Sanidad del Cielo

I don’t know how to start this post.

Over on the Cielo page, at the bottom, there’s a picture over several women sitting together under a huge stand of bamboo. Rosa is one of the women in that picture, and I referred to her as a sister.

Yesterday I received the latest newsletter from the director of Mission Emanuel. Included was a story about Rosa:

I knew that Rosa had breast cancer. I did not know the extent until yesterday.

Wubby and I helped build that house in the picture. When I saw Rosa in June, she asked if I was coming back next January. I told her that I didn’t know, but I hoped so. I also told her that, whenever I came back, I’d be able to speak GOOD Spanish. She laughed, as if to say “Yeah. Right.”

There’s a group headed to Cielo in mid-October and I wish I was going with them. I feel helpless. I’d like to make something to send to her, but I don’t know what. Prayer shawls in the Caribbean? It’s too hot in October. January, when it’s beautiful, temps in the lower 80’s, the Dominicans wear sweaters and the Americanos don’t sweat. Much. So maybe a prayer shawl would be ok. I don’t know.

There was another story about another family. The youngest child, Brenda, is eight. She is sponsored by a friend of mine. Last January I got to spend time with my friend at Brenda’s house. She is adorable, spunky…and faces heart surgery.

This post is not about the condition of health care in the Dominican Republic, or in the US for that matter.

It’s about what one person can do to help another person, what one family can do to help another family.

The mission has established a fund to help defray the cost of major medical care for families in Cielo: Sanidad Del Cielo.

Healing from Heaven.

The first time I went to Cielo we dedicated a very small children’s medical clinic, in two rooms on the second (then, the top) floor of a small building that served as pre-school and church. Next month there will be another dedication for a children’s medical clinic. Ten-thousand square feet, located just beyond the bamboo stand, state of the art physical therapy, vaccinations, dental care.

I don’t have much of a voice with this blog, but with what little voice I do have I am asking. One person donating twenty bucks can’t make much of a difference. But a few hundred people, donating about twenty bucks a month over the last 15 years, have made a huge difference in the quality of life for families in Cielo.

Think about it.

Mission Emanuel

Sanidad Del Cielo

1220 E. Concord Street

Orlando, FL 32803

——————————

Right now the distance between Rosa and me feels like so much more than the 1500 miles between North Carlina and Santo Domingo.  And the distance between me and God feels insurmountable.

I’ve seen You calm the waters raging
in the rivers of my mind
Your spirit blows a breeze into my soul
And I’ve felt the fire that warms the heart
Knowing that it comes from You
Then I’ve let it turn as cold as a stone
Sometimes I feel like I’m as close as your shadow and
Sometimes I feel like I’m looking up
at You from the bottom of the

Grand Canyon, so small and so far
From the Grand Canyon, with a hole in my heart
And I’m a long way from where I know I need to be
When there’s a Grand Canyon between You and me

I’ve had the faith that gave me strength
for moving any mountainside
I’ve felt the solid ground beneath my feet
But I’ve had the bread of idleness while
drinking from a well of doubt
And it shakes the core of all I believe
Sometimes I feel like I’m as close as your shadow and
Sometimes I feel like I’m looking up
at you from the bottom of the

When there’s a Grand Canyon between You and me

Sometimes I feel like I’m as close as your shadow and
Sometimes I feel like I’m looking up
at you from the bottom of the

When there’s a Grand, Grand Canyon between You and me

Hopefully I can send something to Rosa next month that will help close the gap until January.

The distance between me and God? We’re working on that.

 

my friend, the house

(Yes, the girls are home. Yes, the girls had fun. Yes, there will be blogging about the trip when the road stops rushing by.)

Someone new found my blog while I was out with the girls. She read the “what is a house” post and made a very nice comment, and I remembered that I haven’t finished the story.

We sold the house to the guy who made the offer, the first-and-only-showing guy. Only we didn’t close on June 30. As often happens, things didn’t go quite as smoothly with the sale of his house as had been anticipated, so closing was delayed until July 20. Three extra weeks of nail-chewing.

Within the first week, all of the remaining landscaping, with the exception of two trees, one hydrangea bush, and a few hostas, was gone.

The old basement door and front door were replaced.

The porch and deck have since been rebuilt.

He’s started a retaining wall at the end of the driveway.

Everything is very pretty now, as opposed to the remaining shabbiness we left behind.

I still drive through the neighborhood on a fairly regular basis, picking up and delivering kids for riding lessons and church.

In one way, I feel like I’m looking at Charlie Brown’s Christmas tree, after Linus says, “All it needed was a little love.”, wraps his blanket around it, and proceeds to decorate it with the lights from Snoopy’s doghouse.

And I feel guilty about how I treated my friend, the house.

(Darned tears…makes it hard to see the computer.)

But then, I remembered.

The new owner of my friend, the house, had to sell his old friend, his house, because of a divorce. I don’t know if he has children or not, but suspect that may be the case because of his desire to find a house with three bedrooms in the same area. His old house was only a mile away, in the opposite direction from the house we live in now.

He may very well be hurting, badly, separated from the children he loves. So, he loves the house instead.

And we loved it too. It might not have showed as much on the outside as it should have. But it was there, on the inside.

And we brought it here.

 

can I have this dance

I got dance lessons for Christmas.

Last night we had our first one. Fun stuff.

A month from now we will be celebrating 25 years of marriage. Add the 6 years of dating we had before that, plus the year of being “just good friends” before that, and it adds up to, well, almost forever. The dance instructor wanted to know why we wanted to learn to dance. I said, “So if we go to New York to a fancy restaurant that has dancing, they won’t know we’re North Carolina hicks.”

I’m thinking they could probably tell that anyway, not that it matters all that much.

Every little girl, at some point or another, wants to be the beautiful princess, Cinderella at the ball. If you know your Rodgers and Hammerstein, you know that the title of this blog came from Cinderella. Whatever.

If I do the math, it works out that I’ve been with Hubby for 66.6% of my life. I still don’t know everything about him and never will. That’s part of the fun, finding out new things every day. Like, never in a million years did I expect to get dance lessons for Christmas.

We’ve been reconnecting with high school friends on Facebook recently. With a couple of exceptions, most of our friends married, then divorced. I think one of the reasons why marriages fail is because people go into it thinking it’s going to be Cinderella at the ball. But eventually the clock strikes midnight, the dress turns back into rags, the horses to mice and the carriage…a punkin. (That’s Suthrun’ for “pumpkin”.)

The real magic to the Cinderella story isn’t apparent. If I could rewrite the story, I’d write it such that, when the prince places the slipper on her foot, she does become beautiful. In his eyes, definitely. But to everyone else, maybe not.

Because the magic happens between just the two of them. No matter what, they would always see each other as they are in that moment.

Even 32 years later, when the hair’s turning gray, or turning loose. When the laugh lines start getting deeper. When there’s month left at the end of the money, and the cat barfs in the middle of the bed, and the house is swarming with teenagers that aren’t ours, like right now. It is Saturday, after all.

When I look in the mirror and wonder, how could anyone love this person?

And Hubby says, “Can I have this dance?”

Yes.

(About that 66.6%: it’s really 66.6 repeating to infinity. I like that.)

 

’til death did they part

Way back in the 80’s when I first moved here, before Borders or Barnes and Noble ever sprang from the fertile ground surrounding the mall, there was a bookstore, Hinkle’s. It was a family business with a store downtown and another one at a strip mall just west of downtown. They sold books, of course, and office supplies, and gifts, cards, stationary etc. They did custom printing. When I was getting used to living and working here in the ‘city’, I used to walk to the bookstore during my lunch hour and browse. Over the years as the ‘burbs took over and businesses started leaving downtown, the downtown Hinkle’s closed. Not too many years later the strip mall store closed as well.

A Borders opened in the strip mall. The building downtown has been torn down and replaced with a shiny new office building, now in search of tenants. I sort of forgot about Hinkle’s until I was looking for a graduation gift for someone, I don’t even remember who, and I went to the strip mall with the intention of going to Hinkle’s, only to find that the store was gone. A couple of years ago a grandson in the family died tragically. He was friends with some of our students at church, and they took his death hard.

More time passed, until a couple of weeks ago when……

My neighbor went on a trip and I picked up her mail and newspapers while she was away. I was scanning the paper one morning and noticed an obituary for an elderly lady named Hinkle. She was in her 80’s and had lived a very full life. She was described as “not having a mean bone in her body, but she did have a disdain for crumbs.” All in all, a very sweet tribute to a life well-lived.

Then I noticed another obituary, for an elderly gentleman named Hinkle, printed immediately after hers. So I read it and found this:

On Aug. 8, 1941, he married Mildred, and never spent another day without her, maintaining his unwavering devotion to Mildred for 67 years; Mildred also passed on Sept. 16, giving new meaning to “‘ till death do us part.”

So I went back and read the first obituary more closely. Yes, it was Mildred. The obit said that she had been “persistently courted by a young office supplies salesman”. Then, this:

On August 8, 1941, Mildred married Pete, and the two spent every day for the next 67 years together as devoted husband and wife. Pete also passed on Sept. 16, giving new meaning to “‘ till death do us part.”

She had passed away early in the morning at a retirement community. He died later that day, at Hospice.

And I cried for these people I didn’t even know. Not tears of sadness, but what? Their story touched my heart in a deeply introspective way that I was not prepared for. I was crying out of respect for a love story I didn’t really know. There was sadness in that my parents had to be separated by death way too early, and honor in knowing that my parents had also lived a love story, ending in “til death did they part.”

This is what marriage is supposed to be. I pray that hubby and I will be so fortunate.

 

taking care of business

In February of 1999 my grandfather was diagnosed with mesothelioma. He endured one round of chemotherapy, said “enough” and went home. My sweet parents, aunts, uncles and cousins, along with a wonderful hospice organization, took care of him while he took care of business. He spent quite a bit of time those last few weeks helping my mom make sure everything was in order, that his wife, children and family were taken care of. Grandpa knew how to take care of business.

Seven years ago today our country was viciously attacked by people who hate us. They aren’t interested in trying to understand our way of life. They aren’t interested in trying to persuade us to understand their way of life. They hate America and everything it represents. This is war, and the only way to deal with it is to defend ourselves from it, to make sure that our children are safe. And if defending our country means that we go on the offensive, take the war to their turf, then we go. We take care of business.

My little girl is supposed to be in biology class at this moment. She’s next to me, on the couch, asleep. She decided last spring to sign up for Air Force JROTC this year. It’s been a tough week in JROTC class. They had the option of watching a National Geographic documentary on the events of September 11, 2001. She chose to watch most of. We’ve never hidden the truth of what happened from her. She knew people jumped to their deaths. She had seen pictures and heard stories. But studying the events in school brought them to life for her in a new and frightening way. She got up this morning and put on her uniform, all without saying a single word. She does that sometimes, gets up and goes about her business without saying anything. Her dad asked her one morning if she was ok and she said, “Just because I get up early doesn’t mean I’m a MORNING person!” Bless her little heart.

Anyway, I started asking the mommy questions, trying to get to the root of the problem.

Do you feel sick? No. I didn’t sleep good last night.

Do you have a test? No.

Is someone picking on you? No. I just want to stay home with you today.

A little tear slipped down her cheek. So, I thought, is this something relational, since she teared up when I mentioned another person?

She is missing her big brother terribly since he went to college. Last night, after she went to bed, he stopped by for a few minutes. She’d seen him at church earlier. She knew he was coming, but she just couldn’t stay awake long enough to visit with him at home later.

Are you missing your brother? Yes.

Many more tears.

OK, this is something we know, but she hasn’t been this upset about it, and hasn’t wanted to stay home from school because of it. So far, she’s enjoying high school.

Think, think, think.

Is this about September 11?

Unconsolable tears.

Mom, last year they didn’t even mention it at school. Not a minute of silence. Not anything. Please, can I stay home?

So, we snuggled up and took a nap. We munched on cookies and watched TV. She loves Animal Planet.

It’s chilly here today so she’s wrapped up in a quilt, snoozing on the couch.

Tomorrow she’ll go back to school, and I’ll have to answer to the school authorities as to why she stayed home today. We’ll take our little war to their turf. We won’t have a doctor’s note, we’ll have a mommy’s note that will say:

My daughter needed me, so I took care of business.

 

worth the risk

The contractor finished up this morning, and we now have a new house on the outside. The inside is still a mess, and now I have no excuses for not “getting my house in order.”

Time to start thinking up some, huh?

Tomorrow is Hubby’s birthday, and it’s also ‘Freshman Academy’ day at Little Girl’s high school. She’s really, really, REALLY not thrilled about going. But, sometimes we all have to do things we’re not not thrilled about, don’t we? Like me and the clutter. So, tomorrow she’s going to F.A., I’m going to my Thursday morning Truth Project study, tomorrow afternoon I’ll start where I left off in cleaning out Wubby’s room, bless his heart. Then we get to celebrate Hubby’s birthday. Delayed gratification. (Wubby’s room, and the contents therein: could be an excellent inspiration for NaNoWriMo!)

Wubby was not thrilled about high school. He had been to a middle school that was not a feeder for his high school. So, in order for him to engage in high school, he had to take some risks, put himself out there, make an effort to to meet new people, yak yak. Now he’s started college, and we’re having those same conversations with him, again. Is it a guy thing or what? I really don’t understand this. I changed schools tons of times, nine or ten anyway, and I will admit that I got tired of “putting myself out there” after a while. But, I did participate in some club stuff, music ensembles and such, and those things made a difference in how I experienced high school then, and how I remember it now. The Wub, on the other hand, went to class. Period. And his perception now is that high school stunk, everyone hated him, more yak yak.

Little Girl is shy, like her mom. Her friends love to say things to her like “Would you not talk so much? Gosh!” Behind her shyness, though, is a sparkling personality, an amazing intellect, and a blossoming wicked sense of humor. I want her to take the risk and let some people see that incredible side of her that only we get to see.

There’s a quote I picked up from an episode of “Seventh Heaven” a few years back. I don’t remember it verbatim, but it was something like this:

I know how scary it can be to hear your own voice, and what a risk you take when you put it out there.

It’s true, but the rewards are worth the risk. Heck, I was nice to a guy I barely knew in 10th grade because he was in a leg brace. Was it risky? Yep. Was it worth it? Yep.

He married me, bless his heart.

 

Hair

Husband just told me that there’s horse hair in the car. Figured I’d been to the barn and loved on daughter’s horse, thus transferring horse hair to the car. The problem is that I visited the horse yesterday, when he was driving the car that he thinks has horse hair in it from my visit to the barn that occurred when he had the car.

Confused? I was too.

Because it’s not horse hair. It’s my hair.

I drove the car on Tuesday. I got a haircut on Tuesday. My hair was short to begin with and now it’s shorter, but not short enough. I may have to get it trimmed some more this afternoon, so it will stand up on top and be spikey.

And it will start to be its natural color, which is a mystery to me since it hasn’t been its natural color since 1977 or thereabouts.

It’s CG’s fault. Yes, I’ve been too chicken to see what shade of steel grey is naturally growing from my head. I used to pay a professional to color my hair, but haven’t done that in quite some time. I have, however, become rather adept in doing it myself so that it at least appears to be a hair color that does occur in nature, on people. Just not on this people.

To me, grey hair is a badge of honor. Something that you earn from years of being a grown-up and dealing with grown-up issues the way a grown-up is supposed to. My mom has beautiful hair; her sister has beautiful hair. They’ve earned it. My mom earned it from years of working hard to take care of me and my dad, and her parents, and her siblings. She earned it working in corporate America, being a strong woman in a man’s world, telling the truth instead of saying what she knew people wanted to hear. She earned it from living through the illnesses and passing of her parents and my dad, her partner through forty-three years of growing up and grown-up life. She earned it by leaving her hometown and moving here to be with us.

Now she’s entering a new arena, uncharted territory. She’s in love, and it’s an amazing thing. My baby girl hasn’t really fallen for a boy yet, just her horse. But the symptoms are the same. She talks about her love; when she can’t be with her love, she wants to be, and counts the days or hours until she can be with him again. She wants to know everything about him, and each new detail adds another piece to the unfolding map of him. She wants to learn about his interests, and wants to share her interests with him. She wants to try things she’s never tried before, because he enjoys doing them.

The first time I saw my daughter gallop around the ring on her horse I was terrified and elated, all at the same time. Terrified: what if she falls off? What if she loses control of her horse? She could get hurt, very badly. Elated: man does that look like fun! They are both, girl and horse, having an absolute blast doing this. Yes, it looks scary, but look at them together! They aren’t scared; they’re having too much fun to be scared. Little girl lost some confidence with her riding abilities and is now afraid to gallop. I’ve encouraged her to try it again. Her abilities are more than adequate; she just needs to get past her fear.

Now I see my mom, preparing to do her own gallop around the ring. But this time I feel much elation; little fear. She knows enough about the things that should terrify her, and me. And yes, it looks a little scary to both of us. But, oh is she having fun!

It’s a picture of joy.

Back to my “horse” hair.

The question is not about whether or not I can handle the display of my hair’s natural color.

The question is: have I earned the right to wear it?

 

The Part Where (I)We Let Go: Chapter 1

I have a new favorite band, HEM. I must be living in a cave or a barn or something, because I’m finding music that I love, that everyone else already knows about. If this title isn’t a familiar title to you, and you watch television, you’ll recognize it as music from a Liberty Mutual Insurance commercial. Whatever.

The past few weeks have been so, what, frustrating? Boring? I went into knee surgery on September 28, thinking I was walking out the door. But I came out on crutches, and am still on crutches, and will be through the rest of the year, most likely. My fingers, toes and eyeballs are crossed in hope that, after this Thursday, I can “officially” bear weight on my right leg, which means I can drive. Unofficially, I’ve been walking around my house most of the time and only doing the crutch thing when I go out, which hasn’t been that much. Did manage to hit a Switchfoot / Reliant K concert last Friday that was great.

This particular week, the first week of November, is not one of my favorites. On November 3, 2004, my daddy had a stroke. It was Wednesday, the day after the elections. He and mama were at the bowling alley, doing their league thing. They had just finished the first game. I don’t know what he bowled, but I think it was something in the low 200’s. He was always a good bowler. And if you think bowling isn’t a sport, give it a try. Especially if you have knee or back issues. You’ll find out. Anyway, daddy fell or something and someone recognized what was happening to him and called EMT. The got him to the hospital very quickly. Luckily they were at the bowling alley and not at home when this happened, because the bowling alley was about 10 miles closer to the hospital than home was. Last April during the Va Tech tragedy the media was set up at this same hospital. Every time I saw a report from Blacksburg, and saw the entrance to that hospital, my mind went back to November 3, 2004.

I think I mentioned earlier somewhere, that day at work was just nasty. I was assigned to two projects: one in system test, the other in heavy development. There were meetings throughout the day on the two projects. My code in system test was working just fine, thank you very much. But some of the other programmers were having trouble, and I kept receiving error reports to debug that were from other programmers’ code. One other programmer in particular. I was new to this system and development environment; she was a veteran; I was supposed to fix her errors, because she had so many other errors in so many other facets of the project that she didn’t have time to get to them all. Did I mention that error reports were to be cleared in 24 hours? So, in meetings on the project in system test, I was reporting on her errors and not on test results from my own code, because we hadn’t gotten to my code yet because hers kept crapping out. Somehow, I was responsible for that.

On to the development project meetings: where are you on task 23? Not there yet, working on system test errors. What about task 24? Not there yet, because I haven’t gotten to task 23 yet, because I’m working on system test errors. Did I mention that those errors weren’t mine?? I went through two of these meetings, the second one ended about 2:00 in the afternoon. My boss followed me back to my cubicle with a view. Man, did I have a view, the only thing that made going to work tolerable there towards the end. On a clear day I could look out of my 17th floor window, due north, and see Pilot Mountain, and farther in the distance, the Blue Ridge. Awesome. Anyway, boss follows me, I sit down, he stands at the window and tells me I have a problem. I ask him what problem is that? (I know of several, but which one is he wanting to discuss?) My problem, says boss, is that my priorities are not in order. I ask him about that, because I”m genuinely curious. His answer: my focus should be on development, which was something I really liked about what I did. I told him, honestly, that I would prefer that myself, but as long as he assigned me other programmers’ errors to correct, each having a 24-hour turn-around, I had to focus on those first. He told me no I wasn’t. I got really confused. So he told me that I had to figure out some way to do both simultaneously such that, all errors were corrected and development would move forward. I told him I had a headache, probably migraine, coming on and that I was going home. I packed up my laptop and my files and headed home around 2:30.

At 3:00 I walked in my front door at home. The phone was ringing. My daughter had just gotten home from school. She was reading the caller ID and asking me if she should answer the phone. I told her it was OK, so she picked up. I listened to her talking very calmly with someone about school, about her new horse. I dropped the laptop, files, coat, etc. as she said “Here’s my mom” and handed the phone to me. Silence on the other end. The my mom’s voice, screaming. “Daddy, stroke, bad, you and husband come now, don’t bring kids, hurry please.” I don’t remember what I did next. I must have called my hubby because he was there almost instantly. I think I told the kids to pack some stuff for spending the night w/ friends. I don’t remember what I told them, probably that Papa was sick, but not to worry. I called a couple of friends to come pick up the kids. I remember sending both kids off w/ their friends’ parents. I don’t remember packing anything for myself. We hit the road at 6:00 PM and walked into the hospital at 8:30. Found ICU and my mom. Daddy was awake, recognized hubby and me, but he couln’t say anything because of the ventilator. He would hold my hand and smile at me, and then push me away. He did that more than once. My mom interpreted; she’d seen that behavior from him before when he’d been really sick. She said it meant “I’m fine, you take care of you and husband and kids.” I think he did that a couple of times. I think we told him the kids were w/ their friends, and I think he indicated that was a good thing. My mom told him that we were going to stay until he went to sleep, and then go get some rest to be there the next day. He closed his eyes for a little bit, then sort-of peeked out of one of them to see if we had really left, like he was pretending to be asleep just to get us to go home. So we left the hospital and went to mama’s.

And the letting go began.