Ten-Finger Exercises

"Remember me!"

Yesterday morning Bill got up at 3:30 A.M. to watch, on NASA TV, astronaut Scott Parazynski take the risky 7-hour space walk and stand on the distant end of the station's robotic arm to repair a hole in the solar array. Bill said it was history being made, and he didn't want to miss it. He got up in the night to watch his first space mission back in the 50's. By afternoon he was ready for a nap. (Bill, that is. Scott too, probably!)

When he woke up, he said everybody ought to take two-hour naps, because, when you wake up, "fewer people want to kill you." I thought that was funny.

Last evening, right through blogging time, we sat together on the love seat with the laptop and looked at blogs and videos about cruising to the Mexican Riviera. We'll be going right between his birthday and mine, at the end of this month. Woohoo! We're going sailing!

Today was All Saints Day, and our assistant priest added to the sense of the communion of saints, as we refer to all those who have gone before us, by hanging full length silhouettes of people that were cut from screen. These shadowy figures were fastened to the walls, and the rectangles of screen they were cut from hung from the rafters. In her homily, Paula talked about the saints we knew, the people in our lives who taught us right from wrong, who taught us that God loves us, and all the other good lessons we learned that help us be the good people we are.

That reminded me of two things in particular. First, how strange I thought it was when I first heard about "ancestor worship" in China and Japan. Maybe it's only the words that make it sound strange. We would never call it "worship," but maybe, in a good sense, we do the same. We don't do it enough though, don't appreciate what previous generations have done for us.

The second thing I thought of as she preached was a trip I took to Haiti with my first husband, right before he left for VietNam. That's a blog in itself, but the part that came to mind was the donkey trip we took to the citadel in the mountains above Cape Haitian.

Shortly after we got out of town, we came to a clearing where there was a little market. All the vendors were following us and calling out to us, trying to sell us their wares-- their straw hats and donkey bags. One woman was far more persistent than the others, walking alongside us and calling out, "Remember me! Remember me!" It worked. I've never forgotten her. I still have the donkey bag too.

When I visited Washington D.C. for the first time, we toured the city and Arlington Cemetery. Everywhere we looked were statues and plaques, gravestones, and the Wall of names of casualties of soldiers in the Viet Nam war. Everywhere, everywhere, names called out to me: "Remember me! Remember me!"