To be a friend

Last Friday, Kevin and I put our kids to bed and then headed off to the temple. We were going because it had been a little while, but we were also going to decide for sure about Kevin's postdoc.

To tell the truth, I've known in my heart for a long time that we were going to move, so I wasn't going to ask about that. Instead, I went with this question: "What more do we need to do in Ann Arbor?"

I wasn't expecting a big, life-changing answer -- for instance, it's hard to start a nonprofit in just three months. And I didn't really get one. Instead, the impression that has stuck with me is to "be a friend."

Although that should be an obvious thing to do, in some ways it was sort of hard to do this week. Kevin had a paper due today that he didn't have all the theory worked out for, so he spent most of the week working on it til past 1 or 2 in the morning. It usually took Matthew somewhere between 1-3 hours to actually fall asleep for naps once he showed signs of being tired (although driving sped up the process exponentially), and he averaged about 40 minutes of napping each day. Joseph was mostly fine, but there were plenty of meltdowns. And so on.

And on top of that came the instruction to "be a friend."

I had two types of experiences with that each week. One was to be friendly to people I hadn't met before, and the other was to be a friend to friends I already know.

For the past little while, I've generally been able to breeze through week after week without having to talk to people I don't know. Every now and then someone new moves in, but for the most part I've just been able to talk to people I already know. But this week was different. I counted 8 different instances involving more than a dozen people I didn't know where the only polite thing to do was to talk to them.

Some people thrive on that. I've had times where I've thrived on that (freshman year of college, for example). But this week was definitely not one of those times. It felt like someone threw a backpack on me, dumped it full of rocks and said, "Here. Go climb a mountain." Or more accurately, it's like someone squirted an entire tube of toothpaste in my mouth and said, "Go say something intelligent now." Then there was the time there was an intentional language barrier thrown in, and I felt so dense I couldn't even understand what my friend speaking perfect English was saying.

Sure, you can always talk about the weather and where people are from, but once you've belabored that it can be exhausting to think about what to talk about next. Even with all the practice I had this week, each time filled me with trepidation. When Kevin said, "Maybe you can view it as a service," that made it even worse! Service should be fixing up yards and bringing meals. It shouldn't be doing people a favor by gracing them with your glorious presence and making conversation with them. If I thought of conversation as service, then it would become a chore more tedious than weeding or sweeping the front porch.

Well, I thought, this doesn't bode well for our upcoming move to a place where I know absolutely no one! Is this what it means to "be a friend?"

Luckily, I also had lots of conversations with most of my close friends. These conversations were not stilted and awkward. There were inside jokes and allusions to experiences together. We already knew what was going on in each other's lives. I don't think I ever did anything to serve them such as watching kids or making treats, so did I fail that aspect of "be a friend"?

I don't think so. True, I never actively served them, but I think it's actually a good thing that it didn't feel like service to talk to them! And therein was my epiphany of the week. There are really only two ways to see people -- as an object or a friend. Even if you try to put a positive spin on it by thinking of them as "someone to serve," then they are still objects in your mind. And it's really, really tiring to keep on giving to objects.

The tricky thing for me is that I feel like in order to transform someone from an object to a friend in my mind is to need them. It's when I feel like I need them in my life -- whether to text me Parent Trap quotes or discuss literature or laugh at my jokes -- that I'm willing to open up my heart and change them from project to friend.

But that's not what friendship is about, either! Friendships based on "what can I get from them" seem pretty mercenary, to be honest. But friendships without at least a bit of quid pro quo seem exploitative and exhausting. So what are we supposed to do?

I guess the most wisdom I've gained from this is from listening to Charlotte's Web in the car the past few weeks. I've read the book multiple times, but man, listening to E. B. White read it himself in his delightfully old-fashioned accent is incredible. It's also been surprisingly emotional for me. When I think of sweet, innocent Wilbur, basking in the love of Fern and Charlotte without doing a thing to deserve it, I almost get teary-eyed right there in the car. They just love him because they want to love him, and that makes him worthy of their love.

And perhaps that is the answer. Perhaps we will find out we need people when we love them first. Perhaps we will discover they are fun and friendly and witty and dependable when we see them that way. I know that's been the case this week . . . I've somehow been blessed to hang out with people who see me as kind, so I've had to live up to it even though I've wanted to be grumpy. Did I deserve to be seen so positively? Hardly. Have I been changed by it? Yes, even if a bit begrudgingly. (Kevin's heard plenty of grumbling.)

So, I guess the command to "be a friend" isn't about having a litany of well-placed conversation starters with the grandma at the park or even about fulfilling every need a friend might have. I guess it's more about having an outlook of love so that we don't see people as objects that we have to converse with or serve but rather children of God who deserve respect.

I guess it's time to move to a new city so I can practice this more.

(All this said, I still think I want to hunker down and not talk to anyone except Kevin for a few days. And that's probably okay, right?)

Blueberries!

All my life, I've wanted to like blueberries. I remember trying a stray blueberry once when we were making muffins for Achievement Days that tasted like it came straight from heaven. Sweet and flavorful and healthy and wonderful . . .

And I could never find more like it. Every time I've gotten blueberries, I've just had to hide them in pancakes or muffins because they were just too sour or bland for my liking.

So when I learned that Michigan has farms where you can pick your own blueberries, I didn't see what the big deal was. Now strawberries, ooh, those would have been good if we had been around during the first weeks of June.

But blueberries? Meh. We buy them because they are in season and healthy, but I just never wanted to eat them plain.

Luckily for us, we heard from friends that blueberries were actually amazing when you picked them yourself. So we decided to put it to the test. We invited the Roberts, who barely got a chance to breathe after driving here from our old ward in Provo before I called them and invited them to partake in a true "Michigan experience."

And, oh, it was worth it. We found a patch down in Milan* less than 15 minutes from their place and began our adventure.

I love Michigan

The fun started as we drove up to the house. A bunny scurried past us, and chickens and little dogs surrounded our car. Our favorite was the duck that thought it was a chicken. And of course Joseph had to chase all of them around. Luckily they were the kind that ran instead of pecked.

After getting some instructions from the owner (or the owner's son? never figured that out), we drove a few hundred yards over to the blueberry patch in the middle of the woods.

We grabbed some buckets, and then for the next few hours . . . we picked blueberries!

I never knew that dark, shiny blueberries could taste so much better than the weak sauce light blue ones at the store.

Pretty sure he's dropping a stick into the bucket

Kelsie and her haul

Kevin at work

Dropping a beautiful berry in

The weather was beautiful, the company was great, the blueberries were delicious . . . everything was perfect except for one small detail -- Joseph was tired.

What kind of mean parents keep a child up through a morning nap, even if he skips it every now and then?

That said, he still was pretty pleasant through it all. However, he got mad when I wouldn't let him squish my blueberries with a stick.

Then he helped me pick for a while, but he wanted to squish all of them with another bucket and I wouldn't let him. So that was sad.

He wasn't as selective about his blueberries as the rest of us.

But we eventually found a way to keep him happy.

This trick also works at church sometimes.

Dropping sticks and grass through the cracks

Once Kevin and I had a 6-pint bucket full of blueberries and Kelsie had half a bucket full, we felt like we had accomplished enough for one morning and were ready to come home with our spoils.

Jared, Kelsie, and Kevin (and Joseph)

yummmmmmmmm

Tired boy

Jared made it a point to only pick the darkest, biggest, shiniest blueberries. This was his haul.
 

We went back to the owners' house, paid for our berries, and got to listen to a delightful 87-year-old woman reminisce about WWII for several minutes. And Joseph got to chase more chickens. And then we went home.

And that is the story of how I now love to eat blueberries plain and have done so in abundance the past few days. The end.

*For my Ann Arbor friends who read this, we recommend it. I know there's one up near Dexter that's forever away, but this one is so close and a bit cheaper and the blueberries are divine. They don't have much info online, but there is this.

Inca Villa

After this weekend, all of our neighbors who moved into Inca Villa before us or the same summer as us will be gone.

It's kind of terrible.

There are so many wonderful memories we've had with them all, and it's hard to see them all go. I could go on and on and on and on about all the great times we've had and how tragic it is that we are all moving on, but I think the Internet would run out of room.

So I'll just let this clip from Fiddler on the Roof say it all for me. If you replace "Anatevka" with "Inca Villa" then that's basically how I feel about this whole affair. (Especially the "someone should have set a match to this place years ago" part.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWiRetxeviw

Recent Adventures, Part 1: Don't Punch . . . Our Car

The past little while has been . . . crazy. Quite crazy. Let's recap what I've been up to since the last time I blogged.

~The car. Oh, the car. So here's the story. I was driving Kaylie to Mountain View on November 17th (a Thursday) so she could see Children of Eden for her voice class. Just like every other road I've driven on in the past few months, University Avenue is undergoing construction. I don't quite understand it, since I remember it was torn up 2 years ago. Anyway, the median is gone, lane shifts happen about once a minute, and it's just a nightmare, especially when it's dark. As I was maneuvering through all this junk, I saw some cars up ahead of me going slowly. As I got closer I realized they were stopped completely. So I did what any normal person would do and stopped too, hoping to change into the other lane. But before I got the chance,

Crunch! Jolt! I felt someone smash into us from behind.

I looked at Kaylie. "Did that just happen? What just happened?" Did I just get hit? I may have looked back but couldn't see the car that hit me (except for maybe its headlights, which I don't remember). "What do I do, Kaylie? What do I do?" By this point I was no longer in thinking mode. I was in following orders mode. "Um, turn your blinker on, and go to the shoulder, and then we'll talk to the other car there," she told me. So I put my blinker on, and when Kaylie told me that it was safe, I went over to the shoulder. And I waited for the car that had hit me to show up right behind me. But it was gone. Kaylie got out and looked at the damage and said, "It looks kind of bad." Then I got out and saw the complete left back side of the car completely crumpled and I just about lost it. I called Kevin and asked him to tell me what to do, and could we get neighbors to take Kaylie the rest of the way to Mountain View. And I think I started crying.

By this point, a construction worker or somebody had shown up for the other rear end incident (the one I had had to stop for) and so when it was safe I went back to that lane and went up to him and pointed at my car and said that when the police came with a report to not forget about me and my car which looked way worse than any of the other cars. Man, I probably seemed like a wild woman. It didn't help that I hadn't eaten much dinner. (There had been an IEEE meeting which I went to because it had free pizza, but since a bunch of other people went for the same reason, there wasn't enough to fill my pregnant stomach, making me even crankier. After that dinner, I wondered if my evening could get any worse. Yes, it could.) So I went back to the car and sobbed some and then Kevin showed up with a kind neighbor who took Kaylie the rest of the way to see the musical.

The policeman showed up and after talking to the other accident people for what seemed like forever, he came over and gave me a report and asked if I knew who had hit me. "I just assumed they would follow me right over to the shoulder," I said lamely. "That's what they're supposed to do," he said flatly. Then he mentioned that he had seen a white car way up ahead that was stopped. There was white paint all over the back of my car, so maybe it was the same one. But the car was gone, and he hadn't mentioned any damage (I'm still curious how they were able to drive their car after hitting us so hard, since it seems like its front would have been hammered), so there went that lead. I filled out the police report and then Kevin drove us back home.

Here is a picture we took the next morning:

Not shown in picture: damaged internal bumper, damaged exhaust system, damaged alignment, etc.

That afternoon Kevin drove it to the repair shop and found out it was in such bad shape that he wasn't supposed to drive it home. Luckily he got a hold of his sister who picked him up. And that's the last we saw of the car until yesterday morning.

Well, I'd like to say this story had a happy ending and the person who hit us confessed and paid our deductible (which cost more than we were expecting thanks to a "depreciated muffler") and that we got the car back two days later because the replacement parts arrived so quickly and undamaged. I'd also like to say that they replaced the panel where some wonderful children decided to play tic-tac-toe with a rock two years ago (the car's been in the shop twice since then, and it's never been hit in the right spot to replace that. Alas).

But as it is, the ending isn't so bad. After 20 days in the shop, we finally got our car back! And it works! Complete with a brand new shiny exhaust pipe. (I think the people in Casa Dea right next to our parking lot probably think I'm crazy since I've been gushing about the shiny new exhaust pipe so much and so loudly.)

In those carless 20 days, we've had so much support from neighbors and family. There were neighbors who checked on us the minute they heard the news, neighbors who offered their cars while they were gone for Thanksgiving, family who also offered their cars, people who've offered rides, just a lot of stuff. And at least for the first few of those 20 days, it wasn't that cold, so I was able to walk to my doctor's office, El Gallo Giro, 5-buck pizza (hey, we were hungry and lazy those days, plus we had to eat at El Gallo Giro because we had run out of groceries and couldn't get to the store), and everywhere else I cared about. And since it got cold, we've still been able to get rides/borrow cars when necessary. (And Kevin did turn 25 in the midst of all this, so if we'd really needed to we could have rented a car.) Point is, even though this is definitely not how I expected the last 3 weeks to go, it's been a good reminder that we do have lots of wonderful friends and family.

And . . . I think this blog post is long enough as is, so I'll just save my other tidbits of life for another blog post.

Duchesne in August

There's something about going to Duchesne in August that just feels right. Perhaps I have positive memories because the first time I went there was just hours after Kevin and I first told each other we loved each other. Perhaps it's that we're there when the roses are still in bloom, when the hay is being cut. And since the past few years have been so wet, it's still beautiful and green, even in August.

In a lot of ways, Duchesne is predictable and nice. We will always go four-wheeling at least once. We (or at least Kevin) will help out on the farm at least once. We will watch a few too many movies. It's just a nice, laidback lifestyle for a few days (at least for us as guests . . . his parents always stay busy).

This year had a special treat -- the D'Nerdz reunion. Kevin's senior year, he and a few other friends created a band as part of his friend Derek's campaign. The summer after Kevin graduated, they performed at some dances and other events. But after the members of the band started leaving on missions, it never came together again.

Until now.

There I was again, back in high school, listening to "Kryptonite" and "The Middle" and "Swing Swing." And they actually sounded pretty good! It made me so happy.

My heart with raptor thrills

It all started when I saw those billboards. I didn't believe them for a minute, especially because the end of the world was supposed to happen on my sister's birthday. In my mind it was the perfect day for a party, not for the end of the world.


Then as May 21st got closer and closer, I started thinking about funny Facebook statuses I could put about the day of rapture. The Thursday before the "rapture," I jokingly informed everyone that
 "Kyra Moon is thinking about having a "raptor" party on Friday or Saturday. We'll watch Jurassic Park and play pin the wing on the raptor, all in preparation for the day of raptor (or rapture)"


Well, I meant it as a joke. I didn't like Jurassic Park, after all. But then when people started saying they would attend, I started to actually consider having a party. When Liz said she'd bring the brownies, it was settled.


The raptor/rapture was going to happen.


The first activity was the raptor rapture. It involved coloring pictures of raptors (both the dinosaur and bird type) and taping them to the ceiling as if they got raptured. These were some of my favorites:

Peteraptor and Jimmeraptor --- the only Mormons to get raptured.


By the end, the ceiling looked like this (only with a couple more, since some fell down before I took pictures):

Throughout the party, we nibbled on amazing raptor/rapture-themed treats. Liz made absolutely amazing brownies:

Can you believe that? It's a raptor brownie! Of course, as the party progressed it looked less and less like a raptor . . .

and more and more like a whale. Also, Kevin and I made earthquake cake, which is actually super easy the way we do it. (Instructions: Bake a cake. Don't let it cool all the way. Get frosting out of the fridge. Attempt to frost. The resulting cake will look like an earthquake struck.)


Then we played pin the wing on the raptor. The goal was to get an eagle's wing (or was it a hawk?) on the right spot on the velociraptor. Kind of arbitrary, but still lots of fun.

Since there were a lot of things I forgot to do at the party, I'm so glad we get to celebrate again on October 21st. This time, I'll make sure to:
~ Play rapture the rag. I haven't decided on the rules yet but I think they'll be like capture the flag except awesomer.
~ Have awesome rapture/raptor-theme based music in the background. Right now the only one I can think of which is about both raptors and raptures (or apocalypses) is the one I learned in 1st grade about eagles having no friends and no sky and no land. This reminds me . . . Kevin wanted me to post this and this. Hooray for politics.
~ Watch Jurassic Park, 2012, Armageddon, etc. Actually none of those sound appealing, but whatever.


In closing, here's a great quote from Joseph Smith:

"I have asked of the Lord concerning His coming," the Prophet also said, "and while asking the Lord, He gave a sign and said, 'In the days of Noah I set a bow in the heavens as a sign and token that in any year that the bow should be seen the Lord would not come; but there should be seed time and harvest during that year: but whenever you see the bow withdrawn, it shall be a token that there shall be famine, pestilence, and great distress among the nations, and that the coming of the Messiah is not far distant.' But I will take the responsibility upon myself to prophesy in the name of the Lord, that Christ will not come this year, . . . for we have seen the bow." (Teachings, pp 340-41.)

and a great picture to go along with it, taken May 17th:

Happy rapturing!


ps: kudos to anyone who can tell where my title came from. Here's a hint: you've sung it before.