Noelle Has a New Bed

It seems that we have beds on the mind these days. Not long ago I wrote about Doah's bed, which Doah used as late as New Year's Eve, staying overnight in our guest room, ostensibly to see the new year in but in reality getting a good night's sleep instead while Donnie partied alone. (I, too, fell asleep early.)

Noelle's bed is another matter. It was our Christmas gift to her, and I cannot describe it without writing a mini-commercial for the Number Bed. To do that, I have to go back about six months.

Around nine months ago, Donnie suggested that we look into purchasing a Sleep Number Bed. He and I have separate firmness needs. I have a broken back (compression fracture at the T-5 level in 1980 that had me in a back brace for three months), and I cannot sleep on a soft bed. (Hotel beds can leave me in pain in the morning.) Donnie loves soft beds; his weight makes it difficult for him to sleep on a bed with the level of firmness I need. With the ability of the Sleep Number Bed to split firmness between sleeping partners, it seemed like a good choice. So, off we trotted to the Sleep Number Bed store, where we learned our "numbers." On a scale of 1-100 of increasing fimness, Donnie's "number" was 40, and mine was 100. No wonder we have had trouble sharing a bed for the past 30 years! The Number Bed was not cheap. I blanched at the cost: in the thousands (although a bed can be obtained for less than a thousand, depending upon sleep needs and local sales). Given the 30-day guarantee of return and the offer of credit to spread payments over two years, I figured it was worth trying out. Indeed, it was. I have not had any back pain since; neither has Donnie. The bed has remained.

When Noelle heard about our experience with the bed, she volunteered that she wished she had a bed like that because she was always in pain when waking up in the morning. Not sure whether the bed would be helpful with spina bifida back issues, we nonetheless ordered a bed as her Christmas present. Same deal: return in 30 days if not satisfied. The cost at $1300 was well beyond any amount we had ever spent on Christmas, all kids' gifts together, yet would be worth it if it helped Noelle. Again, we were able to spread out the payments over two years, making the cost manageable. Talk about the perfect Christmas gift! Noelle has spent the past week telling everyone who will listen how much her life has changed now that she has a bed that will perfectly match her firmness needs.

I cannot recall commercializing for a particular company on this blog before. However, in the case of the Sleep Number Bed, I am a fan -- a fan without back pain. (I imagine that there are other beds that will meet similar needs. I did not test out tempurpedic beds, for example.) If any reader or any reader's family members is waking up with back pain, I recommend looking into the possibility that the Sleep Number Bed will make a tremendous difference in your life.

End of commercial...

Danielle's Prayer

The following post is a tad long, and for that I apologize. I don't really know how to shorten it, however. It comes from a section of my latest book, A Believer-in-Waiting's First Encounters with God, and tells the story of a special prayer petition made by my sister Danielle when she was very young. I hope you enjoy it.

The “8-pack,” a moniker given to my seven younger siblings and me by my brother Rollie, suffered immense abuse during our childhood. My sister Katrina, in fact, never planned on growing up, certain that she would be killed by our mother before achieving adulthood. However amazing, we all did survive the extensive physical abuse (e.g., being stabbed, thrown into walls, kicked into unconsciousness, pulled down flights of stairs by the hair, and much more), emotional abuse (e.g., being negatively compared with each other, denigrated at every opportunity, and, in one instance, forced to sit on the stairs for hours, expecting to be deliberately set on fire at any moment), and sexual abuse (various male relatives had their way with both the boys and the girls). We had each other for support: the 8-pack was very important to all of us in an age when neighbors and teachers looked the other way. Remarkably, contrary to what most of today’s psychologists would expect, we reached adulthood without any lasting evidence of physical abuse or any significant emotional scars.

After coming to faith, I commented to God, “If only You had been with me during those earlier, difficult days, how much easier it would have been.” To that, a quiet, impressive Voice that still startles me when I hear it, responded “I was with you.” Had I only known!

That interchange reminds me of the experience of St. Anthony, the third-century desert father. As described in The Life of Anthony of Egypt by St. Athanasius, St. Anthony once hid in a cave to escape demons. The demons reached him anyway and seemed to have beaten him to death. His servant brought him out from the cave, and the other hermits prepared to mourn his passing when he unexpectedly revived and demanded that his servant return him to the cave. There he called out to the demons, who returned to attack him. This time, they were stopped by a bright light which Anthony knew to be the presence of God.

“Where were You before,” asked St. Anthony, “when the demons were beating me so badly?”

“I was here,” God replied. “I wanted to wait and see how well you fought for yourself.”

Telling this to Danielle as we walked about the moon-flooded Maine woods one night while visiting my brother Keith, I remarked that I found it unfathomable as to why we would be so protected by God. One can find any number of stories about children who did not survive abuse. Why should we receive special treatment? She looked at me curiously and said, “I thought you knew.”

“Knew what?” I asked.

“What all the rest of the 8-pack knew.”

“What??”

“The very first thing I remember in my life—I think I was only two or three years old—was realizing what a predicament we were in, and I said a prayer: ‘Dear God, Dad is gone all the time, and Ma is a child. So, would You please raise us?’”

It took more than fifty years for me to learn about that prayer. Upon reflection, I believe that neither my siblings nor I were ever far from God’s sight, protection, intentions for our lives, or even the tendency to use us to help others. That could only have been the case if God had answered the prayer of a precocious toddler.

Why would I think that God answered that prayer? Because I am alive today, having survived a dangerously abusive childhood. Because my children are alive today in spite of two having been born with multiple birth defects so severe that doctors gave them little hope for survival, let alone the generally healthy and happy lives that they now lead. Because I have been chronically happy all my life when a person not protected by God might have attempted suicide. Because I am incurably optimistic even though I endured years of poverty and seven clinical deaths of my children. Because I can see where my siblings and I have been used for improving human conditions and helping people in ways that we could not have accomplished alone. And maybe mostly because I don’t know where the parachute has always come from when I have been in the process of falling off a cliff if it has not been being held out to me by God. I have always taken the parachute. I never used to say thank you because I did not think that there was Anyone to thank. At the same time, I never questioned that there would be a parachute if I needed it. It would appear that I had a tacit relationship with God on a subconscious level while totally oblivious to any sense of God in the conscious world.

In today's Monday Morning Meditation on 100th Lamb, I discuss Hosea 11:3, in which God tells of teaching His people to walk, holding his people in His arms (depending upon the translation), and otherwise being with His people -- with their being fully unaware of Him. How sad! (How much sadder to have been part of that group -- and how happy to have found out in time not only about Danielle's prayer but also about the reality that Hosea 11:3 describes!)

Happy New Year! Welcome, 2012!

Wishing one and all a blessed 2012, which has dawned bright and sunny here in San Ignatio. Along with it has arrived my first decision of the new year: whether or not to take revenge on Donnie.



As usual, Donnie and I had made plans to welcome in the new year with a mini-party. Some champagne. A few snacks. And Doah.



As usual, I feel asleep and became nigh onto comatose around 10:30. Doah lasted another hour, then toddled off to bed, emerging, according to Donnie, around 12:30 in the morning, like a groundhog on Feb. 2, saw his shadow, and scurried back to the bedroom.



As for me, I never did wake up. Donnie, ever the photographer -- and, in this case, as is typical of our New Year's eve celebrations, the lone celebrant -- took a picture of me zonked out on the couch and pasted it on Facebook. Of course, that brought it a lot of comments!



Now, he is sleeping in after all his heavy partying, and I am wide awake, greeting the sunny day and new year. Doah is dancing about, demanding breakfast, and I am ever so tempted to take a picture of Donnie, zonked out in bed, and paste it on Facebook!



Happy days and interesting decisions, my friends, I wish you in 2012!



(note: image from stunningmesh.com -- it stunned me; hope you like it)

Merry Christmas! God Bless Everyone!

Since I do not blog on Sundays, I will post a Christmas message tonight, Christmas eve. Plans? With all the kids having flown from the nest a decade ago, Donnie and I will be having our Christmas eve dinner at a local Chinese restaurant, run by Korean, prior to midnight Mass, which is at 10:30 this evening. (It finishes at midnight, so the name is not entirely misleading.)

As he does every year, Finnegan, our priest's cat, has wandered from the cold into the warmth of the manger. Both he, and Sula, are parish cat, take turns sleeping in the manger. Sometimes they share it.

Sharing warm Christmas wishes with all! May God bless each one of you tomorrow and all days of this happy season!

Domesticated Cats and Mice

From time to time, I have blogged about our three cats. They are, after all, a very important part of our family.

Murjan (Arabic name, meaning coral) hails from Jordan, and we adopted him from a friend of a friend when he was six months. We call him our dog cat because he lies on his back and wants his belly rubbed any time I walk through the door. He also licks us like a dog, follows me everywhere, and apparently is about as much of a mouser as a dog, as I shall explain in a bit.

Intrepid came to us as a very young kitten, just weeks old, abandoned too early by his mother, who probably died. He was found, squaling in the grass behind the house of one of the professors who worked for me when I was living in Jordan a half-dozen years ago. He is still a kitten at heart and loves playing with his toys.

Simone we rescued a couple of years ago. She had been a feral cat, living outside our house, and not venturing near us although we fed her. When we moved, she scampered inside the empty house for a look, and I trapped her. The rest is history. It took two years, but she now sleeps with us, wants to be petted, and follows me around much like Murjan does.

All that is prelude to telling the story of this week. For the first time ever, we have had a mouse in the house. Some new food for our cats it seemed to us. Wrong! All three of our cats enjoyed watching the live mouse but preferred playing with the stuffed ones, to which they returned after a few minutes of sitting and watching the live one scamper around the kitchen. As for killing and eating it, that never entered their heads. Food, to them, obviously comes from a can. So, we sighed and called pest control!

Worse, since the mouse appeared, Murjan, all 20 pounds of him, has taken to crawling into our laps, seemingly wanting protection. From the mouse? Now I know the definition of "domestic cat."

Two Anti-Hunger Websites for the Holidays

As the holidays -- and all the yummy treats that most of us will be eating -- approach, I wanted to share with readers of my blogs two wonderful sites that help those who may not be feeling full during the holidays, or any time during the year for that matter.

The first site, No Kid Hungry, is fledgling group with a good objective: www.nokidhungry.org. The leaders of the movement are asking visitors to their site to take a pledge to reach this goal by 2015.

The other site has been around for years (at least ten years) and does wonderful work: www.thehungersite.com, and I posted about it on H2Helper a while back. This site can be visited every day, and just by spending 2-3 minutes at the site, without any investment other than time, you can help feed hungry children worldwide, contribute to saving the rain forests, help autism research, promote literacy, support veterans, and help abandoned animals -- it is an amazing site.

Happy holidays!

Heritage of Er-er?

A couple of years ago, I wrote the story of Er-Er, an adopted rooster-to-be, accidentally (we think) abandoned by his mother before he was ready to live independently, who was scooped up by chicken raiders -- something that occurs every couple of years in our chicken-ambivalent town of San Ignatio. (Colorful Mexican chickens wandering the streets are the trademark of our little historical town, but every few years the membership of the City Council changes and some vocal opponents of chickens convinces the council to open the city doors to chicken nabbers -- even to pay them $5 per chicken for the roundup.) And, so, we lost our Er-er.

I had not thought much about Er-er in recent days, but yesterday, as I was leaving Old Mission, a mother hen with two teenage hens-to-be in tow walked right up to me as I stood beside car to open the door. In fact, she had to cross the street to get to me. She looked at me, turned her head to make sure her teens were in tow, and then all three looked at me and did not move even as I opened the door, got in the car, and very slowly and carefully drove off. I looked in the rear-view mirror, and they were still standing in the middle of the lane, watching me. I wondered if the hen might have been one of Er-er's siblings, whom we fed, along with his mother, from the time they were little chicks until they were teens and the mother shooed them out of the nest. At one time, I even rescued them from a marauding stray dog while the mother clucked furiously from a tree top, wrenching one little chick out of the dog's mouth and returning him unharmed to his mother (not the smartest thing I have ever done).

It seemed as if this hen thought she knew me, and the encounter was as if she were introducing me to her offspring. Who knows? Chickens are not supposed to have memories at all, but all these chicks knew where their "home" was, and even when Er-er would wander away and I would find him several streets away, if I hollered to him, "Er-er, go home and eat breakfast," he would lift his head and make a beeline for the house. As I said, who knows? Why does a chicken cross the road? Perhaps, in this case, to introduce her chicks to Aunt Beth.