Thursday, July 31, 2008

A Funny Recollection

Since I can't think of anything current to blog about...I don't know why, suddenly I'm just coming up dry...I want to tell a funny recollection from back when I guess I could say things were for the moment more interesting.
Last August (nearly a year back) when we were dropping Katie off at her college in California, we met up with another family we know from our previous church, and had dinner with them at the Keg and Platter there. (Now, that previous church was then already our previous church as of May or June of that year.) We talked about a great many things, and were having a great time. But we as a family were not sure whether they as a family knew that we had left their church. It isn't an enormous church, just a few hundred there, but there are two services, and besides, this family had close family friends who were all excited about their daughter's engagement and I think it had them all distracted. We didn't know of any tactful way to broach the subject, and so we just didn't bring it up. What do you do, change the subject from all the various distractions at the college and say, "By the way, did you know that we left the church many months ago?" We didn't want them choking on their steak, after all. It really was fairly amusing, considering that we tend to be at church every Sunday--more faithfully than most of the pastors we've ever known--because we hardly travel, at all. Yes, now you wonder why I have so little to blog about? Yes. That may be it.
And there was another funny thing. Somehow Tim talked us into allowing him to order a mocha-flavored dessert. Let me note to you now, sugar and caffeine in a 9-year-old boy is not a good idea. I know that now. He ate the dessert without much attention and fanfare, but that was not the end of it. Something got him giggling, and he laughed, and laughed, and wasn't stopping. Now don't dismiss that, it wasn't that he didn't want to stop. We kept dropping our conversation, remarking on Tim's giggling, starting up again, and then stopping again. Finally we realized he was doing something akin to hyperventilating, and he just couldn't stop. He was in pain. We didn't have a paper bag for him to breathe into, so we gave him a paper napkin to put over his face, holding it there and breathing through it. It worked. He stopped his giggling and for the rest of the night, he was sufficiently sober and sane. I don't think he slept well that night, though.
Well, months later...Katie was talking down at college to a group of students there, and the subject of our church change came up. For the moment she forgot that one of the students was a member of that family, and would definitely find it significant. So word got back to his family, and there it was, at least September or October, and finally this unintentional secret was out. Ha! Yes, I thought it was pretty amusing, at least once I concluded that they really hadn't known all that time.
The mother came to me later and told me that she had taken it personally that I hadn't told her. I told her how we were stymied as to how to bring it up, and she understood. I told her that if I'd known, I would have gone to her first thing and told her, and she would have gone, "Why are you telling me about it?" And she agreed that that, too, would have been the case. Sometimes you just can't satisfy a person, no matter how you do it.

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