Friday, April 23, 2010

How far is heaven?







"All the way to heaven is heaven, because He said I am the Way."
- Catherine of Siena

Stress, fear, anxiety, etc. etc. etc. I feel a bit broken.

Comforting would be if you told me...one of your favorite memories. Yes, let's have a small storytime, please.

11 comments:

  1. When I was young my Dad commuted between Utah and California for work. For awhile there he was gone for 2 weeks at a time, only home for a short weekend, and then back off again. I'm sure that my dad was always tired on those weekends and would have loved to sleep in. But every Saturday morning that we knew he'd be home, my little brother and I would go jump on him in bed, and he'd do "airplane rides" where he lifted us off the bed with his feet while he lay on his back. We'd laugh and laugh. And at night he'd read to us, from The Little House on the Prairie books or from The Secret Garden. He'd always do all the voices and he always, always cried at the tender moments.

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  2. A couple years ago my family went on a trip with a family we knew to the Smokey Mountains. One of the days we were there we climbed the trail to the top- to the lookout from where you could see the mountains covered in evergreens all around and finally understand why they are called 'smokey'. About three quarters of the way up, there was a side trail. Three of my sisters and one of the other family's girls got permission from our parents to go exploring for a while while we waited for some of our group to catch up. After a while, we decided it was time to continue on again. My dad put his fingers in his mouth and made a high pitched whistle- immediately we heard all four of them yell 'Coming!!!'. Another family was walking past as this happened, and commented on what well behaved children the girls were. We waited until the family had gone around the bend and was out of earshot before we started laughing- none of it had been planned! My dad had just hoped they would realize it was him, and turn around and come back. I think we laughed all the way to the top of the trail.

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  3. Mine is from just a few days ago. At the beach. Sun on my face. The air still cool, and making goosebumps on my arms. My ears filled with the sound of waves reaching the shore. I closed my eyes for a while, and had a wee epiphany. I was perfectly happy in that moment. Perfectly at peace. Perfectly content. It was costing me no money to be there, and I could stay as long as I wanted. And I realized that I could do this every day (why don't I do this everyday??!!). I realized that I can choose to fill my life with whatever life-giving elements I want.

    And it only took me 42 years to figure it out. Ha!

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  4. Once, I was sitting at a bar with my brother, and I made some comment about a gay friend (or maybe he made a comment about a gay person he knew), and then he said, "You know I'm gay, right?" And I said, "Really? No, I didn't know that." And he said, "Actually, no. I'm not. I was just kidding." And I said, "Ok, well, for the record, if you were, I wouldn't care." And he said, "Thanks." It was a really nice moment.

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  5. Is it okay if I do two?
    One was a few years ago. My grandpa was outside trimming the trees. It was July, or maybe August, and quite hot so I took him some icewater and then started helping him. Afterwards, he had some errands to run and I went with him: to the hardware store, to the church where he was resident techie, to the craft store, and to the library. We just laughed and talked and we were both glad to share time together. It's my favorite memory with him.
    The other story has already been written about, by someone who is a much better writer than I am:
    http://onepartgypsy.wordpress.com/2009/08/05/remedy-for-a-common-cold/

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  6. I think I have two as well, since both are completely different to me but equally important.
    First...Our family used to go to Imperial Beach in California pretty regularly during the winter, and my favorite time was when I was probably, oh, five or six. We rented a condo on the beach (literally ON the beach, as in when the tide came in, it came up to the gate we used to get out) and during the day we built sandcastles and dug up tiny, tiny little clams, every color you could imagine, and looked for the big broken seashells that the seagulls had dropped. It was kind of cold in the water itself, but I did go in up to my knees (so, about five inches deep if that) and Dad let Mercy and I take turns being picked up right before the waves crashed into us. In the afternoon we went to this tiny seashell shop (I kept the big purple shell I got for years) where the owner had painted the outside with some gorgeous mural, I think it was of dolphins or something but a lot of things there were painted with dolphins so that might have been something else. We went down the pier at sunset and then went to this little restaurant where I vaguely remember eating really excellent vegetable soup. And we went back to the condo and made a fire and opened up the windows and my dad read aloud, so you could hear his voice and the fire crackling and the ocean outside the window. If I could relive any day of my life (well, we were there for three days I think) it would be one of those. I also happened to write my first poem then, being inspired by reading The Wanderer by Sharon Creech. It was wonderfully awful. "The sea, the sea, the sea, it calls and calls and calls to me. Come in, mom says, and I always get out."
    Yeah. At the time, it was amazing to me, because pretty much everything was amazing. It's my best memory of our family before Hope arrived; not that I don't love her, but it was just Mercy and I and we were close enough in age we still played together and my mom and dad had enough time to spend completely focused on us. Even now (and I haven't been back in years,) Imperial Beach is my favorite place in the entire world and gets mentioned quite frequently in my poetry.
    My other best memory I posted on my blog a while ago, my favorite memory with my Grandad before he died last year. Again, I was probably fiveish. http://faithfullyme.wordpress.com/2010/02/10/if-i-can/

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  7. (and wow, that was long. Sorry. lol)

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  8. all - Wow, I love hearing your voices in these. Thank you.

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  9. Well, once upon a time, last summer before school started, my family went up to Maine for a week in a charming little A-frame house on the very edge of a lake. If you went out the back of the house onto the porch, there was a steep set of steps leading down to a long, narrow walkway out to a dock in the lake. My sisters and I decided that we needed to go skinny dipping because we never had before and had always wanted to. So one night we stayed up very late- it was difficult to plan because my brother Philip was sleeping in the living room on the floor next to the pull-out sofa bed where Claire, Laura, and I were sleeping. So we had to just lay on the bed talking for a very long time before he fell asleep, and then we crept up and pulled open the sliding door very, very quietly. You know how you move super slowly when you're trying to be really quiet, and everything seems like it makes more noise than it does. We wrapped up in big towels and sneaked out, but it was really dark because we didn't want to turn on any lights. So we made it down the steps and out onto the walkway over the water. Unfortunately for me, I thought the dock was closer than it was, and so I stepped over to the side and right off the walkway into the lake, towel and all. I was so surprised and then was laughing so hard that I could barely breathe. I had the most random bruises after that adventure, but it was so much fun, and we all still look at each other and laugh about it.
    Another favorite memory of mine, also involving semi-nudity, was when we did the kingdom run freshman year and I wore your sparkly converse.

    P.s. how did you take that picture of both of your wrists at once?

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  10. About two weeks ago, there was a school dance that I didn't want to go to. Two of my friends tried to convince me to go with them, but I refused (because I really, really don't like school dances), and eventually, I asked one of them what was at the dance that I couldn't get somewhere else. She said tie-dye, glow sticks, and music. Of course, you can actually get those pretty much anywhere, so in the end, the three of us spent the night in my basement, which we decorated with streamers and balloons, playing music from my laptop and their iPods, wearing ridiculous outfits (which all included some sort of tie-dyed thing) and glow sticks, and generally being ridiculous. It got pretty crazy down there, and it was definitely better than the actual dance would have been.

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  11. Every time it rains - Oh, that's wonderful! I remember you mentioning that once before, but you did not mention you walking off the edge. Heehee. Someday I want to see Maine. Oh, and it's two separate pictures.

    spider - That does sound marvelous. I actually liked high school dances, but private dance parties are still much more ftw.

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