the incredible shrinking house.

When I was young, during the pre-elementary school years that everyone sort of vaguely remembers in a fuzzy dream, we lived in a house on Hillside Drive.  It was a white cape cod with a gray slated roof that angled sharply from a point in the center of the cubic house down to the top of the first floor.  Our street ran right behind the hospital where, once a year, they would hold the most glamorous fair with Aladdin's carpet slide and cotton candy machines.  My sister and I shared a room on the second story and my parents had the other across the hall.  There was a bathroom up there too, but I can't remember now the color of the wall paper.

I had won a contest, a drawing I think, at the dentist office.  The prize was a colossal stuffed dinosaur that was roughly five inches taller than I.  Owing to the fact that my favorite movie of all time (at that point) was Puff the Magic Dragon, it was quite possibly the greatest day of my life when I won.  They brought me into the office, put one of those floppy pointed princess hats on my head, and took portraits of me and my new guardian.  Then I took him home and dragged him around our castle of a house every day.  

Puff sat underneath the window in our room that looked out over the backyard.  There was an enormous tree reaching toward the window with grabbing hands that would moan and shiver in the wind.  It was the kind of tree that is incredibly enticing in daylight, yet completely terrifying during the night.  My dragon was the mystical keeper of our bedroom and then, when I got tired, my transportable bed of sorts.

When we moved away from West Chester I cried for months in desperation for the old house with the towering pointed roof, the grandfather trees and the window that was so high up above the ground.  Our new house was one story and seemed so diminutive to me then.  "Ginny," my dad would say softly to me, patiently, brushing my unruly hair away from my wet cheeks, "that house was much smaller than this house.  It just seemed bigger because it was tall."  I didn't buy it.  

In time I got used to the new house and I would lean up against Puff watching television in the basement.  He began shrinking, as I recall.  

Eventually we went back to visit the old house on Hillside Drive.  A blind man with a mean old seeing eye dog had purchased the home from us. He had torn down the white picket fence my father had put up and painted one summer as a gift to my mom and erected a five-foot chain-link replacement.  He filled my mom's flower beds with plastic toys for his son.  The brick porch was crumbling and the house seemed slightly less white and more grayish.  It was drizzling, as I recall, and I'm not good with rain, slightly seasonally affective.  

I was shocked.  "It looks so puny," I said to my parents with a kind of unimpressed grimace. We sat in the car with the doors closed, staring out the windows.  "It seemed so much bigger before."

"You were a lot smaller," my dad said.

"I just can't believe it!" I exclaimed. "I thought it was so enormous." I was thirteen now.  

"It was, to you," my mother said.

good old boys.

When I pulled up to the garage at eight thirty in the morning and the sun was in its foggy and blinding morning glory, I was sweaty from a run and in much need of some coffee.  I had to get some new tires put on my car.  Mark and I had gotten a flat tire in the middle of the West Virginia mountains which then caused me to discover that three of my four tires were all but stripped.  Par a recommendation of the Rudnicke's, I headed over to Mock Tire, a flat sprawled building with tires all stacked around the garage doors and black and white tiled floor in the office.  The place was buzzing with men, some in blue mechanic suits and some in loafers and short-sleeved Oxfords.  A few women lingered around the door.  

I was admittedly a bit awkward walking in.  I always get nervous going into a car place because I feel totally out of my element, primarily because I'm a female.  Secondly because I always end up divulging my ignorance about cars when they ask me questions like, 'when's the last time you got your filters changed?' or 'what kind of engine have you?' or 'what size tires do you need?' I don't know.  

However, this time it was different.  There were four men behind the counter; two were older gentlemen wearing starched white collared shirts and khakis.  They both had white hair combed back and one of them had a mustache.  They were just gentlemen, well-postured and southern and they reminded me of my grandfather.  Another man who was a bit younger and wore a mechanic suit helped me figure out what I would need, taking care to explain to me what type of tires I'd be getting and why I really should get the cheapest ones because they were just as good as the $80 ones, never once making me feel that I should already have mastered the tire market.  The fourth gentleman bore a striking resemblance to Robert Redford and his voice had the calm rubbing sound of sandpaper. Wholly relieved, I sat down to wait.

I waited for about forty minutes, watching them work on my car from the window.  A handful of of older gentleman came in and lingered around the office, talking candidly and laughing with the managers of the store.  All salty and weathered, they discussed the economy and the seasons and asked about each other's wives.  "I don't know a thing you're qualified to do," joked one squat gentleman to his friend the manager.  Most of the visitors didn't have a car needing work, they just came to pass the morning, respectable members of an established city club. It occurred to me, watching the gentlemen, that they were in no hurry.  The reputable managers with their clean shaven faces, the mechanics with their relaxed and efficient working hands and the men who dropped by Mock Tire to pay a visit were happy in their well-fitted matrix of friendship and years and a doubtless myriad of histories.  Glad to shoot the breeze, they just easily took the morning like they always have, I suppose.

water color love.

I have this friend.  She's the kind of friend that will go out for Mexican food on a Wednesday night with you even though maybe Mexican food gives her a stomach ache every time she eats it.  But if you say, "Hey, want to go grab some fajitas?" she'll say yes without hesitation because she knows you love Mexican and she wants you to love your dinner.  And a few months later you'll receive a package in the mail with a bottle of Jose's hot tamale sauce and a little note that says how you made eating Mexican worth it.  She's that kind of friend.

Sometimes I feel sort of like a thief because I can't believe that somehow I have the privilege of such a close and consistent friendship with someone who is so very loving.  She has this radar, whose upkeep I am confident takes a lot of work and deliberateness, that hones in on people's individual needs and deficits, and then pours love in, like concrete in a cracked sidewalk.  And she does it across the board! For so many people, she just tip-toes around soundlessly painting the world with this brilliant water color love.   

I had the opportunity to live with her for four wonderfully unconventional and foreign months.  We travelled and explored and discovered so much in those months, about places and people, ourselves and one another.  We grew together like snaking vines on a trellis, full of all of the brilliant red wildflowers and all of the thorns, and when we returned to our normal lives we couldn't really ever quite unwind.  In fact I don't know that we could have figured out whose thorns were whose.  About a month into our residence together, she gave me a gift disguised as a challenge.  She challenged me to write a book and in some dauntless whim, I said okay.  Well I wrote that book over the next three months-- an entire book.  And when I finished, she walked with me to the local print shop and we printed it with the last of our money right before Christmas.  We hole punched the pages and cut them to fit into a European sized binder.  We spent the entire day making frozen trips to the print shop on foot a few days before Christmas. And you know, I didn't realize how much I needed to accomplish that book, but she did because that's the kind of friend she is.  

And it's ever making me want to be that kind of friend.

big and small.

My nephew was born last week, Jonathan Turner.  His entry into the world was anticipated by a pretty good crowd and even his three-year-old cousin was there at nearly midnight to welcome him.  My sister, who delivered this child with Audrey Hepburn-like grace and class, didn't even break a sweat and when it was all over, still had her mascara on.  

I didn't anticipate the melting phenomenon.  I've never been much of a "baby person," which is a phrase I often hear people say who are a bit cynical and probably a bit nervous, to be honest.  But then I saw him, from behind the plexi-glass window, being washed by a nurse.  She scrubbed his little red bottom and I could see his little face all screwed up in a grimace.  Our whole family, and my sister's in-laws and friends, we all watched.  And do you know what I did?  I sat down on the floor with my chin on the window sill and started crying.  I was the only one! Everyone else is cooing at baby Jonathan, laughing and saying how mad he must be to be so cold and wet and naked.  I pressed my face up against the bottom of the glass to hide my tears from everyone.  I turned into mush, smashed-up with butter and milk mashed-potato face.  That was me.

When my sister asked me to hold him the next morning, the only thing I could concentrate on was not dropping him, hearkening back to memories of the first day we had our Golden Retriever puppy, Jake, in the house and I dropped him from standing onto the wood floor in the kitchen... on his head.  I think I ran into my room and cried.  Are you sensing a reactionary pattern?  I have always hated the fact that I cry when I'm overwhelmed with any emotion because it makes me feel so--ridiculous.  But it's good, I suppose, to be reminded of my own mediocrity.  It causes me to anticipate with eagerness the ways I will one day express the emotion I intend with creativity and grace in heaven.  Anyway, when Hannah handed me her son, I awkwardly cradled him in my arms and said a prayer as she passed him off to me.  I may have been sweating.  

But then I sat back in the chair and nestled the little guy up in the crook of my elbow.  He squirmed around in his swaddled cloths and I called him "Wormy" and stared at his small button nose and his eyes half-opened.  And after some time, when the room was quiet and my sister was dozing off in the hospital bed, I did the only thing I knew how to.  I began to sing, soft and sweet.  He stopped fidgeting and went loosely still.  I think the words of the old Beatles song, "Blackbird," drifted into his infant ears and settled in a little cranny in his memory.  I think we bonded.  

My favorite neighbor and almost-niece, Hannah, waiting for Uncle Mark and Ginny to arrive for dinner.

median jig.

I am in this transitional place in my life where I can't dig my heels in because I know that in seven and a half months I will be, in many ways, uprooted and re-planted.  That is a very violent way of explaining getting married, but I can't imagine a much greater jolt than suddenly compounding your own life, which has always been yours independently, with someone else's.  Except perhaps birthing a baby, which I am nowhere near.  So in this middle earth, this no-man's-land, I am trying to hold out and juggle the unknowns.

For instance, insurance.  I realize that it is completely necessary to have insurance.  What if I had to have my appendix taken out and didn't have health coverage.  I'd be something like twenty-thousand dollars in the hole.  But my parents' plan will let me be a leech for a few more months and then I get married so shortly after that.  But what if, by some outside chance, my appendix, which has been faithful to me for twenty-two years, decides to rupture in that small window of lawless insurance un-coverage?  I'm out of luck.  But for a person who trembles at financial details, I feel sort of pre-dominated by the whole thing.  This is pathetic, I realize, and I need to grow up and stop being such a baby.  So what do I do?  Call my dad of course, like I used to do in fifth grade when I'd lay awake at a sleepover birthday party and finally decide I couldn't hack it, I had to go home.

What is more, I live in a new town with a new family in a new basement apartment where there are new behemoth insects I've never seen before.  I need a new job and new friends and my new church is starting a new series for the new school year.  I am familiar with little more than my fiance, Mark, and the fifteen-year-old over sized chair and ottoman I grew up watching TV in which my parents donated to the our-daughter-owns-no-more-than-what-fits-in-her-Civic fund.

Therefore, because of this sort of rootlessness, I feel like a hobo with a pillow case holding all of my worldly possessions slung over my left shoulder walking down the median of a busy street.  Zoom, oh my! That car just about clipped me!  

The appealing thing about hobos, though, is that they are constantly on the move, always seeing new things and new people, discovering more beautiful things in a lifetime than people who are, perhaps, boxed-up and stamped, ever get to see.  So despite my itch to be at home, familiar with my neighbors and my schedule, I am pleased to find that this kind of adventure is probably actually very life-giving.  What is more, I am finding that I feel at home where Mark is, where my journal and books are, where my Bible is...and that is quite enough.

bridal mart.

I may not have mentioned yet the fact that I am engaged to be married on May 2nd of 2009. As of today that is only eight months away and as the date approaches two things happen: I get a little more nervous about pulling off all the details and little more excited to be married to this man that I love.  I've come around to the realization that it's frivolous to worry about the day--to be honest my only real concern is that there is red wine and if the flowers clash with the tablecloths no one, not even my Logistical Queen mother, will care.  

Of all of the details, I have been able to relax over all but one. I had been losing sleep over the dress. Not being an overly fashion-savvy person to begin with, the prospect of deciding upon the single most important dress I will ever don was costing me hours of sleep at night.  This is a jittery prospective nervousness that begins with driving to a bridal boutique and walking through the door.  All of the fitting and measuring and in-out-in-out of pants and gowns... and then you throw in the lady who insists that you try it with a veil "just to see how it looks"--the whole thing gives me a stitch in my side just to think of it.

I had finally sucked it up one morning and, like the prepped firing squad with feet planted, I informed my sister that TODAY would I venture into the badlands of bridal stores.  We went, I tried on dozens, felt vaguely sympathetic to a lab rat who's been poked and hung up by his tail, and had melted down to a point of exhaustion and hunger.  But in the end we had found a perfect dress. Perfect hue, perfect design, lovely style, incredible detail. Problem: $2,600.  Not okay.

After this experience and some serious (yet slightly irrational) consideration, I decided that I could not bring myself to spend that kind of cash on a one-time-wear, especially considering that that sum of money is more than many people have to support a family for a year in many places across the globe. I'm not a super-hero-Ginny-saint-philanthropy, but that was over the top.

A friend suggested to me that there is a place near where I live in Burlington, North Carolina called Bridal Mart.  Does the name cause you to raise your brow? It should.  This place is renowned for the fact that it carries top-notch designer dresses for incredibly discounted prices, yet it has a sort of TJ Maxx meets Costco ambiance.  When I walked in I was shell-shocked by the quantity of dresses that were squished in among about twenty-five aisles of dresses.  If there was a system, I'm not sure what it would have been.  My sister, who happens to be precisely nine months pregnant, bravely charged on that store like two-ton linebacker while my mom disappeared behind some white lace and chiffon and we went to town. I sort of stood and blinked with my mouth slightly open.  

This searching process, though overwhelming and completely reckless, went smoothly and each of us found a few dresses that could work.  My sister, hoping to move the baby along a little, volunteered to be the dress-hauler and she informed me that I was in "number 8." Assuming this meant dressing room (with a door and a bench) number 8, I gathered a few more gowns and ventured to the fitting rooms.

Or should I say fitting room.   That's right.  Bridal Mart does not have fitting rooms for brides to try on gowns. Bridal Mart has one solitary fitting room with about twenty numbered pegs stuck into the walls upon which dresses are to be hung.  Hannah meant for me to be PEG 8.  I realize that I may be unreasonable to feel entitled to my own room so, to be a good sport, I sucked up my modesty and began to try on dresses dutifully beside my peg.  Granted, I was trying dresses on over shorts as not to throw all reserve to the wind, but still rising to the group-fashion-show occasion.  

Deep in my own little I-have-to-get-this-thing-hooked-on-but-it's-too-damn-tight world, I finally looked up to see not one but two very curvaceous women, clad in not a scrap of fabric besides some anti-panties, pulling on dresses like somebody unpeeling a banana. Prancing all around their pegs two and four, these soul sisters were laughing and having a good old time in the dressing room at Bridal Mart.  I hope I didn't gawk, though the minutes are sort of fuzzy with shock so I can't be sure. I'll just say that I have never in my life felt so nondescript. 

That dressing room, such an incredible sampling of humanity! Suzie-ponytail with her mother telling her how pristine and perfect she is and Gloomy Gladys who thought that there couldn't possibly be a dress for her within the walls of Bridal Mart (much like whining that there isn't a good spot to lay on the beach of Hawaii).  And then Nancy and Nora Nudey all footloose and free--ludicrous yet laughable.

My assessment of the super store for North Carolina brides?  A+.  Not only because it delivered and relieved me of the single wedding detail that was costing me my sleep, but because it welcomes raw female humanity with a big old smile and some great wide open arms.