Visit this link to watch this film, Zeitgeist at Free Documentaries.

I don’t know how you could watch this film and not realize that all of Christendom is a complete load of baloney unless your mind is no more than a clump of quivering gelatin.  Or you believe that God allowed Satan to scatter a myriad of stories in hundreds of cultures throughout all of time just to test our faith and winnow the wheat from the chaff. Which is just such an awesome way for God to demonstrate his mercy, goodness, patience and eternal fount of loving kindness to all of human kind and also explains all those deeply disturbing dinosaur bones.

Day three of our Yellowstone/Teton vacation dawned bright and early as we packed up and left our campground at Signal Mountain to secure a site in Yellowstone right around the break of dawn. We had to stop and get gas and ice (and donuts and coffee) so that we didn’t get to Yellowstone until around 7:00 am.

This was the line when we arrived at the south entrance to Yellowstone National Park.

The line was moving very slowly in part because of an auto accident up ahead.  I am not sure what happened, but we eventually drove by the grisly remains of a pop-up camper that had one side sheered off.  The car that was pulling it was crushed as well.  A woman and a child stood beside the wreckage – the woman was screaming in the face of a ranger while her daughter stood by and looked mortified.  A roll of toilet paper dangled down the side of the clipped off pop-up while the aluminum ribs and insulation littered the side of the road.  From what I saw, it appeared that all the people involved in the wreck were okay.

The top cause of death at Yellowstone Park is car crashes.  This is followed by illness, drowning and falls.  Death by animal attack is rare, but signs in the park warning people of the imminent danger of animal attacks outnumber any other types of signs by about a million to one.  In fact, there aren’t any other type of warning signs.  Only animal danger signs.  Especially bear danger signs.  Which is why my son Drew was so frustrated when by day three we still hadn’t seen any bears yet.  If the signs are right, they must surely be lurking around every corner!

We drove from the south end of Yellowstone all the way to the north end stopping at almost every campground along the way looking for an spot.  We ignored the first few campgrounds hoping to get ourselves more centrally located.  This turned out to be a bad decision.  By the time we reached central Yellowstone, the campsites there were full.  There are about 2000 campsites in Yellowstone for campers with vehicles and 300 back country campsites.  If you multiply 2300 campsites by nine thousand French people, seven thousand Asians and four thousand assorted other Europeans plus maybe a couple hundred Americans and possibly a thousand Canadians you end up with forty two billion people camping in Yellowstone the same night that we were there.

Finally, we reached Mammoth Hot Springs on the northern edge of Yellowstone and our last hope of finding any room at the Inn inside of the park evaporated when we learned that it’s campground was also full.  The Country Doctor located a ranger to get some information about our options for overnight accommodations.  He learned that Gardiner, Montana (just outside the park) had both hotel rooms and campsites available and he also learned that people can camp in the designated wilderness areas of the Park for free.  I could tell by the CD’s voice that this ‘wilderness’ option was very appealing to him.  Not only was it scary, and dangerous, it was also cheap.  Unfortunately, the CD could tell from my voice that the idea of ‘wilderness’ camping was not at all appealing to me as it scary and dangerous and also cheap.

Sensing the danger in my voice, the raised hackles, the attack stance and the flaming eyeballs, the CD wisely opted to drive into Gardiner, Montana where we secured a campsite in a campground on a bluff overlooking the town.

Check it out!  We’re in Montana!  We didn’t even plan to go to Montana and yet here we are!

While the menfolk sat up the tent, I availed myself of a trip to a tricked out, clean bathroom with hot and cold running water and looked forward to a long hot shower later that night.  Then I fired up the camp stove and made us some smoked brats for lunch.

After lunch, we headed back to Yellowstone via the North entrance which is clearly marked by the enormous Roosevelt stone arch.  Theodore Roosevelt laid the cornerstone himself in 1903 during a two week vacation he was taking just up the road at Tower Falls within the park.  Later, a lodge was built to commemorate Roosevelt’s visit.  We would visit the lodge later that day.

But our first stop was the Boiling River.

The hot water from nearby Mammoth Hot Springs runs down from the travertine terraces and joins the icy cold Gardiner river where swimmers can find the perfect temperature to sit and soak after a hard day of traipsing all over the park.

Or a hard day of trying to find a campsite.

This spot was one of the highlights for the kids.

A half mile long hike filters out some of the crowds (including most Americans) so you will bathe primarily with the usual Asians and Europeans.

Languages from around the world will rise over the gentle roar of the hot water splashing into the cold river.  People conversing in German and French and Japanese, with the occasional familiar American tongue joining in.

The boys played for two hours in this river.  They nobly fought the current trying to get from one end of the warm area to the other.  We all really enjoyed it, except for the CD who got tired of relaxing after about ten minutes.  But he was outvoted as the boys were having a marvelous time and I was almost in a coma from the pure bliss of hot water against my skin.  The only thing that would have made it better was a glass of champagne, but food and beverages are banned in this area of the park.

From the river, we headed back into Mammoth Hot Springs which is the site of the first hotel built in Yellowstone.  Mammoth Hot Springs was a military fort and it’s tidy layout is a site for sore eyes for one who long for signs of civilization after too long on the trail.

A herd of elk was grazing on the lawn around the post office and the clinic. One ranger’s job was to place orange cones around the herd so that people would stay back far enough. As the herd moved through the town, the ranger with the cones would pick them up and re-set them in a new spot. I kind of wondered what her official title was.

“Elk Cone Lady”

“Herd Safety Cone Manager?”

“The Cone/Elk/Setter Upper Person?”

“Elk Cone Setter/Vocal Warning Over and Over Again Guide?”

“The Lady Who Shouts at the Tourists While Setting Up Cones around Herds of Elk?”

Or maybe just…

“That Irate Elk Ranger with the Orange Cones”

Hopefully it’s only a temporary assignment for her.

We found a parking space, glad to be rid of the pop-up camper, and set out to climb the travertine terraces.

I only got about halfway up when I spotted a bench and just sat down.  The terraces are interesting, but seeing the steaming pools and marbley pitted rock up close is not that much better than viewing it from a great distance.  The Country Doctor sat down beside me and said, “Have you had it?”

“Yes.”

“Why don’t you go back down to the town and we will meet you there.”

He didn’t have to make that suggestion twice.

I hiked back down, got an ice cream cone and enjoyed the terraces from a great distance.

Trust me, my experience was not diminished in any way.

After a while my family joined me.

We all got some ice cream and cold drinks and then with renewed energy, we continued on our tour of the park.

Our next destination was the Grand Canyon of Yellowstone, but we got sucked off the main highway by a back road that wound through a bit of wilderness.

Even if you drive every road in Yellowstone (which I am sure we did) you will see only 2% of the park.

We saw an elk.

And some gorgeous country.

And encountered our first ‘bear jam.’

A black bear was feasting on some red currant bushes right by the side of the dirt road.  It was almost as if some centrally located control tower had ‘cued the bear’ for the oncoming tourists.

Trust me, we were watching for a safe distance.

We watched the bear for quite a while, partially because we were trapped by the cars in front of us, and partially because it was a bear.

The bear eventually ate all the currants and then he clawed open dead log lying on the ground and a mass of squiggling insects were revealed.  He poked his snout in the insect squirm and took a bite, but then literally turned up his nose and climbed up the hill for more currants.  This was a bear with a very sophisticated palette.  As he ambled up the hillside away from our view, the cars began to pull out and we followed.

We passed an area that showed signs of recent fire.  In an average year, 22 fires are started in the park by lightning.  In 1988, the year that 800,000 acres were burned inside the park, there were 50 fires started by lightning.  Black Saturday occurred on August 20, 1988 a day when hurricane force winds whipped through the park setting 165,000 acres ablaze.  Smoke plumes could be seen from the space shuttle and ashes fell as far as 100 miles away in Billings Montana.  The park is well on it’s way to recovery from the fires of 1988.  Adolescent trees cover large sections of the park while the skeletonized remains of the older trees still stand silent sentry over their younger kin.

We finally arrived at the Canyon which is carved out of yellow stone.

Hence the name of the park.

On our way back to Gardiner, we stopped at Roosevelt Lodge for dinner.  Theodore Roosevelt camped near this area during one of his visits to the park, but he did not stay in the lodge as it was built fifteen years later in 1917.

It’s the smallest lodge in the park and has a laid back atmosphere.  We were able to get a table as soon as we arrived.

The food was excellent and affordable.  Cal and Drew had elk burgers.  Ethan had catfish.  The CD and I shared a bison steak and Roosevelt beans and Jack had spaghetti and meatballs from a plain old regular cow.

I had to take a photo of the sink in the bathroom because it was so cool and maybe I was getting a little obsessed with the idea of hot and cold running water at this point in our camping vacation.

It was just so beautiful!

Soooooooo Beautiful!!!!

Here ends day three of our Yellowstone vacation.  Are you exhausted yet?  Bored?  Sick of nature?  Wishing for a comfortable bed, a modern toilet and a hot shower?  Fortunately there are only four more days to go!

Hwah ha ha hoo hee ho ha ha HWAH!

To see a larger version of any of the photos, simply click on the photo.

Day two of our Yellowstone/Teton vacation we drove to the top of Signal Mountain and enjoyed the panoramic view.  Signal Mountain is a little mountain that is in the middle of the ‘hole’ or the flattened our area that is surrounded by the Tetons, Yellowstone park, and a variety of other distant ranges on all sides.  This would be a view of the other ‘distant ranges’.  Sorry I don’t know what they are, but the river in the distance is the Snake River where we were to whitewater raft later in the day.

Here is my family looking all astute.

This is the Teton view from Signal Mountain which would be from the other side of the mountain.  I am pretty sure that is Jackson Lake in the distance.

On our way into Jackson to whitewater raft the Snake river, we were pulled off the road by the magnetic beauty of this building which turned out to be the Craig Thomas Visitor’s and Discovery Center.  From the road, the building was so stunning that I had to see what it looked like on the inside.

It did not disappoint.  For more photos or to learn more about the Craig Thomas Discovery and Visitor’s Center, click here.

In the photo you can see not only the massive limestone fireplace, but also a topographic map of the Teton area.  Can you see the hole in the middle of the surrounding mountain ranges?  That is how Jackson hole got it’s name.

The visitor’s center has excellent displays.  Here the boys run their fingers over the pelts of various animals that live in the Tetons.  We watched a short movie on the geographic formation of this area in the auditorium ate sandwiches out of the trunk of the van and then headed on into Jackson.

We were scheduled for an afternoon white water rafting trip so I had about fifteen minutes to walk around Jackson and snap photos before our bus left for the wilds of the Snake River.

A part of me wanted to just hang out in Jackson and skip the river entirely.

But I knew we would be back that evening to have dinner with the CD’s former nurse Ella and her husband Mike.  They had moved to Jackson only ten months prior to our visit.

So I rapidly took some photos of this extremely photogenic town and then got onto a bus with (I am not even kidding) twenty French people.  They all had wet suits on over their french bikinis.  None of the Americans had wet suits on (nor French bikinis).

“Why do we have these wet suits and no one else has them?” they asked.

No one was able to answer them, but I think it is because when you visit a foreign country, you are at the mercy of marketing even more than when you are at home.  So when someone tells you to rent a wet suit, you rent a wet suit.

Let it be a lesson to us all.

Don’t rent the wet suit until you see the natives renting the wet suit.

I was glad that I took the photos when I did, because when we got back from the river, the light was fading fast.

We walked around Jackson with Ella and Mike after we put our name in for a table at the Merry Piglets a Mexican cafe that is popular with Jackson locals.

For two days Drew had been very anxious to see a bear as he had been seeing warning signs about bears and bear proof trash cans and bear safe food storage in the campground and yet not one bear had crossed his path.  So when we saw this huge stuffed Grizzly in a store, we had to make sure that Drew saw it in case it turned out to be the only bear we saw.

And then we bought some fudge in a candy store.

And had a fabulous dinner with Mike and Ella.

Here ends day two of our Yellowstone/Teton vacation.

I did buy a water proof disposable camera and took some photos of the raft trip.  If any of the photos turn out, I will try and post a few.

Have a good weekend!

Making pink cupcakes for a baby shower,

Rechelle

I finally was able to watch this movie. I got it from Netflix.  You can watch the entire film online here.  It’s well worth the time.  I wish I could watch it with several different people that I know just for the conversation it would inspire.

First of all I need to say that I was pretty lukewarm about this trip to Yellowstone.  The CD and I went to Yellowstone, Grand Teton and Mount Rushmore fifteen years ago on our honeymoon and though it was a nice trip, I hesitated to go back because there are lots of other places to see, so why re-visit one to which I’ve already been? On the other hand – it’s Yellowstone! There’s no other place even remotely like it on the face of the earth and we have kids now and how can they possibly limp through the rest of their childhoods without seeing Old Faithful shoot off at least once? Besides, my husband and I are nothing if we ain’t determined to always take vacations that are harder than everyone else’s. Right before we left, I asked my husband to tell me exactly why we were going to Yellowstone.

“Why don’t we just go to the lake or rent a condo on a beach somewhere?” I said.   “It seems like we are always trying to impress someone with our vacations. Who exactly are we trying to impress and what do we get when we impress them enough and how do we know when we’ve reached the critical ‘impressed enough’ quota so we can go to the beach?”

He didn’t have an answer to my question.

It reminded me of when we were in Europe and after a couple of days of frantically marching from one side of London to the other and back again according to the frantic pace that my husband set,  I asked him a similar question.

“What is going on here?” I said, “Are we on a scavenger hunt with a million dollar prize at the end?”

He also did not answer that question either.

Which reminds me!

Yellowstone is kind of like visiting Europe.

There really aren’t very many Americans in the park.  Especially in the parts where you have to climb steep metal steps to get to a waterfall or climb the side of a mountain to see a waterfall or hike around a lake on a path that is strewn with huge boulders to see a waterfall.  Every path in Yellowstone eventually leads to a waterfall or to a geyser than will never go off while you are there.  But you will generally find only Europeans and Asians at the end of these arduous paths – and our family.  The rest of the Americans at Yellowstone are shopping in the gift shops or eating at the lodge cafeteria… or at Disneyland.

Is that the problem?

Is my husband simply a European?

Then why the hell am I living in Kansas!

It was especially hard to miss the hordes of French-speaking people who were crammed into every crack and crevasse in the park. Everywhere we went … more French people. “Hey!” I wanted to tell them, ” I went to your country last year!  Remember me? I was the one who wanted a French glass bottle of coke but you wouldn’t give me one because I ordered it at the bar instead of sitting at one of tables outside on the patio where every item on the menu mysteriously costs more? Remember?  Hey guess what! In America coke costs the same no matter where you sit. So maybe you should take that idea back with you to your country and stop being so mean to Americans when they try to speak your language and fail badly!  All I wanted was a coke!  A coke!  It’s not like I was asking for you to saw a piece off the Eiffel Tower and gift wrap it for me!”

But I didn’t say that.

I just smiled at them and listened to the music of their language and the pretty names of their children and remembered when we visited the Eiffel Tower and I watched all the Asians and Europeans and my sons and husband climb the stairs to the top while I hunted around for a gift shop and a cafeteria at the bottom.

As you may know, the Country Doctor and I have very different philosophies when it comes to vacations. When I think of a vacation, I think of sitting on a deck or perhaps a veranda with a beverage and a book, overlooking a beach or maybe a mountain or maybe a body of water. I eat food that others have prepared. I sleep in a bed that someone else has made. I pee in a toilet that someone else has cleaned. Only good food or great coffee or large glasses of booze will lure me from this spot.  There is no pop-up camper in my vacation picture and I am not cooking over a propane stove worrying that it is going to explode and wondering if the next campsite might possibly offer the thin luxury of a hot shower.

My husband views vacations as triathlons, disguised as dissertations, disguised as a climbs to the top of Mount Everest, disguised as relief work in Haiti, disguised as brain surgery, disguised as Rubik’s cubes, disguised as training for every event in the Olympics at the same time.  And then, in order to make my husband extra happy on vacation, we also have to pretend like we are poor.  Really, really poor.  Like we are homeless, and have only ninety five cents left in mama’s greasy paper sack hidden insider her grand-mammy’s thread bare quilt where all the babies was born.  Any type of purchase is regarded as a sign of weakness and results in a public shunning.

If my husband is happy on vacation, I am languishing near the point of death and if I am happy, the Country Doctor is hunting around for a razor blade so that he can slit his wrists.

Here is how it all played out…

We borrowed a friend’s pop-up camper for this little adventure.  It was nice to not have to sleep in a tent on the ground for seven days and I was able to comfort myself occasionally with the idea that a grizzly bear might have a harder time breaking into a pop-up and eating one of my kids as opposed to breaking into a tent and eating one of my kids.  But then I would look at the fabric walls surrounding my children while they slept in the pop-up and my comfort zone would rapidly deteriorate.

Crossing into Nebraska where the sign describes it as ‘The good life”.

Authentic Mexican cuisine in a little hole-in-the-wall cafe halfway through Nebraska. Good cheap food making both the CD and I both happy at the same time.

We drove all night to reach the Tetons starting out at around 2 p.m. in Kansas and arriving at our campsite in Wyoming around 7:30 a.m the next morning.  That’s eighteen hours of driving.  The Country Doctor was coming off  24 hours of call, so I drove almost the entire way.  I saw lots of elk and deer in the middle of the night in the mountains of Wyoming.  One of them was just standing in the middle of the road staring me down.  When I saw him I didn’t swerve the car, but kept it pointed straight towards the deer, slamming on the breaks managing to slow down just in time.  The deer watched me come to a halt and then moseyed off the highway as if he were disappointed that we all survived.  I kept seeing deer all night long in ones, twos and sometimes small groups wearing lots of leather, metal studs and covered in tatoos.  They were gathered around a keg in the ditch of the road.  Or maybe I was just hallucinating from having driven fourteen hours straight.   I slowed down to forty or fifty miles an hour wanting to be able to stop if one of those wild party deer decided to spring out in front of the van.  There were dark looming mountains piling up all around me and I was really hoping to watch the sun come up as I drove, but right as the light started to change from black to silvery gray, I knew I had to stop.  After fifteen hours of driving, I woke up the CD and he took over.  He got to see the sun come up in the mountains.  I fell asleep as soon as I sat down in the passenger’s seat and didn’t wake up until the CD was purchasing a pass from the ranger’s station into Grand Teton National Park.

_________________________________

I really wanted to stay at the Jenny Lake campground in Grand Teton as it was my favorite stop during our honeymoon, but Jenny Lake is a ‘tent only’ campsite.  So we camped up the road at Signal Mountain which is also nice, but has a ‘lake vibe’ as opposed to a ‘mountain vibe’ and was filled with recreational vehicles that ran their generators off and on all day long.  It didn’t really matter though.  There’s no hanging out in the campground if you are on vacation with the Country Doctor.

After eighteen hours of driving and then setting up our campsite, we immediately headed to Jenny Lake for a hike.  I was anxious to see if it was as beautiful as I remembered.

It was…

We hiked around the lake.

The boys found Wyoming’s version of a bridge to nowhere.

The hike took a few hours and although it wasn’t a super hard hike, we were all pretty tired by the end.

Well – all of us except for the Country Doctor.

He wanted to hike back, but once I saw a sign that said we could catch the boat back across the lake, there was only one way I was getting back to camp.  And it wasn’t on foot sister.

Besides!  The boat offered an entirely different perspective of the Tetons!

So see!

It was a meaningful choice after all!

Next stop was the Jenny Lake store.

I had left both the bread and the coffee for our trip sitting on the kitchen counter at home as I was very concerned that the bread would get smooshed and wanted to pack it last and that the coffee would get lost and I can’t deal with lost coffee first thing in the morning.  Instead, I ended up leaving them both behind.  So I spent a few minutes shopping in this store.  I could have spent an hour.  In fact, I could have spent the entire vacation there.  I want to work there.  I want to be the coffee attendant at the Jenny Lake store.

So far this was turning out to be a fantastic vacation!  I had visited my favorite spot on our honeymoon.  I had hiked, but managed to ride a boat back and now I was shopping in a cute, woodsy camp store and clutching a cup of hot coffee to boot!  I love this vacation!  This is the best vacation ever!

These are the Grand Tetons as we drove back to our campsite.  Grand Tetons means big boobs.  A couple of French men came up with the name.

Those French people are all over this place!

We then went back to our campsite, had some lunch and took naps.

And for our evening’s entertainment we decided to drive into Yellowstone.

We walked around the West Thumb Geyser basin which is by far the prettiest of all the geothermal areas at the park.  It”s on the lake and there are some trees so it doesn’t feel quite so inhospitable and ‘died and gone to Hades’ like the other geothermal areas tend to do.

This is one of the famous fishing cones where fisherman ‘back in the day’ before Yellowstone was a huge tourist attraction, would stand and catch a fish in the lake and then turn around and boil their fish right on the line in the simmering water that is inside of the cone.  Those fisherman were clearly the Country Doctor’s ancestors.

Here is one of what seems like thousands of pretty hot pools of water colored by various minerals and bacteria that litter the landscape of Yellowstone.  Some of the bacteria that grow in these simmering pools only exist in that one particular pool.  They are found nowhere else on the face of the earth.  In fact there aren’t any geothermal features anywhere in the world that have been as well preserved and are therefore still producing interesting and useful organisms like those in Yellowstone.  This is probably because the geothermal features at Yellowstone have not been tampered with for commercial use.  Some of the bacteria they have found in Yellowstone hot pools have been used in the medical diagnosis of AIDS and forensic science such as DNA fingerprinting.

Then we drove to see Old Faithful.

When we arrived, people were already congregating waiting for the next eruption.

We joined them.

After watching Old Faithful we walked around Yellowstone Lodge a bit.

Jack bought a wolf in the Lodge gift shop.

We shunned him.

Then we drove over to Yellowstone Inn and inquired about dinner reservations.

We discovered that the only dinner slots left over the next three days at Yellowstone Inn were after 9:30 pm.

We bought the kids some ice cream instead.

The Country Doctor passed.

And then he shunned all of us.

And I bought an eight dollar plastic cup full of wine.

“Do I get a free refill?”  I asked the bartender.

She didn’t answer me.

I think she was French.

While my kids text-ed their friends back home, I drank my wine and soaked up the atmosphere in this beautiful old building and then we drove back to the campsite and ate sandwiches.  Except I didn’t eat anything.  I just went straight to bed.  I was so tired I couldn’t even summon the will to worry about bears breaking in to the pop-up and dragging one of my babies off for a midnight snack.  And that is pretty darned tired for me.

We went to Yellowstone.

I shit you not.

While we were there three people were mauled by a grizzly bear in the Soda Butte campground which is just outside of Yellowstone National Park.

I shit you not.

One of those people died.

I shit you not.

Three dangerous and desperate escaped convicts were hiding out in the area.

I shit you not.

We were there on the busiest day or the busiest month of the busiest year in Yellowstone for fifteen years.

I shit you not.

We got up at six a.m. to secure a campsite in Yellowstone (we were driving from Grand Teton only thirty miles away) but when we arrived, the campgrounds were already full for the day.

I shit you not.

Thirty miles in Yellowstone is like a hundred and thirty miles everywhere else in the world.

I shit you not.

Once you’ve seen one inactive geyser, mudpot, fumarole, sulphuric hot springs, and travertine terrace – you’ve seen them all.

I shit you not.

A waterfall looks the same from the top as it does from the bottom as it does from either side as it does from a distance as it does close up.  There is really no need to hike up and down mountains just to view it from another angle.  It’s not like it is going to change into evening wear or turn a different color.

I shit you not.

The Tetons are gorgeous.  Go there.  Skip Yellowstone entirely or drive thorough it briskly (even though that is impossible).

I shit you not.

Because Yellowstone is a scary place with bears that will kill you, bison that will gore you, escaped convicts that will terrorize you and geysers that sit there and do nothing no matter how long you wait and try to will them to erupt.

I shit you not.

Also  - Yellowstone sits atop a volcano that could erupt at any time.

I shit you not.

I have a new found love for highly contrived vacation spots that have nothing to do with nature and everything to do with marketing.

I shit you not.

I have officially exorcised the demon called ‘camping’ from my being.  From now on my vacation motto is thus -

“If you can’t afford the hotel room, you can’t afford to go.”

I shit you not.

Day by day, hour by hour, minute by terrifying minute of our Yellowstone vacation on it’s way.  Prepare to be scared shitless.

I shit you not.

And all the people said

Amen.

Throughout my life, prayer has played various roles depending on how holy I was feeling and how much I believed.  When I was in high-school, college and on up through my twenties, I prayed all the time.  I had this non-stop running conversation with God going on in my head.  I prayed for friends, relatives and co-workers.  I prayed for the people that I knew who were dabbling in Buddhism, vegetarianism, feminism and environmentalism that God would save them from the eternal lake of fire for their despicable heresy.  I prayed for my friends who were gay that they would accept Jesus and stop being such a heinous abomination before the Apostle Paul, God and me.  I prayed for strangers as they walked by and I would ask God to touch their hearts, their minds and draw them close to Him.  I prayed for people while I was having conversations with them, asking God to use me to show his love and share the gospel with them.

When I was in college I added fasting to my regular prayer regimen.  I made the startling discovery that fasting amplified my  prayers and I certainly wanted God to hear mine!  Evidently God hears you better when you have an empty stomach, except of course in the case of famine – where either people who are starving don’t pray or it doesn’t count as fasting unless you actually have food to give up.  (Boy that God… he sure is a picky bastard!)  But like most things that involve unnecessary hardship – fasting did not come naturally to me.  I am not built to suffer, I am built to indulge.  So I was constantly changing the rules about how long I was going to fast and what constituted a real fast and if fasting through my afternoon snack would be good enough for God.

“Dear God – Today I will fast until supper.  I will spend this day reflecting on your supreme glory and lifting my voice as a humble servant on behalf of all the people in this world who do not have a personal relationship with you.  BUT!!!   I am going to let myself have a soda at lunch time God… a regular soda…not a diet soda… and I can have as much juice as I want all day long and I am not going to start this fast until I finish off this bag of Twizzlers and the rest of the Corn Nuts.  And also,  I can have a cookie at the union if I start to feel really weak, but I will not get a latte to go with it Lord.  I will only get a regular coffee, with a tiny bit of cream and no sugar.  Okay… maybe only one packet of sugar, but only one packet God.  And then I will skip dessert at dinner to make up for the packet of sugar – unless dessert is really, really good.  Then I will skip dessert tomorrow instead.

As I got older, got married, and had babies, the habit of fasting disappeared and my prayer life dwindled.  I had too many diapers to change and nursing moms don’t ever skip a meal.  When I did pray, it was generally for my husband who was not exactly ‘on fire for the Lord’.  Somehow I had managed to marry and make lots of babies with a man whose knowledge of the bible was pathetic and whose basic understanding of evangelical Christianity was abysmal.  I married a Catholic who went to parochial school through the sixth grade and if he worshiped anything – he worshiped it wrong.  Everyone knows that Catholics don’t know the real God.  They are terribly confused.  They worship the pope and Mary, instead of Jesus.  I was sure that God had sent me into my husband’s life to save him and his entire family of devout Catholic Mary worshipers from an eternity in Hell.  So I was always begging God to ‘get a grip on my husband’s life’.  Turn him around Lord!  Bring him close to you Jesus – the real Jesus – not the fake baby Jesus that is really just a prop for their fake Mary god to hold!  Discipline him God and bring him to the truth of who you really are!

But then I would freak out about the whole ‘discipline’ thing.  I had been taught that God disciplines those that he loves and that means he basically beats the shit out of his favorite people by giving them cancer or giving their babies cancer or letting them be paralyzed in a fiery car accident or melting their faces off in a propane tank explosion.  So my prayers always had distinct parameters.  I would try to back-pedal my way out of being disciplined by saying things like…

Bring my husband to you Lord, but please don’t hurt my babies to make it happen.  Please God!  Please don’t hurt my baby!  I want my husband to know you and love you as much as I do, but I don’t want you to give my baby cancer to teach him about your infinite love.  So if you could get a hold of my husband’s life without giving my baby leukemia, I would really appreciate it.  Thanks God!  Love you!  You are so awesome!  And please don’t give my baby cancer God.  Please!!  Thanks God!

But the thing is – that Christians are supposed to trust God and believe that he is always taking care of them.  So if our baby gets leukemia, there is a reason for it.  It is part of God’s plan.  It will only bring us closer to God and make us stronger for Jesus.   But I didn’t want my baby to get leukemia for Jesus.  If God had to give my baby leukemia to bring my husband to Jesus, then I would prefer that my Mary worshiping Catholic husband just went to hell.  I’m sorry honey – but I did it to save our baby!

I do remember a brief revival in my ‘married with babies’ prayer life when my third son Drew became very ill.  He was a plump, rosy cheeked, eighteen month old, when he came down with pneumonia, spent 13 days in the ICU and eventually had emergency surgery to remove a ‘rind of pus’ that had walled itself off in his lung making it impossible for even the most potent antibiotic to kill off the infection.  Every time he coughed, the infection would break through the pus wall, flow into his blood stream and his fever would skyrocket back to 105 degrees.  After attempting to siphon the infection out of his lung with two different chest tubes, the pediatrician finally decided to send him in an ambulance to Wichita for surgery.  By the time they sent Drew to Wichita he had stopped eating and was being fed through his veins.  He had grown very weak and you could see all the bones in his back.  We were very scared.  I distinctly remember sitting beside Drew’s hospital crib in Wichita promising God that if he got my baby out of that hospital whole and healthy, I would re-dedicate my life to Jesus.  I would go to church eight days a week, I would teach Sunday school, I would host bible studies and volunteer to run VBS for the rest of my life.  I would give all my money to the poor and spend every free minute for the rest of my days walking the streets in Mexican villages converting all the Mary worshiping Catholics to the correct version of evangelical protestantism.  But I also knew that the odds were very strong that Drew would get better regardless of my prayers.  While at that hospital, I saw moms and dads with seriously ill children that were much sicker than my baby.  It was highly likely that Drew was going to survive this ordeal, but looking at those kids, I could see that their odds were not as good.  This left a grave imprint on my mind, knowing that God was going to spare my baby, but some of those kids were never going to see another Christmas or another birthday no matter how hard their parents prayed.

My baby did get better.  We brought him home.  His emaciated body had grown so weak in the hospital that he was unable to walk and he had stopped talking.  He was a year and a half old and he could no longer sit up by himself.  But Drew healed quickly.  He had youth on his side, a devoted mother and spastic brothers who kept up tornadic activity around him all day long.  Drew gained weight, and within a week he stood up on his skinny legs and tottered across the room.  He shoved fist-fulls of macaroni and cheese and fat sausages into his mouth and soon started talking again and he hasn’t shut up since.  In just a few weeks time, except for the scars on his stomach and back, you would never know that he had been so incredibly sick.

And who did I owe for the miracle of my son’s recovery?  Who did I have to thank for bringing my baby back from the brink of death?  Why God of course!  God healed my baby!  God brought him back.  The team of doctors, surgeons, nurses, anesthesiologists, radiologists, x-ray technicians,  pharmaceutical researchers, surgical tool inventors, paramedics, hospital administrators – what did they have to do with anything???

Except deep down I knew that if Drew had gotten this sick just a mere fifty years ago, his chance of survival would have been almost nil.  I knew that the ability to operate on an infant – the tiny tools, the properly sized respirators, the correct dosage of drugs, these were all new technologies.  God didn’t save my baby.  Humankind’s ingenuity saved him.  Dedicated doctors, curious researchers, caring nurses, organized administrators, hard working people – they saved my baby – not God.  But of course, even though on a certain level I understood and fully accepted this idea, I still thought that ultimately it was God who decided who lived and died and that advances in science had nothing to do with the delicate thread of human life. If science saved my son, it was because God ordained that science save my son.

So did I keep my hospital room promises to God?  Did I keep up my end of the bargain???

Well…. sort of...

My husband was a medical resident at the time of Drew’s illness and I had three young sons (18 months, three and five).  We went to church sporadically, but we were not exactly stalwart in anything religious at this point in our lives, but I never forgot the promise I had made and when my husband took his first job as an MD, I eventually got ridiculously involved in a church and I think you could say that I kept up my end of the deal I made with God in return for him saving my baby by using all the advances of modern medicine.

As we began to go back to church and got more and more involved, I introduced the idea of prayer before meals to my family.  It became a habit, a ritual, a customary pause before meals.  The boys all became good at saying prayers at dinner.  One son in particular was masterful at meal time prayers.  He was the one we paraded out when the grandparents were visiting, knowing that this boy had the proper amount of reverence, devotion, fervor, gratitude and also he was wonderfully concise.  My youngest son however was a horrible pray-er.  He was awful.  He just couldn’t do it. We would try and make it really simple for Jack.  Just say three things you are thankful for Jack – just three things.  Just say, “Dear God thank you for __________ and ___________ and __________ ” But Jack could not come up with three things.  He would pause and stammer and wait and lapse into silence while our spaghetti got colder and colder and colder.  I think Jack thought that his three things had to be three amazing things, or three thing that no one else would think of or maybe Jack just wasn’t particularly thankful for anything.  After all, he is the baby of the family and usually gets everything he wants within seconds.  Perhaps gratitude was a foreign concept to him?  Do you understand gratefulness if you have never actually wanted for anything?  Or maybe Jack just thought the right people to thank were the people that actually took care of him – his brothers, him mom, his dad.  Maybe Jack – still being young and very left-brained, considered thanking an invisible deity to be strange and nonsensical.  Or maybe he just enjoyed the extra attention he got when he couldn’t think of anything to say during his prayer.

Giving up family meal prayers was probably the most awkward part of becoming an atheist for me.  (Aside from writing about it on the INTERNET!)  We would sit around the table staring at each other waiting for some kind of signal to start our meal.  How do we know when to eat?  What is the new signal?  We need a new ceremony – a song, a poem, a very short story, some kind of ritual that lets us pause and see each other prior to digging in.

And then I became an atheist making every prayer I have ever said – moot.

Still – losing one’s faith is not just a new way of thinking, it is also about establishing new habits and getting rid of old ones.  Up until six months ago, it was still very much my habit to pray and prayer is not an easy habit to break.  I went through a transition phase where I prayed to God by saying – God… I really don’t believe in you anymore, but on the off chance that you actually exist, could you help me find my lost earring? And then if I found my earring, I thanked God by saying - God, I am not sure you are even there, but if you had anything at all to do with helping me to find this lost earring – Thank You. Of course I knew that these prayers were absurd.  I knew there were people starving and dying from easily curable diseases and women were being raped by husband’s with AIDS and children were being turned into brutal soldiers and babies were suffering from abuse and neglect.  So I would add a little tag at the end of my prayers that went something like this… And God if you could please stop all the immense suffering in the world that would really be great.  You are so powerful Lord -so wise and strong and loving… so if you really do exist -  just please make it all stop.  Right now.  Thank you.

As my prayer life and my faith diminished, I found that the only time I prayed was when I couldn’t sleep.  Usually this was because I was worried about something and that worry was usually centered on one of my children, but I had some serious problems with praying for my kids at night when I couldn’t sleep.  First off – I had to apologize to God for hardly ever praying anymore and for not really believing in him anymore and then I had to spend some time promising to believe more and to pray more before I could even get to what I was really worried about.  Finally – I had to deal with the fact that I was laying on my back staring straight up at the ceiling while apologizing for never praying anymore which was not exactly a very reverent position.  Would it be better if I turned over on my stomach?  What if I laid on my side?  Do I really have to get up and kneel beside the bed?  What if my Mary worshiping Cahtolic husband wakes up while I am kneeling beside the bed?  That would be kind of embarrassing plus I would be committing the sin of demonstrating my holiness in front of someone and then I wouldn’t get the extra credit for holiness – because my husband had seen it.  And I knew that Christians are only supposed to be extra holy in secret when only God can see it.  This results in an awesome prize in heaven instead of the crappy earthly prize of only being seen by other people.  What I really needed to do was get up and go into the bathroom, lock the door and then kneel down and pray.  But was it really okay to pray beside a toilet?  Isn’t that kind of sacrilegious to pray beside the shitter?  I guess I could tiptoe out to the living room and kneel down by the couch to pray.  That would probably be the most pious thing to do, but what if someone wakes up and finds me kneeling down by the couch praying?  Not only do I lose my awesome prize in heaven, but my kids might freak out and my husband might think I had lost my mind.  It’s probably best to stay here in bed, losing the pious points, but also not disappointing God for being caught being holy or praying by a toilet.  Praying in the middle of the night was an exhausting ordeal – which was good.  I usually drifted off to sleep in no time.

Besides my middle of the night prayers were usually just more desperate pleas to ward off ‘God’s discipline’.

God – I know we are not exactly the most Christian family on the face of the earth and if we really loved you as much as we should, we would sell everything we had, give it to the poor and go open a missionary hospital in Africa.  I know we are not really obeying your word by living a very comfortable life in America and by occasionally purchasing things on clearance from the Pottery Barn catalog – but could you please not give anyone in my family leukemia to make us better Christians Lord?  I promise to start having early morning bible studies with my kids and to read a James Dobson book with my husband if you please don’t give us cancer to bring us closer to you God.  I will also start to give a full ten percent BEFORE TAXES GOD… no… I will give eleven percent!  ELEVEN PERCENT GOD!!!  BEFORE TAXES GOD!!! And I will never buy anything from the Pottery Barn catalog again!  Just please don’t give my babies cancer!  And please don’t kill my husband in a fiery car crash!  Eleven percent before taxes GOD and no cancer!  Okay God!  Okay?  Thanks God!  You are the best God EVER!!!  And sorry for laying here on my back while saying this prayer.  Just remember -  no cancer God!  You are awesome!

A few days ago, I was visiting a friend’s house and a meal was served.  The food was laid out on the kitchen counters buffet style and we went around the kitchen filling our plates with hamburgers, hot dogs, and garden fresh tomatoes.  The food looked delicious, but just as my kids and I were about to dig into the condiments, someone behind us intoned, “Let’s pray.”  My children were their usual tumultous pile of boyhood and didn’t hear the request to pray until the prayer was halfway finished.  It was one of those Mary worshiping Catholic prayers… “Bless us O Lord and these thy gifts which we are about to receive from your bounty…..“  I whispered to my kids, “Boys… boys… they’re praying.”  My boys quieted down and caught maybe the last dozen words of the prayer.  I still have an automatic impulse to direct my kids to quiet down during a prayer, but I did say, ‘they’re praying’ instead of ‘we’re praying’, so a shift has been made.  Perhaps someday I won’t feel the need to stop placing pickles atop my hamburger when others start demonstrating public piety to an imaginary deity.  I don’t need to thank God for my food.  Even if there was a God, I wouldn’t thank him for my food unless he started giving food in equal amounts to everyone.  Every good parent knows better than to give some kids plenty and other kids nothing, and yet if you examine the world situation, and believe in a ‘father type god’ you would have to admit that he is a pretty crappy parent with a penchant for severe favoritism.  When I want to show gratitude for my food, I prefer to thank my husband for bringing home the bacon so that I can buy groceries and myself for growing a fabulous garden and Kay for raising some fine grass finished beef and Darla for her free range eggs and a nearby dairy for it’s delicious milk from healthy cows and my sister for a generous amount of pork from her home raised pigs.  I am not sure where the line is in terms of respect for the prayers of the household that is serving you homegrown tomatoes on a hamburger buffet, but I do know that I am perfectly willing to prostitute myself and at least be quiet for a few moments of prayer so that I can enjoy the food and the company.   But I don’t think I will shush my kids again.  I am sure that someone else will do it for me anyway.  At this point in my life – prayer is a supremely silly act and though I am frequently silly around my kids, I don’t need them to see me pausing in respect so that other people can speak to an imaginary deity that only gives food in abundance to those with the money to pay for it.

I had to buy this magazine.  Sorry.  I couldn’t help myself.  It was like I was possessed or… or… hypnotized… or maybe I was channeling Sylvia Plath, but on a recent trip to the grocery store it jumped into my cart and I lacked the strength to pull it back out.

As a result I have been sucked into the latest chapter in the Bristol Palin/Levi Johnston love story – and by ‘sucked in’ I mean I have spent the past four days watching every interview, video, commercial and YouTube mash-up ever made about these two young people.

I think I might need an intervention.

I did take a small break today to take a few boys to go see Inception during which I fell asleep...twice.  On the way home from the theater Ethan said, “I heard that the writer took ten years to finish that show”.

“Yeah – and it took ten years to watch it too.” I replied.

The movie is long.

And confusing.

And then you stop caring.

And then you fall asleep.

And then you get ‘jumped’ and you wake back up to find that they are shooting ‘projections’.

And then you remember how little you cared in the first place.

And you fall back to sleep.

And while you are sleeping you start having a dream, that is inside of a dream, that is inside of a dream and you loooooooong for someone to kill you so that your brain will be turned into scrambled eggs under a pile of dreams so deep that you can never climb out.  But the dream lasts for fifty years which is 350 years in dog years, but only five minutes in reality and for some strange reason, Juno is in this movie – or the actress that played Juno.  Or maybe Juno was in the dream, that was inside of the dream, that was inside of the dream. Either way, you arrive at the same conclusion which is that the actress who plays Juno belongs in a psychological thriller/action adventure type film about as much as I belong in a psychological thriller/action adventure type film, which I don’t.  Because the actress formerly known as Juno lacks the necessary intensity for a psychological thriller as well as the upper arm definition for action adventure.  Also her voice has that permanent ironic lilt that makes every word that comes out of her mouth drip with ridicule and she can’t really stop her face from looking sarcastic either.  It makes about as much sense to put the actress formerly known as Juno in an action/adventure/thriller as it does to cast Bristol Palin in a love story with a red neck high school dropout who can’t keep a job.

Speaking of Bristol Palin.

Did you hear that she is back together with the father of her child redneck high-school dropout/ former playgirl model/pistachio ad man, Levi Johnston?

Also!

Did you know that at one point, Levi had the the name ‘Bristol’ tattooed on his wedding ring finger?  Shortly after the baby was born, they broke up, so he had his ‘Bristol’ tattoo covered with something that resembles a big black… smudge?  Someday his son will ask him what that big black smudge is and won’t he ever have a story to tell!

He will also have to explain why the name ‘Johnston’ is tattooed on his arm. Is that sort of like a reminder?  Sometimes I write reminders on my hands, but they usually have more to do with grocery items or errands than they have to do with helping me to remember who I am.  I can also usually remember who my husband and kids are too, so I have yet to tattoo their names on any of my body parts, but I do occasionally mix the names of my kids up calling Ethan, Calder or Drew, Jack – still I don’t see how a tattoo on my body would help me remember which kid is which.  It would be better if the tattoos were on my kid’s bodies, preferably across their foreheads so that I could easily see their names when I was addressing them and therefore be less likely to call my sons by the wrong name.  But ultimately, I think that this whole tattoo strategy of Levi has more to do with grizzly bear attacks than it has to do with memory loss. Levi shot his first grizzly bear when he was seven.  I think maybe if you hunt grizzly bears in the Alaskan wilderness you might want to take steps to make it easier to identify your remains just in case the grizzly bear shoots back.  And if the grizzly bear shoots back and eats both your face and your fingerprints, it really would be smart to have your name tattooed across your arm which the bear won’t eat because it is already full of face and fingerprints.  However, the grizzly bear theory does not hold up in the case of Levi Johnston’s sister Mercede who has the name ‘Levi’ tattooed on her wrist.  Because if she ever gets her face and fingerprints eaten off by a grizzly bear, everyone is going to think that it was actually Levi who was eaten.  But then again, if Levi gets eaten by a grizzly bear and all that gets left behind is his ring finger, they might eventually discover the name Bristol under that black smudge and then everyone is going to think that Bristol was eaten by a grizzly bear.  So now I am thinking that this whole ‘name tattoo thing’ to help people identify your remains in case your face and fingerprints are eaten by a grizzly bear while hunting in the Alaska wilderness is not very sound.

I can’t wait to see where they are going to have the name of their son tattooed!

On Bristol?

On Levi?

Or maybe they should just go ahead and tattoo the baby’s name on the BABY!

I would suggest right across the forehead.  Especially if they decide to have any more kids.

In the meantime, Bristol has been actively involved in the Candie’s Foundation to prevent teen pregnancy.  The catch phrase for this campaign is ‘pause before you play.” which does not exactly push abstinence does it?  It does push ‘pausing’ but that is rapidly followed by ‘playing’ which falls far from the mark of demanding absolute abstinence.  Yet Bristol continues to promise to maintain her pledge to remain abstinent from sex until she is married – which lucky for her appears to be right around the corner.  The article in the Us magazine that I bought suggests a wedding this summer.

Phew!

That was a close one.

So I think Levi will be keeping his stick on the ice, but should he forget, there is always the baby to remind him of the consequences.  And that baby’s name is Tripp. (I am just writing that as a helpful reminder to Levi, because he doesn’t have Tripp’s name tattooed anywhere on his body yet.  At least not anywhere that I can see.)

More Candies Foundation ads to prevent teen pregnancy here.

Congrats to Levi and Bristol!