Going back to last Thursday, our first full day in Georgia: Anne and Ned offered to take us to see the lookout point above Amicalola (not Multnomah, Marian, it’s that funky hearing, sorry) Falls and then a little further down, the entrance to the beginning of the Appalachian Trail.

Where we both said it had been on our life list to hike the entire Trail. Richard had done a goodly distance on it in his younger days but they would have to cure lupus before I could really get to it.

The stone arch marking the spot was behind the ranger station and gift shop. It had rows of benches to the side for people to rest on right after their very long hike, and on those benches was a group of people maybe twenty-five years younger than us. Tattoos, clothes you would definitely wear out in the woods for roughing it, big boned, strong in opinions and body, one would guess.

And here we were, Richard in his oxford shirt (I don’t think the man knows how to wear a plain tee, it’s always an oxford shirt. Preferably blue. Rebel that I am, I occasionally buy him something radical, like a green one) and I in my trademark longish full skirt to keep the sun at bay and so that I don’t hash things too badly when I take one of my frequent tumbles: could we scream city-slicker tourists any louder? Those men guffawed quietly when we walked up to the stone arch, took pictures, talked about the trail wistfully, briefly, and then turned and left without taking a single step past that arch. (I regret that. One step wouldn’t have killed me.)

They couldn’t have known that we were all trying to let us have the experience without my spending one moment longer in the sun than I absolutely had to. But they were right, it was pretty funny.

On the way home, Ned allowed as how we really needed us some lunch, given the three-hour round trip, and he pulled into a barbecue joint to show us a little local flavor here.

I have memories from age sixteen of discovering Brunswick Stew at a little barbecue joint in southern Florida and there it was on the menu. It wasn’t the same thing–everybody has their own recipe–but it definitely made its own memories for the next chef to live up to. The best food comes from the funkiest places.

And yes, this is what they smoked the pulled pork in that Anne ordered. You’ve found it. The smoking gun.

We knew returning the rental car would take extra time, but my brother-in-law added the warning that Sunday evening is when all the businessmen are heading out. So we gave ourselves leeway for that, too. (He added that he didn’t know about rental cars because of course he’d never had to use one in his home city.)

There were stop-and-go backups on the freeway around downtown. On a Sunday in the middle of the afternoon. Who knew. The ETA on the GPS kept getting longer rather than shorter.

Dear Atlanta: please note that when you have two separate highway exits for rental car return north terminal and south terminal your average tourist will have no idea and their tickets will say nothing about separate terminals and your signs do not say which airlines are served by which. In or out of the airport they will not know where they are supposed to go. Turned out there was only one rental car area (I think), but the train from there was a complete mystery.

I turned the cellphone back on and googled from what we hoped was the right train–on our second time around.

The train made verbal announcements that were utterly useless to the hearing impaired. There was nothing written anywhere, not in the station, not near the train, not on the train, not when you get off the train (unless you step off because everybody else does and go far enough forward to find, at long last, a sign), there were no personnel around to ask. Only Google was my friend. (Was this a Bible belt Sabbath-day thing? I actually prefer not to travel on Sunday myself and not to make people have to work on my behalf on that day but sometimes you just really don’t have a choice.)

Dear Atlanta: when you are the busiest airport in the country, having a TSA line serving a few (and it was only a few) businessmen and one. single. TSA. agent. trying to process the several hundred increasingly antsy people in line–and five agents are standing around, one looking busy but the others simply chatting and laughing and having a fine old time till a flier finally desperately nicely asks them (it was the guy behind me) “Could you possibly open another line?”

Don’t tell them no. Open the line, okay?

They told him flat-out no. And after that chokepoint there was only one scanning line as well.

We had checked in everything but Richard’s backpack and my purse and finally asked the people ahead of us, with it visually clear that we were not going to hold them up by messing with our luggage, Would they mind, could we go ahead? We were about to miss our flight.

Now, on our way into Atlanta on Wednesday, we found that there was another train that was running from our terminal to baggage claim–and nobody was running that train. It sat. Thousands of people gave up and walked, dodging latecomers running at us playing rollaboard derby. It was not a wide hallway. I have never seen anything quite like it.

We’d been walking quite some way when an airport employee stood at one point in the forever hallway to announce that it was a 12 minute walk to baggage claim from that point and that the train would be there in half a minute.

She repeated that over several minutes as no train came.

At last one did open its doors and loaded disbelieving people and did what it was supposed to do.

So we had visions of no train in the terminal again and a real good idea of how long a walk that was.

The entire TSA-impaired line graciously motioned us forward. We thanked each person as they nodded and said yes and we continued on past them towards the scanner area.

And then an agent hauled Richard aside and said she wanted to check his backpack–too many electronics in there.

Please??? Our plane’s already boarding, see, it says 4:15 on the pass….

She apologized and moved as fast as she humanly could. She had to have been tired. That line was horrendous and nobody was backing her up either.

I asked Richard to pack slip-on Birkenstocks for the next time he had to put his shoes back on at an airport as we ran.

The new train did what it was supposed to. (I narrowly managed to keep him from getting on one going the opposite direction again.)

Gate 20 noIreadthatwrongsorryit’s10keepgoing! as we ran.

The stewardess was talking to someone while somehow draping herself across three seats at the front of the plane, relaxed, and when she saw that really tall guy coming in, stepped aside and offered the seat to him and then motioned me over too. Given that his knees do not go behind airplane seats in front of him, they just don’t, this was huge: we got the bulkhead!

I’m typing while a load of laundry is washing away so that he can go to work with socks and underwear in the morning.

Atlanta (other than that) was beautiful, wonderful, our nephew found himself a bride that–well, she reminded me of the tease my son’s mother-in-law gave all of ourselves when she said, You know it’s a good match when both families feel like they’re getting the better end of the deal.

Yup. We all are. Holly’s a peach.

Richard and I stayed at my sister’s. She invited us to come a few days early and just hang out and visit and see the sights with her and her husband and play with her twin grandbabies and finally get to meet her daughter-in-law. I’m so glad we went.

And next time we’ll know how to get around Hatfield Airport.

Elvis’s voice on the GPS.

The bride was gorgeous and the groom so very happy too. A very very happy day.

I started a new hat but there was no need: the twins’ mom is thrilled with the two handknit hats made for her babies. Who are just the cutest.

That’s okay, I know who the new one will be for. Right on it.

There is nothing like that moment of blinking in utter disbelief at randomly running into someone you last saw at high school graduation many states away. I guess the Diablo salmon at that place really is that good (it was).

More later.

I went to the audiologist and got the wax out of my hearing aids.

Then I went to the doctor and got the wax out of my ears. Which are always responding to the expensive foreign objects in them by trying to flush them out–amazing how much better hearing aids work with clear airways.

“Any other concerns I should know about?” my good doctor asked me.

I mentioned the bit of a bug, the bit of a flare (83/55 bp, I’ve certainly done lower), being a bit tired, but, eh. No big deal. And in passing I mentioned the peaches and the listeria recall.

She said most cases are low-level illnesses that end quickly with no real concern, for the healthy, anyway. But: in rare cases there’s a lag time of about a month and then it can really go to town, including meningitis. “So,” she counseled, “tell your family to be on the lookout in case you start acting weird.”

Start? …Seriously?!

Too tired (almost) to type. Had a great time. Happy Birthday to Phyllis! *confetti* *noisemakers* *candles* *friends* Huzzah!

The other six in our group took a walking San Francisco chocolatiers tour and then the two of us met up with them afterwards at Borobudur, an Indonesian restaurant. Richard and I (who managed to score a parking spot directly across the street in a perfect no-sun-for-you! moment) were the only ones there who hadn’t been to Bali; for the divers in the group the flavors held many memories. For us it was just very good.

We regrouped for key lime pie chez Phyl and Lee and to watch some sea life videos.

A superb day.  (Do I mention here that that double-decker part of the freeway, the one that’s still standing, still creeps me out every time we drive over it twenty-five years and many inspections after the Loma Prieta earthquake and the collapse of the Cypress Structure? No I don’t. Okay then.)

And a good time was had by all.

Finished the hats for my sister’s grandtwins and then her daughter-in-law posted pictures on Facebook of the babies wearing outfits she didn’t know would match the hats she doesn’t yet know about. Cool.

And.

The manager called.

I was immediately impressed and could tell why he’s the one that got that job. He apologized, he took responsibility when I told him I hoped Corporate hadn’t come down hard on him when it was something he personally hadn’t done; he brushed that off with making it about me and about my being taken good care of. He was diplomatic towards the employees involved while still making it clear they were accountable for what they do on the job.

I told him they could maybe have been doing work I knew nothing about and couldn’t see.

He countered with making sure I knew his name, his assistant manager’s name, and to ask for them should there ever be a problem again. “You don’t need to stand in that line.”

I told him I’d almost plunked down on the floor at the end of it but for fear of being run over by a cart. I also said they were young and they had no life experience dealing with people who are different, and my case is pretty unique and I knew it.

They were to take care of their customers and if ever they don’t I was to come to him.

And that was clearly important to him personally. He took pride in his store running well for everybody, his customers and his employees both. I could not have asked for a better response. Oh, and re my wondering why on earth they would want hundreds of pounds of contaminated fruit brought back in there, exposing people needlessly?

“Bring the box. Just the box.”

Got it. I like it. The way it should be. Well done, sir.

—————-

(Side note: Wait. Having just written that last line–I always feel like I have to go back and explain to Californians just to make sure they know that that’s not snark, that calling someone sir is a mark of respect when you grew up south of the Mason-Dixon line like I did and he very much earned that respect. He was the perfect diplomat: very much in charge but also thoughtful of all others.)

Michelle told us she’s been baking ganache-filled cupcakes, and I can just picture the chocolate being folded into the flour mixture. Sing it with me: While my Guittard gently wheats…

George Harrison died not in London as I would have thought but in Los Angeles thirteen years ago, and it turns out a pine tree was planted in a park there in his name.

We’ve had drought across California, we’ve had heat, and in the end the city was sorry to have to notify Harrison’s widow as they took it down that it was gone, promising to plant a new tree to replace it.

It had been done in by the beetles.

Someone among the empty-nesters and retirees at church decided we all ought to get together and throw ourselves a mid-week pot-luck lunch just because. I didn’t know it was in the works till the invite arrived in the mail.

Hey, any reason to have a good time together is fine by me–I was looking forward to it. Hazelnut torte, anyone?

And then it turned out that one person whom I don’t know well very kindly offered to host it in her gloriously gardened back yard and to cook it all, too. She not only loves to cook, she’s actually a caterer and everything she does is exquisite. No protests about sharing the burden allowed, she was doing this was for fun. And no one would get stuck with vacuuming duty afterwards.

But when I found out the change in venue it meant I had to quietly say to the person who started all this that I wouldn’t be able to make it after all. I’m an indoor cat, shut the door. She was horrified at the exclusion but I said hey, if you don’t live with it you don’t think of it and that’s perfectly okay–it’s actually a compliment, it means they think of me as simply me, not as That Lupus Patient.

Now, I have no idea if anyone else in that group found out anything of that one-on-one conversation or if my situation (which I didn’t mention to anyone else) had anything to do with it. They didn’t say. But Sunday the husband of a third woman in that group tapped me on the shoulder and offered me a beautifully wrapped small gift. As I exclaimed in wonder and looked back at him questioningly–why?!–he simply told me it was from his wife and beat a hasty retreat.

It was a set of note cards that looked like beautiful quilts, so much so that I had to touch the one on top to make sure that it wasn’t actually a tiny one that maybe she had made?  (She’s a quilter.) There was no note, no explanation. I was completely blown away.

And of course I used the first one to write her a thank you note. (And had to put off mailing it a day because I had to ask Richard when he got home from work if he had their address in his phone–“The white house on the corner of X and Y” probably wouldn’t have done it for the post office.)

It’ll get there.

And I strongly feel we should have everyone sign another for our catering friend.

Tonight I set the treadmill faster and went longer than usual, thinking a thank you towards all of you who prayed or Thought Good Thoughts my way after yesterday’s post.

Yesterday I’d set it to super-slow and still stopped it at two minutes when my blood pressure kept relentlessly dropping rather than picking up along with the pace. Air was feeling like a rare thing. Not comforting. I knew the drill from my tilt table test: down NOW and feet up. Breathe deep.

To explain: a dozen years ago, my lupus was attacking my autonomic nervous system the first and worst time with that test confirming it in the hospital, an alarm sounding, people running. My blood pressure was at 63/21, heart rate 44. They stopped it and pulled my feet in the air.

Today was so very much better. And I got to be super-grateful all over again.

And.

My friend Karen at church had her sons and their wives in town for a family reunion and the cousins were all toddlers having a great time being cute together.

At one point at the end I saw a woman I didn’t know minding two little ones that I instantly pegged as Karen’s, clearly; the younger one in her lap wasn’t having a meltdown but he was definitely edging towards it: traveling, strange places, strange people, three hours of church, waiting for Daddy to stop talking to his old friends over there. Enough for one day! He threw his paper airplane down with all the energy he could crash-land it with.

The mom looked ready for a good dinner, too; I think it was more for her sake that I pulled out a finger puppet and asked her if he might like to have it.

It changed everything. Suddenly she had a friend to talk to. Someone who thought her kids were adorable. Seeing her. With no expectations nor requirements on her.

It was like the balloon had been increasingly under pressure and suddenly it popped and she could breathe. Her delight at that little bit of handknitting and the appreciation in her face made my day and we chatted like old friends catching up while her little boy explored that puppet with her.

And if she’d put her feet up on that couch right there in that hallway I would have cheered her on.

Tag-teaming with the lupus today. I was expecting a friend over and I wanted to spruce up a bit.

Wait, wait, not so fast there.

Can I do this. Yes. Alright, then, dishes after breakfast, done.

Can I scrub that. Not without collapsing. Okay, then, that will have to stay imperfect–how do two adults with no little kids around anymore get a floor in need of being swept again two days after the last time? But mopping, not happening. How about this? Okay, then, laundry, mostly done.  I rested and I made progress and at one point I put my feet up and cast on the next Colinette hat.

But rather than feeling growly or worried that things were flaring a little more than I’d like, I found myself mentally giving a brief nod at all the things that weren’t going wrong medically that had before and simply rejoicing at the great gift that it is to be alive. To be able to love. To have been raised by parents who love me, to have been able to turn around and give that to my children in turn, and best of all, to see the payoff in how very well my grandchildren are being parented, with much thanks to Kim’s parents and grandparents too.

Got to see some new pictures today of 15-month-old Hudson helping his cousin out by eating most of Hayes’s birthday cupcake for him. You want all that? Nah, it’s a little much, here, have some. Thanks! Um, wait, that was a lot.

Hayes. A year already! What an intense joy after all those prayers to see him growing and interacting and perfectly fine.

The friend’s day changed such that there was just no way she could make the long drive here and back up clear across San Francisco and beyond after all the traveling she’s been doing. She was so sorry.

I know fatigue. I would have loved to have seen her while she’s back in California, but I totally understood how it was, no problem. I’m just glad we got that close.

And as I knit I anticipated happy faces to come. It’s all good.

Kaye at the shop put a bunch of hand-dyed Colinette yarns on the front table, marked way down.

Superwash merino? $2.25?! Seriously?

“I wanted to see what people would do with it.” It had been sitting in the back unnoticed for awhile but now everybody was going through it and stacks of skeins were going home.

Thus this hat, and as I finished up the simple pattern my brain had time to think of other hands around the world, busily creating…

All these years that I’ve bought those sweet little fingerpuppets knit in Peru by women able to put food on their tables for my purchases. All the small children and their tired parents here who have received one of those puppets, meltdowns diverted.

What if…

I was chatting with one of Sahar‘s American friends last night and asked her if she knew Truman Madsen, the late BYU professor who used to run tour groups in Israel in the summers. Turns out she had been in Israel just after he retired.

He was my mom’s cousin, I told her, and my folks went on the last tour he gave. He took Mom into a shop owned by Palestinian women selling their handicrafts (what town was that, Mom?) and Mom picked out a hand-embroidered apron (purple stitches, if I remember right) and then one for each of her daughters. I treasure mine.

Truman’s reaction was to exclaim that her mother had bought the same thing in the same shop!

I know there are talented women in the West Bank and Gaza and I wonder how much of a difference we could make by buying from them, whether we could help make their lives easier–I would certainly think so. (Typing that and going looking…) I found this and oh look! This!

It says their embroidery work is a connection to their mothers and their grandmothers.

As it is, now, to my own.

Five dollars for a small olivewood bowl made in Bethlehem from locally sourced wood, ten for a carved candlestick, beautiful. One to fourteen of those bowls is $30 shipping, the fifteenth kicks it up to $40.

I am suddenly wondering who around here would go in on an order with me.

And I wonder what it must be like to get a package to the postal service there. Any arriving order would surely have its own story to tell.

One of the most important talks I have ever heard in my life. I didn’t quite know what to expect going in but came away going, wow. I want to live up to what I just felt in that room.

I’m not sure I can do it justice, but let me try.

She was born in Jerusalem but is not allowed to live there now. She is Palestinian.  She is Arab. She is Christian–and she is a Mormon. I had badly wanted to hear what she had to say, whatever it might be; how often do we get to hear firsthand the in-person experiences from that part of the world?

It was not a political talk, it was a human talk. She described a little of what it’s like to live where she does–and what it’s like to try to simply go to church. Church was too important to her not to go: church was where she held onto the Spirit of God, to help her follow the promptings of that Love beyond all human understanding. Her circumstances made it so very clear how badly that was needed in the world. “Both sides think the other is” she shook her head, “horrible. But we are *all* children of God.”

She’s the Primary president there, ie the one running the program for the little ones on up to age twelve.

There are four small congregations in Israel, and if you are Palestinian, she said there are people who live 15 minutes from one but they have to travel for two and a half, three hours to go to a much farther one, because to go to the one nearby requires going through a checkpoint and if you don’t have the paperwork that would allow it you simply can’t get there. And you might not be let through anyway. And that checkpoint would take two to three hours, always, as it is.

She told us this: “Picture someone most dear to you. Your spouse, your parent, your child. Someone you love more than anything.”

She let us consider that for a moment. And then she asked us to think of someone who had done something terrible to us, just egregious, someone we found hard to forgive. Then she asked us to picture those two people side by side and asked us, “Can you love them both equally?”

As that sank in, “God does.” And she put up a slide asking, Have you been

Sexually abused.

Seen someone killed in front of you.

Been shot at.

Had a relative tortured.

She told us, gesturing at those words, “I have.”

She told us what it’s like to be a Palestinian at a checkpoint subject to the whim of whoever was on duty at the time. She showed a picture of men lined up, heads down, hands against the wall, with an Israeli soldier armed and dangerous standing over them. They had simply been trying to go to work.

She was at that checkpoint to try to go to church. And it hit her that she could not live her religion and be angry at those soldiers; they were children of God just as much as everybody else on this planet. Love the sinners, all of them, we are all sinners, and she said it was not easy and it most certainly wasn’t instantaneous. It took a lot of prayer, constant prayer, over a long time, sometimes fasting to gain the strength she so much wanted to have.

And then the day simply, quietly, unexpectedly came. She had to go through that resented checkpoint as at so many other times. And yet. That day, she saw an Israeli soldier and found herself completely, utterly loving him as a son of our Heavenly Father, capable of such great goodness, the scene at hand utterly apart from what he truly meant to God. She saw the best in him and felt a love from God for his sake that transformed her.

And that is how she always wants to feel. It is so hard but it is so necessary not to lose sight of that.

She described the prayer of a four-year-old in that Primary: not asking for food, though Sahar knew their family did not have enough to eat, but for Him to watch over her mother.

We make peace one person and one interaction at a time. And that is no small thing.

People here used to call northern California mellow. With a bit of a sense of superiority: we’re not crowded, we’re not Hollywood-shallow, we’re not into road rage. We don’t say the 101 or the 5 or the anything, the freeways are simply 101, 280, 580, etc, not titles nor entitled but simply an uncomplicated way to get from point a to point b.

A generation later the traffic is pretty intense in the Bay Area too and I haven’t heard anyone call this part of the state mellow in a long time.

I can’t begrudge other people moving here–after all, we did.

It was 7:30 and I was on my way to Purlescence. Past the one-time failed mall being taken apart, hundreds of trees down, the place raw and open, the rebuilding part not yet begun. Twenty-seven years of having that at the foot of the neighborhood and I’d never actually seen the sides of the place before but you sure can now.

I hit lots of green lights and things moved mostly steadily, rare at rush hour, to be rarer soon.

The moon was huge and full. Gentle light, unlike the painful intensity of the sun behind us, it was bright and white against the turquoise of the late sunlit summer sky, dancing a duet with the road, bouncing off the top of that pine, then that long tall redwood, always ahead and always on our side of the expressway. Those singing cartoons from my childhood with the bouncing ball jumping across the top of each word as it was sung so you could follow along (and maybe learn to read to the music)? Like that.  And so big it took up a lot of the view.

I came to the major intersection where two different large roads feed in from the sides and type A drivers are always trying to elbow ahead, always, always pushing to get past all these countless others in the way of them and their dinner and wheredidallthesepeoplecomefrom.

They’d had to drive down ramps that had them facing into that moon, too.

This time there was a nod and an aye for an aye, tooth for a tooth, smooth unhampered zippering all the way, not a single slamming of the brakes just a steady flowing together in the moon’s river.

Mellow.

I could only wonder if anyone else noticed that it had made their cars behave so well.

Sometimes all we really need is a silent moment in the presence of Nature.

Get your name listed privately with the auctioneer, now you can buy your very own.

The guy inherited a fortune.

The guy liked tanks.

And so the guy collected…tanks.

And the guy built a house that had clearly been designed to mimic a very spacious one.

And he built a room (to use the word expansively) off that house with a huge pipe organ in it and seating for a crowd. He invited our friend Jim to play it–the former-world-traveling-concert-organist music professor who helped a Catholic priest brush up on his skills because he was going to go play for the Pope. That sort of thing. (Jim also taught our son Richard, who would go on to minor in organ performance in college.)

Jacques Littlefield invited the Boy Scouts to come tour his tanks and listen to Jim play.

I remember staring at Jim’s email and thinking, he wants to show us his…tanks? Like, real, TANKS? And he has them HERE?!

But so we did, and we got a tour with the enthusiastic owner himself. Each tank had a history to it that Littlefield knew well. They were still functional, too, all or most I don’t remember, although the town required him to have them disarmed before they could come.

There at the end of one driveway was the propeller from the Lusitania.

Turns out the man found out he had cancer not long after that day that we met him.

Reading about the breaking up of Littlefield’s collection after his passing, that building, we’ve been there. There were certain tanks that all those young boys were allowed to climb into to check them out as the guy grinned.

He told the tale that Hollywood had come calling, wanting to have such a perfect period-specific prop in their movies. They set a bond in case anything should happen–and then they blew the dang thing up and happily paid up, having planned to do just that all along.

It still stung and he never allowed it again. Let them find their own $@# tanks if they couldn’t respect his.

There will be a museum now in Massachusetts. And some will be sold.

Y’know? My collection of wool and silk and baby alpaca yarn and fiber? I mean, to each their own and that’s fine, but I think I get to feel supremely reasonable about it all.

And it would be a darn sight easier to give away.

Oh wait. Post-assembly, I already do. Knit on, then.