Once in awhile I get an opportunity to participate in a focus marketing group. It’s a great way to make money for giving one’s opinion, and I’ve enjoyed doing them and pocketing the cash. I’ve earned anywhere from $3 to $150 depending on the length of time that was required. I gave my opinion on cereal box designs, songs I prefer or hate on a radio station, mock trial results, and the taste of new Oreos. But I’ll never, ever forget the one I did for Hatfield meats, and they might remember me also.
I was the only participant, and as usual, I was in a room with a facilitator, but made aware that I was being watched by others through a mirrored window. They showed me two or three ideas for commercials and then asked a lot of questions about what I liked and didn’t like, what I noticed and didn’t notice, etc. Then came the last potential commercial.
It was all about Thanksgiving, and there was a large family preparing. Teens were setting the table and little ones were helping. There were aged grandparents and parents, and aunts and uncles, and everyone looked happy as they put a spread on the table which of course included sausages and other pork products and a big ham in the center. They had all just sat down at the table and were about to start eating. I was thinking, aw, this is pretty nice – I wouldn’t mind watching this commercial a bunch of times because there were a lot of things to focus on and it was pleasant. Suddenly there was a knock at the door and the mother got up to go and answer it. To her total surprise, there stood her daughter in military uniform, home for Thanksgiving. They embraced and the mother’s face showed her tears.
As it turns out, my eldest son David was away in the Navy in Guam, at the time and I hadn’t seen him in a couple of years. That scene undid me. I wept, and wept, and wept. And believe me, if putting a Hatfield ham on my table would have brought my son home, I’d have bought a pile of them right then and there! I can only imagine that the secret viewers were all giving each other high-fives on the other side of the window: “Yep, this one is a winner.”
That’s a mother’s heart for you. We can get by without seeing our kids for awhile, but it doesn’t mean that we don’t miss their faces, their jokes, their stories, and their conversation pretty frequently. They lived with us for over 18 years, and even in the midst of enjoying the current freedom and quiet and lack of tension, there’s still a place that can’t be filled by anyone else, ever.
David didn’t fully appreciate my lack of subtlety when I painted “Welcome home, David!” on a bedsheet and hung it on the front of our house when he finally returned. But I couldn’t do any less.
Spring is the time for Spring cleaning (maybe), baseball (sometimes), beautiful flowers (always),
gorgeous weather (like Wednesday the 27th!) and the start of yard sales! I really should have one
of those “I brake for yard sales” bumper stickers. There’s just such a little thrill to stopping and
taking a look at what’s what, and maybe, just maybe finding a special bargain.
When the kids were younger, I went a lot more frequently. I bought clothing, shoes, baby stuff,
books, VCR tapes (I got 8 just last week for $2! – hey they’re still fun to watch.) I remember finding
a brand new-still in the box – 4-waffle iron which I paid all of $5 for and took home to upgrade
our years-old 2-waffle maker. The next week I found another one exactly like it at another yard
sale for $6, used only once. With 6 kids, hey, we needed two waffle irons going to make it worthwhile,
or I’d be pouring batter all day. My sons could eat a LOT of waffles.
I guess the best thing I ever found, though, was a particular bunk bed set. I had decided that the best way to improve on the crowding we had with three boys in one 10×10 bedroom was to build a triple bunk bed. All I needed was to buy one more set that was exactly like the 20 year old stacking set we already had. I prayed over this one! And what do you know – I walked up to my third and last yard sale of the morning in East Norriton and there it was – same design, slightly different color. $20 for the frame. I took it home, cut the legs off so the bottom bunk would be right on the floor, got a friend to drill holes into the top and into the bottom of the middle bed posts, and glued in a piece of dowel rod. We stacked the beds and then attached them to the wooden window sill tightly so that they would not tip over with three teenagers climbing on them. It worked out great – now there was more room on the floor for them to drop their clothes onto. 😦
I know that recycling is supposed to be really important and all that, but it gave me
pause to find a big package of “recycled toilet paper” at Giant last week. Hmmmm. I don’t
think I want to think about that one too deeply. I just imagine sitting there and unrolling
it and thinking, “where has this toilet paper been before?” 🙂 No wonder it was off-white.
What about Easter (or Resurrection Day, as I like to call it)?
It wasn’t just that our leader was killed. Jesus Christ was God’s Son, and He died to take away our sins. And then: He was raised from the dead – He conquered death, and headed for Heaven. Because of Him and His sacrifice, I will be resurrected to Heaven as well.
And in the meantime, in my life “old things are passed away – all thing become new.” Because “if any man is in Christ, he is a new creature.”
I am not ashamed of this truth. Sometimes I falter in trying to explain it. But it is amazing to live without the weight of guilt and sin. It’s not that I don’t sin (do wrong) anymore – I am far from perfect. But when I do, I can go straight to God in prayer, through Jesus my mediator, and be forgiven. “For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son that whoever believes in Him should not perish, but have eternal life.” And He gives me strength to do what is right.
One of my favorite hymns for this time of year goes like this:
“Low in the grave He lay, Jesus my Savior, waiting the coming day, Jesus my Lord.
Up from the grave He arose, with a mighty triumph o’er His foes
He arose a victor from the dark domain and He lives in Heaven with His saints to reign
He arose! He arose! Hallelujah, Christ arose!”
No, I can’t water that down or take away from the importance of this day by adding trite and silly trinkets and traditions to it. I will wish you all a “Happy Resurrection Day” though.
So, what’s the big deal about “celebrating” Easter with bunnies and eggs and chocolate and all?
I just can’t. You see, the resurrection of Christ is too important. Very important. The entirety of my Christian faith is summed up in this particular act.
The Lord never actually told us to remember Jesus’ birth. It’s okay that we do – there’s good reasons for it. God gave the best, most perfect gift, and so we give gifts to others, and we also remember Jesus’ birthday.
But the Lord, via the Bible, did tell us to remember the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. Regularly. Like, every Sunday – every first day of the week. And so we do, and yet we remember it especially when Springtime comes around and the Jews celebrate Passover and we remember both the death and the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Why?
More to come.
I love chocolate. I think most people do. I really don’t even need an excuse to eat it or to love it. I keep a big Hershey’s Symphony bar around the house just so that I can break off a chunk now and then when I want that luscious taste in my mouth. I keep a big can of Giant store brand hot chocolate powder in my cupboard in case I want to sip it and make it last. I’ve been known to buy Chocolate “Nips” which are hard candies that keep the chocolate front and center on my tongue for a good long time, and with fewer calories. And all our kids weddings have had extremely good, moist, homemade chocolate cakes as wedding cakes. For that matter, all of the birthdays pretty much call for our home recipe too.
All of this to say that I don’t think that kids lost out on anything by not getting chocolate in association with Easter. It’s around all the time. There’s nothing lost there. I can be an individual and not fall for the consumerism either.
They didn’t lose out on the fun of treasure hunts either. From time to time a kids’ party would include one, or someone would have a trail to follow on his or her birthday in order to find a present. It just didn’t need to be connected to the resurrection of Christ, that’s all.
And there was a reason for that.
More to come.
I can only imagine that the current “Easter” celebration was put together by a committee. 🙂
Sometime, oh, say a hundred or more years ago, some people were tired of the usual religious ways of celebrating the resurrection of Christ, and so they put together a committee to decide on some new and more exciting trends to try. Everyone agreed that Easter should be in the Springtime, but some favored March and others liked April. Everyone agreed that animals have babies in the Spring. Since rabbits are so proficient at it (and actually tend to have litters throughout the year, not only in the Springtime), some thought that they should be the symbol of new life. Others thought that chickens were a better symbol, as they could lay out new life on a daily basis.
The committee was rather frazzled, and finally did what all committees do: compromised. They decided that the date for Easter would vary, sometimes in March, sometimes in April, so that everyone would get a turn. The whole sneak-in-the-house Christmas thing had worked well for Santa Claus, so they agreed to start a tradition wherein a giant bunny would sneak into homes and hide chicken eggs in peoples’ houses or yards (depending on the weather.) It would be fun for the kids and give the parents another photo opportunity, as well as a chance to lie to their kids, all in fun, of course.
And somehow, it was still supposed to have something to do with the resurrection of Christ.
More to come…
I don’t get it. To me, if you are going to pay good money to watch a baseball game, you go there to watch the game. You fill in the booklet if you want, or you pay attention to who is up to bat and what’s going on. You learn to do this. Your attention span lengthens as you watch something that takes awhile. You feel the excitement of the location, you watch the people around you, and you p-a-r-t-i-c-i-p-a-t-e.
They tore down Veteran’s Stadium. To me, it seemed like a perfectly good place the way it was. I liked it. There were cheap seats so we could take half the neighborhood (see posts from April 7 & 11). It was all enclosed and it was easy to figure out how to get here or there. I taught the boys to look at the section numbers and figure out where they were going that way. Simple. It seemed like it worked just fine for a long time. Maybe it needed too much overhauling like they said, I don’t know. Seemed to me that somebody just wanted something newer and more advanced.
So I went to the new stadium once, and only once. I will admit that I am not a huge Phillies fan, so they aren’t exactly losing out on a lot of ticket sales because of my not attending. But I didn’t like it. I didn’t like the fact that there weren’t any more cheap seats, and I didn’t like the newer location. I don’t like the big hole in the outfield, although I have been told that it is an improvement appreciated by the players. But mostly I don’t like what has happened to watching sports.
Every five feet there’s a restaurant, and maybe another stand or restaurant out in the middle area. This makes it more difficult to get where one is going because of the odd Mexico-City like traffic patterns, people going hither and yon and across and wherever. It’s frustrating. And then off to the side I saw the “attractions.” There’s a playground. And batting cages and so forth (the latter were at theVet too.) A playground. For when little Joey gets bored, so then his mom or dad can miss half the game taking him to play there. Of course, they are probably also taking him to get high-priced food and nice Phillies souvenirs, so maybe it’s for when they are in the area.
It just seems to me that so much has been added just on the off chance that someone might get bored and need more than the baseball game to keep them happy. And, of course, one must always be happy.
Well, anyway, I’m not an expert. I just liked Vet Stadium and less frustration and cost much better.
I played on a Ladies’ Softball team for my church just after college. It was great fun, and I was pretty good at pitching, so that generally ended up being my position. It was one of those B or C leagues where we had to hope that at least 6 people would show up so that we could have a game, and certain people brought relatives or friends to church once a month so that they could be eligible to help us out. We were always glad when we had all 9! The great thing was, I always got to play the whole game. The fields were wet or bumpy or littered, but hey, it was fun anyway. We played against similar teams from other churches.
I wasn’t the greatest hitter, but I could aim and hit the ball hard enough to earn a reputation for usually getting a single. I could run pretty fast. The two power hitters we had tended to slam it into the outfield for a fly out, way too often. I guess nobody really knew how to hit line drives, or we’d have conquered the league since most of the fielders were afraid of them, including me. We were playing for fun, right? Not bruises. Because of all the fly outs, it happened during my last year that I was actually heading towards getting the trophy for the highest batting average. This surprised, but enormously pleased me. The same certain person had gotten it every year as long as I could remember, and while she was definitely a better all around player, statistics didn’t lie: I was getting on base more than she was.
Then I got engaged. It happened that the team that my future sisters-in-law played on preceded us on the ball field that week and my future father-in-law stayed on to watch my game. Maybe he wanted to see me play, and maybe he thought it wouldn’t look so good for him to leave since we were about to be related and all. In any case, it made me very, very nervous.
I struck out three times.
The worst of it was that a certain woman was more concerned about getting that trophy once again than she was about seeing her team do well. The two power hitters discouraged me and cheered when I bombed. Which I did., four times. And she got the trophy again, all because of that one game. Looking back on it, I wonder if she thought she was being funny, or maybe it was her competitive spirit coming out “all in good sport.” I just know that at the time I wasn’t strong enough to take it, and I didn’t want to play with that team again after that.
So, here’s to the year that I almost won the trophy for highest batting average. It taught me to be a good sport and always encourage, rather than compete with, the team that I was on.
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