The Blog is Back

One of my goals for 2011 was to establish myself as a "blogger". I like to read other people's blogs. I have ideas I want to share. I'm a writer without a particular writing forum at this time in my life. Yes, a blog would be a good thing ... or so I thought.

I managed to make about half a dozen blog posts and then the whole project fell apart. I haven't added anything since September. In rereading my past blog entries, I'm very pleased with how they turned out. So what exactly went wrong with keeping up a regular blog?

Problem #1: The Editor that lives in my brain. Over my writing career I've made more off of being an editor than I've ever made as a writer. I can't just write something and not care about the spelling, the grammar, the imagery, the artistry of my language choices. This is why it takes me forever to write a story and I've never finished a novel. I edit my work to death. If there isn't the time to re-read, tweak, manipulate, massage, and look at my writing from all angles, then I can't sit down to write. Blogs are supposed to be the raw thoughts that just drop out of our open minds. My friends document their activities and record their thoughts in words and move on because tomorrow will be another day and another opportunity to blog. I need to relax.

Problem #2: The Butterfly that lives in my brain. I have focus issues. I shed ideas like skin cells. I start something and am easily distracted by something else. I am the poster child for Random Global. I heat the water and pour it in the cup, drop in the tea bag, and then walk away with every intention of returning in three minutes. Hours later I discover the tea cup with the very dark, cold, liquid and accompanying lumpy tea bag. So I take out the tea bag and reheat the tea. Hours later I open the microwave and find this cup of very dark liquid half evaporated away. By the end of the day I have tea espresso, or distilled essence of tea, that won't scrape out of the cup. Likewise I think, "That would make a good blog post. I'll sit down and write that. Oh, wait, the buzzer on the dryer just went off. I'll change the laundry then sit down to write. Oh, I should make a cup of tea before I sit down..." I need self-discipline.

Problem #3: The Flight Controller that lives in my brain. I love it when a plan comes together. I love making plans and schedules and timetables and setting deadlines. I am Queen of the Calendar and take great delight in filling in the week's to-do activities. I told myself I'd blog once a week and publish on Fridays. Trouble was, once I missed that first Friday (see problem #2 above) then I didn't feel like I could blog until the next Friday because that was the schedule I had set. You miss enough weeks and then it gets embarrassing to show up again. This is what exercise gyms count on -- you'll sign up with the best intentions, but after awhile not show up, then be too embarrassed to show up until your membership expires and you start in somewhere else. I need to pick myself up, dust myself off, and start all over again without self-imposed deadlines.

So, as 2011 dwindles away and 2012 steps up in its place, the blog is back. It's a humbler blog, a more forgiving blog, a sadder-but-wiser blog. It knows it might not do any better in 2012 than 2011, but it's at least willing to try again.

My Favorite Home Tours Part One

I like visiting homes that either through their creation or their occupancy have acquired some of the character of the person who lived there. You can learn a great deal about a person by their home, whether they are present in it or not. Since I love tours and my family operates on a home school schedule, I’ve been to numerous places in California where you can not only visit a person’s home, but walk around inside someone’s dream. In this first of a two-part blog I’ll give you two places along the California coast to check out.

Hearst Castle California State Park
http://www.hearstcastle.org/
On a beautiful hilltop that looks out to the sea beyond San Simeon, California newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst wanted to “upgrade” his family’s tent campsite into a comfortable vacation residence where he could entertain his famous and infamous friends in lavish style. What he ended up with was 90,080 square feet of eye-dazzling architecture that houses his museum’s worth of rare world art and fine collectibles. The California State Park’s Service has created a top-notch tourist attraction out of the estate. There’s a theater that shows a quality film about Hearst and his home, a huge gift shop, candy and pastry vendors, a cafeteria, and air conditioned busses with audio tours that take you up the hill to the estate which encompasses swimming pools, tennis courts, 96 bedrooms, 41 fireplaces, 61 baths, and 19 sitting rooms. Whether you like architecture, art, gardens, history, or interior decorating, you’ll find something awe-inspiring about Hearst Castle. And if all you’re interested in is the sensationalism, hedonism, and scandals of the rich and famous, well, there’s plenty of that, too.

I’ve been to Hearst Castle about four times now in my life and what I love about it is the humble story of Julia Morgan, the architect who started the project in 1919 and spent 28 years of her illustrious career supervising every aspect of the estate’s construction including the purchase of the Spanish antiquities, the Icelandic moss, and even the reindeer for the private zoo. Hearst paid for the castle, and he entertained in the castle, but the character of the castle is a blend between Hearst’s ambition and Morgan’s artistic vision. A San Francisco native, Julia Morgan was one of the first women to graduate from UC Berkeley with a degree in architecture. She was the first woman ever to go to Paris and gain a post-graduate degree in architecture. She has over 800 lovely architectural projects to her credit throughout California and Hawaii. She lived her talented life to an advanced age as a single, professional woman devoted to her extended family and to making the designs of buildings we live in both practical and aesthetically pleasing.

I’m not enough of a party person to have wanted to be one of Hearst’s guests at his dinner parties. But I would love to swim in the indoor pool, with its ultramarine blue gold-leaf tiles, all by myself. I’d also like to sneak up to the library and just sit in a window that looks onto the sea and read. I would have liked to go horseback riding under the riding arbor when the wisteria was in bloom and catch a glimpse of Julia Morgan directing the workman. She is someone I’d like to have split a sandwich and a cup of coffee with while sitting on one of the half-constructed walls during a construction break.

Nit Wit Ridge
881 Hillcrest Drive, Cambria CA
Michael & Stacey O’Malley (805) 927-2690

To go from taking a tour of Hearst Castle with all its glitz and glamour to a tour of Nit Wit Ridge is truly going from the sublime to the ridiculous, but seeing both sights of such extremes provides mental balance and honors the right of anyone to pursue their dreams. Nit Wit Ridge is only a short drive south of Hearst Castle along Highway 1 in the little folk artsy community of Cambria. You can GPS the address and drive by anytime, but to get in and actually walk around you need to call the O’Malley’s in advance and arrange for them to come out and give you a tour. The first time I tried to meet up with the O’Malley’s we missed connections. A few years later I tried again and was glad that I had persisted because I’ve never looked at a garbage heap the same way again.

Arthur Harold Beal lived in the “shadow” of Hearst Castle construction, but unlike the millionaire, he was the town’s garbage collector and junk hauler. He couldn’t believe the things people just tossed out that still had a lot of use in them and often a lot of artistic charm. So, der Tinkerpaw, as he was nicknamed, started creating a home for himself out of “found” materials. There’s a whole “found art” movement nowadays but in 1928 he was just considered a nitwit and the neighbors complained that he was bringing down property values. Beal ignored them and continued for 50 years to landscape his 2.5 hillside acres with 3 levels of terraced gardens, stone arches, and his small home all built out of cement and beer cans, abalone shells, broken tiles, car parts, TV antennas, and salvaged bathroom medicine cabinets. It’s the picture frames made out of old toilet seats that give a glimpse of the humor of this non-conformist. What I liked were the little found figurines, old dolls, china pieces or old salt & pepper shakers that are embedded in the mosaics of ocean glass and broken pottery.

Unfortunately, where Beal excelled in creativity, he lacked in people skills and he often had reputation-damaging run-ins with local government and the “Lookie Lou’s” while apparently being a great host to those he considered friends. After Beal died in 1992 there was pressure to tear the place down. Beal’s friends the O’Malley’s had to struggle to get Nit Wit Ridge declared a State Historic Landmark which does not carry with it the development money that comes with being a State Park but does insure that a bulldozer and wrecking ball don’t have their way with the property. The price for a tour of Nit Wit Ridge is much less than you’ll spend for a tour of Hearst Castle and there is no gift shop or modern bathroom facilities in any visitor’s center. Still, the forty-five minute tour did not leave nearly enough time to study and savor all the uniqueness going on in the place. Where Hearst had poured money into the construction of his home by an army of workmen, Beal had done the back-breaking work of pouring concrete all by himself.

Want to have a perfect tourist day? Take the Hearst Castle tour in the morning, have lunch at the State Park picnic area, then drive down to Cambria and hook up with the O’Malley’s. After a tour of Nit Wit Ridge you’ll have time to go down into Cambria and dine at Linn’s Bakery and Eatery (https://linnsofcalifornia.com/ or http://www.linnsfruitbin.com/) which is worth a trip to Cambria all on its own. We’ve never eaten anything there that wasn’t outstanding and what they do with an olallieberry is sheer artistry. Linn’s represents another form of the American Dream – a family-owned business that started out as an orchard, then a fruit stand, then a fine foods emporium and bakery, and after a fire in the 1990’s, a charming restaurant on a major thoroughfare of touristy Cambria. Be sure to save room for dessert! You’ll be able to reflect over the after-dinner coffee on a day full of inspiration.

Hounds of Heaven

People want believers in Jesus to provide them with some miraculous proof that Jesus, the Son of God, is real and alive. I think all genuine Jesus followers are the miraculous proof of life. It’s easy for Christians to forget that their lives serve as the medium for God’s message to mankind. It’s easy to become complacent about all the carefully orchestrated encounters that lead a person to glimpse a real Jesus for the first time. I do several interviews a year with people who tell me the story of their spiritual lives and how they came to believe in Jesus wholeheartedly rather than just intellectually. All their stories involve relationships with other people. Sometimes those relationships took place at churches, or Bible camps, or revivals but talk earnestly with a believer and you will discover a story of a lost sheep being herded to the safety of a shepherd’s arms by a special operations team of heavenly hounds.

Ever watch a border collie responding to the clicks and whistles of the farmer to move a herd of sheep from point A to point B? They make the sheep go where the farmer wants by every means available to a canine: physical presence, barks, and even growls. If the ewe is stubborn there might even need to be a nip here and there. From the sheep’s point of view it’s harassment but from the farmer’s point of view it’s about getting that sheep where it needs to be in order for it to thrive.

As a child, all I knew of what Christians believed was cobbled together from Christmas television specials and the “Davey and Goliath” children’s television shows on Sunday morning. I suppose that makes Goliath my first hound of heaven. I had a friend in High School that took me to a church production of Joseph and His Amazing Technicolor Dream Coat. Performing in that play was a future boyfriend whose mother would try to introduce me to Advent and saying table grace while holding hands. Years later when I joined Bible Study Fellowship I discovered that she had been a BSF leader at the time I knew her. These seemingly coincidental encounters were, for me, glimpses of the sheepdogs darting behind the rocks and moving me by avoidance down broad paths. But there is nothing random or coincidental about how God woos the people He has created. We just miss the method because we’re lost in our madness.

At college I met this guy who exuded peace and joy. When he smiled, his eyes became two little squinty lines and all you saw was the grin. I didn’t know it at the time, but I became the pet prayer project for him and his dormitory Bible study group. The guys told the girls’ Bible study downstairs about me. Over a two year period, try as I might, I could not shake these people. They were everywhere I went, and they were always happy to see me, like I was somehow special to them. They always offered to help me with my homework, or fix my bicycle, or carry something for me, or go fetch something for me. They would sidle up to me and start friendly conversations. They would stop by my dorm room just to let me know that if I ever needed anything, they were there for me. They had troubles and challenges and personality quirks like everybody else. What made them stand out was that they seemed genuinely hopeful. They moved through life lightly and dealt with things gracefully rather than like people weighed down with dread and bitterness. They creeped me out and fascinated me at the same time. I would tell myself I’d have nothing to do with them and suddenly find myself surrounded by them in the dining commons or the library.

Their ringleader, the smiley one, drove a tiny Civic Honda. Since he was the only car owner amongst the group, eight people would squeeze in to that Honda to get off campus for some fun. When they invited me to brunch on Sunday mornings I should have known the car would stop at church because “it was on the way.” Oh, look, the service is just starting, what a coincidence! I thought I was safe when they invited me out on a Friday night to the movies. We ended up at some warehouse showing of “The Jesus Film.” All the way home I’m sobbing uncontrollably while seven other people compressed into the car are serenely silent and tactfully passing me tissues.

My heavenly hounds’ persistence paid off. Two and a half years of Christ-inspired behavior on their part led me inexorably to my own relationship with Jesus who had given them His compassion towards me. Twenty-nine years later I’m still in touch with a few of those faithful sheepdogs who refused to let me wander off into my own willfulness. I married the Honda driver and our children give us squinty grins. But here’s to those who stalked and yipped and got the occasional kick in the chops for their troubles. I may not get to thank some of them this side of heaven but I am grateful that they surrounded me with prayer and came alongside to guide me with their friendship. And now the one they guided me to communicates His signals in His own subtle ways. It is time for this old dog to get back to work.

Old Lady in the Moonlight

Our German Shepherd/Collie mix, Lady, had seen fifteen Christmases and would not see another. She was down to one working tooth, nearly blind, completely deaf, arthritic, and incontinent. The incontinence had destroyed the wall-to-wall carpet in the living room before I had resorted to doggie diapers. I ripped up the carpet and laid down tile. Lady had the unfortunate tendency to cross the tile and end up splayed upon it like Bambi-on-the-ice, flat on her belly and unable to gain enough traction to stand up. She had lost her resonant German Shepherd “Woof” and could only wheeze “hooth.” Often at night she would hit that tile and end up going “hooth, hooth,” for a long time before someone woke up and came out to pull her back up into a standing position. If it took too long for her to be discovered, her circulation would be so bad that you would have to massage her legs and feet and sort of swing her legs back and forth until she could gain the ability to stand.

One night I awoke from a sound sleep hearing a muffled “hooth, hooth” through the wall. Lady was down and who knew how long she had been there! I flung back the covers and without taking even a moment to put on my glasses or step into slippers I ran down the hallway from the bedroom to the living room and grabbed the forty pound dog up in my arms. Twice I tried to align her four legs under her and get her to stand on her own but she’d start to slide back down. I was trying to massage circulation back into her legs but she started to gag like she was going to throw up and I quickly decided we’d deal with that outside. Awkwardly, with coughing collie in my arms, I got the side door open and was mincing painfully across the patio towards the lawn. Out in the backyard it was California “nippy” cold but not quite freezing. There was a full moon out that December evening and I had a very furry dog keeping my torso warm as I softly swayed with her to keep her legs moving.

Why was I doing this? Buying the delicatessen dog food that she could gum rather than chew, putting her food on a stand so she didn’t have to bend down for it, and changing doggie diapers throughout the day? Because I believe God entrusted Adam, and by extension humanity, with the stewardship of the garden and its inhabitants. When you agree to adopt a dog into your family you commit to caring for it, for better or worse, for as long as there is quality of life. I guess I was doing it because we all grow old and deserve to be remembered for who we were in the prime of life, not necessarily at the tail end. I was doing it because Lady could still wag her tail when I scratched behind her ears.

In her youth, Lady had been a dog of extraordinary talents. We’d been told when we adopted her that she was a “jumper” – we just didn’t appreciate what that meant. We did the first time she launched herself over a six foot wooden fence in pursuit of a cat that had wandered into our yard. The kennel where we boarded her for vacations developed quite a file on Lady D. The first time we left her they tried putting her in a regular kennel and shortly after we left she scaled the six foot chain link fence. After a lovely chase from Lady’s perspective, they put her in a kennel with a roof. She watched her handlers come in and out a few times, and figured out how to flip the kennel latch herself. But in order to create a distraction for her getaway, she also flipped all the other kennel latches, releasing all the inmates in cellblock B. When they finally found her several acres away they put her in a kennel and wired shut her door. It took her awhile but she unwound the wire with her teeth and had another fun romp with the kennel owners. They admitted she was always a friendly and cooperative dog once she was caught.

Even with the gray in her muzzle and the cloudiness in her brown eyes, she was still a beautiful dog. She wasn’t one to gulp her food and when she lay down she’d cross her paws in a lady-like way. People would stop us as we were on our “walkies” to comment what a beautiful dog she was. She walked on a leash beautifully, would let you shake her paw, and she could sit, lie down and play dead on command. Her “stay” and “come” however, was based on whether she found obeying “worth her while.” She could charm a toddler out of a cookie without making a sound. I once found a fresh loaf of baked bread that I had set out on the counter to cool completely hollowed out behind the couch. Sometimes, if I forgot my sunglasses or a grocery coupon and dashed back into the house from the car, I’d find her standing on her hind legs at the kitchen counter, “pilfering” scraps off the not-yet-washed dishes. She’d look at me with some chagrin, as if to say, “Oh, I thought you’d gone already,” then slowly sink back down to all fours and saunter out of the kitchen.

For all her dainty airs, like a Southern heroine from a Tennessee Williams play, Lady had a neurotic, broken side to her personality, brought on by puppyhood trauma. Explosive noises – be it popping balloons, fireworks, gunfire, a car backfire, or thunder – transformed her from Lady Dog to Lunatic Dog. We learned we had to tranquilize her for 4th of July and New Year’s Eve or have 40 pounds of quaking, hysterical canine trying to climb into our armpits or ripping doorframes apart. She once leapt off the balcony of a two-story cabin in Lake Tahoe we were renting for 4th of July. We could only assume fireworks had been set off in the neighborhood but how she made the leap with only a slight limp to show for it we could never be sure. We once had left her contentedly in our mini-van, windows cracked, on a cold winter’s day while we had lunch at an old west sightseeing village. We enjoyed the fake gunfight between the heroes and the bandits until we got back to the parking lot and found that Lady had gone “Hulk, smash!” on the interior of the Dodge. The door whistled and leaked without its weather stripping ever after and once a repair guy questioned me whether those were blood stains on the handles of all the windows. I just told him he was better off not knowing.

Most endearing of Lady’s attributes was the way she took shepherding the children as a sacred duty. If my husband or I started to play with the children in any sort of wrestling way she’d stand and bark at us as if to say, “Enough of that rough house behavior, you behave yourselves!” She could be intimidating if she thought it was necessary, but more often she’d simply come and sit down beside your knees and put her long muzzle across them, patiently waiting for a walk, or a treat.

I was musing about that, staring ahead at the moon halfway up in the sky when I noticed Lady and I were casting a dark shadow that stretched ahead of us when it should have been behind us. I suddenly realized what the “flup-flup-flup” noise that had been steadily growing louder had to be. The shadow shrank towards me as the police helicopter skimming over my neighborhood climbed over my head. I hoped they were not videotaping their inspection of the neighborhoods. I’d hate to see the headlines, “Naked Woman Dances with Wolf,” or “Canine Cultist Moons the Moon.” I suppose they have seen stranger things and had more notorious criminals to apprehend. Once the helicopter was safely out of sight, I put down my fur coat and after a few stiff steps, she did her backyard business and then smelled her way back to me. She wagged her tail as I scratched behind her ear as if to say, “So why are we out here in the cold?”

The Funkiest Wedding

My boyfriend and I both believed that the only reason to wed was because you could love God and serve Him better together than you could apart. After a mini-soap-opera of a five-year courtship in which both sides of the family did not think we were good enough to graft into their branch of the family tree we were convinced it was God’s will that we marry. The families grudgingly resigned themselves to the fact that we were going to do this despite their disapproval. We set a date that gave us three months to pull a wedding together on what the bride and groom had in their savings and enlisted the help of our close friends. I delegated music, decorations, and key aspects of the ceremony to various people and concentrated on things that only I could do like fainting at my blood test for the marriage license.

Despite what the bride beautiful magazines tell you, a wedding ceremony is not about what the bride wants or even about having a “perfect day” of memories. A wedding is about taking two families of strangers and making them into one strange family. My beloved and I could have gone on a mountain top and said our vows before God and the arrangement would have been binding for us because we believe God is omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent. But we felt we had to have a wedding ceremony witnessed by our relatives so there could be no more suggestions that we try “dating somebody else.”

The difficulty was finding a neutral territory in which to have the ceremony. Our college church had met in the YMCA and our pastor wasn’t available for a month surrounding our wedding date. My mother-in-law’s church wouldn’t marry us because I was not Catholic. My family’s Methodism was the kind that didn’t have a home church. So we settled on an outdoor wedding in the back yard of my imminent in-laws. They obtained a little trellis arch and decorated it with silk flowers. My future father-in-law offered to make arrangements to have a new, young pastor from his church perform the ceremony. I had never been to his church – it had a really long name that ended with the word “wonders” – but I was relieved to have one less thing on my to do list.

It is only in the last century that we have grown dependent on weddings to economically sustain caterers, bakers, florists, confectioners, tuxedo rentals, bridal boutiques, and wedding consultants. I found out recently that it is considered bad luck to make your own wedding dress. I had sewn my share of nightgowns and for $50 of white satin and lace, I was able to sew my own wedding dress. I’ll admit, it looked somewhat like a nightgown, but at least there were no complicated fittings and my maid-of-honor could hand sew the hem as we drove to Grover City (later renamed Grover Beach). I bought a nice pair of high-heeled dance sandals. My mother had a silk flowered headdress made for me and since brides in other countries have had to wear far worse, I figured I could get through the ceremony without it toppling off my head. The groom and the best man would wear dark slacks and shoes and traditional Filipino wedding shirts made by the mother-of-the-groom.

Initially, I was just going to have cake and punch for the reception, but my future mother-in-law refused to have a “white people’s” reception for her only son. She and the aunties told me they would cook some decent Filipino food like lumpia, chicken adobo, and pansit, so “at least people could eat” and when word of this leaked out my side of the family volunteered to bring meat pasties and potluck salads. Since I like “naked” Angel Food cake with fresh strawberries, the maid of honor and I baked about six of them and chopped up the berries the night before.

By the morning of August 6, 1983, it had been discovered that the best man had forgotten his dress shoes and had only ratty sneakers to wear. I suggested he go barefoot since the whole thing would take place on the grass in the backyard. My friend in charge of decorations had strung white and pink crepe paper over every part of the patio, clothesline, and shrubbery she could reach. In the coastal air the crepe paper was already beginning to stretch so the patio looked like it had been TP’ed by pranksters. My friend had been drinking cola since breakfast and was looking a bit jittery so I told her she had achieved modern art without a government grant. I later found out she tied three dozen aluminum soda cans to our getaway truck. She also drew hearts in shaving crème over the vehicle which, because it sat out in the sun all afternoon, ate into the paint job so that a heart could be seen on the side of that truck for the next 17 years we owned it.

As we approached the time for getting dressed for the ceremony, my fiancé pulled me aside privately and said, “If you have any doubts about marrying me, this is your chicken exit. You can call it off right now. But if you vow to be my wife, and take me for your husband, it’s for life because divorce will not be an option. We may be happy or we may be miserable, but we will be together until we die.” I don’t remember exactly what I said, but it was something to the effect of “let’s do this.”

I was trying to pull together my whole hair and dress ensemble in my parents’ motorhome when my maid-of-honor came in and said soothingly, “We’ve had a slight miscommunication but things are going to be JUST FINE.” Turns out the young pastor my father-in-law had asked to perform the wedding had thought he was being invited to attend a wedding. I had thought it odd that there was no wedding rehearsal scheduled. Poor guy showed up just when the ceremony should have started only to be greeted by two really annoyed fathers. Fortunately, he lived a few blocks away so he raced home and got his “wedding gear” and raced back to do what the state of California had invested him with the power to do.

I told my musician friends, who often played at coffee houses in our college town, to choose something they knew we would like. I believe our processional was “When I’m Sixty-Four” by the Beatles and our recessional was “Crocodile Rock” by Elton John. Our maid-of-honor was the loveliest thing at the wedding in a rose gown she had chosen. She has a habit of giggling when she’s nervous. The audience kept wondering what joke they were missing as she walked up to her place. Our best man is very tall and very sentimental and as he took his place, there was much questioning among the relatives as to the significance of having the best man go barefoot. The groom was trying to look dignified while giving our names to the pastor. I was concentrating on not losing my headdress of flowers while gripping onto my father’s arm as my high heels snagged on the brick walkway and sunk into the lawn.

I made it to my beloved’s side, was given away by my father, and faced the pastor completely unsure of what would happen next. He threw back his head and flung his hands to the sky and cried out in a booming southern accent, “Praise God, Brothers and Sisters, for the GLORIOUS day HE has made and the bringing together of these two young people in that SACRED and HOLY institution of marriage, AMEN and HALLELUJAH.” I looked at my betrothed and he looked at me and we smiled. God had provided the perfect pastor who would make both sides of the family equally uncomfortable.

We loved everything the pastor had to say except for the fact that he kept getting my name wrong. My husband not only married Sandra Sue that day but Sharon, Susan, and Sally. This sent the maid of honor into suppressed fits of giggles. The best man began to weep and sniffle as large tears dropped off the end of his nose. My groom and I had our own distraction in the form of a fly that thought we looked good enough to eat. I made an effort to not swallow it as I was saying my part and at one point I wanted to reach out and smack it off my man’s mustache but decided the audience wasn’t going to understand a loving slap’s role in the ceremony anymore than they were following the preacher’s southern drawl.

Vows were vowed, rings exchanged, and we were pronounced man and wife. The traditional family photographs were taken. My family made a point of cutting off the best man’s bare feet in the photos they took. My in-laws made a point of including his feet but cutting off the best man’s head in every photo they took of the wedding party. One of our friends had made a lovely mix of wedding music that he played for our reception as both sides of the family endured the afternoon heat on their own sides of the patio and visited their own buffet tables of food. I was particularly proud of the fathers, who broke ranks and went to the opposite sides to fill their plates. My father picked up a piece of lumpia and stared at it. My father-in-law picked up a meat pasty and stared at it. Then they both took a bite and smiled at each other with recognition. Chopped meat and vegetables in a pastry – this they could appreciate!

My brother had been kind enough to play some of his bluegrass music for the reception and now with a piece of cake he came to sit beside me. My husband’s family was on one side of the patio, muttering. My family was huddled on the other side, murmuring. My brother said gently, “You were a flower girl at my first wedding so you remember how perfect it was. The church, the dress, the flowers, the ice sculpture at the reception – all just the way they were supposed to be. But ten years later the marriage failed. Based on what you’ve gone through today, you two must really love each other and I’m thinking your marriage will succeed.” I was too numb at the time to remember if I had a response, but I’ve often thought since about marital success being inversely proportional to the size of the wedding ice sculpture.

Our musicians were getting ready to leave and one of them came up to us with congratulatory hugs and said appreciatively, “I’ve done a lot of weddings but THIS was the FUNKIEST wedding I’ve ever seen.” Twenty-seven years and many weddings later I can say with confidence that mine was the funkiest wedding I have ever seen. But for all the quirks and mishaps of the wedding, the marriage has been glorious, delightful, and blessed. A wedding is just a day, a ceremony, a life-marker that announces, “from here on out, two lives become one.” It’s the marriage and the legacy it creates that matters in the grand scheme of life.

Alma

“I’ll go get Alma ready to receive a visitor,” the orderly said and left me in the hallway of the assisted living center for seniors. Looking around at the various old people inexplicably left in the hallway propped up in their walkers or parked in their wheelchairs I knew, as most of them did, that this wasn’t a center for living but rather one for dying. I was thirty years old, and nine months into a healthy pregnancy that had made my waist-length hair flourish into a shampoo-commercial mane of shiny locks. I stood there, the poster child for fecundity, listening to the grunts and squeaks as the residents sidled closer and closer to me. This always happened. No one said anything, but these souls trapped in withered bodies would crowd around me and silently reach out and touch my belly and smile. The new life I was carrying attracted them like moths to a flame.

“Y’all leave the nice church lady alone now!” the orderly said, shooing old people away like they were overly affectionate cats. To me he said, “Alma’s glad you’re here, you just go on in.” Alma had been some sort of civil service employee, married and divorced, and now in her old age she had no family left and only a few friends. Years ago she had smoked a pack of cigarettes a day and now she was dying of lung cancer. She had rediscovered a faith in God she had known as a child and a friend of hers had asked the church to send somebody who could talk to her about “heavenly things.” I was the trained Stephen Minister that had been assigned as Alma’s care giver.

At our first meeting she asked me, “Do you smoke? Have you ever smoked?” I shook my head, taking in the numerous tubes and the gurgling oxygen tank that was keeping Alma alive. “Don’t you ever take a single puff. That’s the message of my life. If you care about your friends and family, you make sure they never smoke. You tell anybody with a lit cigarette about me. I know everybody dies. But this –“ and she paused both to gesture to her tank and to struggle for breath, “is a horrible . . . way to . . . die.”

I visited Alma once a week for months. In a typical church body the demand for counsel and visitations exceeds what a pastor can keep up with so the Stephen Ministry program was created to train lay members of the church to assist people through the changes in life that create crises. I’d cared for people who had been injured or were recovering from a surgery, I’d visited families with a new baby trying to sort out what life was life without sleep, and I’d been there for people who were grieving the loss of a spouse or a child. Alma was my first assignment in “walking someone home.” There wasn’t anything I could do to make breathing any easier for her. I was just there for her to have someone to talk with about what really matters in life. We talked about God, and faith, and heaven. We talked about hopes and regrets. As the months passed, though, we seemed to talk more and more about the baby.

As Alma’s body trembled as she fought for oxygen between sentences, she would plot how I could bring the baby to see her. She didn’t want me to bring the baby “into a place like this.” But there was a little courtyard outside her room and she would get the orderly to unlock the gate. I could bring the baby up to the window. She would get the attendants to roll her bed up to the glass. We talked about baby names and Lamaze class and I showed her things that were going into the baby’s nursery. Our visits grew shorter because Alma would grow too fatigued to talk.

I went into labor on a Sunday night and by Monday morning I had delivered at the birthing center. My daughter was 7 pounds, 21 inches and “perfect” according to every criteria of infancy. I, however, had complications with the delivery and had it been a century or two earlier I would have probably died. Since it was 1990, I simply had to have outpatient surgery. It meant that my little family did not get home until mid-day Tuesday. My best friend was there to make sure mother and child were resting comfortably and when the doorbell rang she signed for the delivery. It was a beautiful flower and balloon arrangement in a little bassinet vase. I was surprised when the card said it was from Alma. How did she know the baby had been born? I had a phone number Alma had told me to call when the baby was born but up until now I had not had the chance. I did so to thank her for the flowers but was only able to leave a message on a machine.

The next day I got a call from Alma’s friend who had first referred her to our church. Because my husband had called the church to announce our daughter’s birth, the friend had found out I had delivered. Alma had passed away sometime between Sunday night and Monday morning but she had left money and instructions with her friend that when my baby was born, a gift would be sent in Alma’s name. I looked over at the bassinet and at the cat playing with the balloons and realized that Alma had taken her last breath around the same time my daughter had been struggling to take her first. I started to cry, realizing that I would not need to break into Alma’s courtyard in order for her to see the baby. In the twenty years since I knew Alma, I have tried to pass on her message: don’t smoke – ever.

What's with the pigs?

When someone comes into my house it doesn’t take long for them to ask, “Who’s the pig fanatic?” or “What’s with all the pigs?” I estimate that there’s 200 different pig-themed items around the house. I have pig-themed art, tools, books, clothing, kitchen utensils, mugs, table settings, banks, flower planters, wind-chimes, refrigerator magnets, and figurines. If you reach for a flashlight, it’s shaped like a pig. If you lift off the shower cap from the wall it was hanging on a pig head. I have pig slippers and a costume rubber pig nose. I have dozens of pig-themed bracelets and pins. I have pig-shaped corn cob holders. If you are in a public area of my house, there are pig things watching you.

I never intended to collect pigs. In my early teens my family went on a vacation to London. We visited the British Museum, we went to the tower of London, we watched the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace, but we also went to a county fair on the outskirts of the city. I loved the fair because it was so green, and the horses were so beautiful, and they had these pink piglets of the breed later featured in the movie “Babe.” These tiny porkers were reminiscent of my childhood favorites, Wilbur from “Charlotte’s Web” and Piglet from the “Winnie-the-Pooh” series. When we returned to California my brother asked me what I liked best about London. I mentioned that I liked the country fair and I showed him photographs of the pigs and he said sarcastically, “You went to London, England and what you liked were the pigs?!”

For my next birthday he gave me a pig candle with a card that said, “Since you like pigs so much!” There were about thirteen of my high school friends watching me open presents and read cards and they all burst out with, “Oh! You like pigs! You should have told us.” At my next birthday party, everything I got for a present was shaped like or decorated with pigs. The following Christmas, people had noticed I had a shelf of “pig things” and I started to get more presents for my “pig collection.” By the time I went to college, the collection was out of control and since I showed up in my dorm room with pig pens and a Miss Piggy calendar and a pig keychain, I had no hope of coming off as anything but a swinophile, an oinkologist, or a pigmaniac.

For a long time I wasn’t sure I wanted to be associated with a creature typically thought of as dirty, gluttonous, and destined for slaughter. But along with collecting pigs, I started to learn about them. Pigs are the fourth smartest non-human animals on earth after primates, dolphins, and elephants. Pigs can be obsessive about rooting things out using their extremely sensitive noses whether the object of their search is a truffle or a landmine. Pigs can swim. Pigs enjoy music. Pigs are curious and play with toys. Pigs are sensitive and expressive – if they’re happy their tails curl tight; if they are sad or sick, their tails go limp and straight. Pigs are typically covered with mud not because they lack a sense of hygiene but because they wallow in mud to cool their sensitive skin and protect themselves from parasites, much as we might slather on sunscreen or bug repellant. You cannot be “sweating like a pig” because pigs don’t sweat. Pigs, unlike a lot of animals, prefer to defecate away from where they eat and live. Pigs are omnivores but they do not overeat. They are simply “made to be meaty” when they are healthy. The more I knew about pigs, the more akin to them I felt.

But it was at the Kern County Fair one year that I truly bonded with the nature of swine. It was pig judging time and I was sitting in the stands watching 4-H kids move their hogs around before the judge. Vision and cooperation are not a hog’s strong points so to get the beasts to turn the swineherds had to use wide boards with a handle. The pig would plod along and then the youth would plant this board down directly in their path, and make a corner out of it with another board, putting up impassable walls in front of the boar or sow and leaving them only one direction to turn (swine do not go in reverse well). So, resignedly, the porcine creature would turn and waddle in the direction indicated, while its handler ran around it and set up the barriers to turn it in the next direction they wanted their prize porker to go. And then it dawned on me: that’s how God sometimes has to direct me. I get so fixated on going forward that the only way for Him to divert me in a different direction is to put up these barriers, these hardships, these disasters, these losses in my life so that when faced with “dead ends” ahead and to the side I blunder on in the only direction left open to me. I’m one of God’s pigs. Smart, social, curious but built for practicality, not for style. I require spiritual whacking with a cane (“thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me”) or “direction by limited options” to get me where God wants me to be.

Pig anatomy is similar to humans in the arrangement of their internal organs. Nearly every part of a pig can be used for some pharmaceutical purpose which is why we have pig insulin, pig thyroxin, and pig heart valves inside lots of humans today. Not to mention the delicious array of pork products (the other white meat) digesting inside a large portion of the population. I had the most delicious bacon-wrapped dates at my niece’s wedding and was told by the caterers they were called “baby fingers.” Is it any wonder that the oldest known domesticated farm animal was the pig?

What perversity on our part has allowed us to make the term “pig” an insult? Sir Winston Churchill once said, “I like pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals.” Harry Truman was quoted as saying, “No man should be allowed to be President who does not understand hogs.” So whether God knew I was a piggy at heart and allowed the pig collection to develop around me or whether being surrounded by pigs has influenced my approach to life is hard to say. But I do hope the Mama Pig Cookie Jar holding two piglets survives me. It’s where I’ve told the kids to stash my ashes.