Category Archives: Personal Issues
Protected: Sunday and Monday
Protected: Friday and Saturday
Flowering The Grave
Someone who is related to our parish in several ways had twins on Sunday and the younger twin (N) died on Wednesday. N had been born with heart problems and she wasn’t expected to live even those three days. Jon did the burial service for her on Friday and my contribution was to stay home and pray. (I’m a younger twin, female, and my heart stopped at birth. They managed to get my heart going again but I was in ICU for three weeks. In other words, this death hit really close to home and I knew that I wasn’t going to make it through the funeral.) Jon said the funeral went well and the burial was good as well.
Yesterday, N’s aunt (who is my age) called and told us that there were flowers on the piano in her memory. This morning, N’s great-grandmother told Jon and I to take the flowers home with us after church. Jon replied that he thought we should put them on her grave instead and I agreed. After all, they were given in N’s memory and flowering her grave seemed an appropriate use for them.
After the service at the church where she was buried, I took the vase out and started taking the arrangement apart. (I was just going to put the straight bouquet on there but I found that the individual pieces were stuck in floral foam, so I had to take it apart cutting by cutting.) About halfway through this process, some of the kids and their parents came out to the grave with Jon. Jon asked them to each take a cutting and lay it on the grave and we finished laying them out. The gravesite looks so much prettier now and it was a very meaningful way for the kids to deal with N’s death.
It amazes me how simple things like this can be so profound and have such a healing effect.
Guest Blogging & Politics
While Jen is on vacation, a handful of folks have been selected as competent and trustworthy enough to keep Meditatio running as interim bloggers. It’s a humbling thing to be asked to write for someone else’s blog. Jen and I don’t see eye to eye on many things political, but we seem to have a connection when it comes to animals. She loves cats, and I hate them – but really, I think it’s that extreme emotion that builds alot into a relationship.
Just kidding. Maybe.
We do chat about politics a good bit, and it’s mostly about how everyone out there is a lying thieving crook. My big statement is that there’s no one worthy of my vote: the fact that a person runs for political office at all probably reveals a deep character flaw that should remove them from consideration. The turmoil this week over the DOJ’s handling of the prison abuses, followed by the deplorable murder and video of Nick Berg – and the subsequent political “discussion” that’s going back and forth – is enough to make me take all my talk radio presets off of my XMradio. Honestly, yesterday morning I got so irate at one commentator from AirAmerica, saying that the upcoming court-martials were “show trials” and that no one was really doing anything. It was a comment made out of hand, as the left-wing marshalls are complaining that nothing is being done and that the things being done are now the wrong things, or are now just for “show”. There are no right answers here – someone made mistakes, which led to others making mistakes, and people will have to account. But the idea that the other side – from whichever side of the political fence you’re on – is not only wrong but also evil and ignorant: that idea has no place in a society built on what we think we’re founded upon.
I don’t mind disagreement. Most of the time, a good debate or confrontation can get to the truth. But the partisanship that abounds arbitrarily around here is only bringing more division, more stress to the people who are paying attention. The people who actually are ignorant and apathetic? They’re probably a pretty brainlessly happy bunch.
peace – rick
guest blogger
Identity: The “Why I Am The Way I Am” Entry
I’ve been trying to write this blog entry since June and given some recent comments I’ve received via email, I figured that I should probably just hunker down and write it.
A few rules though if you’re going to comment:
Click on (more…) if you choose to accept these challenges.
The Story of “Lepicat”
When I was doing my CIT training and during my first summer of counselling at a Girl Scout camp, my camp name was Leprechaun. I got it when I was 13 because I’m tiny, Irish, and a little on the feisty side. A lot of the international staff couldn’t pronounce it, so they called me “Lepi”.
When I started college that fall, I needed an email ID and I didn’t want to use “jmccabe” because that would be boring. Most of the Jennifer derivatives had been taken and “leprechaun” was too long to use. The server at UCSC is “cats”, so a lot of people have cat-related email addresses. (The various servers are actually named for T.S. Eliot characters like “rumpleteazer” and “mungojerrie”.) I was going to do “lepi_jen” but that one was rejected, so I did “lepi_cat” instead.
When I acquired my group of friends (many of whom I’d met the year before when I’d been visiting my friend Cougar at UCSC), there were about 8 Jen’s. So… they nicknamed us and my normal nickname was “Lepicat Jen”. Well… that soon evolved into just “Lepicat” (though Cougar still called me Leprechaun) and someone even created a special signature symbol for me. My other nickname was “Kitty Cat” because I can sleep almost anywhere and I had a habit of crashing on people’s beds in a ball while waiting for them to take me down to Long’s to get my antibiotics. (I had almost a constant case of bronchitis my first year of college.)
So… that’s the story. My college friends still call me “Lepicat” and it’s happened where I answer the phone and the voice on the other line is screaming “Lepicat!!!!!!” (This would be my friend Brian Green, who I will be seeing for the first time in two years on the 18th while Jon is in his Approval interview.)