Last week--perhaps on January 1st--one of our uncles fell on the ice and broke his hip. We felt so bad about it. He's Uncle Howard, Mama's youngest brother. He's had heart troubles since he was a young man, and has nearly died several times. He is about 74, and -- of all things -- he flies a powerchute. A powerchute is sort of a combination between an ultralight plane and a parachute. He is in the hospital, where he had surgery on that hip. Two days after it happened, he was already up and walking; we hope he continues to improve at such a rate.
Remember the stories I told, first about Dorcas babysitting for the children who removed their shirts when it was time to eat their soup…and then about my cousin Robin (Uncle Howard’s son) turning his plate upside down so as to eat his ice cream on the clean side? Well, these stories reminded Larry’s Aunt Lorraine of her childhood. She would be outside playing…get her clothes soiled…but she had a perfectly marvelous remedy: she simply went behind the barn, took them off, turned them wrong side out, and put them back on.
Voilá! Clean clothes again! (Or so she thought.)
Keith and Esther came Monday, and we watched a video about World War II. During the video, Pablo came looking for us on the Internet.
He told us that his father’s car broke down, saying, “So he called me to go with my car and haul him. He had broken the semi axis.”
I replied, “So.... is yours the only car still working? And did you pull him, flank speed emergency, with his hair streaming back in the wind? Screaming all the way? And do you mean, the axle broke?”
“Axle?” answered Pablo, “Don't know.”
“Where is this thingamajigger that broke?” I inquired, just as Pablo wrote, “Where's the axle in a car?” And then he added, “haha, same question.”
“The axle,” I informed him, “is the doohickey that holds the wheels on. Now.... what's a semi axis, where is it located? (We'll get this here car figgered out yet.)”
Pablo told me, “The semi axis is the doohickey that holds the wheels on.”
“AhHA!!!” said I, “We've got it figgered.”
“Same thing!!” declared Pablo, at the same time I said, “WE'RE TALKING ABOUT THE SAME THING!” and then I added, “Look what happens to my letters when I press really hard on the keyboard.”
"If he can't fix it,” I asked, "what will you do?”
“TRAIN!!!” replied Pablo; “We’ll go by train and some of us will drive my car. We'll race to see who arrives first!!”
“We will email you an axle,” I said helpfully.
“SEND LARRYY!!!” retorted Pablo, “by e-mail to pablo@myemail.address. Send him as an attachment; no virus please.”
“He's protesting!” I exclaimed, and then, “No... I guess he was just snoring.”
Speaking of viruses, remember the “hahaha” virus--something about Snow White and the Seven Warts (is that what they were?) And remember that I had written to our server, TheGroceryStore, asking them why the post had come into my Inbox twice, after I’d blocked it?
They were unable (or unwilling) to give me a good answer. A friend of mine told me that the reason they got all twitterpated when my post (I’d attached the email I’d received) arrived, was because they too had been sent that virus---and one of the co-owners CLICKED on it!
He opened it up!--and he spoiled a whole bunch of their rutabagas and duhmaters. Several customers lost service entirely. He thought nobody would know he'd opened something nasty. People should known better; the minute they see the title, they know it isn’t nice. You'd think they would be embarrassed, once they get the virus, and have to admit just exactly what it is they've opened! I didn't want to touch it with a ten-foot pole.
I told this information to Pablo, who promptly said, “So, you were on the list where the virus copied itself--you received the virus BECAUSE he opened the attachment.”
And it finally dawned on me what had really happened. I’d been dancing around the explanation all along--but Pablo made it clear.
Just think! A whole bunch of people who subscribed to TheGroceryStore probably got that virus, just because Mr. Whozit opened that attachment. They will be wanting to lynch him up by his toes, and put bamboo shoots under his fingernails, one by one.
Pablo gave me the following advice: “Do this: Go to the pawn shop and get a destroyed PC pretending it was yours before the virus attacked it. Sue your ISP for $1,000,000. Like that number?”
“YES!” I replied. “Exactly right! I will be able to buy you and your father both a Lamborghini! A BMW! A Cadillac! A Ferrari! A Mercedes! One for Ivanna! One for Natalia! An electronic scooter for Fede!
Pablo interrupted, “Oh!! e-mail one!!”
I continued, “A Land Cruiser for your mother!”
Pablo had a change of heart: “We just need a new axle,” he said.
But I went on. “A rocket backpack for your granny!”
I then belatedly responded to his acquiescence to a mere axle: “Oh, well... then I guess I won't sue, after all.”
He had a change of tune: “A private plane for me!”
So I continued in the same vein: “Yes! A Boeing 767! Or a Catalina Flying Boat!” and then, “Or just a parachute? Powerchute?”
“An Airbus 300,” said Pablo, and I answered, “Flying Fortresses....dropping bombs....”
Meanwhile, the clock was ticking its inexorable way toward midnight. Joseph rushed about, gathering up leftover firecrackers from the Fourth of July and hunting for a lighter that actually worked. Caleb, speaking of the party whistles one blows at such important events as the Seeing-Out-Of-The-Old-Year-and-Seeing-In-Of-The-New, said in all innocence, but getting the names a bit muddled, "My party pooper just gave up the ghost. Anybody have any extras?"
Just see that you don't wind up acephalous!
I drank coffee, that's what I did.
On New Year’s Day, Teddy went to Amy’s house, where they put together a puzzle. When that was done, they headed out to Amy’s grandparents’ house for a short visit. On the way back, a sheriff came flying up behind Teddy’s car, lights flashing. Teddy’s heart sank. What have I done now?! he wondered in dismay. He pulled to the side of the road. The sheriff went flying past, and roared up behind the car in front of Teddy. The car slowed and pulled to the side. The sheriff sped past. Teddy gulped and let out a big breath, and his heart started pumping again. I think officers of the law enjoy doing that, sometimes, just to keep people properly deferential, don’t you?
That afternoon, Bobby and Hannah came, Hannah's new New-and-Easy Easy-Threading-System sewing machine in hand, so I could see if I was smart enough to figure out why the thing wouldn't sew properly... I read a few New-and-Easy instructions in Greek: Slide spool of thread onto the waggish whittle. Pull thread through the nestor, then the patella, down through the rotula, and into the borstall centrode and twitchel. When the bangash and paythan are deuteric, crubeen the flipper until the tolt shepes the paterfamilias. Voilá! You are prepared to paffle!
Once those were out of the way, I set about threading the contraption--an altogetherly complicated and convoluted piece of work suitable for scientists, chemists, physiologists, meteorologists, and those who outshine themselves on the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale.
I got it threaded.
I inserted a piece of material under the presser foot, pressed on the foot pedal--,and began sewing.
The apparatus thumped along in grand fashion for no more than an inch and a half before it made a horrendous knot under the fabric and came to a grinding halt. I raised the presser foot, pulled the material out--with some degree of difficulty, I might add--, rethreaded the machine, and tried again.
The implement outdid itself. In one inch flat, it had created a knot such as would have held the British Tea Clipper Lammermüir at dock on Rottnest Island with no fears at all of grounding on Henrietta Rocks.
I valiantly rethreaded the sewing machine and tried again. And again. And again. Larry came to see just what in the world we were doing wrong. (He knew it was us, as opposed to the machine.) He looked in the accessory cache at the back of the machine. He watched me putting the bobbin in the case. The bobbins in the cache were plastic; the bobbin I was inserting was metal.
“Is that the right bobbin?” he asked.
I pulled out a plastic bobbin and measured it side-by-side with the metal one. “No,” I replied.
I threaded a plastic bobbin, put it in the machine, and sewed. And sewed. And sewed. Yes, it worked. Imagine that.
Husbands can act sooooo aggravatingly smug.
When Bobby and Hannah went back home again, they took the littles with them, except for Victoria, to play games. Victoria came with Larry and I for a ride. We drove out by the train trestle over the Loup River, where I shot a roll or two of pictures. The sun was setting, shining through the trestle, and overhead were myriad flocks of geese and the occasional lone duck.
When Hannah and Bobby went to Bobby's folks' house for supper and games with his siblings, the littles came home again---and then Keith and Esther invited all of us to their house for pizza. Afterwards, a monopoly game got itself underway and threatened to continue late into the night. But eventually the banker, realizing his potential sleeping hours till time to get up for work the next morning were dwindling, closed store. By the time we left, it was only 3°.
Dorcas has recently learned to knit, and she just figured out how to do the pearling stitch. She is pleased, because one of the sweaters she’s wanted to make utilizes that stitch.
As I write, Victoria and Caleb are playing with their new top from my mother... When it really gets to spinning fast, it sounds like a train whistle. The chords gradually change tones, going down...down...down...I don't mind that noise... but Larry is singing along with it, entertaining Victoria. AAARRRGGGHHH!!!
Hester and Lydia, with a bit of sporadic help from Joseph, are building a tower with the colorful gears my mother gave the children for Christmas. There are extensions and platforms and hand cranks, and if it is put together properly, a turn of the handle can make a gear halfway across the room rotate.
Joseph is a Helpful Hattie. I mean, a Helpful Henry. He did a load of clothes for me a couple of days ago, without my knowing it: black jeans with white Sunday shirts. Good thing black jeans don't fade as much as blue, eh? Today, as a return of the favor, I washed and dried a pile of individually wrapped candies one of the boys left in their pockets. I do hope they appreciate it. That is one of the things mothers should always do for their boys, don’t you think?--wash their candy. It is so inadvisable to eat dirty candy, you know.
CRRAAASSHHH!! The gear tower just fell over.
Tuesday I typed a fourteen-page biography of J. Gresham Machen
for Teddy for his Bible Truths class. J. Gresham Machen is known worldwide for his wonderful preaching and writing.
for Teddy for his Bible Truths class. J. Gresham Machen is known worldwide for his wonderful preaching and writing.Teddy had the book about halfway read when he cut his hand. The therapist in Lincoln told him that good therapists tell their patients not to write when they have had tendons repaired--even when they are right-handed, and have cut their left hand--because they wind up straining the tendon, and causing all sorts of troubles. He told us about a farmer who'd cut tendons in his hand and wrist. He went ahead and did the chores every day...holding up the injured hand and not using it--and things seemed all right for a while... But then, three months later, with only a small amount of exertion, the severed-and-repaired tendon snapped suddenly. Surgery was only partially successful, and the man was somewhat disabled, permanently.
Well, thinking that non-writing advice a bit extreme, a few days later Teddy decided to write some thank-you notes. He carefully laid his splinted arm along the side of the desk as he wrote, using the splint to hold the paper... Guess what? When he finished, about forty-five minutes later, his arm and hand were aching--and kept on aching the rest of the evening and part of the night!
So we had to admit that the therapist had a point: we are all connected together, and wiggling a digit on one side of us is liable to cause a digit elsewhere to wiggle. Think of that.
School started again Wednesday, and the children were glad to return and see all their friends again.
Teddy had a session at the physical therapist's clinic; his finger is getting better and better, improving right along. It doesn’t hurt as much as it used to. Larry pulled a couple of the dents out of Teddy’s poor jalopy and replaced the taillight... Poor Teddy! Right when he almost had that pickup all fixed up nice! I felt so sorry for him...
He's my favorite Teddy in the world; you know that?
He wonders what job he will be able to do. He wanted to work for David, partly just because he enjoys the work and the people he would work with, and partly because David pays well. But that's out, for another year. The surgeon and therapist both say he must not, repeat MUST NOT lift something heavy that he must grip hard--and that is what he would be doing, were he working for David.
That evening, I was walking home from church with Victoria when an airplane flew over, quite low. By that time, it was dark outside.
Victoria said, “I like that airplane! It’s my favorite color!”
“Oh?” said I, looking up at it to see if a person could actually see its color. One could not. “What color is it?” I queried curiously.
She peered up at it. “It’s red, and blue, and yellow!” she announced triumphantly, accurately naming the colors of its lights. Then, “Do you think that was Pablo?”
David gave the message Wednesday night. The main text was from Isaiah 43. Verse 4 says, “Since thou wast precious in my sight, thou hast been honourable, and I have loved thee: therefore will I give men for thee, and people for thy life.”
Now, we know no man is really honorable; not in himself, he isn't. So the only thing that verse can mean is that God looks at us through His Son, Christ, who gave His precious life on the cross for us. And through Christ, we are made honorable, when, as it says in vs. 1, we are redeemed, and called by our name (meaning, God knows exactly what we are--he knows our name--our character)--"thou art Mine".
And we know that we are His, when we turn from our own ways, put our trust in Him, and believe Him with all our hearts. And then "we are precious in His sight". We are "the apple of His eye." The Word of God... It corrects us when we are wrong, but it also lifts us when we are down.
Thursday I did the long-delayed bookwork--and I managed to get it all done--and all nine new pages recorded in the ledger actually balanced, too! I wrote out a check to the Nebraska Department of Revenue…and that will be the last quarterly I have to complete. That’s one thing I will be glad enough not to have to do. Oh…guess how much I made the check out for?
Eight cents, right on the money.
That day, it was warm and sunny for the first time in months. Everything was melting, so there was water and dampness everywhere. Tad bawled at the door. I courteously opened it for him. He raced out onto the porch before I could change my mind, and then onto the driveway, shaking first one foot and then the other as he trotted along. He tried to jump over a big puddle with ice floating here and there on it…he took a flying leap, and landed in the middle, on an ice floe, left rear foot in the water. He jerked it up out of the water and shook it hard--just as his right front foot plunged through the slushy ice with a noisy SPLOOP. Startled, he sprang straight up, tail all bushy--but he hadn’t taken the time to project his trajectory before departing the earth, and his flight path descended rather abruptly, without nearly enough forward impetus. He landed smack dab in the middle of the puddle, whereupon he launched himself in one quick hurry toward the street, where life was a bit higher and therefore a bit dryer. He looked so funny. I stood at the door and laughed at him.
Cats do not like to be laughed at. Tad sat regally in the middle of the street grooming himself, a rather miffed air about him. He turned his head and looked over his shoulder at me. “MMRrrrrrrOOOOooooRRRrrr!” he said with imperial disdain, and rose to his feet to stalk away in high dudgeon.
That evening when Larry came home from work, he looked around the kitchen and remarked, “Mumble mumble should’ve taken out the garbage.”
“Who should’ve?” asked Teddy.
“Joseph,” repeated Larry.
Teddy, in startled astonishment, exclaimed, “Joseph?? Who’s that??!”
That, because Joseph seems to have a knack of disappearing immediately before one of us asks him to do a certain chore around the house. Often, he is spotted one moment strolling calmly through the kitchen, glass of ice in hand, crunching away happily; then, half a minute later when we say, “Joseph? Would you sweep the floor?” he is nowhere to be seen. Plumb vanished off the face of the earth.
We have some friends who are expecting their first child. The wife is very sick, and has been having a difficult time keeping from getting dehydrated. She went to see her cousin a few days ago, walked in the door, and fell over in a dead faint. Since she is unable to tolerate much food, the doctor told her to eat just a very small amount, every couple of hours.
Meanwhile, the husband/father-to-be is an unhappy camper. He was disgruntled about the state of affairs in his house; he was disgruntled that she asked him to bring her food in bed; and--the coup de grâce--he refused to kiss her, for fear her sickness was ‘contagious’.
I walked into the kitchen to see what was transpiring there. On the table sat the large container of powdered chocolate, and there sat Victoria, mug in hand, stirring vigorously.
I told her, “Your face is all covered with chocolate!”
“Yes,” she replied, licking at it with her little pink tongue, “That’s because we always get chocolate all over our faces when we drink hot chocolate.”
“*I* don’t,” I remarked.
Victoria’s shoulders rose, as did her eyebrows. “Well, little kids do; but big kids don’t,” she explained.
Larry and I went to the grocery store Saturday night. My purse was still in the cart when we got back to our Suburban. Larry first put all the groceries into the vehicle…then got my purse out…and when he opened the door to climb in, he had the long strap wrapped around one leg, while he held the other two straps in his hand.
“I sure don’t like this strap,” he said, tugging at it ineffectively; “it always gets me all tangled up!” He climbed in, leg still stuck through the strap. He pulled at it. Then, “It’s a good thing it comes with a quick-release lever!” he said, and triumphantly unsnapped one side and removed it from around his leg.
Last week he managed to pull this stunt smack-dab in front of the checkout stand in Wal-Mart. All of a sudden, there he was, jerking at my purse strap, scowling down at it as if it were some sort of complex trap from which he could not quite understand how to escape. And the more he yanked at it, making his leg fly up with each tug, the more worried he looked. Finally, in a performance of awful panic and fright, he gasped, “Get this noose off me!” The kids, of course, were in far-gone stages of hilarity and merriment. I am not sure but what the clerks did not think we had all lost our marbles. Insanity by Reason of Association, and that sort of thing.
My brother-in-law and sister, John and Lura Kay, gave me a very large roaster for Christmas. I wrote them a thank-you note: “It is just the right size for the yaks and ostriches and moose and such like which we need to fill everybody up around here.” It really is large, the biggest I've ever had...and it works marvelously.
I gave Lura Kay a book on roses, for which she wrote the following note: “Thank you for the nice roses book--but don’t’ expect to see me outside planting flowers any time soon.”
(There was a wind chill of 50 below zero the day she wrote that.)
Larry received a mechanical carpenter’s pencil from a friend of his. I wrote a thank-you note for him: "Thank you for the carpenter's pencil. It will come in handy when I am trying to be a mechanical carpenter."
And lastly, here is what I wrote to Keith and Esther (I couldn't remember what all they gave us) (they are too, too generous): “Thank you for the (named items 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, ...) and…ummm... piano benches, monkey wrenches, and all those sorts of things. They were exactly right. Love, Daddy and Mama.”
I once mentioned ‘monkey wrench’ to Pablo, and he wondered what in the world a monkey wrench was. I told him it was a wrench with which to fix monkeys.
I recently heard a story about my father I had never heard before. It happened when he was in the Navy, off the Philippine Islands. The surprising thing about the story (well, surprising to some, perhaps) is that it occurred before he was saved. But Daddy was honest...he never took a penny that didn't belong to him from anyone, ever since he was a little boy.
One day some Philippine men came rowing out to the ship in a small dinghy. They were offering to sell bananas to the men. The sailors, glad of any chance to get fresh fruit, lowered a bucket. “Put the bananas in,” they said, “and we’ll send the money down.”
But once the bananas were in hand, the men decided not to bother letting down the money. They stood on deck, chortling and hooting over their cleverness.
The Filipinos first looked puzzled; then, when they understood the men were not planning to pay them, their faces took on the familiar hopeless expressions. They were in despair of getting the money they had coming, for they were helpless against those sailors—men who were supposed to be their Knights in Shining Armor, their Liberators. They needed that money, for the Japanese who had overrun the country had stolen everything they owned, and many of the Filipinos were starving. Some of them owned nothing more than the clothes they were wearing.
Well, Daddy saw all this, and he immediately went to the side of the ship and called down to the men, “Don’t worry; you’ll get your money!”
He told his shipmates, “If you don’t give them their money, I will go straight to the head officer.”
The men looked at each other, then at Daddy, and then they put the money in the bucket and sent it down.
So the Philippine men got their money. And they were so very relieved that their bananas hadn’t been stolen, for it was all that they had.
The following is a story I remember my father telling when I was little:
When the sailors were allowed to go ashore, they were not to take anything with them …nothing in their hands, that is. But the captain wasn’t exactly stringent about it. And Daddy had things to sell.
In the days before shore leave, Daddy had purchased a large quantity of clothes: shirts, pants, socks – and a pair of shoes that was much too big for him. He was able to buy more than most of the men, because he saved his money for just such things, not wasting it on cigarettes, alcohol, or gambling, as so many did.
The morning arrived. My father prepared by dressing in as many items of clothing as he could fit around him. Since he couldn’t carry them, he simply wore them. He had on so many pairs of socks, those large shoes were actually tight. His size-large shirt (he normally wore a size small) barely buttoned over all the undershirts and other shirts under it. The pockets were adorned with many pens. He wore several pairs of shorts, and several pairs of pants in progressive sizes.
He walked down the gangplank, past the captain who was standing there conducting inspections.
The captain had taken a liking to him because he never shirked his duty and he followed orders conscientiously. He looked my father over from head to toe.
Now, to those who did not know him, he would have merely looked like a small, rather plump man, shirt and pants perfectly pressed, shoes flawlessly shined, cap on neatly.
But Daddy was anything but plump; he was very thin and wiry. He only weighed 125 pounds, and the captain knew it.
His mouth twitched, and then he burst out laughing. “Swiney,” he roared, “you look like a stuffed shirt!”
The captain looked him over once more, chuckling, and motioned him on without a word of reproof. Perhaps the reason the captain was so tolerant was because he knew that whatever money Daddy made would go straight home to his family.
Daddy headed for the mainland, where the Filipinos were clamoring for clothes that they needed so badly. Most Filipinos are small, and Daddy, too, was small—so the clothes he was wearing were just about the right size for them.
He sold nearly all the clothes that he was wearing, shoes and all. But every now and then, on those off-boat excursions, he spotted a poor person who obviously needed a clothing item, but who did not have any money with which to buy it. And when that happened, Daddy simply gave the clothes away. As he walked through the town, he noticed a poor woman with only a threadbare blanket wrapped around her, standing at the edge of a large crowd. She must have had no money, for she was not trying to buy anything. She merely watched the proceedings with sad, dark eyes.
He removed a shirt and gave it to her.
She was so overwhelmed, she wept. She made such a commotion thanking him that he grew embarrassed.
He smiled at her. “You’re welcome,” he said politely, and rapidly lost himself in the crowd.
Daddy returned to the ship in quite a different shape than he’d left it. Literally. Having successfully sold all those clothes, he had been reduced to nothing but a pair of shorts.
He remarked, “The only bad part of the entire affair was that I had no place to carry my money—not so much as a pocket!” He walked barefoot up the gangplank with both arms wrapped around dollar bills in various denominations, and in his fists were clutched as many coins as his hands would hold.
The captain, at the head of the gangplank doing inspections, went into peals of laughter when he saw Daddy. He could have written him up for his lack of décor (among other things); but he was of no disposition to do so. “Swiney,” he said, “If you don’t beat all!”
Daddy did exactly what that captain had known he would do: he headed straight for the ship’s post office and bank, where he purchased a money order and sent nearly all of the money he’d made home to his wife.
The banker shook his head in amazement. “I don’t see how you do it, Swiney,” he said, “but you send home more than twice what most of the men do. Three times what a good deal of them give their families.”
My father faithfully wrote a letter to my mother every single day – and she did the same. He was never so happy as when the mail arrived. He invariably had the largest pack of letters of anyone on the ship. One day he felt that he had the world by the tail, because my mother had sent him pictures. The picture of Loren, Lura Kay, and G.W. was one of them.
Dorcas is playing the piano. She just played, Beyond the Sunset so prettily...while, right behind her, Caleb and Victoria are conducting World War III with Lego planes.
CRRRAAASHSHSHS!!!
Oops. Over went the gear tower again.
DIRECT HIT!
I have been most dreadfully injured this week.
Furthermore, it occurred during a fight with a mouse--and the mouse won.
Oh, the humiliation. Oh, the disgrace. Oh, the mortification!
You see, I was trying to do the bookwork, and there was this pugnacious little monster of a mouse lurking in the furnace duct in the kitchen, gnawing away at the house's very innards... So, with great courage and valor, I marched over to the corner from whence issued these mastications, doubled up my fist, and smacked the wall three times in succession.
Then I made the error of doing it once more, just for good measure, you know. But I miscalculated and hit the furnace vent, and performed a major dissection to a knuckle.
I'm mangled! I'm mutilated! I'm maimed!
Please send Band-Aides.
Saturday night I kept finding one thing after the other that absolutely had to be done, and I didn’t go to bed very early at all. Well, uh, that is, yes, it was early; and yes, it was late. But eventually I did the last thing that had to be done and went to bed.
Larry, awaking, embarked on a lecture: “You’re going to get sick! You aren’t getting enough sleep!”
I responded, “I’ll make up for it tomorrow afternoon.”
“No, you’ll think you need to type your letter,” Larry countered, “and with dinner…” he faded out.
“Huh?” I said conversationally.
He sighed in exasperation. “I said,” he grumbled, “There’s probably a hole in one of those gas tanks.”
I burst out laughing.
Larry roused himself just enough to mutter disgustedly, “Quit laughing.”
Sunday was our day for having the family for dinner. We fixed our famous super-duper tacos--and we had cottage cheese and cherry cheesecake to go with it. While the tacos were dispatched and saucers of cheesecake being passed around, several people were removing the soiled plates.
Teddy took Amy’s--“HEY!” he said, “Why do you have the meat platter?!”
All eyes turned in Amy’s direction. She blushed. Sure enough, Teddy was just taking off the large china meat platter.
“Who DID that!” I exclaimed.
One and all looked surprised, innocent, and … one and all suddenly rocked with laughter. How incongruous!--slender, svelte little Amy, bequeathed with the meat platter.
“Did you feel privileged?” asked Keith, chuckling.
Amy laughed. What had happened, it seems, was that when somebody took the plates from the cupboard, they had also taken out the meat platter, and then forgotten to put it back. The platter got slid down the table to Amy’s place, and not a soul had noticed--except Amy, who was too polite to mention it. Or perhaps she thought it was a prank, and reckoned she’d get the better of the person who pulled the job by simply pretending nothing was abnormal.
When dinner was over, Caleb and Keith played a motorcycle stunt-and-race game on the computer. Behind them, Victoria set up an afternoon luncheon for her dollies on the hearth. She was playing with the new china tea set, printed with delicate pink roses, that we’d given her for Christmas.
Before long, Victoria, obviously not cognizant as to just exactly what a ‘stunt’ is, carefully brought one of her little china plates to Hannah, and said, "Would you like a stunt? It's a blueberry stunt."
Soon Hannah was playing the piano while Bobby and Larry sang, and Esther and Victoria were ensconced in the big chair while Esther read a book to Victoria. It wasn’t too long before my presence at the piano was requested. In next to no time, the entire family was standing around the piano singing. We have men’s soprano, women’s soprano, alto, high tenor, low tenor, and bass. An even distribution of all parts; how could we be so fortunate! As I said last week, any activity is ever so enjoyable, when those people you especially enjoy are doing it with you.
Sunday night after church, Victoria brought out her new puzzle. It is a photo of a couple of teddy bears at a picnic.
“Will you help me put my puzzle piece together?” she asked me.
So I stopped what I was doing, and Victoria and I put together a ‘puzzle piece’. I let her put almost all the pieces in place, handing them to her one at a time, and pointing out the general area it might go, if she couldn’t find the spot. It’s a 15”x11” puzzle, with 100 pieces. Victoria giggled happily every time she managed to lock another piece in place.
I wish you could've heard my nephew Robert's sermon Sunday night. It was from Chapter 10 of Numbers, and was about the silver trumpets. The trumpets were to be blown for specific purposes--just as the Word of God--the Gospel--is to be used, and it must not give an uncertain sound. There are sure a lot of pastors across the planet who give an uncertain sound, aren't there?
Oh! Caleb just brought me a cup of coffee... hang on a minute, while I warm up my cold, cold hands on the mug...
--- CRRRRAAASSHHH!!! ---
"WHAT HAPPENED!!!" (that was me, as I dashed around the corner)
"UM! THIS STUFF FELL OUT!" (that was Victoria, standing in front of the open refrigerator door, eyes wide, holding up a couple jars of picante sauce that fell out of the door when she opened it {fortunately, not on her bare little piggies}. The bar that is supposed to hold them in place broke long ago, you see, when one of the house apes was using it for a trapeze; so we only use that shelf when there is absolutely no room for anything anywhere else in the murky depths of the refrigerator. And Victoria has to give the door a good hard jerk, in order to get it open--and guess what happens to the stuff on the barless shelf, when the door finally comes flying open?)
Now Dorcas is playing, Work for the Night is Coming, and that's what I need to do--RIGHT NOW.
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