Listening to the talking lama

My Methodist-Buddhist uncle asked if I would watch my grandma for a few hours so he could go out tonight to hear a llama speak. I complimented him on his interest in Peruvian culture. I was teasing him. He meant a lama, a Tibetan lama. A talking lama.

As Ogden Nash once wrote,

A one-l lama, he’s a priest.
A two-l llama, he’s a beast.
And I will bet a silk pajama
There isn’t any three-l lllama.

Be that as it may, I personally have never heard a talking lama or a talking llama.

Why I live with my grandmother

A couple of years ago, my youngest uncle moved back with my grandmother Elva, after her hip replacement surgery, having spent a decade driving to her house several times a day to check on her. It’s been hard to convince her that she could no longer live alone safely, but I think she understands it now. But, as a former worker in nursing homes (LVN), she never wants to live in one. She says she wants to live in her home until she “sprouts wings and flies away”.
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Tantalizing if True?

In the 19th century, newspapers would sometimes flag articles “Important If True” when their information was potentially urgent but they didn’t have time to verify it before press-time. One wag wrote that churches should put the same sign over their doors.

Even when we don’t fully understand the truth about God and the world he created, even when we’re frustrated when we try to talk about these subjects (“No, that’s not it… what I meant to say was…”), we ought to know that truth really does exist. We might even find that it’s specific, practical, and relevant. And it’s not just important, it’s tantalizing, because it’s so different from the way we’ve been living all our lives. Is the Good News too good to be true? Not hardly.

Unlike most bloggers, I find myself constantly editing and re-editing my earlier posts, sharpening the point I want to make. We need to wake up. We’ve been dreaming.

About Elva

Elva is what my grandmother’s Texan-German relatives call her – short for Evangeline. She is more than 90 years old, and remembers bouncing on her Civil War veteran grandfather’s knee before 1914, while he called her “My little elf” (in German). She’s fifth-generation Texan, but was raised in a farming community where everybody spoke German, so she didn’t learn English until she started to school. She raised eight children while working in nursing and food service, first in Houston and later in St. Louis.
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Beyond reality-based politics

‘The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernable reality.”…’

‘ “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities…” ‘

— Ron Suskind, quoting a senior advisor to President Bush, in the New York Times magazine, 10/17/2004