pleat hooks and parent traps

I was walking through the arts-and-crafts store over the weekend, wandering down the upholstery aisle, admiring printed fabrics and wondering if I had anything that needed a facelift. I didn’t. But as I wandered, looking at all the various hardware and interesting devices, my eye fell on pleat hooks. Pleat hooks? you ask quizzically. Or maybe you know. Yes, I answer enthusiastically. Pleat hooks.

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Style, life.

Poverty isn’t a lifestyle.

Lifestyle suggests preference, taste, choice, options. Lifestyle is about whether to buy porcelain or pottery for your everyday dishes; lifestyle is whether to go camping or stay in 4-star B&Bs for vacation. Whether to tailgate at the stadium or hang out in a sports bar – or eschew sports altogether and take up knitting. Lifestyle is about cashing in your split-level ranch and moving to a condo in a high-rise. Downsizing so you can travel more, deciding to move to a city where you can take the train instead of owning a car. Lifestyle is vegetarian or pantheistic or community garden or philanthropic. Lifestyles are subject to change, to whims, to trends.

Lifestyle is voluntary. Even if you prefer picking foods from dumpsters, buying clothes from consignment stores, and bartering for babysitting, if you choose to live this way, this is lifestyle.

Poverty is not a choice.

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I'll say.

A friend expressed her frustration with the easy “unfriend” button on facebook, which sometimes seems a metaphor for our disposable friendships. In the chorus of “Say Goodbye to Hollywood,” Billy Joel sings “say a word out of line, you’ll find that the friends you had are gone forever,” and I’ve been pondering relationships lately.

More specifically, I’ve been pondering clarity, truth and conviction, and the toll they can take on relationships. But I believe clarity, truth and conviction are important. I walk a line. It matters to me to tell the truth; it also matters to be in community.

Which truth?

Which community?

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moving the middle

This week on TVLand or one of those channels, I stumbled upon an old episode of All in the Family, when Edith’s cousin Liz died. At her funeral, Edith and Archie learn that Liz’s longtime roommate, Veronica, was actually her… you know. Yep, they were “like that,” as Edith said; Archie of course commented it was entirely unnecessary, a shame really, because she was attractive and should be able to get a man.

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for want of a comma, seriously

I could tell you how my brain got from one thing to the next, but that would take a lot of words, plus make you dizzy. Let’s just start by assuming there was a reason I was sitting in church on Easter morning thinking of violence and death. It didn’t help that there was this note in the list of Easter lily acknowledgements:“

Easter flowers placed in the sanctuary in loving memory of… the victims of Newtown, CT, Standard Gravure, and all other gun massacres by Jim and Jen Smith.

”I was immediately cast into wondering what other gun massacres the Smiths had committed, and whether they had been apprehended. Then I began to ponder the power of a comma.

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tipping out

Did I ever mention I used to work in a bar? When I was in school, I was a busser and barback at Petticoat Junction in Austin. I mostly enjoyed the work. I met strong and beautiful women, learned to two-step, and was quite entertained by closing-time Patsy Cline impersonations when Philip, the bartender, would stand on the bar and let it loose.

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I have no sense of humor.

So I've been told. Again.

It was to be expected. I even warned you in my “about me” section: I’m a serious person. I take things seriously, often looking for underlying realities or subtleties. And let’s be honest: women and others who want – who insist on and work for – equal rights for all people, have long been accused of lacking a sense of humor.

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Redneck Central

Lately, I’ve noticed the escalating assault of crafts bearing the name ‘redneck.” Redneck windchime made of beer cans; redneck wineglasses made of mason jars; you get the idea. An entire industry is developing around the use of toothpicks, shotgun cartridges, peanut shells and hub caps.

Maybe it’s just me, and maybe I’m being overly sensitive, but this makes me really uncomfortable.

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What's your manifesto?

This week I read that Chris Dorner, the LA police officer who sought revenge by killing some people, had a manifesto. "Like the Unabomber," wrote the news reporter. Manifestos aren't only about destruction, you know, though they seem to get a bad rap. They can give us focus. They can speak our heart's lovely desires and our life's creative purposes.

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taxes and churches: time to talk?

The ministry center I run, UrbanSpirit, used to own a church building. A big, old church building, with, um, issues.

Not the least of the issues were the beasts that constantly set off the motion detectors -- spider webs, a rattling door. My cat Beckett, which is how I came to adopt him. The alarm system also warned of actual intruders. It was these the alarm was intended to guard against. The problem was there were way too many of the other things. In the beginning, the alarm company would call the police, and I would meet them there, sometimes deep into the wee hours, fearful of what we may find. Most times it was nothing, but sometimes it was something. Either way, I was awfully happy the police were willing to be the ones to figure it out.

Eventually, the police department began charging a fee for false alarms…

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In defense of knowledge.

Jon Stewart always makes me laugh when he chastises his audience for not connecting with a classic cultural reference (like the ending of Les Miserables). “Read a f***ing book!” he bellows in mock disgust (sometimes at me, since I don’t understand everything he says) and everyone laughs. But the larger truth isn’t really that funny.

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Coal to Newcastle

According to this morning's Associated Press report, gifts are pouring into Newtown, CT, from around the world. Money, toys, food, whatever. Two-point-eight million so far – that is $2,800,000. “On Saturday, all the town’s children were invited to the Edmond Town Hall in Newtown to choose from among hundreds of toys donated by individuals, organizations and toy stores.”

…

At the risk of seeming heartless and cynical, let me be clear: their heartache wasn’t caused by lack of money. And won’t be fixed by contributions. Money – even large amounts of money – can’t make up for the loss of children.

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Something big happened on Friday.

I knew a pastor long ago and far away who wrote his sermons 4-6 months in advance. I wrote mine at 3 am Sunday morning (I had to be in the shower by 6, or I’d miss worship). I “justified” my procrastination by saying I was waiting for the latest word from the Holy Spirit. He defended his by noting that he would drop in relevant cultural references when the time came.

What sort of sermon would have to have been written last August for the massacre of 6-year-olds to be merely a relevant cultural reference?

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lessons from our past

I knew generally about the dust bowl — about the poverty, how hard the depression hit the area. What I didn’t know was that it was a disaster made of human greed and over-reach. Plowing up millions of acres of grassy plains turned out to be a bad idea. It worked out ok as long as there was a wheat market, but when that crashed and the farmers quit planting, then the fields were unprotected. Unrooted. There was nothing to keep millions of acres of dirt from blowing away.

Like the dot.com boom, or the housing/mortgage boom. Or other highs in our nations’s history that were followed shortly by bust. As with most of those things, the most vulnerable, the ones feeling the most pain when it is done were the ones with the least control in making it happen.

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world on fire

So I’m probably not suggesting we actually torch anything. But it isn’t just metaphorical, either. I think we have to ask ourselves and one another: What kind of fire is required to shape our public life and move us to a new vision? Are we brave enough to set that kind of fire?

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