PeaceBang

Life Among the Teeny Men

I’m helping take care of my 2 and 3-year old nephews in Pennsylvania. Thank God MotherBang is here, too, so we can tag team.

Yesterday:

Nicholas: What’s that? (pointing to a Lancome lipstick ad on the back of a magazine)
Auntie P: That’s lipstick.
Nicholas: Why?
Auntie P: It makes lady’s lips red so they can be prettier.
Nicholas: Why?
Auntie P: I guess so people will want to kiss them.
Nicholas: Will that lady come to my house to kiss me?
Auntie P: I don’t think so, honey.
Nicholas: Why?
Auntie P: Because she’s very busy. And she probably lives in California or New York City.
Nicholas: (after thinking about if for awhile) Can I go to her house?

Today, after a story featuring mermaids and sharks (and snakes coming out of the shark’s noses, per request), Nicholas picked up the magazine again.

Nicholas: That lady is pretty.
Auntie PeaceBang: I know. You were very enamored of her yesterday.
Nicholas: She’s a mermaid.

Best line of the day from breakfast:

Grandma Shirley to Nick: Don’t call your grandma a butthead.

It’s a land of Spiderman (pronounced “Pie-may-ah” by the baby), pirates, and “bad guys.” It’s a life of giggling and dancing, making chimp sounds, playing with mommy’s nail file or hair clip instead of one of your dozens of toys downstairs, a world of “Barney” and baths and sitting naked on the porch eating PB&J sandwiches. You get a nap every day whether you want one or not, and we make up songs about how we like our apples peeled.

I do wish I lived closer to these adorable dudes. It’s practically impossible to think too many deep thoughts when I’m with them, and that’s a nice reprieve from ordinary life. The baby started crying over some small thing the other day and when I picked him up to comfort him, he fell into a deep sleep in my arms in about .03 seconds. Man, life is good when you’re two.

I can hear my Mom and two other little voices singing the Sponge Bob Squarepants theme song in the other room. I’m cracking up because I had no idea my Mom even knew who SpongeBob was.

This morning when Luke was coming downstairs with Mom he said, “I happy.”

I happy too, Lukey.

Fat Is Catching!! Say Very Smart Science-Type People

Well lookee here.

According to the New York Times, researchers have found that you’re much more likely to become obese if your close friends get fat.

Uh-oh!! I hope I haven’t infected anyone out there! But hey, think of the positive applications! For instance, my friend CW who is always trying to put on a few pounds… we should spend more time together! I’ll have him chubbed-up in no time!

Seriously, though, this article strikes me as incredibly hateful. It’s so fear-mongering, so obviously inconclusive, and so biased against the fat.

Did it ever occur to these researchers, for instance, that close friends often have the same ethnic background and personality type, and that it may be those factors rather than proximity that most influence the propensity toward obesity? In a similar vein, did it occur to these people that folks might BECOME friends largely (forgive the pun) because of a preference to socialize around food and drink, to consume extravagantly, and to share similar values (one of which might be not to care very much if they’re packing on the pounds)?

I know, I know. We fat people cost the nation katrillions of dollars in lost productivity because we’re so UNHEALTHY and despite the brilliant efforts of the medical community, we dare get diseases and DIE ANYWAY. It really bothers the docs, I’ll tell ya. Capitalism is really mad at us, too. It is now the #1 disgusting thing to be in America: fat.

As a Fat American, I’d like to share my own personal belief that there’s a stupidity epidemic in America right now that costs the nation a lot of money, and I’d like researchers to study that and the New York Times to write about the results. How much will the war in Iraq eventually cost us in lost revenues and in plain dollars, for instance? Do you think it’s more or less than the cost of keeping chunksters like myself on heart and cholesterol medication in our waning years?

How about the materialism epidemic going on? I’m worried about that, too. I might catch it from my neighbors. Should I make sure to spend time with non-materialistic people to balance the harm that might come to me from having intimate friendships with the very wealthy and acquisitive?

But hey, I’m sure this article will make the rounds and millions of people will evaluate their friendships. I’d like to thank this fine team of scientists for that. For every date people now make with one of their fat friends, many of them will make sure they balance it with a date with a slim person who most definitely, according to the implications of this article, has a MORE HEALTHY INFLUENCE ON THEM.

Bah. A clogged artery upon their house, and on the NY Times for that sensationalistic, obnoxious headline.

Cleanliness Is Next To Godliness, Or Something

I moved into this big, lovely parsonage five years ago. It’s a four-bedroom house and it scares me how I’ve managed to fill it with STUFF. I do keep an eye on things, however, since I don’t want to have a nervous breakdown when it comes time to move someday.

But, aieeee! Closets, drawers, shelves! It’s one thing to keep the rooms fairly neat, organized and uncluttered (lotsa luck on that one, since I love bibelots and have never been the stream-lined IKEA type). But what about the endless cabinets, drawers and hidey-holes that a minister-hobbit can so easily fill with … what’s in there, anyway? ITEMS. That’s all they are. ITEMS. Kitchen ITEMS. Cosmetic ITEMS. Office ITEMS. Bedside table ITEMS. Lip glosses, tubes of hand cream, Chinese take-out menus, incense, pens, tsotchkes (however you spell it), candles, old electronic equipment you don’t know how to recycle (Walkman?), cards, stamps and sealing wax.

But even though the mysterious forest of all my closets and drawers remain wild and untamed, I must say that it is a huge relief having thoroughly cleaned and re-organized my parlor, at least. And I’ve done a lot of work on my home study as well, categorizing books, filing and organizing. My books are like rabbits; no sooner have I given away 50 of them than 50 more appear on the shelves.

It’s a comfort sometimes to think of the inevitable down-sizing of age. One room at the nursing home and then that pine box six feet under. Jesus said you can’t take it with you and honey, I wouldn’t want to.

I’ll be traveling for a bit. I’ll try to blog on the joys of looking after my two nephews (the Adventure Midgets) from Pennsylvania.

I Know How Harry Potter Ends!

Tonight I was doing the most ultimately Boston thing ever and having beers in the Bull & Finch (aka “the Cheers bar”) with a friend while keeping an eye on the Sox game (we won). She told me she had just finished the last Harry Potter book and I got her to tell me the whole ending. I have to say that it was just so much fun watching her narrate the whole thing with major emotional investment that I think I prefer that to the reading experience.

Are you all DONE with Harry Potter yet? Can we go on LIVING now? CHEEZ!

No, I jest. I loved the first three or four of the books. When it got to the Goblet of Fire, though, I just could not get into it. So sad, but I just couldn’t. But I will always love the Harry Potter series, and Hogwarts is my secret alma mater. To this day, I would be SO WILLING to buy my own ticket to the U.K. or wherever they’re filming the next two installments to be an extra. Please, Mr. Producer! Please! I just really so badly want to walk by in ONE scene with a pointy hat on. PLEASE??? My character doesn’t have to have a name or anything. We’re talking just a simple walk-by in the background. You don’t have to pay me a cent! I just want to be part of the magic.

See? I could DO THAT! I would be really good at it!

If anyone has any connections, you know where to find me. I can leave on a day’s notice as long as I can take a red-eye and be back in time to preach on Sunday.

In case you were wondering, my other two big showbiz aspirations are to sing with the Muppets and to do a very insignificant voice for a Disney film, like maybe one line. You know, like the woman who says “I need six eggs” during the opening number of “Beauty and the Beast.” I can do a French accent if they need one.

Binghamton

My mother’s family is from Binghamton, New York, a city my father used to refer to as the Armpit of the United States, and my mother affectionately refers to as Sinus Valley.

We used to take road trips from New Canaan, Connecticut to Binghamton pretty often when I was a kid and going there always seemed to be a trip back in time. Now I recognize the “special” feeling in Binghamton (and by “special” I mean depressed and vaguely oppressive) as being related to economic and class issues, but I didn’t know that as a kid. I just thought of Binghamton as being dead.

I’m sorry we were so snotty about Binghamton, and about my maternal extended family, when I was growing up. It wasn’t right and it wasn’t good for my sister and brother and me. We became so thoroughly identified with my father’s lineage that we missed a lot of the richness of my mother’s cultural and historical DNA. Her parents both had fascinating and sad stories — many of which I finally eked out of my grandfather when he was near 90 years old — and a simple, steadfast Russian Orthodox faith that I have never appreciated until recent years.

My grandfather, my Dede, ran away from home to New York City at the age of 14 (after one too many savage beatings from his mother, a bitter woman with too many kids, enslaved in an arranged marriage and killing work of running a rooming house) and went to work as a grocery boy, living in the attic of his employer. He delivered groceries to the big stars of the day and remembers escorting a very inebriated John Barrymore home from the corner pub more than once, earning a 50c piece for his efforts, and the heady experience of hearing the great man pronounce his name. “Charles,” Mr. Barrymore would say in his most elegant tones, “Would you see me home?” “Cha” would do so (no one ever called him Charles), and sometimes put Mr. Barrymore to bed as well.

Miss Dorothy and Miss Lillian Gish gave my young grandfather tickets to their theatre performances. Another man whose name he could never remember gifted him with a first edition of a book. I’m sorry that I never wrote down the specifics, but I think it may have been a book on Abraham Lincoln.

It touches me that these luminaries treated my grandfather so kindly. At a time when he was invisible, they made him feel seen and noticed.

My Baba had come from Czechoslovakia at the age of five with her mother and settled in Pittston, Pennsylvania. Her father (another arranged marriage) was a coal miner. My grandparents, Anne and Charlie, met in New York City and wooed at places like Coney Island. They settled on Valley Street in Binghamton (which my great-grandfather pronounced “Welly Street,” and Binghamton as “Bee-Ha-Tone”*) and raised their children, two boys and my mother, Shirley (named after You Know Who With the Curls).

During all the years of my childhood and teen years, my Baba and Dede lived on Front Street across from the Howard Johnson. My mom liked to stop there at the end of the long drive and phone them, pretending to be calling from Connecticut. When they answered and they’d chatted for awhile, she’d say, “What are you doing for dinner?” And then we’d descend upon them, crowding into their house with the magical laundry chutes –you could send Barbie down them!– and the raspberry vines outside. Their house was on a rich, wet meadow that led out to a big pond. There was always birdsong and humidity, honeysuckle and the slight odor of mud underneath it all. Cicadas shrilled all night and we could hear cars going by our windows; something we never heard at home.

I have some cousins from that side of the family and they have some lovely children of their own. Last year, MotherBang suggested that we have a family reunion. And so we are going to. I haven’t been back to Binghamton since my Dede’s funeral in the late 90’s, and I’m looking forward to it. I just wish that Baba and Dede would be there, too, and when I push them to tell me more about their lives, they wouldn’t respond with “Oh Vick, you couldn’t possibly be interested in that.”

Yes, Baba and Dede, I am interested. I always have been.

Charles Lesko and Anne Billo Lesko on their wedding day, January 23, 1933.

*My grandparents used to get notes from Dede Billo addressed to “9 Weli Street, Bihanton” (9 Valley Street, Binghamton). My grandmother never finished elementary school. My mother didn’t go to college (girls don’t need to go to college! They need to get married!). My Baba used to tell me that if I didn’t stop reading so much, I would never get a husband. Baba, you were right!

Prayer Falls Like Rain

I’m such a Jesus freak that I went to church TWICE today: to a United Methodist Church in the morning and to an evening service at a UCC/Disciples of Christ church.

I got to sing “It Is Well With My Soul” and “Blest Be The Tie That Binds” and “In the Garden” and “Just A Closer Walk With Thee” and the usual Halle, Halle and “Thank you Lord” responses. Both of the services use a lot of music and I’m getting inspired with some ideas for my own congregation.

At the morning service I went up to kneel at the altar during the prayer. I haven’t done this yet but I felt drawn to do so today and was glad I did, as Sister Chantal brought down the Holy Spirit in a fierce manner and just about knocked me over. Some people have the words for prayer, and some people have the spirit for prayer, but rarely does someone have both the words and the spirit together in a passionate, authentic, poetic and powerfully invocational way. That’s a gift we rarely get to see in the Unitarian Universalist tradition, where we mostly compose our prayers (if we indeed call them that or give anything like a prayer in our worship services) ver-ry carefully and with much forethought.

I thought, man, if I’m having a bad week in the faith department, it sure does help to know that someone like Chantal is out there believing hard enough for both of us.

And I realized that her faith was an act of love. I had never thought of it like that before. It had never occurred to me that when you or I show up to church feeling like “meh, I’m just not feeling anything particularly god-like in the universe lately,” someone like Chantal might also show up and not just suggest, but TELL you that God is a Father who loves and cares for you, will never forsake you, who has made us promises about justice and mercy that He will never break, and that we are yes we ARE living in a creation that God hath made and has pronounced GOOD.

The little hamster wheels in your head finally stop turning for one blessed Sabbath moment as she claims that yes God leads you paths of righteousness and anoints your head with oil and that you WILL dwell in the house of the Lord forever, amen, and amen. Something in your remembers this. Something about this sounds eminently logical, in fact.

There is such love in naming reality in this way for a community of people who come seeking spiritual bread for the journey. What generosity, I have to think, in pouring forth the convictions of one’s own heart with such fervent inclusion; i.e., “I know I am living in the embrace of the Holy and I know that you are, too. I know that God is blessing all of us today.”

There was a time I would have listened to that prayer with critical ear, wondering “how much of this do I believe?” But I have changed. Now I simply bow my head and let the words fall like rain on my parched head that is so often bone-dry from all the thinking, thinking, thinking.

Hungry Hungry Hippo

I can’t help it. I’m such a sucker for stories like this.

Which Harry Potter Character Are You?

I just think it’s pretty funny that I’m Dumbledore, with a strong dose of Draco Malfoy. Which I think is just right.

From “The Onion”

Jesus Demands Creative Control Over Next Movie

{chortling}

Friday Cat And Baseball Blogging

Ermengarde has a toy mouse of which she is extremely fond. She “hunts” this mouse in the wee hours and occasionally wakes me with loud cries so that I can celebrate her catch with her. I dutifully do so, as I want her to know that I appreciate her skills. She is a good mouser of toy and real critters.

This favorite mouse is purple with a yellow and orange candy-striped tail, which is to say that it’s not very easily mistaken for a real mouse.

I understand Ermengarde’s need to hunt and catch this mouse when the appearance of a real mouse is a rare event due to the good works of our exterminator in 2006. I understand her desire to impress the Big Mommy Kittycat who feeds and cares for her (although of course, in her mind, she cares for me). What I do not understand is why just today I found the mouse next to me on my pillow, quietly placed there with no feline wailing and hunting fanfare.

It just so happens that I’ve been kind of depressed. I think she knows that. I think the mouse was left as a gift of love.

If she had wanted to wake me up, she would have cried or pawed my back — two things she does on a regular basis. But she just left the mouse for me, the feline equivalent of a bouquet of flowers on the nightstand.

It’s amazing to me that an 11 lb. animal who has no powers of speech and no opposable thumbs can minister to the member of another species like that. It was quite a gesture. It made me happy. Such sweetness.

And speaking of small things that make me happy, I have become the kind of person who wants to watch or listen to Red Sox games every night that they play. This is a totally new phenomenon for me — I always watched some, but I have never been a park-myself-by-the-TV type before. Why am I loving the game so much this season? So much so that the other night at the colloquy, I drove to the beach and listened on my car radio.

I love the drama of it. I love the wide open spaces of the baseball diamond and the grace of the players as they work the field. I love the apparent cool of pitchers like Dice-K and Josh Beckett who reveal their frazzled nerves by walking three runners in a row (Dice-K) or by screaming with fierce competitive glee when one of their fielders tags a guy out at second (Josh).

I love that even a guy like Julio Lugo — a haunted, hunted looking Goyaesque figure when at bat — will become a beautiful, smiling kid jumping into Manny Ramirez’s arms after smashing in a grand slam.

I love the irrationality of caring a lot about these games. I love the way the hours of the game unfold as I watch with one eye and read with the other, the way the phone doesn’t ring, the way the sermon doesn’t beckon, the way no one expects me at an evening meeting. I love that I don’t have to have anything interesting or meaningful to offer throughout the several hours but cheering and yelling at umps.