Halloween . . .

Quiet around this blog lately. So I thought I'd add some tidbits as we await our ghostly visitors.

Two weeks of classes and a week to finish up papers and finals left in this term. I am trying to work very steadily, because I know that if the flu arrives I will be out for a week of my own and even more should one of the kids get it. I'm very much on target, but I can't say that I'm ahead. Although if I stay healthy, that could change in a day or two.

Due to the workload, I'm reading other things that are manageable in very small chunks these days. On my "current" stack:

a book of Anne Sexton poems,

a book of Mary Oliver essays (and a few poems),

a von Balthasar book that's been lying around here for awhile.

And I picked up Rowan Williams' new book on Dostoyevsky at the library this week, but that probably needs to await the end of finals.

The Lovely Daughter has just appeared in her neon pink wig, pink graduation dress, pink Tinkerbell wings, and purple, navy, and green suede books, ready to venture forth as a pink fairy. She and the one of her friends who is also living at home this year have to go by their middle school science teacher's house. He's the one who told them, when they protested a class trip to D.C. over Halloween, that they were too old for trick or treating. Consequently, the four best friends made sure to go to his house every year while they were in high school, and it only seems appropriate that they should return as college graduates.

I got my hair cut this afternoon. Basic bob per usual. As he finished, the hairdresser asked if I'd like him to touch up my make-up. What make-up would that be, I wondered? There is another world out there.

Thirty minutes and we've only had eight trick-or-treaters. It's cold, cold enough that I reminded Gregarious Son of the year he and Chicago Son went out with another set of twin boys from their class ~ in the snow. We had a lot of fun in those days. A beauitful little girl from down the street just came by, and we discovered that she doesn't at all remember the Lovely Daughter, who babysat for her family for years. Of course, the pink wig might have something to do with it.

Well, that's my exciting life. I guess I have to go back to work and then eventually out to dinner.

Happy Halloween!

Monday, Monday

~ Started writing a blog post and did nothing else that I had planned to do early this morning.

~ Had a three-hour lunch with the associate pastor at my field ed church; very informative and not at all optimistic about call possibilities in my Presbytery.

~ Went for a walk in the cemetery; discovered that the holes are dug for our memorial bench; had a long phone conversation with a friend about a possible memorial scholarship at the kids' Montessori school; took some photos.

~ Went to a church where I sometimes sit to pray; on the way in, ran into a Jesuit I know who told me about his sister's having lost a 19-year-old son to a car accident many years ago; went inside and sat there and cried.

~ Stopped at the grocery on the way home to pick up a couple of necessities, including a pumpkin.

~ The Lovely Daughter made us stir-fry for dinner; it was very, very good.

~ Packed up for tomorrow's drive; going to try to upload some pictures. Maybe one or two will show up here.

Toes 'n Things

The really big and most important news in my life is that I have what I guess is an ingrown toenail. It is excruciating. And yes, I am going to a doctor, in Seminary City because I have more more potential free time there than I do at home, but the appointment is still 10 days away. Lots of soaking and Neosporin.

In my googling around to figure out my pathetic state and what to do about it, I found a youtube ~ a young (I presume) woman's video of her messed-up toe with her voiceover saying "Look at my toe -- owie, owie ~ it's so sore ~ owie, owie." Just how I feel! She comments that she can't believe it's her most viewed video. Misery loves company, I guess.

Toe nothwithstanding, The Lovely Daughter's Americorps colleagues came for breakfast this morning en route to Children's Hospital Down The Hill where they are hosting a Halloween party. They are all doing college counseling in Big City's Less Than Stellar School System and today's is a required service project but, required or not, they are a terrific group of young people. They left here after pancakes et al. as Peter Pan and Tinkerbell, a vampire, a fairy princess, a witch, Harry and Hermione, and I guess a couple of characters I can't remember.

I spent the rest of the morning at the local Jesuit retreat house with a woman I met when I co-led a retreat there last spring. Like me, she is without one of her adult children; in her case the mother of three of her young grandsons. We talked, not surprisingly, for two hours. There was a retreat going on at the center and we had planned a fall walk, but her hip and my toe (owie, owie) kept us inside and we found a tiny chapel in which to sit, undisturbed and undisturbing.

Nap time, I do believe.

Congratulations, Willamette '09!

The Lovely Daughter

Cum Laude

Honors in Sociology

Phi Beta Kappa

The Housemates!

The Campus!

Old Town Cafe

If you're headed for Portland, Oregon, then I suggest a meal in Scappoose!

Lisa and I "met" on AOL Journals back in the old days, four or five years ago. She's a wickedly incisive writer, whether about the pitfalls of the Republican Party or the pitfalls of small business ownership ~ and she's a fabulous cook. I've missed her writing since it's taken a back seat to the restaurant, so I was grateful for the chance to relax after the plane trip west and catch up a little.

That's the Lovely Daughter with the proprietors in the top photo, and the Lovely Daughter with her momma in the bottom -- and, oh, yeah, her dad and brother and grandparents, too.

Graduation Summary

Fabulous lunch at the Old Town Cafe with Lisa (one of my oldest blogging friends) and Matt.

Columbia River Gorge - I hiked to the TOP of Multnomah Falls!

Gardens all over the place.

Lauds at 6:30 am with the monks at Mount Angel Abbey.

Phi Beta Kappa Luncheon.

The Lovely Daughter is a cum laude college graduate!!!

Haystack Rock and birds, birds, birds ~ including harlequin ducks (here).

And then ~ Gregarious Son and I caught the Lovely Daughter's little tiny cold and got so so so sick. All we can figure is we got a ten-fold wallop from an Oregon virus we hadn't encountered before.

So . . . when I get better: pictures of my own.

Sunday Summary Ten Minutes Max

I loved doing the retreat . . . I am grateful to one of my someday-to-be-an-Episcopalian-priest CPE colleagues for showing me how to do annointings . . . wish it hadn't been so gray and chilly out . . . had some wonderful conversations . . . all indications are that it went well . . .

I am really tired and I have a lot of my own reading to catch up on . . .

CPE connections: one of the retreatants recognized me . . . she is a nurse at Giant Famous Hospital . . . we will be there tomorrow for the Lovely Daughter's eye surgery . . . my CPE supervisor will come by for awhile . . . the other retreat director had recently had heart surgery there and I have watched heart surgery there so we had much to discuss . . .

I am having a terrible time getting an internship organized for next year . . . The seminary would not let me start late this year and the church I was so excited about last year is not even thinking intern for next year thanks to the economy . . . I really need to address this problem this week . . .

Lots of people are blogging about writing and new perspectives and new disciplines and Lent . . . In another week I will have been blogging for five years and I think that should have something profound to say but I don't . . . I thought that I would perhaps have a deep and intense experience of Lent but I'm not . . . I have a ridiculous resevoir of self-discipline but no idea about perspective anymore . . .

Last week I spent a few minutes talking to someone who is in the middle of great turmoil, personally and professionally . . . she told me that if she could just get out for a peaceful walk for twenty minutes . . . I told her that she was thinking too small . . . I have been thinking about withdrawing from school and driving to the Coast . . . The Pacific Coast

Or getting on a plane for France and walking the Camino de Santiago . . . if I could just walk some hundreds of miles . . . I had always hoped to walk the Mountains-to-Sea Trail in North Carolina with Chicago Son . . . one of many things that will never happen . . .

More than ten minutes due to interruptions . . .

Monday Meanderings 10 Minutes Max

Encounters today: met with a friend to talk and do lectio for a hour or so -- restorative. Met with my grief counselor -- not sure how to characterize that. Pretty much on my own since then, but Gregarious Son just came home from work.

Long walk all the way around both Little Lakes (3.5 miles?). I was moving pretty slowly by the end. The merganser pair is still there, and when they zoomed across the lake they looked magnificent. Remembering a swimming break on a Canadian canoe trip with the boys as a family of common mergs fished nearby. Remembering the loons. There might be a loon or two on the Little Lakes soon. There is a wonderful article in the new Christian Century about God and silence, and I took it with me and prayed through it on my walk.

Drafted my Homiletics assignment. It is a challenge to preach without energy, without . . . . Just without.

Paid a couple of bills. I wish I had a bill for something fun. I don't. Washed dishes, did laundry, dissed The Shack, started to get organized to drive back to school at the crack of dawn tomorrow. Lots of driving this week, as I have my spiritual direction class back here in the middle of everything else. I am imagining how unhappy our professor is; this past week-end the Catholic Diocese announced the closing of some 40-plus parishes and her vibrant, inventive, energetic parish is one of them. Their recently restored church is magnificent and may soon be empty.

That's it; off to the post office.

Friday Five: Some Forks

Wonderful Friday Five today! Here it is, from Singing Owl:

I am at a life-changing juncture. I do not know which way I will go, but I have been thinking about the times, people and events that changed my life (for good or ill) in significant ways. For today's Friday Five, share with us five "fork-in-the-road" events, or persons, or choices. And how did life change after these forks in the road?

Obviously, the biggest fork in my road, ever, has been the sudden death of my son six months ago. But that horror of a life-changing event happened within a broad context of life, and it's that context that I want to focus on today. Herewith, five forks:

1. That first Brownie camera, received for my 9th birthday. I have experimented with photography off and on throughout my life, and it has played a big part in helping this cerebral, left-brained, language-oriented person become more attuned to how vast is the universe beyond words. I have noticed, in the six months since we lost our son, that despite the cascade of words that have come my way, most of the things which really speak to me are visual, either images themselves or words which create images.

2. The marriage. I have been married my entire adult life, since just before I turned 21. All of the things I have done as an adult have been within the confines and expansiveness of that relationship, meaning that, while sometimes my options have been limited, I have always been supported in decisions that are sometimes a little bizarre and more often than not seem to lead nowhere. I became a lawyer, a teacher, and now a seminary student, welcomed three children and said good-bye to one, all in the context of one marriage.

3. The venture into church, a Methodist church, in my late 20s. I simply woke up one morning and announced to the Quiet Husband that we needed to find a church. Who knew? In addition to serving as the foundation for a whole host of life choices, that church was the place in which we became part of a group of friends who have been family to one another for more than twenty years.

4. Great-horned owls. I first became interested in birding as a law student, when I read an article about a local guy studying and photographing nesting great-horned owls. Who could not fall in love with baby GHOs? That led to a decade-long volunteer relationship with the Museum of Natural History, my first experiences as a teacher, time up-close-and-personal with bald eagles and, most of all, a lifelong dedication to birds of all kinds.

5. The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius. After a couple of graduate courses on spirituality as expressed in literature, I signed up for a course on the Exercises and within a couple of weeks asked my professor whether he would guide me through them. With that low-key modesty characteristic of individuals of profound achievement, he simply said "Sure," never letting on, as he had not through three semesters of classes, that he is one of the giants of Ignatian interpretation. A year later, I was en route to seminary and to becoming a spiritual director myself, immersed in an experience and a tradition of prayer that have, quite simply, changed my entire being and course of life.

So that's it, five forks. All of them unexpected people, unexpected gifts.

(Image: Here.)

Over There

Today I am heading off for the funeral of my father's third wife's mother. She was 92 and has been ill for six months, but still. My first funeral since our son died. My husband went to an uncle's a few weeks ago. It seems that it was good for him to be with his family. My family is a good deal more complicated.

Sunday night we are planning to go to a Cotillion for the daughter of Musical Friend, whose husband died eleven months ago. It will be their wedding anniversary week-end, and their daughter will be escorted by her oldest brother. Enough said.

Hence today's post over at Desert Year. Cross-posting feels beyond me at the moment.

Christmas Eve

Some of our friends spend some time on Christmas Eve lighting up their neighborhoods and, in our absence last week, they stopped by our place to ensure that we remained bonded to one another.

Traditions

I am typing on the deck, surrounded by the tropical vegetation and blue skies of Key West. The image (from a tourist site; you'll have to wait for mine) is what it's like at night. So much for Christmas tradition.

A number of posts today have brought to mind the contrast between Christmases Past and Christmas Now. RevGals talks about how churches handle Christmas traditions, and PresbyOpia picks up the theme with a post on letting go.

For two decades, our home was the Christmas Dinner destination for our friends and, sometimes, parents who ventured in from out of town. QG's post about holiday hostessing got me counting and remembering: for a number of years, there were 11 families, meaning a minimum of 22 adults and 23 kids. There was the year we decided to go Mexican (hence the two pinatas). There was the year that Gregarious Son threw up hot chocolate and another dad and I dragged the dhrurrie rug up to the bathroom to try to wash the stain out in the tub (we failed). The kids remember a hallway light crashing to the floor in response to the joyful tromping of little feet upstairs; if that incident actually occurred, I blotted it from memory immediately.

Year after year, the same families brought the same chairs, the same extra silver, the same food (except for the Mexican year). Musical Friend, sometimes with other women and girls, sang O, Holy Night! as our grace. The tables were always decorated with holly and very cool candles from North Carolina, the piano was always out of tune, and we always sang the same songs around the fireplace after dinner.

It was different only once: the year that Chicago Son spent in France and we joined him there. That December, the Christmas Dinner migrated to Musical Friend's and. from what we heard, she actually got the kids to act out a nativity pageant ~ something I could never under any circumstances have accomplished.

This year, we decided that we could not bear it. We have so many traditions asociated with Christmas, and several of them are particular and personal to our beloved Chicago Son and me. He was always the one willing to respond with a "Sure, Mom, I'll go with you" whenever I came up with a new idea that caused the others to roll their eyes and hunker deeper down into their reading chairs. Without him, I could not imagine any way that it could be Christmas unless, perhaps, Christmas happened somewhere else and in some other way. And so the Christmas Dinner has moved, with four of us in Key West and the rest at the home of our group's own Hostess with the Mostess (who is still going to pull off the usual New Year's Eve gathering a week later, as she has done for two decades as well). In two places we will mark the loss of Musical Friend's Husband and Chicago Son. We will be sharing the same readings across 1500 miles, and we will talk on the phone, and we will acknowledge that almost everything is changed ~ and some of us will hope that one thing has not.

A Window into Grief: The Holidays, Round One

People tell me that the holidays and celebrations the second and third year are the worst. You are somewhat braced for the first round, they say. But then you look up and say, All right, I survived ~ and what do you get? Another year of celebrations, along with the knowledge that this is, indeed how it will be from here on out. He will not be back.

But we are only coming up on the first season. And I've been reading the advice to the newly bereaved: Stay out of the stores. Cut back on the decorations and other household traditions. Know that everything will remind you of everything. Go away.

The Lovely Daughter is coming home for Thanksgiving, something she did not do during her first three years of college, and we are going to the Quiet Husband's parents' home for a day or two. Gregarious Son announced that he and his sister had vetoed what he described as "a pathetic dinner at home with the four of us and a microwaved turkey." "Forget the turkey," I said. "Our point exactly," he responded."

And then comes Christmas. For awhile I was loathe to abandon our 20-plus year tradition of hosting many of our friends for a sit-down feast and conversation late into the evening, but the same son pointed out that I am only just now up to a dinner out on occasion. And then the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I do not want to be here at all. Christmas has long been a time of deep religious significance for me, but memories of the last 24 of them are completely intertwined with joyful memories of our children, and many of those memories are specific and individual to Chicago Son.

What to do? Where to go? Where can we flee from Christmas? Pakistan? offered the Quiet Husband. Baghdad? suggested a friend.

Of course, one cannot flee from Christmas. One cannot flee. One can run away from the commercial trappings, from the traditions, from what now register as oppressive expectations. But not from Christmas itself. The insistence of the calendar means that it will come, whether or not we are ready. And the readings at our son's Memorial Service - Psalm 139 and Romans 8 -- take on a new layer of meaning.

I don't know yet what we will do for Christmas. I don't think that it will be here, but the decision will only come after much family discussion. It may involve palm trees, or a desert, and candles at midnight in a place we've never been. I just don't know.

For myself, the lone religious voice in our household, there will need to be something more. Advent in past years has been a time of quiet reflection for me. This year I am not going to be looking for cosmic significance. This year I am going to try to look for a moment of peace in each day. Such a find would be momentous indeed. This year the hope resides in one of the readings from our Lessons and Carols service last year: Will you come into the darkness of tonight's world?

*****

(Image: Stained Glass Window by Barbara Joyce, here. )

Survival Skills

It's a beautiful fall week-end. A little chilly, but clear and colorful.

My group of women friends is off at a lakeside cottage. I had planned to go this time -- spring and fall trips last year were out for me, due to illness in the fall and exams in the spring. But I'm not there. I've discovered that time spent in groups of people, even small groups of my very best friends, requires skills I have lost. Skills usually exercised without a conscious thought, apparently. But, for now at least, any ability I had to listen to and participate in a multilayered conversation with people saying and hearing and feeling different things, is just gone.

One of my friends said that she would reassure the others that I miss them, too, and that I'm not avoiding them because I don't think they can understand.

Well, yes, I do miss them. But, although they are my very best friends in the world, and have taken good care of all of my family over the past two months, it has never occurred to me that any of them can understand. I have a good imagination, but I'm not delusional. I am not staying away because people can't understand. (Although the fact that anyone might think so demonstrates the truth of the statement.) I didn't try to explain further. Sometimes even one-on-one is too much for me.

I may have lost my capacity for group interaction, but I am honing silence as a skill for negotiating the terrain of sorrow.

Ashes to Ashes

"Easy for him to say, hard for you to do," said the funeral home director when we told him that our son had indicated a wish for his ashes to be scattered, and then tried to convince us, albeit with restraint, that an elaborate urn placed in one of the cemetery's glass cases in the new mausoleum was the way to go. My father has also said that he wants to be cremated and for his ashes to be scattered, and has been specific as to the locale. When that time comes, I will be better prepared for funeral industry resistance.

Oh, what to do with these bodies of ours when they are no longer animated by soul and spirit, by hope and sorrow? During my summer CPE at Gigantic Hospital, I observed bodies of every size, color, age, and condition, often praying over them as family members clung to each other, and sometimes praying over them in solitude because no one from the family had shown up, or because they had been unable to bear the solid certainty of loss any longer and had left the hospital swiftly and in silence. But I did not have to perform the subsequent tasks of the nurses, or make the next plans with the families.

In my own family, closed caskets have been the rule. There has been a general undercurrent of agreement to "remember them as they lived," and so I saw none of my grandparents, nor my aunt, mother, brother, or first stepmother after they died. My mother and brother were buried while I was still in the hospital recovering from the car accident; I'm not sure that I even knew of their deaths before they were in the ground. Only with my last stepmother, and only because I was holding her hand when she died, was I able to spend time in her presence afterward, absorbing her transition to someplace unknown to us.

In none of these situations did I have to make any decisions about what came next. At the hospital, people took their heartbreak and their mourning out the door with them. In my family of origin, my father has usually been the one to direct the events of the week after a death, and has countenanced little in the way of participation of others. Only with my grandmother, to whom I was especially close and who died a couple of years ago, was I able to insist upon something of my own vision of a memorial service, none of which applied to the care or disposition of her body.

I have tried to do things differently. Following the magnificent guidance provided by the wife of one of my patients this past summer, who with gentle authority and great love gathered her family of siblings and adult children and spouses for major decisions and for the final difficult hours of her husband's life, I brought three generations of us together to plan our son's memorial service, and ensured that the Quiet Husband and I involved our children in every decision about our son's remains. We were also graced by the presence of many friends who had recent stories to share over the kitchen table about bodies, funeral homes, cremations, cemeteries, and the scattering of ashes -- all in gentle, generous, and sometimes humorous conversations in which everyone seemed to intuit the wisdom that we each have different needs and expectations and desires with respect to what finally happens to the bodies of those we love.

To give the funeral home director his due, I believe that he was more interested in protecting us than in selling urns when he told us that scattering ashes would be difficult to do. (A few weeks later he was most helpful in answering all the related questions about practical issues.) Many people in our death-resistant culture accept the handling of its processes by the experts, believing that it may be easier to force its tangibility out of their minds than to acknowledge it for what it is. And while I personally am not so inclined, preferring always to see and hear and touch for myself, who can blame them? The confrontation with the physicality of death, with its insistence on the completeness and finality of the breach it creates, is difficult. But it is also the reality.

And so last week I waded into the Pacific, off a coast which our son had never reached in his short lifetime of great adventures, and scattered some of his ashes onto the gentle swells of water. It was in the end not so hard to do, for, in the words of Isak Dineson that one of of my friends used to share with us, "The cure for anything is salt water - sweat, tears, or the sea."

As it turns out, she was not entirely accurate. There are some things for which there is no cure. But for those, the ocean offers its embrace and, sometimes, the sparkle of sunlight across its surface.

Week One

Numbness.

"The house looks like a cross between a florist's shop and a food court," says my father.

There's a wideness in God's mercy. The beautiful version from the Episcopalian hymnal, not the impossible one from the Presby hymnal.

Numbness.

Cards, flowers, emails, phone calls from across the country and two other continents. College students and recent graduates from the west coast to the east appearing in our church and on our doorstep.

Oh Lord, hear my prayer. Oh Lord, hear my prayer. When I call, answer me.

Crematorium. Gratitude for the book Here If You Need Me, which I had just finished. Not, as I had thought, because I needed to read about someone else's experiences after my own CPE. It seems that I read it because I needed to know how to accompany my son on his last journey.

Numbness.

People people people. Family and friends of twenty years taking care of everything. Going with us everywere. Bringing everything we need. Planning speakers and music. Being the speakers and music. Pastors completely at our disposal. A spiritual director who comes for hours. Jewish and Christian clergy from across the spectrum showing up at the funeral home.

John Bell/Iona music:

And wherever you go I will meet you,
Till you draw your last breath in the birthplace known as death;
Yes, wherever you go I will meet you, saying, "Here am I."

A church filled with people who care for us and nurture us and grieve with us. A church that causes me to shake my head in disbelief at those who would criticize or deride or dismiss us because we come together as Jew and Christian, gay and straight, believer and atheist, because we truly and deeply believe that it is impossible to be separated from the love of God. A Christian service which causes Jewish and atheist friends to say, "I love being in church." A service in which humor and sorrow blend in acknowledgment of reality.

A surprising number of voices saying to us, "I have walked in your shoes. Call me."

Psalm 139. Not Psalm 23.

And every once in awhile, a jagged crack in the numbness.

The first week with this terrible hole in our family, in our home, in our lives, in our hearts.

21 Years Ago...

My friend Mary Ann and The Quiet Husband and I were wandering up and down, up and down the hallway of one St. Luke's Hospital. We had spent all of the previous day there, to no avail. After a fitful night of sleep at home, complications had made themselves dramatically manifest again, and so there we were. Walk walk walk. Groan groan groan. One contraction hard upon another, doing . . .nothing. Please please please. Not another c-section.

FOUR other women came into the hospital, fussed and yelled, and produced babies. We passed their rooms over and over again, hearing the sounds that indicated that at least some people up there were reaching their goals.

4:00 in the afternoon? It would be ten more hours before I would cry, "I can't I can't I can't" and grit my teeth and grind my heel into my doctor's knee and call to him from somewhere far, far away, "Joe, HELP me!" Before he would say, "PUSH. THE. BABY. OUT." Before The Lovely Daughter, with limpid blue eyes wide as they could be, would be placed gently on my belly and look at us as if to say, "I know who you are, too."

Goin' to Carolina...

Behind me:

Eight verbatims, four book reflections, weekly general reflections, I don't know how many overnight on-calls, an 8-10 page final evaluation in first draft form, so much suffering and death with humor and triumph blended in, so little sleep and so much tension and the inevitable tears and laugher . . . one week of CPE to go . . . screech to a halt:

We have to go to North Carolina for a three-day week-end to retrieve The Lovely Daughter from her life as a camp counselor. The waterfalls and the mountains and the trails of Pisgah Forest are calling.

We have to take my little car because The Quiet Husband's bigger one is still recovering from its encounter with a deer two weeks ago. It will be a very long drive in a very little car. But at the end will be those waterfalls and mountains and trails and, best of all, The Lovely, Lovely Daughter.

Friday Five Blogging

Another great - and early! -- Friday Five. Thanks, Songbird!

So how did you come up with your blogging name? And/or the name of your blog?

See the sidebar . . . I've been thinking about making some changes, though. Things have changed a lot for me in the past few years. Roadrunner, for all the miles I now have to put on my car? Peregrine, for the intense focus that characterizes my life these days? Suggestions?

Are there any code names or secret identities in your blog? Any stories there?

Not really; I just keep them simple.

What are some blog titles that you just love? For their cleverness, drama, or sheer, crazy fun?

The Owl's Song ~ Quotidian Grace ~ Brininess and Volubility

What three blogs are you devoted to? Other than the RevGalBlogPals of course!

Coming To Terms ~ Sorting the Pieces ~ The Aforesaid Brininess and Volubility

Who introduced you to the world of blogging and why?

I don't remember. I started on the pre-ad AOL Journals site ~ I think I just stumbled upon it. I had some kind of goofy idea that if I wrote about my struggles with losing weight I would, in fact, lose weight. That was about as effective as looking at Weight Watchers' Magazine and expecting transformation by osmosis. Then I got interested in working on my writing and photography, and then I started "meeting" people, and then it just kind of took off.

Bonus Question: Blogger Meetups?

Well, my friend Kathryn has just re-started blogging, and she's visited me and walked in the cemetery with me, and hosted the Lovely Daughter and me on a college visit. Of course, I can't find her link. Polar Bear and I did NOT meet when we were on the same tour on the same day at Chartres Cathedral -- we read about it in each other's blogs. But I think she's changed sites and more or less disappeared. And Lisa of Coming to Terms and I met when she and her husband hosted my husband and me at her fabulous Old Town Cafe ~ the subject of much reflection and humor (probably funnier to her readers than it is to her) as Lisa continues the saga of small business startup ~ in Scappoose OR when we were visiting the Lovely Daughter at college. I highly recommend that you take a little trip to Scappoose for a meal if you're in the Portland area!

Something I Wonder About

Breakfast with a good friend this morning.

"So what," she asked, "is different for you than things were several years ago?"

"We were just talking about that at CPE yesterday," I said. "About what it's like to live in the context of a universe in which everything is permeated by God. Recognizing God's presence in everything."

"Well," she said, "I'm an atheist."

"Then you probably don't sense that God permeates everything?" I responded.

"No, not exactly," she laughed.

And then we spent an hour talking about death and end-of-life decisions and death and bodies and death and hospital care and death, because that's all I really talk about this summer. (I guess I'm really fun to be around.)

She talked about how difficult it was to be present for the death of a beloved family member. I talked about how I try to convey to tearful and anguished people that it's hard to think of a more important thing to do than to witness and be present to your loved ones as they move from this world to the other one.

The way I see it, the Holy Spirit was hanging out with us at the table on the sun-filled (and exceedingly warm) patio outside the bakery.

Not what my friend was experiencing at all. Except, in my view of things, she was.

Life is puzzling, I think.