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Western Star Column: Love and Laughter (for Chris)
May 16th
His persistence at the door was irritating.
“I’m getting ready. Use your key,” I called.
“I can’t come in. You answer the door,” he responded.
“No.”
“Amie Beth, come to the door.”
Because I take a while to get ready and because he had his authoritative, medical student voice on I decided to open it.
“I couldn’t wait ‘til we got to the restaurant. I want the world to know you are with me forever. Will you marry me?” My 6’9” gentle giant was down on one knee, for me.
For me!!!
It was the moment I had been waiting for and I couldn’t stop laughing.
The stairwell in my ancient apartment complex was dark, but for those few minutes it was the set of an MGM classic movie. Big music was playing in the background just for us. Guy gets the girl. Cue credits.
May 10th was 15 years. I remember standing on my father’s arm at the back of the church listening to the Sound of Music wedding march. I remember walking down the long aisle, not seeing a soul but Chris.
As a new bride, I didn’t really know what to expect save two things. One, I now had to do laundry for a tall person without shrinking his clothes! Two, my husband possesses (still) an uncanny ability to crack me up.
Laughter has come in handy for us over the years. Almost half of our married life has been in training, which meant being separated a lot.
Western Star Column – May Days
May 10th
I imagined sitting down today and writing something eloquent. Something like, tears wash my mind and clean my soul. Then I was going to go from there into something equally wise about prayer.
I’m not wise. But, I wanted to play wise today and bring something worth talking about. I absolutely couldn’t wait to sit down at my Fuji Apple computer with missing command keys and a new irritating whirring sound, and let the words flow.
Except when I finally sat down, hours after I was supposed to have this turned in, my day had turned into sheer chaos. This day could only mean one thing. It’s May.
By 10:30 this morning one child barfed and another child had to be taken to our orthopedic doctor for an x-ray. Turns out my adventurous child broke her vein. Who does that? She did get a cool, sort of cast, and was dropped back off at school.
As I was turning in our driveway, I literally said out loud while looking at the clear blue sky, I choose to have a good day and a good attitude. After all, I was wearing my favorite gray boots and that usually cheers me up.
You can imagine my delight when the teenager announced moments after my return, that the six-month-old kitten, who might be pregger’s, had a hole in her side that was “funk nasty.” Hello fun vet bill. Hello emergency minor surgery for a cat bite. Hello funny satellite dish looking thing that’s around my kitty’s neck.
Thankfully, I managed to squeeze in a quick trip to the store during said surgery. When I finally looked at my watch in the check out line, I was chagrinned. It was only 12:55 PM. Only 12:55 and it felt like I had climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro.
Then I remembered that it’s May and everything that can possibly be crammed into a day, will be. Everything that can malfunction will. Every single test that hasn’t been taken will be. Every party or get together that hasn’t happened yet, will.
Western Star Column: What I learned from our five-year-old
May 3rd
Of course my child found it first. We were at the farm for our last field trip of the school year.
When the farm hand announced that farm animals don’t have potty manners, I could see her eyes glisten with joy.
It happened when we walked out of a rickety barn packed with baby farm animals cute enough to make me wish I farmed.
She surveyed me closely, looked at the weedy grass, and then looked at me again.
“Mom, are those beans or pig droppings?”
“Droppings.”
Not surprisingly, I discovered that she’d had a similar conversation with her teacher the day before.
“Who knows what a cow patty is?”
My child’s hand shot up. She wiggled with delight and blurted out her answer.
She doesn’t hesitate to say out loud what’s on her mind.
“I’m not trying to be rude but Mom, this chicken is kinda’ dry. Can I eat cereal?”
She hasn’t learned to fake it.
Not yet anyway.
Western Star Column: Innocents in the Shadows
Apr 25th
The Atlanta airport is not just the world’s busiest airport. It’s a hub for sex trafficking. According to Cathey Steinberg, executive director for the Juvenile Justice Fund, it’s the number one sex center in the states, although other organizations site Las Vegas.
That’s neither here nor there when you consider the human beings destroyed by man’s uncontrollable and criminal urges. According to Reuters, “Men fly in (to Hartsfield), are met by pimps, have sex with a pre-ordered 14-year-old for lunch, and get home in time for dinner with the family.” I almost vomited when I read it, and again when I typed it.
Before I go any further, do you have a young teenager in your family? Do you have an elementary aged child? Do you remember being 11, 12, or 13? Do you remember the oblivious innocence that was part of your daily existence?
Not so for the nearly two million children forced into the commercial sex trade worldwide, this from various “boots on the ground” organizations like Exodus Cry, Make Way Partners and the International Justice Mission.
The U.S. Trafficking in Persons Report says that are approximately 27-to-30 million victims of human trafficking and modern day slavery in the world.
The State Department estimates between 600-thousand and 800-thousand men, women and children are trafficked across international borders every year. A whopping 80% of these victims are women and children, and 50% are minors.
Make Way Partners reports the U.S. is the number one destination for trafficked victims (Read: internet child pornography).
Yuri Fedotov, head of the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, told the General Assembly, “$32-billion is being earned every year by unscrupulous criminals running human trafficking networks and that 2 of 3 victims are women.”
What about the U.S.? According to the University of Pennsylvania, between 200-thousand and 300-thousand underage girls are prostituted annually. Runaways, kidnap victims, and girls met online are lured into the sex trade. They are beaten, given drugs, locked up in some cases and forced to earn their captors anywhere from hundreds to thousands of dollars on any given day.
Western Star Column: On taxes…
Apr 18th
I just put our taxes in the mailbox. Ugh!
Oh, I don’t want you to feel sorry for me. I want you to feel sorry for us, the U. S. that is.
Sorry for the U.S. because for some unclear reason we talk about change but never make a single one.
We dream about paying down our debt but won’t do it.
Our country is like that frighteningly hilarious commercial where the guy rolls around on his lawnmower, looks dead in the camera and says, “I’m up to my eyeballs in debt.” That about sums us up, doesn’t it?
As a country we are drowning. But it’s not just in debt. We are drowning in a sea of ideas that rarely amount to anything. Ideas that amount to little more than clever sound bites, juicy gossip, and fifteen more minutes of fame for whomever uttered that hour’s big idea. (Cue dramatic news-y music)
Sadly, we the people listen to our newsmakers make the news with their newest plan, applaud said plan, and then go right back to doing what we have always done.
For the love of all that’s good and right, when are we going to do something?