This past weekend we went to the mall; a group of teenagers said loudly enough for our whole family to enjoy, “How can he walk around with his face looking like that?”  I thought they were talking about my unkempt beard, but further along in our consumptive stroll my wife asked, “Did you hear that?  Nate did.”  Nate has a port-wine stain on his face, a birthmark.  If I had realized what was said while we were in their proximity, I might be posting this from jail.  Fortunately for the group of slacking miscreants and for my police record, I am slow.

The boy wears his hair long, over his face.  His personality is dominated by kindness, though sometimes I worry that he might withhold this because of his learned shyness.  Sometimes I worry that he hides behind the hair and the birthmark; I haven’t witnessed him doing this, but people are themselves at home, which is the only place I am able to consistently observe him.  Around here he is confident in his abilities.

The medical procedure to remove a port-wine stain is not considered cosmetic; our insurance covers it due to the way a port-wine stain collects red blood cells – I don’t completely understand this.  So it is an option, one which he neither embraces, nor fully rejects.  He thinks about it.  He talks about it with Molly and I, but then, like someone who understands all of life already, pronounces that we are his parents and therefore wholly void of objectivity.  His comprehension of our relationship is astounding to me.

He was wearing the pre-teen sadness last night, so we asked for some kind of explanation, which he was unable to articulate.  But it comes back to the damn birthmark.  I think the splotch on his face has made him incredibly aware of his emotional make up.  He was looking for advice, but not ours.  So we helped him make a list of people he respected whom he could consult.  Then we told him that talking with these people about it was up to him since he disallows our slanted input.

I don’t know if he’ll be wearing the birthmark when he is 13 or 14.  I do know that because he has worn it the first 11 years of his life, he tends to accept people for who they are.  He has a rare openness.  I wish he learned it from me, but instead he learned it from something he wishes wasn’t there.  I suppose he could be a mean and over-compensating young man because of the way he has often been judged; he is not.

I wish he’d bloody a few lips with his wiry muscles.  Test them out.  “Finish it,” I say, “don’t start it; end it.”  He doesn’t feel the need just yet, perhaps one day he will.  Whether he teaches someone a lesson or if he refrains, he is heroic in his manner and wise beyond his years.  To his father he is a walking lesson in grace and compassion.  “One day,” I tell him, “people will notice and appreciate your strength of character, but for now you’re in middle school surrounded by a collection of idiots.”  I hope he remembers this when it comes true.  Because right now, I’m just a father without objectivity.

I think God is like this.  If so, the calisthenics of self-improvement aren’t very useful.  They’re not necessarily bad, but they do tend to lead us into self-sufficiency, if they are not performed with utmost humility and honesty.  You learn these things if you’re born with a port-wine stain.

I am trying to generate some revenue to get my reused and reusable coffee sleeve into retail stores.  Many of you have stopped by cupThreads.com, and I wanted to say thanks.

If you buy one this week (please do because I’m really close to proceeding!) enter the coupon code “ryansfriend” and you’ll get yours for just $4.  Order 4 or more and I’ll also ship them for free.

Thanks so much.  I’ll be back to inspire you tomorrow morning.

I paused, “Um, 19 days.”  She thought that was funny.  Throughout the course of our conversation she kept saying things about 19 days.  I guess she liked the specifics.  Her use of humor suggested that she didn’t think I had some psychological disorder, a serious case of OCD, where I memorize all the details in order to give an accurate report.  Docs usually don’t joke about hypochondria either.

I never get sick so I remember the details.  The last time I saw a doctor was eight years ago with a broken hand.  Second-to-last time was 5 years before that; I had gangrene.  I wanted her to tell me that I had something serious.  No one wants to hear that they have a cold or the flu.  She did a strep test.  Negative.  I was hoping for some blood work.  Maybe mono or pneumonia.

“My eyes are on fire.  My ears feel especially pointy, like they’re preparing for launch.  Throat feels like a desert.  Even the bottoms of my feet ache.  Do you think it may be lycanthrope?”

“Probably not.  Since this sickness has been hanging around for 19 days, I’m going to put you on an antibiotic.  Gargle with saltwater.  Buy some lozenges.  Yada, yada.”  Just what I expected… an unnecessary antibiotic and a series of home remedies.

You mean I’ve been wearing this deathmask for nothing?  My chance of survival is nearly 100%.  I’m taking the antibiotic just in case.  It violates my principles, but so what?  Since I am going to live, I should probably begin blogging again.

art cred: outofmygord.com

Dear Regular Readers:

I’ve been away for a while.  I don’t know why.  I don’t know if there is such a thing as blogger’s block.  Normally I think blockages are reserved for people with real creative jobs, and regular Joes with blogs shouldn’t be subject to their rules.

As Norman Mailer once famously said: “Writer’s block is only a failure of the ego.”  Perhaps I have taken this season of Lent a bit too seriously to be creatively productive.  I don’t know.

Life happened in its severest form this week.  Does that ever happen to anyone else?  I’ll be back next week.  I promise.

Yesterday was a snow day.  I’ll try to not sound remonstrative, but it sucked.  I had work lined up, the kind that pays real money.  Instead all three kids got the day off.  The snow day was on the heels of a 14 day stretch of housebound illness, in which I was both a participant and also primary caretaker of the rest of the invalids, as my work currently draws the shortest straws when competing with my wife’s income.

You get grumpy during a stretch like this.  I started out the day as usual, 6 AM, reading the bible and calling down fire from heaven to consume my flesh.  February is depressing.  Didn’t happen, so I wrote some stuff, ate a plateful of Halls and Mucinex and had 3 shots of Nyquil.  I have a wastebasket full of used Kleenex that I drag around the house to support my newest symptom of OCD – nose-blowing.  Being of Scandinavian lineage, I am nasally gifted.   Molly gets called into work early for a nice 13 hour shift.  Awesome.  The kids ask for cinnamon toast.  I oblige.

Here’s the deal: the shaker thingy that says Ground Cinnamon looks pretty much the same as the shaker that says Ground Cumin, especially while you’re settling into the craptastic-ness of another insert word of choice here snow day.  Turns out kids don’t like Cumin Toast anymore than you might suspect they would.  Even the dog will not eat Cumin Toast, and he is not exactly picky.  The good news: serving Cumin Toast instantly changes one’s mood for the better.  (Historically, cumin was thought to keep both “chickens and lovers from wandering.” – neat side note!)

One of our friends called and asked if her kids could spend the snow day with my kids.  Since my mood had changed, I asked, “Do they like Cumin Toast?”

“What?”

“Nevermind.”

3(kids)+2(kids)=LOUD!, but it also equals happy children; easy math.  So I babysat.  Tiffany, our friend, my wife’s hairstylist and mother of my newly-inherited snow day children, asked if I was planning on actually watching the children while they played.  I said no, because I am honest.

She arrived anyway and I went through the standard checklist so I would appear responsible:

“Allergic to Vodka?”

“No.”

“Smokers?”

“No.”

“Do they have head lice?”

“Not that I’m aware of.”

“Alright, go ahead and leave em here then.”

I did contemplate pulling out paints and brushes with them like a good father/baby-sitter, but then the Nyquil wore off and sanity resumed.  For lunch we tried jam and onion sandwiches.

In my homeland round about this time of year, the obituaries began to run together, especially as the Winter weather eclipses Spring.  There are the few days of hope, maybe a day in the upper thirties.  But that day is followed by the doldrums of a two week cold-snap, where the sun tricks hearty, old Norwegians and stoic Swedes into believing the meteorologist might be wrong.

“I can feel it in my knees,” they say, “the weather is changing today.”  And so, with a heart bursting with expectation old men put on their boots and shovel the new layer of snow from their driveway.  On that sanguine day, the day of assumption, it is no longer “that damned covering of God’s forsaken territory” they shovel.  It is just snow; and, as it relates to God, it is his final, gentle gift of winter.  That is all; it is not a great curse.

But the knees, they lie to the heart.  The arthritis that is so often the great predictor sends the fallacious signal, which is only rightly interpreted on the third consecutive day of snowfall.  The Norwegian and sometimes Lutheran man with the arthritic knees is reminded of that old wisdom scripture, “Hope deferred makes the heart sick.”  This is true, but he does not realize the extent of the truth.  His blood pressure boils with the delaying melt.  Boils beyond what 19 blue cans of Stroh’s in a fishhouse is able to subdue.

Hoisting his shovel up over the December and January snowbanks in his yard, he feels the betrayal severely, and he thinks of his grown children: the son who has been relocated to Arizona by his employer, the middle-son who lives in an apartment in Minneapolis and has never so much as dusted off his windshield.  He goes from underground parking to a covered ramp.  No shoveling.  No scraping.  And then there is the daughter, who lives outside of Denver.  She relishes the snow.  Loves it.  Writes about it for a magazine which no one reads, Ski Bum Quarterly – a free periodical for the perpetually care-free.  She lives under a hut fashioned from used snowboards, insulated with the clothing of Texans who accidentally leave their gear behind, strewn about the mountain face from their end-over-end lessons on edges and on gravity.  “Seems the whole state takes an annual trip to ski Loveland,” she once wrote.

He thinks about these things, about his children, whom he once loved so dearly, the betrayal of it all.  Their insensitivity to the plight of the rural Minnesotan.  Oh, how his heart is sick.  And that is when it happens.  The tightness; it was just a normal scoop of snow, maybe a little bigger than usual, tossed over a drift slightly higher than it was yesterday.

His head is filled with last words, his wife, Judy, who said, “Don’t over-do it, honey.”  She was still in her bathrobe at 6:30, searching for her cigarettes.  Those would be her final words to him.  “Don’t over-do it.”  And, “Feed your dog.”  He hears those words in an echo as he falls to his arthritic knees, the lying knees, the failing, lying knees.  He hadn’t fed the dog, and wondered if his sweet wife would figure that out, or if he’d go hungry until tomorrow. In fact those were his final words, “Feed the dog.”  No one heard them.

The deferred hope has won out, and the obituary reads, “Died of heart complications on Wednesday; he was 56 years old.”  Few understand how true the term “heart complications” can ring.  It continues, “He passed from this life into the next while shoveling his driveway so that his adoring wife, Judy, could go to the store to buy more cigarettes.  Survived by his wife and his three children who live ‘anywhere but here’ (and have never shoveled snow).”

Meanwhile, the man stands before God, who questions him about his language as it pertains to Minnesota Winters.  The man looks sheepish and apologetic.  God says, “Say three Hail Mary’s, and all is absolved.”

“You’re Catholic?”

“Nah, I just thought since you were an occasional Lutheran you’d appreciate the irony.”

“Oh,” the man says in the way his people have said their “O”s for centuries, “Anyhow, sorry about the language; you ever spent a Winter in Minnesota?”

“No.”

“It’s pretty brutal,” the man advises.

“That’s what I hear.  I fish on Mille Lacs on Opener,” then God reverently bowed his head for a moment, an action the man found both strange and appropriate, “but I winter in Texas.  I do spend a week with some of the saints skiing at Loveland in Colorado.  You should come next year.”

“The locals hate that, you know.”

“Yes, well, ‘the trying of your faith produces patience’ and all that.”

“Yes, I suppose.”

“I met your daughter there.  Gave her a stocking cap with huge pink, fabric spikes sticking out of the crown.  I wore it on a dare; it was the dumbest looking hat I’d ever seen.”

“What do you do in March?”

“Cribbage and some Hymns until Easter.”

“Of course.”

Back on earth, Judy, the wife of the now-deceased, gave up smoking in honor of her late husband, and with his life insurance money, she bought a snow blower.  She lived to be 84.  She died peacefully at her home, drinking weak coffee.

I’ll blog-blog tomorrow.

I, I am he who blots out your transgressions for my own sake, and I will not remember your sins.

“For my own sake?”

“But what about me and my sake?” I argue.  So, you’re telling me this has nothing to do with me and what I deserve?  This is a preposterous and a scalding grace to be rediscovered with such frequency; to learn I play only the smallest of roles in my own redemption, like a spectator at a gallery, one who has paid a few dollars for admission.

But sometimes you have to judge, you do.  Something must be said.  Isaiah discovered a cure for this, though I am unsure it made him any more approachable.  He spoke judgment to his listeners, but he had one caveat that remains unique to Isaiah.  He didn’t wear clothes.

Today when you set out to judge one of your neighbors, disrobe and see if your findings still ring true.  If they do, go ahead and say them.  If the shame of your exposure overwhelms your judgments; keep your mouth shut.  Your deliberations will be much shorter and more clear.

A little over a year ago my wife Molly began making items out of felted wool from used sweaters and selling them, purses and scarves, etc.  I thought, this would be a great little upcycling business, but the income levels were such that her creations quickly became a hobby.

I began to play around with an idea for making coffee cup sleeves out of the material, just for a gas at first, as something that could be made rather quickly and generate revenue as a means of keeping my wife in the crafting business.  Over the past two months though, my playtime became a bit more focused.  I figured out a way to more than double, almost triple my previous production (and I’m not a very speedy seamster, by the way!).  Additionally, I believe that we have developed a way to grow this homespun business while keeping costs very low.  (Cue: Revolution – we all want to change the world!)

So we’re giving it a shot!

Our initial target markets are coffee and tea retailers in the Cleveland area.  We think our product is unique, and once it is held in the hand of a coffee connoisseur it will be hard to NOT buy one!  While we are waiting on packaging and other promotional materials to arrive, I’d like to invite you to be among the first to own a cupThreads – upcycled and reusable coffee sleeve.

kinder.cooler.better.

These are our driving principles behind the product (story here).  Our sleeves eliminate waste.  They are made of wool (highly renewable, just feed the sheep!), but not just any wool, already used wool, thoroughly laundered by the way – Kinder for our environment.  They look rad.  You can’t deny it! – Cooler.  They also cover your entire cup, adding an insulating value to the old standby, boring, wasteful cardboard sleeves you currently use – Better.

Please stop by cupThreads.  Then return to Ream of Paper (with or without placing an order, you’re still my friends) and let me know what you think.  You can email me your private responses at cupthreads(at)gmail(dot)com.  Or gush publicly!

Also pass the word about cupThreads.com on to your caffeine-addicted or environmentally-conscious friends.  There are only 60-or-so products listed, but we have literally hundreds more that are not on the site as of yet.

If you choose to make a pre-launch purchase, enter the coupon code: reamofpaper to receive a dollar off each sleeve.  Order three or more and I’ll ship them for free!

Let me know privately if you encounter any problems with the site or checkout process.  Thanks so much.