Today is, at least according to the Hallmark folks, Grandparents’ Day. Now, if you checked around a bit, you’d discover that I didn’t get the Hallmark genes in my family but I really needed to share this with you!
Until a couple of days ago, I didn’t know about this book. Then a friend told me she’d heard something about it on NPR. I went hunting! What follows is the text of a childrens’ picture book that’s a little hard to come up with immediately, but Amazon is glad to help.
For me, this is the story to remember on the days when it’s hard to believe that we really can help make the world a better place for our kids and all those who will come after us. And I now have 2,223 more people standing in my very helpful visualized circle of people who support me in my journey.
I’m sure they’d be glad to join your circle, too! (Even if you’re not a grandmother but just like hanging with hopeful folks!) If you’d like to join this circle, simply add your name and email address to the little pop-up thing or to the comments below and we’ll send you an email when there’s a new post! (There are exciting things ahead!)
My Dream for Paradise
by Sharon Mehdi from the U.S.A.
The Great Silent Grandmother Gathering
A busboy who worked in a café whose window faced the public park noticed that two grandmotherly looking women had been standing in the park all day without moving at all and without talking. They were dressed up in their Sunday best and were just staring at the town hall.He asked the other patrons in the café what they thought the women were up to. They speculated on a variety of things. Then, a five-year old year who was in the café spoke up and said “One of them is my grandmother and I know what they are doing. They are standing there to save the world.”
All of the men in the café hooted and howled and laughed.
On his way home the busboy decided to ask the women what they were doing and sure enough their answer was “We are saving the world.”
Over dinner that evening the busboy told his parents and he and his father hooted and howled, but his mother was totally silent. After dinner, the mother called her best friends to tell them.
The next morning the busboy looked out the café window and the two women were back, along with his mother, her friends, and the women who had been in the café the day before. All were standing in silence staring at the town hall.
Again, the men hooted and howled and said things like “You can’t save the world by standing in the park. That is what we have armies for,” and “everyone knows you have to have banners and slogans to save the world–you can’t do it by just standing in the park.”
The next day the women were joined by the women who were in the café the day before and a number of their friends. This brought the local newspaper reporter to the scene. He wrote a derisive article about the women. The day after it appeared, hundreds of women showed up to stand in the park in silence.
The mayor then told the police chief to make the women leave because they were making the town appear to be foolish.
When the police chief told them they would have to disperse because they didn’t have a permit, one of them responded that “we are just individuals standing in our public park and we are not giving speeches or having a demonstration so why would we need a permit.”
The police chief thought about this and agreed with them and left the park.
At this point 2,223 women including the mayor’s wife, the police chief’s wife, and one five-year old girl were standing in the park to save the world. The news quickly spread and soon women were standing all over the country. Even women standing in every country throughout the globe:
Lately I’ve noticed that I’ve been filtering much of what’s going on in and around me through the lens of the events of 9/11. I imagine many of you have been, too.
Back in those days, I served as editor of a magazine called Monday Morning. It was a publication of the Presbyterian Church (USA). During that time, I lived in a very special time zone known as “magazine time.” Sitting down to write involved quite a bit of trying to figure out what would be going on in the world about a month later when a particular issue actually made it to the readers. Christmas and Easter were easy. General Assembly. Back-to-School. You get the idea. The hard part was dealing with the things we couldn’t anticipate.
I love back to school time! I have ever since I started first grade without benefit of kindergarten. I was way ready. I was going to learn to read! In fact, the oral tradition in my family holds that I returned home after that first day of first grade and swore I was never going back. I’d been there 6 whole hours and no one had taught me to read yet!
On Monday and Tuesday I wrote recipes. I’m about done with the bone broth recipes and have moved on to lots of yummy things to do with that freezer full of broth once you’ve got it. The possibilities are nearly endless!
Wednesday brought a bit of a calendar melt-down, followed by a video meeting with Dr. Scott Mills, the Chief Evolutionary Officer from Planet SARK. If I were to tell the truth, I’d admit that the whole video meeting thing still weirds me out some but I’m getting better. (I seem to have early childhood camera traumas that still need some work!)
As a part of my Lent II, 2016 retreat, I’m trying to pay attention to things that feed me, body, mind, and soul. It also helps with the writing! Let’s Boil Bones…Grammy’s guide to bone broth and other yummy things! is rapidly becoming reality and should be out this fall.
I’ve worked for years to perfect a recipe for roast chicken. Roast chicken makes me happy! It also makes great broth. It’s both homey and elegant in its simplicity. It’s juicy and full of flavor. And, perhaps best of all, it’s easy. In fact, with a little planning and prep time, it could even be a weekday dinner. Or a new tradition for Fridays or Sundays.
We have some fairly unusual traditions in our family. One of those traditions, which others tend to find perplexing, is our habit of moving holidays around to days that are more convenient for us. I think it started a couple of years after we got married. We spent the Wednesday night before Thanksgiving helping a mom and her four children find safety in a shelter for battered women, several counties away. It was 2:00 in the morning by the time we got home. Bill and I looked at each other and said, in unison, “Thanksgiving on Friday!” and fell into bed.
It’s been a challenging week in my corner of the world. A lot of the challenges fit into the category of annoying or inconvenient. Things to breathe through and, hopefully, chuckle about later.
Some of them were much bigger! The kind of reality shocks that require a tremendous amount of pondering and contemplating. The kind that cause me, at least, to stop and really consider what I believe. And for me, that takes a bit of shoring up.
