Brennan Manning

We just now found out through a friend at our church in Los Angeles that Brennan Manning, my number one favorite Christian writer, spoke at a recent retreat. Ragamuffin Gospel and Abba's Child changed my life, absolutely. I was excited to hear that his talks at the retreat are online for download. I haven't listened to them yet, but I wanted to put the word out to any other ragamuffins who might be interested in hearing a Seasonal dose of grace.

Go here to listen. You'll get to hear lines like this one:

"Aristotle said I'm a rational animal. I say I'm an angel with an incredible capacity for beer. That's the real Brennan."

PS: Our friend Dave suggested turning the volume way up, as Mr. Manning has gotten pretty feeble of late and mumbles/slurs sometimes.

Blood!

This has been making us laugh...

A Thing of Beauty is a Joy Forever

My friend Melissa gave us this quilt last week as an early Christmas gift. She made it herself. The only thing I've ever sewn in my life, at age 19 because my mother made me, was a tent dress made with fabric in the "kountry kitchen" style with chicken feed labels and black-eyed pea cans all over it. I think it was supposed to be used for curtains...very ugly curtains. And I got carpal tunnel syndrome in my wrists and forearms from the sewing experience, so I haven't gone back to it since. Because I'm so lacking in crafty talent, I'm always impressed by people like Melissa who manage to put such beautiful things together with their own heads and hands.

It got me thinking about a few beautiful things in my life lately, starting with this quilt. You can check out the other things Melissa has available at her shop at etsy. She sells a lot of things in stores around Portland too. I'm proud of her and the way she manages to work full time, take care of her gorgeous kids, and make such beautiful things.

Another beautiful thing can be found here, at the blog of a 2007 Photobloggies Award nominee. The other nominees are great too, but hers is my favorite.

I find these prints, made by fellow Gladney-ite Jana, especially beautiful and meaningful. I think she needs to do more of these because she's very good at it. Then she can teach me how to do them.

I must have a thing for men in period costumes because I find this, this, and this oh so dashing and gorgeous (I'm the lucky girl actually married to one of these men!).

Finally, I've always loved ballet, ever since I was a little girl (pre-fat days) and met Kathy Thibodeaux right before her performance in The Nutcracker. I thought she was the most beautiful thing I'd ever set my young eyes on. Not long after that, the movie Six Weeks, starring Dudley Moore, Mary Tyler Moore (who I thought looked just like my mom in this movie), and Katherine Healy, came out, and I'd watch it every time it came on HBO. I always loved this scene as a little girl, thinking that playing Clara would have been the best thing in the entire world. And (spoiler alert), no matter how many times I saw it, I cried every time I saw this scene because I knew her days were numbered. I loved this movie.

Good Samaritan

Ted has this habit of getting into the car, turning the ignition, putting the car in gear, and then clicking his seatbelt on after he's already started driving. When he does this, I tend to make the Marge Simpson sigh/growl, which he knows is his reminder that I prefer he not get killed or maimed in a car accident. He doesn't do it as much as he used to, and maybe after what happened this week to my mom, he'll remember even more.

My mom, seen here dancing with Ted at our wedding, came upon a wreck one morning this week on her early-morning drive to work. Cars ahead of her were swerving off to the shoulder to avoid the wreckage, so she did the same. Once she stopped, she saw that one young woman was standing outside her car next to the body of a man curled in fetal position on the side of the road.

My mom told my little brother to stay in the car (he rides to school with her) while she got out to check on the man. The paramedics had been called, but this man was in bad shape, and Momma said she couldn't just stand there and do nothing.

She's been a registered nurse for more than thirty years, so she knew what to do but felt frustrated by her lack of equipment. She'd had experience in trauma cases like this before, but only in an emergency room, not on the side of a freeway. She found that he had a pulse but his breathing was very labored. The young woman standing next to him had seen the accident and said that she counted ten times that the man bounced on the pavement before stopping. He'd not been wearing a seatbelt and had been thrown from the truck. Obviously, he was in bad shape.

So my mom weighed the options, and she knew that, despite her lack of gloves and anything sterile, she couldn't live with herself if she didn't at least help him breathe. So she said a prayer, asking God to protect her from the risk of contaminated blood and with her bare hands, cleared his air passageway. He took a deep breath then, but his pulse was weakening, and by this time firemen had arrived and could move him onto a board.

After they'd done this, my mom could see the full extent of his massive injuries and started doing chest compressions. She continued doing this while hearing the local news stations' helicopters flying overhead. (She told me today how angry she felt then, thinking 1. how intrusive this was to the injured man and his family and 2. how ridiculous it is that news stations have the money for helicopters but hospitals don't and that things could have gone much differently if a medical chopper could have whisked him away rather than having to wait for an ambulance to make its way through miles of stalled traffic).

The medics finally arrived, but quickly after getting him into the ambulance, they pronounced him dead. My mom turned and saw the same young woman standing there watching all of this, so she went to her, put her arm around her violently shaking shoulders and asked how she was. She had never seen someone die before. My mom then got back into her car and realized for the first time how cold she was--she'd not noticed until getting back into the heated car that it was only 32 degrees outside. She and my brother drove back home so that she could clean herself up.

I was so proud of my mother and get teary every time I think about what happened. Of all the people who could have happened so quickly upon this accident, my mom couldn't have been more perfect for that situation. Not only did she know exactly what to do, but she did it with compassion. Upon first feeling the man's pulse, she had a bystander go find some I.D. so that she could address him by name. She leaned next to him and spoke directly to him, calling him by name and letting him know that he wasn't alone. As awful as this accident was, it's also good that hopefully he knew that a caring someone was there with him in his final moments.

He was 27 years old, with a wife and son.

We were talking today about what happened, and one thing Momma said was that she was making sure from now on that she had a box of latex gloves in her car, plus a first aid kit and a blanket. We were also talking about the importance of more people having at least a basic understanding of CPR and first aid. She was telling me how simple it can actually be to keep someone alive in the crucial minutes it takes for help to arrive and how any average Joe could do it. Apparently most fire stations will give free classes on CPR if you can organize a group of people to come. This has inspired me to try to get one of these classes together in our neighborhood.

All this got me thinking about the practical side of being a good samaritan. It's not just having compassion and generosity, though those things are certainly important. If I have a giving heart, I should also have in my car things like a first aid kit, latex gloves, a small box of nonperishable food, a list of all the shelters in my area, a blanket to give to someone who is cold, an extra hat and coat too.

I'm not sure how to wrap this up except to say how proud I am to be my mother's daughter. She's been a hero to many, like the countless special needs foster kids she's taken care of through the years and the family whose father she gave one of her kidneys to (yes, you heard me right--she gave away her kidney, and she's a bone marrow donor too). This week, she rose once again to the occasion, being the comforting hands and voice to someone crossing over, to someone who would have died alone had she not been there to gently say his name.

Please wear your seatbelt.

Pudgy

Because this is who I was as a 10-year-old...

(notice napkin firmly in place for next feeding)

...I can laugh at things like this, knowing my inner fat-kid now knows her way around an eliptical trainer and does yoga:

Fat Kid Successfully Avoids Ridicule By Swimming With Shirt On

Little Tykes

The couple we have staying with us this week through Hospitality Club make me feel old. I like them and all, but it's hard for me to get used to the fact that I'm not in my mid-20's anymore like they are. They both have this "youthful optimism" (to use a cliche) and wide-eyed wonder at a lot of things, like all the vegetarian offerings at Trader Joe's and the surround-sound in our basement (which the previous owners of our house installed).

They both just returned from their stints in Peace Corps-Macedonia, so they're in that weird reentry culture shock that I so much remember. It's nice though--they think nothing of walking the little trek from our house to the closest light-rail station and they came on this trip to Portland with the attitude of "Yes! We will move here! We will get jobs and find an apartment all this week!"

They go to bed early and get up early and cook big eggy breakfasts before setting off on their days, which are no doubt full of optimism. Even the weather seemed to follow them: it'd been downpouring for days before they came but the sun came out on their first morning here. Granted, it's raining again today, but I'm sure they're taking it in stride. They've got their love to keep them dry.

And interestingly, they were just visiting last week with a Macedonian Peace Corps recruiter who I knew in Slovakia. He taught me to make cucumber salad. I even have a picture of Igor on this salad-making day to show them. Small world, as they say.

Another little tyke we've taken in this week is a blind/deaf cat who showed up at our church Sunday morning. I have no idea what to do with this thing. He was shivering and wet and oh so pathetic, so of course we brought him home. We bathed him and fed him and didn't complain too bad when he pooped out some weird, hard stuff with lots of hair in it onto our bathmat (sorry for being so gross). He's still a kitten and is actually pretty cute, but he makes me so so so sad.

Since Sunday, he's perked up a bit. His poops are more normal (I know this because he won't go in the box, only on the floor--though he will pee in the box, which means I get to clean poo every day, hurray!) and he's been trying to explore his surroundings a bit more by walking head-down until he bumps his head on a wall.

I really don't know what to do with him. I've tried giving him to one of the "no-kill" shelters, but they're all full, and I know the chances of some kind soul choosing a blind kitten to take home from the humane society are pretty slim. No one has claimed him from the ad I put on craigslist either. I keep hoping I can find someone in a retirement home to take him. He's just the most vulnerable, helpless little thing, not an ounce of scrappy stray-cat in him. Sigh.

*

According to the Breedlove's countdown, we're now on week 11 or something Waiting. Just so you know.

I leave you with this clip I sneaked during the preshow of the play Ted just finished directing. He led the preshow for the first two performances. I call this piece "Christmas Gusto." I wish you all could see the energy that man has on stage.

The Richest Man in Town

"...And we shall walk through all our days with love remembered and love renewed."

We had lunch today with a charming man, the father of Ted's high school girlfriend. Ted hadn't seen Mr. Miller in decades, and he came to our church Sunday just to find Ted. He lives with his wife in and is the chaplain of an assisted living home. His lovely wife has Lou Gehrigs Disease and can no longer walk or speak. You should see the light in her eyes though. That woman sparkles. The two of them have their own repertoire of signs to communicate with each other, and the love they have for each other is so apparent. The drawing here was done by one of their grandchildren and hangs outside the door to their apartment.

He reminds me a bit of my Grandaddy (who went on to heaven in 2001). I was riding in the car with Grandaddy one day when I was in college, and we saw Granny coming home on the same street. The two of them slowed down, rolled down their windows, and talked for a moment about the event that Granny was returning from. As Grandaddy and I drove away, he said, "Lori, your grandmother is the most beautiful woman God ever created." And that was that.

Mr. Miller used to be a traveling salesman. Some days were harder than others. He is blind in one eye, and has both one bad leg and one bad arm due to childhood polio. One evening at the end of a lean few days of meager sales, he expressed his weariness to his wife, even wondering if he should give up. She said that with their combined three eyes, three legs, and three arms, they should be alright. They were. In the few hours I've spent with them, I can see that these people have lived their lives well.

A friend was telling me today about the importance of surrounding ourselves with people who inspire us, who will challenge us to live better. She's right, and I feel lucky to have met the Millers.

Ted has been directing this fall a production of It's a Wonderful Life which is getting ready to open as I write this. Ted's playing piano for the "preshow" for the first few performances, so he was practicing this afternoon while I was looking through the script. I so love this story. The Actor's Co-Op did productions of the same show for the last two Christmases, both of which Ted was in, playing nine different roles including Mr. Potter and Uncle Billy. I saw several performances those two years and loved that moment during each show when the audience collectively gasped at Ted's first Mr. Potter line: it was dead-on Lionel Barrymore. I was proud of him. Each performance was such a cathartic experience for the audience (at least for me). I think people were not expecting to feel the same sentiment towards the play, yet you'd see the majority of people bawling by the end, probably even more than when watching the movie.

I got all teary reading the script today. That moment when Clarence says, "Strange isn't it? Each person's life touches so many other lives, and when he isn't around, he leaves an awful big hole, doesn't he?" gets me every time.

But the one line that makes my face scrunch up and my chest all achy more than any other, even as I type this, is Harry's toast to his brother George at the end:

To my big brother George: the richest man in town.

This is what was going on at the Rooney house today around 4:30, a woman crying over a script and a man in a suit banging away "Jingle Bells."