DUOFILIA

My dear friend Fred, who is like a brother to me, is very, very ill and currently in the hospital for side effects and severe infection after chemotherapy for leukemia. Please pray in earnest for him to pull out of this, if it’s the will of God. And also pray for his wife Sheri who has stayed by his side this whole time, supporting and caregiving him. We deeply appreciate your thoughts and prayers.

Three Link Thursday is on vacation. Probably sipping lemonade in Costa Rica. But it will be back.

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The story below really touched me. It is profoundly poignant, a beautiful story that urges us to rethink our priorities. I also think of how God loves me even more than this. Read the story and then watch the video.

[From Sports Illustrated, By Rick Reilly]

I try to be a good father. Give my kids mulligans. Work nights to pay for their text messaging. Take them to swimsuit shoots.

But compared with Dick Hoyt, I suck.
Eighty-five times he’s pushed his disabled son, Rick, 26.2 miles in marathons. Eight times he’s not only pushed him 26.2 miles in a wheelchair but also towed him 2.4 miles in a dinghy while swimming and pedaled him 112 miles in a seat on the handlebars–all in the same day.

Dick’s also pulled him cross-country skiing, taken him on his back mountain climbing and once hauled him across the U.S. on a bike. Makes taking your son bowling look a little lame, right?

And what has Rick done for his father? Not much–except save his life.

This love story began in Winchester , Mass. , 43 years ago, when Rick was strangled by the umbilical cord during birth, leaving him brain-damaged and unable to control his limbs.

“He’ll be a vegetable the rest of his life;” Dick says doctors told him and his wife, Judy, when Rick was nine months old. “Put him in an Institution.”

But the Hoyts weren’t buying it. They noticed the way Rick’s eyes followed them around the room. When Rick was 11 they took him to the Engineering department at Tufts University and asked if there was anything to help the boy communicate. “No way,” Dick says he was told. “There’s nothing going on in his brain.”

“Tell him a joke,” Dick countered. They did. Rick laughed. Turns out a lot was going on in his brain. Rigged up with a computer that allowed Him to control the cursor by touching a switch with the side of his head, Rick was finally able to communicate. First words? “Go Bruins!” And after a high school classmate was paralyzed in an accident and the School organized a charity run for him, Rick pecked out, “Dad, I want to do that.”

Yeah, right. How was Dick, a self-described “porker” who never ran more than a mile at a time, going to push his son five miles? Still, he tried. “Then it was me who was handicapped,” Dick says. “I was sore for two weeks.”

That day changed Rick’s life. “Dad,” he typed, “when we were running, It felt like I wasn’t disabled anymore!”

And that sentence changed Dick’s life. He became obsessed with giving Rick that feeling as often as he could. He got into such hard-belly shape that he and Rick were ready to try the 1979 Boston Marathon.
“No way,” Dick was told by a race official. The Hoyts weren’t quite a single runner, and they weren’t quite a wheelchair competitor. For a few years Dick and Rick just joined the massive field and ran anyway, then they found a way to get into the race officially: In 1983 they ran another marathon so fast they made the qualifying time for Boston the following year.

Then somebody said, “Hey, Dick, why not a triathlon?”

How’s a guy who never learned to swim and hadn’t ridden a bike since he was six going to haul his 110-pound kid through a triathlon? Still, Dick tried.

Now they’ve done 212 triathlons, including four grueling 15-hour Ironmans in Hawaii . It must be a buzzkill to be a 25-year-old stud getting passed by an old guy towing a grown man in a dinghy, don’t you think?

Hey, Dick, why not see how you’d do on your own? `”No way,” he says. Dick does it purely for “the awesome feeling” he gets seeing Rick with a cantaloupe smile as they run, swim and ride together.
This year, at ages 65 and 43, Dick and Rick finished their 24th Boston Marathon, in 5,083rd place out of more than 20,000 starters. Their best Time? Two hours, 40 minutes in 1992–only 35 minutes off the world record, which, in case you don’t keep track of these things, happens to be held by a guy who was not pushing another man in a wheelchair at the time.

“No question about it,” Rick types. “My dad is the Father of the Century.”

And Dick got something else out of all this too. Two years ago he had a Mild heart attack during a race. Doctors found that one of his arteries Was 95% clogged. “If you hadn’t been in such great shape,” One doctor told him, “you probably would’ve died 15 years ago.”

So, in a way, Dick and Rick saved each other’s life.

Rick, who has his own apartment (he gets home care) and works in Boston, and Dick, retired from the military and living in Holland, Mass. , always find ways to be together. They give speeches around the country and compete in some backbreaking race every weekend, including this Father’s Day.
That night, Rick will buy his dad dinner, but the thing he really wants to give him is a gift he can never buy.

Watch the video here.

I took these pictures 15 minutes ago, standing on my deck. God saying, “I love you!”

So we’re sitting in church and Summerlyn is on my lap, facing me, looking around and wiggling. The girls are quiet in church but you can’t keep a 4 y/o from wiggling. Constant nonstop movement until bedtime.

I noticed that she was focused on my chest and I looked down. She had unbuttoned the top two buttons of my blouse and pulled it wide open. I don’t think Summerlyn would normally do that, she understands privacy well enough, but I think she was just not thinking, just in her own world.

I gasped and pulled my shirt closed quickly. I was fortunate for two reasons, 1) because she was on my lap the pastor wasn’t able to see what had happened, and 2) I was wearing a camisole underneath, otherwise my flesh-toned bra might have caused some of the myopic little old ladies to pass out.

Afterwards we had a potluck. I’m a good cook and I like to experiment. Yesterday I was tired and so threw a casserole together off the top of my head. Since the casserole would be warmed in the church oven, I decided not to cook the diced potatoes before hand. I added mushroom soup and mushrooms and garlic. Nothing fancy.

So when we went down to the potluck I looked for my dish on the table and at first couldn’t find it. Until I realized it was sitting there right in front of me. I’ll call it the Black Slop of Death. Yes, the combination of not cooking the potatoes plus the grayness of the homemade mushroom soup made it black and grey. Afterwards, David said he saw it and avoided it at all costs. So did nearly everyone else. I had some, perhaps as a little self-punishment, and it actually tasted just fine, but man, it looked repulsive. Actually, looked a little like cuitlacoche, a corn fungus delicacy eaten in Mexico (check out this link only if not easily nauseated), only more dry than slimy.

After we ate (other food) we drove to Leach Botanical Gardens. The girls had a great time exploring all the paths through the gorgeous woods. I used to know a lot of plant names but sadly have lost a lot of that data. It’s such a beautiful day, perfect temperature. I don’t want to go to work tomorrow. Oh wait, if I stay home I’ll have to help David shovel manure into the garden, so I think I’ll be content to commute tomorrow.

Hope you all are enjoying the day. Get some fresh air and sunshine and spend time with your families.

Let the heavens rejoice, and let the earth be glad; let the sea roar, and the fullness thereof. Let the field be joyful, and all that is therein, then shall all the trees of the wood rejoice. Psalm 96:11-12

First of all, the whole insects in the Christmas tree didn’t go off as spectacularly as I’d hoped. My mother-in-law found the plastic bugs herself and thought they were cute, but she didn’t see the tarantula. We had to practically point it out to her and then all she did was jump back startled. No screaming or fainting. Christmas is just not as fun as it used to be.

Thursday before Christmas I took the girls on our annual trip to the Dollar Store where they selected presents for everyone on our list. They wrapped the gifts themselves, using more tape than an elderly chorus girl.

Christmas Eve day we delivered the loot to our the needy Christmas family. That was better than last year where the family acted like it was their right to receive gifts. This year’s family was humble and expressed their desire to pay it forward once they got back on their own feet. The husband, who is artistic, gave me a t-shirt he had airbrushed for me. Summerlyn fell in love with their two-month-old baby and wanted to take it home.

Here’s something amazing: not only did the girls not ask us even once, what we got them for Christmas, but on Christmas Day we didn’t get around to opening the presents until about noon and the girls never once asked to open them. The presents had been under the tree for three days.

The girl’s loved their dollhouse, David his tool chest, and me my mixer I’ve wanted for twenty years. It was a lovely Christmas made extra speical by seeing the girls get wrapped up in the spirit of giving instead of receiving.

We won’t talk about the in-law problems that gave me an ulcer all weekend.