Neil Armstrong and the Wonder Years

Yeah, I lived them.

I was thirteen when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped onto the surface of the moon.  It was a Sunday, and at the time Mom was a real estate agent. Sundays were Open House day and dragging us along to her open houses was pretty much standard operating procedure. But on that particular Sunday, we thought it would be different. Surely, we were going to stay home, right?

Not so much.

For reasons that escaped me at the time, and puzzle me even now, Mom loaded my brother and me into our VW bug and headed out to a vacant tract home in the middle of a Kaneohe subdivision.  I guess somehow she thought that someone, after witnessing the most incredible and historic event of our lives, was then going to think, “Well, that was interesting, but it’s time to go house-hunting!”

Nevertheless, Mom did make one concession to the historicity of the day.  For the first (and only) time, she hauled our portable black and white television to the open house, plunked it in the middle of the furniture-less living room and let us watch.

My brother and I lay flat on our stomachs to watch the grainy footage.  We were enthralled.

I was too young to remember John F. Kennedy’s famous “let’s go to the moon” speech, but at thirteen I was old enough to know that we had done something amazing.

And my brother? Total space geek.

My brother’s 12th birthday, November 1969.

Yes, that is a Rocket Ship with a Man on the Moon birthday cake.  Later, my brother built a 5-foot tall model of the Saturn V rocket which was prominently displayed alongside the color TV in our living room for many months. That is, until he thought it would be a good idea to try to launch it.

And we still love space. Now I’m married to a guy who is a NASA nerd. We’ve got the NASA channel and Sweetie follows every mission.  In 2010 Sweetie and I made our pilgrimage to Mecca, commonly known as Kennedy Space Center, or if you prefer, Disneyland for Geeks.

Getting our geek on

Snoopy and I go way back.

Let’s keep it going. Let’s make sure other kids get to share in that same sense of wonder.

Manned missions to Mars? Oh yeah, baby!

In Memoriam

“I wanted a perfect ending. Now I’ve learned, the hard way, that some poems don’t rhyme, and some stories don’t have a clear beginning, middle and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what’s going to happen next.” ~ Gilda Radner

My former father-in-law passed away yesterday. 

We met in 1979 on the eve of the wedding that would join my first husband and me together for the next ten years.

In time I would learn the family history, but I never knew the man who came before. I only knew the man who no longer drank and who was devoted to his family and was a whiz in the kitchen.  I had no scars. I only had his love. He called me daughter even after the divorce.

Rest in peace, Dad.

A Sunday Morning Reading: My journey to peace

My journey began with the Bradleys. Mrs. Bradley lived down the street and she was our sometime sitter when my aunt wasn’t available. They were a church-going family and they took me along with them to the South Bay Church of God in Torrance. I went to Sunday School and Vacation Bible School. I sang “Jesus Loves the Little Children” Red or Yellow, Black or White, They are precious in His Sight. And oh my goodness, I loved the songs.

I glued cotton balls on paper lambs, and glitter on Stars of Bethlehem. I colored Joseph’s coat with a rainbow of colors using broken crayons from the crayon can. I even got bitten by the theater bug when I was cast as a scolding teacher in our play about the life of Jesus.

I loved going to church. I loved the people and the songs and the stories. I loved dropping my nickel into the offering box. I loved praying to my heavenly Father who I was sure heard my prayers. After all, He loved me. The Bible told me so. Or was it my Sunday School teacher?

When I was five months shy of my 7th birthday, my mother transported my younger brother and me to Hawaii. While mom was getting settled in and finding a job and a place for all of us to live, my brother and I lived with a Filipino family who attended church every Sunday.  Until mom found a house that we could visit on the weekends, he and I were in church every Sunday. Lather, rinse, repeat the aforementioned scenario of Sunday School, singing, crafts, not to mention, cookies and punch! I was, if  you’ll pardon the expression, in heaven. 

I was, in a word, hooked.  And like a junkie always on the prowl for their next fix, I spent the next several decades of my life looking for that high.

In grammar school I made friends with kids whose parents took them to church. I tagged along whenever I could.  In an August 2008 post on the importance of Church and State separation, I gave a brief history of my Christian bona fides.

My mother must’ve been feeling some guilt over her single-parent status, so every-once-in-awhile she made a stab at finding us a church. It never came to much. Still, I kind of missed the “happy god feeling” of attending church. In my teen years my best friend became a Christian and since I spent a lot of weekends over at her house, I went to church with her. Her Sunday School teacher was a lady so happy and loving, what was not to like? At fourteen I was “born-again.”  This was at the height of the Jesus Movement and it dominated the rest of my high school years and much of my early adulthood as well.  I moved from church to church and finally settled on the Pentacostal side of the Christian bandwidth. (The Wikipedia link above was a trip down memory lane for me!) 

And when I use the word “dominate” I really mean it. I wasn’t a Sunday morning Christian. I was there every time the doors opened. I sang in the choir, played in the bell choir, taught Sunday School. I street witnessed. I wrote rapturous letters about Jesus to my family. I read my Bible every day and underlined and highlighted constantly. I memorized scripture,  participated in Bible Studies and intercessory prayer. I fasted and spoke in tongues. To this day I can ace most every Bible category on Jeopardy!   In college I was involved in Campus Crusade for Christ, Intervarsity Christian Fellowship, was baptized in the warm Hawaiian ocean (twice!),  and attended Calvary Chapel in both Honolulu and San Diego. I hung on the words of my teachers and pastors, wept with emotion in our services and felt connected to God.

I wasn’t a slacker. And I believed. Being a Christian gave my life meaning.

Everything in my life was suffused with meaning.  And I mean everything, from knowing where I was  going to go when I died,  to finding a parking spot in a busy shopping center. I praised God for everything because I was told, and believed, that everything works for good for them that are called.

But there was a problem. I read The Book.  

And, non-slacker that I am, I needed to reconcile what appeared to be contradictions. Simple stuff, really. Nothing my pastor couldn’t clear up for me, or so I thought. For instance: I belonged to a “spirit-filled” church – that is, a non-denominational fellowship that believed in the baptism of the Holy Spirit as manifested by speaking in tongues. And we did it. All the time. Individually and collectively. Our church services were filled with the harmonies of believers lifting their voices in “heavenly languages” unknown to any, and to this day, I remember how beautiful it sounded. But I kept tripping over Paul’s admonition to the church at Corinth that the church shouldn’t all speak in tongues at the same time, because a stranger might come into the church and think the believers were all crazy. One person, or at the most, three, should speak in tongues, and only, Paul said, if there was someone to interpret. That wasn’t what we were doing, and in fact, this little fellowship was pretty out there when it came to the gifts of the Holy Spirit, so, in my earnestness, I popped into my pastor’s office and asked him Why? Why are we doing something that we’ve been exhorted [bluelyon: 'exhorted' is a  word that gets tossed around a lot in fundie circles] not to do?

After trying to explain why we could do what was so clearly a violation, and finally tiring of my but it says heres, my pastor dismissed me with this answer: You just have to take it on faith.

Huh? Wow, was that the wrong answer.  I wanted my faith to be strong. I wanted it to be clear. And I wanted it built on a rock, not sand.  And, if the Bible was the Word of God, I wanted to make sure I was following it correctly. And clearly, we were missing the mark, according to Paul, whose words we hung our hats on All The Time. There were other contradictions too.

On the one hand, we were told that we were saved by faith alone, and on the other, faith without works was dead. In the same book. Jesus himself told us that just because we looked like believers and did mighty things in His Name, it didn’t mean we were going to get the golden ticket. On the one hand, we were told to turn the other cheek, but at the same time, Jesus told us he came to pit family members against each other, and that he didn’t come to bring a peace but a sword.

“Do not think that I came to bring peace on the earth; I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I came to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and a man’s enemies will be the members of his household. He who loves father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me; and he who loves son or daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me. And he who does not take his cross and follow after Me is not worthy of Me. He who has found his life will lose it, and he who has lost his life for My sake will find it.” (Matthew 10:34-39 NASB)

So much for the Prince of Peace.

I let it go. I kept attending church. By then I was married to a fellow in the Navy. Church was where I did all my socializing, and when my (then) husband was deployed, they provided me with comfort and friendship.  I worked in the ACE school they founded. At the end of his enlistment Then Husband left the Navy, we moved to Oregon, and struggled to find a church that “fit” us - but eventually did – and we settled into the routine of Sundays, Wednesdays and Bible studies. I pushed away my doubts. We lived in the Portland area for two years, and it was there that I suffered a miscarriage and had my open heart surgery to correct my congenital defect. Then, when the economy started tanking, Then Husband re-enlisted in the Navy and off we went to San Diego. It was the summer of 1982 and I had just discovered that I was pregnant with my daughter.

At about this time, I was recognizing that there were some problems with my marriage. Okay, even before that, but it’s a truism that bringing children into an already weak marriage will not make it stronger.  The problems: Then Husband was not as devout as I was.  Oh, he talked a good talk when around our Christian friends, but when they weren’t there, pfft. He smoked, he drank, he stayed out late. He spent money like water. So there I was, thinking that God had brought us together and since what God has brought together let no man put asunder, I was stuck. And yet, it appeared it was my very own husband doing the sundering, so to speak. It was clear to me that we were not on the same path with the same goals.

Two years later we moved to the Bay Area., Then Husband had an old friend from his BC (Before Carissa) days who was a strong believer and belonged to an Assembly of God church. Easy as pie we started attending, and like the church we belonged to in Hawaii, the fellowship became my social center, especially when Then Husband was deployed.

Church was good, and yet, stuff kept happening that would trip my BS detector. But my belief in God, regardless of what others thought or believed, still held strong.

But the marriage didn’t get better, and it finally fell apart after ten years of trying (at least on my part).  I am convinced that my religious mindset kept us together much longer than we would have had we not been believers. Heck, I doubt we would even have gotten married because there would have been no belief that God had brought us together.

And then came The Divorce. After years of trying, I finally gave up. And in doing so I let go of church too. My marriage had been, I believed, ordained by God, and here I was telling God, “No.”  Further, I knew what every single person at my church thought of divorce, and it was easier to just stay away rather than having well-meaning people (or just busybody types)  coming up to me, holding my hand, and (sigh) offering to pray for us, exhorting me to stick with my marraige (there’s that word again). And yes, I was disappointed. I’d followed all the rules. I’d done it just the way I was told God wanted me to do it. I held up my end of the bargain. WTF?

And so, I just walked away from anything “god” for a few years. But I still believed in the idea of god. I just didn’t want to have anything to do with him. Or her. Or it. Whatever.

But addiction repressed doesn’t mean addiction removed. And I was still hooked on the idea of god and oneness with him/her. I loved the idea of finding peace outside myself. And so, I continued my search to find that place where I fit.  Over and over again, I’d been told that God is Truth. God is the ultimate answer. God was looking out for me and wanted the best for me. All I had to do was tap into God and all would make sense.

I never expected that life would be all roses and song, but I believed that if I worked at it long enough I’d find that inner peace that everyone kept telling me was findable. I began to look beyond my fundamentalist world.  I embraced the idea that God was in everything, but that didn’t seem satisfactory. If god was in everything, then where was the everlasting protector and answerer of prayers? 

For awhile I studied A Course in Miracles. I liked the idea that everything is an illusion and that the only thing that was “real” was Love.  But pretty soon my BS detector was going full throttle. A Course in Miracles teaches that there is no Evil in the world, just that we perceive it as evil and that if we could look beyond the smoke, we’d see the love. Or something like that. Everything is an illusion? We create our own reality? Even the poor little starving child in Africa? Now, granted, ACIM’s proponents push the idea that if we all tapped into the love and pushed aside the smoke we’d all live in happiness and plenty, but the premise that everything is an illusion, smacked of denialism to me. Nope. No good for me.

I tried matching my inner morality to an individual church. I cast about and finally found a Methodist church that was everything I wanted. Liberal, gay-accepting, big on social justice, etc. And yet…  I was really having a hard time with the whole God thing. Even this church, which strove so for social justice and openness, still pushed the idea that God is all-loving and doesn’t want to see humanity suffer. So, I had to ask, why does he continue to let it happen? When does our cosmic lesson end and he waves his magic wand to make it all better? Is this all we have? A lifetime of striving, with what appeared to be no help from the man upstairs? How was I to reconcile my belief, my hope, with what I was seeing with my own two eyes?

Around that time I attended the inaugural meeting of the Network of Spiritual Progressives held in the fall of 2005 in Berkeley, CA. It was a direct answer to the religious right who had co-opted religion for their own political ends.  At that conference I heard Bishop John Shelby Spong speak. He electrified the place, and me. Immediately after the conference I raced to Borders and picked up A New Christianity for a New World: How Traditional Faith is Dying & How A New Faith Is Being Born,  in which he pretty much decimates every myth of Christianity, up to and including supernatural theism yet still embraces the concept of God:

I have moved into dangerous and religiously threatening places. I have walked beyond theism, but not beyond God.  . . . I begin a search for the words that will enable me to talk of a post-Theistic God, the God who is not a person but the source of that power that nurtures personhood, not a being but the Ground of Being, the source from which all being flows.

Shelby concludes that we can still go on as Christians, but in a new way.

When our understanding of God shifts, so will the moral ground beneath our feet. The traditional basis for ethics will disappear. For if there is no theistic being who rules the universe, then there is no law-giver, no dispenser of eternal ethical principles, no fiery finger that inscribed the Ten Commandments on tablets of stone or wrote unchanging laws into the texts of holy scripture. So all those claims must also be abandoned. Those who have simply quoted the Bible to solve ethical problems will discover that the moral compass is askew, and rampant anxiety will result.

. . . Those claims, which evolved as coping devices to deal with the trauma of self-consciousness, no longer keep our fears under control. There is simply no theistic deity whose will we must seek to obey in order to gain divine protection. There is no heavenly parent whose goodwill and blessing we must seek through virtuous living, who will reward our frightened, fragile, yet obedient lives. So the ethical debate must find a new ground to which it can be moved and a new context in which it can be viewed.

. . . In this new morality mindless prejudices can no longer be affirmed by quoting sacred sources.  . . . The persistent theological search for truth is of God for it expands life, while religious claims to possess exclusive truth are sinful because they thwart truth itself and allege that God can be boxed inside our thought-forms.

I liked that. But then, Spong goes on to say how he basically keeps all the outer trappings of his Christian faith, while at the same time giving them a completely different meaning than what is commonly accepted by everyone else about what constitutes Christianity.  So, why bother?  Why not just be an ethical human being? From my link above:

After years of searching, reading, deep thought, looking for God everywhere, attending “liberal” Christian churches,  and desperately trying to link my already existing personal morality to a “faith-based” morality I finally came to realize that I didn’t need any religion to validate my internal morality.  

And so I kept reading.

It was Sam Harris’ The End of Faith that did it for me. Followed by Dawkins, Hitchens and freethinkers across the blogosphere. Finally, with sadness, I gave up on looking for god. I see no evidence of a god who intervenes in human affairs or even in the universe. The world operates just as one would expect if there were no god. I am an atheist.

Leading my life with the conviction that this is all there is and that it is up to me to make this world a better place to live, makes me all the more committed to working for social justice, to being kind to my fellow human beings, to being truthful and ethical.  I have no hope of heaven, nor any fear of hell.

I am at peace. Finally.

13 years and going strong

Thirteen years ago I sent a tentative email to a Compuserve address that a search engine linked to an old high school friend.  The internet has been very good to me.

To my sweetheart, with love . . .

Happiest Day

Twenty-seven years ago, at 9:07 p.m. in the San Diego Naval Hospital, my daughter was born.  No other day in my life has topped that one. She is my heart.

April 9, 1983

1985

1987

1993

2010

 

 

The Old Man and the Afternoon Cat: A Sunday Morning Reading

One of my daughter’s favorites back in the day.

The Old Man and the Afternoon Cat by Michaela Munteen. Pictures by Bari Weismann. Parents Magazine Press (1982)

Every morning, the old man woke up just as the sunlight began peeking through his window.

He heard the birds singing.

He felt the gentle breezes blowing.

What a lovely way to start the day!

“Blech!” said the old man as he sat up in bed. He hurried to put on his sunglasses and earmuffs. “I hate sunlight and gentle breezes. But most of all, I hate the sound of birds singing!”

Then the old man made his favorite breakfast of burnt toast, extra-hard boiled eggs, and a big glass of yucca berry juice to wash it all down.

“Harump,” he said, when he finished. “Now it’s time for my grumbling exercises.”

He grumbled as he washed the dishes. He grumbled as he brushed his teeth. He grumbled as he put on his itchiest pair of itchy underwear.

Now it may seem to you that there was nothing the old man liked. But that is not true. He liked to sing grumpy songs. His favorite was, “I Hate Birthdays,” which he wrote all by himself.

Here is how it goes in case you are in a very grumpy mood and would like to sing along:

I Hate Birthdays

I hate birthdays, I hate spring,

I hate almost everything.

I can be nasty, mean and grumpy.I like to sleep on a bed that’s lumpy.

I’m all alone, there’s no one but me.

No one that I think about, no one that I see.

No one to ask me, “How was your day?”

I’m all alone and I like it that way!

After singing his song, the old man was ready for his outdoor grumbling exercises. His neighbors were used to his grumbling. They just smiled and said, “Good day.”

“Harump,” the old man answered and grumbled all the way to the park. At the park, the old man sat far away from everyone else to read his newspaper. Then, he sat very quietly and waited.

Now, if you were sitting and waiting as quietly as the old man, you would hear it . . . a soft pat-pat-pat, followed by a gentle crunch of leaves. And if you were sitting very, very quietly, without a sneeze, or a cough, or a rustle of paper, you would hear a soft and tiny purring sound.

“Ah,” said the old man. “So you are back again.”

Wonderful day

Sweetie and I will be heading back to Nevada tomorrow. These few days with my father and step-mom have been really nice. Today, after morning errands we went around driving around Palos Verdes,  and wound up up at the public area of Donald Trump’s golf resort. They’ve got public trails that you can follow down to the ocean so Sweetie, Mom, and I walked down. Dad’s feet and legs aren’t what they once were and he held down the fort the top of the trail. The weather was wonderful and lots of people were moving up and down the trails. There were lots of dogs making the trek with their owners and three of the biggest crows I’ve ever seen soared overhead in search of field mice or some other prey.  The ocean always renews me.

I’m bringing home treasure. I’ve got three shoe boxes full of old letter and photographs that I will be going through, scanning, probably transcribing, and using to pull together a cohesive family history. My mother has done the yeoman’s work with her side of the family but I have very little on the parternal side. I guess it will be up to me to preserve it, and try to provide my daughter information of her mother’s family.

Today we scanned this picture of my great-grandparents (my father’s maternal grandparents). We’re not sure of the date of this picture, but judging by the clothing, it appears to be near the turn of the century.  My great-grandmother died in 1928 before my father’s birth in 1929. I remember my great-grandfather as a wizened old man sitting in an arm chair smoking  a corncob pipe. But as a young man, he was a dead-ringer for my younger brother (on the left).

Mother’s Day

It’s the Mother’s Day holiday and while I despise the commercialization of the day, it’s good to have a marker that allows us to stop and, for just one day at least, reflect on what our mothers mean to us. For some of us this is not a kind day, but not so for me.

I am a mother. My daughter is never out of mind or heart. I’m a daughter too, and my mother is never out of mind or heart. All of my grandmothers have passed away, and I still miss basking in their grandma love – the kind that let them be as free with me and my brothers as they wished they could have been with our parents. Being a grandma meant never having to say no.

There are three women I call Mom: The woman who bore and raised Sweetie (MIL), the woman who has been married to my father for the past fifty years (SM), and  and the woman who gave birth to me and raised me (MOM).

MOM (Sandra) - I have a wonderful, loving, and complicated mother. So if you’ve been wondering who I get it from, you need only go up one branch on the family tree.  She still carries the pain of the break-up with my father.  I wish it were not so, but it is what it is. I have no memory of my parents together, and I still wonder (really) how two completely different people found each other, married, and bore three children. Together. Tis a mystery. My mother was devoted to us, but in an old-world kind of way. She despised Dr. Spock, and believed a firm hand or stick to the hind end was the proper method of discipline.  The rules were her rules, because she ‘said so.’  “Do as I say, not as I do” was heard on occasion, as well.  Because she was a single mother for nearly all of my childhood, it really was just mom, my brother and me. Having been a single mom myself with only one child to look after, I still am amazed that she was able to do for us as she did.  I have so many wonderful memories of my childhood: so many flashes from my youth which all seem to jumble together.

The vaguaries of memory leave me grasping at moments: a trip to Disneyland when admission still meant some rides were off-limits if you couldn’t afford the ticket, going to the beach and losing my brother, going with mom to a baby shower and sitting in the kitchen on a tall stool drinking grape juice and then going to a park with her afterward, chicken pox, tonsils, making mudpies in the backyard, waking up one morning to find her sitting in the kitchen with a cast on her leg, flying to Hawaii, weekends at Hanauma Bay, the stairs (oh the stairs) from our garage to the front door to the first floor to our second floor bedroom in our house that overlooked Pauoa Valley, the house on Kamehameha Hwy, family visits from the mainland, music, music, music from the dinosaur stereo system, trips to the outer islands, summers at the Y, sharing household and yard chores with my brother, ballet lessons with Mr. Claus, my first pair of heels bought at the same shoe store on the Fort Street Mall I got my ballet togs ,  hurricanes blowing out power for days at a time, kitten surprises, birthdays, Christmases (and the four-color light that cast its glow on our “flocked” tree), wandering around the University of Hawaii with my brother while mom took night classes,  the Columbia Inn, intermediate school, high school, mono, my first heartbreak, college, moving away, moving back, moving away again for the last time, marriage, grandchild, and on and on and on. 

Through all of it, mom was there, loving us, shaping us, watching over us, expressing correction, opinion, or praise. Her names, depending on my age: Mama, Ma, Mom. She is my heart. And I love her.

SM (Dolly) - As a child I read fairy tales that warned me of “wicked step-mothers” who despised the children of their husbands’ former wives, but my step-mother never treated me as an other.  When I’ve been in her home, I’m just another one of the pack.  She has the patience of a saint and the organizational skills of a drill sargent. She taught me to play tennis, and trusted me (crazy woman) to learn to drive in her  beloved Mustang. Honestly, what was she thinking as I ground gears and gave her whiplash in the South High parking lot? She never let on. I’ve watched her make a loving home for my father, who is more than a handful, even now at the ripe age of 8o. 

Though she’s married to my dad, I’ve never connected her with my parents divorce. I’ve only known her as my father’s mate. And yet, for years I resisted calling her “mom” because somehow I felt letting her hear those words from me  would be a betrayal of my birth mother. But when my mother chose to sit out Sweetie and my wedding in 2002, it was my step-mom who was introduced to all my friends as my mom.  It seemed much easier than trying to explain the family ‘dynamics’ to everyone, and from then on she was “Mom” too.  And I love her.

MIL (Gayle) - I have the world’s best mother-in-law. No, really. From the first day that Sweetie brought me to her home, her arms have been open to embrace me and my (at the time) fourteen-year-old daughter and to fold us completely, and without reservation, into her life, her family and her heart. She asked only one thing of me:  to make her son happy. He’d seen his share of heartache, and she didn’t want him hurt again. I hope I’m living up to her request.  I’ve probably confused the hell out of her sometimes. I know I’ve hurt her feelings too. But her generous heart has forgiven me time and again, and for that I am grateful. She raised a wonderful son, and I’ve been lucky enough to reap the rewards.

Family holidays were always spent at her home, and she delighted in the decorating and the planning and showering us all with her special brand of love (read: gifts and food – lots and lots of delicious food “Are you sure you’ve had enough?”).  When she married in 2004 and moved to Hawaii, we all felt the loss, and none of the rest of us left behind seem to be able to pull it of with the same style.  When she comes back for a visit, it feels like our world just lights up. I’ve called her Mom since nearly the beginning and only refer to her by her first name when talking to my sister-in-law.

My three moms. I love them all.

The Living Years

This always makes me think of both branches of my family tree. This song is probably one of my all-time faves. And words to live by.

Full set of lyrics on the flip

Of Milk Cartons and Missing Pieces, Part 2 Update

Part 2 is in the works but it will be a bit longer until it’s ready to post. I’ve been overwhelmed with work, a recuperating puppy, and other issues, which have wiped me out physically and emotionally and without the reserves needed to do this sort of writing. Bear with me.