September 12, 2010 - "Clone worthy" is now a real phrase...soon to follow is "S.C.O.U.T. worthy"

Background – Matthew, my youngest, livened up our dinner conversation tonight by asking the question “Hey mom, should we clone Scout?”  It turned into a fun discussion about what it would be like to clone our beloved family fur ball and have a slew of wacky puppies just like him running all over the place.  I finally brought everyone back to reality, i.e. rained on the parade, by informing them that I was pretty darn sure that cloning wasn't a thing yet, but that it was fun to think about.  I knew that it had been done somewhere in the world, but had never heard of anything being cloned on a regular basis.   Conversation over, mom is - as always - right.

The dinner dishes were cleared, homework was finished and we all headed off to bed.

S.C.O.U.T. – It was an Uncle Johns Bathroom Reader night and I slipped in between the cool sheets to enjoy some mindless random trivia.  The second bottom crawling fact presented in my reading read as follows:

          

  “Trakr, a 9/11 rescue dog was cloned five times after he won a “most clone worthy dog” contest”

O.K., so they are definitely cloning dogs, and cloning them often enough to have a contest for a “free cloning” Who knew?!!  Could this also be telling me that I should think about cloning Scout?  After all, this little blurb about cloning is a S.C.O.U.T.   How strange that I should come across a fact about cloning (to be clear - the only cloning related fact that I’ve ever come across) only hours after having a fully blown conversation on this very subject.  Simply uncanny.  Now if I could just “clone” this phenomenon, right now it’s way too random and “improvable” for many to accept.  That being said, pay attention, it’s happening to you too – for there’s no doubt you are all “S.C.O.U.T. worthy”!!

From my diary - If the spirit can't move you to "it", can the spirit then move "it" to you?

Background – My grandmother passed away in the late spring of 1983 and it devastated my mother.  She sank into a zombie like stupor for the next six months that had us all wondering if this was how she would remain.  Happily though, with the approach of the holidays, she began perking up again and showing signs of hope.  This hope manifested itself in an obsessive need for my mom to decorate the house with all things related to my grandmother.  She pulled out her photos, her paintings, her dishes, her “collectibles”, and her artwork; my grandmother had begun crafting like a mad-woman in her old age.  She painted pictures and glued and glittered just about anything that would cooperate.  One such craft was a candle stick that she had made out of two baby food jars glued together at their lids, then glued again on either end to an upturned plate.  After a good thick coat of black spray paint, voila! you had yourself an adorable candle stick.  A large red candle, some glitter (of course) and some holly made a stunning display.  It was one of the really, really cute things she had made in her last years and my mother was absolutely determined that it would be the center-piece of her holiday tribute to my grandmother.  The only problem was that she couldn't find it.

She was able to enlist me and my older sister on her frantic search of every crevice in the house that may be hiding her beloved candle stick.  We started at the very top, tearing apart each and every closet and looking in every box under every bed, ending in the storage space in the basement.  I had taken the left walk in cubby and my mom had taken the right (my sister was pretending to “look” in the kitchen while eating left over chocolate cake).  After 20 minutes of looking we still had found no sign of the treasured candle stick, and my mom and I began to lose hope of finding it.

S.C.O.U.T. – I was now just noisily shuffling things around so that my mom would believe I was just as passionate about finding her candle stick as she was, but had really given up on this mission and was preparing to console her when she finally reached the same conclusion.  I had begun gently coaxing her in that direction through the bare beams that separated the two cubbies, I could see her moving around only a few feet from me, when my mom abruptly stopped and stood frozen in the middle of her cubby.

           

“Mom, it’s alright, we’ll find it next year” I said, thinking the reality of the situation had finally settled in on her.

           

“Guenny, come here” she said in a shaky voice.  Her tone was strange and haunting; it stood the hair on the back of my neck up and prickled my skin.  The first thing that popped into my head was that she had seen a mouse and was too scared to move.

           

“I’m coming.  What’d you see?  A mouse?”  I said, trying to head off any hysteria that may be mounting.

I stepped into the little cubby behind my mom and she looked up at me from where she had been staring at her feet.  I searched her face, now wondering what was going on, this was no mouse.  She had a ghostly look in eyes.  She slowly raised her hand and held her finger up in front of me, and then pointed down, 

“Look what I found”.  I looked down to the floor and saw the second half of a black candle stick peeking out from under the hem of her turquoise velour robe. 

           

“Oh, you found it!” I said with excitement.  “How did it get there?”  I asked as the strange location of the candle stick began to dawn on me. 

           

“I have no idea how it got there.  It wasn't there a moment ago” She said while searching my face for a reaction.

Needless to say, I was more than a little freaked out.  At first I didn’t want to believe what she was telling me, and looked for signs that I was about to be “had”, this surely "had" to be a joke, but my mother was dead serious.

We stood for a moment, long enough for the full weight of event to settle in, and then my mother bent down and picked up the candle stick.  We gave each other a knowing look, a promise of sorts, a look that made a silent pact between us that we would  always remember that this had actually happened and wasn’t just a trick of the light.  A look that said no matter how many years past we would always have each other to confirm this moment, to confirm that my grandmother wasn’t “gone” but was somewhere close by, watching over us and waiting to see us again, and that she had somehow delivered the precious candle stick that would soothe my mother’s aching heart.  We never actually spoke of it again, but the “look” was passed between us many times over the following years.

My mother is with my grandmother now, and someday I hope to bring you all the “candle stick” stories that she has provided me with since her passing, a few of them are real chillers.  I know I’m not alone and that there are many, many stories just like this one floating around out there, in fact, I bet you have a few of your own.  Someday I hope to hear, and record, them all for I find each and every one simply uncanny!

January 13, 2012 - "Reach out and touch faith", or faith will reach out and touch you

Background – My dear friend Sujatha and I were having one of our deep, philosophical discussions at the gym this morning.  This particular discussion centered on faith, and whether faith, prayer and “positive thinking” have measurable, “real life” effects.  I was telling her about a study I had read about which concluded that there was no measurable effect from prayer among the subjects that were studied.  I have thought a lot about that study over the last few years, being a fan of science, and wondered how that fits into my current belief system as it seems to contradict my belief in the existence of the “Strange Case Of Uncanny Timing”.  I have come to believe that it may be difficult if not impossible to actually measure these types of events.  Perhaps this is a case of “seeing what you want to see”, but as I go along my doubts about “uncanny timing” being “just a coincidence” continue to fade.  One possible explanation is that, in the world of quantum physics, one of the biggest challenges scientists face in their work is that just the act of observing and trying to measure an event has the power to alter the outcome of said event.  Hmmm?  Interesting!  I think of it as trying to capture a puff of smoke in your hand.  If you stand back and look, your eyes can capture the entire cloud, but when you reach for it...poof!  It slips right through your fingers.

You can draw your own conclusions on this subject, my point was just to tell you that the discussion that Sujatha and I were having this morning centered on having faith in things that science cannot, as of yet, prove.

S.C.O.U.T. - Sujatha scooted out of the gym and left me to my sweat and my IPod shuffle.  I clicked back in and finished the song that I had been enjoying when Sujatha and I began our conversation.  I then waited as the next song in the Shuffles “random” line-up of my 200+ songs cued up and began to play….“Your Own Personal Jesus” with the popular chorus “Reach out and touch faith” came barreling through my head phones, sending chills down my spine.

This song had not made its way through the random line-up for months – in fact, it had been so long that at first I couldn’t remember adding it to my play list at all.  How completely uncanny that it would choose this moment to surface?

Reach out and touch faith indeed.

September 8, 2010 – “Rick Roll’D”…yes, that’s correct - “R-i-c-k R-o-l-l-‘-D”

Background – I was driving home from school with my son Zack and, as is usual, my mind was wandering all over the place.  He was, as is also usual, chattering away with the belief that he had my full, undivided attention.  I don’t know how he got on the subject (because I wasn’t listening), but he began telling me about the internet phenomenon called getting “Rick Rolled”.  Not only had I never heard of this phenomenon, I wasn’t even sure I understood the words he was saying… “Rick Rolled”?  I kept repeating.  I threw out a few questions to try and clarify this internet activity that clearly made sense to all people under… well let’s just say my age (I’m not going to “say” my age), but the purpose of which was completely lost on an old fuss bucket like me.  Who is Rick?  Why is he rolling people?  What is rolling?  Is this supposed to be funny?  Is “funny” the ultimate goal here – because I’m not sure I “see” the funny?  As the tension grew, my son recognized the generation gap that had appeared like a killer vortex between us, threatening to suck us both into a no-win debate about what is “funny”, what is “appropriate use of the internet”, “pointless humor being thrown about at others expense” and other generation gap fueled argument staples.  He made the wise decision to change the subject.

S.C.O.U.T. – That night I popped open my Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader to do a little light trivial reading.  The third story in the in the line-up was called “The Rickroll” and detailed the entire internet phenomenon, much better than my son explained it by the way - I can now see the humor, although still pointless, in being “Rick Roll’D!!  Thanks to the UJBR, the generation gap, on this issue anyway, has been reduced to a smaller generational crack. 

Simply uncanny; I had never even heard this term until this afternoon and here it had randomly crossed my path twice in a day.  So now I know that I’ve never been “Rick Roll’D” on the internet, but I have no doubt that I’ve been “Scout’d” many, many times.

Just in case you need an explanation on the “Rick Roll”… The Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader titled “The World’s Gone Crazy”, pg 387, “The Rick Roll”.  Don’t bother thanking me, us old fuss buckets have to stick together.  

September 6, 2010 - Just follow the path...like you have a choice ;)

Background – I posted a new blog entry this morning and shortly thereafter got a wonderful note from an old friend about it.  We live right around the corner from each other, but with our busy lives going in different directions, haven’t seen each other in over a year.  I was really touched by her note and spent a lot of time that morning thinking about her.  My musings were interrupted by son #3 requesting a bike ride to enjoy the beautiful day.  He wanted to go right away, but I had some things to get done and managed to put it off for over an hour.  Chores completed, I headed out with my impatient son Matt to take that bike ride, all the while thinking of my old friend… perhaps I’ll see her on the path today!  What a silly thought as I haven’t seen her in over a year, but I have this funny feeling…. 

 S.C.O.U.T. – Right before you get to the river, there is a long stretch of straight path.  Off in the distance I could see a man and a woman walking towards us.  A tingle ran down my spine as we got closer and I realized that this couple was my old friend and her husband out for a walk.  Not only was it not lost on me the unbelievably uncanny timing of this meeting, but also the fact that had we left the house when my son wanted to leave, over an hour ago, we would have missed them altogether.   

Coincidence?  Come now, do you really believe that? 

My goofy dog Scout loves his walks to the river, but has yet to learn how to ride a bike.  Therefore he is still mad at me for choosing this mode of transportation for the outing and won’t comment on the identity of the puppeteer who often seems to be conducting this strange orchestra we call life.  He’ll get over it, and perhaps then will reveal the answer to some of these cosmic questions… or not.