Heard from a Muse
These were some of my notes from the Muse and the Marketplace on July 29-30, 2023. Maybe no presenter will recognize some of what I heard online. Was it “sewed” or “sold?” Another phrase might be claimed by several of them. Were you there? What did you hear?
3 Weeks: Jazz, Food, Conversation
Sharing our love of jazz and exploring cultural relationships with our West African house guest.
3 DAYS
My third day with no food. The last meal was lunch on Wednesday: a turkey, cheddar, Parmesan ranch, black olives, and lettuce on marble rye with a caramel-pecan dessert bar from Belle Rose in Nevada, Missouri. The rest of Wednesday I had only water – no supper, no snack, no carbonated drink, no frappuccino. Just filtered tap water, sometimes with ice. The same for Thursday, Friday, and most of today: Saturday.
Cross+Gen 2018
Clouds moving through mountains, sunlight streaking across yellow autumn trees, and grazing elks breathed their magic on us at the Cross+Gen Conference held at the YMCA of the Rockies on October 1-4. My husband, Dyke, and I went with our pastor, Chris Deines, to figure out where our congregation was heading after a year of trying the Cross+Gen approach in our rural Missouri church.
The conference grows from the brain child – the faith child – of Dr. Rich Melheim, and his dream of stirring fresh energy into people of faith and their churches. So many children who grow up going to Sunday School find no place for church in their lives as adults. As a young Lutheran pastor, Rich searched for ways to surround his own children with the gift of Christ’s enduring love.
Over the years, he developed a process for both home and church, “. . . not a way of doing Sunday School. It’s a way of doing life.” Drop a Bible reading “onto a table with costumes and food and glow sticks and food and paint and food. . . . Watch both people and the text come alive.”
Two Novels and a Memoir
Hearing steady rain outside, I woke this morning from a dream of stiff, yellow weeds leaning across the sidewalk to my door. How our green, mowed lawn morphed into parched, unruly growth puzzled me.
Now I’m thinking about two novels, set in different places, both stories agonizing over a mother worrying about a lost child. In Persons Unknown Susie Steiner’s Manon, a pregnant police detective in Cambridge, U.K., has moved away from London for the sake of her adopted black son, Fly. In this murder mystery things don’t go well for Fly in Cambridge, and Manon is torn between her feelings for the unborn child inside of her and for the boy she first loved as her son.
Susan Straight built her novel, Highwire Moon, in the fluid worlds of drug culture on one side and of undocumented immigrant workers on the other. Three-year-old Elvia, found in a car abandoned at a church, was put in California’s foster care system. Nine years later her American father got custody of her, determined to do what he could to care for his child. Here, my prejudice kicks in.