..misty water colored MEMORIES (sing it in your Barbara Streisand voice)

Day 44 reading assignment:
Exodus 35:10-36:38
Matthew 27:32-66
Psalm 34:1-10
Proverbs 9:7-8

I read a lot of memoirs and have thought it would be fun to write mine, just for my family's entertainment of course.  The problem is, with the exception of a very few, I have no childhood memories before the age of 10.  And without memories, one has no "memoir."  This makes me sad because I had a title and everything: "Homecoming Queen in October and Pregnant by Prom."  Now I'm trying to work that title in to a bible study I would like to write for teen-age girls instead.  It is catchy after-all.  But it only refers to a short segment of reckless choices in my high-school days.  That in itself could render it useless as my memoir title, but what a huge role those choices played in the rest of my life.

 I spent the first part of my childhood in very southern California.  The Imperial Valley is a huge agricultural belt twenty-three miles from Mexicali, Mexico.  We lived in a tiny farming community on the corner of "Nowhere and the Sand Dunes."  My mother's mantra was always, "you kids go outside and play"and despite the fact that this is rattlesnake paradise, I don't know if I wore shoes until I was eleven years old.  But my mother was a force to say the least, so go outside we did.  My brother, nearly four years my senior could keep us busy even when the typical summer days paled as the morning sun fried the color out of the ozone.  We had three seasons: The days the wind blew the dirt in our eyes, the day it rained, and hot.  For fun we would take our be-be guns out to the old roofless shop and shoot lizards.  We liked to empty our guns on the lizards, filling them so full of be-bes, they would become our very own "organic" bean bags.  Then, when we tired of squishing them around for the sensory thrill their copper infused bodies offered, we would pinch the pimpled corpse until the be-be popped back out.  This last phase didn't hold our attention long, for after a few extractions the lizard body got slimy from body fluids and we were grossed out.  Disgusting? Yes. But hours of unsupervised fun?  Absolutely.

The environment of my childhood reminds me of scenes from my Bible reading.  The arrid landscape.  The fertile soil.  Pomegranates, lemons and figs grew in our yard and the surrounding region was, and is, a huge supplier of the nation's dates.  I always start  this walk down memory lane with a snapshot in my mind. I see the back of myself.  A little girl, dressed in her brothers well worn hand-me-downs, always barefoot.  In the picture, I am leaning against a front-porch post.  The one the  locusts liked to shed their skins on.  I can remember standing at this post regularly at a certain time of day.  I would fix my eyes on the dirt road across the way, the one that ran down the canal bank.  My eyeballs burning from this deliberate gaze I wouldn't rest until I saw the dust cloud from my daddy's turquoise truck.  The relief I felt from this sighting always left me euphoric because even though I didn't understand it in those days, my father was a functioning alcoholic and the absense of this sighting meant bad things were coming.

It is very interesting to me how since I started reading the Bible consistently, God has begun to permeate every part of my life, of me.  I see everything now in  biblical analogies.  It's a strange and almost bitter-sweet aha moment.  Moments with big regrets of a life with more time behind me than in front of me. Time lost that I didn't spend in a Godly way much less with God personally.  I picture God as that little girl, waiting for me to show up, knowing if I don't, things are coming that He doesn't want me to face without Him.  I made a lot of choices that did not include God.  How incredibly lucky for me that God's glory is revealed in his mercy, grace, compassion, faithfulness, justice and last but so not least, forgiveness.  He took my choices, the messes I made, especially those high-school years, and managed to clean them up, wringing blessing after blessing out of them.

Have you read any good memoirs lately?  I've got a good one for you,  it's not a very catchy title, it's God's memoir.  It's called the Bible.

Memory is a way of holding on to the things you love, the things you are, the things you never want to lose.                 -The Wonder Years-