Kaye's Home

Thank you for your thoughts and prayers. Kaye had to stay overnight even though it was supposed to be day surgery, but she appears to be fine, other than having a pain in the neck (thyroidectomy and intubation during the surgery) besides James and me. She's tired but she'll be okay, I think.

James is glad to have us home, and I'm glad he made it through the night.

I'm Back . . .

Sorry I’ve been away so long. Things have piled up, and I’ve let my responsibilities to friends and even myself slide. Loads of illnesses, crises, and just plain laziness have kept me away.

I’ve started attending church, a local Episcopal church, after about twenty-five years away. I grew up in the Methodist Church but left once I got too big for my parents to drag, and haven’t been back except for weddings and funerals – and few of them. Maybe not even a few – I went to my brother’s wedding in 1995 and my maternal grandmother’s funeral in 1998. I refuse to go to any of my parents’ weddings (there have been three, I think) on the excuse that I didn’t go to the one where they married each other. That’s not really the reason. I’m suspicious of anything that requires new clothes, to paraphrase Thoreau. The church I’m going to now has no dress code, so I can get away with jeans and t-shirts. Perfect.

My mother is married to a Lutheran minister, so naturally she wants me to find a Lutheran church. I don’t think they’re quite as gay-friendly as the Episcopalians, and, in any case, they’ve got prayer books, too, so I might just as well learn the ways of the Episcopalians as the Lutherans. At least the church I’m attending is gay-friendly without being a gay church.

I’m still baffled as to when to stand up, sit down, and find my place in either the prayer book or the hymnal, but I’ll learn. I’m starting a new blog devoted strictly to church questions, debates, and what-not, so I’ll leave that for now and give you the link once I have a post on it.

The great news is that Kaye is finished teaching! All she has to do is give two exams, grade them, and post the grades. She should be done for real by Thursday, at the latest, although she doesn’t officially retire until September 1st as there is some rule somewhere that you can only retire on the 1st of a month. (I assume months where the 1st falls on a weekend let you retire on the 2nd or 3rd.) We’re both looking forward to her well-earned freedom after teaching for some forty years. She’s been at NCSU since 1970.

Hope everyone (and everybody’s cat) is well. See you in the funny papers.

Desecration of Peace

When we got up this morning, barely realizing that it was Easter, but for the mention from my mother and Yvonne, a very loud grease-removal truck pulled up at the manhole in front of our house.  Kaye went out to ask if there was an emergency, figuring a city that closes the liquor stores on the non-existent holiday of Easter Monday would not violate the peace of Easter morning for no good reason.  No, they said.  Apparently they de-grease the sewers every Sunday morning.  Then the kids next door were hunting for eggs in the back yard, arguing over which egg was whose.  I guess because I don’t have kids, it’s interesting to me how worked up they can get over what seems like nothing to me.  I mean, their arguments can escalate to the point that you’d have to have wrecked my car or something for me to get that upset, and I have a temper.  All is peaceful now, anyway.  My brother and I had the decency to yell at each other indoors (“Mom, Chris is looking at me!” or “She rode in the front seat last time!”), not that it would matter, since for most of our childhood (all but two years with the two of us), we lived out in the middle of nowhere. 

Would that every argument were so mild.  If all the people intent on blowing other people to smithereens could just agree to play in different sandboxes . . . but I guess which sandbox is whose is the source of much of the trouble.  There are enough sandboxes to go around.

The American concept that we know best and are the natural arbiters of other countries’ internal or international disputes is another embarrassing and disappointing issue altogether.  We have a very big sandbox and ought to appreciate that, and the fact that we don’t have suicide bombers going on here.  I am sad and angry about the events of September 11, 2001, but the destruction we’ve wrought is just that – it hasn’t rebuilt the twin towers or brought back the victims; it’s simply created more.

I just wish people could work out their violence during childhood, in harmless disputes.  If that were so, the screaming kids would be a blessing.