Friday, July 8, 2022
           (click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Meetings of the mind and heart
Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.
On Wednesday we spent the day with Jack and Aly (13 and 10), our grandkids in Springfield. Then yesterday Miles and Jasper (5 and nearly 3), our grandkids in Austin, included Grandma Margaret in the Face-timed making of a batch of blueberry muffins, complete with drips and dribbles and virtual tastes. It doesn’t get any better than that for a couple of grandparents in Urbana.
Marc met us at Old Orchard Lanes and we went bowling yesterday afternoon. Jack dropped the ball with some forward spin, which sent it toward the pins. Aly added bumpers to her game and scored pretty well. She has a nice ball delivery and is learning to aim the darn thing. Margaret took two courses in bowling at Murray State, so her mind knows the drill but her body can’t keep up anymore.
I took a class too, at Valpo. I learned how to throw a hook and upped my score a lot. But since then I had a knee replacement and a bypass in my other knee, and neuropathy has partially numbed both my feet a little ways up each leg. That changed everything. The first time up I tried my usual five step approach, and my legs felt like jelly. They barely kept me upright. Then I tried a four step approach, and settled at last on a one step approach. I also moved the 14 pound green ball from under my right arm to cradling it with both hands just above my waist.
Aiming … where? I kind of figured it out. I got a strike at the end of our second and last game. And since our computerized scorecard showed the velocity of the ball, I saw that strike came from a 6.4 mph fireball.
Marc, on the other hand, threw the ball 18 miles an hour. His ball swept from the edge to the middle like a rocket. It was beautiful to watch. He got several strikes, and several times he left just one pin in the middle.
Golf might be a little more difficult, but bowling comes in second. It’s just so hard to be consistent. On the high game list, we noticed our old friend from the campus house, Brody Finney, had a 300 (all strikes) game on August 25 of last year.
Brody plays golf too, and a dozen years ago or so I played with him at Tuscola’s Ironhorse course. He had a terrible score on the front nine, so he decided to use only his five-iron for everything on the last nine holes. Driver to putter, it was the five-iron. And he had a better score, proving in a stroke that Brody’s iron will is stronger than his golf game every time. I would love to hear the story of his perfect bowling night.
Afterward, we ate steak and scallops and calamari and shrimp and chicken and rice and lo mein and vegetables, all cooked with fire and flourishes on an Oishi teppanyaki grill by a shokunin who laughed at all the right times and cooked everything perfectly.
Miles Tadashi and Jasper Kazuchi have every intention of becoming outstanding Japanese chefs as well, and they are starting now. Aprons, wooden spoons, a muffin tin, eggs and milk and flour and sugar and blueberries … what else do you need? Pouring the batter was a little tricky. Spooning it into the muffin tin didn’t work so well either. But the oven did its magic, and when they called back (after the muffins cooled), we watched them eat many muffins just before dinner. Salad, chicken nuggets, ketchup and blueberry muffins. Pretty good stuff.
Do not worry about how you are to speak or what you are to say. You will be given at that moment what you are to say.
We have been too busy, traveling too much, to Bloomington and Waynesville and Lincoln, to Springfield and back home, to Decatur and now today to Funk’s Grove for some maple syrup, then to Normal and back to Bloomington again, and tomorrow to Peoria. Much Ado About Nothing and King Lear. Visiting our friends and family, and seeing our grandkids, going to church where we went years ago. So much has changed. So little has changed. Our eternity starts now.
Let him who is wise understand these things; let him who is prudent know them. Straight are the paths of the Lord, in them the just walk, but sinners stumble in them.
(Hosea 14, Psalm 51, John 16, Matthew 10)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
#
