On Thanksgiving/Creamed onions,Sauteed Mushrooms, Lima beans and Corn, Mashed Potatoes, Stuffed Shells, String Bean casserole...etcetera, etcetera...

I was stuffed with delights and fond new memories that I could write about for days. The clouds ran out of the way as if to say, we cannot believe that you are going to the mountains. Even we can't interrupt that party. Not a cloud was in the sky, we wouldn't want you to think that we were trying to dampen your party, they said, by their conspicuous absence.
The table was set, divinely. I took my plate and looked at the buffet, where the fixens were set. Oh Wow! My favorite! I could have taken a plate of each of the fixens, separately. I showed decorum and didn't just gobble the mushrooms from the serving bowl. I wanted to drink them straight, but, I acted in the fashion, my momma taught me and saved some for everyone else. I really wanted all of the mushrooms and then, I saw the onions. MY, oh my! Where will I put it all? If I put all the onions on the other side of the plate from the mushrooms, they will think that I am making a statement of something. I must put...Limas, Limas? They have limas? I love it!
I was going to start talking about Grandma Ruth's limas and how I missed them and how wonderful they are, now. How my gram would be so shocked to see me eating anything healthy. I couldn't. There were other memories to make and other things to put on my plate. I couldn't eat it all.
The food was delicious, but the memories that they evoked were more precious and inexplicable.

...And then there was Abby!

We called the first boy "Boy". That was his name to us. There didn't seem a need to call him anything else. There was no one else to answer to that name in our house. After about 18 months there was a need to diversify his name.

If we seemed unimaginative to name the first boy in our house, the opposite was true for the second. He had every name. We called him anything but boy. His name was Abdul. A princely name and serious name. We called him Dully, Dulcy, Dulcimus, Ashy{a rib about his skin texture}, but, mostly Abby. It seemed he was destined to spend only a short time with us. I wish that I had known that from the beginning, though.

I remember every minute that we spent outside Dr. Hewlett's office, waiting for this boy. I was old enough to know that the stork wasn't coming this time. And old enough to be very annoyed at the inconvenience of going to the Dr's office so often after school. He appeared on the scene, two weeks late and knocked my mother out of her wits. We didn't see that mother again. She birthed him and came back a new woman: A tennis player, adventurous, competitive. Abby and I spent hours with the water bottle and the patting on the back at Rochdale Tennis courts. Mom playing and us learning to rough it, a little. I remember his rough skin on my face and his raspy cry, in my ears. Mommy----the baby is crying again. Okay, Jayne, one more ball and you pat his back, maybe he will go back to sleep. He never went back to sleep, he cried and bauled in that growly kind of way that he did. We had no sympathy for him, we just growled back at him. We learned to love that little "truglidite"{ a term my father coined for the lot of us} Park children. We were there from the time school ended, till into the night, daily. Then, he learned to walk.

I'd say the frogs taught him to walk. Seems they were his best friends. He and Jo would go nature hunting together and gather frogs to bring for us to examine. We never were able to figure out how to keep them. We brought them home and they always got away.

Nature boy was another name that we called him. He was always covered in dirt and mud. I think that is why his skin improved somewhat, as he grew.

On long evenings, he and I would sit and I would lotion his ankles, trying to soften his skin from the scalp to the feeties. The funnest thing, when we were left home, was to play airplane with him on our feet.

There was no law about car seats, so we would ride to drop Dad off to the subway, with Abb laying across the whole lot of us. Our funnest trick was to watch his eyes open wide when we drove under the trestle and it got dark. We all would stare at him closely and his eyes would dialate, really really wide. He was somewhat examined closely by us. Not, because he liked it. I loved to put him on my shoulders and help him touch the ceiling. We would walk around the house and he would put hand prints on the ceiling.

I was ten going on 11 when he was born and entirely too big for my britches. He was my guinea pig in numerous experiments, not just the eye watching one. We rolled him around on the feet, like a baby bear. Grandma Ruth used to say, you girls are going to make his face as bad as his legs are, kissing him, like you do. We did, anyway.

Is it boring to struggle and argue about our faith?

I.Salvation, by Grace Through Faith


I cannot minimize the importance of a spiritual likemindedness, before entering into the marriage vow. If there was not a common spiritual upbringing, there cannot be common expectations.
Marriage, even in the most Christian assumptions of the word, is a merger of great expectations. We speak some of them in our words and we assume some of them in our deepest hopes.
Jesus is the basis for the commonality that we proclaim and exclaim in marriage. We are sinners, who have been purchased by the blood of Jesus. If a person is not aware of their need of the grace of God, it is difficult for him to see the importance of forgiveness in the marriage. You assume, first of all, that his/her hand will not hold you to the fire for small offenses. The assumption of grace is that forgiveness for small offenses will be observed in the light of the Grace that we have freely received in Christ.
It seems obvious that if a person has not accepted the grace of Jesus and is attempting to pay his/her own debt before God, they would expect you to pay for the offenses that you do to them, up to the payment of hell, if necessary. The person doesn’t say this. The unbelieving assumption is, this merger is until you make me uncomfortable.
Marriage, puts your soul in the hand of the other person. Our life and death and care and concerns are lent to the other person, while we are on the earth.
We could have everything in common, but the Grace of God and we really have nothing in common. We could have nothing in common, but the Grace of God and we have everything in common. The common standard, that heaven is our eternal destination is the course of our lives.
“Which way do we go?” is the question at every fork in the road. There will be a sign, toward heaven, or hell and if the common grace is not there, the argument at which way to go will come up, daily.
We get in the boat together and the course is set. If you think that you can reset the course, from hell to heaven easily, you are certainly deceived. A person can go to heaven, personally and live in a boat that is hell-bound. But the course of the boat that you enter into, in the marriage vow, is set by your common agreement.
The course to heaven is never, accidentally set upon. It is marked out and studied and a course that is difficult and charted carefully. When we get off course, we know it. When the clouds roll in and set us off, we are aware of it. When the clouds lift, we both look at eachother and say, which way is heaven. Not, which way do we go?><
The older we get, the more we joke about the lowering of the standard for marriage. We agree that it is a joke. He/she is heavenbound in his soul, or he/she is not for you, my daughter and son.

"Soul and Body, Clarence Day?" Maternal prayers in epithets.

"May your soul not be disconnected from your body, as your clothes are unseeming upon your body."

In the movie Life With Father, I was enamored at the historical example of mothering expertise, delivered to us, through the good acting of Irene Dunne, when she doted on the souls of the boys in her care. That quote was from a scene where the doting and loving Christian mother noticed that her child was wearing clothes where the seams were coming undone.

How sad that generation gaps have taken us far from the interjections that can be the prayers that set the road for the generations before us. Much to replace the natural inclinations of the curses that donn our lips, through the fallenness of our race. The study of motherhood can lend us the words of love that God has preserved in our hidden humble characters around us. Motherhood desires the best for her child. Christian motherhood desires the best spiritual good for her offspring. Keep your soul in mind in the decisions of your life, my son, was the directive of the wise and Christian mother. The son let his pen note that, perhaps, the only reason that the entire household made it to glory, was because their mother was diligent to do battle with the world, the flesh and the devil, in their home. Perhaps the home is the only true sewing machine to seem soul with body. Either way, may God make us able seamstresses of soul and body.

Why do we make love...Stay?{ from 4/20/10}

Students of the love impulse,

Marital love?
Maternal Love,
Parental love,
paternal love,
brotherly love,.

Dan Fogleberg— seems to say, I wish that love were, like my dog, that I could say "Stay!" and she would stay. The only thing that we have dominion over, after the curse, would be the dominion over the regulation of human love. Maternal love is a constant.? We don’t have to say to ourselves love your children. How we love them is the question. Listening? Talking? Instructing? Directing?
Wifing love equals submission and respect, but it also must involve reciprocation of such. "Like a dog", in a sense we say: "Stay right there, love, whatever happens. You stay!" {as though it were outside of ourselves?} It may or may not listen, depending on a lot of factors. ie. Loyalty, is probably the best concept to inject into your children with oneanother— early, before they learn disloyalty.

in the heavenly realms: The angels’ job is to study and defend the holiness of God. A little lower, we study and defend the goodness of God and have dominion over the relationships on earth, in family and government and church. Christ’s defense is for His church: against the gates of hell{forces of antichrist evident in the earthly realms}. Families bound together under a covenant of unity and peace. "I will not wage war against you.", is usually part of the family understanding. I will say to Peace, you stay!

Dominion over Love, dominion over peace and dominion over unity, You STAY.—why do we run so from the concept of having dominion.

Don't Sleep in the Subway, Darling.

Upon planting my "Dusty Miller" and "Violas" at my mailbox. I remember Dusty Springfield and Sister Loyola a dear old Sister from my early fond remembrances. It has been sometime that I have said to myself, I will plant something nice and choice around my mailbox. Life happens and here we are 5 years later and no closer to civilizing this "vast wilderness" LOL than we were when we got here. I had grandiose dreams of "Sweet William" and Clover wafting over my "viranda". Each early attempt was met with design critiques and major marital distemper, and so I gave up, for a time. Here I am, unemployed and longing for flowers and fauna, to the tune of deacon Wests yard and I gird myself for the battle, when the master of the house sees the creative genius that reminds me of subways and Dusty Springfield and Sister Viola, I mean Loyola. Maybe it is a Rock and Roll garden, he is opposed to, whatever. "Nothing beats a failure, but a try."

A Piney Day!

Brentwood in the Pines, Is mighty fine

A group of Highschool prayer group girls singing the joys of reaching out to God, by travelling to the piney woods of Brentwood, in the early 1970's are the echoing memories that are playing this morning. The sunny faces of the optimistic PG, that our prayers could closer reach the throne of God, should we travel to the wooded convent of Long Island. Everyone knew that you had to yell to reach God's ears from Brooklyn, or the other boros. So, we travelled. Our delighted faces to see real and skinny, tall pine trees, made us giddy and we sang. I am grateful to know that God knew our hearts. Our giddy, sophomoric songs of reaching out to God and seeing His glory in the pines was infantile, but happy. They are good memories of growing in grace and in the knowledge of God and using outstretched arms and hands to learn of Him.
Thank you, God, for those good memories.
God bless the archives of PG.