Resting is good, when needed. Rushing is necessary, when needed. I’ve not done the research, yet easy does it can be a predicted response. You are handed a wee child, maybe even a swaddled one. Your arms begin a back and forth motion as you bend over and make cooing sounds. If a sitting down place is required, one hopes the piece of furniture that calls forth peace is close by, a rocking chair. Anything more than rhythmic placidity is usually connected to a rambunctious young lad and the results are disastrous.

Comfort and purpose are tied to my early rocking chair memories. Ours was half of a pair that were foundational in our living room. One was a 1920’s chair with wooden arms and legs and a half top that matched the padded seat. The rocker was its twin except for the curves that enabled the motion that defined the chair.. Some adult sat in that chair providing me with a lap to settle on. I was read to or bandaids were applied or maybe I just rested a head on an available shoulder. In the winter my daddy moved it to the bedroom in front of the then permissible gas stoves. He rubbed vaseline into chapped hands and leaned forward to let stove warmth melt the grease and ease the stiffness of arthritic fingers. Scoot the chair back just a little and it was still close enough to provide a cozy spot to read the Baton Rouge Advocate to wind up the day.

Just a moment rocking chair remembrance is a time or two my preacher birth dad would take my brother and me though the swamp to a bleached wood house built off the ground to avoid flooding. A long front porch was lined with wooden rockers of the same bleached grey wood. Women sat in them and held small children. Men lined up propped up against the front wall by one leg bent to brace them, and their arms were crossed over their chests. We slightly older children sat at the edge of the porch and swung our legs in the darkness to the same rhythm of the rockers as we sang hymns like Blessed Assurance. No tune could outrun what would match the rockers.

Fast forward. David and I did get our own family rocker from one of his brothers as a wedding gift. I sat in it to do needle point and all the raising children chores. Middle son moved it to Corpus. It was stollen from the back of his truck in the return move and for a while we were without. I retired from Kinkaid and a rocker is the gift instead of a gold watch. The front has the emblem of the school and the back has a plaque that says “In Grateful Appreciation of Charis Smith.” Every morning before I dash into what rush requires, I sit and move slowly. Chair motion doesn’t disturb reading or writing or praying. I can lean forward for ease of getting up and going forth. At night it is waiting as a place to recall the actions of the day, always gently and quietly. The chair is part of making the place to accept the invitation that is offered.

“Here’s what I want you to do: Find a quiet, secluded place so you won’t be tempted to role-play before God. Just be there as simply and honestly as you can manage. The focus will shift from you to God, and you will begin to sense his grace.

Matthew 6:6

We counted on reading once a week to once a month. Life with pictures and summarizing comments kept us up with world news. Good Housekeeping provided decorating suggestions we never carried out and recipes we cooked. Daddy made lawn chairs from the directions in Popular Mechanics. This week I remembered Reader’s Digest because of two articles that spoke to truisms of life.

In 1988, Roteert Fulghrum wrote a book and the title article appeared in Reader’s Digest: “Everything I Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten.” Its points matched positive behavior choices after Beryl, our recent storm. First, “Clean up after yourself.” When calm came, people were out gathering leaves and small branches to create a semblance of neatness. Children with mininiature rakes were working alongside purposeful adults. Granted browning piles line most streets, yet step one was accomplished. Next, “Be kind.” Before the day was over I had phone messages from local and far away checking on status and offering assistance. My grown children count and so do those like the neighbor walking around with a small chainsaw offering to help with larger than a hand saw but smaller than a tree chopper limbs. Lastly, take this to heart, “Always take turns.” If there is no power, there are no traffic lights. In some cases major intersections were dark and in some cases yellow cones were out as a warning. In either case people had to note where they were in the time to go cycle. Once the pattern was established you had to pay attention and take your turn. The last one to stop cannot be the first to go. Follow directions and you are ready for the first grade.

I also thought of an article my husband had printed because it spoke so succinctly of the inability to always offer perfect solutions. “Helping People is a Ticklish Business.” Even when the offering is ticklish, the necessity of trying is still essential. For whatever reason, a tree that crashed still blocks a northbound thoroughfare. Phone calls and suggestions have been offered to house owners and city employees and no action has been taken. I just this Monday night got power, eight days down the road. People with small children, and limited funds, and lack of food still aren’t reconnected. Edicts have come from the state governor and complaints made to the local electrical suppliers. Yet, I have seen crews of workers at various hours of the day and night doing, I assume, their best. Options for the rest of us exist from helping at a food kitchen to offering space to a friend still powerless, or even to voting against someone we feel really caused unnecessary delays. Just because my A.C. finally works doesn’t mean I can walk away from the problem.

³ Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, ⁴ not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others.

Philippians 2;3-5

When this summer ends, I feel life will go a different way, never to be quite the same. Nothing will be bad, just different. Twist one you know if you are a faithful reader. I am now 88 and that number carried more weight than I thought it would. I couldn’t pretend I was “advanced middle age ” any more. My mother moved out of her house that year in her life and I am paying attention to each day that I can do most things by myself that are required and also to what is not on that list any more, like heavy lifting and driving long trips alone. I’ll never be 39 again!

Then many of you joined me in the weather that Beryl brought to Monday. In my baby book for at least half of my life is a hurricane. In Louisiana, one watched the trough cross the Gulf, checking on where it might land and how it might be classified and what it would be named. Our family watched rain and wind action sitting on a glassed-in porch with my Daddy explaining what was happening. After the first sweep, calm of the eye, and the second wave moved onward, we would put on our rubber boots and go out to assess the outcome. Beryl did not even have reporters standing in the Gulf with a microphone, yet I woke Monday morning to extreme torrential rain and winds of only 100 mph that seemed to twist trees and snap the ends of branches instead of just bending and swaying. I am one in a million still without power and have a whole new attitude toward being prepared for what might be ahead in this year’s storm season.

Then circle around to a more permanent personal change. I married David in 1961 along with the various entrepreneurial ideas he envisioned. Mixed in with spittoons and saddle cases, he brought to life his vision of owning a chemical company. All our married life, I shared space with Texmark Chemical in Galena Park. He died in 2017, leaving to us in a struggling economy towers, and tanks and shrinking business deals. To inherit someone else’s dream is a mixture of respect and realism. This past week we have finally been able to to release keeping that dream alive. It is a breath catching moment, and amazingly freeing. After aging, a hurricane, and not being constrained by a chemical plant, something new awaits. And it will be good.

See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland.

Isaiah 43: 4 – 9

If I were an investigative reporter, I would have put on sunscreen and gone out into the heat to an outside city limits stand labeled FIREWORKS FOR SALE! and done an in-debth interview. However, I am not of that ilk and, I’m assuming, neither are you. So here is provided for you in the cool and quiet of your own home some details that may be new to you.

All of us have firework stories. I have written of some and have heard personal tales from varied sources. These are the types of fireworks that may be part of a rite of adventurous passage involving some audible or visible reaction and no shrapnel. Alll have constraints to keep them “safe.” Simplest are caps for toy pistols or band snaps to be thrown on the sidewalks. Roman candles and helicopter rockets have restrictions on size. Even those that create smoke screens have curbs. Unless you have a license for a grand production, each firework has an across the counter limit for propellant, casing size, and length.

Down to the nitty gritty ,or to the boom and glow, if you prefer. Selling fireworks restrictions come from various counties and from the Texas Department of Insurance, naturally. In Texas,Six days a year are on the allowed sell now list: Texas Independence Day, San Jacinto, Cinco de Mayo, Memorial Day, 4th of July, and the Christmas to New Year’s week.

All that having been said, remember your own moments with loud and bright. Was one on a sidewalk outside your house with a small box of matches to light a firecracker and throw it in a ditch? Was it being driven as a teen, especially of the male gender, to a stand to choose some to create your own show? Was it sitting on a hillside with family or a handholding special one watching the sky light up? Two bits of music are needed. Remember this day and the moment “when the rockets’ red glare gave proof through the night that our flag was still there.” My favorite is sitting with a three year old at the far edge of a concrete porch lighting a sparkler for him to hold. “Let’s write my name in the dark,” he says.

This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine,

let it shine,

let it shine.

“And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave,

o’er the land of the free and the home of the brave!”

Teaching vocabulary, I would often say,”This is one of my favorite words,” until a student interrupted, ‘Aw, Mrs. Smith, you just like every word.” Out of the mouth of babes as the saying goes. A sentence or a conversation is limping along and then commodious, impetuous, or nonchalantly illuminate the moment. A variety of choices can arise that bestow light on a dark place.

The seven unique letters of various exist to render clone unnecessary. Joan Jonas’s exhibit in the MOMA used a series of mirrors in front of her presentations, so all I kept seeing was a repetition of me. Soon disinterest and boredom set in. Morning routine can carry me to coffee as a habit. One day I long for something more: I dress early, walk four blocks, and order a cup in a different location. Varying order to waking up opens up a whole new possibility for the day.

We tend to choose friends we mesh with. Activities don’t require negotiating, Topics to discuss can be picked up and laid down and returned to without losing the main idea. A different person asks to sit at your table and the kaleidoscope shifts. You laugh more or find yourself finishing each others’ sentences. The variety they insert is invigorating.

Various denotes thinking outside the box. A story and an adage. I visited a hospitalized friend who had lost her phone in her bed. We did the usual. We patted and lifted sheets to no avail. The light went on in my head. I dug in my purse for my phone and dialed her number. The ring took us to the right place. After stuggling to solve a problem, someone offers the maybe even outlandish solution that works and my daddy would then say, “There is more than one way to skin a cat.” God, in wisdom, didn’t think one size fit all. Various counts.

For the body is not one member, but many.

1 Corinthians 12:14

For a child’s special day in a school year, a parent brought a treat for everyone. A vacation birthday, like mine, meant I missed out. I completed 88 years yesterday and while nobody is alive who remembers when I was a baby, 35 people from my dentist to my three children acknowledged that June 17 is special to me. I could tell story after story about my life or even give details of yesterday. Yet because it was year 88, I am going to offer a poem that I wrote in 2009 with a class of children to help them consider what defined them. Maybe you will think what you are most like as a person in whatever year you are.

I am an 8: stable yet moving around in smooth circles. Up, over, around . Down, under, up. Resting at the point of crossing.

Even when I lose my position and flip, I am a driving belt keeping gears turning or maybe I’m glasses; looking, seeking a vision, pursuing understanding.

At times I sink to the bottom, weighed down with garbage: worries or commitments

Other times I go to the top: a soaring balloon about to escape entirely unless someone holds my string.

But mostly I am an 8: stable yet in motion, rising at the point of crossing.

So teach us to number our days, That we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.

Psalm 90:12

P

New York exemplifies the ultimate destination for city traveling, yet for me a tinge of apprehension comes with the excitement of exploration. In my lifetime, I’ve had four purposeful visits to the Big Apple. Each taught me something about myself and what a location requires. Growing up most of leaving home trips were by car to relatives. College age I managed one summer job in Santa Fe, a real adventure, and then camp out field trips with students requiring the appearance of oozing with fun. When I was 35, David had a meeting in New York. Three days away for me. Two memories. Early in the morning, he told me where to meet him at 12:30 and left. I entered the elevator with two men. As the door closed, one of them said, “Do you want a floor.” I answered, “First please. I’m visiting and have three small children and I never get to push the button.” I figured out how the subway worked and took myself to what was important to me, the Public Library. Somehow, I needed to see the lions and wander through what rows of books I could fit in. Not much else in time allotted, yet a thirst for more lingered. I could make survival happen.

Trip two was nineteen years later before school started again after Christmas. I had a friend whose husband was assigned to a lab in the area. We made a train trip to the city and came and went from cavernous Penn Station. Then one day we drove to Long Island, slipped through a barrier, and walked in solitude on a deserted beach between the Atlantic Ocean and elegant sprawling mansions. This was an absorbing atmospheric moment. Trip three came about because all spring WSJ had articles on a Homer Winslow exhibit at the MFA. To see The Gulf Stream in all its glory with the shark circling the boat was all the excuse needed. Throw in supper with friends from a time my son taught in Japan and a dream became reality. Our hotel looked out on the rectangle of Central Park, giving the geographical lobes of my brain a permanent solidity of space.

At age 88, will trip four be a swan song? Don’t bet against me. Some in our church choir were going to be part of presenting a new piece in Carnegie Hall. Their going was my underlying draw. Same son as an earlier time joined in to be travel arranger, planner of days, and wheelchair pusher as necessary. We walked the High Line identifying plants by an App on my phone, had a reunion supper with previously mentioned friends, nodded sagely if not completely understanding the modern art of MOMA, and were impressed and blessed by the music These Ancient Words. Over a period of 53 years, I learned I would be cared for even in riding an elevator, that nature provides solace even in the midst of tall buildings, that creativity appear and endures even as time passes, and that the resounding last ancient word is what age and travel may provide: WISDOM.

Is not wisdom found among the aged? Does not long life bring understanding?

Job 12:12

Not about the Boy Scouts. One doesn’t want to get caught unprepared for a weather change. When I was a child we checked for dark clouds toward Baton Rouge with the wind picking up or listened to Nash Roberts on the 6:00 news for what was happening south of the lake. In 79 AD, the inhabitants of Pompeii saw flashes of fire, heard rumbles, and felt tremors under their feet until Vesuvius blew and changed lives and a place forever with only Pliny who watched from a boat in the harbor to give a written report.

Sometimes knowing in advance doesn’t solve all the possibilities of problems. Houston has had more rain than usual in the last two weeks. One storm was unique, a repeat from 1997 being the last of its specific type. The word went out for several days under Extreme Weather Warnings. As the evening of arrival approached, I put loose pots in the garage and unplugged the computer, and read while daylight lasted. Then rain lashed, wind blew, and the power failed and stayed off for 18 hours for me. However, this storm had a name. A derecho, which is a thunderstorm that lasts over several hours and extends a forward hop, skip, and jump motion for as much as 400 miles, and sustains winds up to 100 mph. From Austin to Florida, some areas had trees down, roofs removed, and windows broken.

An approaching event isn’t very dramatic if one is not on hand to offer the worrying that waiting requires. I was having a joyful carefree trip in New York satisfied I had prepared for eventualities by again unplugging my computer when I got a 10:30 p.m. text from a neighbor. A short rain storm blew though. Yet the wind blew down a tree which leveled a fence and jiggled loose the pole that allowed electricity to travel to 96 families. Across the street had no problems. I was without power for 44 hours.

To wrap this up, the paper keeps saying that this will be the story of our Texas summer. My preparation will continue to be to unplug the computer. After dumping contents of the freezer twice, only keeping two days ahead of food supples sounds like a good idea. Some of you who read may still be trying to repair from the first storm and working on the anxiety that arises with the possibility of a repeat performance. As life has been and will continue to be, storms will come. My middle two paragraphs are my most recent stories. For each of us every storm is our story of preparation, enduring, survival, gratitude in small places, and finding a new start over waiting for us.

God is our refuge and strength, an ever present help in trouble. Therefore we will not fear, though the earth give way and the mountains fall into the sea, though its waters roar and foam, and the mountains quake with their surging.

Psalm 46: 1 – 3

This is just to say I am alive and doing well, if not knowing that bothered you. I was away from my computer and in New York. I signed on the hotel connection to internet and somewhere all .com’s got scattered and needed new passwords and offered no connections, only the suggestion to create new accounts. I quit trying and hunkered down under a sheltering rock until I got home (a story for another day) and plugged in and booted up old master desktop. So please forgive the lapse in faithfulness and hope for a word from the nerd again next week.

Sufficient to the day are the evils thereof.

Matthew 6:34

I’ve known most of my life I love teaching. A happening today helped me define why. Today I went to the 10th year of graduating 8th graders from what began in fall of 2011 as Nehemiah Middle School, my second retirement job. A sequence of various employments had begun in Caddo Parish, Louisiana. I have notes in a file folder from various experienced teachers that were instructions and ideas for the green girl on the team. We needed to be in a certain place at the end of the year. yet we all didn’t follow the same path. I ventured from there to Elliot Elementary near the Ship Channel in Houston. Houston still had split years and from September to January I taught the last half of 5th grade and had a group in late January to start anew at the beginning. In five years at River Oaks Baptist I reached content goals with Lords and Ladies Day (required costumes), Little House on the Prairie Day (cook venison stew), and Patriot Day (a picnic with old timey games). I concluded gainful employment at Kinkaid for ten years. Five of us teachers made a team to each shepherd five groups of seventeen per period. We met formally and in the hall to discuss ideas and problems, blending agreements and disagreements to bring life to content.

Leaving Kinkaid,I had reached the point where students that I had taught were adults in the world. At times I would hear a cry, “Mrs. Smith? I’m Tom (or whomever)” The next sentence was nearly always, “Do you remember when….?” The memory was some activity that taught an educational goal, but sideways. Presbyterian School filled my first retirement gap for five years.

Then in the summer of 2011, I went to work with a former principal to develop a Middle School Grades 6 – 8 to round out a preschool that existed for neighborhood poverty level families. Five of us spent the summer scrounging for ideas and teaching materials and even lockers. I planned an English curriculum and arranged for field trips. By our efforts some children developed scholastic skills, some grew in a safe social situation, some came for help about family problems that I had no idea existed.

Ten years later after going through growing pains and graduating a first 8th grade, a public charter school has taken over our small efforts. Nine students have been guided to learn content and character traits before graduation this year. They all had plans for a high school next year and even a maybe thought for college. I met again with co-workers who were part of the collegiality dreaming time – a number one reason that validates my teaching, and then reason number 2. A 24 year old brought her little girl to me and said, “Mrs. Smith, do you remember when…”

Train up a child in the way he should go and when he is old he will not depart from it.

Proverbs 22:6