Providence

My wife is a long time Avon representative. She used to score very high in her district without making a major effort. When she was President's Club or better I used to get invited to join her at the annual dinner. But many things are slowing down in our lives, and Avon seems to be one of those things. But she still sells a respectable volume, and she went to the dinner last night. Imagine my surprise when she called on the cell, "I'm going to be a little late tonight. I won the grand prize, and we have to try to get it into the car." Me: silence. Barbara: "I can't hear you, there's just too much noise here. I'll see you a little later. Bye." When we were on our great Alaskan cruise a few years ago, she won the drawing for the hand made ring that was featured. And before that she won a drawing she knew nothing about when Avon decided to award a new computer to about three reps in the whole of Western USA, including Hawaii. Our friend, Evelyn Byer told me, "You know I believe in God's providence. But Barbara is just lucky." Susan (Lee) Tierney says that I ought to take her to Las Vegas and make a fortune. I don't think we will do that. But I will enjoy cooking burgers over this new Webber gas grill she brought home last night. I too believe in providence, but the Bible uses the concept of being "lucky" in a sly expression. Look up Ruth 2:3. It is really telling us that Ruth "lucked out" when she gleaned in the field of Boaz.

More Cats

Last weekend we visited friends in Paso Robles, and discovered their cat is named “Spike”. Now, that may be a cute name for a brawler with one chewed ear, but this was a sweet little girl feline. There seems to be no accounting for the names some people choose for their pets. Reading Corrie ten Boom’s story you will discover her cat was named “Mahershalalhashbaz”. This, of course, was taken from the Bible. It was the divinely prescribed name for one of Isaiah’s sons. It was prophetic of the rape of Judah by her enemies, and is roughly translated, “Hasten the spoil, rush on the prey.” How can one complain when God has chosen your name for you? I’ll just say I am happy not to be Isaiah’s son. Well we lacked the originality, but admired the cleverness of this name and so one of our cats was named Mahershalalhashbaz. His life, however, was considerably shorter than his name. Then there was Chedorlaomer, Jezebel (black, of course), Gabriel (see earlier blog) and Pernicious. Some of them became sail cats. You don’t know what a “sail cat” is? Often a cat will come to the end of its career under the wheels of a passing motorist. When it happens on a remote street and we do not know about it, then it becomes a sail cat. The carcass is flattened thoroughly by many drivers, and it dries out under the hot sun, and then one can peel it from the asphalt and sail it like a Frisbee. That is a sail cat.
When Blondie met her demise (under the wheels), she was tenderly carried, in my loving 9 year old hands, to a grave in our back yard. Gabriel just walked away. Jezebel was well on the way to becoming a sail cat, and I don’t even remember if she was given a decent burial.
When we stopped keeping cats for personal pleasure, we discovered we needed to have a cat as a pet for our dog, Talitha. She is worthy of a separate blog, so I will leave it at that. Suffice it to say that Talitha would mope around the house until we obtained another cat for her to play with.
I am a cat guy. I think they are terribly funny. They can also be very cuddly and companionable—if you get the right cat. I am amused at their air of superiority, and their attempt to display dignity. Bob Lee told me the story of his cat, “Mister” who enjoyed leaping onto the glass coffee table where he would settle on his magisterial perch. On the day the glass panel was broken and had not yet been replaced, Mister leaped for his usual perch only to fall through the table to the floor beneath. Bob said that the cat quickly regained his composure, licked himself a few strokes, and settled on the floor, saying with his body language, “That’s what I intended all along.”

The Black Hole

I don't believe in magic. But there are some mysteries in life that tempt one to believe such things. After all we don't really know everything about our world. Even aside from the supernatural (God is there, and He does act) there are mysteries in our natural world.

Take my wife's purse, for example. It has some amazing qualities about it. On occasion it yields a folded $20 dollar bill when we thought we had no money. In this it reminds me of the widow's cruse of oil which, at the word of the man of God, always had something in it. At other times it reminds me of the carpet bag of Mary Poppins. The most outrageous things can be found there. Whenever my wife asks me to look for something, saying, "It's in my purse." My reply is invariably, "Can you be more specific." In this age of the cell phone, we often hear her purse ringing with a strange little jazzy tune. After it has been searched in vain to find the phone, it's okay. When the phone is finally located we can just call the original caller with the push of a button or two.

They say there are "black holes" out there in space. I haven't seen one yet, but I am trusting the testimony of those who say it is so. I understand that they appear black because the gravitational draw from inside is so powerful that even the rays of light fail to escape. When a celestial object of some sort draws near to this hole, it is certain to be drawn into the depth of this area, never to be seen again. Well, that's my wife's purse. At any given moment she must tote $4 worth of change in the crannies at the bottom. When we are making a social appearance, she grabs her purse and looks for her comb. She needs to do this soon after we leave the house because of the time needed to locate something even that large.

People make fun of the junk a man carries in his pockets. Well, that's nothing compared to objects lost in the black hole. The concentrated gravitation compresses the atoms in a black hole so compactly that relatively small things weigh enormous amounts of tonnage. Well, have you ever lifted my wife's purse? It's enough to wrench her good shoulder out of joint. Strong men grunt and comment if they have ever had the occasion to lift it for her. "Wow! What have you got in there, an anvil?" It wouldn't surprise me one bit.

At this rate, as you may imagine, she wears out a purse each year, and the project of moving the contents from the old to the new purse is a half day's work.

Yes indeed, there are mysteries of this life that defy explanation. The black hole is one of those phenomena.

Gabriel

Then there was Gabriel, the white cat with one blue eye and one brown eye. Barbara called him retarded. I'm afraid her derogation gave him a complex which he spent his short life trying to conquer. Cats are great entertainers, and those who harbor a prejudice against the feline species never seem to appreciate this.

At the dinner table one night, the family was debating whether or not Gabriel was deaf or just strange. Philip thought he would resolve the question by getting up from the table, going over to the sleeping cat and clapping his hands near his ear. However we were experiencing a violent storm at the same time. Now I am certain that God has a sense of humor (perhaps that is why He invented the house cat). So providence determined that at the exact moment that Philip clapped his hands, an enormous flash of lightning and an immediate crash of thunder (indicating the nearness of the electrical event) occurred and the lights in the house went out. We never witnessed the conclusion of his experiment.

Once when we were returning to the house--a five level split--we saw Gabriel walking around on the roof of our home. No cat had ever been there before, and we still do not know for sure just how Gabriel got there.

In Wilmington, Delaware, there were a plethora of squirrels in the neighborhood. They knew the landscape even better than Gabriel which became evident when Gabe decided to chase one up a neighbor's tree. The squirrel would ascend to a branch and watch as Gabe climbed up the tree behind it. Then it would scamper up a couple more branches and watch. Gabe was still hot on the trail. The squirrel climbed out on the end of the branch. Again Gabriel was right behind, still coming strong. Then the athletic squirrel leaped from the branch to the next tree and away. Gabriel, however, was left clinging to the narrow branch just vacated by the squirrel. The squirrel's weight, which had helped bend the branch downward, now left the equation and the tree branch sprang back to it's higher position with Gabe hanging on for dear life. The cat's weight caused the branch to bounce several times before coming to rest, all this time with a frustrated white leopard clinging to it. Our neighbor, who understood the humor of cats, was witness to the whole event and relayed to us this story, punctuated with partially controlled laughter.

Negative Reinforcements

When I was a kid a good spanking did me a lot of good. My parents got good mileage from them. Dad even did the old hack of having me go out in the yard and cut a switch for him to use on my legs and behind. And of course he had to re-send me on the errand because of the inadequacy of the switch I had picked.

In our house there was a board of education that I applied to the seat of learning for our kids. No, no, it's not dangerous or abusive when done properly. I told the kids to grab their ankles and then--timing is very important here--just before they reached the ankle I applied the 1/4 inch plywood board, imaging myself lifting the child off the floor with one wallop. I never lifted them, but once I did break the board on Paul's derriere. Oh, they tried things like delaying things for a chance to pray. Or they would wear 6 or 8 pair of underwear for the occasion. Come to think of it, I believe it was our Paul who took all these inventive approaches.

Contrary to stereotypical images, Barbara the piano teacher has never cracked the knuckles of a student with a ruler. Today she would be jailed for such a thing anyway.

My mother used to use a wooden clothes hanger for a spanker. Women are not usually the best executioners, however. Once when Barbara did her best in my absence, Bobby came back and said, "Mom, you'd better spank me again. The first one didn't hurt."

In my latchkey days as a kid, my mother caught me out after dark (a cardinal sin), and needed to apply negative reinforcement. She screwed up her brow, glared at me and threatened to spank me with a clothespin. There was a pregnant silence as we stared at each other. Then we both broke out laughing. She said, "Well, I guess that wouldn't hurt very much, would it?"

Earthquake Season

There was an earthquake last night. It was a 4.7 on the Richter. Okay, so what else is new? We have them every now and again to keep Midwesterners from overpopulating our state. They don't seem to mind the threat of a tornado that can wipe out an entire town in one terrifying roar. But let the ground vibrate under their feet and they spook like it was Armageddon. Something has to squelch the migration or California will get so overpopulated that it just might break off and fall into the Pacific.

Here we were, typical Californians, pausing the video we were watching while our house danced the jig for about 40 seconds.

Me: "Wow, wasn't that interesting!"

Barbara: "Yeah, it was a pretty good jolt, must've been centered nearby."

Me: "Okay, let's turn to a local TV channel and find out."

All this time the two of us refuse to budge from our comfortable recliners. They tell me that people scream, grab their loved ones and run into the street. Well, no one around here does anything like that.

Now when I was a kid (I mean MANY years ago, like 1951 or so) I remember the quake that devastated the town of Tehachepi. I was in bed on the top bunk. We were in a room with many old fashioned sash drawn windows with counterbalances built into the framework. My bed was violently shaking and I could hear those counterbalances banging inside the frames in cadence. The sound was like a platoon of marching soldiers. I climbed out of bed and looked in the back yard where the lemon tree was shaking as though a great hand had grabbed it and was trying to rid it of all the fruit at once. That was an earthquake! But they just don't come along all that often. Most of them are fun, interesting diversions, that keep Californians reminded that they live on the left coast.

My Aunt's Dog

My dad's brother, Fred, was always known as "Speed". I have no idea why he was given that nickname, especially since he was the slowest one of the brothers. I had an uncle who raced Indianapolis type cars. I had an uncle who raced motorcycles on flat track. After he was run over by most of the pack behind him, he turned to motorcycle hill climbing, another fascinating sport. My uncle Harry was not a racer of any kind, but he was the youngest in the family, and maybe the others wielded some influence in preventing his engaging in such dangerous things. Instead he lied about his age to join the navy, and was in the South Pacific somewhere when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. I guess he chose a different danger.

Anyway this is a story about uncle Speed. He told me that I should tell people that he was my "uncle Pud, my drinking uncle." I never remember him being sloppy drunk, but he liked to think he could hold more than most men who are still standing. I remember Aunt Jean in a condition incapable of pronouncing her words clearly. So when they got a pair of yappy lap dogs it was inevitable that they named them "Whisky" and "Soda". By and by Soda met her demise, and only Whisky was left. Well, my Aunt Jean told me this story about herself. One Sunday morning she walked down to the local liquor store to get the Sunday edition of the paper. She took the dog with her, of course. But she had mistakenly gone on this errand a little earlier than the opening of the booze emporium. When she arrived at the door of the establishment, several other people had come early too. Soon the proprietor arrived with the key, and opened the door. Dogs can be impetuous, you know, and so as soon as the door was open just a little, the dog raced into the store like a bullet. My aunt Jean, instinctively called out his name, "Whisky!" she yelled. To which the store manager replied, "Now there's a thirsty woman!"