Thursday Thought

They say that troubles and tragedies come in threes.  First, there was the washing machine.  Aged and infirmed, it died an inconvenient death when we were in the middle of building a room addition and were stretched for cash. The next week, on a  bitterly cold night, we woke to the sound of our smoke detectors.  It was our furnace—nearly melted and ready to explode.  Replacement cost: five thousand dollars. A 66-passenger school bus rammed into our car just one week later, totaling the thing—another few thousand bucks we didn't have.  Though there were no injuries on the bus (which…

There’s magic in those undulating waves of orange and red.  Magic in the mesmerizing dance of smoke and ash.  Sitting around a campfire conjures up an uncommon sense of tranquility.  That tranquility, of course, ebbs and flows when little tykes are around.  Noting the many little ones enjoying the fire with us, my dad started tossing out single-serve packages of M&Ms.  The kids happily snatched them up—all except Ava. Bundled in a blanket on my wife’s lap, Ava was easy to overlook.  Noting the grand fortune that the other kids were enjoying, she unbundled herself, a three-year-old on a mission. …

I miss the fringe kids. The ones with the Mohawk haircuts.  The ones that wore spiked collars and weird shirts.   Somewhere along the way, we got swept into the high school ministry as small group leaders.  The students in our group didn’t come from church. At first, it was jarring learning about the boy with severe depression, abusing his medicine.  Or the girl with sexual orientation issues. Every one of these fringe kids had a story—and they were mostly all quite sad. But over time, we got to know them.  More than that, we loved them.  So the weird hair…

“It seemed like an ordinary day at first,” said my friend Jack. “Then we got the call.” “What call?” I asked, knowing a story was brewing. “A call to visit Eddie and his family—immediately.” “Why the rush?” "Hospice had moved in, and his kidneys were shutting down after a bout with cancer." “Did you know Eddie well?” “Well enough to know he didn’t seem to know Jesus.  Eddie was bony and drugged.  He slept mostly, while his two boys took turns stroking his arms or shoulder. Occasionally, they were able to rouse Eddie to share a quick memory or funny…

Marvin H. Mischnick did not look like a hero.  He was wrinkled, hard of hearing and in need of a shave. Understandable for a man at the unlikely age of 99. As I sat in his living room, his World War 2 stories oozed out. “I was a photographer for division headquarters, G2 Intelligence section. We were advancing in the city of Cologne, Germany.  Our general wanted to know if the bridges over the Rhine River would support our troops and equipment.  So they sent me behind enemy lines to take pictures.” Marvin recalls operating the camera was “hard to…

As temperatures climb up, the lawn trucks roll in. I refer to the fleet of yard care vehicles that will clog the streets of suburbia from now until Halloween.  They will mow, trim, weed, and fertilize—for a fee. Though our town prohibits the roar of their mowers and blowers before 7:00 am, the convoy carrying the platoon of lawn care commandos is in place and unloaded by O-dark-thirty most mornings. While we could probably afford to outsource our lawn care, I’ve decided to do it myself.  Want to know why?  First I need the exercise! Mowing the lawn gives me a…

Like most other humans, I text.  A lot of those messages I tap on the phone screen, though I also rely on voice-to-text communication.  But I've noticed that whatever method I use, my phone appears to be biased: in favor of all things vulgar. If I should happen to slightly misspell a word, the phone often suggests something naughty, including profanity of all kinds. The phone's predictive algorithm goes so far as to look at specific words I've typed and then recommends "typical" follow up ideas.  Words that may be extremely inappropriate. Have you experienced this?  I bet you have….

The glory of springtime in bloom withered with a rude awakening this week.  All I wanted to do was "simply" remove the worn wood siding on our storage barn and replace it with new. As it has been 35 years since we built the thing, it was overdue for an overhaul. After emptying the ten-by-ten structure (a process which somehow filled our entire garage), I noticed the problem. One corner of the plywood floor had succumbed to rot. As my fingers pressed deep into the spongy pulp, I knew this would be no small project.  Time for a trip to…

I am confused. In our town—perhaps yours as well—we see lots of signs encouraging us to “stay safe—stay home.”  Point taken.  COVID-19 continues to threaten and kill. Yet our town also features signs that say, “Businesses are open. Shop local.”  Hmm….what are we really saying? "Stay home unless you have dough to spend, and unless you intend to spend that dough locally?"  Or maybe the intended message is "Spend your money here first—THEN stay home.  To me, it's a mixed message. Sure, I get the fact that everybody needs milk and eggs and toilet paper.  Which means there is a…

On April 15, it snowed.   Enough to cover the grass.  Enough that I could carve a heart on the windshield for my wife.  Enough to cause a 50 vehicle pile-up on Chicago's Kennedy Expressway, sending twelve people to the hospital. It's tempting to call this an "inconvenient snow."  It is spring, after all.  April showers, not April blizzards, are supposed to bring May flowers. For anybody now dealing with an insurance headache and a car in the body shop, it certainly was an inconvenient snow. Me, I took a walk in it. I made sure that hike took me past…