Monday, June 30, 2008

I'm Hades after all; Whaddya' know...

I don't often take facebook quizzes, but sometimes I do and the last one was, "Which Greek god/goddess are you?" Would you believe I'm Hades?

Right. I'm Hades. And The Rock is My Little Pony. My personality quiz then dubbed my personality, "The Nurturer" which I can vouch for. But Hades?!

These results came in after having told Conrad all about a news article I read where children in Haiti were being hurt in unspeakable ways.

Up until then I had always, while I was a teenager, wanted to be a guardian angel. That started after I heard the news of a teenage boy who fell to his death from a ride at Astroworld in front of his very own mother. I cried a lot for that mother. And even younger, when I was about 6 and I heard of the old woman who put her sweet poodle "to dry" in the microwave. She thought it was a dryer. My brothers laughed; and who can blame them? But I cried. I have always been this way. And though you never found me crying in church meetings I was quick to tears in someone's misfortune.

Now I'm a mother and my heart is even more vulnerable than ever- motherhood does that to a person- and you see me cry in church all the time. Things mean so much more now, now that I feel so much.

But after reading the Haiti article- children being hurt the way they were- I told Conrad that when I die, I want to be a destroying angel. I told him I want to "go in there and shoot em' up!" To end the tyranny. To comfort the children. To save the innocents!

Hades? Yeah, I guess so! But only for the same reason I am also "The Nurturer."

Wednesday, June 4, 2008

Goodbye Old Friend


I just shed a tear for a beautiful piece of machinery. When the Geeley scooter we used during college quit working Conrad and Jeff took some tools to it. After a few hours and a now heap of junk later, they decided it would cost more to fix it than it was to buy it to begin with. So we let it sit in the garage in a puddle of oily grease until recently when I decided to clean the garage and get rid of old stuff.

Really I had wanted it to go to a salvage yard. I hate to see all that usefulness go to waste. But in a moment of decisiveness, and wanting to just get it taken care of, and not worry about it any longer, I arranged to have it picked up with the weekly trash.

I almost didn't watch when the trash man came by. But I had to farewell it so I looked out the window as he lifted it and scooted it over the crushing threshold. And tears stung my eyes for the knowledge of lost potential. I watched the compacter crush it and I regretted tossing it. If I could do it again I would have called 'this and that' number and I would have found a better place for it. But as it is, it sits broken and future-less in a field of hopelessly abandoned trash that no one will ever care about or make good use of.

There's no looking back though. I can't live in regret over it. I saved its mini sized license plate. Maybe I'll hang it somewhere in memory of what once was.