And now from the other son

Our other son, the one who lives in Australia and plays in a band, is not only an artist, but a talented manipulator of computer programs. One of his band members is behind the wave watching the kookaburra surfing by. Hang ten, little feathery friend!

Cat and I plan to go to Australia in August for a visit. We have never been, but some of our friends at church just returned from spending some time there with a Christian college choir. Our friends got to meet up with our son for a little while. They were really impressed by the ministry the guys are doing. The band, Zuigia, has seen scores of students come to know Christ through their ministry. I am at once proud and humbled.

Doting grandpa

OK, if you don't think this is the cutest baby named Orion, well, you just don't know cute. He is laughing now. A couple of months ago, taking a bath got him all cranky. But now he loves getting nekkid and wet. This shot was taken after a bath when he was still tickled by it all.

When Orion's father Adam was this size, I worked in the Civil Service as an English teacher for foreign military personnel. Most of my students were Saudis, but there were some Iranians and Kuwaitis also. One day I came home from work, bringing one of my students along, only to find my worn-out wife and a crying baby looking desperate for relief. Ahmed was charmed by the baby boy. He took the squalling infant in his arms and began to sing an Arabic song to him. Adam calmed down and Ahmed quickly became our favorite baby-sitter.

The students began to call me Abu Adam--"father of Adam." We had a meal with their families and Cat got to eat with the men, a rare honor. Adam had his first bite of chicken that day, and we all learned to eat with our fingers.

I wonder what happened to those young men: Ahmed with his tender heart, the Iranians who must have suffered with the overthrow of the Shah, the big Kuwaiti boy who stuttered in Arabic and only wanted to be a fisherman, not a pilot. What happened to the Yemeni colonels who declared I was a better Moslem than they because I refused their offers of liquor? That time was so long ago when we could laugh together, learn from each other, and just enjoy family life. What a terrible, terrible shame.

You making me laff

Wow, what a pile of wrong guesses you all submitted! Annie was on the right track--my dad was a banker, a loan officer in West Texas, where the world's largest harvests of cotton occur. So he might have had a customer who raised cotton. And, in fact, he did have a customer who gave him this miniature bale of cotton.

It's about the size of a medium fist and about as hard. The cotton is packed in very tightly. Of course, nowadays the cotton is transported to the gins in huge modules and the finished bales are wrapped in plastic before being shipped off to China where they can make tee shirts to sell to the US.

Did I ever tell you about the time we were at my grandparents' house and decided to go play in the cotton fields across the street? I guess I was around eight or nine. My brother, younger by three years, and I ran off after Sunday lunch to look for bugs and loose cotton in the harvested field. It didn't take very long before we discovered a long heap of gravel at the end of the field. The highway department had left a deposit and, being as we lived in Big Flat City at the time, this gravel heap represented a veritable mountain. We could climb up to the top and spy on cars whizzing by. We rolled down the sides, until landing in stickers. That ended the rolling party. Then we played chase; I tagged my brother and took off running along the ridge of our hill. My brother started shouting and as I looked back to say "What?" the surface disappeared under my feet. I had run right off the abrupt end of the hill.

Mercifully, I landed in loose gravel (better than sun-baked West Texas sod). Got a considerable gash on my knee. The worst part, though, was lying to my parents about how it happened. My brother and I agreed on a story that, while playing tag in the cotton field, I had tripped over an irrigation pipe. Seemed like that was a better tale since it did not involve having to explain what we were doing so close to the highway. I think it was the end of the week before I finally confessed my crime. Makes me wonder how many times my sons have lied to me.

New "watzat"

I ought to be painting the kitchen cabinets right now. I sanded and primed them yesterday (two coats) and the posts and pans and Tupperware containers are stacked all over the counters. But first, let's have a watzat. This was a gift to my dad, who was a banker. Neither of my siblings wanted it as we were sifting through my parents' junk, so I brought it home with me. Guess what it is.



OK, now I am going into the kitchen to get busy. Then there is bell choir practice. Oh, and we did NOT play my piece in church this morning. The program was too crowded. So we will play it on July 2 to transition between the rah-rah patriotic music and a more reflective communion. The title of the piece is "Who Will Rescue?" and one of the choir members suggested that it will "rescue" the service from a surfeit of patriotic hoopla.

Waiting and waiting and waiting

For the last hour I have been on the phone waiting for a customer "service" representative to finally activate two cell phones. I bought these phones online almost six weeks ago. The deal was that I would get the phones, a year's availability of service, and 270 minutes all for $99 each. I could add minutes at any time over the internet. Long-distance and local minutes are counted the same. Sounds good, huh?

Well, the problem is that the prefix assigned to the phones was for an area outside my town. That meant that anyone wishing to call me would have to dial long-distance. I spent hours on the phone trying to remedy the problem. Packages containing SIM cards were sent. Phones were re-activated then de-activated. Finally, they sent me new phones. And that's what I spent over an hour getting activated tonight. Completely missed the Dixie Chicks on Larry King Live.

And then I think about people who live in Russia, who stand in lines as a matter of course. People in Ethiopia who would be glad to stand in a line if it led to an extra meal. People who wait and wait and wait in Indonesia for disaster relief. Maybe I need to learn patience.

Handbells

As some of you may recall, I play handbells in a church handbell choir. We really love what we do and we took a trip to Hong Kong last summer to play in churches and outdoors. It was swelteringly hot, but the beneficial effects of the trip still remain. The Kowloon International Baptist Church has had several handchime concerts with the set of chimes we left for them.

There are a few songs that I have written over time. Trust me, I am a complete amateur, so it is a lot of work with meager results. Anyway, I did write an arrangement of one of the songs specifically for handbells. The choir has been practicing it (and I have amended and reworked some sections) for performance. Yesterday, a student in the music department of our university entered the music into a composing program which prints it out looking like "official" sheet music. I am pretty excited. When I told the head of the music department, she wrote down the performance date and time. Maybe she will be there. It is slated for June 4 as an offertory. Y'all come.