I Am Thankful For Music

Music has always been a part of my life. I grew up in a family where we would gather around the piano to sing. Our extended family reunions always involved a talent show and church services filled with music.

My mother is a contralto. She has always sung in church, at funerals, and at community concerts. In her mid 80's, she still has a better voice than people half her age. I'm a soprano myself, but I know the alto parts to all the hymns in the book simply because I listed to my mother in church. (This is helpful since my daughter has discovered she is an alto and I can sing alto with her to help her learn.) My father was a bass. He wasn't as comfortable singing in front of people as my mother was, but when they sang their song, "I Love You Truly" they blended beautifully.

I was in the concert band at school from 5th grade until I graduated from high school. I learned to appreciate classical music, from John Phillip Sousa to Wagner to Gustav Holst. If you've followed some of those links, yes, our high school band really did play all three of those pieces (but without the violins).

I can't imagine life without music. It's imprinted on my DNA. Unless someone is talking to me (and sometimes even then) I usually have music running through my head. I'll listen to anything except some forms of heavy rock (too painful to the ears) and rap (which is not singing - it's talking to a beat). Good music is good music, whatever genre it happens to be. But what I love most is when the words and the melody and voice combine to create something transcendant, when it speaks to my soul and becomes a prayer to God.

I Am Thankful . . .

For the beauty of the earth,
For the beauty of the skies,
For the love which from our birth
Over and around us lies,
Lord of all, to thee we raise
This our hymn of grateful praise.

For the beauty of each hour
Of the day and of the night,
Hill and vale, and tree and flow'r,
Sun and moon, and stars of light,
Lord of all, to thee we raise
This our humn of grate-ful praise.

For the joy of human love,
Brother, sister, parent, child,
Friends on earth,and friends above,
For all gentle thoughts and mild,
Lord of all, to thee we raise
This our hymn of grate-ful praise.

For the Beauty of the Earth
Text: Henry Alford, 1810-1871
Music: George J. Elvey, 1816-1893
Jon Schmidt arrangement

What Does Thanksgiving Mean To You?

What does Thanksgiving mean to you? Getting together with family and friends? Feasting until you are so full you can't move? Pilgrims and pumpkin pie? Macy's parade? Football? Scanning the sales ads in preparation for Black Friday (biggest shopping day of the year)?

Do you take time to give thanks on Thanksgiving? Many families have a tradition of taking turns saying what they are thankful for before they eat Thanksgiving dinner. We should be able to give thanks every day of our lives, because we are blessed every day of our lives. And the more we take time to give thanks, the more blessings we will recognize. At the very least, let's take the month of November and make it a month of truly giving thanks. Maybe we'll make it a habit.

So what do you think? What are you thankful for?

Vote Yes on Proposition 8

This blog is not usually politically oriented. I'm not crazy about the whole political process. It gets so contentious that I just grit my teeth and hope election day comes soon so we can get it over with.

But I have to take a stand on California's Proposition 8. I believe marriage is and should be between one man and one woman. Those who oppose Proposition 8 are very vocal and know how to use the media to their advantage. However, making the most noise doesn't mean you are right. But the "silent majority" is learning quickly.




I hope Californians will overwhelmingly vote YES on Proposition 8. And I pray that this time their supreme court judges will abide by the will of the people.

A Little Perspective

I had a wake up call today. Lately I've been grumbling a little about not having a working dryer. Mine doesn't work and it seems to have something to do with the wiring in our house, which is elderly. So until my husband can do some rewiring, I have to wash clothes at home and then either hang them up to dry or cart the wet laundry over to the laundromat a few blocks away.

This morning I had a nice visit with an older gentleman from our church who was washing and drying a bedspread in the extra large machines. (You've got to love a man who will do that for his wife.) During our conversation I discovered he had been an avid reader all his life until two years ago when he suffered a stroke that took away his ability to read.

I can't imagine living through many things more horrifying. (Not counting anything happening to a family member.) And I'm complaining about a lousy clothes dryer that won't work?

The good news is, this man's daughter bought him "Hooked On Phonics" while he was still in the hospital and he slowly worked his way through it. Now he can read enough to puzzle out a restaurant menu, but it takes him a long time. He usually just has his wife read it to him. And he "reads" books on tape and CD all the time.

So the laundromat isn't so bad. I actually get the laundry done faster there. There are nice neighbors to talk to sometimes. And I can get a lot of reading done. Lucky me!

Food Storage as a Lifestyle

When I was growing up, my parents kept a cow in the freezer. Well, really just the edible parts. My father raised cattle and at least once a year he took one cow to the slaughterhouse. A couple of days later he would bring it back home, in small, neatly wrapped and labeled packages, ready to take up residence in the huge upright freezer with the cases of Blue Bonnet margarine and Whole Sun orange juice.

The large quantities of margarine and juice were my mother’s doing. She did most of her grocery shopping at a place called Waremart, which was like a low-tech Sam’s Club or Costco. At Waremart, we pushed (climbed on, jumped off of, ran around, and were run over by) large flatbed carts and loaded them up with whole cases of canned tuna and evaporated milk, tomato and cream of mushroom soup, and Spaghettios if we could talk Mom into it. There was a bucket of black grease pens at the front of the store by the carts, which we used to mark the prices on each case. Waremart saved money by just stacking the boxes on shelves and posting the prices above them. Then they passed on the savings to their customers.

Our family also had a garden; a very LARGE garden. With 9 children, my parents had a lot of cheap (free) labor. After endless hours of hoeing, raking, planting, watering, weeding and weeding and weeding, came the harvesting. And canning. We picked and shelled and snapped and washed and chopped for hours. Once when I was a teenager Dad came home from work and after cleaning up he decided to help cut corn off the cob. He helped so enthusiastically that we later found corn kernels all the way into the next room on Mom’s piano.

For breakfast we ate cracked wheat cereal made from the grain my father planted and harvested on the farm, or pancakes with chokecherry syrup made from the fruit we had picked, juiced and bottled. A typical lunch was sandwiches made with my mother’s homemade bread, tuna from the storage shelves and home canned pickles. Dinner frequently involved parts of that cow in the freezer and the vegetables we had grown. Dad sometimes commented on the personality traits of the particular cow we were eating.

My parents grew up during the Depression and were a young married couple during World War II. As Dad put it, during the Depression there were things to buy, but nobody had money, and during the war they had money, but there was nothing to buy. Like Joseph of Egypt, my parents understood the wisdom of storing up in times of plenty to carry them through times of hardship. But instead of just keeping piles of grain in a bin, they stored food our family really would eat, and we really did eat from our food storage.

For those of us who don’t have the wisdom gained from living through the Depression and World War II, it seems easier to save time and think of pizza as the staff of life and McDonald’s as our personal caterer. But even when we have more money than time, it would be wise to remember the lessons of the past. Whether the crisis is national, worldwide, or just personal, there may be times when there are things to buy and we have no money, or we have money to spend but nothing to spend it on.

Caught in the Headlights: 10 Lessons Learned the Hard Way, by Barry K. Phillips

"I suspect, like most of you, I've set out after some things that I thought I really wanted, only to find out that what I really wanted was something very different--better, as it turns out, but different."

Caught in the Headlights

Trade Paperback: 116 pages

Publisher: Cedar Fort (June 2008)

ISBN-10: 1599551675

ISBN-13: 978-1599551678

Website: www.barrykphillips.com

Blog: http://www.barrykphillips.com/blog

Get your copy here.


Caught in the Headlights was not what I expected. To be honest, this is not a book I would have picked up for myself. The cover invokes visions of hunting season and deer-versus-car collisions, neither of which I like. And I'm not so much into the self-help genre these days. But a friend gave me a copy and there was a foreword by Glenn Beck, so I thought I'd give it a shot. It wasn't what I expected. It was better.

Yes, it's worth reading. Phillips discusses 10 common goals many people have, like happiness and success. Then, in a very readable style and with a large dose of humor, he explains how he discovered that the end results he thought he would achieve by pursuing these goals were really best achieved by going in a different direction.

This is one of those books that caused me to think of things in a new light, to consider concepts I had not thought of before. And, you know, I like that.