Currently The Best of 1980-1990 By U2 When Love Comes to Town see related

Afternoons with the baby

Leaving Arkansas was hard on Brooke. Parts of it were hard on me too, but it was hard on me in different ways and I don't feel a need to talk about them. But she was leaving her home and her family behind and sometime shortly after we crossed into Oklahoma headed up I-40 I thought again, as I had many times before, and have many times since, whether what she said was true - that if I weren't in her life she'd be in Juarez - or if what other people had told me were true - that if I weren't in her life she'd never leave Little Rock.  I always end up with the same conclusion, that I shouldn't feel guilty over choices we feel God is pleased with, whether people who love her believe in those choices or not. It takes me a while to get to that conclusion sometimes though. That day it took a couple of counties.

In a way I felt like God had given us two honeymoons, both ours, but one especially suited for her, and the other for me. We had two nights in Hot Springs after the wedding and then we went to Gulf Shores for five nights.  Our condo was 17 stories above the beach and the Gulf.  The beach was nice, restaurants were great, and we didn't have to worry about anything else but us. That was our honeymoon, and I loved it.  But driving west, headed toward some roads that I had only seen once in the dead of winter, and others I had never seen, knowing there would be mountains and streams and wildlife to look at, I felt that this trip, this second week alone together was for me.  And having found out the day before the wedding that I'd been laid off of my job in Vancouver, I felt no pressure to hurry.  We could drive and look and stop and breathe.

Kansas was pretty that evening.  And evening was long, as evening is in June in the Midwest.  There'd been rain - too much  of it really, but driving across the hills we couldn't see any flood damage, just green miles of fields broken up by hedgerows and cottonwood-lined creeks.  It was such a pretty evening. I wish we could've done better than the Econo Lodge just off I-70 that smelled like I imagine New Delhi smells, but there was a music festival in town so we had to take what we could get. 

After we got through Hays I started to see those subtle signs that tell me I'm not quite in The West yet, but that I'm about to be.  Waterways, rocks, fields, outbuildings, they all start to look different and if you grew up in the Midwest you start to know that you're leaving the Midwest.  Then you cross into Colorado and even though it's a long way before you get to Limon, before you might see any of the peaks on the Front Range of the Rockies, you're out. You're gone. And it's officially a road trip. 

Traffic was heavy around Denver but we kept moving and headed north to Fort Collins. That whole hour's worth of highway is pretty civilized and a little depressing to anybody looking for The West.  My dad went to college in Colorado for a year and sometimes when I've been there I see a place I remember him talking about and I feel glad that he is not there to see how much open space has been filled up and paved over.  He rode a motorcycle - a Honda Dream - out there in the 60s.  He talked himself into going back east somehow, but he saw some country and caught some trout while he was out there.  I wondered, picking my way through Fort Collins, looking for the old road northwest to Laramie, just how different a place it was now and how far the city stretched when Dad was there.

Brooke got a headache as we climbed higher driving away from Fort Collins, and I felt a little guilty over the elation I felt as the air got thinner and the mountains rose up all around us.  We were close to 10,000 feet when we crossed the line into Wyoming, and I hoped  that the 2,500 foot drop down to Laramie would give her some relief.  We had some food in Laramie, and I think that helped her some.  We briefly considered getting a room there, but decided to go on. There are some old log cabins along the Encampment River, southwest of Laramie, that I'd like to stay a night or two in sometime, but it was late enough in the day that we didn't want to risk driving down to them and not being able to get in.  So we put that off for another time, and I thought about the old saloon across the street from the old general store next to the cabins, and the record class set of elk antlers that are in that old general store, and we drove on past the exit.  I tried to find us a room in Rawlins, but everything was booked up by the gas and oil companies, and there didn't seem to be a room in town for less than $130 anyway.  Rock Springs was more of the same and I was really starting to worry by the time we found a $30 room for $75.  We finally got in though, and got some sleep.

- to be finished later -

Currently Reading The Shack By William P. Young see related

Based on the 2 terminals I've spent time in at the airport in Phoenix, I think it's right up among my favorite airports. They've got lots of windows and they've got mountains.  They've got decent restaurants and they've got birds that live inside. They also have these very handy laptop stations right by the gates, not tucked away in some room. Anyhow, I'm in Phoenix, waiting for my flight to Little Rock. I saw Steve Kerr here earlier. He's taller than he looks next to Jordan and Pippen. And once again, I've been led to wonder why so many women dress like they're at a fashion show when they fly. Brooke says it's cause they're skanky. She may be right.

I moved into our apartment Sunday evening. It's kind of exciting to have "our" place, but it has felt more like stepping backward into my lonely hermit days than anything. It's been okay, cause I know when I go back I'll be taking BrookeLynn with me, and it'll be exciting. The other side is that I will miss the Vanderploegs - you know, the family with 6 girls who I lived with for the last year. Their generosity toward me has become more and more amazing as time has gone on. I heard that once I vacated the room I've occupied at their house, it became the favorite play area of the girls. The age-old fascination with what was once forbidden....

It hasn't really sunken in yet that I will be a husband in 8 days. I'm halfway to her, and it's just starting to sink in that I get to see Brooke tonight. I think I've just been so busy, and sad to admit, stressed, that I've not been able to emotionally acknowledge all that's coming. Don't get me wrong - I'm extremely excited. I just don't feel like the enormity of it all has caught up with me.  I know it will though. But for now I'm just relishing the knowledge that after this week is over, I will not have to say goodbye to her. I won't have to go through airport security and know she's got tears on her cheeks behind me. I will not start another long countdown to the next trip back east. I will not put 2000 miles back between us. Nope, this time, I will open the car door for my bride, my soft-skinned girl, my smile and laugh, and we'll drive toward the mountains together. It's all very, very exciting.

Currently Reading Ruth (The Anchor Bible, Vol. 7) see related

Grief is a strange thing. It grows people up, changes their tolerances, and alters their views as nothing else will.  None of us ever ask for it or want it. It comes, in varying ways and degrees, and we all find our own unique but often similar ways to cope with it.  Sometimes grief stays. In my experience, it always leaves a distinct mark.  There've been times when I have heard someone discussing their convictions, beliefs, or opinions about how to handle a situation, or how someone is mishandling it and I've just thought "They've never had to mourn." 

I know many people who've dealt more extensively with grief than I have.  But I've had enough to know some of its effects.  And I've had enough that when I recognize it in someone else I am suddenly able to extend a lot of mercy toward them.  I'm much more inclined to defend them.  Because grief is big enough to make most other things in life seem very small, for at least a while. 

There is a song - one of those kinds of songs on Christian radio that I don't listen a lot to - that caught my attention because the opening stanza describes my friends' grief, or the tragedy that produced the grief.  And later in the song there is this line: "when the sacred is torn from your life and you survive."  That is powerful.  That is the heart of grief.  Sacredness is that which makes something so dear, so important, that you would spend all your strength, even your life, to keep it from being tarnished, damaged, hurt, or killed.  Sacred things are those which we don't believe we can live without, or perhaps that without which nothing could be the same.  We cannot fathom losing what is sacred to us.  But we do sometimes.   

For those who can't find their way back through their grief, Lord, I ask solace.  For those who only know how to replace loss with addiction, I ask mercy and miracles.  For husbands of departed brides, I ask strength.  For wives of the fallen, I ask redeeming, healing love.  For mothers of children gone, Dear God, I ask a divine filling of the emptiness.

We create our own legends and myths sometimes. I have plenty, and one of my particular joys in life is to go and find one of the places that I have read about or heard about or dreamed of to the point that I wonder if it can actually be real.  The real joy is to find one of my mythic places and have it become no less mythical as a result. 

Brooke and I took the old road out of Grants Pass, Oregon that angles southwest last Friday morning. The sky was low and wet and I picked up some snow chains, not knowing how high we would get before we hit the coast. Grants Pass is on the edge of a transition to an arid climate, but the forest got thicker as we moved on down 199.  We passed through little towns and crossed streams that look fishy.  One of them I know to be fishy and I will return to it sometime. 

In Kerby we stopped at Harvey Shinerock's shop.  I met Harvey and feel fortunate about that.  Harvey is an artist. I've seen a lot of woodwork and woodworkers of all different skill levels, and I know a couple who are very skilled and could be artists. But Harvey is a real artist. He makes his art from the burls of redwood trees, and his house is the house of a creative and grand mind.  It's a house of a man who matured into his craft but never had to grow up all the way because of it. The roof curves like different levels of ocean waves, the walls move in unpredictable directions but never have an awkward junction. And Harvey's dogs live in houses that are works of art themselves. He has treehouses scattered through his yard, and one towering fountain made of wood.  If I lived near Kerby, Oregon, I would try to make a friend of Harvey.

Past Kerby we went through Cave Junction, which is notorious in the northwest for being run by aging semi-militant hippies - sounds like an oxymoron, I know - who grow vast amounts of pot. The police made a raid a few years back only to find themselves outgunned and surrounded. Now the police call ahead before they make a "raid."  So the story goes.

While the forest got bigger and thicker we climbed a hill and crossed into California and started winding our way down the Smith River canyon. It's a nondescript name, but it's a spectacular place.  It's the kind of place I'd be disappearing into if my disappearing hadn't been staved off my my travelling companion and our future together. Even so, the river called to me awfully strong while we wound down that narrow windy road with alarmingly fresh rock slides spilling across it.

We began to see the first of the redwoods, and my excitement grew. They were big from the beginning but as we got closer and closer to the coast they became astonishing, and we gawked at them, unable to believe what we were seeing, only to see that the next one was even bigger. We found a place to pull off of the narrow road and we walked out through a grove of the trees while it rained softly, and we found the truth to be greater than the myth. They are not just trees. I do not know what they are, but if it's true, as I believe it is, that God "walks" the earth sometimes as He walked in the garden before Adam and Eve sinned, then I believe those trees are His friends.  And some of them have known Him for over three thousand years. I was truly awed by them while we were walking among them, and it is an awe that comes back every time I remember. 

Our trip was not over. We saw elk, a small wildcat, and more of the incredible trees.  We even saw a whale make four leaps up out of the Pacific on its way north.  We found a couple of restaurants that didn't look like much, but wound up being my kinds of places.  Brooke discovered the charm of strawberry-rhubarb pie. I made the acquaintance of two rivers I have known in mind from my boyhood, and they too were both better than their myth.  But it is the trees that I go back to. It's the trees that I am still not over the thrill and wonder of. It is the trees that I feel so unable to comprehend, and so blessed to have touched, seen, and walked among.

I envy Harvey Shinrock in a way.  He is able to take cast off pieces of those incomprehensible trees, and turn them into something that is art. And I guess that is what the trees are. They are art.  All of Creation is God's art, but much of it we are able to get used to. But not those trees. They are art that humbles a man.  A man wrote once, in a very fine book, something along the lines that "Art comes by grace, and grace does not come easy." I think those trees are acts of grace, something none of us deserve to see, and none of us could come up with on our own.