Bug Rides

These are the happy days, I get the kids and we get to have the kind of fantastical conversations that only children get to have. We've even got a soundtrack for these days. Ladysmith Black Mombazo, especially track 11, or as we liked to call it, The Tap Dance Song. The Mancub asked for Justin Timberlake. I said no, and I meant it. We also listened to some opera (they didn't like, mostly) some U2 (they did like), Christmas music and some other stuff.

There was a special order to who got picked up first too, I had to alternate which child I got first or I would hear it from them, everything had to be fair.

We also had special ways to get home:

• The Fast Way - Route 50, highway, it was quick and they liked this best in the dark. I never liked it because I just didn't like taking them on the highway.
• Bumpy Bridge Way - This way includes Cry Baby Bridge on Govenor's Bridge Road, renamed to Bumpy Bridge by me because of the bumpy effect of the corrugated steel surface and because I don't want to explain why on earth some grown up would name it Cry Baby Bridge. Someday I'll tell them about the Goat Man, who is said to haunt these parts. The best thing about this road is that we were usually the only ones on it. It's a very picturesque two lane road with cows and horses and some geese.
• Lost Way - Once Bumpy Bridge Way was flooded and I just made a left. Patuxent River Road is another one of those lovely, winding two lane roads with farms, flowers and cows. The kids freaked until we came out onto 214. Such the fun road though. The first time we drove it I had to stop so that Princess Sweetpea could stop and be nauseous. After they got over being afraid, they loved it.
• Long Way - Just 424, another 2 lane road, but much busier and not nearly the charm of the other two.

Somedays we would stop and pick up fruit or flowers at a roadside stand. Once we watched a Med-Evac chopper land. We stopped and waited for the passenger, then for the chopper to take off again.

The best part about these days were the conversations, like the one about the injured man. They asked the best questions, mostly unanswerable (what happened? did he die? does his mother know?), and we prayed for him. Other conversations went something like this:

The Mancub: Guess what happened in class today?

Me: I don't know, tell me.

The Mancub: My butt farted all by itself, and it was stinky!

And so on. Sometimes we would talk about God, I'd tell them Bible stories. They especially loved the stories about David and Daniel and their encounters with wild animals. One story didn't go as planned. At least as I planned it. I told them about Noah, the Ark, God's promise and the Flood. After I finished explaining that the Rainbow is God's visible promise that he won't destroy the world in a flood again, The Mancub says "That mean's I'll never drown!" Stupidly I respond to this with "Not really, honey, what that means is..."

I never got to finish. The Mancub burst into tears and started wailing "I don't want to die!!!!!" "I want my MOM!!!!!" Both Princess Sweetpea and I are trying to calm him down, but it's not working. Part of my problem is that I won't lie to the kids, especially not about God. That's why I don't tell them Santa Clause is real, when the time comes I don't want to have to explain elaborate lies about an unseen magical man. If I need to tell them about anyone unseen I wanna make sure that I actually believe what I'm saying, so I limit my mystical conversations to Jesus and God. It's not that I don't tell them stories, I do, but I make sure they understand that I'm telling stories.

Well, The Mancub finally calmed down. Okay, it wasn't me, it was his Mamma. She yelled at me not to tell them anymore scary stories, so we haven't talked about Noah again.

Princess Sweetpea loves to hear stories, The Mancub too, but Princess Sweetpea thirsts for them. I tell her about battles long ago, about the Dark Ages, Rome, Greece, about brave people who stood up for what they believed in. I can't wait to tell her more.

how and what to blog.....Salome's Fictional Veils...

I am a bit confuzzled about what exactly I want to write about. Some of what I want to say must needs be edited for content, I can't exactly say I believe this or that and then dog someone. But oh, how I want to. Sometimes. Other things I want to say are just inappropriate, it wouldn't reflect well on the God I serve, so I don't.

So, do I just make up stuff, veiling my reality thickly enough that no one knows who I'm writing about? Nah, that would take the fun out of it. I've got to figure out a way to use those veils to my advantage.

For now I stick to reality (ish) here and save my fiction for a different forum. But soon....

The Soundtrack of My Life

It's not what you might think, not Mozart, Chopin, The Ramones or even music. Nope, the sound that most calms me, reminds me of happier and sadder times, the noise that grounds me is the coal train that runs behind my home. Since I was a little girl the coal trains have run behind my home, I hear them in the morning, at night and throughout the day. Every aspect of the trains passing are dear to my ears, from the whistles that announce their approach to the distant chugging of the wheels as it passes out of hearing range. I love the way the weight of the train makes bits of the house rattle, the windows and things on my shelves.

On rainy days the lonesome call before it reaches the road runs through my body like a caress, I get goosebumps. When I can sleep with my windows open I listen for the midnight trains passing. You can hear the air rush away from the locomotive, the whine of the engine as it struggles to pull thousands of pounds of metal and ore to the electricity plant down by the Bay. The way the whistles echo so much farther at night, how so little else is sounding to distract your ears away from the urgency of the trains approach.

Occasionally something happens that is out of the ordinary. When I was little it happened twice, once in winter so we could see it from our kitchen, the train derailed. We heard it, and then we saw it. Mom, who was an explorer at heart, got her shoes on and let us accompany her to "see if everyone was okay", or, really, to snoop. We scrambled to get ready, we had to find a way to cross the wetlands and creek that lay between our home and the tracks, less than 1/2 a mile, but significant, none the less. We kids knew how to get there, it was easy for us, we had a rope tied to a tree that hung over the creek at just the right angle to give us a Tarzan-like swing across. Mom would never make it. Plus, much more importantly, we weren't allowed to use that rope or to cross the creek. So we had to find a ford, which we did, a bit further north and away from the rope.

Once across the accident was gloriously right in front of us. Coal chunks scattered everywhere, cars tipped on their sides spilling the earths riches out across the forest floor. The smells of the coal mixed with leaf rot, water, fall and moss to create a new smell that was tantalizingly full of excitement. I grabbed for a piece of coal, hoping to keep it, to put it in my collection of stuff. Mom would only let me look at it, it didn't belong to me, it was the electric companies and they would be by to get it. I thought they wouldn't miss a piece, but she would likely pat me down before I left so I dropped it after examining it closely. Mom searched for the engineer, made sure he was okay, asked if he needed anything and then we had to go back home. She promised that we would one day walk the tracks between Hall and Mt Oak.

Later that spring she kept her promise. Dad dropped us and a picnic lunch off at Hall Road by the Vets office and we took off promising to be at the other end two hours later. We were so excited, my brother Fred and sisters Martha, Laura and Anne. We explored everything along the way, including an abandoned tobacco barn full of bats and owls. There was a field where we ate lunch, and dozens of places to stop and look at things, like bones of long dead deer, rabbits, rats and whatever that one thing was. Flowers to pick, stones to kick, tracks to balance on and trees to watch in the wind. All too quickly the walk was over.

That was one of the best days of my life.

Blogging - Must do more

There are just times that I must write, but I can't, either because I'm in pain or because getting to the computer is just to much of a hassel. Hopefully that will change when I buy my birthday present to me, my brandnew laptop. (I was thinking a Dell, but then reading Consumer Reports I've decided to lean more towards an IBM. I'd go Apple, especially because they are challenging the Beatles {BOO YAAA!} but those babies are spendy.) So hopefully in the next few months/weeks my blogging will get more regular.

These are some of the things I've been thinking about:
1. FIFA's stupidity, re: censuring the Israeli's for bombing an empty soccer field (No injuries) and NOT censuring the Palestinian's bombing of an UNempty soccer field (WITH injuries). WTH? So much for not being political. It's a good thing, they really could have embarrased Pinochet, the Taliban and Uday Hussien had they chosen to do anything political. Phew!
2. The link between freedom, logic, liberty and political clarity.
3. The French and their silly lifetime contracts. Their 23% unemployment rate, the general sorry state of their ecomony, everything.
4. Defining Censorship and Banning. They aren't what Hollywood thinks they are.
5. Bad Drivers - How they make me lose my religion. (Okay, not really, but it's still their fault.)
6. Iraq: the casualties, ours and theirs and how it compares to other wars. (2300 + after 3 years in IRAQ, 6000 on Day 1 of the invasion of Okinawa during WWII)
7. The crappiness of network news. I will blog on this, I will have examples. Like a reporter the other day saying "The tornado utterly destroyed the church, you can see hymnals, boards, pews, etc., lying all around." No, go back to the Tsunami of December 2004 and look again at the before and after pictures of Banda Aceh, that is UTTER destruction. That was a slate wiper. There were things left after the tornado, like hymnals. It might be nitpicky, but I don't think so.

So, hopefully, I'll be back to expand on this.

Oh, and did anyone else notice that we (The USA) are at a 4.7% unemployment rate? Nice, very nice.

Hilarity

Just some funny things I've seen in the news lately.

A. French Anarchists rioting for rights. How funny is that? Even better is when they march together. HA! A bunch of anarchists all walking in the same direction. That's gut achingly funny.

B. Illegal Immigrants protesting for rights carrying Mexican flags. Highly hilarious. Even better is them declaring "I'm not a criminal." Actually, you are, since breaking the law is intrinsic to the definition of a criminal and sneaking across the border would be breaking the law, making you a, um, criminal.

C. Illegal Immigrants protesting for rights carrying American flags upside down. HA! Seriously, if you want to stay learn to wave it the right way, that might help.

D. Ted Kennedy naming his dog "Splash". Does he not get the irony? Too funny.