Hi, John!

Time for installment 2 of this irregularly serial series! Time to meet another influential person from my life. Today's person: John.


John was my first love. (The first that I remember, anyway.)

I don't know his last name, but we went to church together at the Bible Baptist Church in Leslie. Here it is:

There are two things that I remember about John. One is that we went to church together. The other is that he liked spinach. (Who wouldn't love him, right?)

I don't know why I liked John. I don't know if he was nice, cute, polite, or any combination thereof. I just know we were in Sunday School together and he liked spinach. I know this because our Sunday School class had a party, and I took a can of spinach FOR THE PARTY because it was John's favorite.

That's dedication right there, people. Dedication. Devotion. Obsession, perhaps.

Well, that's my entire memory of John. So why does he make the list? Because that memory tells me something about myself. I was willing to do something for someone I -ahem- "loved" even though it almost surely meant that I would be ridiculed. Why? Because others' happiness is important! And if I can make someone else happy, I sure am going to try to do it.

So thanks, John. Thanks for waking that up in me. I owe you one.

It was great! I almost died!

(No, I am NOT preoccupied with death.)


Today is Sunday. Today is the day I get to go to church and be with all my little lovely kids. It's been a little quiet there the last few weeks through the holidays. We have a fairly young church group, so many, many people go away to visit moms and dads and families. They go home.

Some of them also go on trips or vacations, of course, like WE did last year (Disney Christmas 2007!).

One of the families at our church came back from a cruise this week, and their darling daughter bounced up to the Kids Church table to pick up her name tag and announced, "I went on a cruise!"

"And how was it? Was it fun?" I asked her.

"It was great!" she was bouncing up and down. "I almost died! There was this wave, and it tackled me!"

Mom smiled (a smile I can TOTALLY empathize with, by the way) and said, "Yes, we had our own personal life guard at the beach...." I smiled back.

I heard that story twice more that day as the little girl told others at church about it. She's so cute!

Why I can empathize: My lovely son.

Water is not really his best friend, but he thinks it is. He has nearly drowned so many times that I have lost count. We bought floaties. It didn't help. We went in with him. It didn't help. We taught him to swim. It didn't help.

I'm not exaggerating! It's happened so many times, in so many places, under the supervision of so many different people, that it's become a family joke: "It's not vacation if Jimmy doesn't drown."

Because, you see, Jimmy didn't come home when he was littler and say, "I almost died," like the little girl from church did. He would come home and say, "Guess what? I drowned on vacation! Twice! The lifeguard had to jump in once, but once he wasn't there, and then insert family member's name here told me that maybe I'd better just sit in the baby pool, but that wasn't any fun. Next time, I'm going to go in the DEEP end!"

--sigh--

The last time he drowned, he had gone to a friend's house. That friend took him to another friend's to go swimming. He pulled his regular I-can-swim-so-it's-ok-then-I-drown routine. Enter friend's mom's panic attack at nearly killing the pastor's kid. His response? "Don't worry, Mrs. ___, I drown all the time. Mom's used to it."

--sigh--

I remember when he was afraid of the water. Those were good days.