Ringing Like a Bell

I embarrassed my brother. It wasn't the first time, and it won't be the last. He took us (my husband, our sister, and me) to eat at Big Bob Gibson's BBQ when we were in Decatur, AL. First, let me say that the place is a destination all by itself. If you're not from North Alabama and you've never had smoked chicken with white barbecue sauce, don't let yourself die without trying it. I think it is the next best thing to manna from heaven, but I also understand that's how most Southern people feel about their local barbecue flavors. Consequently, my own love of white barbecue sauce made eating at Big Bob's a highlight of my most recent trip home to see my family. Anyway, back to the story. My brother is one of those people that can make friends with anybody. It's a trait he surely inherited from my dad. You might come up on one of them engaged in the apparent conversation of his life and ask, "Who was that?" To which he will reply, ...

For weeks I've been on the lookout for the perfect summer bag. You know the one -- just right for the beach, pretty but not too fancy. I haven't been able to find the right one anywhere. Every time I've stepped into a store with purses for sale, I've browsed. Nothing. All the bags I've seen are either too fussy with lots of weird fringe or metal slugs attached to the sides. The longing for the right purse has been there buzzing in the back of my mind whenever I go out or pick up the purse I've been carrying (One I borrowed from a friend like seven years ago and still haven't returned. Sorry, Whit!). I am happy to report that today I received the bag I've been waiting for all this time. I have a theory that moms get tired after elementary and middle school, so all their eagerness, parent- teacher conference fuel, and gift energy are spent by the time their children get to high school. Consequently, teacher gifts are always pretty thin on the gro...

In full disclosure, I have drafted this post multiple times. That should help explain why it's been so long since I've posted anything. Every time I post to this blog, I've tried to be really honest about the lessons I'm learning and the issues that exist in my life -- to be authentic. Lately that thing has been forgiveness. I've been hurt. Friends of mine have been hurt. There's been a huge, gaping need for forgiveness in my life. I watched a movie recently that had a great scene in it that I think demonstrates what it means to forgive. It is called In My Country and is a fictional story that includes historical elements from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in post-apartheid South Africa. A small boy sits, stone-faced in a plastic chair while two adult men recount the way they killed his parents in front of him. One of the perpetrators stands up, then kneels in front of the boy. He's a grown man sobbing, begging to be allowed to do something...

If there's ever a Lifetime movie made about my life, I'm convinced it will amount to nothing more than a chubby actress bumbling through life enduring a series of clumsy, self-inflicted accidents. Scene one : she falls off her tricycle and skins her knees. Scene two : she loses her grip on the merry-go-round and is launched into a huge puddle of red mud. Scene three : an entire montage of bike wrecks. Scene four : she knocks down an entire row of tables at McDonald's. Scene five : an entire montage of horrendous athletic accidents -- tripping, bobbling the ball, getting smacked in the face... Scene six : she falls, head first, down the bleachers. Scene seven : she loses her balance and rolls down a hill on her college campus. Scene eight : she tumbles off her stool while her students are testing. Scene nine : she slips while trout fishing and nearly breaks her arm. Last night I added a new one to the list; I fell out of the church van while Christmas caroling. ...

Of all the things I need to teach my students, one of the most difficult is clear pronoun-antecedent agreement. For those of you who don't speak 'grammarian', that's the connection between the thing you just talked about and the he, she, or it that replaces that thing later on. When my students write, they are forever rattling off a list of men like Bob, Charles, Tom, and Alex. Then they begin the next sentence with 'he.' I've lost count of the number of times I've written, "which guy?," in the margins of  student essays. A few days ago, one of my classes was discussing a writing assignment. The thread of conversation carried us around to the topic of homeless veterans, which might have seemed illogical, but you've got to remember that I'm teaching a herd of fifteen-year-olds. One girls said, "That's messed up. They shouldn't let that happen." Her friend chimed in, "Yeah, They need to do something about that....

It's a lot like playing Whack-a-mole. I wake up in the morning and think, "Okay, today I'm going to work on my pride." Off I go focusing on being humble, and the next thing you know I'm complaining. I focus on kindness and I start being lazy. I focus on having more faith and begin wasting money on stupid stuff. It drives me crazy because I'm a perfectionist. I want to get it all right all the time. The thing is that people have been trying to be perfect for a long time. Take Benjamin Franklin for example -- he developed this system for himself that, frankly, sounds exhausting. He called it " the bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection ." He explains the whole thing in his autobiography.   He literally kept track of thirteen virtues every day. When he began keeping his charts as a young man, he figured out some hard truths. He says, "I was surprised to find myself so much fuller of faults than I had imagined." In th...

    A Christmas Story is one of those movies you just have to see. What's not to love? Turkey stealing dogs, a mouth washed out with soap, a bumbled trip to see Santa, 'You'll shoot your eye out!", a triple dog dare, a bunny suit, and a glorious Red Rider BB Gun. I was thinking about my favorite scene from the movie earlier -- the leg lamp. If' you've never seen it, Ralphie's dad wins a prize . The anticipation builds, and when the box is finally opened, inside is a horrendously ridiculous leg lamp. His dad proceeds to put the lamp on display in the family's front window much to his mother's shame. It's all very funny, but the part that cracks me up every time is what his dad says just before he opens the box, "Fra-GEE-Lay! It must be Italian!"  The word on the box is, of course, 'fragile,' a fact Ralphie's mother gently points out. I thought about A Christmas Story today because something else fragile came to m...

If you were born in the Southeastern United States like me, you inherited a lot of things: syrupy sweet tea, saying "y'all", calling a shopping cart "a buggy," and an obsession with college football -- just to name a few.  We've also got kudzu, lots of it. It covers everything and is every where. It's like Santa Claus; it sees you when you're sleeping, especially if you're sleeping in an old barn or down by the railroad tracks, and it knows when you're awake, especially if you're driving down some old country road. For those of you who don't know what I'm talking about, it's a vine imported from Japan to help stop erosion around about the time of the Great Depression. This stuff is tenacious. It can grow up to a foot a day in the right climate, and the South has that perfect mixture of humid, rainy summer days and mild winters. The stuff has gone crazy. For my entire life kudzu was this ecological villain we'd all in...

My aunt says that walking every day is the fountain of youth, but I'm not sure I agree with her. Don't get me wrong. I tend to be an "excellent walker" as Jane Austen would say, but I think there is something else much more powerful than a daily constitutional-- the company of children . When I was in high school, I often took care of a little girl. We spent a lot of time together, and I must admit I tended to spoil her. She captained our shopping cart at the grocery store. I usually bought her whatever she threw in the basket on our "expeditions." I was obsessive about my grades and studied more than I really needed to, especially in my anatomy class. I'd be sitting there trying to re-read a chapter about the nervous system when my little charge would march in, shut the book, and declare, "We're going outside!" So that's what we did. We played with puppies and kittens, we fished in puddles for tadpoles, and created works of art w...

Do you remember this music video? If you went to high school in  the late nineties, you probably do. Every afternoon we rushed home from class to see what songs made it onto the day's episode of TRL ( Total Request Live in case you didn't know) hosted by Carson Daly on MTV. I'd love to tell you how many times I've seen the music video for "Tearin' Up My Heart," but I can't. I didn't count. Let's just say a lot, a whole lot. My friend discovered them first. NSYNC aired a special concert on the Disney channel, and she met me at the door when I came over to spend the night. She said,"You've got to see this." At first I wasn't quite as enthusiastic as she was, but then it was like I'd been stricken with a virus. We were NSYNC crazy! Looking back now it was a case of teenage girl mania; I'd never had so much fun in my life. We video taped every TV appearance (yes, with an old-school VCR) , listened to the songs rep...

I've never met a sausage I didn't like. I've always loved the stuff, especially plain old southern pork sausage. As a little girl I requested it for breakfast every chance I got. Then one day someone told me how sausage was made and what was in it. I was totally grossed out for about twenty-four hours when I started thinking about all the sausage I'd eaten and how much I loved the way it tasted. In the end I decided the ingredients didn't matter. Did I want to sit down and eat a roasted kidney? Um, no, but I thought it through. The sausage was still, well, sausage . My knowledge of it had changed, but it still tasted the same. Since then I've managed to focus more on the crispy, meaty, yummy final product rather than the repulsive individual ingredients. Today I went back to school to start a new year. I got to see all my friends and colleagues. After the summer, when I've been away for a while, I always feel refreshed to see the people that work ...