A "Crushed" Friday Five

From the RevGalBlogPals this week:

...in high school, I had a crush on my Chorus teacher. He was a young guy, and he had gone to college with some cousins of mine, and over the summer between 9th and 10th grade, we ran into each other at a series of pre-wedding parties, and I feel DEEPLY in like.

You?

1) Did you ever have a crush on a teacher?
My first first-grade teacher, Mrs. Peters. After a Kindergarten in Hell where I was traumatized by an irascible old relic from normal-school days who had finally begun to melt down in the thick of the Baby Boom, Mrs. Peters was my savior: She treated me with kindness and respect; she actually encouraged my intelligence and curiosity -- unlike my kindergarten teacher, who treated me like an annoying problem; she let me do special tasks for her like help decorate the class bulletin boards at recess instead of going outside. And unlike the rest of the faculty -- the sort of Sensible Women who wore orthopedic shoes and their hair in buns -- Mrs. Peters was hip, with a "That Girl" flip and mod clothing. When circumstances caused our elementary school to add a new first-grade teacher to the roster and shift the original classes around, I found myself in a new classroom, with a dispositional clone of my ogre-like kindergarten teacher, and I was distraught for the rest of the year.

2) Who was your first crush?
I had a boy crush on a little kindergarten classmate.busmate of mine, Ronnie, who bore a close resemblence to a baby seal or a Precious Moments figurine; he had the biggest blue eyes and longest eyelashes of anyone I'd ever seen. He was a tiny, slight boy who was constantly picked on by the bigger kids, and that brought out my protective instincts. I remember Ronnie being tormented one day on the bus ride home by some older students, and that angering me so much that I -- and I too was often the brunt of teasing and unkindness on the bus -- stood up, waved an accusatory finger at the older kids and told them that they'd better leave Ronnie alone. I was loud enough to attract the attention of the bus driver, who finished the job of reprimanding the bus bullies. This of course did not win me any friends among the cool kids, but Ronnie was grateful, and even gave me a kiss on the playground at one point.

3) Have you ever given a gift to a crush?
Just my current crush, who also happens to be my partner.

4) Do you have a celebrity crush? (Around my house we call them TV boyfriends and girlfriends...)
The fact that Fellow Traveler and I have been discussing this for five minutes and are unable to come up with names or faces is probably an indicator that I don't. Now, I used to have an auditory crush on Fiona Ritchie's voice -- she the Scottish hostess of The Thistle and Shamrock. And both Fellow Traveler and I are rather taken with Geoffrey, Ina Garten's amiable, beloved and amazingly well fed husband.

5) Have you ever been surprised to find yourself the crushee?
One evening when I was a freshman in college, walking back to the dorm for supper after a late class, I was startled to find a male classmate sidling up next to me. He was someone who I had, in my mind, voted Most Likely to Ascend the Clock Tower and Start Shooting Random Bystanders With An Assault Rifle. ("He was really quiet..." "He always kept to himself...")  I remember noticing, of all things, his hands in class -- he had short, fat hands like a garden toad's front claws, and I remember being disturbed by that, and by the way he stared at me and other students when we engaged in class discussions. Anyway, Fat Hands started talking to me, innocuous stuff out of the "How to Start a Conversation With a Girl" handbook, and even though I was quite curt and unencouraging in my responses he followed me all the way home to my "island" of dormitories. I decided to eat in the cafeteria of the dorm next to mine, so he wouldn't figure out where I actually lived. He followed right behind me in line, and sat across from me, and kept trying to engage in conversation with me. I finally lied; told him that I had a date with my boyfriend and couldn't talk to him anymore. Despite this, he got up when I did and was ready to follow me to this date until I finally told him that, no, he needed to go home now, or my boyfriend would be angry. He finally took the hint and left...and to my relief, he never attempted talking to me or walking with me or anything else ever again. I always felt that my guardian angel was working overtime that particular evening. But the experience left me very afraid for weeks afterward.

Thinking back on this bizarre incident, I'm astounded at how passive I was and how afraid to hurt this guy's feelings. My God, it's no wonder that so many university students wind up victims of sexual assault. If something similar happened to me today, I think it's safe to say that things would be handled...um... differently.

Whaaaat?

A bit of irony for breakfast: We're doing some catalog Christmas shopping for the extended fam this morning. Fellow Traveler just noted that the Cabela's catalog is offering an Alaskan fly-in Dall sheep hunting excursion for $15,000. I slipped over to the Heifer Project catalog, where purchasing a sheep, plus all the attendant training in husbandry, marketing and such, for a family in the developing world costs $120.

Stephen Colbert Tries Liturgical Dance

Christ the King Sunday

I posted this video on our church website...pretty cool:

Friday Five: Aunt Bert's Thanksgiving

From the RevGalBlogPals:

The Cure

Lying around all day
with some strange new deep blue
weekend funk, I'm not really asleep
when my sister calls
to say she's just hung up
from talking with Aunt Bertha
who is 89 and ill but managing
to take care of Uncle Frank
who is completely bed ridden.
Aunt Bert says
it's snowing there in Arkansas,
on Catfish Lane, and she hasn't been
able to walk out to their mailbox.
She's been suffering
from a bad case of the mulleygrubs.
The cure for the mulleygrubs,
she tells my sister,
is to get up and bake a cake.
If that doesn't do it, put on a red dress.

-- Ginger Andrews (from Hurricane Sisters)



So this Friday before Thanksgiving, think about Aunt Bert and how she'll celebrate Thanksgiving! And how about YOU?


1. What is your cure for the "mulleygrubs"?
A ride in the country often does it for me.

2. Where will you be for Thanksgiving?
I will be at home with my beloved, sans guests -- for the first time in three years. Usually we invite some of our family-disconnected friends to be with us for the holiday. This year we originally thought we'd be in Brooklyn with Son #2, Almost-Daughter-in-Law and Almost Grandchild...but we're now going there for Christmas, so we declared that this Thanksgiving would be our time together.

3. What foods will be served? Which are traditional for your family?
We are, like the Baywatch producers cited on Glee the other week, going in a different direction this year: We ordered a turducken from Cajun Grocers, and will be attempting some Cajun and Creole side dishes to go with it, as well as a sweet potato/praline pie. None of this is in any way traditional for our family. One day we were watching the Food Network, and idly wondered what a turducken might taste like, and one thing led to another.

4. How do you feel about Thanksgiving as a holiday?
I loved Thanksgiving as a small child and have fallen in love with it again since I don't have to deal with the extended-family stress that would send my mother into an emotional tailspin each fall. I like the univeral nature of it; that it's grown beyond its sectarian roots so that everyone from New England Congregationalists to emigre' Senegalese cabbies can embrace it as their holiday.

5. In this season of Thanksgiving, what are you grateful for?
I am grateful for my beloved Fellow Traveler; for my new extended family, which will soon (as in any day now) include a new grandbaby; for our own cozy Thanksgiving this year; for a life away from my former place of employment (something I still thank God for every day); for my church family; for our Amish friends and neighbors and the cultural texture they bring to our community; for our ability to travel and pursue our own interests, and for my increasingly infrequent tendency to feel guilty for this or unworthy of the privilege.

BONUS: Describe Aunt Bert's Thanksgiving.
I've never been to Arkansas, but if Aunt Bert and Uncle Frank were part of my church family I suspect that they'd be showered with holiday cards right now, and that on Thanksgiving they'd respond to a knock on the door to find their neighbors offering them a complete Thanksgiving feast with extras for the weekend...and that Aunt Bert, having met them at the door with her red dress on, would invite them in for some just-baked cake.

A Lutheran Eavesdropping On Calvinists Doing Theology

With apologies to all my friends and readers in the greater Reformed tradition...after reading this , all I've got to say is: My head hurts.

Christian Bullies and Klingon Love

I received this update, again, from yet another former high-school classmate on Facebook:

Let's see how many people on fb aren't ashamed to show their love for God and admit that Jesus is their Savior... We need to get God back in America... If you're not ashamed, copy and paste this in your status!

Apart from the fact that this spam keeps recirculating back onto my Facebook page, sent by people considerably older than the 12-year-old who appears to have originally written it...what really frosts me about this childish conflation of jingoism and kindergarten evangelism is the mocking, confrontational tone: If you're not ashamed...

What if I don't copy and paste? Do I go to hell then? Do you unfriend me because I must be a heathen? Oooooh...I'm so scaaaaared.

What is this thing about a certain subset of conservative Christians and their need to throw down the gauntlet in front of every other Christian they encounter, challenging them to "prove" how Really Christian[tm] they are?

It's kind of like rutting Klingons in Star Trek -- how, before they do the one thing, they beat one another up.

Well, sorry, Real Christians[tm], but I don't swing that way.  And I'm not a Christianity Cop; if someone tells me s/he's a friend of Jesus I tend to take that person at his or her word  -- even a nutty and/or annoying person --  until I'm given good reason to suspect otherwise. And may I point out that, whether someone is a friend of Jesus or not at any given moment, "While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us."

Glory Be To God For Dappled Things

This afternoon we decided to take the Gertster on a ride -- this is how we justify taking rides. As we usually do on such journeys, we visited a couple of our Amish neighbors' roadside stands -- soon coming to the end of the season -- to see what produce they might still have for sale. We were specifically looking for Delicata squash, a small striped winter variety that's easy to prepare even in the microwave, fine-fleshed and candy-sweet.

We were in luck -- there were still a few Delicata  available. There were also some wonderful confetti-colored acorn squash. "I have to try one of those," I announced. (I found out later that this particular variety is called Carnival.)

One of my many garden eccentricities is a fascination with anything unusual for its type. (Fellow Traveler says that this is part of the "Ooh, Shiny!" Syndrome.) Why grow green snap beans if you can grow striped chartreuse-and-purple snap beans? Why not candy-stripe beets, or golden beets, instead of the old Detroit beets that my parents grew every year? Round orange pumpkins are a dime a dozen; what about the elegant red-gold French heirloom pumpkins instead?

Obviously I'm a GMO developer's dream consumer, which is why it's a good thing that I'm also an organo-locovoric type who shuns such products whenever I can identify them, on principle. (And usually loudly, in the store -- as in, "Oh, look! Here's some Acme Corn Critters made with genetically manipulated corn!") If my squash is tri-colored, I want it to be because its ancestors were cross-bred with lovely multihued heritage varieties, not because a mad scientist in a multinational agribusiness added some calico-kitty DNA to his witch's brew of Frankensquash.

And some of these veggies don't just have a pretty face. Chioggia beets, with their candy-cane interiors, are wonderfully flavored, as are the purple-striped Dragon Langerie snap beans. One of our great discoveries this summer was the Black Russian variety of tomato, which beat out all competitors in my BLT taste test. Other unusual veggies are -- well -- meh; all hat and no cattle. But that's okay too.

I'm going to continue my love affair with dappled things in next year's garden...and expand that category to include the "Miscellaneous" section of seed catalog offerings.  After all, we can get a lot of very nice veggies from our Amish friends; but try finding salsify or Florence fennel around here. FT is chuckling over my current moodling over sketches of our garden plot -- which will be divided into raised beds in the spring -- trying to decide the most advantageous spots to plant this motley assortment.

Frankenfood: no. A garden of earthly delights to the eye as well as the palate: oh, yes.

Sermonating

At our church we lay ministers get a monthly opportunity to deliver the sermon. This month is my month, and this Sunday is my preaching Sunday.

I've preached on Christ the King Sunday before, so between the lessons and the experience I'm on pretty familiar territory.

Sunday's lessons are rich in irony, from the "God is on our side" Psalm identifying the king's earthly reign with the Reign of God to that dramatic text in the Gospel of John where the rabble seems to fall away in the periphery as Jesus and Pilate, the representatives of heavenly and earthly authority, confront one another; where God With Us speaks truth to power not in the person of the prophet Daniel's awesome vision but in the battered and bloody person of a tortured prisoner in an occupied land. The festival day is itself ironic, born at the ascendancy of fascism, a nationalism worse than the nationalism that had just laid waste to much of Europe.

But this is tricky stuff, in a local culture where God and country are often knotted together in ways that make conveying the subversive nature of the Gospel sound like treason to all that is right and good. I briefly thought about sketching out a swastika on a sheet of typing paper and taping it to the pulpit as an illustration of what happened in our own faith tradition when Church let itself be coopted by State, but reality-checked myself shortly thereafter. There has to be a good way to communicate the implications of "Jesus is Lord" to people who love their country, who in many cases have served their country in the military, some of whose kids are off in the Middle East fighting a war of dubious wisdom on behalf of that country, who on some levels feel beseiged by outside forces challenging their beliefs and practices and presumptions about many things. The good news that Caesar isn't Lord of All may, on some level, sound to them like the bad news of one more brick being kicked out of an increasingly shaky wall that keeps them on the other side of chaos.

I'm not sure exactly where I'm going with this whole thing yet. But I'm going somewhere with it.

Apples of Our Eye

One of our best Amishing stories happened a short time ago:

We were driving home from a trip to a local apple orchard, where we'd bought some cider and a bag of apples. We decided to go home via the back roads, past a couple of Amish families who maintain roadside stands, to see what they had to offer that day.

As we stopped at one stand, a young girl came out to wait on us, soon followed by a smaller child who couldn't speak English. (Small Amish children speak a Swiss dialect of German at home, and only learn English when they start attending school.) The barefooted kids were so charming, and grimy, and seemed so serious about closing the sale. So as we bought a couple jars of canned peaches from them we offered them a couple of apples from our bag, along with our money. Their faces lit up. The younger child devoured his in a few gulps; he ate like a kid with competition at the dinner table.

"Maybe your other brothers and sisters would like apples too," offered Fellow Traveler. "How many do you have?"

"Ten!" announced the girl.

Gulp.

We just gave them the rest of our bag.

Bugged

You know it's not a good day when Fellow Traveler, the University of Michigan's most ardent fan, takes to her bed at the beginning of the game.

FT woke up in the middle of the night with nausea and a gutache. She was marginally functional in the morning, but after attempting soup for lunch she threw up again, and decided to go back to bed.

We are desperately hoping that this isn't the H1N1 virus, since neither of us has had the opportunity to get vaccinated for it yet. (We did get our standard flu shots back in September.) FT wondered if she could have possibly picked up the bug at the emergency room the other night when she had to have the sliver in her toe removed. Because of her ostomy, she has to be careful avoiding influenza, especially the barfy/diahrrhea-y strains; aside from the misery these symptoms cause in someone who's missing a significant chunk of her gastrointestinal system, the potential for dehydration and inability to take in nutrients has all sorts of negative implications for maintaining a healthy electrolyte balance. (We travel with gallons of V-8 juice, which is loaded with potassium and other important minerals -- more than sports drinks or other fortified foods/beverages.)

We reviewed our diet over the last couple of days. The only food she has eaten that I haven't was chili sauce on a couple of coney dogs we ordered for takeout yesterday. She didn't eat anything that might cause a blockage, a potential problem for ostomates that leads to nausea and stomachache. "It feels like the flu," she explained. "Nothing mechanical. It feels like a bug."

It's a moot point anyway. She's in bed; I'm half-watching the MSU game and wondering what useful household tasks I can accomplish without making annoying noises. Poor Gertie, who picks up on when one of us is sick, is lying next to me with furrowed brow. It's a warm, sunny November Saturday, but it pretty much sucks at our house right now.