Category: Uncategorized

At my kitchen table sits my grandmother with her crossword puzzle book and me with my manuscript and laptop. Every so often we both glance up from our respective work to watch the cardinals and mourning doves fluttering about in the rain outside. The bird feeder by our deck is nearly empty and I really should venture out and refill it. She’s on her third mug of coffee and still her head bobs as she slips into a doze between crossword clues. I can’t say I am wishing to be anywhere but here at the moment.

Tonight I’m seeing Matt Maher in concert. He and his band are fantastic and fun, and the other band in the lineup sounds exceptional too. Honestly though, my excitement for tonight isn’t so much tied to who is performing but to the chance to worship. I am impatient to sing along, to lift my voice and my hands and close my eyes and praise my God. I miss the Festivals of Praise at FUS and the Masses there with not only beautiful music but a congregation that sang with full voices and hearts. Tonight I will worship in that franciscan fashion that used to characterize my spirituality and which I long to recapture.

Told myself I would finish editing my manuscript today. Instead I am transfixed by the Brewers game on my television screen. Who is this pitcher on the mound and what did they do with the mess that was Suppan in his previous starts? I can’t stop watching. Must see Suppan gain another scoreless inning. Okay, I’ll compromise. I’m hitting mute on the commercial breaks and turning my eyes to chapter nineteen until the top of the sixth starts.

I am thinking entirely too hard about what to include in this first post. “What do they want to know about me?” “What will cause them to come back again for the second post and the third?” I’m so over this dilemma.

This week’s thoughts are all about a boy. While I am aware of all the other options available for my attention, I choose the boy. Over the pile of work waiting beside my keyboard, over the editing I claim will be completed this week, and even over the gnawing craving for a handful of the M&M’s in plain sight at the moment, I choose the boy. The one I keep sighing over as I listen to Matt Nathanson. The one who has, for all practical purposes, become my reason for logging into facebook as often as I do. The one who is the first to make my stomach do somersaults since I was eighteen. Yes, there have been other attractions in the last nine years but none that equal the immediate, unshakable infatuation of the present. This dear boy produces such a mixture of hope vying against certain disappointment that I am left feeling imbalanced at all hours.

He’s the reason I can’t come up with anything more mature or consequential to write about today. Even putting that much in writing gives me some relief though. Putting a preoccupation down on paper (yes, I’m referring to this website as paper) releases it’s hold to some degree – some tiny and temporary degree.