pilgrimage

A long time ago (okay, just shy of three years ago...I had a blogging dry spell for a while there) I started a one-word project: I asked people to give me one word as a writing prompt, and I would write a blog post inspired by that word.

Since I'm busy at the RevGals Big Event this week, contemplating writing as a spiritual practice, it seemed like a good time to resurrect the project.

So I'm thinking about pilgrimages--journeys, often with some degree of difficulty--to a special place in search of an experience of the Holy. I kind of love them. So much so that I will occasionally use the word to talk about simply going to inspiring places that aren't easy to reach. For instance, I used to say that Whole Foods was a pilgrimage for me. It's 45 minutes from my house, and once you navigate the directions and the traffic and the bad drivers, you find yourself in a place of wonder and ideas and hope.
(we'll leave out the part about the political ideology of the owner of the corporation, and the prices in that place...)

Now, of course, I work just 5 minutes from that Whole Foods. So my place of pilgrimage has become potentially ordinary.

And there's an interesting idea...what happens when the experience of wonder, of the holy, of inspiration, turns from something special and difficult to reach into something ordinary?

I know many would say that it makes it not special. This is the usual argument against weekly communion, for instance--that if we do it all the time, it's not special. But that's not quite true, is it? There are lots of special things that are made more special by their frequency, not less. Little-kid hugs, kitty snuggles, tv shows, movies we like to watch over and over, walks in the park, conversations with friends. Hopefully we do these things frequently enough that they become a part of us--like Taize music, where the melody and simple words are repeated so often that they become part of your unconscious prayer.

Maybe finding ways to bring a little something of the pilgrimage into the everyday is part of what it means to pray without ceasing?




another aside: I do value the idea of pilgrimage to holy places, and have participated in several and even led one. The pilgrimage in the Holy Land, or in the northern holy land of Scotland, or in Rome, have all been meaningful times in my life. I'm planning a Reformation pilgrimage to Germany and Switzerland even now. But still I wonder: can I bring the experiences I had in those places into my everyday awareness? And if not, is there value in that pilgrimage experience, or was it just another trip?)

coming down from the top of Mt. Sinai, toward St. Catherine's monastery--home of the burning bush

with a bunch of people seeking an experience--or any variety of experiences--on Iona

the arms of holy mother church (!?!?!)--from the top of St. Peter's Basilica

wisdom...

I have been thinking a lot about wisdom lately, but not "wisdom" in the traditional sense, or at least the sense it usually seems to get talked about in our culture. We have this picture of wisdom as something you sort of magically get when you're older--as in the phrase "older and wiser"--or through lots of really hard and tragic experiences.

But "wisdom" is also a spiritual gift listed in 1 Corinthians and it shows up on all the spiritual gift inventories, described as (different from knowledge) knowing God's will and being able to see the connections between everyday life and spiritual matters/God-things.

I think there's also another kind of wisdom--the kind that allows us to see ourselves clearly, to see others clearly, and to make room in that clarity for the movement of the Spirit.

I don't think many people (myself included) have this kind of wisdom.

But this is the kind of wisdom that we need if we are going to stop saying things like "it's not my fault there aren't any women leaders at this conference--we were just looking for the best people." This is so arrogant/condescending (especially when talking to a woman), and it shows that the speaker has not seen clearly the gifts of others or made room for the Spirit to work through people the speaker doesn't see fitting the usual mold of leaders. (Because really? all the best people just happened to be white men? really? hmm.) It's also the kind of wisdom we need if we are going to stop meeting new ideas with "that won't work because ______." Because as soon as we utter those words, we have shut down our own vision of others, we have blocked their creativity, and we have closed the windows and kept the Spirit outside. This is the kind of wisdom at work when we choose to listen without fixing the problems of the other person, when we show compassion without needing to solve everything for them...because when we fix it, we not only give the impression that we believe we are better than the other person, we also close down room for the Spirit to work in that person's own creative solutions to what's going on in their life.

The trouble is, this kind of wisdom requires that we know ourselves really really well, and that we simultaneously allow others to know themselves (and show that self to us) and to know us. So few people in our culture are truly self-aware, and so few people seem interested in really knowing The Other, and so few people want the Holy Spirit blowing in and messing up their worldview and plans, that this kind of wisdom seems scarce. When we're around it, we know. But most of life (at least my life) is not lived in that wisdom atmosphere, and we barely notice its absence until we breathe that life-giving air for a few moments...and then it's awfully hard to go back to the way things were.

So today I'm working on making space, because I breathed that other atmosphere and now I want it back.

friend

I have some amazing friends--people who have walked with me on the journey of life and faith, people who listen well, people who tell amazing stories, people who know how to share laughter, people who have challenged and supported and generally been fantastic.

Among these friends:

Rachel (my best friend from high school), with whom I shared the excitement of the Running Start program, where we went to college during high school, and who has been an important partner in my seeking and discovering both faith and ways to do good in the world...who recently got married in a fantastic (if I do say so myself) ceremony in Seattle. (why yes, I did do the ceremony! and I did refrain from using my impromptu "sermon" in the ceremony to tell Alan, her new husband, how funny I think it is that one of the things Rachel keeps saying is that she likes to hang out with him, in spite of the fact that Rachel is the only person I know who has ever declared a moratorium on "hanging out." (scroll down to January 13) LOL.)

Amy (my best friend...we met in seminary), who I didn't like at first and who didn't like me! Amy has been with me through so much...seminary, relationships, good choices and mistakes, adventures and explorations (which is NOT the same thing as being lost!), travels, hopes and dreams both fulfilled and dashed. We may live hundreds of miles apart, but still our friendship grows thanks to cell phones and airplanes.

Elsa (a fantastic friend I met through the young clergy women project), who opened her heart and her home when I so needed both of those things. Elsa also knows how to challenge and support simultaneously, which is a little ridiculously impressive. She calls me on my crap, listens when I spout my neurotic issues, and knows how to use twitter and text messaging to great effect. I particularly appreciate the way she is compassionate and loving and blunt all at the same time. And, of course, the parts of our journey that we share in common make her a wonderful sounding board and comforter when I'm particularly neurotic about health issues or grief stuff.

The PFC girls--my McHenry County friends, amazing women who play and laugh and cry and are generally wonderful. They are fun to hang out with, good friends and wonderful people. Their compassion, willing spirits, and great laughs make my life here very good.

Among these PFC girls is one who is moving away. I know from experience (obviously) that it is more than possible to maintain and even grow friendships without living near each other. But it's still hard--to know that the days of random dinner parties or late-night tv watching or shouting at Mario Kart or spur-of-the-moment hot cocoa with bailey's nights are coming to an end, to know that when I forget something I can't just call this friend to help, to realize how much that friendship has come to mean and to contemplate the ways it will change now that we have to drive 4 hours to visit in person. We'll still be friends, and we'll still be close I'm sure, but it will be different. So I think I'll take this moment to just say thanks: Thanks for being my friend, for keeping me sane, for listening and talking and watching The Doctor and talking about Buffy and commiserating sometimes and doing rituals and making up youth group games. You're awesome. I'll miss you.

As is probably obvious from my list of good friends, I'm not used to being one who stays behind. I've almost always been the one who moved away. It's a weird feeling, but I suppose it's part of being a grown up and part of living in a culture where people move for economic and family and other kinds of opportunity. I understand it, but I don't have to like it (lol).

slide

It's the first day, and I always forget.

Short as the non-cold season may be here,

it's long enough to forget

how it doesn't take much--

a dusting, really, along with a cold night/day.

The snow turns to ice,

and what looks sparkly and pretty

and maybe even crunchy, if you get lucky,

is actually slippery.

One wrong step,

one extra swing of an arm,

one slightly-off-balance-from-carrying-a-bag-of-groceries move,

and suddenly I'm down.

and a car is coming.

Quickly enough I'm up again, hoping no one saw,

wondering what the bruise will be like,

glad I didn't get run over...

and glad to have gotten the first parking lot slide of the year out of the way.

clouds

We've reached the time of year when it's cloudy almost every day. As I look out my office window this morning, there's gray asphalt and gray sky and even gray-ish barren trees. Once snow falls and then gets old, freezing and re-freezing with dust and dirt and salt inside, it'll be gray ground and gray sky for pretty much all of the foreseeable future.

To say that clouds are not my favorite type of sky-adornment would be an understatement. I love the sun (though it does not love me, thanks to my ridiculously fair skin), I love blue sky, I love to see stars at night and vibrant color in the daytime. But here in the midwest, the blue sky and stars hide behind the clouds for months at a time.

It's not even so much the cold of winter that I find problematic -- though I don't prefer cold! -- it's the drabness. The gray everywhere. But on the other hand, blue skies in winter mean colder days (because the cloud cover does trap the heat a little), so that's a double edged sword. It makes it hard to hate clouds when they keep it slightly warmer, and when they do all their important water recycling work. But still...it's the beginning of the cloudy season, and I miss the sun already.

Play

This is a week when work and play have overlapped and intertwined and found their way through my days. I've recently been playing Mario Galaxy 2 on my Wii...it's crazy hard and many nights you can find me on my couch shouting at Mario on my tv screen, wildly waving the Wii-mote. Some may think that's not really play, or at least not relaxing, but it really is surprisingly fun. (well, most of it--there are a few levels that stretch the definition of fun to the max, but it's technically still play...)

Then this week I also WENT to a play...I saw Candide (oh, Leonard Bernstein, how I love your music) at the Goodman Theater with my friend Jenny. It was a very good show, capturing the spirit of Voltaire's novel and inviting the audience into the creative process of putting on the production. I found it funny and touching, inviting and depressing, strange and wonderful and beautiful and horrifying all at once.

And then this week at youth group we are planning a game that combines aspects of pilgrimage/labyrinth-walking, Cranium, and theology/bible/mission...in a life size board game. The game takes up the entire fellowship hall and we move around the "board" and have to answer questions or perform tasks at every square we land on. It will be awesome.

It occurs to me that these three types of play--personal, communal, and theatrical--are crucial aspects of the way we approach life. We need a little drama, a little problem solving, a little journey, a little laughter and a little stress and a little Bernstein music. We need to play alone (and learn to make our own fun and to amuse ourselves), we need to play with others (and figure out how to play well with others too), and sometimes we need to watch others play. One of the things I enjoyed about Candide was that the cast was obviously having a good time. They understood their roles in a satire to be filled with irony and subtle hilarity, and they were clearly enjoying it as much as we were. And if we never see others play, how do we learn to play ourselves? I mean, children play--at least, most (healthy) children do. They have active imaginations and lots of ideas and they play basically all the time. But at some point in our education or maturing process, we lose some of that. We lose imagination and wonder and wild abandon. Instead we play by doing grown up things like eating out or going to the movies or even playing video games (which, for me anyway, don't involve a lot of imagination or wild abandon--they are about figuring things out and accomplishing tasks to get points...which is still a form of being productive, if you think about it...).

But when we see others play, when we see a play, our imaginations are engaged, there are tons of possibilities, and we have to suspend reality for a little while. So ultimately, while the actors may be the ones playing a role, I think we are the ones playing--letting go and just having fun exploring an imaginary world for a little while. I'm glad I got to do that this week, and I am excited about seeing 2 more productions in coming weeks. May there be more play in all our lives...

rain

Usually I am sort of against rain, on philosophical principle. I mean, I get that it's necessary for plants to grow and stuff (and I do love me some fresh-from-the-garden food, including zucchini that seem to double in size after a night of rain), but in terms of mood and productivity, rain is a big downer for me. I dislike rain pretty intensely...which strongly suggests that Seattle was never really the place for me (ha!), and I'm constantly saying to people that I hope never to move back there. At the same time I'd be perfectly willing to move to Portland or Scotland, where it also rains a lot, so maybe there's something else going on there...

Anyway, today it's gray and it's supposed to rain a good portion of the day. This means a couple of things: 1. it will hopefully help cool us down just a tad, and break the humidity ickiness we've had going on; 2. Guinness is not going for a walk today.

Guinness is a Kerry Blue Terrier, feisty and gorgeous and hilarious. He owns my friends Laura and Bruce, who are on vacation in Hawaii, which is why I get to go to Guinness' house and feed him and take him for walks and watch him scarf up baby carrots more enthusiastically than treats. Guinness is a very spirited walker...by which I mean he walks me more than the other way around. So while we could cover the mile loop pretty quickly, doing it in the rain just doesn't sound terribly appealing. It's more likely that I'll attach him to the lead in the backyard and let him run around out there in the rain by himself.

On the bright side, rain will also wash off Guinness' back deck, where he insists on peeing while I'm hooking him to the lead or even to his leash if we're going for a walk. It's better than being so excited he pees in the house, but only by a little. I've been hosing the deck down, but a solid rain will probably do more good.

So there you have it--dogsitting has helped me see the light, and I can now say one good thing about rain. :-)

Hopefully the sun will be back tomorrow.

growth

So I've been involved in a number of discussions about "church growth" here at Church Unbound.

What's interesting about this to me is that even after a zillion unsuccessful campaigns to "grow" churches numerically, churches are still experiencing numerical and demographic decline, while the "no religious affiliation" demographic grows in number with every poll. And even KNOWING these two (dare I suggest related?) facts, people still incessantly talk about church growth and mean getting more people on the rolls and in the pews. For some reason church growth is pretty much only about membership.

Please tell me this is not what growth means. Because ultimately, the church is not the same as the purely capitalist economy, which must continually grow or die. Besides that, we won't even talk about how "membership" is an increasingly irrelevant thing, not just in the church but in all kinds of organizations.

The church is about being the people of God in the world. Which means we're supposed to be about loving people and creation, caring for one another, serving others, feeding the hungry (in all aspects of the word "hunger"), building community, etc...in other words, we're about living good news, exhibiting the kingdom of heaven to the world.

When people wonder why unchurched people are unchurched (or dechurched), I always remind them that the church is overwhelmingly known in our culture for *bad* news, not good news. It's hard to grow numerically when what we see of church is mostly exclusion, hate, and fighting.

But besides that, church growth shouldn't be about the number of people on our rolls. What if, instead, we measured as Reggie McNeal suggests--in numbers of people engaged in serving others or numbers of people who view their everyday jobs as ministry? What if "growing the church" was about communities cooperating with the Holy Spirit rather than trying to do what we think we're "supposed" to do as a church? What if growth has more to do with love and understanding than it does with numbers? What if growth is about people living the good news in every place where they are, about *being* the church in every context in which we find ourselves, about being the body of Christ out in the world...and has nothing whatsoever to do with how many people are in our Sunday School classes?

Nothing I'm saying is new or even news. (though some conversations I've had the past few days have shown me that it is a radical idea for some.) Jan and others have been talking about these things for a very long time, and I suspect we'll still be talking about them for a good long while yet. I just hope we can reframe the conversations into something not about a slick new marketing technique (because who needs more products, religious or otherwise, marketed at them?), conforming, and pew-filling, but instead about growth.

capsule

I love to travel. LOVE to travel. Travel feeds my soul—I get to see places, meet people, do stuff…
So I’m at the beginning of two weeks of travel right now. Today I left home in mid-morning and arrived at Montreat, several hundred miles away, only a few hours later. Saturday I’ll leave here and, through the miracle of time zones, end up 3000 miles across the country in just “4 hours” (including a layover!).

The downside of travel is the means of transportation. Here in the good ole USA we don’t have a lot of good travel options—it’s pretty much drive or fly. Driving takes forever (12 hours from my house to Montreat if you don’t stop. at. all.) and is fairly uncomfortable. Flying is getting less and less comfortable every day—long security lines, oppressive packing rules, people insisting their bag is carry on size when it is clearly not, and very small spaces in which to sit for the duration of your flight.

Today as I was getting on the plane (a small regional jet—the kind where you have to walk out on the tarmac and then climb a little staircase) AND, coincidentally, contemplating my woefully inadequate handling of the one-word project so far, I realized that the thing about flying is that all these people are basically crammed into a capsule—it’s an oversized Tylenol tablet (and you kind of need those to fly anyway!). It’s also, in some strange way, sort of a living time capsule. All these diverse people, their stories, their belongings, their hopes/dreams/fears about where they are going and where they are leaving…their dated hairstyles or latest fashion, their iPods and laptops and hot novels…all speeding through the sky at 35,000 feet, going hundreds of miles an hour.

I think shooting them off like rockets would make time capsules more interesting than burying them. Someone take a cue from airplanes, the living speeding time capsule!!

picnic

I kind of feel like I want to combine several of the one-word project prompts into one, but it seems that would not be in the spirit of the exercise, so I'm going to try to go with just one at a time. And on a sunny day like today, a day when I'm still finishing up with post-mission trip stuff, a day when I'm looking forward to new things, a day when it's absolutely gorgeous outside and I am stuck in my office trying to get stuff done, a picnic is just the thing.

In southern Louisiana last week we had a picnic, sort of, almost every day. Three days we ate at our worksite, balancing on random pieces of furniture or paint buckets, holding peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on our dust or paint covered hands. The other two days we went to a local park and had picnics at picnic shelters, sitting at picnic tables, surrounded by grass and plants and wildlife and water...and across the street from a sno-ball (snowcone) stand. yes, life is good.

At these picnics, the youth in my group discovered something that I can't believe they didn't know about me before: when I get tired of peanut butter and jelly (which happens about halfway through the first sandwich), I like to make sandwiches out of cheese and chips. wheat bread, whatever condiments are handy (mustard and mayo are best), some cheese (american cheese will do--which is good, since that's what we had--though I did have swiss and american one day), and whatever kind of chips I have. Some days I put Sun Chips, some days baked Ruffles cheddar and sour cream, some days baked lays (plain)...but always cheese and chips. It's so delicious! Crunchy yet sandwichy, a fun mixture of flavors, easily held together with no need to reach into the chip bag while your sandwich falls apart in the other hand...and PERFECT for the vegetarian in your life who wants to have a sandwich but only has meat and cheese and chips on hand.

I learned to do this at a church picnic many years ago--the first church picnic that Fourth Presbyterian held at the "new" (especially then!) Chicago Avenue site--back when it was just a parking lot awaiting a building, not a thriving community garden. We had this picnic there, and there was Not.A.Single.Vegetarian.Thing at the whole picnic. So I had a hotdog made of chips instead of hotdogs--bun, ketchup, potato chips...mmmmm.....and ever since, chip sandwiches have been my picnic food of choice.

Well, I still eat peanut butter and jelly sometimes (I even packed my own no-high-fructose-corn-syrup-no-sugar-no-chemical jam to take with me to Louisiana...and two of us ate the whole jar!). But it's not quite a picnic without a chip sandwich.

puppy

Before I tell you a story, you should know that I tend to use the word "puppy" to talk to or about any dog, no matter the dog's age or size. I think there's probably a bit of puppy in every grown dog, just like there's a child inside every grown up person--the question is whether we let it out.

So today, the 5th of July, was the Crystal Lake 4th of July Parade.

...

...

...

I don't understand either, so don't ask.

My friend Cecily is out of town for the long weekend, camping with her family in the Wisconsin Dells. So I get to take care of Bonnie, her adorable puppy...who is, umm, an unknown age. Probably older-ish. I'm not sure what kind of dog Bonnie is, but I do know she looks a lot like a bichon-frisee, but isn't one. She's very loving, very funny, and very good.

Anyway, the last few parades I've been to (well, okay, Memorial Day and 5th of July, for the past 3.5 years) have lasted around 30 minutes. And they begin just 2 blocks from Cecily's house. So I thought I'd pick up Bonnie and we'd walk over to the beginning of the parade route (literally right where the various groups stage and then enter the route) and watch the parade.

Our first spot lasted only a few minutes because there was a boxer puppy (a young one) nearby who just Could.NOT.Contain.Himself and wanted to come play/eat bonnie every few seconds, and his owner was *clearly* annoyed that we had taken up residence only 8 feet away. So we moved across the street, where I sat on a curb and let Bonnie run as far as her leash would take her (about 6 feet). There was a great dane nearby, but not close enough to be interesting or interested. There were also two small dogs (one VERY small and yappy) but they were interested in each other, though Bonnie wanted desperately to join in their fun. And so Bonnie frolicked, made friends with some small children, and did that thing where she burrows her face into the grass and rolls around. I watched the parade, which was a typical small town 4th (5th) of July parade--a truck carrying the community band, trucks carrying the praise bands of various local churches (including one church that, I'm pretty sure, doesn't even use a band in any of their worship services), trucks carrying people who work at local businesses, girl scouts, library workers doing drill-team-esqu routines with book carts, local high school pom squads, the Jesse White tumbling team and the South Shore Drill Team, the local drum line, etc. It's a good time. But pretty soon I noticed that I'd consumed my entire bottle of water, Bon-pup was getting restless, and there were still an unknown number of acts lining up in the staging area.

The parade ended up being over an hour long. Bonnie was so tired and hot that I had to carry her partway home (much to the amusement of the police officer, who stared at me as I walked down the street with the 12 pound dog in my arms). And, of course, I have a RAGING sunburn. Because what fun is a parade without an unexpected sunburn?

I will say that I think I had more fun at the parade with Bonnie the lovely white puppy than I ever have by myself. She was fun to watch, fun to see kids interact with, and cute to carry home. Thanks, Bonnie, for a good afternoon. Hope you got a good nap and lots of water!

storm

There have been a lot of storms lately--physical ones, I mean. I feel almost like I live in the South again, what with the daily thunderstorms. There have been tornadoes, lightning and thunder, hail, power outages, and crazy wind.

This past Friday night we had two huge and powerful thunderstorms come through. The radar was RED, the trees outside were bent almost to 45 degrees, and the lightning and thunder continued for hours. There were reports of tornado sirens (but no tornadoes) and of hail the size of a quarter.

Also over the weekend I was contemplating 1 Kings 19, where Elijah experiences a storm (wind, earthquake, fire), followed by silence. He's also experiencing a political/religious storm, of course. Not to mention his internal storm!

Three years ago I preached on this text and opened with "it was a dark and stormy night, both inside and outside Elijah." Then this year, when it was actually a dark and stormy night outside, I decided I couldn't reuse the line...too bad. (The Glee illustration worked just as well!)

The internal storms are harder to talk about--this is the stuff of novels and TV dramas. We all have them, and each person's storm is different. I think I pretty well covered that in the sermon below this post (not that I was intentionally identifying with Elijah...it just sort of happened!) I think the interesting part is that the silence, the calm, comes after the storm, not before. Usually we talk about "the calm before the storm" and mean that eerie silence when birds stop singing and there's not even a hint of breeze...the calm that means something bad is coming. But this calm after the storm is...well, hopefully is not just the calm before the next storm! It's somehow qualitatively different. It feels different, more...calm, I suppose, less anxious/filled-with-foreboding.

Sometimes the summer is the calm (both before and after the storm!) season for pastors, especially those of us who work primarily with programs. Programs tend to break in the summer, at least a little bit. It's a time to both take a breath and to look ahead, to plan. At this moment in our congregation's life, and in my life as the Associate Pastor of a congregation that is without a head of staff, we're doing more breathing and less planning...hoping to be in that lull that means that the worst is over and something good is coming.

Elijah left the mountain after the storm and found himself in a partnership with someone new. I'm hoping the same will be true for us--it's so much easier to face the next storm with a colleague by your side.

(send some good vibes our way, would you? we've been waiting for the Spirit for a long time on this one, so if we could just remind her that we're still waiting....LOL!)

Scoop

I must confess that my very first thoughts on hearing or seeing the word "scoop" all involve ice cream. I love ice cream in ways that can't really be described in words. If I thought I could work out every other available minute, I would eat ice cream for lunch and/or dinner probably every day.

My favorites, of course, depend on the season.

Early summer calls for root beer floats, filled with much more than just one scoop of ice cream.
late summer/early fall is when I turn to the mackinac island fudge ice cream with caramel and hot fudge topping, no whipped cream and no nuts, extra cherries.
the instant it's "holiday" enough time for the grocery stores, I scoop up peppermint candy ice cream, which I think may be my favorite but is only available in November and December. (OMG yum)
midwinter is when Girl Scout Thin Mint Cookie Ice Cream becomes available (briefly)...also yum.
spring makes me want sorbet. Maybe because there hasn't been anything resembling fruit (or any kind of real fresh food) in my part of the country for so long by that point that the acidic fruity nature of sorbet is something my palate craves.

And, of course, the Turtle Blitz from the Freeze is lovely and wonderful anytime the Freeze is open (May-October). They use pecans that are both salty and slightly glazed...maybe they add salt to the caramel as they're glazing? I don't know, but OMG it's so good.

When it was available, I also loved the Breyers Overload "Fried Ice Cream"...with a little warm caramel sauce added, it tasted JUST.LIKE. fried ice cream from my favorite mexican restaurant back in Yak. (I don't think they're making this anymore--I looked for it the other day to no avail.)

If I'm looking for a grocery-store available ice cream that won't tempt me to eat the entire half gallon tonight, I like to pick up Ben and Jerry's "Everything But The..." It has heath bar pieces in it, which are so ridiculously good in ice cream it's a little embarrassing. (the lack of half-gallon temptation is due to the size Ben and Jerry's comes in...I have accidentally eaten the entire pint before....)

When I was little, during the time I lived at my grandparents' house, I remember eating ice cream with my grandpa many nights. His favorite is rocky road, I think--chocolate ice cream with marshmallows and I think chocolate covered peanuts? That's not my favorite, but it's certainly pretty to look at! We would get our bowls of ice cream and, if we had a special night, we might get out a bag of pretzels and use the pretzels as spoons. Salty-sweet, creamy-crunchy, cold-roomtemp...it was so so good, and such a wonderful memory to have. So wonderful, in fact, that tonight I might just eat some ice cream with pretzels....

What is it about ice cream that makes it the first thing to pop to mind on seeing "scoop"--right before thinking about singers who scoop their notes and before thinking about gossip/news?
I have no idea.

I do know that it's one of those things that makes my mouth happy, and it must release some kind of endorphins because ice cream just feels so...relaxing, luxurious, soothing. I eat ice cream even when it's cold outside and everyone else is saying "you seriously want to eat ice cream TODAY? really? it's too cold for ice cream."

It's never too cold for ice cream.