In the Pink

Christmas shopping is not one of the things Dearly Beloved and I do well together.  I think it’s the man thing. . . .

“Go to the mall. . . NOW??? (hyperventilate, gasp, wheeze) Not NOW!”

We’ve already had this conversation several times.  He likes to do all his shopping Christmas Eve, when the merchandise looks like roadkill and “his kind” (read husbands) fill the aisles.

Thus, when he announced he was going Christmas shopping yesterday–before Thanksgiving, for goodness’ sakes–I was mystified.

Wha’ the. . . ?

Five grandsons,  our kids and their spouses–three guys, three girls.  He’d find something for all of them, he told me, unless I said otherwise.

Where was this shopper’s paradise where he could find something for everyone?

The pro shop at the golf course.

“Maybe just concentrate on the three guys,”  I suggested, picturing the three-year-old opening a dozen golf balls for Christmas.

He accomplished his mission quickly, returning with three golf shirts made of that fabric he says golfers love.  So do golfers’ wives; the shirts don’t require ironing.  Size in our family is simple–the guys all want XL and all the girls are S.   (For size purposes, consider me a guy.)

“The colors may be a problem,”  I told him.   He’d gotten one white, one black, one pink.  It was that last one that concerned me.   DB wears pink, looks great in pink, and the talking heads on TV often wear pink shirts or ties.  But our guys?  I didn’t think so.

DB dashed off an e-mail to the girls:

Today, before leaving the beach, I bought a golf shirt for each of your husbands.  The shirts are exactly alike except for the color; 1 black, 1 white and 1 pink.  Mary is not sure any of your men would like the pink.  I like the pink.  I’ve had many pink golf shirts and liked them all.  Of course I wore some in the day when polyester lime green pants were popular.  However I’ve worn many since, and have had many pink dress shirts.  Boo gave me a pink tie that I still have.

The question is:  are any of your men not man enough to wear pink?

Daughter-in-law wrote back immediately:

M has a pink button up shirt that he wears frequently…he is DEFINITELY man enough to wear pink!   :)

Next came a note from Pogo:

Husband is not.  Middle son is.

(Pogo has three sons.  The oldest one wears anything as long as it’s comfortable.  It can be inside out, too small, too large.  He doesn’t care.  Middle son, the slugger who looks like a young James Dean, makes Ralph Lauren look like a slob.  Don’t try to get him to ditch the belt  or he’ll knock your block off.  Youngest son prefers nudity.  Hand-me-downs are useless in that family.)

Daughter Boo sent regrets, also.

I’m embarrassed to say it, but C is not man enough.  I have tried to help him become comfortable with his own macho by giving him pink shirts in the past.  Alas, they still hang in the closet...

DB took it all in stride.  He responded:

Thanks for your quick responses.  Looks like M  is the winner.  I’ll keep C and K in black, white, tan and light blue until their sons show them what THEY can do.   I’m glad more than you know.  I almost got a purple and a light green and white stripe instead of the black and white ones.

Oh well, he can still exercise his creativity when he buys my gift on Christmas Eve.

I’m sure those colors will be available.

(

(“Pinkie” by Sir Thomas Lawrence)

They Don’t Eat Goldfish in Ireland?

A few weeks ago when I mentioned in a post that grandson Elmo snacked on Goldfish, Stephanie W, a blogger in Ireland, was taken aback and quickly dashed off a Comment.  She was thinking  “much beloved pet” and I was talking Pepperidge Farm.  I sent her a picture of a bag of the little crackers to ease her mind.

It’s always fun to hear from her (how I love Internet!)  and she sometimes e-mails incidents from her own life that parallel things that have happened to me.   (Steff, tell ‘em about the snails!)

When Dearly Beloved and I were at the beach this week, we went out for lunch and something there made me think of SteffiW.

It is a lovely restaurant with wonderful views of the ocean, but we opted to eat on the pier even though it was a cloudy day.

We could see all the surfers.  Hmmm. . . don’t they have classes on Fridays?

Don’t drop crumbs!  The birds perched on the pier railings and or flew overhead to dive for any abandoned food.  The wisdom of umbrellas on a cloudy day became obvious.

Someone was having a birthday.

Our server took our orders and said he’d bring us something to nibble on while we were waiting for our food.  No, not Goldfish.

(Are you ready, Stephanie?)

He brought us a basket of . . . (drum roll, please. . . !)

↓                   ↓                     ↓

HUSH PUPPIES!

Not to worry,  these aren’t the tails of too-noisy dogs!  Just bits of batter, deep- fried.  Not heart- or hip-healthy, but seductively tasty.  Like popcorn, you just keep dipping in!

I asked the waiter for a box so that I could take some of the Hush Puppies back to the dog. (Oh, the irony…!)

DB was suspicious when I put the little cup of whipped butter in the box, too, that I might not be exposing my true motives.

Waste not, want not.

Miss Piggy loves Hush Puppies.  She makes her little moaning noises–piggy sounds–when she eats one.  (Yes, only one!)

It’s a cute name, don’t you think?

Much better than ShutUP Dogs!

Beach Wedding

For a couple of weeks, we have been wedding dress-sitting.  We were chosen because we had space in our closet and no curious cats.   Yesterday–the wedding eve–the dress was picked up by the “Man of Honor.”  Time for a wedding!

Outdoor weddings in November are not for the faint of heart.  The weather has been “iffy” this week.  Showers, fog, clouds, patches of sunshine.

This morning, Miss Piggy and I headed to the beach while it was still dark so that I could take a picture of the sunrise.  Surely, there would be one!   Getting up before dawn was the easy part.  Miss Piggy does not like the click of the camera.   She peed, she pooped, she yanked her leash, she jiggled my arm.

“Suck it up,” I told her.  “Just a couple more minutes.”

And then my camera battery went dead.

Frankly, Miss Piggy  looked guilty.  I just can’t figure out how she did it.

The sun rose brilliantly without my documenting it and quickly warmed the morning to the mid-60’s, but there was still the wind. . . .  Most of the wedding guests had worn a jacket or shawl.  The only one without a wrap was the bride .  She wasn’t cold; she was GLOWING.

You may be seated:

Lovely music!

Who is wearing the veil. . . dad or daughter?

The wind caused us to lose the bride for a minute during the ceremony.  Everybody helped in the rescue, including the minister.  The groom looked relieved.

After the ceremony, the photographer took photos of the families while the guests were invited inside for coffee and pastries.

I thought it would be cute to include this little picture, but somehow this shapshot has ended up as my Desktop wallpaper.  I don’t know how to get him off my Desktop.When the photographs were finished, we moved into the ballroom for a lovely sit-down buffet.

We have known the bride since she was a little girl, watched her grow up just two houses away.

Dearly Beloved loves her laugh.  It gurgles and bubbles and spills forth in deep, throaty little hiccoughs.   It’s a great laugh.   We do not know her new husband well, but he is polite, hard-working, kind, and handsome.  He has a nice laugh, too.

That’s our wish for them. . . may they always laugh together.

“I dropped a tear in the ocean,  and whenever they find it I’ll stop loving you, only then.”
- Anonymous

Yucky Yucca and Elmo

We have, around here,  the good, the bad, the ugly. . . and the things gone very wrong.

About a dozen years ago our Memphis neighbor left an ugly yucca plant in a plastic quart container on our front porch.  She claimed that she was allergic and said to throw it out if I didn’t want it.  I didn’t. . . but I couldn’t.

Personally, I think she was allergic to its ugly condition and didn’t want to tend to it.  Sucker that I was,  I repotted it and now the still ugly plant resides at the beach-house-not-on-the-beach where it is over-watered when we’re here and parched when we’re not.

The only other plant here, a jade, suffers a similar fate.  If the jade tree gets in a snit,  it drops a branch and I pick it up, apologize, jam it back into the pot, and water it.  It forgives me, takes root,  and all is well.  While it’s not a pretty plant, it’s not eating the house.

But the yucca?  It was munching on the sunroom ceiling when we returned this time:

Son and Daughter-in-law said it would be great in their Virginia loft.  They think it is striking with its stark, naked steams.  I think it’s just stark naked.

Getting it there would be interesting.  If you’re driving a semi- to Virginia anytime soon, let me know and I’ll put it out by the curb for pickup.

Dearly Beloved wheeled it around our deck in search of higher ceilings.  Getting the darned thing through doorways was not easy.  He was not thrilled that I was following with a camera instead of a helping hand.

Twenty feet, Baby!  Knock yourself out,  Skinny Minnie!

Speaking of things gone wrong. . . real knitters should stop reading at this point.

Several months ago I began knitting a sweater for Elmo, the youngest grandson.  He was two at the time, so of course I cast on a size 6.

The unisex pattern pictured a multi-colored yoke but I thought that looked a little girly.  Not to mention that I wouldn’t have the faintest idea how to do it.  I’d have had to cast on a size 14 and watch how-to videos for 10 years.

Unfortunately, omitting the pattern makes the decreases jump out and my mistakes show more easily, but that was the least of my problems.

When I saw Elmo in October and tried it on him, he couldn’t get his hands through the too-tight cuffs.  Or button it at the neck.  Solution: tear them out,  learn stretchy bindoff,  loosen up, and redo all of that.

My problems didn’t end there.  Like when I redid the sleeves,  it took me days to realize I’d screwed up the cuffs.   See how long it takes you to see it, non-knitter.  Arrggghhh!

“Leave it,” DB said.  “He’ll know that Grandmary made it for him.  No one will notice.”

Not notice Elmo?  Not likely.

Wednesday on the Waterway

It’s Wednesday on the Intracoastal Waterway.  Where is everybody?  There is always at least one boat motoring out here!

There are always boats!   Looks like the little guy is king of the waterways today.

There’s more action going on overhead:

Maybe the pirate flag is keeping everyone at bay.  (Take my word for it–it’s a skull and crossbones.)

Time to open the floodgates and let the big guys in.   Make that the drawbridge.

Going south!

It has a motor, all right, but. . . um. . . what IS it?

Anybody need a tow?

What do you mean, this picture doesn’t belong here?  It’s what got MY motor going!

For more Outdoor Wednesday blogs, visit A Southern Daydreamer.

Watching Like a Hawk

An article in Saturday’s paper about hawks preying upon songbirds caught my eye because I’ve seen a hawk in our yard occasionally…atop the basketball goal and in the crape myrtle tree.   Dearly Beloved and I had assumed it was trolling for squirrels and chipmunks–the same furry critters which ate every single strawberry on our plants last year.  I’ve seen nothing, but admit that rather than allowing rodenticide to happen on our watch, we may have opted to turn a blind eye.

But now this. . . !

I hung this little birdhouse last week to remind myself that below it is where I’d planted a little dogwood I’d found among the ferns in the front garden.  I had no idea we’d immediately have renters, especially in mid-November.

Several houses ago, we had a large kitchen/keeping room combination, and when I contracted a mild case of “country-itis,” I had a friend paint this little birdhouse to match the everyday dishes we used.  It sat on a shelf in the hutch with the dishes.

Neither the dishes nor the birdhouse have been used for years.  When I dug it out of the garage and hung it on a whim, I never dreamed that any bird would be interested in such flashy, retro quarters.

This scene is just plain wrong!  Talk about being cocky!

This hawk was so brazen that it simply yawned and ignored all the arm flapping I did from the safety of the deck. It  finally flew off, probably for a pedicure, only after I got close enough to practically smell its hawk breath, but its message was clear:   “I’ll be baaaack!”

What now?

We have several bird feeders hanging around our back yard as well as the fountain where the robins line up with their little towels and flip flops as they await their turn in the communal bath.  This could become a blood bath!  What now, indeed!

Although I’m a bird lover, I’ve been frustrated with my fine-feathered friends lately. I’ve wanted to call fowl foul several times, especially in a nearby grocery store.

Not just a small corner market, this is the “flagship” of the largest chain of supermarkets in our area, the chain my midwestern transplant neighbor calls Hairy Tweeter.   (It’s better not think about it.)

Some weeks ago I was flying through the aisles and noticed bird noises…noises coming not through speakers, but from the overhead beams.  Not just a bird, mind you, and perhaps not a flock, but I believe Alfred Hitchcock could have shot footage there.

I steered clear of the deli section, the produce department, the bakery, and the pet food aisles.

Last week the lure of triple coupon redemption pushed aside my bird memory and I returned to the store.  I was merrily pushing my cart along when something ahead of me moved under the toe-kick area of the cereal shelves.

Holy crap, a mouse…?!  I went weak-kneed.

Nope–it was a bird, looking for God-knows-what on the floor.  Two aisles over I encountered another one on a low fly-in and watched it disappear under a cookie shelf.

Enough!  Triple coupons or not, I headed for checkout.

I don’t know about their other customers, but I prefer that any birds where I buy groceries be plucked and packaged.  Isn’t there a law?  Somebody check those health inspection rules.

It isn’t hard to figure out how the birds get in and I can see how the chain might have a real dilemma in getting rid of them, but surely someone hasn’t come up with the birdbrained idea to do nothing.

Here it is in a nutshell:  a hawk preys upon birds I’ve invited into our yard at the same time, uninvited birds turn my grocery store into a biohazard.  I’m apt to go batty!

It’s enough to put me off chicken indefinitely.  Not only that, I’m boycotting that supermarket.  I don’t want to have to watch like a hawk to make sure I don’t get pooped upon.

After all, I’m nobody’s pigeon.

Powerless

Last night, Dearly Beloved and I had another Fireside Chat.  We didn’t need it as we’d had a perfectly good one earlier in the day, but as we were enjoying a glass of wine (before the dinner I hadn’t yet prepared) the power went out.  Something about the noise we heard as the lights flickered four times sounded ominous.  It was the sound of a long goodbye–a transformer blowing–as in might as well pour yourself another glass of wine.

We are not good sports about power outages.  There are far too many.  A recorded voice on the hotline informed me that there were numerous outages in the area due to weather conditions and that it would be repaired by 10 PM.

The Duke Energy above-ground wiring syndrome struck again.  We don’t remember our power ever going out during all the storms we experienced during our years in the midwest.  Here, it’s more times than we care to recall.  Trees and wires, especially in winter, don’t mix.  Here is our backyard:

We turned on the gas fireplace and pulled out some old Christmas candles.  Matches are hard to find around here and I tripped over Miss Piggy as I was looking for them.   Miss Piggy takes “being underfoot” to an art form.  She does not embrace a change of routine unless it involves food or a car ride.  Lights out?  She’d already had supper; it must be bedtime.  She headed back to her bed in our room.

The candles and firelight weren’t bright enough to read, do puzzles, or knit by, so we had a fireside chat.  We worked our way through an analysis of  cable news which took about five seconds: shameful. We agreed that our favorite news commentary is the few minutes on Friday nights that Mark Shields and David Brooks discuss issues on PBS news hour.   After them we’ll take Jon Stewart… and that says plenty about the state of television news.

That resolved, we moved on to Afghanistan.

Watching the President at the ceremonies this week–at Fort Hood,  the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, and Arlington Cemetery–we were struck by how the man carries heavily the decision he must make about Afghanistan.   Are there any possible solutions there?  We don’t see one, but we are grateful for  Obama’s thoughtful consideration.  Dithering?  Not on your life.  Or someone else’s.

DB assumed prone position on the sofa.  Might as well;  dinner wasn’t going to happen.  I couldn’t even manage a sandwich for us because we were out of bread.  Lash me with a wet noodle; any good Southerner rushes out to get bread and milk at the first sign of bad weather.  I need to assemble a box of emergency supplies.

DB invited me over to snuggle with him and even took the back cushions off the sofa so that I could get both butt cheeks beside him.  Unfortunately, as I leaned over to lie down,  a little flatulence (chili bean alert!) spoiled the moment.  So embarrassing.

Yes. My bad.  I pooted.

That’s not something we do around here and he was genuinely shocked, which sent me into a fit of nervous giggles. Only a couple of 12-year-olds could manage to make such a to-do over a bit of wind.  ( It was not unprecedented, however.  For THAT time, go here.)

So much for the snuggly moment.  I gave up and returned to the loveseat.  All the laughter was putting me at risk for further misfires.

DB, taking his cues from Miss Piggy, went back to bed, but I waited up until after 10, hoping that the power would be restored in order to cut the lights off before I went to bed.   There is only so much contemplation a person can do alone by the fireside, however.  My navel failed to hold my attention.

Finally, I had a banana and a glass of wine.  Dinner.  I don’t recommend it.  Then I took my little candle back to the bedroom and went to bed.

I don’t count sheep; I analyze Miss Piggy’s snoring sounds.   Garrison Keillor could use her sounds on his radio show.  There’s the cow noise… the banshee…the squeaking inner-sanctum door, and the loudest… snow plow blade scraping the pavement.  At one point, DB burst into snore song, too, and I lay there grinning, wishing I had a recorder handy because he, of course, does not snore.  Or fart.  Or cuss.  Or make untidy messes.

That in no way is meant to make him sound prissy.  Far from it.  Mr. Jock is simply a man of strong will.  Mr. Jock also never pushed out three big-headed babies.

Note to self:  Add Beano to emergency kit.  It’s romance we want in the air.

Fireside Chats

We may need a refresher course in conversation around here.

We also need for it to stop raining so that one of us can get outside.   Two days of being inside with a wet-smelling, snoring, farting dog is wearing thin.  All three of us need some exercise–especially Miss Piggy.

Dearly Beloved is reading Beach Music, having just finished Conroy’s new book and enjoying both, despite the fact that neither was another Prince of  Tides. He had been boycotting Conroy’s books because, he reasoned, there could never be another Prince of Tides. Besides, just hearing the name Pat Conroy reminds him of the movie The Prince of Tides and he hated that.  He feels that Barbra Streisand butchered it.

“Maybe not the same,” I’d told him. “But Beach Music is very good.”

I read the book when it first came out and can’t remember enough now to discuss it with him.  I think he’s suspicious that perhaps I did not read deeply enough.  Reading fiction is one of his retirement enjoyments, but he takes his reading seriously.

Maybe he’s right.  I read for enjoyment; he’s the one that looks for symbolism, parallels, allegories, metaphors, and anything to get inside the writer’s head.

Last night I was watching something on TV and he asked me would I mind turning it down a little so that he could concentrate on his book.  He was over in the sunroom in The Reading Chair.  That is the only thing one should be doing in The Reading Chair, unless one dozes accidentally.  That is the way his mind works.  I knit, do Sudokus, even write e-mails in The Reading Chair.  Furthermore, I often read on the sofa.  All sacrilege on my part.

What can I say. . . ?  I’m a wild and crazy woman.

So I turned down the television and he began explaining something about how one had to absorb the words with Conroy because it’s obvious that he selected each one after careful consideration.  I can picture Pat plucking just the right adjective from his bonbon box of literary delights.

That was fine. . . blah, blah. . . I was trying to reknit a sweater vest because the neckline was too tight to go over my grandson’s head.  I had visions of making five by Christmas. HA!   So I’m concentrating on the knitting and he informs me, “His sentences are so long.  I’ll bet this next one has fifty words.  I’ll count them.”

I wait while he counts the words.  If I don’t, I’ll screw up what I’m doing.

“32 words,” he calls out. “I’ll count the next one.”

“NO!” I shrieked.  “It doesn’t MATTER!”

I’m not making fun of him, implying that he’s dense.  I’m making fun of him because that’s so MAN-ish of him!  What would he say if I told him that this vest has 53 stitches I am about to bind off in a super stretchy bind-off for the first time?   I learned it from watching a video.  Would he give this accomplishment the proper respect?

Of course not.  In the first place, I learned from watching the video and reading instructions.  That nullifies my accomplishment right there.   Men never read instructions.

He offered to fix lunch for us earlier since I was in the middle of another project.  I had a package of three-cheese tortellini in the fridge.  He doesn’t have much of a cooking repertoire, but this required three minutes or so of cooking, grabbing some basil leaves from the plant on the screened porch, and tossing it all in olive oil.   He does it well and we like it.

Today, he added some sundried tomato bits and they were a little crunchy.

“You could soak those in boiling water for a bit,” I said innocently.

He looked a little surprised that I would offer advice to the Chef de Cuisine.   I backtracked.  “I mean,  just read the instructions on the container.”

I swear to you that he put up his arms in a cross sign, warding off the hex I was casting.

“READ the instructions?  NEVER!”

THAT is the man thing in fulll bloom.  Well. . . not exactly, but you know what I mean.

A few minutes ago he asked me was I writing e-mails.

“No.  I’m doing a blog.”

“What’s it about?”

I flicked my index finger toward him and he came to read the first few paragraphs over my shoulder.  Here is what he said:

“South of Broad.    That’s the name of the book I just finished.  You should mention the name of his book.   I also read My Losing Season.  You should add that, too.”

He started to say something else, then stopped in mid-sentence.

“I’m proving your point, aren’t I?”

I love it when we have these chats.

Information Specialist At Your Service

Watching the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall has stirred up some memories for us.  Considering that we’ve never even been to Germany, Dearly Beloved and I inadvertently became part of a mystery that involved that wall about 23 years ago.

One of the largest industries in our state is tourism and for several years my friend Martha and I worked locally as “Information Specialists.”  Sounds impressive maybe, but after several rounds of budget cuts in intervening years, many of those positions on the state level were eliminated and outsourced to the women’s prison.  Call with a tourism question and you’re apt to get a prisoner.  Back then, though, we did our jobs enthusiastically, carried around  business cards with our high-falutin’  job titles and hey, we were free range!

Most questions were routine, but we answered with flair.  Once, when a woman called for directions to the sports arena I asked her where she would be coming from so that I’d know how to route her.  I meant what local address, but she answered, “Indiana.”  I should have clarified, but since we’d driven from NC through Indiana many times and I knew it by heart,  I directed her over the Ohio River, through Kentucky and Tennessee, highway by highway, and delivered her to the door of the coliseum.

She wasn’t even impressed.  Just said, “Thanks” and hung up, like that’s the answer she expected.  Sometimes, though, the answers weren’t even what WE expected.

When a handsome young man came into the office one summer day and asked, in precise English but with a pronounced German accent, how to get to a small mountain town a couple of hours away, he wasn’t asking for directions, but for transportation options.  Because he was under 21, he was unable to rent a car even though he had the funds.  There was no bus nor train service; it was an isolated little place.  The short answer was, “You can’t get there from here.“

When we asked why he was going, hoping to steer him toward more accessible areas of similar interest, he opened his backpack and, from a neat folder, pulled out a copy of a birth certificate.  His father’s birth certificate.  An American soldier father he’d been trying for years to find.   One of the few clues he had was on the certificate: his father’s place of birth.  The little mountain town he couldn’t reach.

Having never known my own father, his story pushed buttons in me I didn’t even know I had.  He had managed to come all the way from Germany to North Carolina and it seemed incredible that lack of bus service would stymie his efforts.  He was a slightly built young man and even though his English was excellent,  hitchhiking was not a real option.  Before he left to go back to his room at the YMCA, I had promised to drive him to the little town that weekend.

We went, we saw, we found nothing.   A couple of old-timers there had only the faintest recollection of a family by that name, but they’d moved away decades before.

Monday he was back at the office again, pulling out more papers, including copies of some of his father’s military records.

His story was baffling.  He had been born and raised in East Germany, getting out by proving to authorities that he had an American father.  He had been living with his mother’s brother in a West German city.  He had not seen his East Berlin mother and older brother for several years.

“She must miss you!”

“She is COMMUNIST!” he answered, scornfully.

We continued our search, but it is difficult to explain exactly what that entailed because truthfully, I don’t remember all the steps.  I talked to military people, law enforcement,  DMV personnel.  My “Information Specialist” title of a government agency took on new importance when I didn’t specify “tourism.”

The phone calls took me across the country and eventually a sheriff on the west coast agreed to assist.  He  could not give me information directly,  but would send a deputy to leave a message at a home belonging to someone with the name we were seeking.

About 10 PM that night the phone rang and a deep male voice told me he had found a message from the sheriff to call his daughter at my phone number.  He said he didn’t have a daughter.   I explained that I had been seeking information on behalf of a young man searching for his father.

Our conversation was odd.  He sounded guarded and suspicious, wanting to know how I had found him…and why. Was  I military?  A private detective?

He told me briefly that he had been a prisoner of war, had been involved with Radio Free Europe, had been covertly rescued by the millitary.

I had questions, too. . . prisoner of what war?  POW’s marry and have kids during their captivity?  Prisoner of whom?  Since he didn’t even HAVE a daughter, what made him call?  I found his story as baffling as he found mine.   I didn’t ask him to clarify;  it wasn’t my business.  I was helping a teenager  find his father.  Did I have the right guy?

Yes!

I gave him the phone number of the Y and the next day,  the young man appeared at the office again, smiling broadly. “I talked to my father!   I’m going to see him!”

He had to go back to Germany for his university classes though, and would have to do so on another trip.  We saw him twice more in the ensuing months and he told us that his newly discovered father was a west coast news anchor.   He also traveled to meet a cadre of aunts and uncles all over the country, becoming enmeshed with the family he had been seeking.

After a couple of years, we lost track of him, but when the Berlin Wall came down a few years later,  I couldn’t help but wonder whether he and his mother would be reunited.

He’d have to do it without my help.  I couldn’t handle a trans-Atlantic search.  Besides, by then I was no longer working in tourism.   But someplace behind bars, an Information Specialist with literal–if not conventional–ties to law enforcement, could perhaps make a few calls. . . .

Sign On. . . Sign Off

I know better than to talk about religion, yet here I go.

A minister friend once reassured me in my stumbling faith, “Would you really want a God you could understand?” I “got” that.  If we are so sure we know what God thinks, that puts Her/Him on our level and that’s waaaay too scary to contemplate.  God’s gotta be smarter than that.

What I don’t get are people who are so certain they have all the answers that they use their religion as a club.  I mean that both ways, as in, “I’m part of this group and I’m going to beat you upside the head with it.“

Now that you know my point of reference, I have to tell you that I am baffled at some of the displays of religious fervor that I see here in the South.  That is saying something, considering that my own first cousin had a neon “Jesus Died Here” sign in her front yard.

For instance, in the soda shop we frequent because it uses my favorite kind of finely crushed ice in its Diet Cokes, hangs a framed dollar bill bearing Jesus’ face instead of George Washington’s, right by the cash register and the tip jar.  What, pray tell, is the message there?

On our ride to the beach, we travel along a street of beautiful old historic homes in one of the small towns on our route.  One has had a very large wooden JESUS LOVES YOU sign in the front yard for years. Does having that sign there help the neighbors feel the love?

Further along the route is a big truck with a sign board on the side.  The top line features a message that Jesus saves and beneath it,  Storage lockers, $1.  It makes for a fascinating mental image if you think about it.

When I was about ten years old,  Congress added “…under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance.   I remember feeling confused, not because I didn’t believe in God, but because we were learning about how our forefathers left England in search of religious freedom…including the right to have no religion.  Adding those words to the pledge didn’t make me feel more patriotic or more Christian.  Not then, not now.

Back to our last trip to the beach:

When I couldn’t find a radio station that wasn’t political and/or religious,  I simply stuck in a CD.  The Jesus fish on business ads and company trucks?   I don’t play Go Fish when I need a plumber.  The church sign denouncing Halloween as a day for worshiping Satan?  No surprise there.

It takes a lot to stop me in my tracks, but in a strip mall, between TJMaxx and Lowe’s Foods,  a shop sign hawking nail care, belts, wigs, cosmetics,  jewelry, hair extensions, purses, and more, gobsmacked me.

What th’. . . ?

I had to make a U-turn to look again at their sequential signs:

The next message featured a pink, sparkly JESUS is the answer, but was too light to photograph.

Next messages announced that they offered GIFT CARDS and Layaway.

Ah, the choices. . . !  Need some place to keep it all?

I know where you can rent a storage locker for a buck.