Facebook

I had an epiphany Sunday night. I was corresponding with Marnie, our executive pastor at Peachtree Presbyterian Church via Facebook. The dialog was clearly supportive of My 95, an initiative of the missional church to guide parishioners in how to spend the vast majority of their life.

As a part of MEDITECH, my email at work is OPEN. That means that anyone can read it. As an officer of the company, I don't even have a log of who read it (most employees can see who has read their email). It's a very convenient mechanism for checking an ill colleague's email, to make sure their clients get appropriate responses. But now I recognize that it is also a very interesting way to convey to the entire company whatever it is that I want to convey. If I'm writing another officer, I know that dozens of employees will read it.

Clearly, we at Peachtree are using Facebook this way as well. I want you to read what I write on Chuck Roberts or Vic Pentz's wall. We're trying to influence you. As followers of Jesus should be hoping to influence others who watch them with everything we do.

My cousin Randolph has made a career out of figuring out how young folks are using the current media. I think it's cool that we old folks can use the new media as well.

The Cobbler's Children

Medical care is not always easy to get, even if you live in a doctor's house. However, the tradition of makeshift medicine began a generation earlier, back at the Holly's. Young Vertrees (TGP) used to like the way the cut ends of the tobacco looked as they were hanging upside down in the barn curing. He jumped up to see them and missed the 4x4 rail on the way down. His chin hit a rail, and his lower teeth came through his lower lip.

After a lot of noise, Denzil (my grandfather) was summoned. He attempted to remove the lip from the teeth with the aid of the best tool he had available, a kitchen fork. When that didn't work, they went to the doctor. As the MD was working, he said something to the effect of it appearing that someone had been tugging at the lower lip with a fork. TGP tried to explain that that was exactly what had happened, but couldn't be understood, as he still had teeth sticking through his lower lip.

One beautiful summer day at Spindletop, I was playing on a variant of a see-saw they have there. I kicked my bare foot forward and it dug down underneath a metal handle bar, slamming the left big toe into the metal. It split asunder immediately. Eventually we got home and TGP examined it. The usual rule for pain among the children was that there had to be blood or bone visible, or it had to hurt for two weeks before it warranted attention. This fit in the blood category, so I didn't have to wait. Surveying the damage, TGP when down to the tool chest in the basement. As he came up with the needle nose pliers, Sophia remembers him saying "Oh, this isn't going to be good for Eben". I remember the painful shots of anesthetic, the the removal of the separated top and bottom half of my big toe nail. It really hurt. It hurt at school when someone stepped on it. It hurt for weeks.

Years later, in Charleston, Dunn returned from a game of Bladderball
with the youth group. He came through the first floor in Charleston where I was holding court with Mary Anne, holding his jaw up with his hands, and said "Pleez have Pha check on me when he gets in". After several hours, Dunn got X-rayed to find that he had broken his jaw. Herself passed out at the hospital the next day looking at the X-rays. After several weeks with a jaw wired shut, Dunn was good as new.

I still discount whatever gets hurt. At least we don't panic easily.

MS Walk 2009

This one is a little harder to write than others posts, as it is more personal. I want to express a little bit about our experience with MS as I solicit for research funds again.

MA was definitively diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in March of 2002, after a first incident over Christmas of 2001. (as you can derive from the name, it takes more than one episode of inflammation of myelin around the nerves in the brain to constitute Multiple Sclerosis). I sent an email to many of our friends at that time; if anyone has a copy, I'd love to see it again.

The hardest part of MS is the lack of predictability. MA had numbness in her face in December 2001, then double vision and vertigo in March while we were with my family in Mexico. Strong doses of IV steroids tend to eliminate the short term problems like that and she did that a few times early on. Over the years since, she has had very few vision problems and no more bad numbness. The persistent recurring symptoms are extreme fatigue and a slight limp.

I did the MS walk in '05, '06 and '07, raising enough to be in the top 100 fundraisers in Georgia. A testament to how many people love Mary Anne. In 2007, our Faithmates Sunday School class from Peachtree walked with me (I should have a picture, but can't seem to find it) Last year, we were in Charleston watching Eleanor in her last college play during the walk, so we missed it. I'm looking forward to walking again this year.

My roommate Chuck said he admired me for how I took care of Mary Anne. It's really not taking care of, it's doing what you want to do for your favorite person on this earth. I love to cook, so it's convenient that it's easier for us to eat in most of the time. We did end up getting a housekeeper, as a concession to my not wanting to take the time to keep the house clean.

An MS blog Mary Anne read a while back was set at a diner and the speaker, who had MS, gathered spoons from some tables and put them in a pile. He explained his experience by saying something along the lines of:
Imagine that everything we expend energy on costs us some spoons and that we all start our days with the same number of spoons. Getting dressed, walking, shopping, even driving takes away spoons. For regular folks, getting dressed and driving somewhere probably costs one spoon. On a bad MS day, that can cost me a whole pile of spoons. This disease just makes me more careful about how I spend them.

We have worked very hard at making this disease less of a limitation and more of an opportunity to be careful with our spoons. Family and friends come first. We have eliminated from our lives many of the less important things that we used spend time and effort on. We do all our shopping on line. We also really don't sweat the small stuff; perspective is a beautiful thing.

Sitting here with the fire on, MA knitting, two dogs in dog ball in the den, life really couldn't be much better.

If you would like to sponsor me as I walk this spring, the link is here. If for some reason that doesn't work, paste the mess on the next line into the address bar on your browser.
http://main.nationalmssociety.org/site/TR/Walk/GAAWalkEvents?px=2158684&pg=personal&fr_id=11240

As the old Bartleby and James commercial used to say, thank you for your support.

Halloween

I wear a lot of plaid.

Also, patterns, stripes and colors. In general, I am a very good knittee, which is convenient since herself is such a good knitter. See my most recent sweater, done in entrelac, as shown below.
.

I'm not afraid of a strong pattern either. Back when embarrassing the girls was part of my job, I even went so far as to wear both the top and bottom of a wonderful Old Navy pattern. We had Halloween contests at my office in the old days. If you can't read the sign I'm holding, it says "Embarrassing father of teen age daughters".

Come June 5th, I won't have any teenagers any more. I'll miss it.