On Visiting

It has been a week since passion three and I started on the road for our graduation trip to merry old England. There have been a few memorable moments and many ooh aah times when we just enjoyed the road, each other's company and the incredible English countryside. It really is something. The lake district was as ever breathtaking, a train ride over the pennines provided several comedic cultural moments,not to mention blogger fodder but the interesting highlight to me is always the visiting.

In the Midwest we "visit" with people. We do not pay a visit,we just visit. We do not take people with us we "take people with." The truth is, that visiting can reveal and explain for us many of the things that we have "taken with" in life. Visiting is an invaluable and vital reality check to us all. In fact a good visit with friends can bring life and recalibration to many parts of our catalogued misconceptions that we thought were true. History is shared story after all.

This is what makes friendship and visiting one of life's great pleasures to me.

For passion three, being there creates the strange and unremitting realization(so necessary
for every teen)that they have a history that is shared and somewhat owned by others. Even at a young age she realizes that actually, she has forgotten much of what formed her and discovers that in finding out who you are, it is oft times best to see yourself through others' eyes.

The dearest friends are those who have shared your history, and can play it back to you with
footnotes, explanations and sometimes, corrections. It is all too easy to misframe our history or to lose our balance on the tight rope of memory. Our history comes with feelings, emotions and perceptions that are not facts, however strongly held to be so. A visit with those that have shared those memories can sometimes reverse the sinking of the good ship ego. Visiting is like nectar and ambrosia to the wearied heart. To hear from those who have known you, love you, and only desire your best is medicine and family, and not be missed for anything.

Live life to the full, memories included. Understand that its on the foundation laid in your past,that you will find the boundaries of your future yet to be. Tend and maintain those foundations as they provide your life's strength and context.

Remember your old friends, honor them,consult them, hear them, visit them.

Okay I know its been ages.

The Joy of a Mid western summer


When the winter is here you all wish for a change
But the summer's wet calling may catch you as strange.
In the depths of the winter its so dry like desert,
A white coated landscape, a starched linen shirt.

But the summer can catch you not ready or primed
Which tornado and hailstorm are apt to remind.
Its damp, dank, and steamy, the blame the dog days, .
Humidity, torpidity, to walk is a slog in multiple ways.
Smells, swells, quells any and every impulse or drive,
Rains, drains and siphons your will and melts your urge to survive.

Seattlites grumble about their dry rain,
In Phoenix the dry heat will itch and cause pain
but here in the midwest despite being so nice
Our precip is always too much or too ice.

Temperance is nice with weather too you know.

Heritage legacy and context

I had the pleasure recently of sifting through countless piles of old photographs. They are countless for two reasons. Firstly because there are a lot of them and secondly, because every time I try to count them someone keeps moving them somewhere else. Significant occasions writ  in black and white, or in fading vivid colors you are sure your relatives never dressed in, are all part of the joy that it is, to work through a visual record of your genetic heritage.

Fading, shiny papers from exotic places, transport me back in time to distant places and ages that a strand of my DNA experienced in another life. Now, somehow, they are strangely connected to form part of the strands, that carry the information that form the building blocks of who I am physically, and in so many ways, spiritually also.

Weddings of long divorced people, mingle with baby christenings of people long buried, in one wonderful blurry mosaic, a picture of life, history, legacy and heritage of what it all means for us to be family. Strangely in the reverie of it all, we easily forget the irritating habits, we overlook annoying attitudes, and the demands and the cravings for attention, for  we look back with a sense of acceptance and warmth towards our forebears, knowing forbearance will be necessary for us also.

It is with nostalgia and sentimental, reassuring comfort that we look into the eyes of  young smiling faces belonging to those long since dead and passed on. Remembering again that a little part of them still roams about in us so many years later on. Truly, our family is our fountain and foundation, our heritage and if the lines of connection remain.long enough, our legacy.

Perhaps understandably, as I move closer to being a part of history myself, I have started to look backwards as much as forwards, for my life's meaning and purpose.

Its not all about me, isn't it?

Today, a rather sweet and uncharacteristically subdued passion three came to me and said, "daddy, I've been reading that book you gave me and I realize that it is not all about me."

Now those who have the pleasure of knowing passion 3 will know her as a bubbly, vivacious,friendly and chatty person who fills any room she enters with fun, and it has to be admitted, a certain increase in the noise level.(Don't cross her though, just saying!) As one prone to entering the room with statements about what one of the multifarious celebrities she follows are doing this week,  for breakfast or some such, this was a rather different tack or opening salvo. It was not however an unwelcome one and in fact gave me pause to think. Reflection, self effacing comments and humility are not the usual bill of fare when dining out at Lou's cafe, but it was sincerely delivered and despite my erstwhile joking, sincerely received by me.

I thought for two minutes on the wisdom and revelation expressed in those words. For some of us not a new revelation, but for the majority of us one that needs to be revisited through the span our our lives if we are to understand our place in the purposes of God and in the responsibilities we hold in our world, present or future. When the young express wisdom the old are still trying to learn, it strikes me sometimes and humbles me once again.

She is right of course. It is not all about us at all.

I had a a friend once who used to love to say a particular put down when some poor unsuspecting person asked him something. He would say, "Don't worry about it, your not important enough," then laugh at his gentle put down. Funnily enough though here we find a strange enigma, because in some ways he was right, I am not important enough. This becomes especially true when we look up from Earth, as God looks down from Heaven.

As I look up, I sense like Isaiah, the Lord, High and lifted up and I can not help but say to myself, it really is not all about me. However when God looks down upon us all, one by one, hair by hair and cell by cell, I perceive that the love He has for us, causes Him to say, "child of mine,  this is all about you."

I guess it is one thing for God to say it, and quite another for me to take this for granted, and think and act as if it was true by any personal virtue of mine. So I find myself, like my passion 3, trying to live aware of the importance that is attached to me by God whilst realizing that when I look at my own needs, desires, plans and hopes, it really is not all about me after all.

I was bought with a price, redeemed at great cost and now, I no longer live, but Christ lives in me.

You see it really is not all about me, its about the One who lives in me. Isn't it?

10 minutes and 43 action packed seconds.

3xl has a confession to make to you all. I have an obsession that I find hard to control. It only occurs at certain times of the year so it is mercifully seasonal and not a year round problem to me.The other saving grace in this distraction of mine is that I am not alone. In fact on any given Sunday during certain months of the year many thousands and millions of men and regrettably some misguided women seem to lose all sense of proportion and decency and sacrifice their time, vast amounts of money and energy on this, my particular failing. I am referring of course to football of the American variety.

On first uninformed glance any newcomer to the game could be forgiven for thinking that this is nothing more than a gladiatorial melee of over "roided" men seeking to smash, mash and bash the poor chap on the other side of the defensive line. The names are strangely code like and they run plays as a noun rather than the verb form for the third person singular.

The player's positions have interesting names, such as quarter back, wide receiver and tight end (tee hee) but the plays are even more strange. You will hear commentators talking about the bootstrap, nickelback, dime, wildcat, blitz as common parlance on the field of play. When you listen to the quarter back calling his "plays" the words used are all code so as to confuse the other side and make them think you are going one way when you are going another. After all football is a game of speed as well as strength, where the average NFL play is 4 to 5 seconds and then it is done.The best quarterbacks can have the ball "snapped" and then passed on in 2 seconds and for good reason, to hold it longer usually results in the embarrassing and sometimes painful "sack" by three hundred pound men at speed.

Now I was one of those who could not quite fathom the point of such a game. I had been raised playing rugby and soccer and as part of the village cricket team I really enjoyed these sports. Football seemed so dumb frankly with little going on. However, over time as I began to understand the strategy and the planning and thinking that went in to the game, I became a firm fan, along with all the other devotees, glued to my set.

I did however ponder why it truly was American Football and why games like cricket had never caught on. Some commentators say soccer will not truly catch on until they can guarantee a higher score. Cricket and rugby however do have high scores but they are not storming the States.

Other commentators suggested that the manly nature of the sport could not be compared to anything from the old country, but try telling that to a rugby player who has speed, bulk, strength. Be prepared to have a getaway care standing by however. Some said it is the fact that sports like cricket go on for too long, and since the average test match can go on for anything from 3-5 days they do have a point, but they are missing the point of cricket as a great excuse for getting away with your mates for several days, with the game as a nice sideline to engage with every now and again. Its more like tailgating during the game. So after all the expert's contributions and comments  I found myself personally still unconvinced that I understood why these sports had not caught on here.

Then just released studies brought this eye opening revelation.

The average time of actual play in an NFL game lasting three hours, is ten  minutes and forty three seconds.

This is all the more amazing when you realize that before the game many people gather and "tailgate" for three or four hours. That is, they drink beer, barbecue meat in various manifestations and generally bad mouth the opposition whoever they are. For the pleasure of doing this many fans pay a fee of $65-100. Then they spend three hours in the game for which they pay another $50-250 and when all is said and done they get the pleasure of 643 seconds of play or for the whole day about 50 cents per second of play. Now I would like to be paid by the second, 30 bucks a minute, 180 bucks an hour, 900 bucks a day..... you get the point.

So I felt that I had identified at least one important component of the football experience that Americans and we American wannabees so love.  Ridiculous expense and costs for sport.

I felt that there was something though still missing from my investigation, and then I struck upon what it was.

Concentration span.

I had missed the central wisdom of American Football and why it was truly our sport. American football consists of weeks and months of prep and hype, drama,  and  prolonged obsessing about vacuous, so called celebrities along with all their torrid lives' speculations and rumors. Just like real life.

When game day arrives we have multiple experts arguing about outcomes, sharing their oft lacking experience, and making predictions and unsubstantiated claims. Just like politics.

Then finally we get to the game and we are not asked to think too hard or long for anything to happen on the field. Just shy of 11 minutes concentration is required. The majority of the program is about talking about it not doing it, which is then followed by constant replays of the same few minutes of action played over and over. Just like our real life TV offerings.

I had struck on the deep wisdom of American football and its popularity. It was a microcosm of our own American Lives a much ado about nothing scenario where 11 minutes seems like three hours and the bait and switch, redirection of society away from what really matters is performed as sweetly as a Brett Favre touch down to Sidney Rice on the run to the end zone.

Has this shocking revelation changed me as a person, or caused me so to redirect my time for better more meaningful pursuits? Has this voyage of inner discovery, painted large on the great American landscape, provided any catharsis or release from the tyranny of my obsessive devotion to the great vacuity that is enshrined in those 643 seconds?

Ask me in three weeks after the Superbowl. Till then, Go Vikes !!

Interesting times

The first decade of the third millennium after Christ will soon come to an end and I do not know if it is due to my advancing years or that we just get bombarded with too much information but it seems like a lot has happened. If we were to step in to our Tardis (Dr Who fans unite) and go back ten years we would look on a very different time. Imagine a world without...Twitter, Facebook, Youtube even texting (let alone sexting). Now consider the time it takes to keep up with these new time tyrants and how they have entered the collective western subconscious in  a way that we would not even consider ten years ago.

Go back to near the beginning of the decade when there was the event that has shaped much of what passed in public life since then, the 9/11 attacks. They were not the most deadly, or widespread attacks on a nation, consider Serbia and Iraq's treatment, yet in some strange way the surreality of the nature of the attacks almost makes them play like an outlandish unimaginable action film in our minds, at least those of us who were not there, or in some way forever hurt by the attacks. We now close the decade with the almost unimaginable exploding underwear on Nigerians scenario. Almost hilariously surreal because no one but the foolish young man was hurt but it could have been awful and I fly Northwest through Amsterdam all the time, so it is close to home in so many ways.

So now to the great African nation of  Nigeria's list of things to work on, 411 scams, corruption as an art form, brutal shariah law in the North etc, we now have a true piece de resistance, young Nigerians wearing exploding underwear on airlines. Interesting times indeed. Thankfully though the decade that started with a bang mercifully did not end with a bang from two day old underwear on a Nigerian.

It is sad to think that it is the violently unimaginable that bookends the decade. Then again there is always Y2K to not think of and the countless generators, safe rooms, gun stores and can repositories that were assembled over that one. I am sure somewhere in this there is a message for all of us.

Maybe the decade actually started with a fizzle and ended with a sizzle....Hmmmm?

For 3xl the thought of hibernating for a few months or the next decade does seem mildly appealing. However when I woke up what would I find?

May you continue to live in interesting times friends.

Next?

Greetings fellow turkey tasters, stuffing scoffers, cranberry consumers. Let us all bid a hurried farewell to 2009. Whether it ends with a bang or a whimper it ends nevertheless and we all look forward to the next decade. To say the year ended inauspiciously would be an understatement worthy of someone from my fair isles. Yes we are still in the dead zone between Christmas and New Year, Kwanzaa suspended and Hanukkah held looking to a decade we hope will be more Gator, and less Lemon-ade.

So what now? New ideas, better plans, less loans? The possibilities are nothing like endless, but with all of this frugality, fear and pink slip petrification comes a sense of that special magic that every new year brings, that it will be different.

In the regions around Azerbaijan and Iran the new year festival of Novruz comes in the spring time and in commemoration of that time children build fires and jump over them. They trust that the old bad things will be burned away as they leap over the tongal and a new year will begin with them free and clear. For many despite foreclosures and credit crunches there arises in the breast of man a sense that things can change and will be better, and why not! 

So whatever 2009 did to you, take five minutes to linger in the luxury or melancholy of it and then turn your head to 2010 and shout out, Next!