Cars Are People Too

For as long as I can remember, I have personified cars. What I mean by this is that I think of the cars I see as seeming like people. For example... a new pickup is like a "weekend warrior". An old pickup truck is a guy in flannel. A station wagon is a person with a large rear end. A Land Rover is a hiker. A sports car is a guy with gold medallions tangled in the midst of an excessively hairy chest, etc. An Oldsmobile or Buick 4-door sedan (whose turn signal lamps, incidentally, need frequent replacing) is an elderly person . The car with the open gas cap has its fly open.

I know that personifying vehicles is not something that only I do. In fact, if you've seen the movie CARS (like I have about 3,000 times), you know that they've pictured a Hummer as a drill sergeant and a VW van as a hippie. I'm not saying any of this in a "this is what your car says about you" kind of way. Obviously, people from many different walks of life own and drive many different types of cars. It's more like what I see when I look at a car.

Cars that bear the evidence of crash are "sick". I steer clear of those cars, for fear of getting "sick" too. My van is a mother, after all and can't be taxiing children all over town when she's sick. Cars with tape over a window or tail light are bandaged and not generally contagious.

I get more and more comfortable with my van. The more dings, dents, and dimples she has and the more she sags and squeaks, the more I identify with her. She's dependable and quite reliable. She hasn't let me down yet. Tonight, I discovered that one of the van's headlights was burned out, and it seemed as though I was wearing an eyepatch all over town. I felt quite conspicuous. Fortunately, the police car who followed me for quite awhile on my way back home didn't pull her over for it.

My husband has had a little fun at my expense with regard to all of this car silliness, but his driver's side window doesn't roll down in the cold weather and has been the source of my own embarrassment on more than one occasion. So his car is as crazy as I am. Either that, or it likes to frustrate me - much like my husband does.

It's a blessed wonder that God doesn't look at people the way I look at cars. He takes no stock in the outward appearance. In 1 Samuel 16:7, God talks to Samuel about how to choose Israel's next king and says, "Do not look at his appearance or at the height of his stature... for God sees not as man sees, for man looks at the outward appearance, but the LORD looks at the heart."

I am most thankful that God sees my heart... and loves me anyway.

The Way We Were

I just finished watching the movie The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. I am a little late; I know. I have had it on my Netflix list for over a year, probably, but other things just kept bumping it. I really enjoyed the movie, and my husband, who was in and out during the movie, didn't seem to mind that we had to watch it during our nightly workout. If you haven't seen it, it is about 4 friends who find one pair of pants that fits each of them perfectly, which is a "miracle", because they are each a different body-type. They pass this pair of pants around amongst themselves by mail during the summer of their Junior year... when they are all separated from each other for the first time in their lives. Each of the girls is very different from her friends. One is a provocative, blonde, sports star. The other three are brunettes... one is a prudish artist. One is a vivacious writer, and the third is a rebellious filmmaker. At one point, my husband turned to me and said, referring to the blonde one, "I just don't picture her being friends with those other girls." I thought about it for a second, and then I assumed that he meant that he couldn't picture 3, sensible, creative brunettes being friends with the athletic, haphazard blonde. I responded, "Well, when you're young, you get thrown together with other girls and you pretty much get along, and, if you grow older with these same friends, it doesn't matter what type of person they become (whether or not they're different from you), because they have always had your loyalty, and they always will."

After he got in the shower to get ready for work, I got to thinking about the friends I had as a child. When I was in early elementary school, I had friends who were boys and friends who were girls. I had friends in every spectrum and type of lifestyle. Most of my friends were what I would have thought were better off financially than we were. I remember one friend whose mom was a dance teacher. They lived in a subdivision. She seemed to have the perfect life. She had all the cute, dance costumes and got to dress up, for real, any time she wanted. She was blonde and always had her hair curled in just the perfect way. At the school programs and on picture day, she always wore the cutest, most fashionable clothes, beautiful earrings (yes, she had her ears pierced), and her blonde curls were in perfect place. Her perfect teeth glowed when she smiled, and she always smiled. I was a brunette myself - with freckles and corduroy knickers (thanks, mom) and teeth that were completely the wrong size for my face. I also another subdivision friend whose mother was a Mary Kay lady. Her mom had a pink cadillac. This friend had the most amazing collection of play makeup under her bed that we could use whenever I spent the night there. I had another friend who had a huge, beautiful house on the nice side of town. She had Elvis movies and dry spaghetti noodles. Whenever I went there, we could watch TV (which she wasn't nearly as impressed with as I was), eat sugar cereal (which my parents were against), play with Barbies, sneak down at night to eat dry spaghetti noodles, and eat at McDonald's - each getting our own meal Happy Meal. (My dad was a big believer in sharing and was the first conscientious objector of the Happy Meal.)

I had a German friend - whose parents were immigrants who spoke very little English. They lived near the cement plant in town, and had one whole wall missing from their house. It was very cold there in the winter. Her toys were few and simple, but she was one of the happiest friends I had. I also had a friend who was a boy - whose mom invited me often after school to their home on our side of town (the south side). Their home was plain and older. She had an odd quirk - which didn't disturb me that much as a child, because I wasn't sure how uncommon it was, but she fed her own children food when I was at their house, but she never fed me. If I was there over lunch or supper, she fed her own family and left me to sit at the table without food. I always tried to figure out if I had done something wrong or if I wasn't even supposed to be sitting at the table and should just be off playing. If she brought popsicles out to the little treehouse in back, her two sons both got one, and I received nothing. I always wondered if it was because she didn't like me or if they didn't have enough money to feed me, but I was afraid to tell my mother, because I didn't want her to tell me I couldn't go back there anymore. I thought about packing my own food sometimes, and I'm not sure I didn't, once or twice, sneak a box of raisins or something in my schoolbag if I knew I'd be going there.

I had laotian friends from our neighborhood also, whose culture and lifestyle were completely different than my own. One of my friends didn't have a mom around at all, and her dad was a car dealer. She only had brothers, and it seemed she didn't have any interest in being a girl at all. One of my friends' parents were caretakers at a summer camp, and we had great adventures playing there. One was the boy who was our backyard neighbor - whose brother was mentally handicapped. We spent hours pretending the basement stairs were a Firebird or a T-Bird or a Camaro or a Mustang, and that he was a cook and I was a waitress and my sister was a teacher. We dressed him up in chocolate hair mousse and barrettes.

I had friends whose parents were married and friends whose parents were divorced. In fact, the girl whose mom was a dance teacher eventually moved out from her dad's house in the subdivision and lived in an apartment over the dance studio - which, as a child, I thought was so much cooler, because now we could go play in the studio whenever we wanted. I never imagined how difficult it was for her to be going through the transition she was... until she told me. I remember crying with her about it and then crying privately with fear that my parents might someday do the same thing.

All of these friendships bring back sweet memories - no bitter ones - no, not even the kid whose mom didn't believe in feeding, freeloading child guests. Each held a special place in my life at that time and will live in my heart forever.

I guess the apex of all my thinking tonight came down to one thing. The diversity of my friendships then was so much more than it is now. Most of those early friendships dissipated for one reason or another - many moved away. Many changed schools. We moved to the country when I was 10 and left many of my friendships in town. One way or another, things changed. Our lives led in different directions.

Today, I love my friends, but I have to acknowledge that many of them are people with the same life path as I have. They are stay at home moms. They are middle class. They are Christian. They are married. Don't get me wrong, I do have a few friends who work. I have a few who are other religions and some who are single, but they surely aren't the majority. It's not something I have worked at. I haven't tried to narrow down my friendships. I haven't cut off people who work. I haven't alienated single people. I haven't hung out a Christians Only sign. I just think that it happens to us as we get older... if we're not careful. As people get older, they become "lactose intolerant" or find out that certain foods don't agree with them, but I think we also become "different intolerant". We just don't have the time or want to make the effort to develop friendships outside our sphere - our comfort zone. We find that certain people "don't agree" with us, and then we minimize contact with them for our own convenience.

This realization almost made me long for more complicated days... filled with the richness of different types of people. Don't get me wrong. There is a most certain blessedness in the comfort of people who I know will understand me and with whom I can confide and in whom I can trust. However, the simplicity of the way children generally relate is something I envy. They don't see all of the things adults see which "turn us off" to what we perceive to be a certain type of individual. They don't see economics. They don't care about race or creed. They have a flawlessly objective viewpoint that gives them the opportunity for simple, gratifying relationships with a multifarious blend of people. Much of it is my vocation, I understand. When I worked outside the home more, I came in contact with a larger variety of people. This is one of the reasons that I am enjoying the opportunity to volunteer - in kind of a selfish way. It benefits me, because I am getting to meet and know a much grander variety of people. However, even within my vocation as a "SAHM", I see cliques that form based on personal preferences, etc. How far do we have to segregate ourselves, as adults - down to the point that even those within our own profession are strangers to us? Those who are the most familiar with our plights, our frustrations, our joys, our fears... still remain strangers over issues as small as what they believe about pacifiers, breastfeeding, co-sleeping, etc. The sadness is palpable but remains. I suppose we are destined to narrow our viewpoints even further by sticking primarily with the like-minded.

As a child, I didn't balk for a second at sleeping in a house with three walls and a plastic sheet, freezing cold, in the middle of winter with a friend whose parents only spoke German. I was just glad to be with another girl - one who liked My Little Ponies and Rainbow Bright and who liked to climb on the monkey bars... one who liked to sled in the winter and run through a sprinkler in the summer. I felt proud when she taught me to count to 10 in German, and I was proud of her for being bilingual... something that seemed so hard to me. Life was simpler then, and I wonder if I would be so quick to befriend someone like Monique today. I imagine my daughters would be.

Back to the movie... some things are fairly universal to personhood in general, but this movie focused on girls/women. Many of us know the rejection of a parent... a difficult relationship with a father... fear of saying we are angry... the desire to be known but the fear that it will bring us only desertion... the exhilaration of new love... the loss of someone dear... the desire to rebel... the will to create... the need to compete... the ache of emptiness... the desperation of loneliness. All of these things - so universal - yet we remain separated. I guess tonight I find myself longing for a little bit of the way we were.