about her worth, her right to exist.

If this were a movie called When Katy Met Mary, my next line would have to be, "I'll have what she's having."

Anything you've been made to feel guilty about, when it's nobody's business but yours?

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