I'll be there...

(Quick warning: In order to find photos for this post, I had to dig through my old honest-to-goodness-real-film photos from my childhood point and shoot cameras.. there is only so much quality one can expect from an 8-16 year old with a 35mm and a questionable quality of scanner!)

I really won on the day they were handing out grannies.

 My Granny has many grandchildren and great-grandchildren. She was the kind of grandmother who could halt a displeasing behavior with a few curt words, but still manage to make a grandchild feel extremely, securely loved and like a uniquely special individual. She played our silly games(even though she disliked most of them), watched our age-level movies, and read our grade level books, and generally valued our personhood at whatever age we were, which allowed us a level of closeness that other people might not achieve with grandparents.


The same curiosity and independence that were the bane of her cooking abilities formed the random escapades she invited us along that formed of our now cherished memories. I say all this just to preface what an important and special role Granny has held in my life. She died in July of 2008, and while occasionally I regret that I could not steal more time with her, I also feel privileged- as the daughter of her fifth and youngest child- to have been able to know Granny for as long as I did. I am grateful for the time I got, and as she knows Jesus, I am glad she is finally with him.

I am at peace about Granny going to be with Jesus. Some days though, I miss her more than others. There are some situations that spike an automatic desire to go visit Granny: 

Coming across a bag of Lays sour cream and onion flavored potato chips tucked away in a corner. Sitting down to a pile of of books, or perusing a used bookstore. Driving to the coast. Taking a stroll on a lovely day through a park or particularly forested area. Settling down to a cup of tea, or soup. Finding an excitingly strange foreign film, or watching a great book-based movie.

It is during these moments that I catch myself mentally loading up the car to go to Arroyo Grande and looking forward to a lunch at the Back Door Deli.

I remember several years ago, when my two youngest siblings were in those years of annoying car trips. We often drove to the coast as a family, spending the weekend with Granny and Grandad. While Melody and James were between the ages of 4 and 10, the ever present question was "Are we there yet? How much longer?"

They asked this so many times that Mom came up with an auto-response that soon became so traditional that even after they outgrew that stage, someone would always ask the annoying question just to hear the response before we got there.

"We'll be there when we see Granny waiting for us on the front porch waving."

Granny often did that. When she knew we were getting close, she would go stand on the front porch and wait for us to arrive. It became a joke those times when she wasn't there on the porch that even after we were there, we weren't really there until we saw Granny.

Sometimes, I drive past her old home, and there is a quiet pang of loss, knowing that she wouldn't be waiting for me there, if I stopped by. Granny's house was always a sanctuary: leave all bullies, worries, and stresses on the freeway, they couldn't come through Granny's door. Recently, during one of those pangs, I reminded myself what a relief it is that she is in heaven, fully well, unrestricted and rejoicing with Jesus.

I love Jesus, too. There is a certain amount of comfort I take in knowing that not only will I be able to bask in the presence of my savior, I'll get to see Granny again. Somehow, knowing that my once tangible Granny is there in Heaven makes my Jesus, who I have never physically hugged, feel even more tangible in those times when I really need a hug. 

Even during the difficult times, I can keep moving forward, because eventually, I'll get to go to my real sanctuary. It is striking to me how similar life is to the drive I so frequently used to make to Arroyo Grande: long, steep, and twisting, sometimes exhausting, other times it isn't all that bad, occasionally fun, occasionally boring, filled with glimpses of breathtaking beauty and unexpected dangers, some days it goes by quickly, others it drags on forever, but in the end, it is well worth the trip. There are phases in my life when the trip is so long, so foggy and dark, so scary, and exhausting that I hear my soul wearily nagging God with that annoying question. 


But I already know.

I'll be there when I can see Granny waiting for me on the front porch waving.
 And this time, Jesus will be standing right next to her.

Until then, I'll keep traveling, and usually, I'll enjoy that traveling.

However, when I do finally get there, I want a hug from both.

Blocked.

Blocked.

Block.  Like legos, and wood, and childrens toys.  Blocked like a doorway. Like road construction.

Blocked forcefully into a wall. Hockey players call it checked. Check. Cheque. Czech...123 testing, testing.

Blocked. B Locked. Be locked.  Ideas will be locked up when you want them most.

Blocked. Locked. Hocked. Walked. Knocked. Rocked. Talked. Clocked. Mocked.

Inspiration mocks, sauntering around me in a steady walk, while gazing at the clock...something something hocked, knocked... blahblahblah.blocked.

Rhyming doesn't make it art. Fart. Smart. Tart. Cart. Chart. Heart.

Four chambers.

Two, if you're a fish.

They're friends, not food. Draw one in the sand, stick it on your bumper and you're a Christian. Put legs on it and you're a macroevolutionist. Symbols. They represent something big, and can reduce us to something as small as they are. Classified.

Organized.  Put into a box. Fox. Socks. Rocks. Locks.

Locked box.  Box locked. It all comes back to blocked.

Writer's block.  It happens sometimes. If you were hoping to get something out of this post, too bad...it's blocked.

My wild nerd happy weekends

You may ask yourself, in your spare thoughts, what exactly does a jobless 20-something do on a weekend?  Well, usually, very little. In fact, my weekends look an awful lot like weekdays, and occasionally this causes me to be puzzled as to why the post office is closed for no apparent reason.  Not this month, though!  Thanks to family and friends, and I had quite an adventurous month of weekends.

Two weekends ago I went with my friend Laura (I left the synonym cousin in Hawaii...just to keep things from getting confused) to hang out with one of my brothers.  We went to the aquarium, which I truly enjoy, every time.  The deep sea exhibit was open again, and they had sea turtles and sun fish! And they were huge!  There is something about an aquarium that brings at the dancing, hopping, squealing 5 year old out of me.  In one of the larger tanks, there were murres ( a bird that looks similar to a penguin, but can fly, and is NOT a penguin...but try explaining that to every person who walks by a tank without reading the conveniently placed placards) diving in and darting around the water like they were flying, teasing the fish and nibbling for scraps after feeding time.  They left little silver trails of bubbles in their wake.  Watching all those trails of bubbles is probably what kept me standing there overly long.  

We also explored the nearby shops and considered attempting a laser room.  The laser room is set up like in the spy movies, and for a few dollars you can attempt to stealth your way past the lasers up to 3 times. Instead, we went home, and played cards late into the night.  The next day, my cousin dropped by for a visit, so of course, we had to teach her the game from the night before, because some of us (mainly, me) had lost the night before, in a way that could have been referred to as a massacre(my tallied points from the 3rd round still couldn't beat their tallied points from the second round).  My cousin played on my team, and helped me win some dignity back before it was time to hit the road.

Then the most recent weekend, I drove up and met my friend, Rachel, who was in San Francisco for a weekend. This is where you might be getting your hopes up that the theme of my trips might change, but you might also be rather disappointed in that.

We had a great time of it.  The first day we went to the California academy of sciences. (And this would be where your hopes for a less nerdy report might plummet)  There was sooooooo much there to absorb.  I just feel the need to state this: they have rolling, grassy hills for their roof.  Yep, it's true. Where a roof should be, instead there is what appears, at first, to be a nice little dog park. Minus dogs.  It is all in the effort to lower energy use, as well as lower pollution caused by roofing materials in rain water.  Personally, I just thought it was cool, until I read that the job that required the most man hours for keeping it in good order is weeding. Count me out!  Unless I can have a weedy roof, there will be no garden on my roof.  Then inside the building there was a ginormous bio-dome filled with a rain forest.  I'm serious: humidity, plants, trees, amphibians, reptiles, birds, fish, butterflies, and less pleasant bugs.  Thankfully, the unpleasant ones were kept on their side of the glass. I got to see piranhas and electric eels .on.the.same.day! Who is jealous now?

The next day we went to the Exploratorium.  Wow!  They only charge $15 an adult, and I think the reason it is so cheap is that they think it is a children's museum.  They are so very mistaken, which is probably why they kept letting in all these little kids who kept cutting me in line while I waited for my turn to play with the never-ending slinky conveyor belt.  All of those weird science experiments Mom rarely let us do(mainly because we lacked such wonderful resources), Bill Nye style, are stored in this very building.  I got to play with dry ice, and make water float, and vibrate cornstarch, and beat a drum to make the platform underneath me vibrate, and make smoke signals, and drink from a musical drinking fountain, and then from a toilet, and sit in a giant chair, and see my reflection in a giant bubble, and play with lasers, and switch my ears, and run out of time and leave before I finished.  Ah, well, it just gives me a reason to nerd out another weekend I guess.  I just want to say, if you're nerdy like me, you're in San Francisco and you see an ad for the exploratorium, and it looks too childish... do it anyway!  I would tell you to bring a child along so you don't look out of place, but then you'd have to take turns with the kid.  Besides, I saw plenty of other childless adults impatiently waiting for their turns, too.  Take it from me, don't let the people with offspring have all the fun.  And in between, Rachel and I enjoyed some shopping, some Indian food, some TLC shows, and the fact that we could get so excited about nerdy things without the person we came with pretending they didn't know us.

So maybe my weekends are more nerd-happy than they are wild, but hey, I did say I drank out a toilet, didn't I?

It tasted better than Rosedale water, that's for sure!

Thanks for reading.