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.