The Electric Company

In October, 1971, I was a two-year veteran viewer of Sesame Street. I was also, in my own mind, a veteran student. After all, I had kindergarten in my past and had only just begun my experience in first grade. I can remember secretly rushing home after school to watch my favorite shows - secretly because they were "kid" shows - and I can remember the hype surrounding the newest offshoot of Sesame Street on television, The Electric Company.

When The Electric Company came out, I was really excited. Part of this was because I loved Sesame Street so much and I knew that this new show was supposed to be for grown-ups like my 6-year-old self. But mostly, it was because I lived two houses down from The Electric Company.

My world was not yet disturbed by the reality that I lived in a tiny little piece of a massive universe. I knew that there was a little store at the corner of my block named The Electric Company and I knew this television show was called The Electric Company, therefore I knew that all I had to do was walk a few steps and I would be looking straight into the world I was seeing on my television set.

It was exciting. It felt like my own little secret - that I lived so close to the fantastical characters and situations I watched on my TV.

The picture is of the building that was The Electric Company when I was very young. The building had originally been built as a corner "Mom and Pop" grocery store. While it was The Electric Company, those big windows across the front were filled with lights. Sparkly lights. Very shiny lights. Barely lit lights. Lights that flickered like candles. Before the television show, those lights held my attention. I would stand in front of that window and become mesmerized by the lights that looked like candles. After the show started, I still stood in front of that building, but now I was looking deeper into the darkness behind the lights - searching for Bill Cosby, Morgan Freeman, Rita Moreno, and all the other super cool people that I knew were in there. I knew they were in there because this was The Electric Company.

In later years, the store left and this building became a hair salon, Kuttin' Korner. While convenient through my teenage years, the little building never again held my attention the way it did in the early 70s, and also never disappointed me as much as it did when I concluded that the television show was fake, The Electric Company on the corner was real. I would never see my Electric Company on television and I would never see the characters from the television within those windows.

The elevator

Last weekend, I made a very quick (less than 48 hour) trip back home to Kansas. While I was there, I took pictures of many of the places that reside within my memory. It was an interesting trip. I had a friend of mine along for the ride and because of this, I saw my town, my state, and my life from a whole new perspective. I've decided to write a blog post for each of the pictures I took while I was there so that I can remember, and so that my children will have my stories.

The first picture I will share is the first one I took upon arriving in my hometown of Hutchinson, Kansas (affectionately known as "Hutch).

Hutch has a lot of grain elevators. In fact, I'm wishing I had taken a picture of the "city" skyline, which would mainly consist of grain elevators. The one in the picture was the world's largest when it was built at 1/2 mile long. It could hold 46 million bushels. It is now the 2nd largest grain elevator in Kansas and there are larger in the world, but it is still a really large elevator.

The elevator is in a state of neglect right now. Even though it is still in use, it is no longer the pristine white I remember it being when I was young. As long as it held the spot of world's largest, it was painted regularly and was a source of pride for my hometown.

My earliest memory of the elevator is not a complete memory. The only part of the memory I can bring to mind is riding in my dad's pickup truck. He stopped at one end and I can remember somebody getting me out of the truck. My siblings are all present in my memory and the last thing I can remember is running as hard as I could to try to keep up with them.

The full story, as it was retold often by my dad, was that I was still in diapers then. He took us to the elevator so we could see how long it was. Since it was a half mile, he suggested that we run to the end and back and then we would know we had run a mile. I was the youngest of four children. My siblings would have been 12, 9 and 7. I would have been about 2. It is the first memory I have of a very strong desire to be like them. It mattered to me that I was left behind while they ran ahead of me. My father followed along behind, slowly, in his truck so that he could convince me to get back in. I probably only ran about a 5th of the length of the elevator. Dad always said I was crying that I had not been able to keep up and mad that he wouldn't let me keep going.

One of my first memories in life tells a story of a little girl who was striving to keep up with someone else, to achieve someone else's dream. If only she had known how frivolous that endeavor would be.

Memories: A bald boy, a tractor and Pooh

David and I have been doing projects around the house, so far mostly surrounding the garage. We have needed to clean for quite some time and over the holiday break seemed a good time to get started. As we opened boxes, which mostly held the remains of my home in Kansas, we laughed at old memories, pondered how far we have come, and encountered mementos of Nathan's fight with cancer.

There were two of those mementos that have stayed within my mind during the time since we did the cleaning. One, I will save for another post, but the other haunted me on my drive home from work yesterday and I feel compelled to tell a story.

The story begins in a big white hospital in Wichita, Kansas. St. Francis is a complex of big, white buildings, and there is a wing in the main hospital that is very special. It originally was built to be the birthing wing, full of large rooms equipped with televisions and VCRs, rocking chairs, recliners, and enough room to roll a second bed into. When St. Francis built a new, free-standing birthing unit, this wing became pediatric oncology.

I spent a lot of time in that wing. Whenever we would arrive there, if Nathan was feeling up to it, he would walk the halls, looking for "his" fire truck. It was a pedal-powered fire truck, complete with lights and sirens. Often, he would encounter another vehicle on his quest. It was a pedal-powered John Deere tractor. This tractor was most often being driven by a boy just a few months older than Nathan. The boy was from a Mennonite family who lived on a farm and he was drawn to the tractor as a reminder of home.

The first time I saw the boy, he had blonde, curly hair. He was riding the tractor and his mother, in cap, and father, in beard, were walking along beside him. As the months went on, I watched as he became bald, just like Nathan, and rode the halls on his tractor alone, just like Nathan. The ride-ons in this wing are equipped with a pole on which the IV bag can be hung and this means freedom from having to follow youngsters through the hall, pushing a clunky IV pole.

The two of them riding together and laughing down the halls while the parents got a rest from the constant supervision is forever in my mind. I distinctly remember, for some reason, the last time I saw the boy. I was standing in the doorway of Nathan's room, looking for him and I saw the boy at the end of the hall, turning the corner and riding away on his green John Deere.

The last time I saw his mother was six months after Nathan's last chemotherapy treatment. Every three months, we had to return to have Nathan sedated while he went through a new C-scan and bone scan to be sure nothing new was showing up. While I sat in the prep room, watching Nathan receive the IV, the boys mother, whose name I never knew, walked in. She handed me a soft, plush Winnie the Pooh blanket. Without tears, she told me of her son's passing on the 2 year anniversary of his diagnosis, just a few days before he was scheduled to receive a bone marrow transplant. She had purchased the blanket as a present to give to him once they arrived at the strange, new hospital in Houston, and had never had the opportunity to do so. She wanted my son to have the blanket because she remembered him the same way I remembered her son - riding along those halls, celebrating freedom.

She had held on to the blanket for a few months after his death, holding it as she would have held him, and had decided that the Lord would prefer that she let it go so that another boy could get comfort from it as she had intended hers would. She chose Nathan to receive this beautiful gift.

12 years later, we came across that blanket - too small now to cover my boy but lovingly and safely stored away with favored mementos of his childhood. Last night, Nathan sat watching TV with it covering his lap. The gift served its purpose then as a comfort to him as he recovered and it continues to remind us of the beautiful gift of life.

It also ensures that I will never forget the back of that little boy's bald head turning the corner as he rode his tractor out of view, nor will I ever forget his sweet mother's pain and compassion as she processed her own loss.

Hug your children. They are precious gifts for however long we have them.

My new journey

I've decided, once again, to tackle my weight issue. This time, it is totally for me. I know that my family and friends love me no matter what size I am. However, my health, as I get older, is worse than what it should be, and I know it is because of my weight. I want to be healthy again, I want to be happy with myself again, and I want to fit into the closet of clothes I call my "skinny closet".

I decided that all of the "plans" aren't working for me. Although Weight Watchers helped me lose 70 pounds a few years ago, it didn't help me keep it off. I needed to start something that would be more of a life change than a planned diet.

Enter my BFF, Andrea! She asked me if I would be her accountability partner as she tries to lose weight, also. It seemed like a great idea, so I said yes. She texts me every time she eats something and I text her whenever I eat something. Seems simple, but it really makes a difference. We have been doing this for just a few days and I can see my attitude towards food changing - if I am going to have to confess to eating this, is it really worth it? Sometimes it is, and we talk about what to do to counteract the decision, but more often, it isn't.

As we have been doing this, I have also seen that I'm not only saving calories, I'm saving money, as well. I am going to try to post updates on this blog with the choices I'm making, both to remind me later, but also in case my choices might resonate with others.

Yesterday:

Before all of this started, I visited Starbucks at least once a day and often, twice. My morning drink is a Grade soy latte, which costs about $5 and is around 170 calories. To be honest, I almost always get a banana walnut bread, as well, which adds $3 and a whopping 425 calories.

My choice yesterday was to brew my own Starbucks Cinnamon Dolce K-cup in my Keurig. The K-cups are 50 cents (these are only 25 cents because I bought them on a B1G1F special). I also decided I wasn't really hungry for breakfast, so I saved between $4.75 and $7.75 and only took in 5 calories!

Today:

Again, I saved my $4.75 by making my own coffee. This morning, I was hungry for breakfast.

What I wanted: McDonald's Egg McMuffin (300 calories) $3.00 + Grande soy latte (170 calories) $5.00 for a total of 470 calories and $8.00.

What I had:

Thomas Multigrain Lite English Muffin 50 cents 100 calories
1 egg, fried in canola oil with spinach on top 10 cents 92 calories
Cinnamon Dolce K-cup 25 cents, 5 calories

for a total of 197 calories and 85 cents.

Savings: 273 calories and $7.15!

Yesterday -- Now my troubles seem so far away

Yesterday, I was feeling sorry for myself. As my friend, Dawn Davis, said – I didn’t think it fair to have to focus on work when my mind and body needed a rest. Today, I have applied all of the techniques I’ve learned and developed over the years to turn this feeling of desperation into a feeling of anticipation.

Here is what I came up with:

Rested | Tired

Joyful | Sad

Carefree | Burdened

This represents the way I turn my focus. The items on the right are the words that I described myself as - tired, sad, burdened. The items on the right are on what my friend, Tom Whiteman, gave me a name for - the "God Side."

Here is how you would read the words - 

Rested | Tired

Instead of feeling tired because of the state of sleep-deprivation I’m in due to a health issue, I’m choosing to focus on how well-rested I will feel once I’m able to begin using a resource that will enable me to sleep.

Joyful | Sad

Instead of feeling sad because I lost a member of my church family, I am focusing on the joy I feel when I remember the impact he had on my family and on others inside and outside of the congregation.

Carefree | Burdened

Instead of feeling burdened, I’m focusing on the fact that in a few months, I will feel carefree, as I finish my graduate school work and eliminate some of the other outside stresses I have at the moment.

Today, I woke up and went to work – the sun was shining. There was a light breeze blowing against my face. I spent the day with educators who are passionate about doing what is best for our students. I came home to my family, who I love, and who I love to spend time with. Through that whole time, my body worked – I breathed, my eyes blinked, thousands of metabolic processes happened without a hitch, mutations happened and were repaired.

And I enjoyed another day.

It’s all good.

A new challenge

I was challenged to complete the Ice Bucket Challenge to raise awareness and money for ALS. As a student of sociology, I had been watching the challenge gain momentum on Facebook and had pondered the reasons why we, as a society, seem to need personal attention (a/k/a posting a video of ourselves doing something silly) before we will donate to a cause. Some folks took my ponderings to mean that I was against raising awareness for ALS, which I could take another look through a sociology lens to evaluate. I won’t do that here.

The fact about my relationship to ALS is that it has been my worst fear since January 2, 2002. I’ll get back to that date in a moment, but I have had an awareness of what ALS is and does for a very long time. It is my worst fear because I cannot imagine being “here” in mind but unable to express love for my family because my body won’t cooperate. It seems to me like it would be the worst thing that could happen to me – since 2002.

Before ALS, I had a different, deep fear. When I was an introverted old soul making my way through my 5^th grade year, I read a book by Erma Bombeck entitled “I want to grow up, I want to grow hair, I want to go to Boise.” In it, she told stories about children who were battling cancer. As a fifth grader, I somehow wasn’t worried at all about having cancer myself, but I did develop a deep fear of having a child with cancer sometime in my adult future.

Even in college, I studied Biology with a focus on cancer and micro-biology. Always in the back of my head was that remembrance of the fear that I had. My senior year of college, I had my youngest son during the week before fall finals and I returned to school that next week to take my exams. I didn’t know then that I would learn more about pediatric cancer than I ever wanted to know in just over a year.

January 2, 2002, was the day that I learned my son, who had just celebrated his first birthday, had alveolar rhabdomyosarcoma (RMS). RMS is a rare form of cancer, and the alveolar subtype is one of the most aggressive. Through a year of surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation therapy, my son fought the battle with this disease and won. Today, he is 13 years old and, although he continues to have surgeries to correct skeletal issues as a result of the radiation, he is very healthy and I am thankful for each day that I get to be his mom.

The outcome is not always that good for the families whose lives are forever changed when a doctor tells them their child has cancer. Cancer is the leading cause of disease-related death among children ages 0 to 19, even though it is rare enough that (aside from leukemia) drug companies do not see it as being an area of strong need for research. In the United States alone, 37 children are diagnosed with cancer every day. That is 37 families whose lives are forever changed. Of those 37, 9 of them will die.

My reason for writing this is to issue a new challenge. Because we all found it incredibly easy to open our wallets and be silly for a good cause, I believe we can continue to do that on a regular basis. My challenge to you is to find a cause each month that you will open your mind and your wallet to. Whether that is a continual donation to ALS, a new donation each month, or whatever you decide to do, don’t let the ice bucket challenge be something you did just for a Facebook video opportunity.

Open your minds. Open your wallets. Change lives ALL year, not just for a challenge, but for good.

September is Childhood Cancer Awareness Month. My donation this month will be to St. Baldrick’s Foundation, which I have found to be an organization who puts a very high percentage of the money it raises directly into childhood cancer research.

Amazing Grace

I am an emotional person. I cry when I'm happy, I cry when I'm sad, I cry when I remember something good, I cry when I remember something lost. For many of the congregation of my church, that won't really mean anything. But to the clergy, who sit facing me each Sunday as I and my family sit in the second row (nobody sits in the first row unless someone is getting baptized), they get to see emotion draw across my face often.

I am a very emotional Christian. There are days when just looking at Jesus, hands outstretched on the stained glass window in front of me can make me cry. There are days when looking at my boys, arriving late, but sharp in suits and ties, can make my eyes misty. Then there are those days when music does it. It can be a song, like What a Friend we Have in Jesus - which my father used to sing to me when he talked about it being his father's favorite song. I never knew my grandfather, a preacher himself, but I heard so many stories about him growing up that I always felt like I sat on his knee all my life. It might be the sound of Jed Maus playing a trumpet, sounding exactly like the smooth tones my father caused his cornet - now mine - to issue.

Those days are a little embarrassing to me. I leave the sanctuary teary-eyed and sometimes I know people wonder what is wrong. It is nothing - I just felt it that day.

Today was really something completely different, which is ironic since it was the first day after our last youth mission trips returned home, having served under the motto "Something Completely Different."

It was a song, once again, that triggered the emotion. It was the sermon that might have had me thinking a little too deeply about what that song meant to me that resulted in an all-out, waterfalls down my face, can't talk, good cry. I felt compelled to lean over to my youngest son, Nathan, and kiss his head, which resulted in a similar display of emotion from him. I also felt compelled to touch my husband's shoulder and to sit down beside my mother and give her a hug. By the end of the song, we were all covered in tears.

Rev. Donna McKee silently gave me a hug after the service. She didn't need to ask questions - she knows that I don't just think about my spirituality in worship, I feel it. Still, as I thought about the reason for this over-the-top response to a very familiar song, I feel the need to explain myself a bit.

The song was Amazing Grace. This is such a popular song that I know as soon as you read the title of this post, the tune started playing in your head. Music is one of the most basic of human memory aids - hearing it can deposit us firmly into our past and that is sort of what it did to me today. Because of the sermon topic, forgiveness, I think it was more than just memory. I have four explicit memories that surround that song:

1. My grandmother, Vivian Keller, was a pianist and a preacher. I grew up in a small, wood-floor, wood-pew, no-air conditioning, frame church watching Grandma play every single gospel song ever written from memory on a piano in the front left corner of the sanctuary. Grandma had been a pianist in a silent movie house when she was young, which required her to understand the composition of music itself, so a visiting soloist or instrumentalist had only to tell Grandma which key they needed her to play or a general idea of the sound they wanted to achieve, and she started hitting those keys in  grand accompaniment. As a result, I knew many old gospel favorites - Sweet By and By, Beaulah Land, and yes, Amazing Grace. As an adult in my late 20s, I struggled with my life and my relationship with God suffered. My first story about Amazing Grace is one of new life. I was poor, depressed, and had a car that had no radio. I lived in a town about 45 minutes away from everything, and those silent drives were intolerable. I would sing songs to myself. One of the songs I sang most often was Amazing Grace. It started because it was the only song I knew every single word to. As I drove home in the evenings, I slowly began listening to the words and a song changed my life.

2. Fast forward a few years and the song that meant so much to me became my favorite song to sing to my children when I was trying to get them to sleep. I would sing it, hum it, and sing it again. Because of this, my daughter, Rene, loved the song and determined to learn all of the words. My dad heard her sing it once and the next time he visited, he brought with him something to record her voice. I still have the recording, when my 9 or 10 year old daughter sang all six verses beautifully and my dad just couldn't help but to accompany her in his tenor. That very recording was played years later at my father's funeral and I know he would have been delighted to know that he sang at his own funeral.

3. Three years prior to my father's death, my youngest son, Nathan, was diagnosed with cancer. I had recently become separated from my husband. For a myriad of reasons I won't go into here, I found myself alone with Nathan many times during the year of chemotherapy and radiation therapy that followed. My vivid memories of that time include many nights, sitting in a hospital rocking chair, rocking my baby to sleep and singing quietly. The song that I sang, hummed, then sang again reminded me of the powerful presence that kept me from being completely alone in that room. I'm sure you know the title.

4. Couple years on and David's grandmother "Mamaw" passed away. He sang at her funeral. You can guess the name of that song.

Today, all of these memories with forgiveness wrapped around them brought on the tears. Forgiveness isn't just about forgiving others for wrongs, it is about forgiving our own past. It is about forgiving our own actions, or inactions. It is about forgiving so that we can move on.