A life less comfortable

"Sometimes I say at writers' conferences that while many people think they want to write a book, what they really want is to have written a book. It's sort of like wanting to be thin without exercising or eating right. It's fun to hold in your hand a book you wrote, but good writing, like good farming and good bricklaying, takes real work." ~ Randy Alcorn Randy Alcorn is one of my favorite writers. When I was in my early twenties I read a novel called Deadline by Alcorn. I passed it along to my dad to read. Shortly after our big move to PA my mom and dad came up to have a vacation with us. Dad had just finished reading the book and we had the most amazing conversation as he and I traveled to the Pocono Mountains with baby Megan strapped in her car seat sleeping away the miles. We had to take two vehicles and somehow dad and I ended up with baby Megan in one car while Steve, my mom, and Joey were in the other. In life we have these golden moments that glimmer and s...

I have been thinking about Rouark, my knight in dull armor. He is no longer with me. I sold him. I sold him for twenty dollars and watched a man walk away with Rouark held awkwardly under his arm. Rouark is a 4' knight complete with a sword and a helmet visor that can be opened or shut. Rouark stood silently yet valiantly over my life from the time I was twelve to about six months ago. I got him from my beloved Uncle Bob. He got him in some shadowy mysterious way and gave him to me due to the fact that Rouark scared the crap out of my cousins. They would freak out at night when they saw Rouark standing guard. I have had re-occurring nightmares from early childhood on but Rouark never scared me. He was my knight. I took him to college with me. I had to go to a college I felt was beneath me. My dad had gone through two bouts of cancer my junior and senior years of high school. He spend seven weeks in a Cancer ICU ward at Baylor Hospital in Dallas, Tx battling for his life. Rouark sto...

We are putting the house on the market Friday. I'm so sad about it I've been driven to watch the Turner Movie Classic channel. They are playing a movie with Frank Senatra and Louie Armstrong as himself and good ole what's his name. It's a musical. I'll think of what's his name by the end of this blog. While talking with our realtor on the phone he asked why I sounded so down. I swallowed back tears and brightly chirped something about life and big changes, etc. I went downstairs to find Steve on the computer reading an e-mail from a pilot who sent a picture and wrote about his recent flight into Bongolo. Steve was pouring over the e-mail green with envy. He can't wait to fly those African skies. I swallowed back my tears and left him to his e-mail. Bing Crosby, that's his name! I heard he beat his kids in real life. That's so disturbing. But his voice, his velvet-like voice... one could crawl up inside of that man's crooning. It'...

"And anguish knows no boundaries: a fierce current courses from South Central Los Angeles to South African townships, Sarajevo and Sebrenica to Khan Yunis and Gaza City. An undertone of horror echoes from women in Serbian rape camps, eyes and bodies taut with an unspeakable anguish, to deceptively ordinary American homes where someone whispers threateningly, "Don't tell." "Don't tell." It has taken me a lifetime to begin to understand the ways in which such words corrode, crushing palpable lives beneath the stone weight of fear. But who are we if we cannot speak out about what we have undergone, learned, become? We are the stories we tell; our words map the spaces of home. Our experiences etch themselves into our faces, the lines of grief and joy becoming sharper with age; our lives timbered with a resonance underscored by the fragile bass note of sorrow. To remain silent is to deny the embodied selves that bear us, rooted stalks, into the world: to bec...