PROGRESS

My grandparents were born at the turn of the century and lived long lives—I used to marvel at the degree of change they experienced in their lifetimes.  They were born into homes without telephones or automobiles.   I didn’t figure I’d ever see that amount of transformation in my life—everything we needed had already been invented.

But I grew up in a home without air-conditioning, as did most of my friends.  I remember hot sweaty nights, lying on the top of the bed without covers, a fan pointed directly at me.  My parents later had central air installed, but when I got my married it was back to the fans.  On particularly hot summer nights we’d run the tub full of cold water and soak in it every few hours.  After a few years, we got two noisy window air conditioners—a big one in the living room and a small one in our bedroom.  The roar in your ears was a trade-off for the heat.  My two oldest sons may remember a few years without an air-conditioned house, but the youngest has always had the luxury of central air.

I saw my first microwave oven on the day my mother took me to see The Sound of Music at the Trail Theater in downtown St. Joseph, in the mid 1960s.  They were doing a demonstration at the appliance store next door to the theater, and had drawn quite a crowd.  People were taking turns crowding around to watch cupcakes rise right before their eyes, and then oohing and aahing as the salesmen reached in and pulled the dishes out without any hotpads.

But it was years before the microwave took off among the people I knew—what use really was it?  Cupcakes could be made easily in a conventional oven.  My parents got us one as a wedding gift fifteen years after that.  I quickly discovered it could do more than bake cupcakes.

When I was a senior in high school, I got a job in a local hardware store.  This was a big step up from working at Kentucky Fried Chicken, which I did for three years.  The owner bought a Betamax video camera, and I was quite enthralled—this was the first video camera I had ever seen.    She hooked it up so that she could watch the register from the office.  I think it was after that that I began to hear about people recording TV programs to play back later whenever they wanted!  I was used to having only three channels, and knowing if you missed something you had wanted to see, you missed it.

I remember later, when my boys were growing up, telling them that I had grown up without a microwave and without a VCR.  I remember being asked, with wide-eyed wonder, “How did you live?” Actually, we managed quite well, thank you!

I think if I were to tell a child today the same thing, the question would instead be, “What’s a VCR?”  They’re now obsolete.

And can we imagine a life today without the internet?  Without information on every subject imaginable available instantly?  My dad loved his set of World Book Encyclopedias, and referred to them often.  Does anyone today have encyclopedias?  Why?

It’s progress.  That is, I think so.

SMEDES

MENAGERIE UPDATE

St. Francis of Assisi

One night last week I walked through the kitchen and glanced through the sliding glass door where Brian was sitting reading on the deck. I noticed one of our three cats, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, eating from the bowl of food by the backdoor, just a few feet away from where Brian sat. But I looked again at the cat—his tail looked a little fuller and fatter, and I moved around to see his face. It wasn’t Fyo, the calico cat, it was a RACCOON! I rapped on the window to get Brian’s attention—he turned around and then yelled “Hey!”  The critter looked at him calmly for a minute, and then stuck his face back in the bowl.  “Hey, get out of here!” Brian yelled again, and got up to chase him off.  The coon reluctantly ambled over to the steps and down. Leo, the big yellow tomcat, (that’s Leo Tolstoy) who had been sprawled out under the table got up when Brian yelled, and walked placidly down the steps with the coon.

The raccoon tried to come back again later, but was again chased off.  But the next evening after dinner, when Brian was again sitting out on the deck with his book, he felt something brush up against his leg.  Thinking it was probably Leo, his favorite cat, he reached down and was very surprised to find it was the RACCOON!  The other cats were on the deck, not a bit bothered by the newcomer.  We’ve decided Brian has picked up on the St. Francis of Assisi anointing—or perhaps Noah?

Brian came in to tell me, and I said if we were going to have another pet, he needed a name.  I suggested Sparky.  He objected, and said all our pets needed to have literary names.  We have Leo and Fyo, named after the Russian giants, and then there’s  Buechner, (pronounced Beekner, after Frederick).   And so I amended my suggestion from Sparky to Gabriel Garcia Marquez.  But Brian preferred to name the raccoon Salmon Rushdie.

We were telling some friends the story the next day, and the day after that, got an e-mail from someone else who’d heard it.  He was concerned the raccoon might be rabid, and suggested we shoot it.  We don’t have a gun, but we haven’t seen that coon since.  Salmon Rushdie has had death threats before, and once went into hiding for several years after the publication of his novel The Satanic Verses.  We figured that coon didn’t want to take any chances.

A week went by, and then one evening while I was out watering some flowers, I found a huge snapping turtle in the yard.  I went inside and got my husband, St. Francis, who said it couldn’t be a snapping turtle.  He came out and looked at it, poked it with a stick, and it about snapped his hand off.  He now agrees it is a snapping turtle.  And while we were standing there looking at the turtle, I saw Salman the raccoon lope across the backyard!

Philip picked up the turtle and carried it down by the woods from where he’d probably come.  He was just a few feet away from the road, and we really didn’t want him to get smashed by a car.  He still had the stick Brian had poked him with clenched between his teeth, looking like a big stogey.  All three cats joined us then, Leo, Fyo, and Buechner, who took turns sniffing him and jumping away when he jerked his head. 

I assumed he’d be gone the next morning, but when I woke up and looked out my bedroom window, I saw three cats in a row, their heads poked through the rails in the deck, standing at attention, staring intently at something below.  I couldn’t see anything, but a few minutes later, the turtle emerged from the irises.  And Leo, the brave one, trotted down the stairs to investigate.  When he was about twenty feet away, he began to creep up on the turtle, like a lion stalking his prey.  But he stopped ten feet away, and then was afraid to come any closer.  Fyo and  Buechner were even less valiant than Leo, and stayed safely up on the deck, totally mesmerized by our new family member, the stone that moves.

I’ve named him Herman Melville.

TAKING OUT THE TRASH

On Tuesday our church staff put our regular tasks aside to go pick up trash.  No, it wasn't glamorous.  But I had been aghast at the huge amount of trash that had been thrown out of car windows defiling our fair city, and decided we could at least take care of the two roads leading to our church building.  It was overcast and windy, which made our job a little less pleasant, but doing it together made it fun.

Walking about four miles of roadway, we filled approximately fifty large trash bags--that is, a full pickup bed and two trailers, which filled up an empty dumpster, and that’s not including the decomposing deer carcass.  It was an unbelievable amount of trash.

Some observations we made:

1.Beer drinkers in our city are decidedly health conscious—almost all the bottles were lite beer, and Miller Lite seems to be on top.

2.The beer bottles outnumbered the soda cans 10-1.  We decided this doesn’t mean ten times more beer than soda pop gets consumed in our city, but that beer drinkers are more likely to toss their trash out the window.  We found a surprising amount of full, unopened bottles of beer—perhaps people are worried about getting caught with it in their cars?

3.Most of the paper trash is related to fast food.

4.There was very little other trash of any interest whatsoever.

5.All that bending, stretching, squatting, and hefting is far more exhausting than you would think. 

I was excited to drive to work the next morning.  I was anticipating seeing an amazing difference.  It did look much cleaner.  It looked different to me, since I had been so aware and disgusted by the mess.  But driving down Cook Road, I admitted to myself that the absence of trash is not something people notice.  What gets noticed is TRASH.  I was also quite indignant to notice the Hardee’s sack and two drink cups that had shown up overnight.

TRASH.  It’s the ugly part of life, but admittedly, there’s a lot of it.  There was far more laying there by the side of the road than we would have guessed.  And there’s not much glory in picking it up.  But I’m glad we did, even though it will re-accumulate, and need to be done again.

I’m a Christian, a follower of Jesus.  Last Friday’s message at church asked the revealing question, “Why Do You Want to be a Christian?”  That’s a great question—how we answer that in our own mind will greatly affect the quality of our Christian life.  I want to be a Christian because I want to participate in God’s plan to redeem creation, and creation includes me.  I recognize the world is full of trash—I not only want to go pick it up on the streets, but I want to get it out of my life and help others to get it out of theirs.  So what we did was a prophetic declaration of what we’ve committed our lives as a church staff to.

We could have looked at the trash, condemned it, said, “That’s not my trash.”  That’s what good Pharisees would do.  Jesus joined the human race and gave himself up to the purpose of redeeming creation.  I deal every day with trash in the lives of people who are in the process of being salvaged.  Picking up beer bottles and paper was a bit of a break, but a reminder that what we do everyday is eternally valuable.