more normal than not

There’s some new kind of coffee beans in the container this morning…black and greasy…..shiny with coffee oil.

This should be one heck of a cup of coffee coming soon.

We went to Walmart last night.

That was our big “cabin fever” tonic…to get out of the house after a week of snow and go somewhere…we needed to get out and just go.

We had to go.

So we went to the Goodwill and then went to the Walmart .

That’s what they call “thinking out of the box”.

We are nothing if not creatures of habit.

When we were finishing up at Walmart, but before we’d actually had a chance to start ringing up our small pile of merchandise, Jenny asked the checkout girl for a price check on a usb charger that my son had found in the marked-down section.

She didn’t realize that the checkout lady was already in the process of doing a price check for the people ahead of us.

Apparently, those people had picked up the one box of chocolates in the discounted Valentines Day candies that had an illegible bar code, so the lady running the register had her co-worker waddle slowly back to the section to get a price on the already cheap….but soon to be cheaper….candy.

You would have thought Jenny had said something like, “OK…hold still…I’M GONNA CUT YOU NOW!!!” when she asked her if she could scan that usb thing.

This woman started huffing and puffing, subtly rolling her eyes….grabbed it, scanned it, threw it back at Jenny….”12.95!!!!! 12.95!!!”.

It kind of gave us something to talk about later.  It wasn’t very nice.

But, you know, thinking about it this morning…it wasn’t very “anything”.

That the people working the front end at Walmart are civil at all is a miracle.

They’re like caged wolverines….taking our money through the bars of their prisons, snarling “DEBIT OR CREDIT?!!! DEBIT OR CREDIT?!!!” as we try to expedite our evacuation.

Their managers even tell them when they can step away for a moment.

They are tied to that little area, working on a bad case of carpal tunnel syndrome, punching numbers and running barcodes across the scanning platter, having someone else occasionally waddle out into the giant store for a price check….and trying to give correct change every single transaction.

And at the end of the encounter, they are probably required to say, “HAVE A NICE DAY!!!! HAVE A NICE DAY!!!”

It’s not a résumé builder to work at Walmart.

You don’t get to join the “1 percenters” very often if you run a register at Walmart.

And it doesn’t get me any closer to nirvana to have a cashier monotone an insincere wish for me to have a “nice day” before I can leave.

It is a victory to find some quick common ground with these cashiers…to connect momentarily and let them know that I know that behind all the “wolverine”, there’s a human being ringing up my doodads.

I like connecting. I like letting them know that I see them.

(They’re probably thinking, “I WISH THAT WEIRDO WOULD STOP LOOKING AT ME!!! STOP LOOKING AT ME. MANNNNN, IF YOU DON’T STOP LOOKING AT ME…..”)

I don’t know that I should expect much from a Walmart cashier, though.

They are all just a bunch of caged beasts…more minimum wage slaves.

But….HAVE A NICE DAY!!!

My family has Norwegian roots.

I think that’s different than Norwegian Wood.

I’ve never been to Norway.

I’ve eaten a lot of lefse.

I’ve smelled my fair share of lutefisk.

But I’ve never been out of the country. I’ve never even been to Canada.

But when I’m watching the Olympics…and I see that the Norwegians are cleaning up in the medal department at the Winter Games (who saw that coming? The Norwegians! Doing well at sports involving snow! Who would have thought that would happen)…what was I saying? Oh, yeah…when I see the Norwegians dominating… well, I get all puffed up with pride and definitely claim ownership of my lineage.

“See?  Look at those totals! Look what we’re doing? See how we’re winning all those medals? Norwegians rule!!”

Of course, having some kind of strange unofficial dual citizenship brewing up in my head, when the United States moves up in the medal total, I claim that, too.

I work it from as many angles as I can imagine.

Ah, what the heck…we’re all just really citizens of the world…just ready to claim allegiance to the place we land, anyway.

Holy smokes…it’s Valentines Day!

And I got some presents for everybody and made some cards!

I managed to prepare some in spite of the snow!

Whew.

My allegiance is to my family.

That allegiance knows no borders…but the country of my family is a small and tight unit.

I’ll claim it no matter who is winning the medals.

What a mystery life is.

How we love…and who we bind ourselves to…who we claim as our “country”.

That’s a beautiful and mysterious thing.

Of course, it’s not a matter of worthiness or “being the best” that brings love to us.

We don’t stand on a podium with a medal around our neck when something miraculous happens… and we are loved by someone.

Although…I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to stand on a podium and have someone place a gold medal around our neck. It would be kind of attention getting.

From my experience with my family, I get a lot more than I deserve.

I am loved even when I’m being unlovable.

I am an irritation sometimes…but even behind the irritation I manufacture, there’s love.

That’s amazing and unexpected.

So it’s Valentines Day.

We slow down a little and make extra sure that we do something that says, “I love you” today.

If things are going OK, that’s information that doesn’t really need to be underlined.

I didn’t copyright that last line, so if anyone needs to use it when they forget the card or flowers or little box of chocolates…or even the big, steaming plate of lutefisk, if that’s how you roll…if you forget the day, if you forget your place in the universe of love…you have permission to repeat it to your benefit.

Maybe it’s better to put your love in bold italics everyday.

In the meantime, while we try and figure out all this love stuff…go United ‘Wegian States of the World!

Go Love!

 

 

We moved around some when my sister and I were young.

One of the places we lived was in the upper part of New Jersey.

Somehow, to my some of my Southern friends, this makes me a Yankee.

Who would have thought that a couple of years up North could turn me so completely into a Yankee?

Not me.

Anyway, that’s not really the point. I think I have a point…but that’s not it.

We’re watching the Olympics some these days….along with the rest of the world…and one of the things that I’m really enjoying is seeing how some of these athletes started out.

I love seeing these little kids skiing and snowboarding and skating.

I love seeing all this activity before it was a “quest” for anything.

When you see the faces of some of these athletes, you can see that they’ve managed to carry the “fun” with them as they’ve moved up in the sport.

I never had a “quest” for Olympic gold.

Of course, that’s always a good fantasy for a kid to have while he’s pushing himself around on the pair of skis he got for Christmas.

It’s fun for him to be able to imagine a podium somewhere while he’s whizzing by in a dormant cornfield at 10 miles per hour.

Imaginings never approached a real attempt to stand on any podium, though.  They were always just a fun game.

While we lived in New Jersey, we used to go to a Lutheran camp somewhere in upstate NY. It was called Camp Koinonia….let me look it up real quick….in Middlesex, NY…up in the Finger Lakes region.

It was beautiful up there.

We’d go up in the winter for a family retreat with a bunch of other families from our church in Allendale.

I remember this one visit we made to Camp Koinonia.

It was pretty windy that day and we were all out on the frozen lake skating.

The lake was pretty big, and we’d skated far away from the rest of the group.

After we’d skated far from the other people, an even bigger wind came up and started to blow us around a little.

Then it started to blow us around a lot.

We couldn’t skate into the wind, but when we turned to join our friends, we discovered that we could hold our arms out and let the wind push us.

If we skated with the wind, we could really fly.

Really fly. I don’t mean that we could literally fly…that would have really been something to reminisce over…I mean that I’ve never moved that fast over the ice. It was outrageous.

It was hilarious to skate over to a friend and yank his hat off…and watch him frantically try to catch it as the wind carried it away on the smooth ice.

It felt good to have the wind push us like that.

It was pretty darn memorable.

I watch these kids on the television, skating and skiing and moving around on the ice and snow doing things I’m never going to come close to trying, and I think, “I bet that most of them have something like a windy day on a frozen lake to remember.  I bet that something brings them that much joy.”

My experience with the wind and the ice was 40 plus years ago…but if I think about it a little, I can still hear the sound of the skate blades on the frozen surface, hear the wind blowing hard…hear our laughter. It is a palpable memory. It is so strong and good. All these years later, it is still so strong.

The things that drive us and stick with us are…hopefully…strong and good. The things that move us are bigger than we fully understand. It’s about strong feelings and memories. It’s not “having an appreciation for.”  It’s not feeling some “strong affection” for an activity.  It’s not about having an interest in something.

It is about feeling that uncontainable joy…joy so strong that it sticks with you over a lifetime.

It’s about joy so strong that it sustains.

I have a lot of moments like that.

That is the blessing that I’ve been given over the course of my life.

Being a “kite on ice” is just one of many “sustaining moments”.

 

 

I watched a tribute to the Beatles last night on the television.

I don’t know where else I would have watched it, really.

It makes sense that it was on the television.

I didn’t get any special invitations.

Maybe it got lost in the mail?

It was a pretty cool show.

There were a lot of performers who’d been around for a long time paying tribute like the fans they are.

Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart doing a really beautiful, subdued version of “Fool on the Hill”….Joe Walsh and Gary Clark Jr. playing a nice version of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”…John Mayer with some funky boots….it was a  good night.

Paul McCartney and Ringo closed out the night with some solo and duo performances.

Watching Paul play “Hey Jude” made me think of how many times I’d listened to that song in my room in Marietta, laying on my back with my headphones on, getting up every 7 minutes or so to place the needle back at the beginning of that long Beatles classic.

I listened to that song for a while when I was in my very early teens like it was going to show me some sort of hidden truth about surviving adolescence…as if he was saying, “don’t make it bad, take a sad song….” to me directly.

I guess that we grab on to whatever flotation device is within reach when we feel tired of swimming.

The Beatles were a life raft, sometimes.

Now some might say, “Oh. Oh. Oh how sad! Liking the Beatles? How sad that you didn’t have a more solid bedrock to stand on! How sad that you didn’t have the Rock of Ages to stand on! Don’t ever place your faith in Man…. how sad that is that you liked the Beatles that much!”

Well, I was a kid.  There was a lot of that “rock of ages” stuff going on…even when I was a young kid…but I liked the Beatles, too.

I still like the Beatles.

I don’t think that I was alone in that feeling.

I know a lot of people who had a very important relationship with music.

Music was a pretty tactile thing to get some sustaining strength from.  You put the album on the turntable, hit play….and a favorite song could do a lot for a young troubled mind.

You knew that before you got the album out of the sleeve.

Forget self-help books…we all had self-help albums.

The remaining Beatles are getting older.

I told Jenny that Paul is starting to look like my Dad…and he is, with his swept over hair and a few more wrinkles.

It’s good to see them getting along…playing some music together.

That is surely a good thing to see people enjoying each others company.

 

I was thinking about being alone this morning.

Of course, when I write this, it’s usually dark… and I’m alone.

If everything’s alright, people are still sleeping this early in the morning, so I’m in a house full of people but….for the moment…I’m alone.

I was thinking about really being alone.

I don’t suppose that we’re ever really alone….really alone.

There’s usually someone around, somewhere.

If you want to get on the “I never walk alone” track, we could say that God is always with us.

That’s true. I believe that.

But there’s been times when I really felt alone.

When I transferred from Newberry College to Georgia State University, I was pretty alone.

I was like everybody else, I suppose…alone in a sea of people.

What the heck? I’m not really whining about it…it’s just kind of surprising that in the midst of the biggest crowds is where I find myself feeling most alone. That’s something for me to think about this morning…that I’m most alone in the crowd.

That’s not very profound…maybe it’s just where I’m forced to notice it the most? Out in the woods I’m not nervous about being by myself…it was just something about all those people who I didn’t know…strangers…that bothered me.

(Now I understand that these strangers are just friends I haven’t made yet…but I was more self-conscious when I was younger…seemed to have more at stake than I do now.)

The first time I ate in the cafeteria by myself was kind of eye-opening.

Making that long walk to the table, in a sea of unfamiliar faces, sitting down and eating so I could quickly move on to a location where I didn’t feel so conspicuously solitaire, was a really concentrated effort at first.

And then I got used to it.

Maybe that’s the hurdle we face when we’re slogging towards adulthood? Maybe being alone is something we need to get used to? Maybe recognizing that there are minor (or major?) things that we can survive….like loneliness….is what makes us able to push on into something approaching maturity?

I don’t know.

( Here’s an unscary scene for a new horror movie….all alone in the morning, with your french press of waiting coffee…and you look over and think, “I DIDN’T PRESS THE PLUNGER! WHY IS THE PLUNGER DOWN?!!  I DIDN’T PRESS THAT PLUNGER…WHO PRESSED THE PLUNGER ON MY FRENCH PRESS?!! IS ANYONE OUT THERE?!! WHO’S THERE?!!!!! WHO PRESSED THE PLUNGER?  HELLO? HELLO?!!! WHO’S OUT THERE?!!!”  I think you get the picture.  It could be pretty scary.)

I got pretty used to being alone.

Between the running and the art and the music, I seemed to pick solitary amusements.

I didn’t mind not being with anyone other than myself.

“Me time” wasn’t freak out time.

Now I drive the mail around, and while it’s very social sometimes and I do like to visit with people, for the most part it’s a solitary business.

I’m in my Jeep with a bunch of letters and magazines and packages, and I’m with myself all day.

Just me and the radio.

But I don’t feel lonely like I felt in a big crowd of strangers in a very urban cafeteria.

I got better at it…it’s not hard to be the lone wolf now, even though with a family I thankfully never have to know what that feels like anymore.

I don’t know that “getting good at being alone” is really something that’s all that great to shoot for, anyway.

Maybe that’s just part of our “human condition”…so getting “good at being human” has to include some “me..alone.. time”.

What do I really know about being alone, anyway? I’m just sitting here typing…drinking my coffee in the dark.