Dog Burritos, Car Keys and Fish

Ok, so this weekend I kept seeing a pervading theme developing around me…..and actually even into this morning too. One of BEING a friend and helping others when they need it and the intrinsic value of HAVING friends to help when you need it…..and the really cool thing is that I got to see it from three viewpoints…..the doer, the receiver and the observer.

So it all started late Saturday night. I was talking to a dear friend of mine who is going through a really hard time and towards the end of the conversation she mentioned to me that her family (her siblings and elder relatives) had all decided that evening at the dinner table that family is everything…because essentially friends will just stab you in the back. Now, my friend doesn’t feel that way at all but no matter how much she has tried to sway her family they just won’t budge…to them, blood is everything and the ONLY thing. (Visions of countless mafia movies filled my mind…lol) So this got me thinking….and sooooo the chain of events began……

Event #1) Yo Quiero Taco Bell: As this friend was sharing her family’s views on friendship with me, I heard a bark coming from our bedroom. Now yet another quirk that the boy has is he LOVES to attack his toys. He will carry them into the bedroom, jump on the bed, fling the toy into the air, let it land and then pounce on it and bark at it as if it’s going to bark back. We’ve gotten used to this nightly routine of his so most of the time Ben and I just tune it out. So when I heard that bark I just assumed this is what he was doing….even though it did sound a bit muffled. A minute or so passed and then another muffled bark. Again, I didn’t think anything of it because it’s become so normal to hear Sarge do this. So I continued with my conversation, but I could hear Ben get up from his chair in the office and go into the bedroom to check on the him. I heard him saying something to him, but couldn’t hear what it was and a moment later I heard Sarge running down the hall and looked up just as he bounded into the living room towards me. Then I saw Ben standing in the doorway, red from laughter. “Would you like to know what your son just did?” he asked me…. I KNEW this was going to be good so I said yes, and as he tried to hold back his laughter, Ben told me why Sarge had sounded muffled when he barked. On our bed, we have several layers of covering, a top sheet, a cotton blanket, a fleece blanket, a goose down duvet, and a regular bedspread. Lately, the boy has discovered how fun it is to burrow under all the layers of covers and zip around like a mole underground. Well apparently, that’s what he had decided to do, however this time he had gotten so excited that he had tangled himself up in the fleece and in trying to get loose had in fact wrapped himself up tighter like a little doggie burrito…(gives new meaning to the Taco Bell dog…lol). So when Daddy Ben had gone in to see what Sarge was doing all he could see was a whimpering, wriggling lump under the many layers of covers. The pitiful furball was completely helpless and Ben had to come to his rescue….

Event#2) Fish Sandwich: Sunday’s have simultaneously become my most fulfilling yet most exhausting day of the week. Without going into a long self-absorbed brag list of what I do, let’s just say I’m VERY busy with a new undertaking at church. Now I love this new project, more than I ever dreamt I would to be completely honest…but I LOVE it! So when I get to church on Sunday mornings it’s pretty early and I hit the ground running. By about 11 I’m still going strong, but I’m beginning to slow down a little. When 1 o’clock comes around however I’m starting to feel the exhaustion. Now I know in time, once I build up my volunteer base, things will get significantly easier, and the load will become much lighter…until then however, it’s just me and another woman closing up shop and cleaning when everyone else is gone for the day. Thankfully we get along very well….it makes the job much easier when you enjoy the person you are working with. Yesterday however, she had to be somewhere and had to leave early. She felt bad and kept making herself feel guilty and I kept telling her not to worry about it. “Loaves and fishes” I kept saying. I’ve seen it happen too many times out at the street ministry we work at. When all the volunteers have to be somewhere and you’re operating on a skeleton crew…out of the blue, a group of volunteers will show up to help. So I knew somehow it would be ok, but even it if it ended up being just me and taking a lot longer I wasn’t going to make myself miserable by complaining. So we went along doing as many of our chores as possible before she had to leave. Then just as she had to go, a man walked up and asked me if I needed help. I told him I would very much appreciate any help he could offer if he had time. He said ok, immediately went out, and came back a few minutes later with his son in tow. Not only was he going to help me, but so was his son, his daughter and his wife! WOW!!! I was practically in tears…I was soooo thankful. Then, another couple that are in charge of another ministry at the church also came in to help me… just spontaneously decided to help. LOL….it was awesome! It was a total “loaves and fishes” moment complete with so much extra help that I didn’t know what to do with it.

Event #3) Buzzed: So normally Ben and I will take Sunday evenings off instead of going to the evening service, because it’s the only rest we really get during the week. Last night however it was our turn to help with baptisms so we went and had a blast, and I got to take pictures of the people before, during and after they got baptized….it was really fun. Well, midway through the service the cell phone rang. After feverishly rushing to turn it off (in my defense we always leave it in the car which is why I wasn’t used to turning it off before service…lol) I looked to see who called and it was my mom and brother. I thought it was a bit odd for them to call on a Sunday on the cell phone and hoped it didn’t mean there was an emergency. I decided to wait until after service to call back though and dropped it back in my purse. Then about 20 minutes later it rang again (in silent mode…don’t give me that look…lol), so by this point I knew something was wrong. I got up and called my brother back. Sure enough, mom had gone to the grocery store across town and accidently locked the keys in the car, he didn’t have a way to get to her with his key and we had the spare. Sooooooo…..after service was over and we had a couple more spontaneous baptisms, helped clean up and get everything settled, we headed out to help mom.

Event # 4) Nothing is Impossible: So first thing this morning I came into work and there was no heat…..ohhhhhhhhh…joy. LOL. I decided not to complain and just be thankful that for some odd reason I had decided to wear my ski jacket to work instead of my lighter Fall jacket. THANK GOD!! About an hour into the morning one of my friends here at work came over to say good morning and she looked about ready to cry. She suddenly opened up and asked me to pray for a family member….a potentially serious need. So I told her of course I would and gave her as many encouraging words as I could at the moment and told her to never lose hope….that I would stand with her and pray for a miracle. So we are…..

After all of those things is when I began to think about what my friend’s family had said about friendship. Yes, it’s nice to be close to your family…and it’s GOOD to be close to your family…but you need outside friends too. If you seclude yourself into a cluster of family only and nobody else just because it’s “safe”…YOUR entire life suffers as well as those that would have benefitted by having you as a friend. I remember a couple of years ago reading a VERY interesting article about a science study going on in England. It’s called The Eden Project. What it is, is an absolutely Fascinating GIANT domed ecosystem. I highly recommend you read up on it…very interesting stuff. ANYWAY….early on they discovered that the trees grown inside were large and beautiful but they weren’t as strong as trees outside of the dome. WHY? Simple, they hadn’t been exposed to the elements……they had been sheltered. The elements of driving rain, wind, extreme heat, extreme cold…though temporarily unpleasant and potentially deadly for sustained amounts of time…temper the trees with strength. Life is like that too…and so are friends. Sometimes friends will hurt us, sometimes people that call themselves friends, aren’t really friends at all….I’ve had my share of those too, sometimes family will hurt us when they are supposed to be our biggest support. Regardless…good or bad, sometimes we just can’t do it alone and we need people to reach out to us and lend us a hand and vice versa. The more we reach out to others in their time of need, the more they will reach out to us in our own time of need.

Ecclesiastes 4:9 (NLT)

9 Two people are better off than one, for they can help each other succeed. 10 If one person falls, the other can reach out and help. But someone who falls alone is in real trouble.

It's "My Husband Rocks" Friday!

So this is my first official “My Husband Rocks- Friday” blog entry (thanks sooooo much Katy Lin at the blog The Great Adventure for creating this weekly tribute! If you click the title of this entry you can be taken to Katy Lin's blog page to learn more.) …..YEAH!!! I started to post one last week, but time got away from me.

So, I was trying to decide what to put in my first MHR post and decided to go with something he did last Saturday. Ben and I usually spend our Saturdays preparing for and then going to feed the homeless and low-income people in our town as part of a ministry called Isaiah 58 Outreach. Last weekend I had a bit of an emotional meltdown (you can read my post “It’s My Party and I’ll Cry if I Want To” if you want the full details.) and decided I needed to stay home, so I gave him a bag of women’s clothes somebody had donated to us and he went without me. While he was out there, he and some of the other volunteers met a young woman who was obviously down on her luck. She lost her place to live and was afraid to sleep on the streets in our city (completely understandable if you knew our city), she hadn’t eaten anything in a few days, had no car and only the clothes on her back, her children had been taken away, and she was trying to find a rehab. Attempting to find a shelter that will admit people on a Saturday is not an easy task where we live. Most of them only take new people on weekdays between certain hours. So anyway, after he and our friends made sure she had eaten a good meal Ben let her look at the bag of clothes I had sent with him. Miraculously, they were her size, so she now had fresh clothes to wear too. Finally, he and a friend decided that since she needed rehab also, they would take her to a shelter that they knew of two towns away. So without a thought, and with total shock from the woman that somebody would actually offer to help her, they took her to this place.

Now, there’s one thing you must know about Ben, if you don’t already. That is that he is the type of guy that defines the phrase, “Knight in Shining Armor”…he always looks for a person in need and rarely turns away. I’m thoroughly convinced he should have a cape and tights….well….maybe not the tights…lol. Once as he was returning from picking up an elderly man to bring to church they saw a car on fire on the freeway. Ben pulled his car over, grabbed his fire extinguisher from the trunk, ran across three lanes of traffic, jumped a jersey barrier, ran across three more lanes of traffic, and proceeded to put the fire out….all while looking dapper dressed in his suit. Then when the fire was out and he knew everything would be ok, he said goodbye to the driver, raced back across the three lanes, the jersey barrier, the other three lanes, popped the extinguisher back into the trunk, hopped into the car and still made it to church on time. LOL. Another time he met a woman and her family who had just moved out of a homeless shelter into an apartment and literally had NOTHING….so he decided that this was not suitable. So he began calling connections and little by little we were able to furnish their entire apartment from top to bottom. Then in his spare time (lol…those of you that know us know the humor in using that term), he mentors male prisoners as a pen-pal to encourage them, help turn their lives around, teach them the value of accountability and give them hope for a better life when they get out. He’s just amazing like that…..he’s my hero….and THAT’S why my husband rocks!!

Fiddle Dee Dee and Grilled Cheese

Isn’t it funny, the things that trigger memories and emotions for us? So today is one of those for me, it’s what I consider a beautiful Fall day, overcast and comfortably cool. Days like this always remind me of growing up in Alabama. Growing up Southern was quite an adventure and had a distinct fairytale quality for me, even to this day. Not that it was always happy and spectacular, Lord knows, my family took the fun OUT of dysFUNctional…..lol. However, there are certain things that will ALWAYS be close to my heart and put a smile on my face. So just for the heck of it I thought I would share a few….

~Rain: Yep, rain…..we never got much snow down in Alabama (at least not compared to the amount we get here in Connecticut), maybe a few inches a year, which was rarely enough for a snowman or snowballs yet would immediately shut the entire state down until it all melted, but that was it except for every couple of years or so when we would get about a foot and that would all melt in a couple of days. So ANYWAY, the idea of a white Christmas as a kid wasn’t all that “Christmas-y” to me. Rain however…that was another story. Rain STILL brings me happy memories of long warm Autumns, family Thanksgivings at Grandma’s, Christmas tree shopping from the Boy Scouts in the rain and leaves still falling off the trees at Christmas!

~Grilled Cheese Sandwiches: My mom LOVES grilled cheese sandwiches and when I was a little sprout whenever she would take me out to eat, she always ordered grilled cheese sandwiches with pickles for the two of us. Three of our favorite spots back then for the best gc’s around the Birmingham area were,

1) The “Giant Chuck Wagon Driver” Drive Through. Neither one of us can remember the actual name of it because that was the nickname we gave it, but when I was little there was a tiny little drive through near the Eastwood Mall that had a GIANT crusty looking, whip switching, chuck wagon cowboy on the roof. They had the best grilled cheese by default because they were just so COOL…therefore they were the top choice and I would constantly BEG my mother to take me there. I’m sure many times she took me there simply to shut me up. LOL.

2) The “Roller Skate Drive-In” Restaurant. Another one we can’t remember the actual name of, but I’m pretty sure it was located near Irondale and just a short way from the area where Fanny Flagg based her book, Fried Green Tomatoes (even though it was filmed in Georgia). I’ll tell you more about that in another post someday. So the roller skate drive-in was the best because they actually WERE the BEST. To this day, every grilled cheese sandwich I have or make myself is compared to them and they still are the best. Perfect melty cheese, perfect crispy yet sloppy buttery toasted bread….MMM….the fact that they skated the food over to us in cute little plastic baskets was just a benefit. LOL

3) Woolworths. There were many Woolworths all over the place as many of you know and remember…but the one in Vestavia had the best grilled cheese for yet another reason. Now, they were the best not for flavor, quality or uniqueness. They were the best because they had a counter to eat at and toothpicks with frilly stuff! Now, tiny as I was, there was nothing more fun than climbing onto the top of one of there chrome and pastel colored vinyl stools and watching the cook (dressed in mostly white and a little paper soda jerk hat) make the grilled cheese on the griddle. Ok, maybe there WAS something more fun than that…. The next step was then spinning myself round and round on the stool until not only was I dizzy but I nearly launched myself into the booth behind us. It was cute for a while, but when I was one step away from puking, it was no longer cute to mom. Now Woolworths also had an added benefit that made them the best…..TOYS. So after lunch we would roam through the aisles and I would reach up or climb up and finger all the goodies that were so nicely displayed in rows. Woolworths also had another distinct trait that stays with me to this day, the smell. Don’t make that face…..it wasn’t a BAD smell. It was a clean, dime store smell. It was a combination of clean crisp linen (from stacks of starched hankies and neatly folded pajamas), cardboard boxes, new plastic toy smell, and French fries. LOL….yeah go ahead and laugh but those of us that remember Woolworths, especially the one in Vestavia, I bet they recognize that smell. J

Of course, all three of those places are long gone now; replaced by bigger, better and more modern things….but the memory will always be fresh to me.

~The Birmingham Zoo: For most of my childhood, we lived VERY close to the zoo and the Botanical Gardens, so both of them became favorite haunts of ours. (You know you go to a place a lot when the staff recognizes you.) So anyway, I have many fun memories from inside the zoo over the years, but my FAVORITE zoo memory was actually far outside the walls of the complex. Because we lived so close, I remember on some nights when not much traffic was on the road and all was quiet in the neighborhood, I would sit on the steps of our porch and HEAR the lions roaring. I remember using my imagination and pretending that I was in Africa and the silhouetted trees in front of me were hiding a jungle of wildlife and hidden treasures waiting for me to discover them. It’s not a very big memory…but it’s one of my favorites as a kid.

~Gone With the Wind: Now as far as I know, they don’t do this anymore….but when I was a kid, you could count on several movies being played on TV every year, like clockwork. It’s a Wonderful Life, The Wizard of Oz, The Sound of Music, and Gone With the Wind. To this day all four are among my favorite movies, but the last one holds special meaning. My mom just adored the gentle kindness of Miss Melly and admired the fiery chutzpah of Miss Scarlett. We all agreed that while Ashley was a kind and gentle man, he was also a mamby-pamby wimp and while Rhett was a rough around the edges and boorish cad, he was also deeply in love with Scarlett and would have done anything to have her love in return. They were her literary heroes….although she would never call them that, trust me, they were. She wouldn’t throw out the common quotes and sayings of Scarlett that we all hear, like, “Fiddle Dee Dee” and she wouldn’t make us eat like piglets in private so we could eat like birds in public…no none of that. What she WOULD do however, is whenever times got tough, she would ALWAYS rally herself by saying, “I just can’t think about it today, it’ll drive me crazy if I do…..I’ll think about it tomorrow, after all, tomorrow IS another day”. She would then talk with GREAT affection about how she believed Scarlett and Rhett got back together because she had FINALLY come to her senses and realized she truly loved Rhett all along, and how she just knew that she would go back to Tara to gather her strength. Then as the conversation would progress, mom would inevitably bring up how her grandmother was on the board of movie critics in 1939. And how they almost banned the movie because that famous kiss was too long between Rhett and Scarlett and because it was the first time a swear word had EVER been in a silver screen movie (that famous last line where Rhett says, “Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn”…wow…mild compared to today, but I digress). Of course there would also follow the stories of Sherman and the yankees (not the baseball team all you non-history buffs). When they came through, looting the homes, my relatives who were determined not to have the enemy touch their precious things, took all of the family silver, china and jewels and buried them in the back of the property. A great idea in theory, but there was such a rush as horror stories filtered in of Atlanta burning, that no account was made as to WHERE on the property the pieces were buried. So when they came back to retrieve them after the war, some pieces were hidden so well, that they were simply never found. So watching that movie, although a vast Hollywood epic, it does bring back memories of countless family stories I remember hearing as a little girl…and even now actually.

These are just a small handful of memories from growing up Southern….there are sooooooooo many more. I’ll share most or all of them over time….but these are my favorites, the ones I think of the most often. Of course, I’ve finally come to call New England home since my migration North 19 years ago…but I still love and cherish my Southern roots. Maybe that’s where I get some of my Pollyanna-ness….Scarlett and Melly…..hmmmm….food for thought.