Cellophane Flowers of Yellow and Green

It's been a couple of weeks, but I've been sick. Meanwhile, here's another short and probably meaningless story of my childhood. 

It starts out with me watching a clip of The Graham Norton Show on You Tube the other day. Now, if you don't know who Graham Norton is, it's okay. He's a talk show host in Britain who is absolutely hilarious and has an appalling laugh. In any case, this clip features Ryan Gosling telling a story about his own childhood.

Okay, Ryan Gosling can tell stories absolutely deadpan, which makes them even funnier. This story was about how his parents somehow came to acquire a truckload of cellophane (plastic wrap, in case you didn't know it), and wanted him to sell it to their neighbors and take it to school and sell it - pretty much every kid's dream, help their parents make a million dollars the easy way.

He tells it better, but it made me think back to when I was eight years old and my mother had just left my dad and taken us with her to a small two-bedroom house to live. Okay, she didn't come across a truckload of cellophane, but what she did do was spend money (I don't know where the money came from) and printed her own greeting cards. They weren't ordinary greeting cards, no, they were full of lesser-known sentiments, like "Go Get 'Em, Tiger."

They weren't even printed on card stock, just black ink on colored paper. As an aside, I think with the right packaging and marketing, these would make a million dollars today, for sure. However, in 1971 no one cared. The reason this story comes to mind is that she bundled them together and packaged them in, you guessed it, cellophane. And then expected us to go door-to-door selling them for her.

Here's the thing. I don't do door-to-door. I don't do street evangelism either. I barely do meet-and-greet at church. I'm pretty much the hermit you read about, only without the explosives. Give me a piece of land, a room dedicated to arts and crafts and a great internet connection and what do I need with people? I don't even need cable TV, the internet is that good these days.

Later on she would create a line of 3-D greeting cards on card stock; they were art projects on their own because you had to color them in and cut them out and paste them together yourself. A great idea, if  the drawings weren't too fiddly to use actual scissors on. I think the kids and I used the last of them as art paper; the backs were blank.

So yeah. That's the story. I don't know what happened to those first cards. I think if I asked my oldest brother about it, he might know where the metaphorical bodies are hidden. In any case, that was the year I got glasses, discovered the joys of OCD and got to know the neighbor kid who was also a pyromaniac. No, really, he loved to burn things. The next summer we moved to the SF Bay Area from Sacramento. 

I have a few million-dollar ideas myself; we all do. Fred Flintstone and 412-Up soft drink, but then Barney Rubble is invisible. Right now I'm trying to figure out how to illustrate a children's book, publish a book of hand-drawn mazes and sell craft items online. Just one or two little ideas. Or maybe I'll just put that PayPal button on the bottom of this blog. Free book of mazes to the first person who helps me make my first million, no cellophane needed.  

I Miss Homeschooling

Some of you may know that I had to empty out my storage unit a couple of months ago. It wasn't easy - I ended up losing my furniture and throwing away or giving away a lot of things.

But there were boxes of papers leftover from homeschooling my kids back in the 90's-early Naughties. Boxes and boxes and boxes. And boxes. I kept every paper they ever did from every school year from 1994-2002. It's daunting.

I thought to myself, "I'll have all these memories of my kids when they were little." Boxes and boxes. I threw away a whole bunch (recycled, so don't go all Mother Earth on me), but there were still some boxes left that I didn't want to get rid of quite yet, mostly because I hadn't gone through them.

So there those boxes sat outside, with the word, "SHRED" on them so I would know what to do with them. Today, it being a kind of quiet day here (unemployed, doing transcribing on the side, sitting in my pajamas), I decided I'd get started shredding. I brought one box in, set up the shredder and started.

Two hours later, I'm sitting here with a large outdoor garbage bag (you know, the green/black ones) full of shredding and the box is only half-empty. Remember, this is only the first box. There are six other boxes out on the patio waiting to be dealt with. But back to this box.

I've often wondered if anything I've kept over the years is really worth keeping. Actually, I've been wondering about that a lot since I emptied storage. I want to have good memories, I want to look at something and say, "Wasn't that adorable," or "I was so happy then." When it comes to these homeschool papers, though, I wonder, "Why in the world did I keep every damn single solitary piece of paper?"

I've kept out a few. Some drawings, some journal and story papers, one or two crafts. I'll probably have more as I move through the boxes.

Meanwhile . . . I remember organizing and finding curriculum and grading and teaching and using "The Price is Right" for math lessons and on and on. And I miss it. I don't know if I have the wherewithal to do it again, but I still look back and think maybe I didn't do so bad a job of it.

I've taught every grade from kindergarten through 12, learned along with my kids (ASL at the local community college with my high schoolers who needed a second language), and generally had fun exploring God's world with my children.

It's amazing to me that no matter what else, God keeps His hands on all of them. Oh, they might not think so, they're so grown-up and skeptical. Still, I believe that at least they are better people than I am. That's what parenting is about - make little people who are good people when they are big people. Four kids who are self-sufficient. Four kids who have goals and plans and friends and family and jobs and even faith.

I've had a difficult few months. More than a few, actually. But, I still believe that I was the best mom I could be, that I still am. (Those of you who disagree, please stand in THAT line over there.) If nothing else, I am so proud of all of my kids that I burst to tell people all about them. Not about how good a mom I was, but how proud I am of them.

How can I not believe that God is with them?

Post-Easter Reflections

Everyone who follows this knows it's been a very difficult year so far for me.  I lost My David on Christmas Eve and the aftermath of mourning has been a series of ups and downs as I try to understand God's plan and keep my temper at the people around me who think I should be done being sad.

It's getting easier, I hit a plateau in February, but March was completely off and April has been one stress after another.  Work, choir, grandbabies, Easter without David - I've been feeling rather sorry for myself.  

Fortunately, I do have people who love me.  I just have to believe that in my heart, even though I know it in my brain.

It's been 4 months since David died.  Sometimes I listen to recordings of his voice - we used to record Skype conversations sometimes and there's a message on my home phone answering machine from him that I will never erase.  

I miss my friend David. And Easter was his favorite time of year for some reason - he loved Lent and the contemplation of his life, the pageantry of the Stations of the Cross and the incredible story of the Resurrection.  

The Choir sang beautifully on Easter Sunday - only two songs, but the second one was a doozy and we got everyone clapping and cheering by the end.  I'm waiting to see if the video is posted on the church website - if there was a video - there usually is.

After spending the day before coloring eggs with my girls and hanging out with my oldest son and daughter (missing my younger daughter and son, who are busy with work) - my daughter Claudia spent the night with me and we took the girls to church on Sunday.  Everyone there was happy to see her after so long - she's busy with school and work and hasn't visited in a while.

After we took the girls home to John, Claudia took me out to lunch and we hung out for about two hours at the local international market - what a blast!  They had everything and anything you could ever want and I'm thinking I might go shopping there more often. Asian, European, Mexican, Russian - an almost endless array of goodies.

Claudia and I always have fun hanging out together - but I missed Clara being a part of it, because I know she would have loved it too.

And I miss My David.  He would have strolled through the store making rude comments about the frozen alligator legs and squids and chickens with their heads still attached.  David would have talked about Belgian chocolate, the array of vegetables he'd only heard about, and teased me about how I wanted to start cooking everything right away.

As much as I love my kids and hanging out with them in odd places, this would have been a great way to spend Easter with My David.

But God's got something else for me to do, and I only hope He can forgive me for missing David so much as I try to work toward whatever the Lord has in mind.