whales of tails

this is a piggyback post to something my friend elaine wrote recently about riding the bus. i began thinking about my rides on buses and buses in general and the word “bus” itself. look at it. bus. think about the phrases commonly associated with it..
“i’m going to miss my bus!”
“here comes the bus..”
“did you catch the bus?”
bus is derived from omnibus, which sounds a lot like ominous to me:
The service started on the Place du Commerce, outside the hat shop of M. Omnès, who displayed the motto Omnès Omnibus (”Omnès for all”) on his shopfront. When Baudry discovered that passengers were just as interested in getting off at intermediate points as in patronizing his baths, he shifted the line’s focus. His new voiture omnibus (”carriage for all”) combined the functions of the hired hackney carriage with the(wikipedia)..
in general, i have a thankful feeling towards the bus. i realize what a service it provides. perhaps if i were from Malta http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malta_bus, like my friend ang, i would not be typing this discourse. as it is, however, i originate in the united states, and unfortunately,  am usually not headed to a public bath.

i have ridden the bus for the same reasons most of you have..the sum total of my bus riding experiences probably adds up to 15% of the time i have spent in any wheeled vehicle.  why, then, does the bus stand out in my memory?  i suppose it would be helpful in this arena to list the types of buses i have been in and what i encountered therein.   and, so, here they are:

1) the school bus( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:HISDSchoolBus.JPG)  the big yellow bird.  when i lived in houston, i rode the bus for a year.  overall, this was a hideous, character deforming experience http://www.stomptokyo.com/img-m2/nightmare-elm2a.jpg  walking to the bus stop in the often humid and misty mornings=not fun.  standing on the porch of some unknown person’s house at daybreak, waiting for your close friend to arrive, dodging the hecklers passing by in the other school bus, who included the famed A. carter, who supplied us with our share of full moons for the harvest and into planting season, the cramped seats, the jerky kid cliques sitting behind you, a. carter also selling illegal substances in ziploc bags while you gripped your bookbag and thought happy thoughts..all in all= not so much fun.  then there was the big bus breakdown outside little mexico. we sat on the interstate for a good hour and a half.   other than being a little sweaty, this wasn’t completely terrible, but i think it was for my mother, who met us in the cul-de-sac, hair flying, mid-missing person report.  pretty soon after that she got on top of her big city agoraphobia and was waiting for me in the parent pick up lane after school.

2)college town buses.  these are of a different variety than your primary and secondary sort.  the ones at UGA http://cheriwra.myweb.uga.edu/bus_0374_hr-copy.jpg, who at first lived only in my mind as frightening mythlore from my georgia bulldog friends while i attended the school whose halls were within a cart push of each other, were very shiny and nice and rather roomy inside, rendering them more like a winnebago than a coed stop and dropper.  i recall my friends mentioning in casual conversation, “yea and so then i caught the bus to drama class..”..”caught the BUS?”  i would repeat incredulously.  “how do you get off in time? how do you catch it in the first place?? what if you miss it???  where are they taking you anyway, stratford-on-avon??”. it totally boggled my mind.  but it seemed that sometimes productive things happened on these bus rides.  like my friend ang received the first complete song lyrics she had ever written.  said they just dropped into her brain, while on the bus.  sometimes unproductive things happened. like my other friend e overhearing some girls talking about what her boyfriend had said about her, ultimately leading to the demise of their relationship in light of what she heard on the bus, that he thought she was a religious fanatic. 

at last i was able to experience the mystique of the college bus when i was in my twenties and living in athens.  i rode with ang to drop off some papers at one of her classes(she had gone back to school).  i found it to be very climatized and with someone to sit with and to tell me when to unboard, a very pleasant experience. 

the buses in Oxford and Cambridge http://www.oxford-chiltern-bus-page.co.uk/upload211002/Worths220-exOxfordBus.jpg were equally lovely, mainly for the drivers’ and passengers’ accents, the view out of the top level window, and the simple plunk of pence in the box up front.  also, i was on vacation and anything that wasn’t an airplane, taxi or train seemed a heavenly alternative.   these buses i also boarded with initial trepidation until i was joined with my group and then became one of the herd, blindly following the others with the name badges and permanent grins. 

3)the greyhound. of all things, my dad made me ride the greyhound to meet him for a business trip.  he became sold on the bus as the only means of cross-country travel after a trip to Texas to visit his family.   i was a little wary, but i am one for adventure, so i agreed.  plus i really didn’t have a choice.   it wasn’t until a friend dropped me off at the station in Athens that i began to swallow lumps in my throat.  i had blindly passed the station many times on Broad St.  talk about selective seeing!  i don’t think it was my imagination that several unsmiling men were eyeing my things as we unpacked the car.  my friend gave me a bag of snacks she’d made for my journey, i told myself not to be a baby, and went inside to get my ticket.  while waiting, i saw a black and white photograph on the wall of the Greyhound Bus Rosa Parks had refused to move to the back of in the fifties spearheading a shift in the Civil Rights Movement . http://www.africanaonline.com/Graphic/rosa_parks_bus.gif  I was fascinated by this and began not to care about the dingy state of affairs in the waiting area.   i sat down.  across from me was a mother and daughter.  the daughter looked tortured, had several piercings and was wearing mostly black.  the mother went to talk  on the phone and get some Cheetos.  it came time to board.  the mother shared with me on the way to the bus steps that she was glad her daughter was grown and leaving home.  the daughter shuffled in front of me.   as would normally be the case in my life, her seat was next to mine, or rather, i guess she chose to sit with me and i have to admit i was glad, as she seemed to be the only female passenger aside from myself.    from the time of the first exhaust psssshhh and the sound of the gear shift till we pulled up at our first stop in atlanta, i heard the story of this girl’s life, which ranged from childhood sexual abuse, to being put in juvenile homes and now going onto a job/juvenile center program.  as we chatted, two men in front of me slipped a note to the girl asking for her phone number.  she gave it to them.  i gave the men withering looks and tried to tell the girl not to be taken for a fool, essentially.  she was way more streetwise than me however, and didn’t seem to care that they were, in essence, disgusting.  in atlanta we parted ways.  that’s where the real fright began.  the atlanta bus stop made the athens stop look like the lobby of the Ritz-Carlton.  my passenger friend had told me to hang onto my stuff and stand near the window of the facility as people would rob you blind.  not soon enough, it was time to leave again.  as i settled into my seat, a strange looking gentleman chose me as his focal point for the next two hours.  the woman in front of me began to share that she had lost her money or it had been stolen or something involving a charity need.   she worked into asking me for money.   i gave her my lunch instead.  she began talking about wild times when she was young in New York.  i sedgewayed into the Rosa Parks bus picture i had seen.  she looked at me uncomfortably and got quiet.  finally we arrived at our destination which was a convenience store/McDonald’s surrounded by empty fields in the middle of nowhere.  most people got back on after eating their Big Macs.  i waited for my dad to arrive with the other workers.  when he saw me i thought i saw him breathe a sigh of relief.  then i’m sure he thought he saw me give HIM a withering look.  dad, i know you’ve got two daughters to spare, but is my life of any value to you??  he told me that as he’d reflected on his insistence that i take a three hour bus ride so that he didn’t have to go thirty minutes out of his way, he began to feel uneasy.   i had, too, i told him! 

4)airport detention bus.  this vehicle, with its barred windows and plexi-glass divider separating the driver from the passengers, was the first indication i had, aside from my bags being seized, that my trip to england was not going to end on a happy note. http://www.the-two-malcontents.com/wp-content/uploads/MLA11403290926-big.jpg    not the best way to see the country anyway and falling a little short of climbing out of a Mercedes at your destination..

so there we have it.  one could see how i would not want to be kissed in, on, or near any of the busrides described herein.  unless maybe i were in college, or visiting a college town. 

taking a devotional turn, thought to read oswald this morning and wow, seems to fit into my reality.. what am i seeing for myself? for others? what am i seeing that is from god’s heart? what am i seeing from where i’ve been swallowed? swallowed by my futon, the tall grass, late night television….stored mercifully after being tossed off the ship.
open my spiritual eyes that i might see. for him/her who has eyes to see..
May 9th.
GRASP WITHOUT REACH

“Where there is no vision, the people cast off restraint.” Proverbs 29:18 (R.V.)

There is a difference between an ideal and a vision. An ideal has no moral inspiration; a vision has. The people who give themselves over to ideals rarely do anything. A man’s conception of Deity may be used to justify his deliberate neglect of his duty. Jonah argued that because God was a God of justice and of mercy, therefore everything would be all right. I may have a right conception of God, and that may be the very reason why I do not do my duty. But wherever there is vision, there is also a life of rectitude because the vision imparts moral incentive.

Ideals may lull to ruin. Take stock of yourself spiritually and see whether you have ideals only or if you have vision.

“Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp,
Or what’s a heaven for?”
“Where there is no vision. . . .” When once we lose sight of God, we begin to be reckless, we cast off certain restraints, we cast off praying, we cast off the vision of God in little things, and begin to act on our own initiative. If we are eating what we have out of our own hand, doing things on our own initiative without expecting God to come in, we are on the downward path, we have lost the vision. Is our attitude to-day an attitude that springs from our vision of God? Are we expecting God to do greater things than He has ever done? Is there a freshness and vigour in our spiritual out look?

i thought this was funny.

everyday we do our part to make your face a work of art.

“flying cowboys” by jean iva anderson, a 13 year old rickie lee jones fan, who painted this picture from her favorite album of the same name and was killed in an accident.

happy cinco de mayo! i had a tres de mayo late “surprise party” hosted by my nephews, six and four. it was really fun. they picked out Scooby Doo and Transformers as the theme. the cake had the Mystery machine on a turquoise tarmac with a bright yellow headlight streak and shaggy holding scoob in their usually cowardly position. i was a scooby doo fan growing up. i held tight when Sandy Duncan, Mama Cass and even the Commodores guest starred, but they lost me when Scrappy came on board, however. anyway, my brother, who gave me my first rickie lee jones cd, and one of the first cds i ever had actually, found “Flying Cowboys” on album for me. previously i have only owned it on cassette tape because that’s the kind of backwoods girl i am. i ran that thing into the ground when i was fourteen and forlorn, sitting in the park with my headphones on, walking around the neighborhood looking at the sky. for years i peered at the tiny script running across the rim of the winged hombre’s sombrero/candle holder. all i came up with was ventana and muerto, window and death. that didn’t sound too promising. but now with this larger print of the cover image and this handy translation service i have found on line, i have finally been able to decipher it. and i can also send out and receive messages in swahili, or spanish.
i punched in the text: canto al pie de tu ventana pa’ decirte que te quiero tu a mi no me quieras nada pero yo por ti me muero. it came back:

I sing to the foot of your window pa’ to tell you that I want you your to my want me nothing but I by you I dwell,
reminding me of the scene in “Best Friends” when Burt Reynolds and Goldie Hawn are married by the man with the thick accent and have to end up settling for repeating “i dee n doe” to each other amidst giggles. here, therefore, is my further translation:
in short,

i sing underneath your window to tell you that i want nothing but to dwell by you.

maybe??? at any rate, it seems a fine sentiment and fully satisfies the longing in my imagination to know what the angel cowboy was saying to the girl behind him and why that shadowy figure was present underneath the number 32.
if i were wearing a hat, i am not sure what i might want emblazoned across it…”i brake for seals”; “de colores”; “live free or perish!”…i just don’t know..do you?

yesterday i obtained four album prizes at an antique store that is going out of business(i also bought a fifties era pineapple corer, and a “vintage” Almaden California Mountain Rhine Wine bottle, both for my sister).  after adding up what i was spending, i had to leave behind the Honeysuckle rose soundtrack, but i did take home Bruce Springsteen’s “Tunnel of Love”, Emmylou “Elite Hotel”yippee!, Rachmaninoff’s symphony 2, and Linda Ronstadt…”Don’t Cry Now”.  on the back i was excited to note that this one had her cover of “i believe in you”, but for a moment i couldn’t remember if it was neil young or bob dylan doing the believing.  turns out it was neil and that he was believin before bob in 1970.  it’s a beautiful if not slightly melancholy tune from “After the Gold Rush”, a really worthwhile album. 

Now that you found yourself losing your mind
Are you here again?
Finding that what you once thought was real
Is gone, and changing?

Now that you made yourself love me
Do you think I can change it in a day?
How can I place you above me?
Am I lying to you when I say
That I believe in you
I believe in you.

Coming to you at night I see my questions
I feel my doubts
Wishing that maybe in a year or two
We could laugh and let it all out

Now that you made yourself love me
Do you think I can change it in a day?
How can I place you above me?
Am I lying to you when I say
That I believe in you
I believe in you.

i like his honesty in the line “how can i place you above me, am i lying to you when i say..”.  he seems to recognize that it is harder than it may seem on the surface to put a belief in another above your own self preservation and that he may very well be fooling himself and/or the other person in purporting to do so.

and then here’s bob’s classic statement of belief, on the Slow Train coming record.  of course this is a great song in my book.  i read on the biograph liner notes once something about the listener not being sure if it’s written with a person or with God in mind, but i would have to say, let’s study the contextual clues…like, when the album was put out, the rest of the songs on the album, what he seemed to be addressing at that period  of time and lastly, the lyrics themselves..  people, just give it up.  we’re not trying to decipher “Visions of Johanna” here…maybe just a vision of Jesus..

a popular sentiment it seems…a popular sentiment to sing about anyway.  believing in someone really tho requires a lot as we grow in age and awareness.  children believe somewhat implicitly.  as adults, it takes an exercise of faith and action to believe in a person, to give them the benefit of the doubt, to trust them.  sometimes it seems we can say we believe but in our heart there is much unbelief.  i see this in myself.  i am a believer but at times i have an unbelieving heart.  believing in God seems a bit safer than doubting him tho and i think the doubt begins with persons who have broken our belief in them, in what’s right or wrong, good or bad, our expectations.  if we can’t trust those that we can see, it seems a farther jump to try and believe in someone we don’t.  when we believe, however, that the love of god is filling us and when we experience the so called fruit of our belief,  it is easy to run down the love checklist from 1 cor 13 and check “always believes the best of the other” without too many qualms.  even if the other party doesn’t exhibit the best, we can believe the best for and of them. 

this is what i mean when i say or sing, i believe in you.

Pesach, painting by Brandon Willett     www.myspace.com/brandonwillett

Today we had the sitcom version of a Passover Seder in Sunday school, by which i mean we went thru the normally three hour ceremony in 45 minutes.  I really enjoy participatiing in the Haggadah, especially with the Messianic additions.   Every time i do, a new revelation about Jesus as the Passover Lamb, whose blood atones for the sins of the world, is imparted to me by means of God’s grace.  This time i was struck with his brokenness.  we break the bread in remembrance of him.  in his memory we break.  his brokenness feeds us all.  if he weren’t broken, we would not have the bread of life.  Jesus was even born in Bethlehem, which means ‘house of bread”.  he became life to all, spiritual nourishment.  i think of the miracle of loaves and fishes.  the bread as it was broken multiplied and with it the fishes.  food for all who were hungry.       Bruce Springsteen sang, everybody has a hungry heart.  i believe it’s true! 

staring at the matzo today, flat and broken, with stripes and holes, i couldn’t help but be reminded of Jesus on the cross, the middle man in the trinity: hidden, revealed, broken.

i share the painting and this blog from Brandon Willett’s myspace page.  i saw the painting a few weeks ago and was inexplicably blessed by it.  in light of today’s thoughts, it reminds me now of the pieces of broken matzo, being supernaturally released..    the blog has some interesting historical information, but i am not chucking my easter basket or chocolate bunny.  easter is a happy time usually in and out of the church, but spiritually speaking i find the seder more enriching, or authentic or something. 

Passover vs Easter
published: Sunday | April 8, 2007

Ian Boyne, Contributor

Today, millions of Christians around the world celebrate the Resurrection of Jesus Christ during this season of Easter. But perhaps most don’t realise that it was not until the fourth century that Easter was uniformly observed by Christians.

What the earliest Christians observed in memorial of Christ was the Passover, which occurs at this time of the year on Nisan 14 on the Jewish calendar. The Palestinian historian Epiphanius (AD 315-403) said that the 15 Jewish Christian bishops who administered the Jerusalem Church until AD 135 observed the Lord’s death on Nisan 14. In the Apostolic Constitutions, an early Christian document, the following rule is laid out: “You shall not change the calculation of the time, but you shall celebrate it with the same time as your brethren who came out of the circumcision (the Jews). With them observe the Passover.”

It was anti-Semitism - racism against the Jews, which was responsible for the Christian church’s adoption of Easter over the Passover which has Old Testament (Jewish) roots. A brutal and vicious persecution against the Jews had started from early under Emperor Hadrian who outlawed Jewish practices and customs. Jews and Jewish Christians were expelled from Jerusalem after Hadrian had crushed The Barkokeba revolt of the Jews (AD 132-135). With that eviction of the Jews and Jewish Christians came the increasing non-Jewish influence on Christianity, and a rabid anti-Semitism whose relic is still with the Church today. The rejection of the Passover and the substitution of Easter is a manifestation of this malice against the Jews as well as poor hermeneutics of Scripture.

An early Christian controversy was the Quortodeciman Controversy between Christians of the East and the West. The Eastern Christians insisted that Jesus should be memorialised by the observance of the Passover on Nisan 14, while those in the West felt that an independent festival not connected with the Jews should be adopted to celebrate His death and resurrection.

No pretence

Emperor Constantine settled the issue at the Council of Nicea in 325. He made no pretenceof his motives for doing so. The following could not be plainer as at the reason for adopting Easter over Passover. “It appeared an unworthy thing that in the celebration of this most holy feast we should follow the practice of the Jews, who have impiously defiled their hands with enormous sin and are therefore deservedly afflicted with blindness of soul. Let us then have noting in common with the detestable Jewish crowd: Strive and pray continually that the purity of your soul may not in anything be sullied by fellowship with the custom of these most wicked men (We must) avoid all participation in the perjured conduct of the Jews”.

There you have it. With that Easter was imposed on the Eastern Christians who were threatened with expulsion if they continued to meet on the same date that the Jews kept their Passover. But there are a number of reasons why Christians should celebrate the Passover over Easter. First, the Easter ritual has pagan roots and the Scripture is replete with warnings, especially in the Old Testament, against syncretism.

In their work Passover: Before Messiah and After Donna and Mal Broadhurst trace the origin of Easter to Ishtar the Sumerian goddess of love and war who, in Canaan, evolved into a moon goddess and wife of Baal. According o the Sumerian lore, Ishtar was the wife of the Sumerian god, Tammuz. They write: “The worship of Ishtar as nature goddess had spread throughout the ancient world. In Phoenicia and Syria her name had become Astarte’.

Alan Watts in his book Easter: Its Story and Meaning says, “As we go on to describe the Christian observance of Easter we shall see how many of its customs and ceremonies resemble these former rites of the pagan cults).

Says Seventh Day Adventist scholar Samuelle Bacchiocchi in his book God’s Festivals in Scripture and History: “Pagan influence can be seen in the replacement of the Passover symbolism of the lamb with that of the Easter hare. The Easter hare was once a bird that changed into a four-footed creature. Thehare, or rabbit, became a symbol of fertility. The hare laid eggs which became the symbol of abundant new life of spring.

“The origin of the Easter egg is traced back to the ancient civilisations of Egypt, Babylon, Phoenicia and Greece where the universe is said to have been born from a mighty world egg”. So now you know what egg and bunny have to do with Easter.

Line of reasoning

But some Christians will protest my line of reasoning. They will maintain that Christian celebration of Easter today has nothing to do with rabbits, eggs or bun and cheese. Festivals can evolve from pagan roots into genuine, authentic Christian observances, they say. Indeed, they will point out that the biblical festivals, celebrated by the Jews have their own origin in the agricultural festivals which pagans observed before. Even the Seventh-day Sabbath they claim comes from ancient Babylon. So what’s the big deal about pagan origins? It just arrant nonsense and runaway fundamentalism devoid of rational analysis and serious theological reflection.

My rejoinder: Passover is a richer, deeper, historically rooted and multi-layered festival, which links the salvation story of Christians with their ancient predecessors of the Old Testament. In other words, here is a festival which celebrates what is paradigmatic of liberation in the Bible: The Exodus as well as our liberation from spiritual Egypt and slavery.

The Passover theme runs throughout the Bible. Indeed, the prophetic writers identify the second coming of the Lord and the gathering of his people as a Second Exodus. Professor Timothy Laniak of the reputable Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary published last year his Shepherds After My Own Heart, which shows the Passover theme running throughout the Bible and climaxing in the book of Revelation where the (Passover) Lamb is prominently featured.

Christians would have a richer celebration of the Lord’s Passion, linking that with the greatest previous act in salvation history, the Exodus of the Israelites, fromwhom Jesus sprang. In one festival one would collapse thousands of years without bifurcating salvation history. Paul in I Corinthians 5 says “Christ our Passover has been sacrificed for us” and then urges Christians to “keep the Feast” (both metaphorically and literally)

Where is the resurrection in the Passover? The Passover is tied to the seven-day Feast of Unleavened Bread. Jesus in John 6 says He is the true unleavened bread from heaven John represents that bread as giving life. The Christians symbolically eating Christ’s body for seven days represents their intake of Christ’s resurrected life, therefore it is not true to say that the Passover feast as a whole - meaning the 14th to the 21st - does not include the resurrection. The Church would lose nothing by rejecting Easter for Passover.

The Last Super, which Jesus took was the Passover. The New Testament says so clearly in a number of accounts. The disciples asked, “Where will you have us go to prepare to eat the Passover (Mark 14:12 Matt. 26:17; Luke 22:15). What we call the Lord’s Supper or Communion was actually the Passover celebrated on Nisan 14th. Paul in 1 Corinthians 11 recounts “the night on which Christ was betrayed” as the night he took the bread and the wine that was the evening ending the 13th and beginning the 14th.

Feast days

The early Christians continued to keep the Old Testament feast days. In Acts 2 they kept the Feast of Pentecost, an Old Testament feast called Feast of Weeks or Feast of First fruits. In Acts 20:6 Luke records that Paul and his team sailed away from Philippi after the days of unleavened bread. Philippi was a gentile city. But Christians there were observing the Jewish liturgical calendar and the feast days. Later, Paul talks about keeping Pentecost. In 1st Corinthians 16, he talks about Pentecost outside of a Jerusalem setting.

In Acts 27 we see a reference to the Day of Atonement (called the Fast). Why would Jewish and non-Jewish Christians be keeping these days long after the death of Jesus if they were abolished at the cross? It is time the Christian Church re-examines its Hebraic roots.

Says the accomplished biblical scholar, James Tabor, in his April 2 blog: “It is unfortunate that the liturgical link between Jews and Christians were severed. For more than a century before the Good Friday/Easter Sunday tradition had fully prevailed in the church, thousands of Christians all over the Roman world used to observe what they called Pasch on the 14th of Nisan. They used the Hebrew calendar to determine the proper season. On this day they would remember ’the night he was betrayed’ as well as the death of Jesus on the afternoon of 14th of Nisan. Now thousands of Christians have begun to learn about the Passover both in study and direct celebration”.

I have been observing it for 33 years. I strongly recommend it

magnifique

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A whistling girl
Among his flock of sheep
Lay breathing backward rest assured
Of Elijah and gods birds

It will fall to us
It will fall to us

Inside the home the folk pine grow
Where hearts are fire sparks are thrown
Is all that glitters
This terrible weakness

It falls to us
It falls to us
From his holy hill
By his perfect will

Through the open eyes
Soul tonight
His yoke is easy and his burden light
Kiss the sun lest he be angry
And you perish in the way

The rivers of the sky are dry
A roll up like a scroll
Down below
We tend to the forgetting
Forgetting what we know
The sun slips from your shoulder
As you enter in the wood
Without thought of thorns
Without thought of thorns

8 out of 45 duckcakes

after all my church cookbook research, it was funny to find myself piping buttercream icing thru pastry bags and small metal tips this weekend.  i volunteered to make cupcakes for my dear friend elaine’s church baby shower.  (what, elaine?? what??? who told you you could procreate??  god?? your husband??? what happened to the carefree days in the blue chevy, guitar out one window, hair flying out the other?  the driveway singalongs?  wearing your grandma’s prosthetic shoes for kicks? soon you will be a mother!  your getting married seemed extremely irresponsible and now THIS!!)  i actually bumrushed the email invite that asked for planning assistance because i wanted my friend to have a get together that would suit her, not a churchlady episode.  not that i have anything against churchladies.  i just don’t want them at my parties. 

 well, anyway, like martha stewart, most artistic visions i have had began with something small and a modeling career.  and involve a lot of haggling with the powers that be.  in this case the creative catalyst was a rubber duck; the haggling involved the other party planner and the cupcake paper she thought it would be unsavory to peel(just give this one to me, ok spivey? OK?!? ).  i became determined that there would be a sea of yellow ducks( http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=464768&in_page_id=1770) afloat on individual ponds at this celebration, to beckon baby nathan for many bathtimes to come…people’s laps and peeling angst be darned!   

my sister, the pastry chef, made some very yummy buttercream icing, two different colors of my request.  she showed me how to use the pastry bags.  i procrastinated and waited until sunday morning, 7am to start slathering those things(elaine had me on a donut run the night before and i grew tired).  keeping the tip in place proved the most challenging part of the endeavor.  that and trying to keep from licking my fingers, and the stomachache i had from starting the day off licking my fingers…  i could not find the tip my sister had used during her demo and had to settle on the next largest size.   the first cupcake looked like a nest of blue snakes on board a raft.  as i kept squeezing tho, i saw that the ducks could soon have rippled ponds upon which to swim.  however, my hands quickly became buttercreamy and it was all greased pigs on a slip-n-slide after that.  finally when the clock was rounding 9:15am, i finished up.  then began the plate up and the carry down to the car, involving three trips. five if you include me taking them into the church. 

everything was pretty much ducky from there on out.  i did my part in attempting to make room 401 fit for the likes of a lady like elaine, a fiddle playing scottish woman.  when the room began to clear, i pumped up the shower background music.  in this case, emmylou’s cover of tom petty’s “thing about you”.  i have to hold onto something from our youth and there was nary a duck left..

i came across this Lutheran recipe book the other day.  the “OTHER” day…it was their 25th Anniversary Cookbook, spanning the years 1966-1991.  i chose it as my before bed reading.  after perusing the “common causes of failure in baking” page, tips for dealing with perspiration stains,  how to putty windows and make fake sour cream using cottage cheese and a blender(at that point i’m willing to drive to kroger..), and flipping past the disected cuts of meat pictographs, i became intrigued by some of the name choices,  ingredients, and recipe donors.  perhaps you will be as well…

starting in APPETIZERS, BEVERAGES, DIPS, SNACKS, MISC. 

Bunny’s Appetizer Pie –this one is from Cog Anderson’s sister and includes a jar of dried beef. 

Pastor Tania’s Lobster Fondue Dip–should Lobster and fondue ever meet?  apparently Pastor Tania thinks so.

Senator Dave Durenberger’s Favorite Recipe–all i’m saying is that it involves mayonnaise. 

PIckin’s–aka “Chex Mix” with something called Beau Monde and celery seed.

Peanut Butter Play Dough–sounds yummy–snack time and play time rolled into one..the nursery school teacher’s dream.  “make a snake, then eat it!”

Puppy Chow–pickin’s with chocolate.  appetizing name. 

SOUPS AND SALADS

Cherry-Lutheran Jello–not sure how this differs from Methodist or Baptist cherry jello.  or when jello announced its denomination…

Mexican Mound–Straight from Barbara Bush’s cocktail party to yours…

CASSEROLES

Pork chop ‘71 Potato Bake–Jim Hoogheem.  can you really put a timeline on pork chops? 

Seafood Quickie–nothing involving Seafood should be done hastily…

Shipwreck–the ingredients include 2005-2007 of my life.

MAIN DISHES

Can’t Fail Recipe for Egg Brunch–Pearl Claussen.  can an egg brunch win seems to me to be thre real issue. 

Poached Torsk–Eunice Helgeson.  what is torsk? for $500, Alex. 

Pizza Pull Aparts–Janet Nepsund.  required: 2 tubes Big Country biscuits.

Tijuana Torte

DESSERTS

“Church Council Meeting Cake”

adage:  It’s nice to be important, but it is more important to be nice.

BARS, COOKIES, AND CANDIES

Bible Bars

1c. Samuel 30:12, half cup Leviticus 3:9;1c. Jeremiah 6:20;1 Isaiah 10:14,2c. Exodus 29:2;1tsp. Exodus 13:7, 1tsp 2 Chronicles 9:9, 1tsp 1Kings 10:10,1 tsps. Luke 23:56,one half Exodus 13:3;one half tsps. Leviticus 2:13, 1c.Numbers 17:8.  frost if desired.

Senator Dave Durenberger’s Favorite Recipe: Mint Stick brownies.  hey, wait a minute…