Random Blogger Thoughts

1. My last blog (May 30) was written to continue various Mother's Day thoughts. It was also my 57th birthday. Time passes, as we observe often, and we grow old(er).

The picture shows an earlier and younger day: Daryl at 13 or 14, Denise at 6 or 7. Yesterday Denise turned 50. The week before I turned 57. Some things don't change. My blog shows that I still start things and have trouble finishing them.

2. Donna was remembering the summer of 1966 in her blog. Other summers come to my mind. The summer of 1968 I spent mowing lawns in York, Pennsylvania. The next year, summer 1969, I spent in San Francisco. Now I watch PBS specials telling me how special and amazing the summer of 1969 in San Francisco was. It was broadening, certainly. I remember also the moon landing that year, and dropping my glasses on the floor to prove that they were unbreakable. (They weren't.)

3. Vaughn is home for a couple of weeks. We've played some table tennis, watched some soccer (and hockey and basketball), and talked some. I've joined facebook now, but I feel like an intruder there. Vaughn is at the upper end of age in facebook, if the pictures and profiles speak true; so I am really over the hill! But where else can one join a group of people who have eaten at Eskimo Hut in Bulawayo? Or a group named "Climenhagas Anonymous"? I had never thought of my name as something to enter group counselling for: "Hi. My name is Daryl, and I'm ... a Climenhaga." There are a fair number of Climenhagas who surface in facebook, but only three Slagenweits. None of whom I know.

4. Last Tuesday I went to an emergent conference in Winnipeg. Alan Roxburgh joined us for a conversation (which is what emergent likes to call itself). Al's contribution was on target: learning to live as strangers and guests who come to our neighbours with no set agenda in our hands, to stuff into their unwilling hands; learning to live with people and discover their stories as part of our own and of God's story. Much more to be said, of course. The only drawback for the evening was that Al stood on a stage (at Ellice Theatre -- itself a wonderful movement within Winnipeg's city centre) and we sat below him in the theatre seats. Hard to converse as equals in such a setting, but one trusts that the conversation will continue in Winnipeg's (and Steinbach's) churches and cafes and pubs and parks.

5. Last evening Lois invited several families who have been part of her intensive English class in Steinbach to join us for dessert. We had 15 of us sitting around conversing in English and Spanish, with a variety of accents. Her invitation extends Roxburgh's thoughts: entering other people's lives, in this case by extending hospitality. Southeastern Manitoba is experiencing huge immigrant growth, so I sat next to a truck driver from England, as he described crossing the channel and driving through Spain. "Winding roads through the mountains. The Italians go through mountains, but in Spain they go around. Harder to drive." A delightful evening as the light faded into darkness somewhere after 10 pm.