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.

Happy Year Of The Sheep! Or sheep-like animal of your choice.
Google had what looked like a ram by their name that day last week. “Goat” has been tossed around too. And people love lambs.
We’ll be delivering a baby boy this Summer. A Chinese friend explained that a Summer Sheep Year baby is good because sheep have plenty to eat during the Summer. So some of this is logical.
To the Christian mind, confusing a sheep for a goat wouldn’t seem likely.
One appeal of the Bible for some people is that one thinks one might find within it, if not the meaning of life, maybe a vital clue to what one can expect from the afterlife.
Jesus addressed the subject directly in his description of the final judgment. The sheep merrily go off to Paradise. The goats all go downstairs.
He describes the difference between the two. The sheep helped people out. The goats did not.
Perplexingly, both sheep and goats are oblivious and incredulous. Neither group is clear on what they did to their credit or their shame, and need to have it spelled out for them.
Each group is surprised that Jesus says they helped Him out all those times, in all those ways; that they snubbed Him all those times in all those ways.
How difficult for the rich to get into Heaven!
Of course, it can be. For some, the status of wealth centers on making distinctions and passing judgments: who are one’s peers in society, in temperament, in the worth of respective accomplishments.
Sometimes, those with cannot help out those without, because those with barely have enough and live in fear of losing what they have. We have our few bucks toward the small luxuries of life, and we have our street cred that knows we can’t believe everything we hear from those who will make a claim or tell a story to get a dollar.
Blessed, the poor in spirit, whose is the kingdom of Heaven.
A story aired recently about a guy who gave a street person $100 or some such amount, and followed him to see what he did with it. The man went into a store, bought some groceries, and shared it with some friends. His celebrity benefactor was astounded by the gesture, amazed that this man didn’t just live on an island where only one man lives, who has no friends and no sense of society.
That the celebrity wasn’t embarrassed by his own cynicism– really weird.
Blessed, those who do not make false distinctions about who and who is not worthy of a simple gesture of humanity.
Blessed, those who are not ashamed to be brothers and sisters to those who suffer through the most trying circumstances, who bear the heaviest burdens.
Blessed, those who see their own reflection in any other person, who treat others as they would like to be treated themselves.
Blessed, those who see there are no enemies, foreigners, or strangers among the sometimes-wayward children of God.

An only dog is a lonely dog, an alien among the human species.
We almost expect them to read our minds, to know what we want them to do and not do. Constantly surprised we are that they have so little grasp of common sense.
How do they not know that silently walking up and lying at our feet when we are sitting down is a bad idea?
We are supposed to know the dog is there so we won’t trip over the dog. So nobody gets hurt.
A dog’s constant task is to determine who in the house is doing the most interesting thing, and participate. With two adults and a 2-year-old in the house, that’s exhausting.
The male adult, the garbage Sherpa, is constantly taking trash outside. If anyone goes outside, the dog wants to go. If someone is carrying smelly stuff around, the dog is all over that. If a person is taking smelly stuff outside, it could be the best part of the dog’s day.
If an adult is cooking, or eating, that could be the highlight of the day. Just let that person drop their hand with any type of food on it, and one lick of a tongue takes care of that.
If a child is running around with any kind of toy, obviously the child wants the dog to give chase and jump at the toy.
If someone is sitting, or lying on the floor, that means he or she wants the dog’s company.
Inconceivable, the idea that we do not want the dog alongside us, in front of us, behind us, at every moment.
Humans are all hands. Instead of fingers, dogs have sharp teeth to handle their worlds, which largely consist of things with no purpose other than to be shredded by a dog.
Dogs are as sentimental a creature as exists, toward people, but they are sentimental toward few things. A favorite hat? Nothing more to a dog than anything else the master brings home from the pet store.
Yet, these humans do not reciprocate. They do not try to eat the dog’s food, or lick the dog’s face and paws at every chance, or follow the dog everywhere he goes.
A dog might live in constant doubt of his identity, except that, looking out the window, or going outside, it’s never long until another dog walks past, until somewhere nearby, a dog barks or howls. The dog then knows that he is not alone. More of his type are in much the same situations.
With a super powerful nose, the dog can smell the presence of other dogs.
He sees another dog, who responds with the same intense excitement at the appearance of another of his kind. When they meet, they each know what to do, while the humans look upon the meeting with the same bemused incredulity that the dog feels practically all day every day at these people who say they want him around, but seem to have so little idea of a dog’s understanding of basic dignity.
To be man’s best friend might seem ennobling to us, but it’s a hard thing.

People love a good mystery, they will say– the mysterious stranger with the shadowy past, the tight-lipped acquaintance of many secrets. “What do they have in their medicine cabinet?” we wonder in friends’ bathrooms.
Men tend not to find each other mysterious. We don’t spend much time thinking about hidden messages and unspoken intentions. We tend to assume that we can take each other at face value.
As a father of a two-year-old son, my son, for all his uniqueness and individuality, isn’t an inscrutable mystery to me. The fact that he is a male explains a lot. When he pounds on things and throws things and runs around uncontrollably, screaming for no apparent reason, that all makes sense to me. Kicking and throwing balls, all that physicality doesn’t concern me in the least. Jumping off chairs and sofas, all the things he does that cause people to say, “Be careful! That’s dangerous!” I can relate. If I tell him, “You’ll hurt yourself,” I know that just makes him all the more determined, because a boy is supposed to hurt himself and not shy away from daring, dangerous, precocious feats.
The women in his life don’t seem to have that intuitive connection with him.
My wife and I might have a baby girl. If we do, I thoroughly expect to be at something of a loss in helping that child navigate through childhood and life, because I know nothing about being a little girl.
I’d love to have a girl, because I’d love my wife to have that intuitive connection with her that I share with my son.
We are mysterious, we men. Not only do we like to watch sports on TV, everything from football to golf, we even like to listen to the broadcasters narration of the events.
Sometimes we have to watch games that become such civic events that even casual fans are interested enough to sit down with the devotees.
Men are baffled that some people would rather have their ordinary conversations while the game is on than listen to the game, while the casual fans seem baffled that we would prefer to listen to the expert analysts than listen to our friends’ uninformed commentary, questions, and unrelated conversations.
Each side can criticize the other, but in matters of professional sports, the casual fan would do well to be mature and respect the experience preferred by the true believers, as we would all do well to respect the mystery presented to us by the inexplicable other– i.e., the opposite gender.
We can talk during the commercials.

Ever wake up screaming in the middle of the night?
A figure of speech, but how else do you describe seeing the same catastrophe every time you open your eyes when you wake up at night, the same thing you see over and over all day long? The same unbelievable thing?
Remember last Summer when Brazil hosted the World Cup, and Germany destroyed them? Millions of Brazilians who saw that woke up screaming in the middle of the night, and some probably still do, and always will.
Remember the Red Sox in the World Series when that ball went unconscionably rolling through Bill Buckner’s legs? The people who woke up screaming in the middle of the night remembering that will still remember that.
When the Packers lost to the Seahawks in the NFC Conference Championship, scenes from that were and are the stuff of nightmares all throughout Wisconsin and the Packers Nation.
An old friend told me about how his teeth were so rotten that once he woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of screaming– his own– because his teeth hurt so bad.
That most ill-advised pass in the last minute of the Super Bowl…. Had the football gods been asleep as Carson Palmer got hurt and the Cardinals lost the division lead, as the Seahawks rallied most improbably against the Packers and the Patriots, not waking up until the last minute of the Super Bowl, and then realized that one of the Seahawks stars had exhibited extremely poor sportsmanship against #24 on the Patriots, and a catch had been made that defied all logic, chance, or reason, and the gods sent a demon into the mind of the offensive coordinator or whoever to call an insane play that never should have been called when the perfect running back for the job was just waiting with three chances to hammer the ball in from a yard out for a winning touchdown, a demon with an ally who caused the golden boy quarterback to throw a pass that never should have been thrown?
Ever sit by yourself all night in a dark room in a rocking chair as your mind tries to wrap itself around the greatest sports catastrophe Seattle has ever seen?
Yes.
Let us never speak of this again.

“I’ll be glad when things get back to normal.” A common sentiment.
2015 has barely begun and our minivan was in the shop for three weeks, we had a houseguest for four weeks, and I had been sick almost continuously since early December. The last day of this month, my wife and I are going to run a 25K trail run up Mt. Constitution on Orcas Island.
When we have the van back, our houseguest has moved out, I regain my normal health and we’re no longer training for a particularly difficult run, things will be back to normal. We’ve been encouraging each other all month with that sentiment– it’ll be so nice when things get back to normal!
Except that we’re expecting our second child in June or July, our 2-year-old is blossoming more spectacularly every day, and we just had three straight days of record heat.
The letter to the Hebrews advises that the world is passing away. They expected the imminent return of Jesus; they really thought they lived in the end times. Maybe they did; maybe we do.
If Jesus returns tomorrow, the 2,000 years that have passed won’t seem such a long time, though for some of us, it has been such a long time, and the world has changed so much, that the idea that Jesus will return in our age of Google and Youtube seems farfetched, and a dauntingly difficult maneuver. Of course, were Jesus to pull it off in His inimitable fashion, we would be embarrassed at how we had underestimated Him.
As individuals, we do pass away. Our worlds pass away.
A 2-year-old lives half his life as a 2-year-old, but that’s maybe 1% of his parents’ lives, a year that includes the unique marvel of watching your child grow up so fast, through the most endearing phases, on his way to becoming a solitary stranger on a bus someday who no one will regard or look at twice.
The child will someday look back on his life and remember his mom and dad and wonder, was I really special to them? Was I a happy little 2-year-old? Was I the center of their lives? Did my parents take the deepest delight in me and wish me every happiness? What remains of that now that I’m an adult who never lived up to peoples’ expectations who now struggles simply to find some small meaning and consolation in life and would love so much to be with them again as we were so long ago for just a little while?
The new normal might someday be a house that once included pet chinchillas, Spirit, Qyx and Butterfly, a dog named Clover, children George and his younger sister Piper and/or his younger brother Oliver, a house in which the parents once went to their day jobs, and drove a 1996 Dodge Grand Caravan.
Some, or all of us, or none of us, might move to different locations. Some of us might drive by this house and stop by the side of the road as time itself stops and we tearfully remember triumphs and tragedies that still haven’t yet happened while other people in this house peek outside and wonder who is that person outside looking at this house.
That person will then return to his or her normal life, remembering a world that has passed away.