I enjoy watching my family do things I suspect other families do not but which I consider healthy. In this photo, all three of them are leaning out or about to lean out past the boardwalk rail in searching of jewelweed pods ready to pop.
It turns out the seeds are edible!
Spending time with those good friends of ours in Pine Grove Mills is like eating comfort food.
To our surprise and disappointment, Council voted 3-2 to reject the ordinance as written. That settles the matter until at least after the next election; to insist Council take the matter up again any earlier would be inconsiderate and likely rejected.
How they can go from a consensus agreement at the previous public hearing to keep the chicken ordinance alive, directing staff to make specific modifications, to a 3-2 vote at this public hearing to completely reject the ordinance, staff having made the very modifications they specified, is baffling.
I am very proud to walk town with my children. Among several reasons that came to mind this evening, Éa insisted we take this photo of this 150-year-old magnolia tree planted by Fred Waring, the northernmost species of magnolia—because she loves her friend whose middle name is Magnolia.
Childhood’s Gate Children’s Garden at the Penn State Arboretum is a wonderland. Thank you for building it.
But please tell me this sign is meant to be ironic.
For the second consecutive year, I’ve been referred to Chris Kiver by an outstanding member of the State College Choral Society to audition for the Orpheus Singers: Colleen emailed me today about it.
Other than the remarkable depth to which my telling her as an aside that I wasn’t going to sing with the Choral Society this season felt like a confession, the thing I found most remarkable about my emotional response to this message was how much it stirred up again my desires to be a specialist. To pick something, just one thing, and concentrate all my energies into mastering it. Choral singing, solo singing, pop singing, hootenannies, improving neighborhood walkability, improving neighborhood bikeability, building relationships in my neighborhood, front-end web development, sales, tweeting, music appreciation—the list of possibilities feels endless. However, nothing pulls my affections like singing, perhaps because it’s the one with which I have the longest history, the one for which I feel most guilty not having pursued.
But unless my soul changes, I need to consider the following: I want to do those other things. If I plunge into singing to the depth I feel like I want to, I will not be able to tweet, organize Houserville Social Club, engage civically, work on my house, listen through the classical repertoire, or any of the other activities I so enjoy. I would only be able to stand utter commitment to becoming a singer for so long before I’d bail in favor of my life as an enthusiastic generalist.
Walking is one of my favorite activities. That means this afternoon made my happy: I not only got to walk the sheep pastures with God and sing snippets of Delirious? numbers to Him, but also got to walk from Sunset Park to Pattee Library to Rec Hall and back—about one mile each way—with Sullivan and Éa, who enjoyed seeing the sights and climbing things as much as I enjoyed watching them enjoy them.
On our Saturday morning errands, feeling proudly countercultural, I suggested the kids walk ahead of me to Barnes & Noble while I returned spoons Carla had bought from Ross Dress for Less. Sullivan’s eyes widened with excitement at the prospect. So they did it, following the sidewalk as much as they could, as instructed.
In my perfect world, there would be sidewalks connecting Ross to Barnes & Noble, and it would not be extraordinary for a six-year-old to walk to a building three hundred feet away from his dad.
(The photos is from our walk back to the car together.)
A simple experiment in making friends (and thus a community): Let’s gather for a potluck dinner on the second and fourth Thursday evenings of each month.
Open to anyone living in Houserville, Bathgate Springs, Clover Highlands—anyone at all, really, but intended for folks for whom, say, Spring Creek Park is a walkable destination.
“What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured” (Kurt Vonnegut).
This write-up of mine describing the Houserville Social Club on the potluck sign-up sheet on SignUp Genius and the accompanying Vonnegut quote has taken on increasing value in my life recently. As if it really is my mission. Maybe it’s Robin Williams’ death and the admissions of depression that are being published everywhere in its wake that has helped galvanize it.
After an evening with the Houserville Social Club that included a LifeFlight helicopter takeoff, new friends Janine & Kimberly joining us at the table, Wengyi signing up for the email list, a game of cups (frickets) played heartily with Carla, Lara, and the kids, then more dowel/disc/cup fun with just the kids, I find further peace in my current station. I am a:
The list above is enough of an identity and set of pursuits to satisfy this hungry-for-meaning soul. I need do no other “great” things. If I fulfill my roles above with all my might (the specific, mutable ones subject to Your redirection), I shall be happy, and I shall not blink on Judgment Day.
More importantly, I shall no longer be subject to judge-and-second-guess-myself day, which used to happen, like, every day of my life but now wanes in frequency until it shall soon disappear completely.
And as for my doubts and questions, whether You are a restrictivist, an inclusivist, a universalist, or even a religious figment, my life will be best lived if I live it as though You are completely real. My prayer is that my doubts have three effects: More sympathy, less dogma, especially toward my children, and more action, since faith-as-action is much more important than faith-as-specific-credence to Inclusivist Yahweh, and Restrictivist Yahweh seems to prefer action as well.
I like Shardas. And FarmFest.
Tom Lundin, Dan Sharda, and I trotted over to the ballfield at Spring Creek Park to toss a disc this evening during a Shardas-are-here! shindig at our house that also included Stacy Tibbets. In the end, we ended up playing a game in which Jori Sharda tossed the disc long-distance to all three of us and we fought for it. What happy, sweaty exercise it was! And now that I think about it, the fun bears some relation in my mind to my recent hypothesis that physical affection between heterosexual men in Western societies such as our own will rebound once homosexual men no longer face stigma.
A cheer for the red team, whom we beat, 12–8, sung to the tune of “Rudolph, the Red-nosed Reindeer”:
O, how the black team loves you,
And we’ll shout it out with glee:
Good game, Red Bull frisbee,
You’ll go down in history!
Carla: Are you ready for your [chickens] meeting tonight?
Scott: Yeah, it’s just a brainstorm and catch-up meeting.
Sullivan: Ketchup? Ketchup is for eggs. Ketchup? Ketchup is for eggs.
Carla and I parted ways for the evening after a noisy, meh-but-enjoyable “food fair” (glorified, overpriced kosher hot dog party) at Congregation Brit Shalom: She to a council meeting, the kids and I downtown for the tree lighting ceremony. We missed the actual lighting by literally three seconds but enjoyed the tree anyway, along with hot chocolate, popcorn, secular Christmas tunes, Animal Kingdom, the bathroom at Irving’s with Éa while Sullivan waiting in line with Lucy S-M & her mom, dancing on my shoulders, and Sullivan on Santa’s lap asking for mittens and a whole dinosaur skeleton for Christmas.
But the real pick of the day today is how much time I spent crafting simple HTML email signatures at work. Was it a waste of time? My desires said no, but perhaps it wasn’t the highest priority. Why do I let myself get carried away with trifles?
Don, a fellow tenor at the Choral Society, shared with me this evening that last week at his usual post-rehearsal social hour at Texas Roadhouse, Russ Shelley, the music director of the Choral Society, gushed momentarily about the beauty and power of my voice.
Obviously, that’s a heady sort of thing to hear. It inspires me to pursue more opportunities to share my voice. But at first, at least, this inspiration feels akin to the addictive high that I imagine you get from using recreational drugs. That’s dangerous.
It’s good to sing for my own enjoyment (or Yours, God), and it’s good to sing to delight someone else. But it’s unhealthy to sing to elicit praise.
Father, as I get deeper into singing performance in State College, please protect me from the intoxicating effects of people’s praise.
“I just wanted to tell you that seeing you with your daughter in the store and hearing the way you talk to her has been a gift to me today.”
— a woman in the Giant parking lot this morning at the end of a grocery trip with Éa
Éa, most of these eight swim class evenings you roamed the bleachers while Mom watched. I spectated with her twice, although the second time I came, I mostly meandered through the school lobby with you, appreciating athletic trophies and girls basketball practice with you. You were mesmerized by the girls’ dribbling skills.
Since I’m always looking for lessons, I’ll say the the main lesson I gain from yesterday evening is that there is value to meandering with someone. I felt closer to you, Éa, because of the twenty minutes we spent ambling through the North Building lobby.
Sullivan, You enjoyed yourself in the water very much. And you made friends easily, including Lily, a fellow Houservillian with purple hair with whom you always ran out ahead of Mom and Lily’s grandma after class was over and you were heading home.
The most significant thing to happen to me today was a visit from Jami and Jordan. We chatted in the sunroom, stuffed ourselves into Jami’s Honda Fit, bought a shelf bracket and some window plastic from Ace Hardware (where Sullivan’s, Éa’s, & Carla’s eyes all got very wide) from fetched milk and ice cream from Meyer Dairy, did a very quick motor tour of parts of campus for Jordan, picked up two pizzas from Corrinado’s, ate together & watched the film below so Jordan could do his Nutrition class homework.
The most significant thing to happen to me today is that I car-, er, truckpooled with Ethan and Ben up to Philipsburg to work at DiamondBack. It’s significant for a few reasons: Ethan and I reconnected during lunch about his life and about the future direction of DiamondBack (especially creating a “spiritual space” for transformation), I reconnected with several other folks in Philipsburg, and, I met Ben, our Christian finance director, who living on Clover Road is a neighbor of mine with two children contemporary in age to my own. It was a big step in rooting myself more deeply in a company whose culture and bottom line seem to only be getting better.
The most significant thing to happen to me today was the time Sullivan, Éa & I spent at the Historic Harvest Festival at Millbrook Marsh. I got the chance enact what I had resolved at the Arboretum’s ForestFest: Dig in to festivals with time, money, and participation because let’s face it: I love them. We rode bikes to the marsh, put a bandage on the abrasion Sullivan got from his bike pedals during a bike path spill, pet the giant bunnies, ate hot dogs, saw taxidermy, ponies, bonsai trees, falcons, arrowheads, a cider press, the Harts, Bill Sharp, and Charlotte, Etta & Marin, poke light holes in aluminum foil. Oh, and Sullivan got third place in his heat of the donut-on-a-string contest, and I got third place in the adult bracket of the pie eating contest.
The most significant thing to happen to me today was that (at my insistence — the only sign of real kick I’ve put into Carla’s campaign in recent weeks) we did our last day of canvassing for Carla’s campaign for College Township Council. It happened to be at a time when the Nittany Lions and the Illini were tied, 17-17, at the end of the Penn State football game. So we didn’t knock; we just left flyers in doors. And we got to meet the triceratops that lives at Michelle’s house behind the Peters’ house.
as reported by Carla:
Just after sunset yesterday, I yelled for Scott to come see this neat swarm of tiny ants that I found in the driveway. We noticed one example of the stark difference in our kids’ personalities when Sullivan stood looking from a safe distance while Éa lay right on the blacktop inches from the mess of ants and poked at them with her fingers.
When I followed Éa in her boldness and looked up close myself, I noticed that these little ants weren’t after some food item as we had first assumed, but were actually fighting each other. I described what I had seen to the others, saying, “They’re fighting! It’s an all-out war! They’re in piles on top of each other and some are carrying away the dead.” Scott explained to the kids that this must be two distinct any colonies fighting for territory or something.
Then our kids displayed another fine example of their polar opposite personalities. Sullivan folded his hands and looked up to the sky with his happy bright blue eyes reflecting the clouds and prayed, “Dear God, please help these ants stop fighting each other.” Meanwhile, Ea moved even closer to the ants, with her brown eyes wide open and a big smile on her face, put her forehead right into the swarm and said with joy, ”Bonk heads!”
The sun woke up over Mount Nittany.
— Sullivan on a morning walk to the park