More Birthday Party Pictures

(Click on them to enlarge.)


Thats DD, DS-I-L, and Sydney Elizabeth with Wallye the Warthog, mascot of the local baseball team and a huge favorite of Sydney's, who came to surprise her. She had met him before, at a baseball game. (Yes, that's how he spells his name. I know because he gave his autograph to several children, who thanked him by giving him theirs in return.)

It was raining, so the party, planned for outdoors, was held in a small tent and in the garage, where this picture was taken.





Pizza with friends





Fun in the rain





After having eaten a red lollipop. That's a dalmatian raincoat on little Anna. Some of the younger children went through two changes of clothes, but the sporadic rain didn't affect anybody's fun.

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Happy Birthday, Darling!

This is Sydney Elizabeth, my youngest grandchild, born three years ago today.

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The Intruder

The Gloria Stories, Part 6

Gloria was visiting her parents in their third-floor flat in Brooklyn.

Her father, Hyman, was very sick. Lung cancer had made his lungs so inefficient that his feet were swollen from the fluids that weren’t being extracted from them. He was in a wheelchair, his feet wrapped in ace bandages. Breathing was so difficult he could no longer sleep lying down. Instead, his wife, Roz, would pull up a card table and heap it with pillows. Hy would lean his head on these to sleep.

On the last morning of Gloria’s visit, Hyman woke up as dawn was streaming through the east window, facing him. He looked up to see a stranger standing in front of him, silhouetted by the bright sun. The shadowy figure wore a long robe, hooded.

Hy knew all the doors and windows of the apartment were triple-locked. There were deadbolts throughout. This must be some smart man, to have gotten in. He must have some serious motivation, too, and he must surely be armed.

“What do you want?” Hy croaked, his voice almost too frightened to make any sound.

Gesturing toward Hy’s feet, the stranger said, “Take off those rags and stand up and walk.”

So Hy unwrapped the ace bandages. He knew he couldn’t walk, hadn’t been able to for weeks, but as there was probably a gun pointed at him, he thought he had better try. He stood up. He took a step, then another. “I have to go to the bathroom,” he said to the shadowy figure. The intruderer nodded, and Hy walked all the way into the bathroom.

When he came out again, a few moments later, the stranger was gone.

Hy walked over to the bed, where his wife was still sleeping, and shook her awake. “Roz, Roz! Look at me; I can walk!” And he told her what had happened.

“Well, is he still here?” Roz demanded.

“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

They sat in the bed several more minutes, listening. All was silent. Gloria was still asleep in the next room.

Finally, they both got up and walked together through the whole apartment, checking every room, every closet. There was no stranger. And nothing appeared to be missing.

They woke Gloria up and told her to get home and ask me my opinion of what had happened.

Gloria caught me at 7:00 the next morning, when she came to pick up her dogs that I had been keeping for her. I said, “Gloria, give me some time to think about it and talk with your dad.” Just then, I had to rush to get to work.

On her way out the back door, Gloria passed the refrigerator, where the kids had stuck a picture of Jesus, brought home from Bible School. “That is Who it was!” she said. “And don’t you try to tell me otherwise!”

“Oh, no, no, I wasn’t going to do that!” I assured her.

That evening, I telephoned Hy and had him tell me the story firsthand. It was the same in all points but one: he left out the part about going to the bathroom. (“From a sense of delicacy,” Gloria said.)

“So what do you think it means?” I asked.

“I’m hoping it means Someone upstairs loves me.”

“Yes!" I said. “Yes, it means at least that! Then, with Gloria there, I read him the Gospel story of the healing of the paralytic. They were in silent awe as I read the words, “Arise, take up your bed, and walk.”

After Hy's death a few months later, Roz told me, “Now he has taken off his rags, his torn up body. And now he is walking.”

The Green Potato

Or, How to Spoil a Dinner Party

In general, practical jokes are inadvisable. The trouble with them is, you can never foresee all the unintended consequences. You never know, if you tell your fellow dinner guests you grew up in the circus and they find out later you didn’t, whether they may resent having spent the entire evening being enthralled by your tales of lion taming, and the host may never invite you again. You never know whether, if you send someone a poem anonymously in the mail, an innocent person may be blamed for your mischief. (Because, of course, your enemies will never believe you clever enough to have written it, and your friends won't believe you were stupid enough actually to have mailed it.)

And there will always be people who will utterly fail to see that your stunt was hilarious, who will see nothing faintly humorous about it, who may well turn out to be the very ones to whom you are forced to confess everything. That’s what happened to my brother, when we lived on an Army post and he painted the parade-ground cannon flamingo pink. And that’s what happened to me when I dyed my potato green. (Now if the dinner party had been in my own home – no, not even then would it have worked.)

It sounds funny, though, doesn’t it? Go to a company dinner at a steakhouse with a tiny, plastic bottle of green food coloring in your purse. Be sure your order includes a baked potato with butter and/or sour cream. When it comes, surreptitiously lift up the sour cream and/or butter and squirt a large amount of green onto your potato. Replace the topping and slip the food coloring back into your purse. Begin mashing up your potato with your fork, all the while pretending to be so engrossed in the conversation you don’t notice what color your potato is turning. Prepare to take your first bite.

Can you predict how this goes so horribly wrong? I should have, because in retrospect, the results were inevitable. You have to factor in that green food coloring, mixed with yellow butter, turns a really disgusting color. You have to put yourself in the other people’s places. They actually care about you! They care about themselves, too, and what they may be eating. Or serving.

“Oh, look at your potato!” cried one of my co-workers. “It’s green!”

“Eee-yew!” exclaimed another.

“Why, so it is!” I said, looking down at it. “How charming!” And I raised it to my lips.

“No, no!” someone cried. “Don’t eat it!”

I ate the first bite anyway. “Mmm! This has got to be the best potato I ever ate!”

“Please, please, don’t eat any more!”

“But it’s delicious! Really. Here, try some!” and I took another bite.

That’s when the boss summoned the waiter.

A large knot formed in my stomach. I tried hard to stave off my plunge into ignominy, assuring everyone I was delighted with my potato, it was scrumptious and I wanted the recipe, but I’m sure, by now, you can see how it went from there. The panic-stricken waiter called the manager to come see the green potato, and the panicked manager called the chef, and none of them could form any idea of what had happened, how many other green potatoes might show up, whether eating them might be dangerous, what the Health Department might say, whether anybody might sue the restaurant...

So I had to admit what I had done. I even had to produce the bottle of green food coloring to prove it, because the chef was on the verge of losing his job. I was extremely lucky not to lose mine.

That was the last practical joke I ever attempted. They’re just too dangerous. You never know whether, if you drop out of a tree at midnight dressed as a ghost, the drunk you are trying to scare may have a heart attack.

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The Icon of Pentecost

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What I like best about this icon is how it depicts the relationship between earthly knowledge and spiritual knowledge, or between mere knowledge and Wisdom.

The king in the middle represents the world, crowned with human knowlege. The scrolls he is holding represent various branches of human learning, such as medicine or astronomy or mathematics. Or theology, which in and of itself is also a wordly discipline. (That's right; it is not the subject matter that determines whether wisdom is worldly or spiritual. Even the study of the Bible can be worldly, and most often is.)

Notice the figure is a king; he is sumptuously robed and there is a crown on his head. This is because we Christians do revere learning. We do not disparage worldly education or try to restrict the use of the human intellect.

But this king's crown is of gold and jewels, while the Apostles are being crowned with fire. This king's wisdom is purely of this world; that of the Apostles is divine, sent by the King of Heaven. While the uneducated fishermen are being enlightened, this learned king is standing in a realm of darkness.

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God is God!

God was never obligated, and never obligated Himself, to punish sinners or treat them unlovingly. Yes, I know it sounds that way in some parts of the Old Testament. But much of the Old Testament was written the way it was in gracious condescension to human weakness; or as Jesus put it, “because of the hardness of your hearts.” The Law came by Moses, but truth and grace, by Jesus Christ.

The truth is, a person who rejects God - and every sin is a way of rejecting Him - inflicts upon himself the worst punishment of all, namely, godlessness! I mean, not being within loving union, indeed, communion, with Him Who is love, with Him in whom alone is life. Yes, that is the worst punishment there is, though the fact has yet to be made universally manifest. And yes, the sinner inflicts it (and much more) upon himself, unilaterally, without any help from God. God in no way approves, assists, condones or connives in this. He has no interest in the destruction of His own handiwork (for to reject Life Himself is to die); that is the devil’s agenda.

But even if we were to take certain passages of the Old Testament in an unspiritual way, literally, as they were written for Israel’s hard heart, we Christians could, should, never say the Old Covenant is still in effect, so as to suppose God obligated by it.

What? Didn’t Christ Himself, echoing the Old Testament, say the Old, law-based Covenant would never pass away, not even an iota or an accent mark of it, till all was fulfilled? Yes, He did. (Matthew 5:18) And then He perfectly fulfilled it.

Did not St. Paul protest that we are not doing away with the Law, but in fact establishing it? Yes. He also wrote, “He who loves another has fulfilled the Law.” (Romans 13:8) We establish the Law by fulfilling its intention, by doing what it could only point to, by loving God with all our heart, mind, soul, and strength, and loving one another as ourselves.

We establish the Law for what it is, for what it was always intended to be: a temporary substitute for Love, Love which cannot be brought about by any legislation. It’s where our love fails that laws become necessary. But the most they can accomplish is to teach us what love would look like, get us to mimic love, to approximate it externally. Only the Holy Spirit can bring true love to us, as He did on Pentecost, and that initiates us into the New Covenant foretold by the Prophet Jeremiah:

Behold, the days are coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah-- not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers in the day that I took them by the hand to lead them out of the land of Egypt, My covenant which they broke, though I was a husband to them, says the Lord. But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put My law in their minds, and write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be My people. No more shall every man teach his neighbor, and every man his brother, saying, 'Know the Lord,' for they all shall know Me, from the least of them to the greatest of them, says the Lord. For I will forgive their iniquity, and their sin I will remember no more.’ (Jeremiah 31:34)

The book of Hebrews, after quoting this passage, comments, “In that He says, ‘A new covenant,’ He has made the first obsolete. Now what is becoming obsolete and growing old is ready to vanish away.” (Hebrews 8:13)

Vanish away? How can that be? In what sense? In the sense that the Law, the Old Covenant, has been subsumed under the New. It was only our “governor” to keep us until the Christ should come.

The purpose of the New Covenant is not to make us into law-keepers per se; that has now become utterly beside the point. The purpose of the New Covenant, and even of the Old, except it lacked the power to do it, is to make us into lovers. To be mere law-observing is unnatural for us and for that reason, we cannot help resenting it, even if we try to push that resentment out of our minds. Loving, however, is natural; it's what we were created to do. To love is truly to rejoice. Loving simultaneously fulfills the Law (gives it its ultimate meaning) and abolishes the need for it.

And indeed, God Himself revealed the end of the Old Covenant in several ways. First Christ taught it, obliquely, when He cursed the barren fig tree and it withered, the fig tree representing the spiritual barrenness of Israel. Again the end of the Old Covenant was revealed when Christ was crucified and the Veil of the Temple was ripped from top to bottom, and, according to the rabbis, the glory (Shekinah) of the Lord departed from the Temple. God demonstrated the end of the Old Covenant even more dramatically some 40 years later, when Rome sacked Jerusalem and demolished the Temple, as Jesus had foretold, and scattered Israel, destroying the old worship permanently. It couldn’t be any clearer: the Old Covenant is no longer in effect. And God is not obligated by it any more than we are. He is perfectly free (as, in truth, He always was).

Now if the thought of a perfectly free God alarms us, it is because our fallen minds tend to equate freedom with license or with arbitrariness. But in God, freedom is not like that because God is love and God is perfect. It isn’t bad news that God is utterly, radically free. It’s very, very good news, because it means He is free not to punish or take revenge or be vindictive. It means He is perfectly free to love us, and only love us, and He is never required to behave unlovingly toward us in any manner.

Moreover, we do not need God to place Himself under obligation before we can trust Him to be kind, or not to be arbitrary! We do not trust Him because we consider Him safely bound (even by His own promises), but because of Who He is, Whom we have encountered. We trust Him because we know Him. We would be safe with Him even without any promises.

Safe from our own consciences is another matter! But let us not project our own problem onto God. God simply loves us. And nothing can ever separate us from His love, not even hell. (Psalm 139:8) Period.

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Coming Apart at the Seams

The Gloria Stories, Part 5

You sew a small, secret pocket to the inside of a very blousy blouse, put a spool of thread into that pocket, of matching color, and with a sewing needle, bring the end of the thread to the outside of your top. Then you go to a restaurant with somebody like Gloria. Someone like her, not easily embarrassed, is needed to make it work.

You wait until some of the other diners happen to direct their gaze toward you, and then you say, not quietly, “Oh, look at that; I have a thread hanging down. Would you mind pulling it for me?”

Gloria, of course, to hook the audience, yanked several inches out. She wadded it up and put it on her bread plate.

I thanked her.

After a few more moments, the others around us now curious, I said, “You know, I don’t think you got it all…”

“No problem, let me try again,” she said. This time. she pulled out a whole foot of thread and added it to the bread plate.

“Nope,” she said. “That didn’t do it. You still look scraggly.” And she pulled out another foot or two and added it to the heap on the bread plate.

The waiter came to offer us drinks. We declined, but Gloria did ask him to take the bread plate out of our way, which by now was piled high with wadded up, black thread.

I don’t know what happened to that waiter, but we never saw him again after he removed that plate. A woman took his place.

By now, people were checking us out quite regularly, so we regularly obliged. Several more feet of black thread were now heaped on Gloria's new bread plate.

Finally, after dessert, Gloria said, “I am determined to get that thing, once and for all.” So she stood up and pulled. She backed up three steps and kept pulling. She backed up some more, winding her way among tables, until she was all the way across the room, and still kept pulling.

Suddenly, I wrapped my arms around my torso. “Gloria, stop!” I cried, in a stage whisper so everyone could hear. “I think you’ve pulled my whole top apart!”

“Grab my jacket!” she stage-whispered back.

“I can’t. I can’t move!”

So she hurried back to our table, put her jacket around my shoulders, and laid our money on the table. Then we made a hasty exit, I all the while clutching at my blouse and her jacket.

You have to be quite bored, I suppose, to do things like that.

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God is Always Gracious -- to Everybody

Here is an interesting blog post about whether grace is imputed or imparted.

Thing is, God does not need to do any legal manipulations by which He can manage to regard us as righteous, before He can treat us well. He doesn't have to bestow a new legal status upon us before being good to us, as good as He is to the greatest saint. He doesn’t first have to kid Himself about who we are. He doesn’t need any justification to do whatever He pleases with His servants, including His unwilling ones. He is allowed to be merciful to whom He will be merciful.

In His ultimate self-revelation (in this life) He shows Himself the “Friend of sinners.” (Mark 11:19, Luke 7:34) He sends His sunshine and His rain upon the just and the unjust, alike. He loves those who hate Him; He is good to those who curse Him. (Matthew 5:44-45) “He is kind to the unthankful and to the evil.” (Luke 6:35) All these are Christ's own words, not mine.

And the Law? Has not God obliged Himself to be very much the opposite of all that to sinners? The New Covenant is not legally based. Christ fulfilled that Covenant and closed it out. God’s new covenant with mankind is a covenant of eternal, unbounded love. See more in an upcoming post.

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The Elevator Game

The Gloria Stories, Part 4

Whether it was Gloria or I who came up with the Elevator Game I can’t remember; I think I came across it in a book somewhere. It’s simple. You just tell your friend a story on the elevator. The catch is, you only tell the middle of it, only as much as fits into your ride. Timing is crucial; you have to pad it or condense it as time requires. You also have to speak so everyone in the elevator can’t help hearing you.

Our favorite one went like this:

[Getting on elevator]. “Of course, I knew I shouldn’t open the front door at four o’clock in the morning; I know it was stupid…”

“Very stupid.”

“I know.”

“And dangerous, too.”

“Yup, but I did it. I threw on my bathrobe and ran down the stairs, and sure enough, there he was, with his friend, and with his gun pointed right at me.”

[Ding! The elevator bell rings to announce your floor. Doors open]

“OH, no! What did you do?”

[Walking out the door]

“I didn’t even have time to do anything, when all of a sudden…”

[Thunk! Elevator doors close and your audience disappears.]

We had several such stories, for variety. One I remember was this:

[Getting on elevator]

“Well, the whole room fell silent and everybody was staring at me. That’s when I looked up and realized it was the Prince.”

“You mean—?”

“Yes, the Prince. Of Wales! I could have died!”

[Ding!]

“No offense, but I would have, if I had just done something that stupid! What did you say?”

“What could I say, after that? In the end, he was the one who spoke first. ”

[Exiting elevator] “Trying to make a joke of it, you know, but to me that just made it worse. I was so mortified! He said…”

[Thunk!]

Don’t ask me how the stories ended. Or began. We only made up the middles.

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Gloria’s Mother Takes Charge

The Gloria Stories, Part III

Gloria’s husband had moved out and her mother was flying in from New York for a week. Gloria was distraught as I drove her to the airport. “I just know I’m going to cry,” said Gloria, “and that’ll make her cry, and I just couldn’t stand that.”

“So be strong,” I said. “Don’t cry ‘til you get home.”

“I won’t be able to help it. As soon as I see her get off that plane, I’m done for.”

“You are not going to cry, okay? NOT!”

“I don’t know…I’ll probably blubber like a baby and then she’ll start in, and between the two of us, you just don’t know what a scene that’ll make.”

“Since when have you ever minded making a scene?”

“Well, but not that kind of a scene! Weeping all over the place, the both of us.”

“But you're lucky to have a good Jewish mama. Nothing more comforting, huh? Everybody should have one!"

"You don't."

"Yes, I have. We Christians consider St. Mary our mother. Now buck up.”

“My mother is no St. Mary. When she sees me cry, she will be all out of control.”

“You are not going to do it, not going to cry.”

She sighed. “When my mother cries, she really carries on something awful. I’m really dreading this.”

The drive to the airport took 40 minutes, and the whole of it was occupied by this conversation. I lost count of how many times I repeated, “You are going to be strong. You are NOT going to cry!”

She didn’t, either. The plane arrived; the large woman in a housedress came out of the jetway; she and Gloria embraced, all smiles. Mother had come to comfort and to take charge.

Relief overwhelmed me. I burst into tears.

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Yes, You Can

You can be like the prophetess Anna, or the prophet Simeon, who prayed day and night in the Temple and were rewarded by the sight of the Messiah. You can be like the disciples and Mary who prayed in the Upper Room until the Holy Spirit descended. You can be like the Ethiopian eunuch, who tried to read the Scriptures. Even though he failed to understand them, God rewarded him by sending him Philip, and salvation.

Yes, there are things you can do to prepare yourself for the coming of Grace. Seek, and ye shall find. Ask, and it shall be given you. Knock, and it shall be opened to you.

Does this mean Grace wasn't already with these people, or with you, if you tried to pray or struggled with the Scriptures or sought and found or asked and received? Certainly Grace was already there, prompting all these things.

The trouble with, "I believe that I cannot, by my own strength..." is that it assumes there is such a thing as our own strength apart from God and unaided by Him. There isn't. Nobody even draws a single breath except by Grace. God never abandoned mankind because of sin. Our God's love never wavered nor changed. Only the strategies it employed varied according to the situation. God Himself remained faithful, true, constant, and unvarying in His love for us. His love is infinite; there are no boundaries on it. His love is unconditional. Grace was always with us, leading us every single step.

So use the grace given you to seek "more", for although it is not given by measure, it is indeed by measure received. Invest it like the talent in the Parable; use it as Pentecost approaches to prepare yourself for the Holy Spirit's coming. That's the only way to acquire the fulness of the Him, the only way to arrive at the ultimate goal.

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The Fruit Hat

The Gloria Stories, Part 2

I didn’t want anybody I knew to see me wearing the hat, so with it I wore a disguise, a red wig and large sunglasses. The wide-brimmed straw hat was decorated with assorted plastic fruits, to which I had added real grapes.

The plot was that at the restaurant, whenever we noticed other luncheon patrons glancing in our direction, I’d find some pretext for bending head my head forward, and Gloria would pluck a grape from the hat and eat it, while I pretended not to notice.

We did that, but it wasn’t satisfactory. There was no noticeable reaction. People were too polite or the restaurant was too upscale or something.

The real fun didn’t begin until we went, separately, into Spencer Gifts. I’d bend down to examine merchandise on some low shelf and Gloria would sneak up behind me, pick a grape from my hat and pop it into her mouth.

Have you ever noticed that there are a lot of ceiling-to-floor mirrors in Spencer Gifts? Those are two-way mirrors. After Gloria had stolen several grapes from me, one of those mirrored doors swung open and out came a detective and accosted her.

I continued wandering about, pretending not to notice.

“Ma’am,” said a man’s voice behind me.

I turned to face the detective. “Yes?" Then, eyeing Gloria, "Is there anything wrong?”

“I caught this woman eating your hat. There’s no eating or drinking in the store, you know.”

I couldn’t resist. I said, “Well, I’ll eat my hat!” and then, glaring at Gloria, added, "I will eat it, not you!"

“So the question,” the officer continued, “is whether you care to press any charges? It’s petty theft.”

Ah, sweet revenge! I said yes.

Then after a moment, I said, “Can I think about it a few minutes?”

“Well, I mean…”

“I’m absolutely desperate for the ladies’ room!” I said, and bolted. “I’ll be right back!” I called, over my shoulder. “Hang on to that crazy lady!”

Instead of running to the bathroom, I sauntered over to the Orange Julius stand.

The girl behind the counter exclaimed, “Oh, I LOVE your hat!”

“Really?” I said. She loved this gaudy, tasteless thing? Well, not exactly tasteless, but… The grapes were nearly gone and many, ugly, twisty stems were now adorning the front of the hat.

“Oh, yes!” she assured me. “It’s great!”

“Would you like one or two of the grapes?” I asked.

“You mean they’re real?”

“Sure! I wouldn’t have offered if they weren’t.”

“Oh... Well, in that case...would you mind if I took a strawberry?”

I let her take a grape instead.

I was about to order a drink when I remembered, no food or drinks inside Spencer Gifts. So back to the store I went and told the detective those grapes hadn't been worth very much, and if this woman would pay me enough to buy a large, cold drink, I would consider us even and would be willing to forego any formal charges.

Gloria, scowling, handed me three dollars.

"I hope you'll stay out of trouble from now on," I told her, sternly. "And now if you will both excuse me, I'm off to the Orange Julius stand!"

Gloria's drink was waiting for her when she joined me there a few minutes later.

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How I Met Gloria

The Gloria Stories, Part 1

Before we had our get-acquainted lunch, sometime in the early 1980s, Gloria and I had only met long enough for me to buy a copper-colored, miniature poodle from her. She had had to give up the puppy as a result of severe marital problems, something about her always being out of the house, playing tennis and swimming and attending coffee klatches and book clubs and something about her being Jewish. All I knew was, she clearly needed a friend. I didn't have any inkling about her sense of humor, and it caught me completely off-guard.

My first clue of what was in store ought to have been when I arrived at the restaurant and gave the hostess my name and she said, “Oh, yes, your date is already here. Follow me,” but I didn’t pick up on that odd way of putting it.

My next clue ought to have been our order, by the time we were finished giving it. There was only one serving of carrot soup left, our waiter informed us, so Gloria said fine, we’d split it, please. Just bring two soupspoons. We split the salad, too, just because neither of us liked it all that much. The crepes (for the restaurant was a creperie) we couldn’t decide upon, so she ordered hers filled with strawberry and I ordered mine filled with chocolate (of course!) and we agreed each of us would give the other half.

But that clue by-passed me, too. I was all oblivious to the bated trap until she sprang it. “Oh, and we’ll take the discount, too,” she told the waiter.

“Discount?” I said, pleasantly surprised. “What discount is that?”

“Its Valentine’s Day,” Gloria replied, and then waited.

I shook my head. So it was. “And--?”

“The restaurant is offering all Valentines ten percent off.”

“Valentines?”

“Lovers,” the waiter clarified.

My mouth fell open. My face burned. My stomach lurched. “No, no, Gloria! Don’t tell this man that!”

“You see how hard it is,” said Gloria, “just to tell you these things? I think we deserve the ten percent discount for our courage alone!”

“Oh, but it isn’t like that!” I protested. “We aren’t lovers, no; in fact, we are married women!”

“That’s right,” said Gloria.

“No, not that way!” I cried, in desperation. “Not to each other! We have a husband - each of us has one, I mean! Two different men and... ”

The waiter wasn’t listening to my babbling. He stared at Gloria and said, “Far out!” which back then meant, “Totally weird!”

“No, it isn’t!” I shrieked, causing several heads to turn among our fellow diners. “I mean, we are normal women!”

“If you say so…”

"We consider ourselves normal," said Gloria. “So you’ll give us the discount?”

“I'm not sure. Because, you know, how am I supposed to know whether you two really are…you know…”

“How are you supposed to know we’re lovers, you mean?” Gloria bellowed. “Look at that couple over there!” whirling around and pointing. “They’re man and woman, for ___ sake, and you don’t know whether they really are lovers, either, yet you're giving THEM the discount! You didn’t ask them, did you?” rising to her feet, pounding the table. “No, you did not! So why are you asking us? You wanna know what this is? This is discrimination!”

“Okay, okay, I’ll ask my manager…”

I groaned. “Please don’t. “Ten percent isn’t all that important.”

“Yes, it is,” said Gloria. “Tell your manager we demand the discount!”

He departed, and I slumped forward, head in my hands, elbows on the table.

I stayed that way about thirty long, silent seconds and then, suddenly, a giggle escaped me, and then another.

Gloria nodded, her satisfaction evident.

“Now that we’ve got everyone’s attention,” she said. “Don’t you think we should give them a show?"

It was true. The diners around us were staring openly, not even making any pretense at eating; some of them had actually laid down their forks. "Well..." a smile spread across my face as I toyed with the idea.

“They’re all staring at us, so we may as well make the most of it.”

I nodded, weakly. "I'm in."

“Wanna play footsie?”

“Who’s going to see that, under the table?” I squeaked, my voice still having not recovered from the shock.

“Shall we hold hands?”

“Definitely not.”

So we settled upon looking googly-eyed at each other across the table. We couldn’t do it with a straight face, so we beamed as if adoringly at each other.

Our carrot soup arrived, which we shared, still gazing at each other. Then the salad, also shared, and the crepes…

Out of the corner of my eye I spotted two women from my (Episcopal) church, no longer eating, but it was too late to do anything about that.

“Do you want to hear my news about my husband?” Gloria asked.

“Yes. And if you please, I’d like to hear that word, ‘husband' very loudly.”

“Okay. My HUSBAND is very unhappy with me. He doesn’t APPROVE OF MY EXTRA-CURRICULAR ACTIVITIES. So I have to figure out whether to separate from him or divorce him or make up with him.”

From my left came a high-pitched, raspy voice. “Do you mind if I put in a word?”

Eyes wide, jaws agape, we turned toward the speaker, an elderly woman at the next table with a kind smile. Reaching over, she patted Gloria on the knee. “Make it up with your husband, honey. Make it up!” Her elderly companion nodded.

The subtotal on our check was ten dollars, minus the ten percent discount, for a total of nine dollars, with “Happy Valentine’s Day!” written beside it. All that for one dollar! Gloria shrugged. "A dollar's a dollar. Plus all the fun we got out of it."

“I'll call you,” she said. “We’ll get together again sometime.”

I said I wasn’t sure I ever wanted to speak to her again, but I already knew that wasn’t true. And I was already looking for sweet revenge.

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Goodbye to a Good Egg

Lucky Egg, the baby bluebird, is ready for his new home.

He now looks like this:



I've done my part and today I'm taking him to Amber, where he will go into one of her flight cages with five other Bluebirds. They already know how to pick up their own food, and will teach him, while he also learns to fly.

I can't tell you what a great joy this beautiful boy has been. But the greatest joy was when Demetrios said, "I now see that it is a wonderful thing you do, to raise a little miracle like this and then release him."

I've been waiting years for that. Thank you, God.

Mom, following her surgery to put in a new shoulder, is being released from her rehab unit tomorrow (hooray!) and Rosie, her home health care helper, is on vacation this week, so I'm going to spend a couple of days with Mom to make sure she is able to be on her own again. Leaving for Springfield this evening.

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The Glass Bubble

It’s hot today, going to be in the upper 90s or even get to 100 degrees. The sky is bright blue and there are a few cumulus (“cotton ball”) clouds. And something about this day, I’m not sure just what, reminds me of the days long ago (I was not yet ten) when my twin sister and I used to have such wonderful adventures in our glass bubble.

Oh, you never knew I had a twin sister? Well, I had. Her name was Monica, because back then, that was the most beautiful name in the world. It’s a pity you never saw her, for she was gorgeous. (Lots of people of course could and did see this raving beauty, but you, being visible yourself, weren’t one of them.) She had long, dark hair to contrast with mine, short and yellow, and she wore it away from her face, in a hair band. She had delicate, dark eyebrows and doe eyes. She was sweet and kind, very feminine, yet mischievous and ever so much fun.

And on afternoons like this one, when we were supposed to be taking our naps, we would sneak out the window of our room and climb aboard our glass bubble.

It looked something like the bubble that forms the cabin of some helicopters. It was perfectly spherical, though, and it didn’t have a rotary blade. In fact, I no longer remember how it flew, although I knew back then, and was adept at operating the control panel, with all its switches and levers and dials and lights.

Inside the bubble, there was a flat floor, with storage space below the hatch. In that storage space were bananas, Fritos, and a cooler containing Cokes and tuna salad sandwiches. Our swimsuits and beach towels were there, too, in tote bags. In the main compartment, besides the complex control panel, were two canvas chairs, two rope hammocks, and shelf full of books.

And in this transparent craft, Monica and I would rise high above the house, above the plains, where the bison and long-horned cattle grazed (for this was Oklahoma), above Medicine Bluffs, our favorite picnic spot, and even a little above Mount Scott and Lake Lawtonka. We would look down at the patchwork ground and the tiny cars and minute people. We would zip around a cloud, or sometimes fly right through it, just to see what it looked like inside. We would put the bubble in auto-pilot and lie back in our hammocks, admiring the sky and feeling utterly free.

Just staying up there in the blue was enough to enthrall us, without necessarily going very far away. Just being in the sky was our joy. But sometimes we traveled to foreign lands, too. We went to Paris once, to see the Eiffel Tower, and we went to Africa to see the animals, and to Brazil to see the Amazon and the jungle.

Our glass bubble was also a submarine. It could cruise on the surface of the water as well, so sometimes we would take it to Long Island and tie up beside Grandpa’s boat at the dock in Greenport, and sit there on the dock and fish. We liked the smells there, the salt air and something oily about the boats, and the way the ropes smelt. We liked the sound of the wavelets slapping the sides of the boats, and the way our bubble rocked if we sat in it.

Sometimes we would fly to some beach and be amazed that here, an entire continent ended and the vast ocean began. Sometimes we would batten the hatch at the top of our bubble and dive to see what was under the water. We looked for starfish, especially, and jellyfish, and dolphins and whales. The dolphins were always so friendly we could have petted them, had we not been encased in glass.

The only hard part was getting home before naptime was over, so Mom wouldn’t discover our absence. But we knew that we’d be off in our wonderful glass bubble again, the very next time this sort of day came around, with just this sort of sky and clouds and sun and breeze and temperature and indefinable something, a magical summer day.

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