The Allen Family in Mozambique

When my oldest son went to preschool, I would pick him up after school was out and would stay afterwards out back to chat with Dan Allen, one of the few other dads who wasn't working a job that time of day. We would adjourn to the schoolyard, with his kids and mine running ahead and climbing all over the playground equipment.

In those days, Dan and I spoke of many things. Dan is a deeply convicted and devout Protestant, and I the same thing, only Catholic. We discussed abortion, evil cultural influences on children, Islam, and morality. We spoke of sin, redemption, forgiveness, faith, heaven, and hell. We saw something unfold over time, a truism I first heard from Mark Crutcher at one of his seminars I'd attended 15 years before - namely, that because religious conservatives seek, affirm and embrace that which is true, they find more in common with each other beyond sectarian lines than they do with liberals bearing their own denominational label, who reduce and deny that which is true.

All the while our children played near us, sometimes cutting in competing for our attention. His two beautiful little girls had a way of hugging each other "sorry" when they'd accidentally hurt one another, and would hug my kids when they accidentally hurt them.

Those people are very far away from me now. After having given the matter much prayer and thought, the Allen family - Dad, Mom, and girls - sold their home, packed everything up and went off to Mozambique to do missionary work for their church. I've added their new blog to my blogroll.

Personally, I wouldn't do that with my kids. Mozambique is poverty stricken, AIDS ridden, and not as safe as America. By Dan's first blog entry alone, it looks like the country suffers from poor infrastructure, scarcity, and overpricing as well. Personalizing the situation by imagining my own family in it clarifies in my mind why the Catholic Church defines unmarried vocations for missionary priests, brothers, and nuns. But this family feels led there by the Spirit to do God's work, to bring the Gospel and loving hands to the people of Mozambique.

And so they have. And so they do. I pray for their success and eventual safe return.

Boy Eating Halloween Flesh Fries. Yechh!

Between the school party and trick or treating, our kids got lots of loot on Halloween. And because we strictly ration their candy consumption, they still have lots of Halloween loot.


A couple days ago, Patrick dug through his bag (the one from the school party, not the trick or treat bag) and found a sealed black plastic bag from one of his classmates. Inside that bag was a wrapped french fries cup that held 5 candy severed human fingers.

Here they are out of the package.

Yechh! Even though they're made of the same gummy stuff they make chewy fruit snacks out of, no one would actually raise one to their mouth and take a bite of it, would they?

No, wait. Oops!

Even kiddom has its limits. One bite is all he took, and so they remain back in the cabinet to this very day.

Takers?

Added: Glenn Walker's French Fry Diary has more on these foul confections here.

If Only He Were President

Friday was the parent-teacher conference at the school and, per laws of physics, the chain of parents ahead of me extended over their alloted face time with the teacher; thus, arriving at the appointed time entailed a wait out in the hall. In anticipation of parental wait times, the teacher hung up essays written by the entire first grade class out in the hall, entitled If I Were President.

With one exception, every child's essay's points were confined to the following:

• I would stop the war in Iraq.
• I would bring all the soldiers home.
• I would give the poor people money.
• I would give the poor people food.
• I would move into the White House.

Two of the boys added "I would play" as the final point.

My son reports that the entire first grade class except himself voted for Obama in the mock election. Were they under the misimpression that we don't give money and food to the poor people now, and that Obama's the only candidate who would do it? Who guided them to think that the only policies worthy of the President are of pacifism and redistributive socialism?

As I said, there was one single exception to the above manifesto; I'm proud to report that my son singly strayed from the lockstep with this opening sentence of his essay:

First, I would stop uborshin.

You done your daddy proud, son!

To Die of Shame

My wife had to work all day Saturday, leaving me with all the kids. The day before, the school issued the older boys 104 chocolate bars to sell within two weeks. Since that's both too high a price for me to do an outright buy of the lot, and too many calories for us to have around the house in any regard, we had no choice but to go out and sell them to the public. That meant me, with the four kids in tow.

Saturday was the day of the Berwyn Auto Show. They closed off a few blocks of Historic Route 66 to traffic for a few peak hours of the day so folks can walk around and admire the parked cars.




















With four kids in tow and a toting a heavy case of chocolate bars, I didn't have time to snap pictures, so I lifted a few from this participant's gallery.

Even as a guy who's never been into cars, I couldn't help but to admire the beautiful things that were the product of many hours of laboring, loving hands. The hoods were propped open for all to admire the detail the owners put into them with custom parts, fittings, lighting, and other configurations meant to be admired from the inside. Simply amazing.

Some of these engines were cleaner than my kitchen floor.

Literally.

The show was a perfect market to sell the candy bars, more so anyway than bothering people to answer their doorbells at home. Here there were hungry people out on the street with money in their pockets. So many of the owners sitting in their lawn chairs next to their cars were happy to help the little kids out.

Mr. Robert Pilsudski, the owner of these photos, bought 2 or 3 bars from Charlie and struck up some conversation with the kids (and welcomes all admirers, young and old). He's the nicest person we ran into at the show. In this photo, he's the man on the right.




The kids loved that fantastic car of Mr. and Mrs. Pilsudski, which is named "Light Show". It boasts every sort of lighting a car can have - undercarriage, wheel hubs, a dash display, laser animations, and so much more. You can see some gorgeous photos of the Light Show doing its thing against the Chicago skyline at the bottom of this page.

A row of older men beside their display cars beckoned Charlie over, and each peeled off a single or two and bought a bunch of his candy bars. Charlie wasn't much of a salesman, but their hearts opened up to him since they remembered having to sell stuff for Catholic school back when they went. (So help me, I wouldn't dream of going out and working the crowd at such an event by hawking wares like this if I didn't have to unload this haul for the school).

After the men's generosity, we moved on, the box loads lighter, when one of the men shot up from his chair and held up a finger. I said, "what, do you need another one?" He swatted dismissively and lowered back down into his seat. Then he shot up again and shouted, while at the same time I heard a loud grinding knock close to me.

His vehicle was polished to a uniform, glossy, cherry red lollipop perfection, and that included two wide running boards near the doors. I'm not sure whether this is the vehicle, but it looks the most like it from our friend's gallery:




And Patrick, in an act of pure, barbaric malice lashed out at this beautiful thing and stomped his foot squarely on the running board. The labor of love of the kind man who had just bought two of his candy bars. Not once, but twice. This was the tail end of a long time I'd been hammering it into these kids not to so much as touch the cars, and he knew that.

Add this to the list of times I wanted to drop dead of grief and shame on the spot. But not before meting justice to a certain someone on the way down. As Uncle Jackie [Gleason, that is] used to say, "Bang, zoom! Right to the moon!"

Memo to self: Do not take small children to auto shows. With so many delicate, expensive, unprotected, hand labored things about, auto shows are for grown-ups. Like when grandpa's toy train is set up, the stress level rises way up to the treetops with the associated risk level for damaging something expensive and perhaps irreplaceable.

Batman Begins (Ka-Shing! Ka-Shing!)

Movies in kiddie vision.

Given my state in life, the time I watch new film releases is when they get pressed and distributed as DVDs. Of these, it's mostly the ones that get viewed and deemed in the judgment of their first purchasers to be slated for donation to the Lyons Library, where I then rent them for free.

What better movie to rent than Batman Begins? I heard that this one was exceptionally good in the long line of Batman movies. I own a copy of the granddaddy of them all, Batman - The Movie, that campy classic from 1966. (I realize that's not the great-granddaddy of them all, which would be the 1940s vintage serials, but here I digress.) I liberated the DVD of my childhood TV friend from its unworthy temporary resting place in the Wal-Mart $5 clearance bin of shame, mixed in with low budget horror and fight films with the boxes in Spanish. My kids love that movie. You pop it in, skip the opening title sequence with the bad guy running past the words, and right away Batman and Robin are flying the batcopter over a trouble spot at sea. It's all great for my kids, bright and colorful as a comic book. Nothing that gives you too yucky a feeling to show them like the way they did up Danny Devito as the Penguin with the flesh rotting off his face in the remake.

That's the Batman movie they've come to expect. So I popped in Batman Begins and it starts up with some poor men in shabby clothes warming themselves outside on a dusty lot near some run down concrete buildings. They might be ruined buildings in a tank battle, or a prison, or in the shopping district downtown in some commie country. I have no idea. I'm watching this in kiddie vision, which is something like watching a foreign film without subtitles. There is much kiddie environmental noise in the room. You can see the action on screen and hear sounds but can't make out words.

The men on the screen are exchanging hostile words. No one is in a Batman suit. That's bad for this audience, which is rapidly growing restless.

One mean looking man shouts, "I am the DEVIL!"

Interruption. "Daddy, is that man really the devil?"

"Um, yes. I mean, I don't know, but I don't think so."

The men are punching each other. No one is in a Batman suit.

"Daddy, did he lie?"

I'm trying to hear something from Batman Begins besides I am the devil. Put this kid's fire out. Quick.

"Yes."

"Daddy, why did he lie?"

"Um, because he's bad. Very bad, son. Bad guys lie." Hey, this is a teachable moment. "Only bad guys lie. Don't every lie, kids."

"Daaaa Deeeee..."

"Yes?"

"Is he a bad guy?"

"Yes. Very bad." I'm inadvertently talking like Dan Aykroyd.

The scruffy men are punching each other. Batman isn't swinging in on a rope and joining in or anything. The devil's really taking it in the face. Then I take it that Batman's dressed down in his civvies, the scruffy guy in the dirty trenchcoat who's beating the devil guy's face in.

Next there's some narrative, a scene change, and we have two guys in trenchcoats fighting each other with samurai swords. Ka-Shing! Ka-Shing! That quieted the room a little. They stop and converse here and there then go back at it with the ka-shing. Looks like a whole lot of movie ripoffs rolled into one here. They've got the dark trenchcoats of The Matrix, the dueling pupil and master of Highlander, and Liam Neeson in this scene looking to mine eye like he walked right off the set of Star Wars Episode I and picked up a samurai sword. That's all lovely, but there's still no friggin' Batman in this movie!

The romper room audience timed out. Most of them walked out to make mischief in the back room. By the time I quell that, there's one last kid still holding out, and he's asking a zillion questions about the scene now showing; by the visuals I recognize that it's boy Bruce Wayne's parents getting shot in slow motion in front of his eyes. Ugh! The next scene is a youthful Bruce at stately Wayne Manor conferring with Michael Kane as Alfred the Butler, driving home the point that all this is now his.

Bong! Time's up. Last audience member gone after a half hour in and still no hood and cape. It reminds me of the old SCTV bit of Count Floyd, hosting Monster Horror Chiller Theater, the howling vampire playing up tonight's feature as "really scary". Inevitably, it would end embarassingly anticlimactically.

Batman Begins is back in the Lyons Library. Show it to your big kids.