Twenty-Two Days To Christmas, I've Been There A Million Times … At Least Sixteen!
This weekend was actually fun; Saturday morning after our niece Josceline had spent the night with Sarah and Jeffrey playing with Wiki Stix, these small flexible colored bendy toys you get now with kids' menus at our local Ground Round where we ate Friday night to celebrate my winning entry “Rivalry” (it gets italicized when it comes out in book form after some MAJOR editing on my part). Martha and I had as much fun with them as the kids did before our food came, and our waiter Caleb – yes, Tara, why Why WHY did I not get this guy's contact information because he so impressed me with his attentiveness? – showed us a filled in heart a ten-year-old made with the Wiki Stix. Great guy, everybody had a great meal, we got home … oh that's RIGHT, we don't have to drive to the FEMA trailer anymore because Martha turned in the keys Thursday night after her bowling. I'm so good about that.
Saturday morning I headed from the house with my Shaklee business partner Tara (jeez, there's so many texts on my phone from her you'd think we were having an affair which we're not) to a vendor show at Berthold Sportsmen's Community Building where for the day we promoted Shaklee's GET CLEAN water filtration system and our variety of health and wellness products as gift ideas for Christmas. Had an awesome lunch of chili, coffee and tea throughout the day, got to interact with a variety of business owners specializing in other product lines from Leigh with Discovery Toys and Alicia with Damsels In Defense and Jehan with Paparazzi and Kat with Nerium … yes, you'll notice the preponderance of women at/in charge of these booths with their husbands – well, two of them had – there to help set up and scope out the others when they themselves were not busy. But to be quite fair, a toy or defensive object is not going to get you healthy unless you chase it!
Turns out one vendor DID recognize me, or at least recognized Jeffrey after I showed her the current screen saver photo on my phone of Jeffrey, Sarah, and Martha – let me see, Angela operates her own painting business in Berthold (“a town of six blocks by seven blocks”, pop. 500 ish about twenty minutes northwest of Minot) and used to bring her daughter to play at Dakota Square Mall when I brought Jeffrey there – I'm going to guess last year, when Sarah was in school and he wasn't and I had different days off every week instead of working a Monday through Friday schedule – and I won the door prize from her and Christine's booth, a hand-painted Grinch ornament. (I also bought three ornaments with objects scattered at the bottom in “snow” and you have to shake them to find the objects, as Sarah, Jeffrey, and Josceline love the I Spy games and books. They WERE going to be Christmas presents, but the bag they were in broke and the kids attacked me!
Sunday morning we got to church and I taught the last Parable Playhouse of this calendar year to ten fifth graders and learned a lot myself. Since the class involves using puppets to tell the story (and Mary and Elisabeth in the play happen to be pregnant), the two girls playing them asked could they use tissues to make them “look” pregnant. This got funny when the tissues from Elisabeth's belly started falling out … I've got photos, I shall have to post them sometime, but my phone with which I took them is having some, um, issues. After church and a light lunch at home we elected to walk to Minot Public Library and check out some more books, and in my case to turn some in. I turned in two and checked out three more, two of which I've read already! Jeffrey and Martha both checked out four, and Sarah checked out NINE. This is behavior I want to encourage, like what Jeffrey said in today's title.
And now we come to the part that I should find difficult to write and even talk about, but I don't. I'd known for about a year when my mom's health really took a downhill turn that she was not long for this world, but still getting the phone call last night was a bit of a shock. It was about 10:30 pm our time at night, Martha and I were settling in watching some recorded programs and the kids were long since in bed as my brother Garry called Martha. She handed the phone to me and I got numb as I heard him talking and added a few comments of my own. My mom … Doris June Alvin … had died last night. I called her late afternoon and the nurse said she was asleep. Truth be known, last few weeks I've called she had been unresponsive so the nurse held the phone by Mom's ear as I talked and told her that we – Martha, Sarah, Jeffrey, and I – love her. And now we know she is in a far better place than this anteroom we call life. It's Life Plus, baby!
My seventeenth time, David
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