Anna Resurget

Reading was very important to Anna.  It is safe to say that reading gave her more pleasure than any other worldly activity.  She was known as the girl that carried books wherever she went.  They went with her to bed.  They went with her to school.  Whenever we got in the car, Anna would bring along three, four, or five books “just in case.”  Her books were almost like an emergency kit.  Samuel is learning now as a Boy Scout about “being prepared.”  For Anna, that meant having some good reading with you.

I mention this because I was talking to a few people yesterday and today about Anna and the matter of reading came up.  One of these people, after he heard some of my stories, remarked that he had read stories of the Puritans and how their children showed great evidences of regeneration at an early age.  He always found them a little hard to believe, but then added that it seemed as if Anna showed those same evidences.

I don’t want to equate reading with faith.  Many atheists are good readers, too.  It’s just they have been reading the wrong books.  But I will say this:  that reading provides the reader a vocabulary for life.  For the Christian, reading, and especially reading the word of God, gives the believer a vocabulary for faith.

Anna read a great many books during her brief life span.  We have not tried to catalogue everything in her room, but I am certain that it is in the hundreds of books, and most of those she had read multiple times.  Because of her reading, Anna had a much wider perspective on life than have many others, including adults.  She had swum in some pretty deep waters even at nine years old.

Because of her reading, Anna had an awareness of what she was feeling and thinking and could relate her thoughts to a broader world.  But perhaps more importantly, she had a vocabulary of words and expressions from which to draw to communicate those thoughts to others.  Conversations were never boring or trivial with Anna.

I have written on this blog about how Anna learned to read and the importance of the word of God to Anna.  I mention this again here to encourage all of us to read more.  And not just to read more, but to read more good books.  This will begin in large part by parents reading good classics to their children before they can read for themselves.  It will mean parents modeling to the children that reading is important.  It might even mean substituting evening television with family reading time.  It was a sad time for me when the children began reading longer books on their own and stopped relying on our evening read aloud sessions for their literary intake.  I began missing out on many good books because the children were reading on their own.

Those evening reading sessions did much for our family.  Of course it encouraged the children to read.  But it also provided us much to talk about.  We never lacked for things to discuss, questions to raise, or just funny stories to tell and retell.  I don’t know how many times I heard Samuel and Anna telling the Miller’s Tale with a great deal of vigor and much laughter by all.  (Warning: we read an abridged version of the Canterbury Tales; the link here is to the original and it is quite a bit more “colorful” than ours.)   But the most important thing that our reading time provided us was personal family time every night.  We had actual contact with one another.  We had times to talk together about things.  Our family grew very tight during those evening reading sessions.  I miss them now.  But then again, there are many things I miss.

When we arrived in Indonesia the children were 6 and 4 years old.  Samuel was finishing up a few months of kindergarten, but Anna had not yet begun school.  Timberley and I were going to language school every day so we had to make some arrangements for Anna.  In Indonesia we had a few options.  The first thing we tried was to hire a young lady who would take care of Anna during the day.  Mbak Watik (Miss Watik) would be there when Anna awoke in the morning.  She would help Anna get dressed.  She would make Anna’s bed.  She would play with Anna.  She would bring food to Anna and try to help her eat.  But just like Poppleton with Cherry Sue, Anna just couldn’t stand it.  She wanted to be left alone.  She wanted to read.  She wanted to work puzzles.   She wanted some space.  So in the end, Mbak Watik had to find other work.

But what would we do with Anna?  We decided that the best thing would be to have her go to an Indonesian pre-school.  She visited  a few times and we decided she could try it out.  It was a small school, two rooms with a small playground outside.  The slide was a concrete construction with steps up one side and smooth slab of concrete down the other.  The other playground equipment was in various states of violation of basic safety rules for children.  The teacher was a very nice lady, I thought, but she always reminded me of an Indonesian, female Sgt. Carter.  Timberley always told me that that description wasn’t fair, but I don’t know how else to say it.  She was not an attractive woman.

We bought Anna’s uniform and sent her off everyday to school.  In the year that Anna was there, I don’t think we ever did learn to navigate or understand the Indonesian school calendar.  Some days were normal days, usually only a few hours since it was pre-school, but some days they would only go for maybe 30 minutes to an hour and then come back home.  Some days school was cancelled altogether.  Everything was very fluid, but it seemed that all of the Indonesians knew and understood the schedule, or when it came on them unawares, it didn’t bother them at all.  Adjusting to Anna’s ever-changing schedule was one of the lessons we had to learn about Indonesian culture.

Pre-school in Indonesia is not for the faint of heart.  For example, the teacher graded coloring assignments.  These are four-year-olds, remember.  Anna would come home with a picture that she colored and up in the corner in large letters, “B-“, or “C+.”  I don’t think Anna cared, but we didn’t like it.  Anna suffered from two problems with her coloring skills.  The first, and perhaps most problematic, was that she could not color within the lines.  I am sure at her age it was mainly mechanical, and yet when you look at her classmates’ drawings, they were all meticulous.  There was never a stray line, or a slight smudge of color outside the strict black-and-white boundaries.  The second problem Anna had with her coloring was that she liked to use her imagination when she chose colors.  Why does grass have to be green when it can just as easily be purple?  Why can’t a dog have pink spots on his brown coat?  And so it went.  The teachers did not appreciate Anna’s sense of wonder and imagination.

Anna learned another lesson at pre-school.  Don’t cry.  Not when you are hurt.  Not when you are sad.  And never out loud.  Indonesians don’t cry in public.  She made the mistake of crying one day in class.  I don’t remember the cause.  The teacher made her sit outside by herself until she could stop.  She saw another child suffer the same punishment.  Her experience embarassed her so much that she promised herself that she would never cry in school again.  I did not like the fact that Anna felt the need to stifle those emotions and her reactions to them, but at the same time I noticed a strength that developed in her that I had not seen before.  It was not that she felt things less.  If you knew Anna at all, you knew that she was very emotional and sometimes very dramatic in her emotions.  But it was that she was learning to control herself and the way she presented herself to the world.  She was becoming a young lady.

After a year of language school, it was time to pull Anna out of her pre-school.  I sat her down one day to talk about the decision to take her out.  I was ready to explain to her the reasons and to convince her that leaving her school was the best option.  I was not ready when, after I let her know that she would not be going back, she quickly said, “Okay,” and turned to leave.

“Wait a minute,” I said.  “Aren’t you upset about leaving school?”

“No.”

“But what about your friends there?  Won’t you miss your friends?”

“No, I don’t have any friends at school.”

“What about the children you play with at break time?  Aren’t they your friends?”

“No, I always play by myself on the swings at break time.” 

“But what about your teacher?”  I was grasping for straws here.  “You liked your teacher, didn’t you?”

Anna made a funny face.  “Oh, Dad, of course not.  She was mean to all the kids.”

I was finally ready to give up.  “Well, Anna, was there anything about school that you liked?”

“No, not really.”

“Well if you didn’t like school so much, then why didn’t you say something before now?”

She didn’t miss a beat in telling me.  “Because I knew that was what I was supposed to do.”

I almost started to cry.  On the one hand I was proud of her for enduring something that she knew she didn’t like, and I was glad that she was so aware of what was going on, even as a five-year old.  But I was also sad that she felt she needed to sacrifice for the sake of our call to Indonesia.  I gave her a big hug, and said, “Anna, please don’t ever feel that you have to put up with things just because you think we expect you to.  I want you to let me know when something is not going well.”

Today is my bride’s birthday.  She is lovelier than ever and every year seems to grow in new ways.  I can’t wait to see what is to come!  Here we are in Roma in front of the Colosseum on this past New Year’s Eve.  What a beautiful day to spend with my beautiful wife.  Happy Birthday.

Sorry if this was a secret, Mom.

Today is my Mom’s 80th birthday.  She is  a great mother to me and my brothers and a great grandmother (not a great-grandmother) to Sam and Anna and her other grandchildren.  This is one of my favorite pictures of her with Anna.  This was from our last trip to Disneyland together.  Our kids are not night owls by any stretch.  Anna wanted to stay up and watch the Main Street Parade and that is when this picture was taken.  Can you see how tired Anna was from her eyes?

Anna loved her grandmother very much.  And we who are still here love her very much as well.  If I could characterize my mom in a few words I would say that she is kind, patient, consistent, steady.  I have always known that whatever situation I may find myself in I have a constant cheerleader in my mom.

Happy Birthday, Mom.  May your next 80 be as blessed as the first 80!

This post is one day late, and the title is intentionally deceptive.  It is not the facts that are wrong, but rather that I am not going to talk about Lincoln and Darwin.

Yesterday, Feb. 12 was Samuel’s 12th birthday.  We always knew that Samuel shared Abraham Lincoln’s birthday.  But it was only this past week that we learned he also shares Charles Darwin’s birthday, and that Lincoln and Darwin were born on the same day 200 years ago.

I am at the office and do not have the pictures of the brief celebration we had at Samuel’s school, but there is a picture of his cake that you will not want to miss.   More later.

Samuel is really developing as a fine young man.  He continues to do well at school.  He is active in boy scouts.  He is finishing up his first basketball season.  He has definitely improved over the course of the season as he has learned more and more about the game and how it is played.  We have seen lately a change in Samuel as he begins to take new responsibilities and show some independence.  He is growing into a young man.

The two photos below were taken in Italy.  The first shows Samuel climbing (or descending, I forget which) Brunelleschi’s dome atop the Duomo cathedral in Florence, Italy.  The other photo was taken inside St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City.  My battery was fast fading on the camera and I told Samuel I had only a few photos I could take.  He quickly told me to turn it off and wait for two pictures he wanted.  The first was a photo of Michelangelo’s Pieta statue.  The second was the photo below of Samuel standing at the foot of St. Peter.  I pray that Samuel would grow to be a man like St. Peter, a disciple of Jesus, a fisher of men, a man that could be used by the Holy Spirit to preach the gospel boldly as Peter did in the book of Acts and later in written form in his two letters.

Happy Birthday, Samuel.  We love you.  Mom and Dad.

Anna’s favorite music group for about the last year of her life was Switchfoot.  You can see in some of her pictures a bunch of hair bands she wore on her wrist.  She grouped several colors together, but oftentimes she simply had four on.  They were red, white, blue, and green.  When I asked her about her hairbands at the dinner table one night, she and Samuel turned to each other and smiled and then she belted out in her best rock and roll voice, “Red. White, Blue, and Gree-ee-eeeen!” from Switchfoot’s song “American Dream”.  Our whole family really liked the group and after we hooked our iPod up to the car radio through our iTrip we had an all-Switchfoot-all-the-time policy in the car.

I enjoy Switchfoot’s music, but it was the lyrics that really captured me.  I enjoyed the drives in the car with the kids explaining to them the meaning behind some of the songs.  Songs like “Faust, Midas, and Myself” and “4:12” really came alive when we talked through the songs.

Jon Foreman writes the songs for the group.  I don’t know his story and background, but there are elements of sadness, depression, and grief that he “gets.”  An insider can listen to his songs and say, “Yes, that’s how it feels.”  Some of the songs, such as “Yesterdays”, “Amy’s Song”, or “4:12” are explicitly about grief or depression/anxiety, but others, for me “24”, have become songs of mourning as well.

But there are other songs from Switchfoot that are so hopeful that one cannot help but rejoice with them in the future and what a new day might bring.  Such is the song, “Learning to Breathe.”

I am including two live songs from the group.  The first is “Yesterdays.”  The second is “Learning to Breathe.”  Enjoy.

I need to start with a caveat.  Timberley told me a while ago that I needed to clarify two things about our trip to Italy.  First, we did actually go there.  I have been sharing about all the problems with us getting tickets and whether the airline was still solvent, but in the end we did get the tickets and we did fly.  The second thing she wanted me to clarify was that we did have a good time while we were there.

Our last lesson to learn about flying with Alitalia is that you have to check with the airline to confirmthe flight.  While we were enjoying the run-up to Christmas at my brother’s place outside Chicago we read a disturbing news story.  The Alitalia strike in Rome had left hundreds of passengers stranded in the Rome airport.  People were sleeping in the airport for days unable to travel.  We immediately checked on the Dec 24th flight from Chicago to Rome, two days before our travel day of Dec. 26, and learned that that flight had been cancelled.  There was no information given about our flight.

Timberley called Alitalia customer service and spoke with a very Italian representative who basically wanted to know why she was bothering him.  Of course our flight was leaving as scheduled.  Why wouldn’t it?  Strike?  There is no strike in Rome.  Don’t you Americans know the difference between a strike and a labor dispute?  And on it went.  In the end, we felt assured that our flight would leave as scheduled.  This was all part of the adventure.

I should tell you a bit about how we got ready for our trip.  We decided early on not to make reservations anywhere.  We thought that by not making reservations we would not be tied down to any specific itinerary and would be free to travel around the country as we saw fit.  Also, since it was off-season we did not think that places would be full.  We packed light.  We rented backpacks from the rec center at the seminary.  We basically left with our plane tickets, passports, about three days worth of clothes . . . and an ATM card.  We were ready for the adventure.

Louisville has been under the weather a bit lately.  I will post a photo when I can, but you have probably seen the news already.  Cold weather.  Snow.  But the killer was the ice.  I have not seen anything like this before.  When I went out to clean off our car I found a sort of frozen, white Oreo cookie on the roof of the car.  Two inches of soft white snow on the car.  Another two inches above that.  And in between the two layers was an inch of solid ice.  As I cleaned off the car I was pulling off sheets of ice about two feet across and throwing them to the ground.  It was great fun.

The worst part of the ice was the trees.  The ice covered every exposed spot on the trees.  The ice was so heavy that it literally pulled branches from the trees and in some cases pulled whole trees down.  Along with about a half million other people in Kentucky we lost power on Wednesday.  Ours came back on Sunday, but in many places it is still off.  We spent the first night at home and watched the inside temperature drop to 59.  My first thought on waking up was, “This won’t be so bad after it warms up during the day.”  The thought just passed through my mind when the answer followed it.  “It is only 20 degrees outside.  There is no “warming up.”   We decided to leave town instead.

Samuel’s school was cancelled for the week. The start of my class was delayed for a week.  So we went to Richmond to see Timberley’s family and surprise her brother and sister on their birthdays.  We had a good time there.

We are back home in Louisville now and working to get things back to normal.  More later.

Blessings.

This has been a difficult day at the end of a pretty nice week.  I just needed to see a smile.

We love you, Anna.

Dad, Mom, and Sam

Amalfi Coast

Okay, where were we.  Alitalia is going bankrupt.  Not sure if they even fly out of Chicago anymore.  Rome is in a state of emergency.  Venice is so far underwater that extreme sports people have descended on the city to take advantage of the water.  Oh yes, our decision to fly into Naples.

When I bought the tickets online, I found really cheap tickets from Chicago to Rome.  “Well,” I thought, “If they have cheap tickets to Rome, then maybe they have cheap rates to other cities as well.”  Chicago to Milan?  No.  Costs more.  Chicago to Venice?  To Florence?  No, and no.  Chicago to Naples?  Hey, I just saved $400!  And Naples is farther south, so it will be a warmer place to stay.  What a great deal!  At this point the little voice inside my head must have been blinded by the $400 and sunshine so that it was not asking the obvious question, “The airline wants to fly you to Rome and then put you on another plane to Naples.  And they will give you $400 to do so.  Why are they trying to get you to Naples?”  Who cares?  Just buy the ticket.

Then we started our planning.  We checked out all the travel books from the library.  We scoured the internet for information.  And we started reading things like, “If you travel south to Rome [assuming you are starting your trip in the north of Italy] and you find that you have had enough of Italy, turn around and go back.  It only gets worse.”  Or the one about Naples being the hub of organized crime in Italy.  That was a good one.  Or the time we started to look for a place to stay in Naples and we read, “We can’t imagine why anyone would want to stay in Naples, but if you must . . .”  My favorite was one of the travel books that began its section on Naples with the heading, “Naples: A Tough City to Love, But It’s Worth the Effort.”

That $400 was starting to look like a bad trade.