Only a Dad

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Only a Dad

By Edgar Albert Guest

Only a dad with a tired face,
Coming home from the daily race,
Bringing little of gold or fame
To show how well he has played the game;
But glad in his heart that his own rejoice
To see him come and to hear his voice.

Only a dad with a brood of four,
One of ten million men or more
Plodding along in the daily strife,
Bearing the whips and the scorns of life,
With never a whimper of pain or hate,
For the sake of those who at home await.

Only a dad, neither rich nor proud,
Merely one of the surging crowd,
Toiling, striving from day to day,
Facing whatever may come his way,
Silent whenever the harsh condemn,
And bearing it all for the love of them.

Only a dad but he gives his all,
To smooth the way for his children small,
Doing with courage stern and grim
The deeds that his father did for him.
This is the line that for him I pen:
Only a dad, but the best of men.

Friday’s Fave Five

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Susanne at Living to Tell the Story hosts Friday’s Fave Five so we can share our favorite things from the last week. This has been a wonderful exercise in looking for and appreciating the good things God gives. Click on the button to learn more, then go to Susanne’s to read others’ faves and link up your own.

So here are five favorite things from this last week:

1. House-hunting online. I mentioned earlier this week that we are moving to TN. Most realtors have their listings online these days, and though it is not enough information to make a decision without going to actually look at houses, it’s enough to weed some out. Though at first the list of possibilities from the realtor looks a little tedious to sort through, it has actually been a lot of fun. Helpful hint to anyone selling a house: take LOTS of pictures, and of all the rooms. It’s frustrating when there are only 6 pictures, all of them outside.

2. Finishing two books this week, reviewed here and here.They were both good and neither very long, but somehow it seemed to take a long time to actually complete them, so it is nice to be done with them.

3. Magazines. I have a weakness for magazines, particularly decorating or “homey” magazines, to the point where I’ve actually had to discipline myself not to pick any more up. I enjoyed sorting through some Martha Stewart Living, Family Fun, and Taste of Home magazines as well as some decorating and “do it yourself” project magazines before passing them on to others. I love the good tips and projects in them, and even just the creativity they inspire.

4. Having a voice in issues and politics. I was reminded of this when my husband wrote a letter to the editor this week about an issue in our town. We have the privilege in this country of letting our voice and opinions be heard by our representatives and the press, and we probably don’t use it enough. There are still countries in the world where people are punished for expressing a different opinion than the approved one.

5. Safety on the roads. I was just reading a tragic story of a friend of a friend who was killed when she stopped her car on the shoulder of a road to get out and latch the back hatch, where some things had fallen out, when she got hit by a car and died instantly, with her two daughters seeing the whole thing. Life is just so fragile — just a vapor, Scripture says, or like flowers or grass that only last a short while. My husband travels so much, and I’ve had more travel with the family and alone in preparing for this move, I am so grateful for the safety we’ve had.

Flashback Friday: Friends

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Mocha With Linda hosts a weekly meme called Flashback Friday. She’ll post a question every Thursday, and then Friday we can link our answers up on her site.

The prompt for today is:

Who was your first friend? Did you have lots of friends when you were growing up or just one or two close friends? Share memories from your childhood friends. For women, were “mean girls” an issue when you were growing up? Or were you a “mean girl”?! How did your friends shape who you are today, for good or not-so-good? Do you still keep up with your childhood friends today?

As I was growing up, I usually had one close friend rather than a whole gang. I had a good-sized circle of people I was friends with, but I didn’t hang around with a group.

My earliest friends and playmates were my cousins. I have hazy memories of playing with my parents’ friends’ children when they all came over, but my earliest memory of a close personal friend was in third grade. I had gone to a Lutheran parochial school in first and second grade and transferred to a public school for third grade. Cindy was one of those girls who was popular, but not in a snobby way and not with the negative connotations popularity can have today. Everyone liked her because she was genuinely sweet and interested in other people, and as such, she introduced herself to me, and we became fast friends. I still have a bracelet she gave me for Christmas one year. For a few months my siblings and I stayed with my aunt and uncle in another state when my parents were having problems, and Cindy’s letters were the highlight of my time there. She invited me to revival services at her church, where for the first time I understood I needed to trust Christ personally as my Savior rather than just having a nebulous general belief in God. I made a profession of salvation then, though I struggled with assurance for years before finally being settled in my faith. But whether I actually believed at that point or later on, those years at that church did much to set me in the right direction. Unfortunately I ruined that friendship with jealousy: Cindy’s pastor’s daughter, with whom she was also close, transferred to our school, and instead of welcoming and befriending her, I was jealous of Cindy’s attention and sad that things were not the same. 😦 So they pretty much dropped me, understandably, and I learned a hard, painful, but valuable lesson.

My closest friend for the next several years was Laura. I don’t remember how we met or got to know one another — we attended the same school for years and somehow must’ve crossed paths and continued on from there. We moved to another town when I was in 8th grade, and one of my best surprises was when Laura and her family showed up unexpectedly on our doorstep one day. They were on a trip and surprised both Laura and me by stopping in to see us for a few hours. We wrote, sent pictures, and kept up with each other through high school, but eventually the relationship just faded out over time.

The school system I went to in 8th through 10th grade was the one I’ve mentioned that was extremely cliquish. I had always been shy but had never had any problems making friends until that school. There were very distinct groups that rarely interacted with each other. I spent what seemed like months walking around at lunch time all alone and miserable. My mom had to practically push me out of the car in the mornings. Then one day Dawn and a neighbor of hers introduced themselves to me, and Dawn and I just clicked. Dawn’s parents ran a little convenience store that was close to my house, and they’d let me “hang out” with Dawn at the store and help her stock shelves. Her mom was one of those people who is so cheerful, she’s annoying. 🙂 It was awful to be awakened after staying up late talking on a sleepover by her cheery, “Good morning, girls!” and whisking open the curtains to flood us with sunlight when she thought it was time for us to be up. Dawn and I were fast friends throughout the rest of high school and kept up with each other for a few years in college, but then our lives went different directions and the friendship faded away.

That high school was the only school I attended with “mean girls.” One of the groups was probably the closest thing that town had to a gang, and the leader was a seemingly always angry girl named Nadine. You never wanted to be caught alone in a hallway with her. I don’t think she ever hurt anyone physically, but she was very intimidating verbally and in the way she carried herself.

Between 10th and 11th grade we once again moved to another town, and the Lord provided miraculously for me to attend a Christian school. It was small enough that we were all general friends with everybody, but I didn’t have one really close girl friend there. That may have been because I started dating a guy. There are many reasons not to date exclusively in high school, and one of them is that, depending on the relationship, it can hinder developing friendships with other people and put you into an unnaturally close relationship sooner than you’re ready for it. That was the case with me, anyway.

Then in college, again, though I had a wide variety of friends and could usually easily find someone to attend things with, talk with, or pray with, I didn’t have any seriously close friends. Somehow the people I felt closest to didn’t really “need” me as a friend — they had all kinds of friends, many closer than I was. But I eventually met my life-long best friend, my husband. 🙂

I think each of my friendships shaped me for the better. I hadn’t received instruction as a child in looking for the right kind of friends, but thankfully the Lord over-ruled and brought my way friends who generally wanted to do right, and generally we encouraged each other along the way. As I write that, though, I do remember being friends for a while with one girl in 11th grade who tended to be deceptive, and there was an instance or two of climbing out her bedroom window to go see people, but thankfully, for whatever reason, that friendship didn’t last long and nothing serious happened during it, so I am thankful the Lord nipped that in the bud.

Book Review: Hope and Help For Your Nerves

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It’s not unusual to have some physical symptom of stress, nervousness or anxiety. Even world class athletes have reported throwing up before a big match, and many seasoned performers and public speakers battle “stage fright” with sweaty, shaky hands. Nausea, vomiting, headaches, multiple trips to the bathroom are just a few physical manifestations.

In some people, though, those reactions appear in excess, or at the slightest trigger. Sometimes this overreaction or over-sensitization to stimuli occurs after a prolonged problem or illness when the sufferer is depleted or exhausted. Sometimes it occurs as what Dr. Claire Weekes in her book Hope and Help For Your Nerves calls “second fear” — fear of the symptoms themselves, fear that they might crop up at just the wrong moment (which they then do), anxiety that they crop up with so little provocation.

The first instinct or first advice, if you talk to someone else about it, is to fight against it. But fighting releases adrenalin, which heightens all those symptoms. And you can’t reason it away as an irrational fear of something that will likely not happen, because it has happened before, and at the worst times. As this over-sensitization continues, it sometimes grows and produces other problems.

A summary of Dr. Weekes advice would be to face and accept the fears, anxieties, and their physical symptoms rather than run from them, “float” past them rather than fight them, and be patient, letting enough time pass to change the conditioned responses of your mind and body to new ones. She explains all of these to greater degrees in her book and applies them to various scenarios.

If you’re prone to feel symptoms that you read about, you may want to skip parts of the book that deal with the escalation of symptoms and problems that a person experiences when these reactions go unchecked, lest you add fears of that happening to your other fears.

Though the book is not written from a Christian vantage point, it is not anti-Christian: Dr. Weekes acknowledges that “religion is a good friend” to those trying to recover from nervous illness. She doesn’t say this, but in my opinion Christians have an additional layer to deal with because they feel guilty: we think Christians shouldn’t have panic attacks, anxiety, or fear. In fact, I wrestled for a time with guilt over any kind of physical response to nervousness or fear, thinking I wasn’t exercising faith, until my pastor said something in a message to the effect that, if you are taking a walk and a dog starts chasing you, as you run to find a tree to climb with an angry dog nipping at your heels, you may fully trust that the Lord is with you and will help you deal with whatever happens, but your heart will still be racing. An over-reaction to the normal fears of life is a product of faulty thinking, and Christians are as prone to that as anyone else and in need to changing their thinking to right patterns. And sometimes the practical considerations need to be dealt with alongside or even before dealing with the spiritual issues. When Elijah fled, fearful and discouraged, from Jezebel in I Kings 19, the first thing the Lord did was to let him sleep, then send an angel to give him food and drink before dealing with the issue at hand. In Dr. Jim Berg’s Quieting a Noisy Soul series, he has a quick start section for those dealing with debilitating symptoms and who need immediate help. Of course, he deals with all of the things that disquiet the soul from a Biblical stance and in much more depth, and I hope that some day he will subdivide the series so that people can purchase the book, DVDs, etc. individually and more affordably rather than having to buy the whole kit when there will be parts of it they don’t use. But in the meantime he has a lot of excellent resources and helps on his site. I found Dr. Weekes’ book a helpful companion to Dr. Berg’s series. She does not advocate the Eastern religious types of meditation or other practices that would be cause for concern for the Christian.

I would not agree with every single point. For example, she advises that someone suffering extremely from these responses have companionship and not be left alone. But I have found that sometimes having to keep up with conversations and even someone else’s presence adds to the over-sensitization, and I can relax more fully when alone. I think one’s personality determines whether or not solitude is helpful or harmful. Overall, though, I found the book very helpful and practical.

(This review will be linked to Semicolon‘s Saturday Review of Books).

Book Review: Detour

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While reading Grace H. Kaiser’s Dr. Frau: A Woman Doctor Among the Amish (reviewed briefly here), I learned that she had written a second book titled Detour, about suffering an accident which left her disabled.

Grace was an active family practice physician in a primarily Amish area when a freak accident resulting from getting her foot tangled in an electric cord left her a quadriplegic. Her doctor told her she should be able to return to her practice within a year, so she pushed herself hard to achieve that goal only to find it was not a reality. He had only told her that to motivate her to work hard, feeling she would be depressed and discouraged if she knew the truth from the outset. Thus the discouragement and depression hit about a year later when reality sank in.

Throughout the book there are glimpses into incidents that occurred during her practice, her former patients coming to visit her, her husband’s perspective during both her active practice and her injury, her life and adjustments, spinal cord injury, her point of view as a doctor-turned-patient, and her struggle to find something useful and meaningful to do in the state she found herself after a year of intensive therapy.

I continued to enjoy her apt, concise but colorful sentences that she employed here as well as in her first book: “empty as Monday morning church, ” “I feel like dice shaking in a cup,” “That applejack wore fingers of golden satin as it slid across my tongue.”

The book is not a Christan book per se, though it is not an anti-Christian book: the doctor has some kind of belief in God but does not really write from that perspective. I only mention that because I review many Christian books and don’t want readers to mistakenly think they’ll find issues of faith dealt with in connection with the other subjects.

It is a good, fascinating and honest book, and I enjoyed reading it.

(This review will be linked to Semicolon‘s Saturday Review of Books).

Big changes coming….

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I’ve mentioned a few times that there were some possible big changes coming for our family. I so appreciate those of you who prayed as we tried to discern the Lord’s will. We’ve come to decisions and can talk about them publicly now. I’ll let you know what’s happening up front, and then go back to how we came to those decisions.

1. Jim, Jesse (youngest son), Grandma, and I are moving from western South Carolina to eastern Tennessee this summer.

2. Jeremy (oldest son) is moving to Rhode Island at the end of the summer.

Over the last couple of years my husband has been working out of town more than days at home, and for over a year now has been working 4-5 days a week in TN. His company has wanted him to move for years, but we’ve resisted because we’d like to wait until our youngest was out of high school rather than have to have him transfer from the school he has been with since K-5.

But a good look at what is best for our family leads us to feel that it would be better for us to be together rather than separated as much as we have been. We all went up to TN over spring break to interview at a Christian school, look at the area, at houses, churches, etc. At first 4-5 days in a hotel seemed like a lovely break for me — no cooking or dishes to wash, someone else to make beds and pick up wet towels, etc. But after just that amount of time, hotel living got old. I can’t imagine how Jim has been doing this for so long. Plus we’ve seen with our older boys just how quickly time passes and how soon they’re grown, and we feel it’s best to be all together as a family for Jesse’s last few years at home rather than having Dad here only for weekends and holidays.

So with all of that and a few other considerations, we decided to make the move. We’ve been house-hunting, and how all of that works out will determine when we actually move. Jesse’s new school starts mid-August, and we’d like to be settled before that. I’d appreciate your prayers for that — as much as we research, only the Lord really knows what all the issues are with the house, what the neighborhood is like, etc. Years ago when we faced our first major move, I came across this verse in my Daily Light reading, and it was a great comfort in knowing that God was preparing the way before us: “the LORD your God…Who went in the way before you, to search you out a place to pitch your tents in” (Deuteronomy 1:32b-33a). (When I first showed that to Jim, he said, “Does that mean we’ll be living in tents?” Funny, dear. 😀 I hope not, anyway!)

When we first began to entertain the idea that we really might move, Jesse was of course less than thrilled about leaving his school and friends, and that’s what is the hardest aspect for us as well. But as I had devotions with him most nights, we prayed for the Lord’s will, for wisdom, and for grace to deal with whatever the Lord might have for us. And I think the Lord has worked that grace into his heart. Though still not thrilled with the idea, he’s not morose or gripy or complaining. He has accepted it with a good attitude (and is even excited about his bedroom situation if we get the house we want!) He has never had any trouble making friends, so I think he will adjust to a new school and youth group well, though I am praying about that as well and not taking it for granted. This will be the first major bump in the road he has had to deal with in his short life, and as such I am glad we can go through it together and help him with it.

Jeremy is 25 and has been wanting to move out and start life on his own as an adult, but just hasn’t known what he really wanted to do. We had hoped he would move with us: we’ll be near Knoxville, and we felt there would be a lot more opportunity there than here. But in the meantime he learned that a friend in Rhode Island had a job opening in his company, and as he inquired into it further, it sounded like something he’d like to do, and his friend told him the job was his if he wanted it. In all honesty, I am having a lot harder time with his move than ours. He will be our first one to actually move so far away. None of our kids has been away from home more than a summer, but Jeremy has never been away from home for more than a week at a time. But this is the first opportunity he has been really excited about, so we’re excited for him while still adjusting mentally and emotionally to it all. He’s not moving til the end of August, and he and his dad are going up to RI in a few weeks to look at apartments.

This will make things even harder for Jesse, though, because he and Jeremy do a lot together.

We did talk with Grandma about the possibility of moving when it first came up, and beyond reassuring her that she would come with us, it didn’t seem to faze her. But she would forget about it in between times of discussing it, so we finally decided not to bring it up again until a couple of weeks before we move. That may be harder to do now that we’ve made it public at church. She really likes where she is and doesn’t like change at all, but I have to think this move can’t be nearly as traumatic as when we moved her here from her home of 30 years in ID a couple of years ago, and the Lord really gave her a lot of grace for that. Jim did scout out one assisted living facility he really liked near his job site, but we’re waiting on making a decision there til we know where we’re going to live.

That leaves Jason and Mittu. We’re trying to talk them into moving to TN with us. They eventually want to go into a camp ministry and are just working now to pay off school bills before they can do that. They’ve been looking for better jobs, so it is a possibility they could join us there. For now it looks like they’ll likely be moving into our house here, working on painting and various repairs to help us get it ready to sell.

As parents of course we’ve known that some day our kids would probably go further away from home as they became adults, but it seems ironic that our decision to move is becoming the impetus for that to happen. We’re really going to miss Sunday dinners and pizza and video nights and just the easy access to call each other up and get together. Hopefully we’ll be able to coordinate visits where we’ll all be able to be together again at times. We’ll be only three hours away from Jason and Mittu, so they’d be pretty easily able to come up when they have a couple of days off together (though I know they’ll have other things they want to do with time off than take a trip). It will probably be a little harder for Jeremy to get there, but I hope at least at Christmastime we can all be in one spot together.

Another aspect of all of this is dealing with change in the various ministries we’re involved in at church, particularly the ladies’ group. I have been feeling for some time like it might be time for a change, that I had taken it about as far as I could and it was time for someone new, but I was wrestling with whether those feelings were from the Lord or whether I was just being “weary in well-doing” and needed to get a renewed vision and passion for it. I have to think now that those feelings were the Lord’s preparations for this move. I’ve had several ideas buzzing in the back of my mind for other writing, a web site, an Etsy store….I’ll have to wait til the dust settles after our move and see what the Lord would have me pursue in any of those directions. We have found a church there that we’re very excited about, and will see what opportunities are available there. Back to the ladies’ group here, I know several ladies who could take it, but I don’t know who might be willing. Thankfully, finding a replacement is not my responsibility. 🙂 But I am concerned and am praying about that as well.

So…I think that catches you up to date with us and covers all the bases, or most of them. As you think of us, I’d appreciate your prayers for this new phase in our lives.

The Week In Words

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Welcome to The Week In Words, where we share quotes from the last week’s reading. If something you read this past week  inspired you, caused you to laugh, cry, think, dream, or just resonated with you in some way, please share it with us, attributing it to its source, which can be a book, newspaper, blog, Facebook — anything that you read. More information is here.

I am sorry to be so late with this today. Getting back from a trip with its associated laundry and grocery runs, company, and then having the kids over til pretty late last night prevented me from pre-preparing a this post, then I slept in a little to recover from all of that. 🙂

I saw this first quote at Carrie’s in her review of the book Purity: A Godly Woman’s Adornment by Lydia Brownback. This is her succinct definition of purity:

“It is to have a single goal, a single focus, and a single purpose for ourselves and for our lives. . . . At its core, purity is having a heart for the Lord that isn’t watered down or polluted by lesser things.”

I don’t have that book, but I do have the one on Trust in the series waiting for me.

This quote is longer than I would usually share here, but I felt it was all needed. This is from the June 14 reading of Our Daily Walk by F. B. Meyer. You can read the whole excerpt here by scrolling down to June 14. In discussing the man with the one talent from the parable of the talents, Meyer says the person with one talent may feel discouraged by his limitations. Then he goes on to say:

But the world will never be saved and helped unless the one-talented people, who are the great majority, can be aroused to a sense of their responsibility. Five men can put the whole energy of their manhood behind their single talents, whilst the one man with five talents has only the driving power of one. It is probably a greater thing in God’s sight to use one talent faithfully than many. No one notices the man with his humble one talent. There is no outburst of praise or cheering. It is a greater test of the quality of the soul to go on doing one small thing well, than to be able to turn with brilliant versatility from one talent to another. …

But the one thing that our Lord demands of each of us is to be faithful–faithful in a very little. He is watching each of us with great eagerness as we live our daily life, because He knows, as we cannot realise, how much our position in the other world depends on our fidelity in this. It is for our sake that He is so anxious that we should make good use of our one talent.

Have you only one talent? Are you doing anything with it? Remember it is the ounce-weight that may turn the scales where hundred-weights are balanced; it is the tiny tug that can move the great liner. Be thou faithful in thy very little, and thou shalt receive the “Well done” of thy Lord.

If you’re joining us for The Week In Words with your own post, please leave a link to your family-friendly quotes for today below so other participants can read them. And please feel free to read and comment whether you have a link to share or not!

“I Am the Flag”

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Did you know that June 14 is Flag Day? Here is a tribute to Old Glory.

(Photo courtesy of the morgueFile.)

I Am the Flag

by by Ruth Apperson Rous

I am the flag of the United States of America.

I was born on June 14, 1777, in Philadelphia.

There the Continental Congress adopted my stars and stripes as the national flag.

My thirteen stripes alternating red and white, with a union of thirteen white stars in a field of blue, represented a new constellation, a new nation dedicated to the personal and religious liberty of mankind.

Today fifty stars signal from my union, one for each of the fifty sovereign states in the greatest constitutional republic the world has ever known.

My colors symbolize the patriotic ideals and spiritual qualities of the citizens of my country.

My red stripes proclaim the fearless courage and integrity of American men and boys and the self-sacrifice and devotion of American mothers and daughters.

My white stripes stand for liberty and equality for all.

My blue is the blue of heaven, loyalty, and faith.

I represent these eternal principles: liberty, justice, and humanity.

I embody American freedom: freedom of speech, religion, assembly, the press, and the sanctity of the home.

I typify that indomitable spirit of determination brought to my land by Christopher Columbus and by all my forefathers – the Pilgrims, Puritans, settlers at James town and Plymouth.

I am as old as my nation.

I am a living symbol of my nation’s law: the Constitution of the United States and the Bill of Rights.

I voice Abraham Lincoln’s philosophy: “A government of the people, by the people,for the people.”

I stand guard over my nation’s schools, the seedbed of good citizenship and true patriotism.

I am displayed in every schoolroom throughout my nation; every schoolyard has a flag pole for my display.

Daily thousands upon thousands of boys and girls pledge their allegiance to me and my country.

I have my own law—Public Law 829, “The Flag Code” – which definitely states my correct use and display for all occasions and situations.

I have my special day, Flag Day. June 14 is set aside to honor my birth.

Americans, I am the sacred emblem of your country. I symbolize your birthright, your heritage of liberty purchased with blood and sorrow.

I am your title deed of freedom, which is yours to enjoy and hold in trust for posterity.

If you fail to keep this sacred trust inviolate, if I am nullified and destroyed, you and your children will become slaves to dictators and despots.

Eternal vigilance is your price of freedom.

As you see me silhouetted against the peaceful skies of my country, remind yourself that I am the flag of your country, that I stand for what you are – no more, no less.

Guard me well, lest your freedom perish from the earth.

Dedicate your lives to those principles for which I stand: “One nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

I was created in freedom. I made my first appearance in a battle for human liberty.

God grant that I may spend eternity in my “land of the free and the home of the brave” and that I shall ever be known as “Old Glory,” the flag of the United States of America.

___________________________________________

Previous Flag Day posts:

Flag Day.
I Am Old Glory.
Our Duty to the Flag.

Friday’s Fave Five

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Susanne at Living to Tell the Story hosts Friday’s Fave Five so we can share our favorite things from the last week. This has been a wonderful exercise in looking for and appreciating the good things God gives. Click on the button to learn more, then go to Susanne’s to read others’ faves and link up your own.

So here are five favorite things from this last week:

1. A successful first-ever solo road trip. (Thank you, Lord!!) That’s one reason this is late — I just got back this afternoon. I’ll tell you more about it next week. 😀

2. Rest stops. They’re clean, they have multiple bathroom stalls, and they’re quiet — no music playing over speakers. I got so tired of small, crowded, messy, noisy restrooms in restaurants and gas stations.

3. Mug’s Root Beer. I mentioned before liking root beer at restaurants because it’s decaf, and I can’t have caffeine, and I am not crazy about Sprite or 7-Up and the like. If we’re eating out I usually drink water, but if I am running errands and want something cold to drink, I usually go through a drive-through for root beer. Sadly, I found out a few weeks ago that Barq’s root beer, which most restaurants seem to sell, does have caffeine. A&W root beer is too vanilla-y. Bojangles is about the only place in town that sells it as a fountain drink (Taco Bell used to, but they stopped. 😦 ) I couldn’t find a Bojangles on the trip at first, but I found a drink machine with bottles of Mug Root Beer at a rest stop, and then I got…

4. Zaxby’s munchy crunchy small ice to pour it over. Yumsome! Plus that Zaxby’s only charged me 11 cents for a cup of ice — here they charge 25.

5. My own computer! Well, it’s actually the central family desktop computer, but everyone else has laptops, so I almost have this one to myself. My husband has a small notebook-type computer that is portable and nice for trips, but it is very small. This screen and keyboard seem so BIG after using that one!

That’s it for this Friday. Hope you have a great weekend!

Flashback Friday: Extended Family Memories

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Mocha With Linda hosts a weekly meme called Flashback Friday. She’ll post a question every Thursday, and then Friday we can link our answers up on her site.

The prompt for today is:

Tell about any grandparents, cousins, or other extended family that was special to you growing up. Did they live near you or some distance away? Do you have any particular childhood memories (good OR bad!) of times spent with your grandparents? With your cousins? Did you spend holidays with them? At whose house did you generally gather? Do you still keep up with cousins, aunts & uncles, etc.? Did your paternal relatives and maternal relatives know and get along with each other?

My mother’s mother passed away when I was about 4. I have a dim memory of talking with her once about her colostomy bag — she had cancer that spread throughout her lower region. My mom said that when I asked about it, she (my mom) was embarrassed and tried to divert me, but my grandmother just answered me very matter-of-factly (which is usually what most kids want.) I was very pleased to receive some of my grandmother’s things, like a autograph book she had during school days, after my mom passed away.

My mom’s father was tall, skinny, and had a distinctive laugh — his laugh is probably what I remember most about him. He loved to joke and tease. We lived in the same town, and even actually lived with him for a while during my childhood — my brother was born unexpectedly in his house (my mom had been told by her doctor that day that she would not deliver yet — but she did, and so fast they couldn’t get out the door.) We eventually moved to another town, and in later years when he remarried, whenever he and his wife drove up to our house to visit, he always brought a box of Dunkin’ Donuts. No matter when I got up in the morning while he was there, my grandfather and mom were already up in the kitchen, drinking coffee and talking. His second wife developed arteriosclerosis and deteriorated mentally, but he cared for her himself. One time when he was persuaded to leave her in something like an adult day care for a short while, when he came to pick her up, they had her strapped down. I don’t remember if she was trying to find him or what, but he never left her again. Though he was not what you would describe as warm or affectionate, I thought this was one of the greatest examples of sacrificial love I have ever known of. This wife passed away as well, and several years later he ended up living with my aunt, who was single, but she was at work all day and he wouldn’t take his medicines or eat right and finally had a series of small strokes. He recuperated in a hospital until Medicare would not pay any more and then had to transfer to a nursing home. Everyone was depressed about that for a while, but when he recovered well enough to leave, he decided to stay: He had made friends, had his meals and medicines taken care of, and found more to do than sit in front of the TV all day. He volunteered for a program to answer the phone as Santa to kids who called in to a special number. I can imagine he would have been great at that. I wonder how many kids associate his distinctive laugh with Santa. The last time I saw him was at a family reunion over twenty years ago — he passed away a year or two later, in his 80s.

My father’s father passed away before I was born. My father’s mother was the one I mentioned a couple of weeks ago in summer memories: the “galloping Grandma” who would drive to see all her kids in TX, LA (Louisiana), and AL during the summer and took me with her a few times. She never remarried. She went back and forth between living in TX and LA. When she lived near us, I often went to spend the night with her, and one of my fondest memories is both of us staying up late reading. Sometimes I would go with her to visit her sister, Jewel, in another town. Jewel had one arm that was paralyzed but had a garden, and she and my grandmother loved cooking fresh vegetables. My Grandmother loved to crochet and whenever she was sitting still for long, she had her yarn and crochet hooks going. She could be a little sharp and critical sometimes, but overall I have fond memories of her.

I am fortunate to have cousins my age on both sides. Until I was 13, we lived in the same town as my mom’s sister and her family, with one girl cousin a year younger. The father’s side of this cousin’s family was somewhat well-to-do, and this cousin got things like a Barbie Dream House, Susie Homemaker oven (with which you could make REAL cakes!), and her own TV — all things that were beyond my realm, so, yes, I was a little jealous. One time when I went to church with their family, I didn’t have any money to put in, so I wrote something on a piece of paper — I don’t remember if it was an “IOU” or what — but my cousin’s other grandmother took it out. 😦 But overall my cousin and I got along well. Her mom was the aunt for whom I am named.

I only saw my Louisiana cousins occasionally, maybe once or twice a year, but there were three girls in that family, one my age, one a year older, and one a year younger — and all of our birthdays were in August. I think I’ve told before of one birthday we celebrated all together. At their place we road bikes all over creation, and their mom had a distinctive way of whistling so that we could hear her from a pretty good distance away and know it was time to come home.

I hear about my TX cousin from her mom occasionally, but the LA side of the family just doesn’t keep in touch any more since the dad, my father’s brother,and my own father passed away. I would guess my aunt probably remarried, but it would be nice to hear how they are all doing and where they are these days. Though there were several other cousins that I saw less often, those four were the ones I knew best and interacted with the most, and  some of my best childhood memories were with my cousins, who were some of my closest friends.