Rev Your Engines

I was always up for action as a kid. Luckily for me, so were the kids who lived across the street: Hide-and-Seek during the day, Ghosts in the Graveyard at night, building tree forts in the summer and igloos in winter, or hunting for hermit crabs at the shore or blackberries at the park. 

Their stepdad liked to play with automobiles, and he let us race his go-karts around the field, and tagalong to Riverside Park to watch the stock car races where he worked on a pit crew. 

I just discovered a speedway exists in the county where I live, so my friends and I took our kids down one Friday night to watch the races. What I quickly remembered is you don’t just watch a car race, you feel it. The vibrations, the sounds, the smells are all so intense that you can’t focus on anything else. I wasn’t out there racing a car (even though I’d love to give that a try!), but I still felt like I was a part of the action.

I may not play like I used to, but I still like to explore what’s out there that can get my engine revving. 

Moonshadow

In high school, we got out of class to view a solar eclipse with the pinhole projectors we made in Science. I love that so many of us, as different as we were, actually wanted and tried to view the eclipse together.

My daughter won’t be in school for tomorrow’s eclipse, so I made a cereal box eclipse viewer for her. I’m sure she’ll find it as cool as I do. Eclipses are pretty cool… literallly! It actually gets cooler when the sun is obscured. (That’s the science nerd in me talking.)

One might get a little anxious when the world around us plunges into a dark, cold space. But during the eclipse, and always, I hope we can leap and hop on the moonshadow, because the faitfhful light will find us again.

Lyrics credit: Yusuf/Cat Stevens

Turn On Your Listening Ears

I did a lot of listening today. Which, if you know me, is no small feat.

I didn’t know that my day would involve so much listening. In fact, I didn’t think I’d have much human contact at all, based on my assigned tasks for the day. But I encountered 9 different humans, in 9 different places, and without prompt, they began telling me stories. And none of the plots were light; they all posed a question or concern to consider, even though some weren’t expressed out loud.

By the end of the day, I felt like Lucy van Pelt sitting at her psychiatric booth listening to Charlie Brown and the gang. Her advice wasn’t usually good, but her peers sat and talked to her anyway, I’m guessing because she was simply there.

My friends will agree, I’m not a good listener, but yesterday my antenna must have been receiving a clear signal from my kindergarten teacher. The message: Turn on your listening ears. So I did. And it felt good to be present and to be trusted. And I hope they felt good to be heard. Maybe Fulghum is right, and all we really do need to know was taught in Kindergarten!