Month: April 2008

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Dad Blogs Family Marriage

How Chris lost his groove…

After writing yesterday’s blog, I got to thinking about my quick comment about the 18-year old beverage cart girl at the golf course. Then I remembered the details surrounding this little encounter and after running it through my head a dozen times, I realized that I am totally clueless around other women.

Let me explain…

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Hot ChicksOn Sunday, I was sharing a golf cart with a friend of mine. He’s a bachelor; successful, reasonably good looking, etc. He’s also a known horndog with two houses in TX, but he lives here in Atlanta, and I’m pretty sure he has women in both locales.

On the course Sunday, we were rounding about the 9th hole when the beverage cart came motoring up the hill towards us. We were both frustrated enough with our game by then to need (YES! “need”) an alcoholic beverage, so we hailed down the cart.

For the uninitiated, it’s normal practice for the golf course manager to employ hot college-age girls to run these carts. It’s not because they are trying to exploit women; no, it’s more like the “Hooters” philosophy:

Hot girls = More Business

So, it’s simple economics.

However, today’s beverage cart girl was actually two girls, a brunette and a blonde. The brunette was driving, and her friend, the blonde, sat beside her with a blanket thrown over her legs to presumably, stay warm in the drizzly, gray soup we were playing in.

As the cart pulled up beside ours, the blonde said in a very attractive southern drawl, “Can I get ya’ll something?”

To which my friend replied, “Can I get a Diet Coke?”
Not wanting to be the first guy to get a beer, I seconded his request and the blonde removed her blanket and got up to fish our drinks from the back cooler. It was at this time, that I “noticed” the blonde and I looked over at my friend to see his reaction and as expected, he raised his eyebrows in surprise and looked over at me. We both gave that, “Yep, I agree” nod and walked around to pay the lady.

Now this is where I got all fuzzy. After noticing how cute she was, my married-ness kicked in and I found myself unable to look at her again. I couldn’t look at her eyes, I couldn’t look at her…shirt…nuthin! I also apparently went stone deaf! Because, according to my friend, she then sassed the both of us with a, “What’re you boys doin’, watchin’ your figures?”

Now, even the jaded among you must agree that was a flirtatious opening statement if you’ve ever heard one and had I been younger and single (and not deaf), I would have responded in kind. As it was, I was too busy acting like some gangly, uncomfortable teenager putzing around in my golf bag in the back of the cart. So much so that I didn’t hear my friend and her strike up a conversation, despite her being about 20 years younger than him.

The next memory I have is of us puttering away and my friend saying, “Wow, they sure grow them big up here in rural Georgia,” speaking not of her weight or height, but of her…well, you know.

Thinking about all the many the couple of times I’m reasonably confident that I’ve been hit on by other women since I’ve been married, and knowing how I react around good looking women, I have to say that, should (Heaven forbid) anything ever happen to make me a single guy again, I’m pretty sure I’d become a reclusive hermit; spending my days in the gym and my nights in front of the computer surfing for gym clothes. Because I seem to have lost all the Game that I ever had. And I’m not talking about Golf here now either.

I’ve really gotta get outta the house more.

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Dad Blogs Family Fatherhood Marriage

I’m not Irish, but occasionally I play one in my head…

Ordered Chaos

There’s an old Irish folksong (read: bar song) called “Seven Drunken Nights” and it starts with:

“When I came home, on Monday night, as drunk as drunk could be…” (here’s a link to the lyrics if you’re inclined)

…and it goes on through all seven days of the week and it details how this drunk keeps coming home finding items left over from his wife’s apparent “lover” though she pretends that he’s too drunk to see straight and explains to him that what he’s seeing is not really what’s going on (though it is).

No, no…my wife isn’t cheating on me. My point is that sometimes when I’m sitting there at home in my own little world of calm as the chaos swirls around me, these lyrics spring to mind and I chuckle at the absurdity of the situation. For instance, last night:

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CareerMom got home from her trip to Orlando at around 7:00 p.m. By then, I’d been feeding the boys sugary snacks in a vain attempt at staving off their hunger till she could get home with the dinner I called in to the local pizza n’ pasta shop. As we got the table set and just sat down to eat, CareerMom yells, “Knikki!”  (apparently, my Doberman was puking on the kitchen floor).

So I hopped up and opened the door and shooed her outside. I closed the door and sat down to feed MLE while CareerMom cleaned up the puke. Thanks heavens for linoleum!

About five minutes later, MLI says, “Why did Knikki puke on the floor?” and I explained that she’s old and sometimes her tummy gets sick. He nodded and thoughtfully poked at his food.

Five minutes later, “I’m done, may I be excused?” he says. I nod and he gets down from the table and walks into the living room.

“Eeeeewww! Knikki puked in here too!”

At this point, I knew the liquidity from the puke had seeped into the carpet by now leaving only “chunks” on top and also, I have supreme confidence in the aforementioned “SpotBot” to clean it up so I said to CareerMom, “Don’t worry about it. Enjoy your dinner and we’ll clean it up later.”
Then to MLI I said, “OK, let’s not talk about puke anymore.” To which he nodded and then went and sat on the stairs.

A couple of minutes went by, “I can see the puke from over here.”

“Honey,” I said, starting to get slightly annoyed now, “I told you already that I don’t want to hear another word about the puke. You already ate and now mommy and daddy are trying to enjoy their dinner. Not another word.”

A couple of minutes passed and by this time MLE was stuffed, and out of boredom, was leaning waaaaaay out of his high-chair in an attempt at escape, so we put him down on the floor to play.

Then  from the stairs, I hear MLI yell, “Don’t let him go in the living room or he’ll step in the puke!”

Which was true, but which also made “it” click in my head and then all hell broke loose. Dinner was over, regardless of whether or not I wanted it to be. Both CareerMom and I hopped up from the table. She grabbed MLE as he was running into the living room, where he would no doubt trip up at the critical moment and fall face first into “said” puke. I turned to MLI, “I told you not another word about the puke. Go to your room!”

“But why?”

“Because I said so and don’t talk back to me. Now go!”

He stomped upstairs and slammed his door, while life went on downstairs; just me, CareerMom, MLE and our beloved Spotbot.

Did I mention that I had on some lovely classical music in the background? Just another soothing dinner.

And then, like the closing of some gritty western, where the cowboy rides off into the sunset amidst the lonely whistle of a prairie song, I heard in my head, “…oh there’s a many a days I’ve traveled, a hundred miles or more, but a quiet dinner with my lovely wife…sure I’ve never seeeeen beeeefooooore.”

Yep, absurdity among chaos. That’s family life for ya!

Categories
Dad Blogs Family

Not (yet) on Oprah’s Book List

The ShackI guess I’m probably the last person to read
“The Shack” by William Young. If I’m NOT the last, and you haven’t read it either, it’s the fictional story about a man (Mack) who loses a daughter in a horrible twist of fate, and as a result, blames God…blah blah blah. The story details how Mack receives a personal invitation from God to return to the scene of his daughter’s disappearance where, over the course of the weekend, he meets with God and eventually reconciles his relationship with him. The location isn’t as plain as it would seem, and neither is his meeting with God. I won’t spoil it with more details.

CareerMom bought this book for me over Easter and as I pulled it out of my basket, she said, “I got it at Sweet Spirit. It was on the Best Seller’s list, so I just got it. I don’t know if it’s good or not.”

Normally, I might believe her lackadaisical attitude about why she purchased the book, but the back cover of the book explains… well…you read it:

shack excerpt

It’s a not-discussed non-secret between CareerMom and I that my personal beliefs about God, while still strong, don’t run towards the “gotta go to church every Sunday” direction and that my frustrations with God generally stem from a seeming lack of interaction (or interest) on his part. Given the facts, I’m pretty sure her wish was that this book would hopefully give me some answers, while guiding me back towards a closer relationship with him. Having read a number of these “Where’s God” books, I didn’t hold out much hope.

Surprisingly, it may actually work out that this book provides some insight, if not actual answers, but not in the way she thinks. This book, a piece of fiction containing “real conversations” according to the author, won’t come as a shock to the millions of us who have grown up and cast aside the traditional religion we grew up with and who, have instead, embraced a more personal God, according to his or her own views of spirituality. It will, and has, cause a visceral reaction among those (like my mother) who believe God is up there diddling his finger around in everyone’s business and who also believe he has a plan for absolutely everything that happens.

The shack doesn’t portray God in a manner that fulfills any one religion’s perfect ideal, and some of the theology taught by “God” in the book would probably give even the youngest Pope a heart attack. What it does do, is tend to bolster the agnostics’ belief that we’ve gotten religion all wrong (and I’m talking about Eastern and some Western religions) and that there are many paths to God and not everyone will get there the same way. The shack portrays God as more a relationship oriented being, rather than a rules oriented being.

There’s a part of me–the part that went to a Bible thumping, fire and  brimstone church when I was a kid–who wants to scream “HERETIC!”, but then there’s another part of me that wants to believe what is written here. But despite all this, what I haven’t found in the book, is a concrete answer about what a person needs to do to gets on God’s eternal good side. Is there a prayer I need to say to ensure I go to heaven? Do I need to get sprinkled with water again, turn around three times and do ten pushups? What?

I’m not quite finished with the book yet and these answers may still reveal themselves. Either way, I have gotten one thing from the book and it came in a very offhanded passage where I don’t think the author was actually trying to make a point; which actually lends authenticity to some of the book’s tenets.

From my own church background, I know that the Bible tells us to model our prayers after the Lords prayer:

  1. start by praising him (“…hallowed be thy name…”)
  2. next comes our submission to him (“…thy kingdom come, thy will be done…”)
  3. then we ask him for things (“…give us this day our daily bread…”)
  4. ask for forgiveness (“…and forgive us our trespasses…”)
  5. ask for guidance (“…lead us not into temptation…”)
  6. Conclusion

In following this, I always find myself thanking God over and over for the same things. In fact, I’d bet most of us use the same prayer playbook–generally speaking–and honestly, I get bored with it and I figure he does too. But, in The Shack, it details how Mack is sitting around the table eating dinner with God and he’s telling God all about his friends and then he says, (I’m paraphrasing) “Hey wait a minute…what am I telling you all this for. Don’t you already know everything about them?” And God answers (again…paraphrasing) “Of course we know, but in this moment, we are turning off that part of us that knows all about them, so that we can enjoy listening to you tell us in your own words.”

I must say that was a bit of a revelation to me. What if that’s REALLY how it works for God? What if each time he hears our cries and our praise, it’s as if he’s hearing it for the first time? Sort of brought back a renewed interest in prayer for me.

So as I finish the book, we’ll see. If I’ve gotten you interested in more, then great. Hope I didn’t turn anyone off though. If you’ve read it, I’d love to hear your thoughts.