Saturday morning, Sean’s soccer team played against the German Nationals and it was no surprise that they were thoroughly trounced. Those German’s are good at soccer and not nearly as tall as you might think.  The score was something like 782 to 0, but our guys took no notice thusly living out the principal that it’s not whether you win or lose, as long as there are snacks.

There’s no sorrow that a Moon Pie can’t sooth.

In spite of the loss, Saturday afternoon turned out to be fabulously beautiful, sunny and mild, so after the game Sean and AD took off on foot around the neighborhood looking for someone to come out and play.  They rang four or five doorbells but everyone was busy or gone, so they returned home in the second defeat of the day.

Not wanting to miss the glory of the day, we drove to a nearby park that has a big playground and a trail that runs alongside a nature preserve and a creek.  We walked the trail together, the three of us, pretending to be explorers. We hopped back and forth across the creek and in and out and through the brush, stopping occasionally to dig treasures out of the mud.  In Sean’s world this kind of outing trumps Six Flags and Disney World all rolled into one.

As we walked back to the car in the glow of a fading sun, I watched Sean gallop ahead of us.  He had a short rope that he had found that he was swinging over his head like a lariat.  He was singing some church song off key in little boy falsetto. Yellow leaves rained down around us and the warm November air smelled sweet of damp earth and decaying leaves.  And it seemed in that moment, that we were complete, that we lacked absolutely nothing.

As older parents of an only child, sometimes we are hyper-sensitive to the fact that Sean’s primary playmates are us, two middle-aged goofballs who adore him.  And that seems a little sad.  Sometimes we feel sort of sorry for him that he doesn’t have built-in playmates in siblings or that he can’t open his front door to find a mob of kids to play with as we did when we were growing up.  These days, it seems that everyone is at lessons.

But the fact of the matter is, the sense of loss is felt only by us. For Sean, in this season of his life, he would rather be with us, such that we are, than with anyone else in the whole world. And there is nothing in that to count as loss.

I thought that going into the weekend you might want a recipe for a soup that is easy, hearty and most of all yummy.  And there’s a good chance that you already have most, if not all, of the ingredients on hand.  What I love about this bean soup is that it calls for vinegar which gives it an unexpected zing.

Aside:   This recipe comes from my “big tattered envelope file” — only the best of the best, tried-and-true recipes go there.  Some are scrawled on scraps of paper, others clipped out of magazines or newspapers and just now it occurs to me that some of these recipes are about 20 years old. I know the crab cakes recipe is on a blue post it note and the bean soup is on yellow paper folded in half.  They are curled, frayed, have food on them and are a disorderly mess, but it works for me.  How do y’all keep your “go to” recipes?

The recipe suggests that you make this soup in a crock pot, but on many occasions I have forgotten to get it started early on, so I just make it atop the stove, get it good and hot and it’s still yummy.

Ridiculously Easy Three Bean Soup

1 pound of ground beef, browned with one small diced onion

½ lb of bacon, fried and crumbled

1 big can of baked beans (I like Bush’s Maple best for this recipe).

2 cans of white beans

½ cup of brown sugar

½ cup of vinegar

1 Tablespoon of molasses

Do not drain the beans. Put all in a crock pot and slow cook for several hours.

The combination of the brown sugar and vinegar gives this soup a wonderful twist that makes it different from your standard bean soup.

Now here are some variations that I make. Instead of frying up 1/2 a pound of bacon, I use a teaspoon or so of liquid smoke which you can find in the grocery store near the barbeque sauces and other condiments. I want the smoky bacon flavor, but my cholesterol is off the charts so I try to limit bacon and I have found that I don’t really miss it that much in this recipe.

If I don’t have molasses on hand, I’ll use a little maple syrup instead, but I think the molasses are better.  Plus molasses, particularly blackstrap molasses, are a good source of iron which is often deficient in the diets of most women.

I have on occasion forgotten the onion and didn’t miss it.

Cooking is one part art and one part improv.

Have a great weekend!

In his famous poem Ode to Immortality, Wordsworth wrote that our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting.

I’ve always loved that imagery. I love the idea that at one time, in some unknown form, we dwelled with God, that we communed intimately with him, knew every line in his face, the softness of his hands, the sound of his voice, the warmth of his embrace.

And then we were born.

No wonder we come into this world wailing.

As we are awakening to a new world, we are dying to another.  Every minute of life carries us further away from whence we came; the older we get, the less we remember of it.

Last Sunday evening during Children’s Bible Hour, the children were asked to draw a picture of God.  Sean immediately got to work. There was no question in his mind what God looked like.

The teacher called him to the front of the class and asked him to talk about his picture.  He held it up and told an audience of 30 or so children with confidence that he thinks God is a happy face in the sky with a beard and some swirly lines.

The teacher nodded and said with a sigh that he was sure there was a message behind his picture. Sean shook his head. “There’s no message behind the picture,” he said and then he showed the teacher the back of his paper.  Blank.  No message.

The next day, as we were eating breakfast, I saw the drawing at the end of the breakfast bar. I picked it up and looked at it again.  I asked Sean to tell me more about it.  “Well,” he said pointing his fork, “The smiley face with the beard represents God and the swirly lines are a gust of wind.”

I was intrigued by the idea of God as a gust of wind.

As I looked at the picture, I thought of how many times God has drawn near to his people in the form of wind – sometimes in a violent gust like in Acts 2:2 and other times as gentle as a whisper as in 1 Kings 19:12.

I thought of how the Greek word pneuma is used to mean both wind and spirit and how the Hebrew word ruah is used to convey both wind and spirit but also breath – the very essence of life.

And then I thought that maybe he has not yet travelled so very far from whence he came.

And I wanted to stand just a little bit closer to him.

* * *

More esoterical musings on the nature of God from my She Speaks peeps over here.

About a year ago, Sean’s grandmother gave him a money jar which sits on top of his dresser. It is a big plastic jar that looks like a pickle jar, only it has a slot on the top which shows a digital reading of how much money has been deposited.  The digital reading is about as accurate as taking a wild guess, or basically the same formula we are using to determine the actual cost of national healthcare.

Be that as it may…

Like his father, Sean likes to hold on to his money, so after a year of saving, the jar was half full with about $40, mostly in change.  Some of the money he earned from his towel folding business but most was given to him with impunity from recalcitrant grandparents, aunts, uncles and other nice people.

Last week my favorite five-year-old was in a growth spurt or something was up because we had some attitude and obedience issues.  Normally he is a pretty compliant and polite little guy and doesn’t delight in giving me too much trouble. Which works out well for him since I don’t abide much nonsense.

But, last week there was an incident involving the carpet in his bedroom.  I won’t say what the offense was because I don’t think anyone deserves to have their misdeeds recorded for all the internets to analyze and comment upon forever amen.  But it wasn’t an accident; it was premeditated, willful and on purpose. An accident I can easily forgive because who among us hasn’t knocked over a perfume display in Sanger Harris? Accidents happen. But this was no accident.

I was in a quandary as to what to do about the incident because it was so far out of character for this child. I was really interested in getting to the bottom of why he would do such a thing more so than issuing a swift punishment.

I was baffled.  I took a day or so to figure out how to proceed.  The side benefit of this delay was that it allowed him to stew just a little and meditate upon his actions.

Finally, I recalled that one time my brother shot out the neighbor’s picture window with his BB gun and I believe my parents made him pay to replace it.  My brother is not now, nor has he ever been in jail, so I decided to go the personal responsibility route.  Rather than punishment, I decided that the appropriate thing to do was to have him take responsibility for his actions and make him pay to have the carpet cleaned. And that meant I would have to confiscate his money.

He cried when I told him I would have to take his money to pay for the carpet cleaning.  “I was saving that money for an iPhone!” he wailed.  I told him that was really sad with as much sympathy as I could muster. And then I took away his money.

The rest of the week passed with no further incident.  And although I never got to the bottom of why he did what he did, I did see in him a contrite heart. He was sorry.  So Saturday, I took all the silver coins and the dollars to pay for the carpet cleaning, but I let him have his pennies back for seed money for his iPhone.

AD and I talk to Sean a lot about spending and saving so that he might grow into a financially responsible man. But we have some concern that because he lives a privileged life, that he doesn’t know what it is to want and to wait and to do without — which in our view are not bad things.

So sometimes, in an effort to remind Sean of how good he has it, AD will tell him that when he was growing up, he just wanted to have enough money to be able to get a snack out of the vending machine at school. That was his idea of being rich.  But you know, these kinds of stories tend to fall on deaf ears.  All they hear is “Iwalkedtoschooluphillbothwaysthreefeetofsnowblahblah”.

We are genetically programmed to say these things.  We cannot stop ourselves.

This morning, for the first time in 11 years, AD’s work took him out of the house to work on a project.  All Sean has ever known is AD working in his office upstairs.  So this morning, as AD was heading for the door, dressed and carrying his brief case, it shocked us all just a little.  Sean stopped him and asked him to wait.  He disappeared into his room and when he came back, he handed AD a fistful of pennies. “Here you go dad, in case you want to buy a snack out of the vending machine.”

So, maybe he was listening after all.

I’m not really sure what in the heck happened here this past week.  I think we might all be going to through a growth spurt.

Note: Sean is not getting an iPhone until he can buy me one too.