All images ©Copyright by Mitch Teemley…of my country’s 250th anniversary, I thought I’d share a small slice of my America. Trudy and I are from California, and have travelled extensively. But all of these phone-tographs were taken in or near our current home in Cincinnati, Ohio, and feature local history and character. Enjoy, and have a Happy 4th of July!
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See video belowPreachers, teachers and group leaders: If you’re looking for a brief-but-powerful illustration about what patriotism means, especially for people of faith, my 2 1/2 minute video may just be it. In the film, four ordinary people remind us it means not only to celebrate, but to participate: “I may not be one of America’s founders, but I am one of its continuers!” My Declaration is available from church film distributor Sermon Central. To download the video, click here.
Photo courtesy of riotdaily.com…that fed my hunger for stimulation. It was the unknown. I think, at age seven, my real, underlying desire was “to go where no kid had gone before!” Not surprisingly, I had a budding passion for fantasy and science fiction. But I didn’t want to just read books or see movies about unknown worlds – I wanted to visit them!
And then I found one! Or rather, Somebody’s Cousin found one. True, our little suburb was only about ten minutes old, and so were our little one-size-fits-all tract homes. But on the edge of town, where Somebody’s Cousin lived, was a dead-ringer for the Adam’s Family house! It was a condemned Victorian masterpiece with five stories, if you counted the attic and the basement where “the bodies” were buried! And right there on the front door was an invitation. It said, “No Trespassing!”
Somebody’s Cousin’s mom was delighted to hear he’d suddenly acquired a dozen of new “playmates,” so she invited us all to come over for a Play Day.
…bejeebers have no known purpose. Hence, it’s best to lose them. And that’s done by having them scared out of you. Halloween was coming, and we were all in the mood for an extraction. And so, for three magical Saturdays in October, a dozen of us would arrive, thank SC’s mom for the bologna-and-cheese sandwiches, and then slink off to play in the haunted house at the end of the street.
We spent hours sneaking up on each other, making otherworldly noises, and whispering, “Who said that?” “Not me!” But the unquestionable E-ticket ride was the dumb waiter! We’d challenged ourselves by seeing how many of us could squeeze into it at once. Then we’d ride lurchingly, screechily down from the attic to the basement where the murder victims were entombed. This, we had it on good authority, was how the Evil Butler had transported them.
We never wanted it to end! But heartbreakingly, our haunted house was boarded up and torn-down shortly before the annual Halloween night invasion of beer-bashing teenagers.
It may not sound like it, but the upstairs Men’s Restroom at the back of Hiram’s Supermarket housed the secret portal to another world. One day while I was “ocupado” in a stall, I spotted a trapdoor in the ceiling. I told my buddy Rory about it, and we did what any seven-year-old adrenaline-addict would do. We stood on a stack of toilet paper rolls, and pulled ourselves up into Hiram’s Heaven!
It was thrillingly perilous, to be sure. To step on any of the drop-tiled foam panels would result in a twenty-five-foot plunge into the frozen foods. Or worse, the canned goods. If we did, we would thereafter hear the words, “You are in so much trouble, mister!” when we awoke in the hospital–assuming we’d survived the canned goods. But…if we walked spread-eagled across the wooden beams (do eagles actually do this?), we could go anywhere in this vast alternate universe.
And from there, we could look down like gods from Mt. Olympus through any lighting fixture hole, at the mere mortals below, who naturally assumed no one was watching them. What we saw was sometimes dull, but often funny, embarrassing, or even illegal. We’d finally gone…
Where no kid had gone before!
Photo by Edgar Chaparro
Image source: pinterest.com“Aslan,” said Lucy, “you’re bigger.”
“That is because you are older, little one,” answered he.
“Not because you are?”
“I am not. But every year you grow, you will find me bigger.”
Many people say they are, and that it is unfair, therefore, and infringes upon other people’s rights, to say otherwise. But when did everythingism replace tolerance?
Most nations have tolerance laws, ones that include everyone’s right to believe what they wish. But they do not protect everyone’s right to be labelled correct. In no other field of study does this kind of everythingism prevail. We don’t insist that all methods of brain surgery, or even weather prediction, are equally valid.
“Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.” ~Matthew 7:7
“The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried.” ~G.K. Chesterton
“You will never glory in God till first of all God has killed your glorying in yourself.” ~Charles H. Spurgeon
“I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.” ~C.S. Lewis
And these ridiculously literal memes and so-bad-they’re-good puns, are just that. When I was a teenager, my friends and I were watching a WWII movie at a theater, and the sound suddenly went out. On the screen there was a brief shot of a cat. A soldier pointed and spoke (still no sound). So my friends and I started shouting dialogue: Soldier: “Look, a cat, sir!” Captain: “So?” Soldier: “So, the Nazis are using cats as spies, sir!” Captain: “Capture that cat and bring it in for questioning!” Soldier: “Kommen sie hier, kitty!” When the sound came back on 20 minutes later, the audience gave us a standing ovation! Ridiculous subtitles and dialogue are still among my favorite forms of absurd humor. You too? Enjoy!
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Source: pinterest.com“Love suffers long, it is kind and does not envy…it is not easily provoked and keeps no record of wrongs. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. It never fails. Only three things will last forever: faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love.”
~1 Corinthians 13:4-13
∴
If adventure has a name, it’s Indiana La Mirada Jones Teemley. I know that sounds a tad over-the-top, but I had an insatiable hunger for stimulation; my mental motto at age 7 was, “The bigger the risk, the bigger the fun.” Hence, my favorite stories were adventures: The Three Musketeers, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, The Call of the Wild, and best of all, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. In my mind I was Tom and Huck rolled into one!
Our tract homes were boring popcorn-stuccoed boxes, suitable only for eating, sleeping and watching Zorro or Leave It to Beaver. So, Rory, Jeff and I virtually lived outside. And “outside” mostly meant The Field, which a big cheery sign labelled the soon-to-be home of “La Mirada Creek Park.” Work was due to start any day! But when we moved away a decade later, half a dozen matching signs had come and gone, each sun-bleached and riddled with BB and pellet gun holes. (The park was built shortly after we left, so obviously we were the problem.)
Every other year or so, The Field would catch fire, and the streets surrounding it would fill up with singed field mice, disoriented gopher snakes, and indignant geese. Grown-ups complained non-stop about the dangers of The Field. But their kids rejoiced. We liked it primitive and dangerous — danger was our middle name!
On The Field’s highest hill was our treehouse. Rory and Jeff and I regularly upgraded it. But other kids, mistakenly thinking it was their treehouse, kept altering it. So we switched to hunting for exotic critters like coyotes, quail, and cotton-tail rabbits. Alas, they resisted capture, but we regularly brought home pollywogs and crawdads from nearby La Mirada Creek. We would set the pollywogs free once they turned into toads, and find hubcap-sized versions of them a year later. But the crawdads quickly became gourmet meals for our feline family members.
I especially loved capturing trapdoor spiders! This was accomplished in five steps:
But the biggest buzz of all was “The Shingle Wars.” Kids from all over the neighborhood would climb up onto the rooftops of The Field’s two remaining, precariously-leaning shacks (left over from when seasonal flower-pickers lived there). We’d rip up chunks of asphalt-shingle roofing and “sail” them at the kids on the other rooftop! For weeks, we came home covered with cuts and bruises, beaming like gleeful little Vikings! But then a quickly-formed parents’ committee made the city tear down the shacks. No more shouting, “Today the shack, tomorrow Valhalla!”
Ah well, on to bigger and better ways to terrify our parents!
Image by Maksym DiachenkoWelcome, Summer Solstice!
“Summer has always been good to me, even the bittersweet end, with the slanted yellow light.” ~Paul Monette
Welcome, Summer Solstice!
