The Royal Wedding

I have one last post for the month of April. May I start by saying that this month went by very fast for me. It seems such a short time ago that I was eagerly awaiting my March statistics for this blog. Any way I figured I would hit on the wedding of the century as people have been calling it.

Several days a week I work in a news stand at the airport. The TVs are always on which is nice most of the time, but can be annoying after you hear the same five stories for the eighth time. Over the last month or so news has been building about the royal wedding and magazines have increasingly been featuring Kate and William. It has been kind of fun to see the development of the wedding, but I am glad that it has now happened so that there can be some new news stories, hopefully.

I didn't watch the wedding as I don't have TV and it aired at 2 am my time. I did watch some snippets online. I am a girl and a fairy tale wedding of a prince to a more common girl is almost every little girl's dream. I thought Kate's dress very beautiful and that the couple was fighting smiles as if it was inappropriate to smile during the ceremony. When the Archbishop of Canterbury started reading the reasons why people should and do get married I was transported back to one of my favorite stories. I didn't realize that the Church of England still used that particular service. In Pride and Prejudice when Fitzwilliam Darcy marries Elizabeth Bennet and Charles Bingly marries Jane Bennet the exact same passage is read. I was absolutely delighted. It was like watching one of my favorite stories come to life. I quoted the words in my head even as the Archbishop read them and I could hear the soundtrack playing in the background.

It has now been a day and a half that Kate Middleton has been a princess and has been imbued with the title Duchess of Cambridge. She might be a princess for real, but I think all women become princesses when they are loved. When a father, a boyfriend, a husband or another significant man in a woman's life treats her with love and devotion, she feels like a princess. The little girl in her is putting on a fluffy dress, spreading her arms, and twirling madly. Joyfully she proclaims, "I'm a princess!"

Jesus' Last Interactions

This post is a week late, but I wanted to share this with you anyway. This is a poem I wrote several years ago about some of the key players on Jesus' last day.

Jesus’ Last Interactions

8/2/08

Matthew 20: 18, 19

Listen. We are going up to Jerusalem, the Son of Man will be handed over to the chief priests and scribes, and they will condemn him to death. They will hand him over to the Gentiles to be mocked, flogged and crucified and he will be resurrected on the third day.

I’m known throughout the generations

As the betrayer of the one who would save nations.

Judas Iscariot is my name,

I hung myself under the burden of my shame.

Tossing and turning I cannot sleep

Jesus the righteous man whose pain I reap

Approach my husband, Pilate, I presumed

But Jesus’ flogging and torture is resumed

Innocent man dragged before me by the Jews

If I give them what they want, what do I lose?

My wife says let him go

I give him to the Jews, wash my hands-white as snow

I weep to see my son on the cross

I never imagined I would suffer such loss

Jesus said, “John, behold your mother.”

In his shoulder my tears I smother

Look his robe torn and bloody

Let’s gamble as if it where money

It’s your turn, throw the dice

“I won.” With a laugh, “it isn’t at all nice.”

I’m beaten and hung up to die

Father don’t turn away from me I cry

Forgive them for they know not what they do

Take my spirit home, the covenant make anew.

Three times I denied my Lord

My self-hatred snapped like a chord

Forgiven and restored, Peter am I

My life poured out in service, to myself I die.

Road Trips

Road trips are strange things. Time ceases having normal meaning and soon becomes measured by many other things. I recently took a road trip. My total driving time was 23 hours. I drank three thermoses of coffee, one incredibly nasty green apple Slurpee, and two liters of water. I flew to Indianapolis to pick up this car. It is standard and so besides a road trip, I was relearning how to drive a manual. I stalled out four times. I stayed in one hotel. I bought one large pizza and ate three quarters of it. I ate two pb&js, a sandwich bags worth of carrot sticks, innumerable sesame sticks, snickers, milky way, pecans, chocolate chips, chocolate covered coffee beans, and banana bread cooked by my loving sister.
Gas prices, as you know, are quite high. Therefore the number of times I stopped to get gas is important. I stopped 4 times for gas. Three of those times my tank was at about half, but they coincided with my bathroom breaks and Nebraska and Wyoming are not known for numerous towns.
Many of the files I put on my new mp3 player wouldn't play so mostly I listened to Disney songs and country music, as there are always country stations in any given desolate spot. I tried counting the number of cars on a train. I got up to about 72 and had to pass a truck so I lost track.
Besides the way you measure time, the other strange thing is the friends you make along the way. When you travel such long distances you play the passing game with several other vehicles. You also might follow behind someone for hours then when they turn off it feels a little bit sad as they were a companion through the lonely miles. As nice as it is playing passing tag, there are those drivers that you want to leave far behind or have them leave you behind. There was this one car who just couldn't wait the 15 sec it would take for me to pass this semi so they whipped over into the right lane and squeezed in between me and the semi just as I was coming up on it.
When I arrived home after driving for 12 hours and oddly took only two breaks. I was so time disoriented that I was under the illusion that I had stopped three times. I was so used to speeding along at 80mph that I had to lay down when I got home because I almost fell over when standing up.
I love road trips. They are so much fun.

Where'd that song come from?

Do you have those moments when you remember an out of context snippet from your past? This has happened to me a couple of times recently. You know when you are going about your daily business and out of no where a line from a movie or a song that you haven't heard in years seems to teleport into your thoughts. Several weeks ago while I was working a line from a video that my parents put together to explain their work to friends and family just popped into my head. I was folding shirts or something and I recalled, "a hungry man will eat as many as six of these delicious tortillas with his bowl of beans." This line referred to large hand made tortillas. When I was a kid, I had this video memorized because of the many times I had seen it. However, I haven't seen the video in at least 12 years. I wasn't even thinking about anything that might cause the association.
Last week I had another out of the blue moments. I woke up with a song in my head from my childhood. The rest of the day I sang "Bullfrogs and butterflies, they've both been born again..." Today when I was looking at facebook, my sister posted a line from that song on her wall.
It is really a strange experience when these things happen.

Serenity

I love this word! It means the state or quality of being calm, tranquil, or serene. I was first drawn to this word about six years ago when I started watching the TV show Firefly. I fell in love with the characters on the show and loved the story line. I bought my own set of DVDs and since them have watched them more times than I can remember. The show is set five hundred years in the future which necessitates people exploring and braving the far ends of the known frontier. At the heart of the show, the spaceship Serenity becomes a character. I could go on and on and give you are review of the show, but I'm not going to do that. I want to tell you about my reaction to the movie.
The movie Serenity came out in 2005 and was long awaited by the fans. I was a senior in college, living out in the middle of no where. Two friends and I drove the hour and a half to Buffalo, NY where we met up with another friend. We went to a Lebanese restaurant for dinner, which was amazing and then on to the theatre. My friend who lived in Buffalo went to see it earlier that day so he knew the exact point scare me when the reaver suddenly jumped out. The experience was fun, sharing time with friends, but what stuck with me was the movie. I became so invested in the movie that for several minutes I didn't know if any of the characters were coming out of it alive. I love stories and I can usually predict something of the ending. I had no idea what the outcome of Serenity would be. I had a deep connection with the characters and when I left the theatre I didn't have anything to say. I had to mull it over in my mind. I bought the movie and have since watched it many times. For a while it was my packing movie. Although through many watchings and familiarity with the story I can still empathize with the characters and really imagine what it would have been like to be in their situation.
I love movies like this, movies that make you think. Stories that touch the soul and impart a truth of some kind. What stories have touched your life?