Halloween

Back when I was a kid---no, there were no dinosaurs, it was the 'fifties. It was just cars that were the size of dinosaurs---Halloween was always a confusing sort of day.  It was my sister's birthday so we could never go out trick-or-treating till after her birthday dinner which was continually interrupted by other kids trick-or-treating.  At the last clink of a fork on a plate we kids jumped up and ran for our costumes.

My big sisters were forced to drag me along with them for a little while and we hit the road, clutching---I am not making this up---pillowcases for our loot.  And my sisters' bags came back full! Mine not so much since they would stay out till practically midnight walking miles without street lights to get the best stuff. I didn't last quite that long. After the first skeleton costume I encountered walking toward us on the dark street I was ready to go home.  Heaven forbid there be a Frankenstein or a werewolf.

When my sisters finally came home we all sat on the kitchen floor and dumped out our bags.  You should have been there! We're talking full-size Hershey bars---the kind that cost a dollar today---homemade popcorn balls, apples on a stick covered in caramel and wrapped in waxed paper, homemade cookies, and if a neighbor was running out of goodies, nickels, dimes and pennies.  And guess what!  Nobody x-rayed the candy or even gave it a close inspection before we could eat it.

I was usually a gypsy or a hobo, costumes that were thrown together that day, and Danny Zinn from across the street always borrowed one of my dresses and went as a girl.  There were no costumes bought at the store.  If somebody's mom was the kind who cut the sandwiches into shapes before she put them in your lunchbox, she might have dyed a pair of your uncle's long underwear blue, put red shorts over that and with a red apron for a cape made a Superman costume, but that was as elaborate as anybody got.

By the time my boys were trick-or-treating things were in transition. Kids wore some home-made costumes but mostly bought ones.  Halloween costumes in our family, however, are like our  birthday cakes: they have to be homemade or your mother doesn't love you enough to go to the trouble.  Not that I ever sewed, but we had a few fun ones. We cut holes in boxes for arms and heads, covered the boxes in aluminum foil and made a robot. The year Ghostbusters came out in theaters we fashioned a costume out of boxes and the wand from our vacuum cleaner.  Once we did an astronaut costume made from a paper bag, arm and face holes cut out and a soda straw attached to the side for an antenna, then sprayed with silver paint.

Jake's best costume was the year he was about four and went as The Incredible Hulk.   He wore a long-sleeved green t-shirt of mine, stuffed with dish towels for muscles, with someone's green knee socks that came up to his thighs, under his shorts, and I mixed green food coloring in with my make-up and put it on his face and hands.(Who knew food coloring was a permanent dye?)  His skin had kind of a sickly pallor to it for a few weeks, but he was darn cute as the Hulk!

I did break down and buy a mask for one of Josh's most memorable costumes.  He was going to be CP3O from Star Wars and the mask was very realistic.  For the body I had gold gift-wrapping paper and we wound it around and around him, trunk, arms and legs.  He looked terrific for the parade they had at school every year, where the kids marched around the gym in their costumes first thing the morning of Halloween. There was only one problem.  He couldn't bend his knees to sit down in the car for the ride to school. Hey, I was nothing if not a resourceful mom. We had a two-by-six board in the garage and a station wagon.  We leaned the board against the back of the car, leaned Josh against that, then tipped it up and slid him into the car like a big pizza going into the oven.  I think he wore a different costume for trick-or-treating that night, though.  Something we made up on the spot, of course.

Tonight when I go to the door I'll drop candy bars about the size of your thumb into plastic pumpkins and  there will probably be very few costumes that were not purchased at Wal-Mart or Target.  I won't be wearing a costume myself, although I've seen adults do that for when kids came to the door. Okay, one time I dressed up like a dog, white sweats with black felt pieces for spots and fabulous felt ears pinned into my white hair, because the company I worked for at the time was having a contest.  The make-up was terrific and very dog-like.  Only problem,  it was on Jake's birthday and we didn't have time to go home and change clothes before we went out to dinner with him. He was in college and didn't seem to think it was that cute, but several little kids in the restaurant came over to see me.

Once when I was taking my kids around, a lady greeted us looking like a regular mom, but when she turned around to get the candy she bent over and was wearing a plastic derriere over her jeans and it had a big kiss mark on it. I think she was commenting on how Halloween has changed through the years. I don't blame her but don't think I'll do that.

A Wife's Prayer

When you've been married forty-five years you almost don't remember what life was like before you were married, it is such a big percentage of your life.  I keep trying to do the math (quit laughing): 19/65.  Is that, like, 7/8 of my life that I've been with this same guy?  Well, okay, it's not the same guy.  We've both changed so much, so many times that it's like someone new all the time.  It's never boring, that's for sure.  And yet, that old thing about "the two shall become one flesh", that's true too.  We are like two halves of a whole.  Especially when it comes to memory.  Dennis says we share one brain.  One of us is always saying "You remember when..."

 "Harry?"

 "Yeah, Harry.  Remember when he..."

 "Knocked the mirror off the side of the car? It was the..."

"Dodge station wagon.  He was here for a convention or..."  And so on.  It takes both of us to complete a memory or find the keys or take the right medicines.  Don't get me started about driving!

We were kids when we met each other (fourteen and sixteen) and even before that we lived in the same community: same drugstore on the corner, same library, our mothers shopped at the same National Grocery Store. It's kind of like we were always together.

I know it's a minor procedure, this heart thing, but I don't want them to take him into that O.R. without me today.  I'm supposed to be there with him.  When they put that funny shower cap on him (to keep what hair he has under wraps in the "sterile field") and wheel him through those doors I'll probably hold my breath till they get back.  We've been breathing the same air all these years, I'll just wait for him.

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While I don't usually write prayers, I must have once because this was in the things from 1979 that I found the other day, from another time when there was a health problem..  It seems very appropriate for today.   We were married about 13 years when I wrote this.  Feelings are still the same.

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He's my rock, Lord.  I can't afford to lose him yet. We have come through so much, Lord.  We have changed and grown and he has become a man.  I'm not the only one who sees it.  He is always the leader, the solver-of-problems.  So many people depend on him.  Especially me, Lord.  Particularly me.

When I have spent all day till I'm in tears trying to decide between yellow wallpaper and green wallpaper, he says "Green" and it is always the right thing.

When the repair department has not heard a word I have said to them for three days running, he calls to be "firm with them" and is so nice and gets their names and they are laughing and are friends with him and they say "There'll be someone right out, will anyone be home?"

When it has been raining for what seems like a week and the kids are climbing one wall and driving me up the other, he walks in the door and suddenly it is a whole new day and there are lots of things to do indoors and they are fun when Daddy does them.

When I have been searching for an hour and a half for the error in my checkbook or my dropped contact lens he comes in and puts his finger right on the spot without even seeming to look for it.

When I call him at work when he's in a meeting with his boss to tell him I sideswiped the neighbor's pick-up truck with our new car he says "Are you sure you're okay?" before he says "How bad is the car?"

At night when it's cold he's my warmth.  When I don't think I can go any farther he's my strength.  When I am really down and there is no one I can talk to he's my friend.

He is all these things because of You, Father.  When I met him he was a shallow boy and then he came to know You. Now he is trying to be in the exact center of Your will.  He is the High Priest in our family, my spiritual leader. He seeks Your guidance in all that he does. He searches Your  Word.

I know You gave him to me, Lord, and me to him.  Let me keep him awhile longer.  I want us to grow old together.  I want him to be here until the boys grow up.

Please, dear Lord, please touch him with Your healing hand.

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Maybe I should retract that part about the boys growing up and us growing old together.  We're there now.  But I'm still not ready to lose him.  Did you hear that, Lord?

Soul Sister

Tomorrow my sister-in-law will be here for a few days so I will be taking some time off again from the blog.  Just letting you know.

I'm excited to see her for lots of reasons, one because she is six feet tall and I never have to drag my stool around to get things from the top shelves when she is here.  Another is that she totally gets what it is like living with a Carey. The first time we met we each said "...does he do that, too?" about four-hundred and fifty-six times.  It was like we had known each other forever.

Because of that six feet tall thing I have to get off the computer and go dust things that are way up there like the tops of the refrigerator and the bookcases.  My general motto is "If you can see it and it bothers you, clean it yourself" but I don't usually do that with her.  We only see each other a few times a decade and I want her to come back.  (She sometimes cleans when she is here anyway and it can be embarrassing if she finds things like pacifiers we lost when the last grandkid stopped using them five years ago or the mop water is blacker than the cat.)

I have watched her raise six children and start on grandchildren before her youngest was out of diapers,  and cook and clean for the" boomerang kids" still at home and  the two or three people down on their luck that her husband constantly invites to live with them "awhile", and do all the extras with the church and community that a preacher's wife is called to do and never stop finding humor in the situations.

She has been married to a Carey forty and years survived! It's a God thing.

A Still, Small Voice

Jesus said "A little child shall lead them," and "Let the little children come unto me," and there are some iconic pictures of Jesus sitting on a big rock and lots of little kids are grouped around Him listening to Him teach them.  Not a one of those kids is depicted picking his nose or trying to wiggle away. But they weren't trying to sit still on hard church pews, either.

There are lots of churches with wonderful programs called "Children's Church" where the teaching is geared to accommodate a child's short attention span and still get the message across.  And there are snacks involved. During the time that our children were that age we never belonged to one of those churches, although Dennis worked in one.  It was cool.  They demonstrated baptism with a fish tank and a doll once.  But we had moved by the time our kids got out of the nursery. They came into "Big Church" when they got to be four years old.

When our oldest son, Josh, graduated to Big Church he was very excited.  That nursery stuff just wasn't cutting it for him any more.  We talked ahead of time about being very still and you may color or do something quietly but you may not do anything to draw attention to yourself and away from the preacher, like talking out loud or standing on the pew and waving to someone in the choir. (When one of my nephews went into Big Church for the first time, he was shocked when the pastor stood up to speak.  In a loud voice he said, "Mom!  Did you know PawPaw's the preacher?")  And we got a drink and went to the bathroom beforehand so there were no incidents like the one my friend had when she was trying to get her four year old to wait for the bathroom so she wouldn't have to walk out during the preaching and he shouted "Do you want me to poop in my pants???" Josh understood.  He could hardly wait.

The big day came and he sat in his seat very quietly but when the hymn service started he was visibly upset.  He was holding a hymnal, looking intently and almost crying.  I found out later that somehow he had thought that when he graduated to Big Church he would magically be able to read the words in the hymnal. But does God care about little kids or what? The very next song was "Jesus Loves Me This I Know", a song that Josh knew by heart.  I honestly didn't remember it ever being sung as a hymn in a worship service before but it was that day and it made all the difference for him.

Still, it is a very long time for a child to sit still. I was the mom with the bag big enough to hold a pup tent slung over her shoulders, the one full of colors and coloring books and little toys, hopefully, quiet things, for the boys to do during the preaching.  The bag got fuller and fuller every week but there was never anything "good" in it.  Match-box cars were not really encouraged but they don't make noise when they are run along a padded pew so I didn't forbid them.  Not until after Jake, when he was about four, somehow let his red car loose on the slanted floor and we---along with the rest of the church---watched it roll down, down, down the aisle, across the front of the church and park itself right in front of the pulpit where it stayed until the closing hymn.  The preacher was the only one who didn't see it and probably the only one who didn't stare at it the whole rest of the service.

In one church we were in, a family thought their kids were old enough to sit by themselves while the parents sang in the choir but the mom spent the whole service making faces and gestures at the kids when they weren't being still.  She was the entertainment for the whole congregation that was watching her instead of listening to the preacher.  I always wanted to tell her the kids were less of a distraction than she was but I never got up the nerve.

This is how you handle the choir thing:  One of my strongest  memories, when I was about eight or nine years old, is of my mom getting up from the choir loft in the middle of the sermon and walking down to sit by me in the pew because I had been talking during church. She never said a word to me.  She just sat there in her choir robe getting the message across. No, really, you have to give up some things for awhile till your kids are old enough to sit by themselves.  Of course, nine is old enough.  I still remember.

I, of course, was always a perfect little angel when sitting in church. Well, there was that time when I was apparently making such a commotion, crawling under the seats or something--- I don't remember, but I have been told by reliable sources (my mom on her deathbed, who could doubt her?) and my older sister who was there---that my mom picked me up to carry me outside for a spanking.  I wasn't the preacher's daughter for nothing, though.  As she slung me over her shoulder and was walking up the aisle to the door I called out to the congregation.  "Pray for me!"

They probably did. I really needed it after that.

A Small Town Good-Bye

When I get ready to die I think I'll move to a small town. They throw a heck of a funeral. Sometimes people complain about small towns giving you no privacy but in the end, the real end, having them there for you is like a big, warm hug.  And there are a lot of those too.

My brother-in-law, who died last Saturday, had retired as the Chief of Police of a small town in Kansas a few years ago, but in a small town everybody has to step up and do things, so after he retired he was on the City Commission and then he was the Mayor.  He was buried in his police dress uniform.  His hat with the gold braid of chief on it and an American flag were on the casket.  Uniformed officers were the casket bearers and as we drove to the church and the cemetery we had a police escort and every police car in town was parked, and the officer, black band across his badge, stood by it with his hat over his heart.  It was very moving.  I guess it would have been a good time for somebody to rob the bank or something but they didn't have the nerve. They were probably at the funeral with everyone else, anyway.

People told stories at the funeral of when Bill was on the force.  One was about the time he had spent the whole day one step behind a man who was selling "hot" pots and pans that had been stolen from a warehouse.  He was so mad that he couldn't catch the guy that he was still fuming when he got home.  When he walked into the house his wife at the time said  "Look what I bought today.  Someone came by the office selling these pots and pans. They were a great price!"  So not only had he not caught the thief but then he had stolen property in his own house.

Earlier, the funeral director told us about the time his mother, Bill's secretary, had confided in Bill that he was running around with the wrong crowd and on the verge of getting into trouble.  Bill invited him and his friend to tour the jail, then locked them in and left for an hour. When he came back he said "Is this someplace you want to spend more time in?" and that was all it took for the young man to get his act together.  He obviously held no ill will because the service and all the care his funeral home gave us could not have been better.

In Kansas apparently, at least in this small town, people come to the house instead of the funeral parlor and they started coming in droves within an hour of finding out about Bill's death.  It makes me think I need to get up and clean house 'cause you never know.  Fortunately my sister is a clean-nik (don't know how that happened).  No one who came was empty handed.  Most everybody brought food of some kind.  A brisket that would feed---I'm not making this up---forty people, dueling KFC bucket meals that fed ten, (two people came in with those buckets at the same time), a six-pound pork roast for pulled pork with all the fixin's, two huge meat trays, a spiral-cut ham, cakes, chocolate chip cookies as big as your fist (we didn't put those out to share), and on and on.  And there were only my two sisters and me to feed until the day of the funeral.  My sister from St. Louis said it was like being on a cruise ship: every time you moved someone was trying to feed you.

Friends from Bill's daughter's church were bringing just as much food to her house plus they hosted a whole luncheon for our entire family just before the funeral. They must have cleaned out every grocery store in town.

There was a lot of sittin' and talkin' and since I didn't really know anybody I liked just listening.  Of course the conversation turned to funerals and so on.  One lady said she still has Charlie in the living room and it has been four years since he died.  I hoped she meant she had his ashes in a container or something but I didn't want to ask.  Another lady said she gets cold all the time so she has told her husband that she wants to be buried with an African to keep her warm. I don't know how the African will feel about that.  She may have meant one of those little, warm lap blankets though.  I'm not sure.

Now that I've been through this, I learned a few things for the future. It wouldn't hurt to wait a couple of weeks to take food to a family after a crisis. Put your name on your dishes, even if they are plastic & you don't want them back. (We lost track of who brought what and my sister was stressed about that.) One neighbor who came brought Kleenex and stamps.  If you don't have time or the inclination to cook, bring paper plates, napkins, Saran wrap, even toilet paper.  These are things you may need if there are hordes of people coming in and out and you had not known you were going to have company. Several people did that.  It was very thoughtful.  People just wanted to give to show they cared.

My sister's former employer not only brought breakfast for us but offered her extra bedrooms for the rest of the family that was coming in.  Construction workers stopped the street repair they were doing next to the cemetery during the graveside service.

I guess when someone leaves a small town there is a bigger hole left than from a large city. It was as though everyone in town was mourning with us.