Ali Rogers Music/Lyrics: “If I Ever”

Ali Rogers “If I Ever.”

ALLI ROGERS

If I Ever Lyrics

I don’t have words to tell you how I’m feeling
I don’t think any language can
At times like these silence is appealing
Somehow I know you understandAnd if I ever lose my hearing
If I ever lose my sight
If all my five senses leave
I know we’d be alright
Cause it seems your heart is a part of mine

So this is how it feels to be breathless
When someone walks out of a room
Stay by me, we can be timeless
Less than forever is too soon

And if we ever lose our hearing
If we ever lose our sight
If all our five senses leave
I know we’d be alright
Cause it seems your heart is a part of mine

I’ve sorted through every word I know to use
And looked for beauty to define
I haven’t found what I want to say to you
But I’ll try for the rest of my life
Lets try for the rest of our lives

And if we ever lose our hearing
If we ever lose our sight
If all our five senses leave
I know we’d be alright
Cause it seems your heart is a part of mine

I Will Be Seeing Birds this Weekend. You?

(I found this on Pintrest, not managing to find a link to the artist)

My friend and I are celebrating her birthday today. We’ve just now decided that our party needs to become a weekend long event. Originally, my idea was that we would go for a walk in our respected cities at some point today, July the 19th. I thought we could then report back to each other. Last week I got confused about which Friday of this month is her “real” birthday, and this gave me an extra week to look forward to the event.

Then, while cleaning out and reorganizing our small home office, I found two empty packages that were addressed to my birthday pal and one to a common best friend who is a bird watcher as well. I felt terrible. The package intentions were to make three copies of some great music as a token of my regret that our friend’s brother had died very unexpectedly.

Clearly, I never even sent him a card.

So, on my desk was a sealed and ready to mail birthday card that included a cute cow finger puppet and some raspberry flavored dark chocolate. A sad reminder of the mounting grief of each of our adult lives: the music-less and card-less packages are from, I’d guess, a year ago.

(copyright protected image by Kathy Hare, which can be found on Pintrest or at www.moongazinghareillustration.blogspot.com)

The news is good despite my failed condolence effort. Along with the birthday card, I sent quick and goofy birthday party invitations to both friends inviting them to try and do some birdwatching today as a sort of global birthday effort. I spoke with our friend yesterday when he called confused and said, basically: “Kate…what are the two of you up to now?” and, “you are inviting me to do what? when? are you sure that….”

It was great. I’d not heard his voice in well over 25 years and the friendship dynamics are the same as when we were teenagers: he is sweet and a bit wary of our complicated and some times outlandish ideas for a fun time, and she and I just go about our merry way and laugh at what a job it can be at to distract him from his tasks at hand.

For me, sweet memories of being the age of my young adult sons are experiencing now, is condolence enough. I should be so lucky that, despite the gaping hole of time and life which has kept the three of us from a lazy evening together watching a sunset on Lake Erie, cliff swallows will certainly swarm back to their nest holes this evening. Even better, we each remain nature lovers in our respectively hectic households.

While I am not at all positive that any of our three work and family lives will allow more than a brief stroll, or a few moments of window gazing today,

I have faith that in her wisdom, the Holy Spirit will interrupt our day, and hopefully weekend, with some lovely and surprising bird sightings, and a moment of laughter to preserve the moment. This I believe.

Grace is God’s Unmerited Favor

“Grace is God’s unmerited favor.”

I’m going to go ahead and claim that I wrote that sentence, even though it is part of my six month old scribbled notes that I made while on Wikki (of all places). I was working on a tab for this blog which explains why I would pick an often uncute theme: grace.

Wait! Red light! Am I tiptoeing around the stickiest theological debate of all time – for me anyway: Exactly where do toil and grace meet?

Know what I mean (jellybean)?

And…who, how, when and where is grace found? And why…of course we ask over and over, is toil and suffering so often what we associate with the experience of God being in our midst?

Let’s just put that on the chalkboard for now:

“Def.: Grace = God in our midst.”

So, let me explain

Tangent: here’s why I’m bogging down your computer with huge photos:

 

I just want to.

Want to bog mine down anyway. I was lucky enough to have scored a job for a couple of months at the end of the school year and that was a really wonderful experience. My title was “Communication Coach” for a Kindergarten student who is hard of hearing.

If I can get back into a routine to blog more often, I’d love to share more about my experience. It was just what I didn’t know I was praying for.

The huge pictures in this post? Because as soon as I signed my contract, I treated myself to a new printer that has a scanner so that I can try and organize old photos.

So far, what I have is an office and moving boxes that are a jumble of…

a jumble. In a room with stinky carpet.

(insert music or images that lead you to toil and suffer,

if my friend, you are on my side…)

I am still committed to try and not write more than a few hundred words per post, but for now, as I brush away some midlife cobwebs, I need to see these snippets in biggie size. 

“Oh, you weak, beautiful people who give up on such grace.

What you need is

someone to take hold of you –

gently, with love,

and hand your life back to you.”

 

~ Tennessee Williams

 

Defining Grace Two: Let It Be Me

During the American Presidential election debates, I became increasingly angry.

Ouch. (Rubbing my ears.) Yes, I just heard the “so was I” shouts and moans.

In my case, I’d never watched a political debate in my life. My parents, and then my husband did the watching and grousing up until this year. Until this year, my attitude has been:

What could be fun about worrying that the candidate I oppose is the fool who will lead my sons for four, maybe even eight years?

With this election, those eight years take our January baby right into adulthood. So, hearing the careless, utterly wrong and jacked up feather fluffing of the candidate I oppose went straight to my mom brain and has me sleepless with worry once again.

This blog is not about politics, so don’t leave me now, as this post will stay non-partisan and will get to my point in a few scroll clicks.

Oh “hell’s bells” as my mother would say, I’ll just get to the point now, and if you have time to read my longer than usual post, feel free to scroll and read on.

Are you ready?

The process of trying to experience grace has more than once, more than twice, even more than thrice made me mad. Very, very mad.

But, life has taught me that the only way through is not around or under these speed bumps, but to ramp those suckers and hope for the best. ~ Kate

After I got a few sentences into this post the other day I started thinking about when might have been the first time I felt the effects of trying to ram rod good to happen in my life. I found myself being little in my mind’s eye. How old are little girls when they first try the “he loves me, loves me not?” game of pulling daisy pedals off one at a time to learn the “truth” by way of an empty flower stem?

Young. That’s for sure.

I remember sitting on our front porch stoop and being irate that the damn flower didn’t work. Who knows if the object of my heart was “Fonzie”, or the handsome dudes on the T.V. show “Emergency,” or the acting student at my father’s work that ‘I could die for.’ Maybe it was the 5th grade dream boat that declared his crush on me with a Grape Ape Shrinky Dink, only to be too shy to deal with teasing as we continued to pass notes in class.

At any rate – that is what trying to jam prayers, hopes…dreams into the God funnel feels like. It’s like a little girl who did

every

single

thing right,

including trying a few more flowers and cheating by counting the pedals or accidentally on purpose plucking two to get the “he loves me” right on cue. For some reason what I remember about that day is that I plucked my little heart out, and what made me so angry is that I said to myself:

One more. Try just one more.

And the stupid thing landed on “he loves me not.”

Hopefully I went inside the house and had a cold glass of Tang and then skipped off to some other more productive activity.

But, isn’t that what wanting to throw things at a news clip of a debate is like? In the end, what upset me the most about the debates was the hyper active predictions, and re-predictions, and conflation about who won which debate and why. I’m actually a pretty big fan of social media for the sake of what it can do for good. I figure that this is where we are…many are living and breathing and believing all that is online – so grab that communication tool and promote what deserves to be promoted and try to ignore the rest.

But Good God Almighty! The concept that a news headline, or political leaning of a news channel is what decides the winner of a Presidential debate is Cray and Zee in my world. I’m not mad at the media, they are feeding us the Hostess treats we ask for…and repeating it every nanosecond because our attention spans have become that short.

Maybe the issue for me is that I had good parents and was raised to somehow know that lousy daisy pedal odds or not, my voice counts, but only if I use it.

So, use it I am…trying anyway. I’m retweeting and praying and going to rallys and signing up to give out water to the good people who are running the voting (not prediction!) polls. I launched a get out the female vote pumpking carving #GoVote TweetAThon with me, myself and I. It made absolutely no sense, but did burn off a lot of worry and impressed the heck out of said ten-year old son when lit up in our dark family room.

…tragedy, comedy, and anxiety

So, I mentioned in the previous post is that my plan is to come up with five definitions of grace, and to pass on a song that touches me in connection to that pondering. Here goes:

Grace is about being a mad hatter.

Grace is when you wipe out your mother’s garden and STILL have no luck with getting the cooties.

Grace is that the television you threw your slippers at was the 200 pound NotSoFlat screen and that you remembered to say You Rotten JackWagon! rather than…..

Grace is just that. It’s graceful!

And the music? Ray LaMontange and his song Let It Be Me. I close my eyes and try to imagine Jesus himself rowing me in a boat…and some times I am calm. Off to listen again.

Bye for now, Kate.

Ma’am, would you like your cake first?

Well.

What I wish is that this morning I could have some time and energy, and focus to write “a bit” about the terrorism that has swept my nation right before starting the school year.

I’m not so sure how much energy I have to help “us” process how, or why, or when, or where to take a knee on the terrorism part.

I’m a pretty big fan of theaters and houses of worship. (Looks at calendar on wall). Yup. Pushing 50 years of both types of buildings being my safest, bestest spots on earth other than a nice little tree stand to sit and day-dream for a minute before misplacing my planner again.

Not good timing in this family as our calendars rotate by way of the school year by trade and young’ins.

Nor as the daughter of the best actor on earth, or friend of the hippies that really did start Saturday Night Live.

But, I’m digressing again, and won’t go there yet other than to share that Mr. Coop and I fell into a date last night by default of kids being too busy to eat with the rents and we had a couple of seconds to take a deep breath over schmanzy heated salad dressing.

And, I’ll admit that I wasn’t much of a date other than I am certain I brushed my teeth before we left.

My mindset for the first, at least, quarter of our yummy meal, or maybe half, was the big deal I made with the waitress that dessert needs to be ordered first.

She actually came back to the table and said, :

“Ma’am, would you like your cake first?”

because I was being so complicated with my food order.

Okay. Truth told, I managed to pull out my theater background and make the entire evening about that chocolate heath melted surprise. But, Professor Cooper was a sport and yes, I got my cake and ate it too.

School readyness thinking on my part a few weeks ago was along the lines of the kool-aid mom thing going on in our new ‘hood. This is fun, worry about the pencil box later.

After baseball was over for our youngest he figured out that much of the team is within a block or three reach of our door. He’s extroverted. I’m not. I get that.

I didn’t think he could surpass his oldest brother with extraversion, but he has in a certain cute way that involves fifth graders in and out of the door for most of July. I picked up on complicated baseball conversation that involves something about Omar from Chi-town and dancing in the rain at the Big Red Machine Stadium vs. Babe Ruth and did the Great Bambino use to stuff their gloves with sawdust or not?

These, thank GOD are still at the top of the minds of some of the littlish people who crossed the door this summer.

These, I think, I know, are very good worries for a guy to have.

Fast track to a few days ago realizing that my favorite son of the week, the track star who I forgot to sign up for ACT’s who really does want me to remember to buy him a birthday cake this year for his birthday, zzzzpt…fast track to the one who is my favorite at Christmas who has decided to rock the work world in Ohio for us and made me take a nap in his apartment this summer on his couch….pppsssszzzzdddt. He’s the one that I can’t remember if I dreamed about mailing a birthday cake to last December or not. It was an odd winter on that front.

Sons. Hmm. Overwhelming? Yeah.

Are they doing okay? Yup. Check. Not bad at all really.

I could scroll the play list for you to my father moving, my brother and I helping him do that while balancing moving our adult kids into the universe, another niece getting married and one starting kindergarten and,

yeah.

I guess insomnia does have some logic of late.

And.

Thankfully, I had a moment to take a knee by way of scoring the two photos in this article from Facebook. The cute daisy from a bestest college friend who knows I don’t sleep, and the other of my father’s favorite students of the ’70’s.

It will all be okay.

John Fugiel Improv Troop, circa ’70’s

Is Joy Deeper Than Happiness?

The Davenport Iowa River Bandits Rally in the Rear of the Game with a Home Run powered by cheers from their best fan Joe!

“Joy, deeper than happiness, is a virtue that finds its foundation in the knowledge that we are loved by God.”

~ Fr. James Martin, SJ,

from  Between Heaven and Mirth

Forgiveness Friday: James W. Riley about Happy Boys

Nothing Like a fresh diaper to make a brother coo.

The smiling face of a happy boy

   With it’s enchanted key

Is now unlocking in memory

My store of heartiest joy.

And my lost life again to-day,

In pleasant colors all aglow,

From rainbow tints, to pure white

snow,

Is a panorama sliding away.

The whistled air of a simple tune

Eddies and whirls my thoughts

around,

As fairy balloons of thistle-down

Sail through the air of June.

Oh happy boy with untaught grace!

What is there in the world to give

That can buy one hour of the life

you live

Or the trivial cause of your smiling face!

If James Whitcomb Riley is not on your list of sweet guys (besides Twain) that came from the midwest, you might want to rearrange your post-it notes and move Riley to the top.

I’m fairly biased because my grandmother grew up next door to his house in Indianapolis and was one of the neighborhood children that he taught his poems to and shared readings with back, back in the day.

In turn, my father learned how to read Riley’s poems from his mother with intonations that were intended by the author himself, well, golly, are we talking a century ago? Yup. ’bout that!

The good news is that my father is en route to visit me here in Iowa, today’s windstorm has passed and I’m almost done mopping the floors.

The sad news is that a friend of my father’s, a best friend really, died last weekend. They were coworkers who taught at Allegheny College in Meadville Pennsylvania. They taught them to, of all things, speak! Jim taught speech, and my father theatre.

So, part of our visit will include looking up a particular poem that my father will be reading at Jim’s memorial service.

I do appreciate boys with untaught grace. What a lovely turn of words, yes?

My Son is a Rediculous RefusalMan

This is how the letter "r" looks to the peRson who is Reading the woRd that is being spelled in sign language. "R"eally. It is.

Definition: A boy or man who is endowed with greater than usual avoidance and refusal skills that take battle with anything which he does not consider fun.

True Example: The Mom chased the boy around the house with increasingly stern reminders to get the school work done. She set kitchen timers. She used a happy face approach. She warned him once. She used a serious face approach. She warned him twice. She tried to not use a “red in the face” approach. She went for a short walk. After he finally gathered his books, on the way to his room the kid said: “Mom, I’m just a rediculous RefusalMan.”

Letter O: Yes Dear, You are my “O”nlYest One

Made up “O” Word of the Day: (“o” is my favorite letter of the alphabet, hands down…so it was hard to pick, but based on some cute antics with our two dogs fighting for attention with my son and I, here’s what he helped me pick:)

OnlYest

Definition: Assurance from a loved one that there is, absolutely and postively no way to replace the unique love that comes from that person (or critter for that matter).

Real Life Example: The two dogs fought for the mom’s attention so hard that by the end of the day, she had to pull each one aside to assure each guy that he is her OnlYest one because they have that special something that no one else does. (Wiping my brow…honestly, how DO I get myself into these things?)

Don’t Peek! Good Friday and the Letter F

sign language "f" From the signer's eyes....

Gentle Neck roll to the right everyone...and we have the letter "f" view from the listener's point of view!

(this post is meant for (Good) Friday, April 6th, when I hope to be shoe and hat shopping and drinking a fountain coke on the Ohio River)

Made up word of the Day: Famorama

FAmoRama (n.) : A family event.

eg: All of the guys had a famorama to see who could throw the rock across the river first.

Logical Eg: Aunt Kate and Grace kindly left the famorama behind and dashed off for a last minute marshmallow coke and a trip to walmart to look for a polkadot hat.