random Wednesday musings

1. MIA Coach is back on the scene. Apparently he got the message that he was getting ready to get the boot so we all got a contrite email this morning, apologizing for his absence but he's ready "to get the season rolling." To which I want to tell him that the season is already rolling and that he better have fast shoes on to catch up with the momentum.

2. One of the team moms told me last night the scores of the last two games. I won't tell them to you here because they are shameful. We have so much work to do.

3. I come from a long line of devoted obituary readers. My grandfather used to say that he wanted to make sure he wasn't in there. I never really got into reading them until recently, but I'm hooked now. They are fascinating glimpses into people's lives or at least what the surviving loved ones think are the interesting bits of the deceased's life. I''m particularly drawn to the obituaries of people my age or younger because people my age or younger should not be dying. I read one last week of a young woman (in her 20s) whose obituary read that she was passionate about tanning. That struck me as really the saddest commentary. She hadn't lived long enough to even find a passion outside of personal vanity.

4. At Monday night's game, I noticed a man watching our team from a wheelchair. I didn't know who he was or who he was there to watch play. Last night I learned the story. This man is the father of one of our players. He's in his mid-30s and when his wife (one of our devoted team mothers) was pregnant about 6 years ago, he was diagnosed with brain cancer. He's had treatments but it's incurable. He's undergoing another type of chemo now and it seems to be working in terms of retarding tumor growth, but in the last 3 weeks, he's gone from normal functioning, walking and talking to a wheelchair with Alzheimers-like behavior. The wife wasn't at practice yesterday because the boy on our team had an ear infection and her other son had the tummy bug. In the last 3 weeks since he went downhill, her house has been full of his and her extended family. How much can a woman take? It's stories like these that put my life in perspective. From where I'm sitting, things are pretty much perfect in my world.

5. Last week I was asked by a classmate of Mac's why I didn't work. I explained that I had this opportunity to spend the year doing things with and for Mac and our family. He then asked if I didn't like money. I tried to explain that there was more to life than money, that no amount of money can buy health or happiness and that those were the most important things to me. I'm sure that team mom would give up every penny she had to have a healthy husband.

6. One of our church's mission projects is to stock a food pantry at the high school where church services are conducted. This high school is brand new and caters to some wealthy neighborhoods, but also to some poor areas as well. I'm not sure how many students attend the school (there are only 3 grades so far as they build up to the 4 grades), but there are some 300 students who are on the free- and reduced-lunch program, some of whom don't eat from the time they leave school until they come back the next morning. The school sent home a letter to those 300 kids to tell them that a food pantry was being stocked if they needed some provisions to get through the weekends or nights. Of those 300, 80 children showed up last Friday to get some food. The big concern is that with Spring Break coming up, these students won't have sufficient food for over a week. So our church is having a food drive to stock up the pantry.

This has been a powerful teachable moment for Mac. I went to Sam's the other day and bought some stuff for us and some stuff for the food bank. Mac saw the groceries in the trunk and asked what they were for. I explained that some students don't get to come home and eat snacks after school or dinner at night, that their families don't have money to buy food. He asked why they don't just go to the ATM and get money out. I explained that if you don't have money in the bank, you can't just "get money out". Clearly this talk was long overdue.

The whole point of sharing this today is that I do feel profound gratitude for the blessings in my life and those do include financial blessings. We may not be rich by certain standards, but we can eat when we're hungry, we have a roof over our heads, and we most certainly enjoy good health.

Can a girl ask for anything more?