A socially chilly town, Seattle. So many people say that, maybe there’s some truth to it.
Seattle drivers are horrible, they say. We don’t know how to drive in the rain.
Not true. People just don’t like how we drive in the rain, but Seattle drivers are expert at driving in the rain.
Some of us have horrible bus-riding manners.
Toward the back of the bus, two rows are just in front of the back exit. On a bus I take, the frontmost of those rows is taken by an older man who sits on the outer seat. As people board, he watches to see if anyone is going to ask him to free up the inner seat. On days he isn’t aboard, another silver-haired, steely-eyed older man does the same thing.
Some of us like a window seat. These seatblockers passively deny others the inner seat although they have no interest in the view out the window.
I used to think this was a uniquely Seattle failure until I went to San Francisco and saw the exact same behavior there.
The New York Times had an article about it– “manspreaders,” these guys taking up two or more seats.
So evidence abounds that we are not always a perfectly considerate society.
The other night, my wife and I went to dinner at a friend’s house. A special occasion for us. Never before had we gone for dinner to the home of another couple with a little boy.
What should we wear? What should we bring?
At the end of the night, we analyzed how it had gone, and evaluated why we thought the night had been successful.
We were invited to go over at 5:00, but didn’t get there until 5:30 because we had to wait for our son to wake up from his nap. We told them when to expect us as we found out ourselves.
We were a little late– that’s always a plus for the hosts, and we kept them in the loop so they weren’t surprised or unable to use the extra time.
We brought a bottle of wine. That’s always a positive. It’s no big deal, but it’s something.
We dressed nicely, but not in clothes we would never wear among ourselves at home.
We ate everything we were offered, with compliments to the chefs, including dessert.
After dessert, we were all mindful of keeping on our kids on their usual evening schedules, so we left.
Socializing isn’t so hard after all!

“What happened to our Spring?”
Rainy, cool, and windy again, after mild, sunny late Winter days. But three months is plenty of time for warmth, cool, rain, wind, thunder, lightning, Sun, be it Winter, Autumn, Summer, or Spring.
When the Sun sets after 6:00, that doesn’t seem like Winter anymore. But that’s been messed with nowadays when we turn the clocks ahead earlier in the year, so that the Sun sets after 7pm, as one associates with Summer, during what technically remains Winter.
A 60-degree day doesn’t seem like Winter.
A 30-degree day seems like Winter, not Autumn.
December seems less an Autumn month than September seems a Summer month, but it’s not about our emotional response to the month. The Earth’s rotation around the Sun is what determines the timing of the seasons.
The seasons, though, are a human thing. Winter, Spring, Autumn, Summer: these are among the great trigger words that bring on some of our deepest sentiments.
Day, night, light, darkness. We understand ourselves as living beings by experiencing our primal responses to the Sun rising, rain falling, Spring’s blossoms, Autumn leaves, snowfall.
I imagine a distant civilization that imagines, somewhere, a planet that has that rarest, most precious phenomenon– liquid water that falls as rain.
And children splashing in the puddles.

The Spirit drove Jesus into the Desert, say the Scriptures, where He experienced a period of purification and preparation.
Lent is habitual for Catholics. We regard it as akin to a time of preparation for a Marathon, a time of heightened self-discipline.
When Easter arrives, we wonder why Lent seemed so long and difficult, although it certainly is long when Lent begins in February and Easter isn’t until April, after the festive occasions of St. Patrick’s Day, some family birthdays, the Vernal Equinox, the beginnings of the soccer and baseball seasons.
It’s odd that St. Patrick’s Day always falls during Lent, as odd as it seems odd that people don’t give up alcohol for Lent, because that’s a tough one, a worthy challenge.
Lent is a time of conflict and struggle, with one’s appetites, one’s worldly nature, one’s selfish impulses.
Maybe there’s a way to spend Lent not on engaging in a war with one’s self, in a war with the world, but in trying to figure out how to live at peace with one’s self, and the world.

Outside the hospital, we tossed pennies into a fountain and made wishes after we had the ultrasound to learn the gender of kid #2.
If I’d had more time to think about it, I would have wished for O.P. to have good teeth. He’s not going to get them from me!
Everyone should have a good story about the time he was thrown in jail, about a near-miss while driving, a broken heart, and a horrific toothache.
Few things humanize someone like a story about a bad toothache: the desperate attempts to drown the pain with alcohol, the reckless consumption of painkillers, the appalling procedures undertaken to eliminate the problem.
I have had teeth pulled, root canals, caps, all that.
The worst thing ever was when I had to have gum removed from the base of a bottom molar so a cap could be put on.
The gum was removed, and much of the tooth removed, WHILE I WAS AWAKE. (Could’ve put me to sleep, dude!) Afterward, I had time before my bus to go to the Washington State Convention Center and recuperate a bit. In the mirror, I saw I had droplets of blood on my face. The people at the office had let me walk out of there with blood on my face. Not awesome!
The worst is over, I thought.
Wrong. The dentist tore into the scorched earth of the gum with a metallic floss thing, scraping it along the sorry, ultra-sensitive stub of a tooth. As I shook with pain, he lectured me on the need for me to do a better job cleaning on my teeth, and said I was going to have to do to myself what he had just done for a week before the cap would go on, and if I didn’t do it right, the cap would have to wait until I did.
I recommend my program of “Ten Minutes For Teeth.” Floss after meals, if possible, getting between the tight bottom and top teeth, reaching as far into the gums as possible, and brush, with an angle to get the bristles up into the gumline, and use a mouthwash, preferably an alcohol-based one. If it doesn’t kill all the germs, maybe it will kill the brain cells of the germs.
I wished for kid #2 to have a good, tight relationship with his older brother.
I hope they both get their teeth from their mother!

“Take your only son Isaac, whom you love, to the place I will show you, and there offer him up to Me as a sacrifice.”
One of the great stories of the Hebrew Scriptures.
Abraham didn’t have the benefit his descendents have, of familiarity with numerous stories that feature phrases of language whose meanings are not immediately apparent.
Abraham might have thought along the way that God’s meaning was clear. He was to kill his son, he might have thought, and might not have imagined any other ending to the story, but that might not be giving Abraham enough credit.
As a friend of God, Abraham would not have mistaken Him for someone easily understood, Whose depths are readily plumbed.
From our perspective, we can see the crucial elements of the phrase, “offer him up.”
Abraham did offer up Isaac to God, Who never actually said, “You are going to kill your son for me.”
As Jesus said, God is not God of the dead, but of the living, and to Him, all are alive.
What did Sarah think about that?
Mothers and fathers are possessive of their children, but parents learn that their children are not their own to keep for themselves.
A father has to offer up his sons and daughters, to God, to the universe, if only as an act of consent, trust, letting go of that which is not his to possess or control.
Parents are mysteries to a child.
Nothing is so predestined as one’s own life, and as certain and nonnegotiable as one’s sense of self is, so is one’s permanent, unbreakable link to his parents.
At some point, the child acquires the insight that a parent is an individual too, who went through every phase of childhood, adolescence, and adulthood, who made choices, who got married, and had children.
When the child is married and has a child, then he begins to appreciate the ineffable joys of parenthood.
It’s not only sorrows and misfortunes that break hearts. A heart can break from sheer happiness, I’ve learned from my son.
For all their faults and mistakes, a child owns his parents.
They have no choice but to be his parents. They are the portal to whatever worlds we came from to be born. They are the ones who must allow their children to live their lives as only the child can understand, imperfectly, how he must try to live the life he is given.
That is what children demand of their parents.
That is the demand of humanity to which God consented in the creation of humanity– free will.
That is the sacrifice we offer up in our lives, the lives of our children and parents– to each, a life, lived by one alone, created by and answerable to God alone.