There's No Place Like Home

As of today, we have been in our house exactly 20 years. It's the longest we have ever lived anyplace, including both our childhoods. We've done a lot to the place, put in double-paned windows and new siding, remodeled the kitchen (which was original to the house!), and revamped a lot of the plumbing, not to mention the usual paint-and-paper cheapie remodels of all the rooms.

Twenty years. It's hard to believe. Our daughter was 11 and our son was 7 when we moved here. Now she is 31 and expecting her second child, and he is 27 and just yesterday, passed his practical test for his Transportation license, which means he can now haul freight and passengers with a diesel locomotive. The last hurdle is another 200 hours on a steam engine; then he will be licensed to do the same thing with steam, which is important on a tourist railroad (New Hope and Ivyland is both tourist and short-line freight). He's extremely nervous. That's a good thing, it will keep him from doing anything stupid.

*****

In other news, yesterday I went to the hospital for an intake interview prior to having a hysterectomy. Why do hospitals treat their patients like a product?!?! The machinery kicks into gear and churns out yards and yards of labels with your name on them, reams and reams of forms asking the most phenomenally personal questions ("What in life makes you happy?" "What is important to you in life?" The answers to both would be enough to get me committed!). The thing that got me the most, I think, was being told that when I went to the hospital on Wednesday (the surgery is Friday), a red label would be attached to my wrist that isn't supposed to come off until I leave the hospital -- oh, and "don't get it wet." That's two days of walking around in public with the Scarlet Letter!! Not to mention two days of wearing plastic to shower and wash dishes?! "That's not gonna happen," I said firmly, and she changed the date of my lab test (it's to identify my blood type) to Thursday. "Don't get it wet"?!?! I will come home, snip that puppy off, go about my business, and reattach it with tape on Friday morning. "Don't get it wet," give me a break!!!

And I look back over the past 20 years and so help me -- and I never thought I'd say this -- I want my old life back. It had its drawbacks, believe me -- for one thing, my son's 12 years in school were unmitigated misery -- but the four of us were happy together, and healthy, my husband wasn't commuting six hours a day to and from work, and we had our own house, our very own house, something that had seemed so unreachable back in the days of 18% interest.

Somebody Pick Me Up Off the Floor

Feeling at loose ends today, and slightly masochistic, I guess, I got into my Xanga account and from there went over to Chris's ex-girlfriend's blog, just to see what was up with her. I'm still reeling.

Out of curiosity, I paged back through her blog, back two years ago, when they were together. And nearly all of it is gone.

All but one photo of him.
All the references to the week she spent with us.
All the references of the trip they took together into northern New Hampshire.
Nearly every reference to his first winter in PA -- she had a cute blog up about how much fun they'd had while shoveling out the driveway. Gone.
All the references to what it was like to have a railroader for a boyfriend -- she liked trains, too, and those were very cute. All gone.
The post she had written about her first Pascha as an Orthodox Christian, gone. (Interestingly, the post about her baptism is still up.)

He loved her so much. For their first (and last) Christmas together, he walked twelve miles to buy her a present -- he was a bus driver at the time, and had driven a charter to Atlantic City. Having several hours at his disposal, but no transportation other than his bus, he walked six miles to the nearest mall, and six miles back, to buy her a DVD she'd been wanting. No reference to that. No reference to their Christmas together at all.

I guess I'm having a hard time believing that someone who loved her so much that he left home for her, has ceased to exist in her mind. And why? Because once he moved closer to his railroad job, she felt "abandoned." He told us that that was why she dumped him -- she didn't feel as if she "mattered" in his life anymore, probably because he wasn't driving an hour and a half to her house every single evening.

I just can't conceive of such cold-bloodedness.

An Answer, At Last

Just heard from the oncologist -- his lab confirms that it looks enough like early-stage cancer that they are recommending surgery. So he will call me on Friday to set that up.

Thanks, everyone, for your support in this matter. I was never of a mind to fool around with hormones, I've wanted it out. Now I don't have to argue with this character.

St. Marina Goes to Work

Yesterday was my name day -- apparently, Margaret is another name for St. Marina of Antioch. St. Marina/Margaret used to be a saint on the Western calendar, too, until the Catholic Church threw her and several others off in 1969, noting that they were "probably myths brought back by the Crusaders from the East" -- since those "myths" include St. Christopher, St. Barbara, and St. Catherine of Alexandria, we will say no more about that, except to note that icons are not made of "myths." In other words, :-P~~~~~~~~~

However, sometime last year, this article came into my inbox, a translation from a newspaper article that appeared in a Greek newspaper. I was thinking of it recently, during my recent surgery. You draw your own conclusions.

*****

A few years ago, a family from Lemessos, Cyprus, named Vassiliou received the following miracle. In Greece they are well known from the televised requests they made in order to find a donor for their young boy Andrea, who suffered from leukemia. The donor was indeed found and the parents began preparing for their trip to Texas, U.S.A where the bone marrow transplant was going to be performed. Meanwhile, they also prayed and begged Jesus Christ to save their boy. Before they left for the U.S.A the parents heard of St. Marina's miracles and they called the monastery of St. Marina located on the island of Andros in Greece to ask for her blessing. The Elder of the monastery, Archimandrite Fr. Cyprianos promised that he would pray to St. Marina. He also wished the parents for St. Marina to be with Andrea in the operating room, to help him. With Elder Cyprianos' blessing and with strong faith that St. Marina would help indeed, the Vassiliou family went to the U.S.A.

After the necessary pre-operation tests that Andrea had to undergo, he was taken to the operating room. A short time before the operation was to begin, a woman came to see the surgeon who would be operating on Andrea. She said that she was Andrea's doctor and asked to be allowed to observe the operation. The conversation that ensued proved that the woman was indeed a doctor. However, the surgeon replied that 'outside' doctors were not permitted to be present in the operating room and that his medical teams' policy was that no doctor other than those on the team be involved in such delicate operations. The persistence of the woman however, convinced the surgeon to allow her in the operating room. But before, he asked her to leave her coordinates [presumably, credentials] at the administration desk. The unknown doctor did as told and then entered the operating room with the surgeon. During the operation, she gave several directions regarding the progress of the procedure. The operation went well and in the end the surgeon thanked the woman and exited the operating room.

Andrea's parents immediately went to inquire about the outcome of the surgery and the surgeon replied that all had gone very well, adding that he could not understand why they had brought Andrea to him when they had such a fine doctor. The parents were surprised and responded that they had not brought any doctor with them. The surgeon insisted, however. He also told them that when he came out of the operating room Andrea's doctor had remained there for a little longer with the rest of the operating team and therefore, she would probably still be around. He recommended that they look for her. The search, however, proved pointless, as the 'woman doctor' was nowhere around. The Vassiliou couple then concluded that it must have been a doctor from Greece or Cyprus who had decided to travel to the U.S.A and contribute to the delicate operation. They expressed the wish to know who she was so that they may be able to thank her, and at the surgeon's recommendation they then went to the administration desk to ask for her coordinates.

It was with utter surprise that they read that the unknown woman had signed with the name "Marina from Andros". Tears of gratefulness and joy filled their eyes as they recalled that the Elder at the monastery had said to them that he wished Andrea to have St. Marina in the operating room to help him. Andrea's parents shared with the media their joy both for the successful operation and Andrea's recovered health and for the miracle they received. The Vassiliou family made the vow that the entire family will be present at the saint's monastery every year on the saint's feast day (July 17) and Elder Cyprianos reports that the family has been making the annual trip from Lemessos to Andros every summer to thank Saint Marina for saving Andrea.

Miracles performed by the saints have never ceased to take place in the Orthodox Church. With these miracles, may our Lord Jesus Christ help us build our faith.

Ayuh.

A young lady whose chrismation I was privileged to attend on Holy Saturday, has written the most beautiful description I have ever read of why folks live in this neck of the woods -- click on the title to access the link. I should explain that she is not a New Hampshirite; she lives just over the border, in Maine, maybe about 15-20 miles from my home. I should also explain that "Ayuh" is how people in Maine say, "Yes" -- accent on the first syllable, pronounced with a long "a," barely vocalizing the "yuh." Try to pronounce it in the back of the throat with a slightly nasal twang, and you've got it.

But the geography is all pretty much the same, and in fact we were in Maine yesterday to attend church. Saco is much farther, 40 miles, about an hour's drive, but I go to confession to the priest of that parish, and the people have gradually opened up to me in a way I haven't experienced in a long time. Every time we go to Saco, I think, "If I ever had to leave NH, I'd want to move here," and Emily Michelle's post says why.

Blogthings - Are You A Control Freak?

I just had to post this, mostly for the benefit of any offspring who may (or probably not) read this blog, both of whom think I am the absolutely most controlling mother on the planet:


Blogthings - Are You A Control Freak?: "

You Are 24% Control Freak

You have achieved the perfect balance of control and letting go. You tend to roll with whatever life brings, but you never get complacent.

Are You A Control Freak?

I should probably take the test, "Are you addicted to Blogthings?" Yep! ;-)

"

Update

Well, I don't know what to make of this.

I saw an oncologist today, who read over all the paperwork -- and there was a lot of it -- then said the pathology report was "inconclusive," and he wanted to send the tissue samples to a lab he preferred in the middle of the state. (NH is not all that big a state.) As I was leaving the oncology unit (the most horrible place I've ever been), he rode down in the elevator with me and said that he had called the path. lab, and they had admitted to "hedging."

Meanwhile, I have a friend who's a nurse, who had offered to interpret the pathology report for me. Having acquired a copy of said report, I scanned it and sent it on to her. Her opinion: This does not look good, have the thing out.

Yes, I'm a trifle upset, to put it mildly. Those of you who are on the OrthWomen's list may remember my posting, last year, about my lack of trust in doctors generally. I was thrilled to have found a gynecologist whom I thought I could talk to. But she's the one who called in this oncologist, and I'm not sure now if she will abide by his opinion, or if she will listen to me (and my friend), and take the thing out. Let me make this as plain as possible: I do not want to mess around with even the suspicion of cancer.

But how hard do I push???

And the Answer Is....

For a variety of reasons -- mostly because whenever I'm out and about, I've been feeling a tad dizzy -- I went to see my doctor today (I also wanted to update my list of people to keep informed about my medical condition). As it happened, she had had a cancellation for an appointment, so I got right in to see her. As it also happened, she had just received the pathology report on my surgery. And the answer is...

(you gotta love this)...

they don't know.

There are more cells than there should be, which is indicative of cancer. But the cells themselves look normal, and not remotely cancerous. So the official diagnosis is "hyperplasia," meaning, hunh???

See why I love modern medicine?!

Holy Cow

Much to my amazement, I have actually survived. Yeah, OK, a biopsy isn't life-or-death surgery. But do remember, I have no faith in hospitals whatsoever, so I plan to enjoy my feeling of amazement for at least the next 24 hours.

The first thing we established was the First Name thing. My first name isn't Margaret -- it's something I loathe with all my being -- and when people use it, I generally go for the jugular. Which is what I told folks at the hospital. It got a laugh, and I got what I wanted: people calling me Margaret, which is my middle name.

Then, I think I set records for post-op discharge. I woke up at 10:02, and by 10:45 I was out the door. I had been insisting, from the moment I learned I'd have to have this procedure, that I should have been able to drive myself there and back, and they kept insisting that no, I had to have someone drive me; and the logical Someone was my husband. That isn't gonna happen again. You know the expression, "Nervous as a cat"? He makes cats look calm and placid. And yes, despite dire predictions of loopiness once I was out in the fresh air, I could have driven home with no trouble whatever.

Right now, I have sent him off to obtain some fish. I have a blessing to eat fish on fast days, since I really really need to lose weight and finally found a doctor who doesn't think a low-carb diet is a recipe for trouble. And when I finish this post, and send thank-you notes to all my other friends who promised to pray for me, I do plan to take a nap -- not only am I post-op, but I've also been up since 4:30 a.m.

I'm glad this is over with. For now, anyway. Results in 2-3 weeks. Many thanks to all who read this blog, for the prayers you have offered on my behalf; I'm very sure that they were largely responsible for my being this together and coherent! ;-)

Slice 'n' Dice!

I understand that that's how biopsy is referred to. Which is what I'm having done tomorrow.

I hate doctors. The ones I have, I trust marginally, because they haven't done anything radically stupid -- yet -- but by and large, I strongly suspect there isn't an entire functioning brain among the entire medical community. I think they each possess a zygote of a brain cell.

And I really hate hospitals. That damn johnny, for one thing. (Everybody hates that thing. And the fact that they keep using it, despite knowing that everyone hates it, tells you everything you need to know about customer relations from the hospital's point of view.) But then, they insist on calling you by your first name. I wonder how the anesthesiologist would like it if I kept referring to her as "Debs." And when they're putting in an IV, if they can't find a vein, they keep sticking you in an effort to find one. For crying out loud, just get a damn phlebotomist up there to find it! To say nothing of the fact that the IV keeps you tied down until they say you can go. I mean, who's gonna risk taking it out himself?! You could rupture a vein or something!

But what I really hate is that you are not only helpless, you are clueless. I mean, what the heck are they putting into that drip bag, anyways?! It could be anything. How would you know? I was watching a TV interview while we were visiting our son in Philadelphia, and this guy said his wife went into the hospital for a routine procedure, and while she was there her entire lower body turned purple, and she was in excruciating pain for a month. Turns out it was something they put in the IV.

Then there's the woman I was reading this morning, on my cross-stitch board -- so this isn't tabloid stuff -- who said she had no anesthesia for the first twelve minutes of her surgery, and the only way they found out she wasn't anesthetized was that she coughed.

The thing is, why should an Orthodox Christian fear death (apart, of course, from an acute awareness that you actually have to stand before the Throne of God and account for yourself)? And when I think about it, I find that that's not what I fear. What I really fear is them screwing up so badly that I will need medical care for the rest of my life. I don't want to do that to my family.

So, much to my husband's distress, I have put all my affairs in order. I have a book with all my final instructions printed out, and I plan to leave it on the kitchen table. I plan to take icons fo St. Marina and St. John of San Francisco with me. Meanwhile, prayers would be appreciated.

Epitaph

Sixty, I read recently, is the "new forty," so I guess that means it's time to start being nervous about one's age when one hits sixty?? I dunno. What I do know is that I become that magic number later this year, and I find myself -- not exactly dwelling on death, but considering it. Making a will, arranging for a plot in my parish cemetery, all that depressing but necessary stuff. I must admit, it was a little startling to receive a card with my plot number and an illustration of where my grave is!! =:0

Oh, and I've written my epitaph. This is not the official obituary, which I'm sure someone will compose either in boring one-liners ("She was born in Brooklyn, NY. She went to school here. She lived there. She was a member of xxx parish," etc.) or hysterically funny purple prose ("On xx/xx/xx, our beloved Meg went to be with her Lord and Savior Jesus," etc.). Reading the obits in the local paper is entertaining as well as, um, enlightening.

No, this one is how I want to be remembered:

When I look back on the hopes I've held,
the plans and the dreams that Time has felled....

No one will ever read the book
I wrote, nor give a second look
at art created by my hands,
nor speak in hushed tones of the lands
my strategies and wealth amassed;
and though in pleasure life has passed
with love for friends and family,
all they, like me, will cease to be,
unmarked, unsung.

Yet this remains:
The melodies and sweet refrains
of Orthodox Church music, learned
and chanted daily, till it burned
and purified my heart and soul,
refined the gift to shining gold.

So let this sum up all my days:
"She lifted up her voice in praise."

The Sky Is Falling! The Sky Is Falling!

Well, no, not really, of course not. It's just -- two consecutive posts, on two consecutive days?! The sky falling in is more likely than that!

But I wanted to respond to the several positive comments I got about my cross stitch. It is a complicated pattern, but made much simpler by two nifty little tricks I learned from a cross-stitch group I joined online: parking threads, and gridding.

Some people grid their fabric conscientiously, every ten or twenty stitches, using ordinary sewing thread, and the whole fabric looks like a giant checkerboard until they start stitching. I don't have the patience for that; so on a pattern like this, I work it in blocks of 10 x 10. (My pattern is gridded.)

Then there's parking: Once I've finished a sequence of stitches in one color, I find where it next occurs within that 10 x 10 grid, and bring up the thread in that space, and leave it there. Then I pick up the next color and work with that in the same way. When I've finished with the color in that row, I park it in the next place where it will occur. Looks something like this:

x = brown
~ = red
$ = green (all examples -- this whole piece takes a total of 87 colors!)

xxxx~~xx$$
$$~~~~$$$x
x ~ $

Now, it will occur to you that the last little tongue on the piece I put up yesterday looks like a heck of a lot more than a 10 x 10 grid. That's because I was down to the last 40 rows, and decided to work that bit straight down to the end, just to make sure I wasn't going to run out of room at the end -- yes, I had checked and double-checked innumerable times, but "paranoia strikes deep, into your life it will creep" (OK, Blast from the Past out of my system now). I had to be sure. Now that I am sure, I've gone back to a regular 10 x 10 grid.

And once this page is done, my pattern will be 20% complete. The next part takes me back up to the sky, and to stitching the word "Hope" in the sky -- the idea is to have "New Hope and Ivyland" arcing across the sky, and the word "Railroad" appearing in a straight line beneath those words. It's a present for my son, who has seen it, and, for an almost-27-year-old bachelor male, is quite excited about it!

Sleepers -- Go Back to Sleep

I suspect that only a classical-music lover will get the full import of that title, so I will explain that it's from Bach's beautiful cantata for the First Sunday of Advent, "Sleepers Awake." "Wake, O wake, for night is flying, the watchmen on the heights are crying, Awake, awake, Jerusalem."

Now that I have that out of my system -- someone whose blog I subscribe to was bemoaning her slacker status, and promising a whole bunch of us to respond to our posts. I told her, No problem, and besides, there's a nasty little flu bug making the rounds of these he-ah pahts, which I know because it bit me yesterday and I'm still recovering (nicely, thank you). It's pretty sad when a little old flu bug can thumb its nose at flu shots and leave you shivering under a pile of blankets while burning up with fever, and every muscle feeling as if it's just been under the rack.

My point to her was that slacking is *good,* if it means you're getting lots of sleep, because sleep is necessary to keep up one's immune system so these nasty little bugs don't find their way in the back door. Can I make up excuses for slacking, or WHAT? Dang, I'm good.

Last week was my 37th wedding anniversary. We have survived travel 1/4 of the way round the world and back, seven moves, two children, in-laws (by far the hardest part), my changing religions -- twice -- the ins and outs of the public-school system, which I thank God I will never have to deal with again, AND the federal government, which is what has put bread and water on our table for all of these 37 years. I'm at an age where I hope I'll see my 38th wedding anniversary, but at least, that's not because I fear divorce; I'm just at That Age. I see people younger than me in the Obit columns all the time. And since I'm rather fond of the person with whom I have shared more than half my life, I'd like to continue sharing my life with him awhile longer.

Oh, and just for -- how does it go? fits and grins? -- I'm uploading a picture of my latest effort, Maryland Mountain Express, a painting by James Lee, translated for cross stitch by Candamar Designs. I hope to heaven that Mr. Lee does not mind the liberties I'm taking with his beautiful painting, which really is exquisite, but Candamar did note that they printed this design in the expectation that people would "embellish" it as they pleased. Obviously, I can think of quite a lot of "embellishment."

OK, all you sleepers -- you can go back to sleep now. ;-)

Amos Pottroff: 1925-1949

My daughter, who is a writer (her fiction is as yet unpublished, although she's a contributing editor for a number of special-interest publications), recently penned a bizarre short-short that was published on the internet -- since I don't know if internet publishing counts, for the time being I'll say she's unpublished, though after having read this mini-horror, I can't think why. Baldly put, it's about a two-year-old who discovers his mother's murdered body, and the whole 700-word tale is told from the toddler's point of view. She says she got the idea from a combination of wondering how her son would react if they were home alone and she were hurt and unresponsive, and the way I brought her up, with tales -- all of them true -- about kids who were struck by lightning while watching TV, or were snatched off the streets while walking to or from school alone.

Her tale is unfortunately not entirely fiction, either, since a classmate of mine was murdered while home alone with her four-month-old. Sometimes I wonder about that child, if he has any memory at all of his mother, if he grew up knowing that something big was missing from his life. Frankly, I can't conceive that he doesn't remember something, because -- I remember something. Every time I fell seriously in love, it was with a brown-eyed man, and my father had brown eyes.

People always think that when you lose a parent at a very young age, it's not such a big deal, because how much do you remember, anyway? And it's true that you don't remember much, if anything at all; but I can tell you from experience, you know that something is gone that can never be recovered, and it colors your whole life. For one thing, death doesn't hold the same horror that it does for others, because hey, you've lived with it all your life, like that uncle who keeps popping up at family parties and offering you candy, and you wish he would just go away, like to another galaxy. But he's there, and you learn to deal with him early on.

So -- what do you call someone who's been dead almost your whole life, but without whom you wouldn't exist? I don't know. I grew up calling him My Father. These days I call him Amos, if I have occasion to refer to him, since everybody in my family knows who I mean by that, since who in the heck names their kid Amos, anyway?! (And the worst part of that is that that was his father's name, so he grew up being called Junior. Junior! "Jun-YER!" Gosh, I hope his mother never called him home like that.)

We never talked about him, if my mother could help it. I used to ask all the normal questions a kid would who knew she was adopted, and my mother would always skate away gracefully. Finally, when I was ten and asked yet another question -- I think it was about their marriage -- she snapped, "We were both young and stupid." Oh-kay,drop that one real fast. As an adult, I finally learned that the marriage was not happy, and he walked out on her when I was 18 months old. Sometimes, knowing my mother and her family, I don't blame him.

What strikes me as bizarre now is that all the years I was a Catholic, 30, to be exact, it never once occurred to me to pray for his soul. I mean, Catholics are always praying for dead people. We prayed for my great-grandmother's soul, for crying out loud. But it never once occurred to me to pray for him, not till I was in my 40s and already Orthodox and I had a dream about him: I dreamed he was wandering in a trackless, featureless desert landscape, looking terrified, moaning soundlessly. Not hell, but certainly not heaven; and not too long after that, I came across a description of Tartarus, a place in eternity occupied by souls that never knew God. That would be my father, who was only nominally Christian. These days, I pray for his soul.

Thanks for listening.

Stabat Mater

When I was a girl, a popular feature of Catholic Good Friday was the Stabat Mater. I copied this one from a website devoted to the Stabat Mater -- the owner has over 200 recordings of music created for this piece -- and she offers multiple translations, so I selected the ones that seemed to reflect the text most accurately:

At the cross her station keeping, stood the mournful mother weeping, close to Jesus to the last
Through her heart, his sorrow sharing, all his bitter anguish bearing, Lo! the piercing sword had passed.
Oh how sad and sore distressed was that mother highly blessed, of the sole-begotten One!
O that silent, ceaseless mourning, O those dim eyes, never turning from that wondrous, suffering Son
Who on Christ's dear Mother gazing, in her trouble so amazing, born of woman, would not weep?
Who on Christ's dear Mother thinking, Such a cup of sorrow drinking, Would not share Her sorrow deep?
For the sins of His own nation saw Him hang in desolation, all with bloody scourges rent.
Bruised, derided, cursed, defiled, she beheld her tender child, till His Spirit forth he sent.
O, thou Mother, fount of love, touch my spirit from above, make my heart with thine accord.
Make my heart to glow within me for the God who came to win me, burn with love for Christ, my Lord
Those Five Wounds on Jesus smitten, Mother! in my heart be written, Deep as in your own they be.
Thou thy Savior's Cross didst bear; thou thy Son's rebuke didst share: Let me share them both with thee.
Let me mingle tears with thee, mourning Him Who mourned for me, all the days that I may live.
By the cross with thee to stay, there with thee to weep and pray, this of thee I ask to give.
Virgin, of all virgins blest, O refuse not my request: let me in thy weeping share
Make me after thine own fashion Christ's companion in His Passion all His pain and dying bear
Wound me with thy Son's affliction, kindle through his crucifixion zealous love within my soul
Thus aflame with fire of love, shield me, Virgin, from above, when I hear the Judgement call
Christ, when thou shalt call me hence, be Thy mother my defense, be Thy cross my victory.
While my body here decays, may my soul Thy goodness praise, safe in Paradise with Thee. Amen.

So what is this Catholic thing doing on an Orthodox Christian's blog? I think of it every year, when I read this, from the Matins for Holy and Great Friday:

Seeing her own Lamb led to the slaughter, Mary His Mother followed Him with the other women, and in her grief she cried: "Whither goest Thou, O my Child? Why dost Thou run so swiftly? Is there another wedding in Cana, and art Thou hastening there, to turn the water into wine? Shall I go with Thee, O my Child, or shall I wait for Thee? O Word, do Thou speak some word to me; pass me not by in silence. Thou hast preserved me in virginity, and Thou art my Son and my God."
--Ikos following Canticle Five, from the Canon by St. Kosmas

Well, no, it doesn't have quite the same rhythmic elegance of the Stabat Mater. But I like it better, for two reasons: one, it doesn't focus on me at all, and two, I think it's much more realistic. I mean, think what is happening. Think what it is to see your own child suffering horribly for something he didn't do. All parents witness this at one time or another, but none of us has to watch our kid being put to death for the crime of loving too much. This is what she's witnessing; and, with an exquisitely human grief, she simply -- blocks it out. Goes into denial, on a scale none of us can fully comprehend. This can't be happening to my Son, so He must be doing something else, like going to another wedding.

For a few years now, I've been able to read a number of canons written specifically for Great Lent, and the Theotokia of all of them focus on the agony of the Mother of God. And I find, with each succeeding year, that I enter more and more deeply into her pain; more and more of a sense of what she felt wounds my soul. Last year, I even found myself addressing Christ, "How could You do that to Your Mother?" And this year came the answer: He went to Hades, so she wouldn't have to. If He hadn't come, if He hadn't died, it wouldn't have mattered at all how good she was, how devoted to God she was; she would have suffered the same fate as everyone else, up to Holy Saturday. Of course He went through that for all of us, but I bet His Mom was at the top of His list.

Somebody -- I think it was Louis Evely -- once wrote that it was just great that she said Yes at the Annunciation, but this one, at the foot of the Cross -- this was the Yes that mattered. What a thing to have to say Yes to. What a thing to have to forgive. And so great is her love for her Son that -- she does it.

Most holy Theotokos, save us!

Who's in Your Corner?

Well, yeah, I cribbed that from the Capital One ad, "What's in your wallet?" Just like I'm cribbing this entry from St. Rebekah's site, where she was writing about her personal synaxis of saints. I have my list of favorites, too.

When it finally became obvious that I needed to be Orthodox, regardless of how convenient it was (it wasn't), I also knew I needed a patron saint. I would have liked to be named Sergia, or Serena, after St. Sergius of Radonezh, still my favorite; but the subject of a name never came up, and on my chrismation day, my priest just chrismated me "the servant of God, Margaret." Yes, I was disappointed, the more so because I couldn't really find a Margaret among the Synaxarion. (Russians tell me it's St. Marina of Antioch, but that particular priest said they were two different saints. There is a St. Margaret among the 40 Holy Virgins who were martyred on September 1, but nothing else is known about her. I like to know the people who come into my house, KWIM??)

How I came by the name Margaret is its own story. I was baptized with Mary as my middle name, and a completely unChristian first name, which I have always hated. As my husband and I began to move different places, it developed that nobody could remember my first name -- not that I care, but it was a terrific embarrassment for people who had to confess, "I just can't remember your name," until, by about the fifth move, I would just say, "That's all right, I must not look like an x." And they would say, "No, you really don't." To which I would reply, "What do look like?" Try that for a conversation stopper! Finally, one kindly soul answered, "Margaret," and since it began with the same letter of the alphabet as my middle name, I went to court and had my name changed so that my middle name is Margaret. And no one has trouble calling me Meg, except, naturally enough, my mother, who, being dead, doesn't call anyone anything anymore.

So! That said, our personal synaxarion, including, of course, our Lord and His Mother:

My favorite icon of Christ is Christ the Teacher. You'd think it would be the Good Shepherd, but I have never found a Good Shepherd icon I liked.

My favorite icon of His Mother is the Mother of God Vladimir. I just love the expression on her face. But I also have a strong devotion to the Kursk Root icon, since it once healed a broken wrist, and the one where Christ is wrestling His Mom to get out of her arms, and she's hanging on for dear life. I like the look on her face there, too! (Sort of, "God, give me patience with this Child!")

The patron of our household is St. Sergius of Radonezh. Why, is because he is the first Orthodox saint who cropped up in my life, and periodically thereafter I would run into various references to "Sergei Somebody." Why he keeps popping up like this is a mystery to me, but I understand that when this happens, it means a saint has decided to make himself part of your life, and this one really helped my son when he was in middle school.

My husband's patron saint is St. Demetrios. We were a little surprised to find that in the Greek culture, the name James is considered an anglicization of "Demetrios," but it makes sense -- more sense than James being related to Jacob!! That St. Demetrios was one of the warrior saints is especially important to a guy who works in the Dept. of Defense.

Our daughter's patron saint is St. Michael the Archangel. She chose him because she was, at the time, interested in becoming a cop, and St. Michael is the patron saint of cops.

Our son's patron saint is St. Christopher, which is what we named him at birth, and who has proven to be a particularly apropos saint, since (at least in the West) he is the patron saint of travellers. I understand that in this East, this honor is accorded to St. Nicholas, but St. Christopher seems to have done well by our Chris. What amazes me is that although I am 5' zip and my husband 5'10", our Chris is 6'4" -- just like his patron saint! And they seem to have had the same gentle nature, too, as well as the same interest in getting people from Here to There.

We also have hanging on our wall St. Xenia of St. Petersburg. For a time, we were members of St. Xenia's parish in Methuen, MA, till the drive proved to be too much. But she is another of those saints, like St. Sergius, who keeps sticking her head in the door to say Hi, so she stays in the icon corner.

The last icon we have in our icon corner is the Holy Royal Martyrs. I like them because they were so devoted to each other as a family, and Nicholas and Alexandra were pretty darn good parents, as well as madly in love with each other. It's nice to have some married saints around the place, too.

However, I also have an icon of St. John of San Francisco, which occupies our back office. I like all the stories about him, and he's the third in our synaxarion who keeps popping up from time to time. Whenever I get completely frustrated with Russian, I glower at my icons of him, St. Xenia, and St. Sergius and say, "Come on, guys! Help me get a handle on this cockamamie language of yours!" And they always do.

I am still looking for icons of St. Vasilios and St. Benjamin that would fit into the icon corner (Vasilios for my son-in-law, and Benjamin for our grandson). You'd think that with all the Basils running around the Greek Church, they would have every size imaginable -- apparently not. And finding any of the Old Testament saints is an exercise in perseverance.

Sheep May Safely Graze

From the Great Canon of St. Andrew of Crete:

Spare, O Savior, Thine own creation, and seek as Shepherd Thy lost sheep; snatch the stray from the wolf, and make me a pet lamb in Thy sheep pasture. (Psalm 118:176; John 10:11-16)

Anybody who knows me well, knows that I just love sheep. As a knitter, how could I not fall in love with those fluffy little creatures who provide me with one of my favorite pastimes? Plus, they are so funny in their odd little habits (unless you happen to be a shepherd, in which case, those odd little habits are downright annoying. My daughter once had a teacher who kept sheep, till summer vacation, when the little dears came up to her window at 5:30 a.m. baa-ing because they missed her company. The sheep disappeared in short order).

Who, loving sheep, could not love an image like this? The Great Canon is, as I'm sure you all know, pretty heavy-duty stuff, and, at least in my case, all of it depressingly accurate. But this -- this says it all.

This time I got tagged by Athanasia: How many Bibles are in your home? She has an impressive 20! So, without further ado:

1. How many Bibles are in your home?
We have 5: The original Jerusalem Bible (not the new one that's floating around out there -- my husband bought this one in 1967); the annotated Oxford Study Bible; the Third Millennium Bible; the Luther Bible, which is in German; and, believe it or not, a Scottish New Testament which is a riot to read, since it's written in Scottish dialect. Then there's an on-line King James Version that I have for when I have to put together something called Choir Cues; the Orthodox Study Bible, New Testament (and I most certainly do plan to get the Old Testament when it comes out next year!); and a "Boston Psalter," the Psalter according to the Septuagint, put out by Holy Transfiguration in Brookline, MA.

2. What rooms are they in?
The Jerusalem Bible, the Third Millennium Bible, the German Bible, and the Scottish New Testament are all in the living room. The Oxford Study Bible, the Orthodox Study Bible, and the Boston Psalter are in the office -- sometimes I have to look up concordance notes for Protestants who ask, "Well, what about THIS?!" when I'm on line.

3. What translations do you have?
NKJV (that's the Orthodox Study Bible), whatever the Jerusalem Bible is considered, KJV, Oxford Annotated, German, and Scottish. I'm considering asking my daughter for her Russian Bible, since she isn't reading Russian anymore.

4. Do you have a preference?
For daily devotions, either the Third Millennium Bible -- it has the style of English that I like best -- or the Orthodox Study Bible, which has better notes. My favorite used to be the German Bible, till I found out it used the Masoretic text, and I really prefer the Septuagint.

5. Nominate an interesting verse:
Now, this does say "interesting," so here goes: It's in the Scottish New Testament, when Mary Magdalene sees the risen Christ and thinks He's the gardener, then realizes Who He is and reaches out for Him, and what does He say? Well, in Scots: "Quit grabbin' at me, woman!"

A Music Meme! A Music Meme!

Over on Trudy's blog http://philippaalan.blogspot.com, she posted a meme that is irresistible for me: Your top ten musical rushes, those pieces of music that make you want to crank it whenever you hear them. Although I haven't been tagged, my brain immediately exploded with ideas. Genre mixing is encouraged, but that's a problem for me, since nearly all my "rushes" are classical. Oh well.

1. Rachmaninov's Second Piano Concerto, especially that glorious final movement.
1. (Yes, there are two #1s.) Bach's Violin Partita, of which there must be dozens, but I've only ever heard this one introduced in this way. It was discovered wrapped around a piece of butter in a dairy in St. Petersburg. The criminal waste of this man's music after his death is enough to make my blood boil.
2. The Hallelujah Chorus, from Handel's Messiah. Isn't that on everyone's list?!
3. Vivaldi's The Four Seasons: Winter. Final movement. Muted passion in every note.
4. Ralph Vaughan Williams' Five Variants on Dives and Lazarus.
5. George Butterworth's music. Virtually anything by Butterworth, since his musical career was cut so tragically short by WWI -- there just isn't that much of it.
6. Zigeunerweisen (Gypsy Airs) by Pablo de Sarasate. There's a relatively new recording out by violinist Gil Shaham that just smokes.
7. Romanian Rhapsody #1 by Georges Enescu. There is also a Romanian Rhapsody #2 with some nifty airs in it, but it sounds as if he cut it short before he could complete it. But in the first one, you can practically see the Turks coming over the hill, straight into an ambush by Romanian peasants. Of course the peasants won! ;-)
8. The Greek version of Lord, save Thy people and bless Thine inheritance. Sung in Greek Tone 1, it really sounds like a fight song.
9. And my #1 fight song: The Russian version of the Paschal Hymn, Christ is risen from the dead. Talk about spitting in the devil's eye!

No #10 -- I had two #1's, remember?

Mary McCann: 1921-2005

Today is the first anniversary of one of the most important people in my life: my mother's only sister, Mary McCann, the oldest of the six children in the Paige family.

Everybody should have an Aunt Mary in his life. Aunt Mary was the person who would walk into a room, and faces all over it would light up: "Mary's here!" Instant party! No matter what the subject, she always had a tart, and extremely funny, rejoinder (none of which, naturally, I can recall at the moment). After World War II, when housing was so tight, a succession of relatives lived with her and her family, often for a year or two. Her house was shabby, and never very well furnished, but that never seemed to matter: The meals she turned out were masterpieces, not of haute cuisine, but of down-home cooking. Anyone who thinks that Irish cooking is bland and tasteless, never ate one of Aunt Mary's pot roasts. Nearly all of my fondest memories of her home take place in either the dining room or the tiny kitchenette.

Speaking of Irish, she was fiercely Irish and fiercely Catholic. The fact that her husband was a Scot was explained, "The family was really Irish, but they had to live in Glasgow." (Not according to my uncle.) The fact that one of her grandmothers had been (gasp) German, was simply never mentioned. She attended Mass daily, but she wasn't one of those Sweet, Genteel Irish Ladies, not by a long shot. If there was a battle to be engaged, her head would rise up and her eyes would flash; you could tell she was enjoying every second of the conflict.

She was, according to herself, one of the first feminists, and that's probably true: She worked all the years I knew her, and in the 1950s and 1960s, it was highly unusual for a woman to work outside the home who wasn't a widow. She was the mainstay of the New York State American Legion -- organized all their conventions for nearly forty years, kept all the statistics in her head, did all the bookkeeping, and did it all on a part-time basis: She only worked 9:00-3:00. My mother watched her two sons between the time school let out, and the time their mother came to collect them, usually around 4:00 (the train from Manhattan to our part of Queens took 45 minutes, then there was a bus ride and a longish walk to our house).

There were downsides to her life. Her mother died when she was eleven years old, and the only other person in the house to oversee its care and upkeep was a 67-year-old grandmother. Consequently, she spent far too much of her childhood working and trying to chivvy her brothers and sister into doing their fair share of housework (I have the impression she was never successful at that). Her marriage was forged in World War II, and I'm not referring to the date. She was married for over 40 years, and of them, maybe the first three were somewhat happy: Two people who grew up motherless are not a match made in heaven. She was a shocking housekeeper: While her house was always clean, it was never tidy, and considering that my family consisted of seven people in four rooms, while hers consisted of four people in a six-room house, that's not a very high standard of tidiness on my part. Housekeeping wasn't her thing; numbers were. She had the house paid off in ten years, and how many of us can say that, these days?

Towards the end of her life, it all told. After retirement, she had literally nothing with which to occupy herself, and as she turned inward, she became suspicious of nearly everyone in her life. The last two years of her life, she lived in New Hampshire, where two nieces and a nephew could keep an eye on her; of her two sons, one had moved to the West Coast, and the other was someone she just couldn't get along with. She was not happy about that move, and let us all know it, every day. Eventually we had her evaluated by a social worker; it was clear that she could stand to live in an assisted living facility, since she made a habit of calling on people for help in the wee hours of the morning, and didn't always know where she was. At one point, the social worker asked if she had any living brothers or sisters, and Aunt Mary replied, "One brother." Since I knew what the social worker was getting at -- a brother's wishes for her care would always be considered over nieces and nephews -- I quickly noted that her one surviving brother was an alcoholic, and not really capable of informed judgement. After the social worker left, Aunt Mary turned on me: "Uncle Richie is not an alcoholic, and how you could say such a thing to a complete stranger is beyond me." Characteristic of the Irish: Let's not admit that there are Problems in the family, What Will the Neighbors Think.

Yet her death was peaceful -- and typical: She had hung on all day, although we all knew the end was near, and we couldn't figure out why. Around 3:00 p.m., to our surprise, my nephew Richard showed up, and we all turned to him with exclamations of, "Rich, hi!" with evident surprise in our voices -- and she expired. Not five minutes later, her brother, also Richard, called to say hello to her (he lives in Tennessee), and we had to break the news to him that she was gone. We thought that perhaps she had been holding on until her brother could arrive, and when we all exclaimed, "Rich!" she thought it was her brother. Then her oldest son, with his mother's characteristic sharp wit, added, "Unless she knew he was going to call, and she didn't want to talk to him."

She was brought back to her hometown for burial, and buried from the church where she had been baptized and married. When I think of her, I always have the two Aunt Marys in mind, the one I always knew and admired, and the shrivelled, suspicious old lady she had become. In retrospect, I wish I had never met that old lady; the other memories are the better ones.