Anna Resurget

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.

Samuel loved his little sister!  A friend of mine from work, whenever she saw a pictire of Samuel, would always say, “Look at that big cheesy grin!”  She said he always looked like he was up to something.  He still does.  Sometimes.

Anna changed so much from her baby pictures.  When she was a baby she had that big round face.  Kind of a Winston-Churchill-in-diapers kind of look.  You can still see her big cheeks on the picture of Timberley and her in Jakarta.  But something happened when she was about seven when she suddenly turned into a tall, thin young lady.  And a beautiful one at that.

In Sam’s case, well some things never change.

So we have tickets on a soon-to-be-bankrupt Italian airline.  This soon-to-be-bankrupt Italian may or may not fly out of the airport for which we have tickets.  (As it turned out, my brother was mistaken.  He aplogized later for his mistake.  You are forgiven, Dave.)  I wonder what winter weather is like in Italy.

We read on the internet that winter is a fine time to go to Italy as long as you don’t go north of Florence.  But we’re Americans.  We’re used to the cold.  We’ll go wherever we please, thank you very much.  Let’s go to Venice!  (For those of you who are not sure where this is going, Venice is north of Florence.)  Let’s check the weather on the internet, shall we.  We turn on the computer, open up the explorer.  Before we can get to a weather site, we find that we don’t need to look there.  The Italian weather is so bad that it has made the US news!  Rome has had so much rain that it has been declared a state of emergency.  And Venice is experiencing some strange tides that have brought on the worst flooding for the last forty years or so.  Things have gotten so bad in Venice that a world-famous Dutch wake boarder made news and brought the attention of the Venetian police by wake boarding through St. Mark’s Square.

How is this going to turn out?

This picture was taken our first morning in Indonesia.  It was March of 2003.  We were staying in a guesthouse in Jakarta while our immigration paperwork was being processed.  It is strange that at such a momentous time I do not have many clear memories.  Perhaps it was the location of the guest house.  It was located in a busy, downtown area of Jakarta.  The street was full of offices and small stores, of which we knew little to nothing.  In this photo Timberley and Anna were taking a walk to a grocery store a few blocks down the road.  Little did we know at the time that the dirty, slightly odiferous convenience store down the road was part of one of the largest and finest grocery chains in the country.  The dirt was not from the store itself.  It was simply everywhere.  In one newspaper, Jakarta had the nickname “The Big Smoke.”  At street level the pollutants are horrible.  The exhaust from busses and trucks is so thick at times that one is unable to see through it.  If you get  caught in the middle of a large blast from an accelerating bus, you are momentarily blinded in a thick black fog.

The smell of Jakarta, and of the grocery store we visited, was not as bad as I had imagined before we arrived.  Much of the foul odor inside the store came from the fruit section.  The large, round, thorny durian fruit filled the boxes in the produce section and filled the air with its pungent and unmistakable odor.  Years later I was driving into Semarang for church one Sunday morning.  I had the window of the car rolled down to enjoy the morning air.  As I approached Semarang I had to roll the windows up because of the bad odor.  At first I thought it was durian season.  But then I realized it was just people outside burning their trash.

When we returned to Indonesia early in 2007 after spending seven months in America Anna got off the airplane in Jakarta, took a big, long sniff of air, and said, “Oh, I just love the smell of Indonesia!”

There were a few other times during the planning process that should have given me pause.  After the warning that Alitalia was “only flying until the fuel runs out” I went ahead and made our reservations.  We made our plans to visit my brother’s family in Chicago for Christmas and they agreed to take us to O’Hare for our departure.  My brother works at O’Hare as an air traffic controller.  In the course of one phone conversation he asked me, “So what airline are you flying?”  “Alitalia,” I innocently replied.  There was a pause.  “Alitalia?” he said, “Alitalia doesn’t fly out of Chicago anymore.”  A longer pause on my end.  “But I already bought the ticket.  They must fly out of Chicago.”  He went on to say that he hadn’t seen an Alitalia plane in a long time, but that there was another Italian airline flying out of Chicago.

What had we done?  Was this some sort of internet scam being run by the Italian mafia?