fathers

My father was released from the hospital, in good physical shape but with some minor language problems. He said now when he reads the New York Times the stories seem poorly written and stupid.

I'm struggling with bad memories from after my first father died.

family news

My second father (stepfather) had a mild stroke Friday night. He sounds fine except for some memory and word-finding difficulties and he hopes to get out of the hospital tomorrow. It feels weird because he is almost 80 and until this point had slowed down so little (still played tennis, etc.). It also brings up feelings from my first father's death.

car shopping

I stopped by the car dealer we have bought from for 15 years to see if they had anything that met our needs for a fairly low mileage used minivan. When the salesman took me in the meet the manager, the manager said: "cyprus green Voyager, live in Clemson..." He had been the salesman who sold us our current minivan in 1998. I remember vividly too--I told him the price he was offering us was garbage (there were various rebates from Chrysler, but no discount from the dealer). He did finally get us a better price on that car, but only because my husband and I are good at doing the good cop bad cop routine, and I'm the bad cop. I suspect he isn't going to be able to come up with a good enough price this time, since the car he has that is closest to what we want has an awful lot more options than we care about.

change

I have been saying I don't know who I am. I don't mean in the conventional ways--I'm happy with my husband, my kids, my job, my church, and the area I live in. And yet as I heal my inner pain I also feel I am losing an anchor. I finally found an analogy that I hope makes clear what I am feeling. Imagine a person who went deaf in early childhood and grew up in deaf culture. If that person chose surgery to restore hearing, he would suffer a terrible loss of identity. What would it mean to no longer be a deaf person?

I went looking for such a story and I found one story in progress. But it doesn't capture well the attitudes of deaf culture towards cure.

rain

We had a dry May and most of June, and the lake was dropping fast. We worried about another drought where the shallow arm of lake behind our house would become a meadow again. Then we had a lot of rain--the place where we pick blueberries overflowed a 5 inch rain gauge in 4 days at the end of June. The lake looks a lot better. I suppose we are back now to a normal pattern of afternoon thunderstorms. But they can be frustrating. Yesterday we took a family hike and a thunderstorm came up and we got drenched.

July 4th

This morning in church we sung America the Beautiful (719 in the Episcopal hymnal) and I was struck by the second verse:

O beautiful for heroes proved in liberating strife,
who more than self their country loved, and mercy more than life!
America, America, God mend thine every flaw,
Confirm thy soul in self-control, thy liberty in law.

I wish the people in power would take in that idea of loving mercy more than life (not to mention self-control and liberty in law).

learning new things

At the spiritual directors training residency in May, one of my fellow students spoke of his commitment to learn something new every 6 months. He has MS, and believes that making new brain pathways is particularly important for people who have MS. He had learned new things varying from New Testament Greek to Yoga--the more different, the better.

I grew up in a family where the idea of adults learning new things was not seen as anything but embarrassing. There was a certain standardized set of skills (riding a bike, swimming...) that it was very important to learn as a child. But that isn't where I want to be any more, in fact I realized part of the appeal of running to me is that I haven't done it before, while I'm not likely to do anything on a bicycle that I haven't already done when I was into cycling in college. I rode a century ride then, a recreation of the first organized century ride.