Sweet Reminders

            Let me make one thing crystal clear – I don’t like to cook. It’s just not on my list of favorites, which is funny because ‘eating’ definitely made the cut. Also awarded a place in my priorities, even higher than eating and trying to invent new holidays for reasons to dine out, is helping my children. That explains why I offered to cook for my daughter Elise.

          She was invited to a potluck dinner and didn’t have time to prepare a dish. I quickly convinced her to let me cook something to bring. I thumbed through a rarely used recipe book, chose a shrimp and pasta dish, grabbed my car keys, and headed to the store.

          My mom will now have to stop reading for a moment to catch her breath. She never tries a new recipe on others until she has practiced it first. Only when it meets her approval, will she cook another batch to serve. I’d be lying if I said I don’t have time for that. I’d also be lying if I said I taste the food as I cook. None of this is my mom’s fault. She tried.

         Back to my shrimp dish. I assembled the ingredients and fired up the range. Shrimp, butter, seasonings, cream, and cheese were all getting along and blending to form an aromatic dish. The recipe also called for flour, so I grabbed a canister, and removed the pan from the heat before adding it (to avoid lumps). I hesitated for a moment, shrugged, scooped and stirred in the new ingredient. At this point I entertained the foreign-to-me idea to taste.

         It was so sweet! Adding powdered sugar to sauce does that. I tried liberal doses of salt, garlic powder and crab boil which helped, but never masked the sweetness. I started all over.

        Yes, the addition of sugar changes a dish just as the words we speak change situations. Proverbs 16:24 is as clear about that as I am about my feelings toward cooking. “Pleasant words are a honeycomb, sweet to the soul and healing to the bones.” A kind word can invigorate, strengthen and turn a person’s day around. It’s a practice I highly recommend and sincerely appreciate when I am on the receiving end.  My little powdered sugar/flour mix-up was a great reminder of the power of words.

        I learned a couple of other lessons that day. From now on, I will pay more attention to what I’m doing and I will always be prepared. I’ve already got a plan.

        The next time Elise asks me to cook for her, I’ll tell her that it’s National Order Your Kid A Meal for their Friend’s Potluck day.

Ronny may be reached at rmichel@rtconline.com. 

Walking in My Own Steps

            If you think you’re read the following column before, you may be right. Although I wrote it a while back, it’s been stuck in my head for the past few days, especially when I sit and begin to write about something else. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I should submit it again, and yes, I have thought that maybe I’m the person who needs to revisit this lesson. Anyway, here it is:

Growing up with two sisters had many advantages. Over the years, Kay, Ann, and I have shared numerous things including rooms, secrets, advice and clothes. It was great having someone to talk to and truthfully answer the question, “How do I look?”

I also enjoyed going into their closets and emerging with a whole new outfit. We even invaded my mom’s closet and proudly wore her things, too. But we most often wore each other’s shoes. The fact that we didn’t wear the same size never really bothered us. We were just happy to have such a variety of footwear. Life was pretty smooth until the day my Dad discovered we had been swapping shoes.

            “You’re not supposed to wear other people’s shoes. You’re just going to ruin your feet. Other shoes don’t fit right and you won’t be able to walk,” he said.

            “But Daddy,” we argued, “We’re saving you money. You won’t have to buy as many pairs if we just share.”

            “I don’t care,” he insisted. “I’ll buy all of you as many pairs of shoes as you want.  Just wear your own shoes.”

            I wish that I could remember if we stopped sharing shoes after that, but even as I’m typing this, I’m reminded that we still occasionally wear each other’s boots. (Clothes, too.) Sorry, Dad. But the older I get, the more I realize how wise my parents are. It does feel strange to wear someone else’s shoes. Even if they are the same size, they don’t fit as well as your own shoes fit. And think of how awkward little girls walk when they try to wear their mother’s high heels. Wearing your own shoes just feels better.

            The same is true when we try to be like someone else and attempt to walk in their steps. Have you ever thought that your life would be better if you just had your brother-in-law’s job, or your co-worker’s family, or your neighbor’s house? I think that if we were somehow allowed a minute of someone else’s life it would be as awkward as walking in someone else’s shoes. We’d probably wobble like a little girl in high heels, or trip like a little boy in his Dad’s boots. 

God often reminds me of Psalm 37:23, “The steps of a good man are ordered by the Lord.”  Not only does this give me peace about my future, it also encourages me to walk in the steps that my Father has laid out for me. My steps fit me. When I walk in my God-ordained steps I can walk confidently and securely. But I’ve noticed that if I try to walk outside of what God has called me to do, I wobble and I trip until I return to the steps that line my own path of life.

            May contentment, grace, and joy abound as we flow in God’s will for our lives.

Sweet Distractions

     This is not the column I intended to submit. It was supposed to be about cursive writing. Granted, first you would have had to get over the irony of me typing a column about the benefits of cursive writing, but after that I think it would have been an interesting topic. Y’all, I had research and everything. Then life happened.

     I was asked to watch my granddaughter Olivia and thought, “Olivia entertains herself. I can type while she plays.”  Ha!

     Whenever the two baby strollers Olivia insisted on using got stuck, she screamed. An ear-splitting, bolting from my chair, is there blood? sound I didn’t think possible from the sweet looking one-year-old who wore an “I love my papa” shirt. As soon as I helped her, she would smile and continue on her way until another bump in her road. Smile. Shriek. Smile. Screech.

     I longingly looked at my chair by the fireplace and thought, “Only a couple of hours ago, I sat there to read, pray and write in my journal while I sipped a cup of hot coffee. It seems so long ago.”

     When Olivia rubbed her eyes, I rocked her to the nap that took mere seconds for her to find and gently placed her down where she slept for almost an hour. When she stirred I ran to pick her up and rocked her for almost another hour during which I may or may not have dozed off.

     The next day I was asked to watch my other granddaughter Adeline and bring her to get a flu shot. “I can type while she plays,” I naively thought for the second consecutive day.

     I spent the morning reassuring Adeline that yes, I would bring her to her sitter, and yes, she would see her sitter soon. In the meantime, she abandoned her fruit to eat my yogurt, placed strips of scotch tape all over the house like it was her job, and didn’t stop talking.

     “I go outside,” she said.

     “I’m trying to write a column.”

     “I go outside,” she repeated, so we went outside to water plants and write with chalk on the patio.

     “That’s okay,” I thought. “I will still have time after her flu shot to read through the research on cursive writing and complete the column.”

     As soon as I dropped Adeline off at her beloved sitter, I sat at my desk and heard a key in the lock of the front door. Victoria, my college sophomore, had come home for a visit.

     “We can go to lunch as soon as I finish my column.” I offered.

     “I’ll go to the gym while you do that,” she said.

     “Trying to make me feel guilty about not going to the gym since last week?”

     “Not at all,” she said. “I just hate the sound of you typing.”

     Another point in favor of cursive writing - it’s quiet.

Ronny may be reached at rmichel@rtconline.com.

Eighty Years of Photos

            “So, Dad,  your eightieth birthday’s coming up. How do you want to celebrate? I’m not giving you a surprise party.”

            “Y’all surprised me for my seventieth birthday.”

            “We did?” I listened as he reminded me of the time he found the family in the rear of a restaurant, waiting to commemorate his seventy years of life.

            “Oh, yeah, that was fun, but what do you want to do this year?”

            After very little discussion, he decided that he just wanted a low-key family dinner: no cake, no candles, no singing, and I’m sure he meant to say no gifts. I’ll have to check. He called Sno’s to set it up and since I’ve had nothing to do for the big day, I decided to gather photographs for my daughter and son-in-law to put onto a DVD.

            Ever go through eighty years of pictures? It was an emotional journey through time as memories lured by snapshots swam to the surface of my mind. I have relived my grandmother’s birthday parties, (figuring her age by the approximate ages of the children in the pictures), weddings, graduations and so many ordinary days when someone thoughtfully picked up a camera and captured a moment.

While I’m grateful for each and every photographer and family member who has held on to these printed memories, I wish names and dates had been written on more of them. My family spent the past week pouring over pictures and  guessing identities and ages, but speculation was unnecessary when it came to the photographs of two dogs. Yes, dogs. I turned over the picture of the first one to find “DASHER”  printed neatly on the back and “taken by Eula Duhon” right above it. A name and a photo credit! The picture of the other dog was also labeled: “Skippy,” three and a half months, 3/12/43. Name, age, date. If only the succeeding generations had followed this lead.

The project of collecting pictures for my dad’s birthday DVD was fun and led to another one: little by little I will write information on the backs of pictures for my granddaughters to one day read.

I’ve even thought of a project, but it’s one my dad has to work on. I want him to record his stories. Maybe I will get him a birthday gift after all. A digital recorder sounds nice.

Ronny may be reached at rmichel@rtconline.com.

Go For It

            It was a Friday afternoon at the beginning of 1991. I sat in a gym waiting for Monique’s dance class to end, Operation Desert Storm dominated the national news, and I announced to my friends that I was expecting my fourth child.

As excited as I was about the new baby, the round-the-clock television broadcasts of the war concerned me. I wanted to welcome a baby into a gentle world free of conflict. Only when I remembered Jeremiah 29 did I find peace.

A portion of the letter Jeremiah sent to the captives in Babylon instructed them to “Build houses and settle down; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Marry and have sons and daughters.” God used a message written over 500 years before the birth of Christ to tell me to go on with my life and keep moving forward even when life was not perfect.

Calm and quiet Elise Ann was born in September of that year and has grown into an independent thinker with a stubborn streak marbled throughout her sweet soul. I’m not sure how she acts when I’m not around, but I was proud of the way she held her tongue recently while we shopped.  

Elise grabbed my purchase to carry to the car and I said, “Don’t worry, it’s not heavy.”

She laughed, “Not for you. I’m the one carrying it.”

A passerby said, “That’s what wrong with your generation. Y’all are lazy. I don’t know what’s going to happen.”

I was too surprised to respond and Elise kept walking. It would have been pointless to stop to defend Elise and her generation. Given a do-over, I’d question the stranger’s decision to label an entire generation with one word and ask if encouragement might be better than judgment.

Do I have any concerns about this generation? Absolutely. And the last one and the next one. I’ve never lived in a perfect time or place and won’t until Heaven. Until then, I will keep praying, moving forward and encouraging others to do the same.

I’d like to look forward to the future with the same excitement as John Erskine. Once an English professor at Colombia University and president of Julliard School of Music, Erskine was also a writer, composer and musician. His wife wrote, “He was a good teacher because of his own excitement for learning and his trust in the future.” He would tell her: “Let’s tell our young people that the best books are yet to be written; the best paintings have not yet been painted; the best governments are yet to be formed; the best is yet to be done by them.”

To Elise and her generation, I say, “Go for it.”