Hey! God!

My sibling-in-law – “Atti” (Atticus, formerly referred to here as Brianna) – told an amusing story.

What with tuition breaks, Atti used to attend a private Christian high school in Granger, South Bend’s upscale suburb. Her mother (Karin’s mother) taught there. Being a teacher’s child wasn’t always easy for Atti.

One day, Atti + classmates were riding through South Bend to a charity recipient’s house for “Service Day” and talking about the privileged lives of Grangerites.

They passed a trailer park. Hey! Atti exclaimed. That’s where my sister – not Karin – used to live.

Nuh, uh! gasped Atti’s classmates.

It began to dawn on them that Atti was different from the others.

As the children rode along, the surroundings became curiously familiar to Atti.

Then they parked in Atti’s driveway.

Atti’s mother had signed them up to rake the leaves in the yard.

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Samuel has been taught to say “please” and “thank you” but still begins most requests with “Hey!” This morning he was, as usual, taking out his frustrations on Daniel. I told him to ask God to help him to be patient, and to breathe some deep breaths.

Hey! God! Please help me to be patient! (Deep breath, deep breath.)

Le spam; body-text fonts, pt. 12: URW Garamond

For 1½–2 years, my phone wouldn’t ring. A short time ago, however, it “fixed” itself – probably by downloading an automatic update – and the spammers began making up for lost time. A spammer roused Daniel from his nap, and, when I picked up, inquired after my “senior benefits.” Within an hour, another spammer had tried, twice, to convince me that an impostor had used my Amazon.com account to buy a MacBook Pro.

The police, paramedics, firefighters, war veterans, university chancellors, air traffic controllers, dentists, etc. resumed their panhandling-by-phone. I still am waiting to hear from the U.S. Space Force – or whichever underfunded military branch it is whose job involves shooting down Chinese weather balloons.

(I mean, either the phone repaired itself or Samuel fixed it by punching who knows what buttons. The other day, he called 911.)

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This “true crime memoir” is quite good.

The typeface is URW Garamond, the upper-case “Q” of which makes it an apt choice for setting The Fifth Queen by Ford Madox Ford.

The Carter project

Our Indiana county is the site of this year’s Jimmy & Rosalynn Carter Work Project, an intensive building campaign by Habitat for Humanity. Later this week, Karin will help to build one of the houses.

I wanted to peek at the Carters, and so, yesterday, Karin & I attended the “project launch,” which was held inside Notre Dame’s basketball gym in front of thousands of people. I thought Jimmy Carter might say a few words about the Bible. Alas, what transpired was an hour of mutual congratulation by the local bigwigs.

I did learn that one of the dignitaries – an architect named LeRoy Troyer, the designer of the main building of the Ark Encounter – had long worked with Habitat for Humanity, and that he’d been inspired by the Amish practice of raising barns.

David Letterman told a few jokes and introduced the Carters. Jimmy Carter said very little. Even so, he was the night’s best speaker. As the proverb has it: when you reach the end zone, you should “act like you’ve been there before”; that was what Jimmy Carter did.

EXTRA

I was in prison and you came to visit me.
[Matthew 25:36]

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If you aren’t Ecuadorian, you might not appreciate this story. And if you’re very, very Ecuadorian, with no outsider’s perspective, you might not appreciate it, either. But I’ll try to explain it.

The Russian soccer league is on holiday. One of its employees — Felipe Caicedo, Ecuadorian goalscorer — is using his time off to play soccer in his homeland, for charity. (1) A week ago he played in a fundraiser in Esmeraldas. (2) More recently he’s been visiting prisoners in Guayaquil, bringing them food (5000 kg of rice, 280 chickens) and playing in their soccer tournament.

He explains how God called him to do this:

Mira, estaba en mi cama y recordé la Peni Champions, lo leí en el EXTRA y era como si Dios me decía lo que tenía que hacer, y me puse como meta venir hasta acá.

When Stephen read this to me, I laughed for five minutes.

Translation:

I was in bed and remembered [the prison soccer tournament]; I read about it in the EXTRA and it was as if God were telling me what to do. …

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EL DIARIO EXTRA is a tabloid, a purveyor of sex and graphic violence, infamous for its lurid photos and shocking headlines:

¡Pum! contra un camión

Con un arma mató a siete

¡Mató al entenado a “cuchillo limpio”!

Una piedra en el camino … ¡lo mató!

This is Ecuador all over: horror viewed with a certain innocence. It isn’t strange for a Christian to admit to reading this. EXTRA is our most popular newspaper.

Caicedo explains why he serves the prisoners:

Son personas que por cosas de la vida están acá y qué mejor de venir y poder estar unas horas y hacer que se olviden de sus problemas, y si eso sirve de algo gracias a Dios.

(“They’re people who, because of life’s circumstances, are here [in prison]. What could be better than to come and stay a few hours and distract them from their troubles? If this is useful, then thanks be to God.”)

“Life’s circumstances.” Ordinary disasters. Violent porn culled from daily life. One reads it for amusement, then hears the call of God and visits the local prison to comfort the broken.