Because my high school pep band totally rocked Sweet Caroline back in the day, and because I’m still nostalgic over the night my brother once treated me and my husband to a certain concert in Oklahoma City’s Lloyd Noble Center, a burned copy of The Essential Neil Diamond was playing in the CD player as I was being chauffeured around the West Valley a few days ago. Sadly, I was miffed because I was spending some of my precious “free time” taking Daughter #2 around to pick up job apps. My driver was Daughter #1, and as she steered into the wrong lane approaching a stop light, I lost my composure and succumbed to a mid-life mother meltdown. It was a mother of a meltdown, too. It brought a whole new context to “You hardly talk to me anymore when you come through the door at the end of the day.” If I didn’t shape up, that would soon describe me and my daughters. So…there is a subdued and dimly lit new wing in the gallery of my conscience; it’s filled with scenes depicting a mother begging forgiveness as she traverses a grey phase of parenthood, a phase which demands that she overcome her fears and releaseher babies into the streets and establishments of the big, wide world.

“SALVADOR? WHO IS SALVADOR? SALVADOR DALI?” Such were the questions fired from the mouth-turned-machine gun of my daughter-turned Barbara Walters. The person/object in question was an inscribed baseball in the pull-out cup holder of my husband’s Camry. I’d had my Barbara Walters moment with my husband yesterday, so I could absorb the rapid-fire onslaught and field the questions with the wisdom I’d gained.

Sorry, Bob, but I’m moving on. To Keith (as in Richards.)

I decided to read Keith’s new book, “Life,” primarily for two reasons: (1) my husband’s interest in the Rolling Stones, and (2) his status as an accomplished musician. Unfortunately, because it’s a new book at the library, we could only borrow it for two weeks. When my husband finished it I only had time to read about a quarter of it. I’ve reserved it again; I’m 90th on the list (again.)

I did read enough of it to find something to admire in Keith as a musician. As a traditionally trained musician myself, I couldn’t help but be impressed with his tenacity. There’s something very admirable about a man -a musically untrained teenager, really – who will take his instrument and lock himself in his room and listen to a recording until he can play the music himself. My piano teacher probably would have been grateful if I had ever shown a tenth of that kind of determination.

But, of course, Keith’s “Life” is about more than music, although you sometimes do have to read between the lines to find that story. If his life is the music on a grand staff (or maybe a chord chart in his case) it’s necessary to read the accompanying lyrics in order to truly appreciate the song. One thing I “heard” in his “lyrics” relates to my first reason for reading his book – my husband’s interest in the Rolling Stones.

I’ve been married for 25 years. My husband and I have had our ups and downs, and we work every day to learn how to do marriage better. We’ve learned to enjoy each other’s interests; we’ve learned what ticks each other off and what makes each other tick. One thing that makes my husband tick is a little something Aretha taught our generation, “R-E-S-P-E-C-T.” Aretha’s plea is so convincing and so in line with the women’s movement of our time, that we often forget that the song was written by Otis Redding. It was originally a man’s plea for respect from a woman. Do you see a pattern here? The short list is Otis, my husband, and now…Keith.

On page 181, in comparing “English chicks” to “black chicks” he met on tour, Keith wrote, “They were great because they were chicks, but they were much more like guys than English girls were…I remember being in the Ambassador Hotel with this black chick called Flo…she’d take of me. Love, no. Respect, yeah.” (Emphasis mine.)

I was struck to find, here in a book by a free-wheeling rock-and-roller, this desire to be respected by women. I know it annoys some women. Some would say Aretha is the one that still needs to be getting the message out. However, I have found that my husband’s need to be respected isn’t because of some egotistical chauvinism. And though a young Keith Richards might have been disappointed in the reason, I must acknowledge that my husband’s desire for respect is generally rooted in his love for me. He doesn’t demand conspicuous acts of respect. He wants me to respect him enough to turn the light off when I leave a room because he tries to be good with our money. He wants me to respect him enough to take my cell phone with me when I go out alone, because he’s concerned about my safety. Yep, it’s the little things.

If we remember history, this “little thing” is actually quite ancient. The apostle Paul wrote to the Christians in Ephesus: “…let each individual among you also love his own wife even as himself; and let the wife see to it that she respect her husband.” Otis, Keith, my husband and I – we’re all just demonstrating the truth – that God has created men with the need for respect (and women with the need for love). And if we ever forget the seriousness of the situation, we have another rocker to remind us. Tell us again, Pat Benatar: what is love?

NOTE: Lest one think I put my Thanksgiving decorations up AFTER Thanksgiving, the reader should know that I actually wrote this a few days ago, but am just now getting it posted. Such is my life.

I spent the morning putting up Thanksgiving decorations then getting my ironing done while my daughter danced to Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. Yes, I STILL iron, and if you are someone who takes pride in expertly finding ways to get out of ironing, “Great for you!” but I happen to like the smell of hot cotton.

It was a pretty ambitious morning for me, but now I’m sitting here eating Ramen noodle soup and feeling like the most boring person in the world. I’m thinking about giving the blog the boot because surely no one wants to read about my life with Ramen noodles even if it is spiced up with Vivaldi. That just makes me sound like a Ramen snob. “Well, I prefer my noodles with the Adagio Molto movement from The Autumn concerto.” Sniff. Sniff.

Perhaps worse than succumbing to being a Ramen snob, is that I’ve also been devising desperate last ditch schemes to increase readership, and since my blog about the Bob Dylan concert a while back was my most commented upon ever, I’ve considered just typing “Bob Dylan” about a thousand times to see how many hits I get. However, believe it or not, I have too much respect for Dylan fans to do that. Instead, I’m just going to direct you to a book review I wrote on a book about Mr. Dylan. If you happen to be a Dylan fan, who is reading this because I’ve now used Dylan’s name five times and cyberspace directed you here, great. However, I’ll understand if you prefer your Dylan served up a by a non-Ramen snob. (Click here to read the review.)

This review is on my church’s website. We’re Presbyterians and it’s been hinted that that makes us “bookish.” Some might even call us book snobs. So, am I Presbyterian because I love books, or do I love books because I am Presbyterian? Neither. My love for anything worthy of being loved is due to my love for Jesus who has given me eyes to see and ears to hear and tongue to taste and experience all that is good. I think Bob Dylan probably loves Jesus, too. It was not the book that convinced me of this, though; it was his own words, the lyrics to some of his songs.
Whether one speaks of Vivaldi or Dylan, I’ve found it’s usually the artist’s work itself that says the most. I hope that doesn’t sound too much like a snob – of any kind.

Regardless of what I might say about quaffing and quotidian quandaries, sometimes life is a muddy deluge that leaves me gasping and sputtering, drenched like a precocious pup. I need a “River Glorious” or a “Fount of Every Blessing…”

“Come, thou fount of ev’ry blessing
tune my heart to sing thy grace;
streams of mercy, never ceasing,
call for songs of loudest praise.
Teach me some melodious sonnet,
sung by flaming tongues above;
praise the mount! I’m fixed upon it,
mount of God’s unchanging love.

Here I raise my Ebenezer;
hither by they help I’m come;
and I hope, by thy good pleasure,
safely to arrive at home.
Jesus sought me when a stranger,
wand’ring from the fold of God:
he, to rescue me from danger,
interposed his precious blood.

O to grace how great a debtor
daily I’m constrained to be;
let that grace now, like a fetter,
bind my wand’ring heart to thee.
Prone to wander – Lord, I feel it –
prone to leave the God I love:
here’s my heart, O take and seal it,
seal it for thy courts above.

– Robert Robinson, 1758

Personally speaking, today’s defining sin was greed. I awoke to one of the rarest of Arizona days – partly cloudy. For someone whose blood was apparently infused with a cloud gene during my years in Oregon, it should have been a delight. But no, partly cloudy wasn’t enough today. I despised the patches of sunlight, the golden linings. I wanted utter and complete cloudiness.

I’ve come up with the invention of the decade, and if you steal it from me, I will hunt you down with a salad fork. Why? Because I have 22 of them in my flatware drawer, that’s why! There’s a chance there might also be an unlikely few in the dishwasher, and if the kids were younger, I’d say there are probably several in the sandbox, too. But the kids are older now, so my bet is that you might find one under a bed – but only because someone mistook it for a spoon when she was sneaking a midnight bowl of cereal.

Now ask me how many cereal spoons are in my flatware drawer. You guessed it. Zero. Battle Creek, we have a problem.

The Little Mermaid may have had a cute idea for forks, and those wind chimes are nifty, but I’m all about being practical, and that means (tune the drum roll on a cereal box…) the Salad Fork Converter Attachment! As seen in the prototype pictured above, the SFCA would be a spoon-shaped piece that snaps on over the tines of a salad fork. (This one was molded out of aluminum foil, but you get the idea.) All out of spoons AGAIN? Just snap on the SFCA, and voila! I think I hear Tony now.

Should I market them in sets of 50 or 100?

One day in January 2006, my husband’s brother called him with an exceptional birthday surprise – the offer of a new job. It seemed to be a fantastic opportunity, but it wasn’t a slam dunk decision. It would mean uprooting our family and moving to Arizona from Oregon, a place where we had put down roots as deep as those of the fir trees in our neighborhood. After much prayer and many pro/con lists which consistently pointed to accepting the job, we put our house on the market, and my husband headed for Arizona. Given the way houses had been flying off the market, we were quite confident the kids and I would be following him in no time.

Two months later and with Doubt waving from his perch atop our For Sale sign, we were elated to finally get a contract on our house one Wednesday afternoon. I went to church that Sunday rejoicing. To add to my joy, my friend, Dan, sent me home with a new tune he’d written for Psalm 57. I took it home eager to sit down at the piano and play it.

The tune was quickly forgotten when I pulled into our driveway and saw that the “Sale Pending” sign had been removed. A call to our realtor confirmed what my heart feared: the prospective buyers had backed out. Needless to say, it was quite a blow. Since childhood I’ve always done one thing under such circumstances – sit down at my piano. I pulled out Dan’s music and began to play it and read the words… “Show me mercy, O God, show me mercy, for my soul finds its trust in you. In your shadowing wings I take refuge, until sorrows have all passed by…”

The sorrows of losing the sale did pass and a sale did finally come through, but not for another two and a half months. I’ve played Dan’s tune many times since. It’s in the key of D minor, and I love minor keys – whatever that may say about me. But a couple of months ago I asked Dan if he would mind if I transposed the last verse of the song into the major key. It took me four years and many trials and tribulations, but I finally realized that (for me, at least) I needed to sing the last verse with an obvious change in tone. “I will give thanks to you with the people, with the nations I’ll sing praise to you. For your love is great to the heavens, and your truth unto the clouds. Be exalted, O God, in the heav’ns, let your glory be over all the earth. Be exalted, O God, in the heavens; let your glory be over the earth.”

Last week I finished reading a great book, “The Gurnsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society.” It reminded me of another of my favorite books, “84, Charing Cross Road.” In church, we just started a study in the book of Romans. All these books have something in common that I very much like: they’re all letters – either a compilation (the ones about Gurnsey and Charing Cross Road) or a single missive (Romans).

There’s something automatically enticing about reading someone else’s mail. When it’s not published in a book, it’s considered rude and bad manners. And yet, elevated to book status, it’s like being given permission to read someone’s diary. It’ so personal.

Sometimes letters in books are like diaries – you only get that writer’s perspective – but if the book includes recipients’ responses, you get to find out if the letter was received the same way you would have received it. If there is no record of the recipient’s response, you get to imagine what it was. That can be fun, too. For example, when Helene Hanff wrote to Frank Doel (in “84, Charing Cross Road) “…we live in depraved, destructive and degenerate times when a bookshop – a BOOKSHOP – starts tearing up beautiful old books to use as wrapping paper…You tore that book up in the middle of a major battle and I don’t even know which war it was,” we know that Frank wrote back and said, “…please don’t worry about us using old books such as Clarendon’s Rebellion for wrapping. In this particular case they were just two odd volumes with the covers detached and nobody in their right senses would have given us a shilling for them.” The confidence and closure is palpable on both sides.

On the other hand, when the apostle Paul wrote in his letter to the Romans, “So then He has mercy on whom He desires, and He hardens whom He desires,” (Romans 9:18) we don’t know if those words created the stir among the readers that they do today. Did anyone write back to Paul and say, “You’re a raving lunatic, man?” “God would never treat people differently!”Or did anyone write back and say, “Dear brother, thank you for your beautiful analogy, that God is the potter, perfectly right in making vessels for both honorable and common use in order to make known the riches of His glory?” “What an awesome, Holy God we serve.”

Is it ridiculous to compare these two letters? I know that Helene’s letters are meant to be amusing and Paul’s letters are meant to be instructive and authoritative. But to me, it’s pretty significant that they’re both dealing with real people. The God who created people like Helene Hanff (and me) who love books and the adventures in collecting them, chose to speak to us through very personal means – letters. That can’t just be incidental or practical, can it? The people to whom Paul wrote in Rome were just as real as Helene and Frank. Helene had an interest in historic battles, and what Roman citizen wouldn’t have had an interest in the empire’s battles?

How beautiful that God chose letters to pierce human hearts with His word, that His letters are about the The Word (i.e., His Son, Jesus), and that when it comes to battles, His word is “living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword…” (Hebrews 4:12)

I don’t know if Helene was intrigued by that kind of battle and Word, but I am.