HomeSpunHealers

I grew up in a church where we called the spiritual leader of the church the “preacher.”  Sometimes we called him pastor or minister, too, but mainly we called him the “preacher.”  When my sons were about 3 and 6, we got a new minister at our church, which was the habit about every four years.  I wanted the new preacher to meet my children, and I wanted them to meet him, so after his first sermon, I went to the nursery to get them to go meet the preacher.  I had told them at home about wanting them to meet the preacher, and my husband and I had talked a great deal about the new preacher.  All seemed normal until I got to the nursery to pick up the children.  Michael, my younger son, started crying when I told him it was time to go meet the new preacher.  I couldn’t understand why he was crying.  It wasn’t as if he wanted to stay and play in the nursery; he just didn’t want to go with me to meet the preacher.  I could tell he was afraid.  I kept telling him it was going to be okay, that the preacher was a nice man, and he just wanted to shake his hand, maybe pick him up and give him a hug.  Michael cried all the more.  I kept heading back to the church sanctuary with him in spite of his tears and clinging tightly to me.  Finally as we were standing in line to introduce ourselves, Michael wailed at the top of his lungs, “I don’t want to meet the creature.  Please don’t make me touch the creature!”  Bless his heart.  He just misunderstood the title.

A lot of us are very lucky to have gotten the parents we were born to or adopted by.  Some are extremely lucky, such as Randy Pausch, author of The Last Lecture, who claims he won the lottery when it comes to parents!  However, most of us didn’t get perfect parents, and a lot of us got some extremely dysfunctional ones.  When my husband and I recently heard Randy Pausch claim he had won the parent lottery, my husband Jim put this spin on it:  “He may have won the lottery; I got a scratch off ticket that said, ‘Thanks for playing; try again!’”

We may as well laugh, huh?

Skyler, Rita’s four year old grand daughter,  was the flower girl in a wedding recently . Skyler so enjoyed dressing up and all the festitives afterward that she decided that wanted her Mama to “start over” and get married again.  She told her mom while they were looking at the wedding photos, “Mom, you need to start over. You can marry Michael (her mom’s brother). He’s cute! And then we can have a party.” Skyler’s daddy was feeling a bit miffed that his little girl was trying to marry her mother off to someone else. He told her, “Well, what about me, Skyler?”  She told him, “You can stay here, Daddy.  Mama can start over.” He told her mother couldn’t marry her own brother.  She told him,”It’s ok, Daddy, we are just going to have a big party, but maybe Mama can marry Chris Daughtry. He is her man.”  So to Skyler, weddings are just all about dressing up in fancy clothes and having a big party.  And you can “start over” as many times as you like. I guess that’s why bride dolls have always been so popular.

On my cruise to Mexico, I found my biggest language barrier to be not with the Mexicans in Mexico (they all spoke very good English) but with the cruise ship employees.  They were from all sorts of different countries, and some of them did not speak English very well at all.  On my very first afternoon on the ship, I was sitting on the deck, and waiters were walking around with yummy looking mixed drinks full of skewers of fruit and little paper parasols.  The drinks were kind of expensive, 6.99 apiece, but I was on vacation, so why not have one?  A nice young man carrying a tray of these beverages came up to me as I sat at a table waiting for my husband to join me.  He held out the tray and said something to me in a questioning tone.  I had no idea what he said, but I figured he was asking me if I wanted a drink.  I asked him if I could charge the drink to my account, and I don’t think he understood me either.  Some people do think that Southerners speak a foreign language!  Again, he asked me something which I couldn’t understand, and I told him I’d like one of the specials.  He then continued talking to me, and I didn’t understand a single word.  I just nodded “yes.”  He stood there grinning at me, and I pulled out my ship card.  He quickly took it and wrote down my cabin number and handed me a receipt to sign.  I signed it, and he quickly walked off without giving me a drink from his tray.  I was shocked.  I looked at the receipt to make sure we had been talking about a drink, and I saw that I had been charged $19.00!  In the meantime, my husband came up and sat down, and I told him my sad story of spending $19.00 and getting nothing in return.  He just went off to the bar to get me a drink.  While he was gone, the waiter came back and plopped a bucket of ice holding 4 bottled beers down on my table, smiled, and hurried off.  So that’s what I had nodded “yes” to!  When my husband came back with my drink, he saw the beers and asked a guy at the table next to us if he was interested in buying some beers at a reduced price.  He explained that I had bought them because I couldn’t understand my waiter, and apparently my waiter couldn’t understand me.  So, he sold them to the group next to us for $10.00.  They were happy to get the reduced price (they had several buckets on their table already) and I was relieved to recover $10.00 of the $19.00 that I had wasted by ordering something neither of us would drink.  The epilogue to the story is that I came back out on the deck to read a book two days later, and the same group of drinkers were sitting in exactly the same place!  And they still had several of those buckets of beers!

Wednesday night, my husband and I took two teenaged girls to the Jonas Brothers concert.  We were surrounded by thousands of screaming, jumping girls (and a few boys) from six year olds to teens.  The reaction of the crowd to these young boys was amazing.  I probably won’t get my total hearing back for a few more days at least.  One of the funniest moments of the night, though, was the conversation between some girls, probably around 9 years old, who were standing right behind us, after a video explaining Nick Jonas’ battle with diabetes.  In the eyes of these little girls, these boys are flawless, and I think it was a little overwhelming to them to hear him talk so openly about how devastated he was when he was diagnosed.  So, here is their conversation as nearly as I can remember it:

Girl A:  It’s okay.  It’s not really like a  disease or anything.

Girl B:  But he’s crying.  He’s actually crying.

Girl C:  Do you even know what diabetes are?

Girl A:  Yes.  It’s like when you have trouble with sugar.

Girl B: Well, I just want to know one thing!  Can he eat sugar or can’t he eat sugar?

Girl A:  He can’t eat sugar.  If he does, he will get sick.  He can’t eat anything that has sugar in it, like candy or cake or pie or ice cream.

Girl C:  Not ice cream!  Ice cream is not sugar!  It’s a dairy product!

Girl B:  (after a close up on the video showing his insulin pump)  They showed his back!  His beautiful back!

Girl C:  What is that thing (referring to the insulin pump) ?

Girl A:  It’s like a metal thing.  They have to take a piece of his skin out and then they plug it in.  He has to unplug it when he takes a bath.

Girl B:  Somebody help me.  I think I’m going to faint!