Happy May Day

Last week some friends and Veeka and I went to a cool garden show at the National Arboreteum and joined some folks dancing around a maypole. Can't say I have ever done that before. I am off to the side in bright green and Veeka, of course, is smack in the middle in her multi-colored raincoat.
Have worked like a dog this week churning out various religion articles. Things at my workplace are as unsettled as ever. One of the cuts made is that of the exterminator who used to keep mice from entering our building. Well...we are next to the 400-acre arboreteum and now not only mice are ranging about the newsroom but so are snakes. We discovered a 3-foot black snake curled up behind the door of the conference room earlier this week. Apparently there's been at least two more. Just the sort of thing to liven up the workplace: a creepy crawly hiding under my desk.
I am busily making plans to remodel the second-floor bathroom with some Christmas money and today the new washer arrived.
Discovery of the week: the guy who does massages for $1/minute at Union Station, which is a very cheap rate for this area. Was racing through there to a press conference and had a few minutes to spare when I saw this massage stand near the escalator. Ten minutes after having the knots in my neck rubbed out, I felt so much better.

Veeka and the bike

Of course one thing our now five-year-old got for her birthday was a bike with training wheels. So recent evenings after dinner have been spent helping her ride the thing. Never realized how hard it is to keep those little legs pumping so the pedals don't get stuck somewhere in the middle. I still have to push her uphill because she can't pedal up a slope yet. So, she resolutely does U-turns on the alley in back of our home.
Got a pleasant surprise last Friday when I received a first place award for religion coverage in 2009 for division A (dailies over 75,000) at the MDDC awards banquet today. Which stands for Maryland-Delaware-DC Press Association, btw. All this while we were getting the news that our publisher is stepping down. Which is a shame because I truly like him. All sorts of rumors are out there about the newspaper being sold; apparently the current owners want out of the newspaper business. Read all about it here.
Just keep those paychecks coming, is all I can say.

Veeka turns 5

Yes, it's been awhile since we've posted but yours truly has been on the road, first to Tulsa and then a quick overnight to Richmond. But first: Easter. The photo of us is great but...our princess, who used to take great photos, now closes her eyes each time, which has made pix a bit more of a challenge.
A few days later, I zipped off to Tulsa for 3 days of attending a large charismatic conference there of 5,000-7,000 people. I think most of them were ORU students who were as courteous as could be. I'd never been to Tulsa before and it was a pleasant city but as I say in this column, the futuristic Jetsons-style architecture on the ORU campus was beyond weird. But the people were fine and I enjoyed walking about and attending workshops. Unfortunately I only sold 5 of my "Fire and Glory" books so the event was a financial loss for me and much of it was subsidized! Still, had to pay obscene fees to get the books back and forth on the airplane. It was quite a switch to be in an atmosphere where charismatic stuff is considered natural and everyday- so opposite to the world in which I normally live in.
And then there was the trip to Richmond, which I wrote about here. Some friends and I had dinner on W. Cary Street, a part of Richmond I'd never seen before and really enjoyed - lots of cute glitzy restaurants in the city's west end.
All this is a walk-up to April 16, which is when Miss Veeka woke up to a small mountain of presents. First, we dressed her up with a little crown and took her into school, along with 18 cupcakes for teachers and little friends. Then Veeka was allowed to bring one of her little friends home with her, shown helping her unwrap gifts. And then Veeka got to see her gift from Mommy, which was a bicycle. The next post will describe what it's like to help teach her to ride the thing. Some neighbors came over for dinner - and brought more cupcakes.

Good Friday in the cherry blossoms

This morning, I packed Veeka into the car and drove to the Tidal Basin, an act of sheer madness as the roads around there were reaching gridlock by the time we got there. Finally found a place to leave the car - miraculously - although we'd no sooner walked away than Veeka began to wail that she was too tired. Little did she know she had an entire mile to go trudging around the pond. Whole buses were disgorging dozens of tourists, so the walk was beyond packed in that a crowd equaling the populations of several states were doing the same thing as we were. Still, the blossoms formed the loveliest delicate pink roof as we made our way around.
Veeka liked the Jefferson Memorial quite a lot, as it turned out and thought the blossoms were pretty and demanded to be carried much of the way. A popsicle mollified her somewhat on what turned out to be a very warm day. The weather could not have been lovelier and the photo was taken from one of the few uncrowded spots.
Next, we ended up at McDonalds, her favorite place, to get her a Happy Meal and then it was off to a local monastery that was also packed to the gills. The place is known for its stations of the cross walk through a very lovely garden so I spent a lot of time explaining to Veeka the concept of piercing someone's hand with a nail. She has done so well so far - Thursday she made it through an entire Maundy Thursday service. She really enjoyed having her feet washed.

Houston part 2/St. John the Divine

I don't remember if I noted how large Houston seemed; how the huge number of freeways, on-ramps, toll roads and so on seemed doubled from when I visited there 12 years ago. One of the highlights was speaking at St. John the Divine my last night there. Thanks to a long-standing relationship with the rector, Larry Hall, I was invited to be a speaker in their Lenten speakers series on Wednesday nights. St. John the Divine is larger now than it was when I worked in Houston; 4,500 members and one of the top five Episcopal churches in the country.
There was lots of remodeling there since I last saw it and they asked me to speak on how Redeemer affected the city of Houston. The conversation with the two pastors (Larry Hall being the one to your right, my left) was on all sorts of things, including my personal walk with Christ, my "Quitting Church" book, etc. It was a most pleasant gathering; catered dinner, place cards, lovely tables, Eric and Stevie helping with the book table and a chance to chat up some of the church leaders while tossing dinner into Veeka's mouth.
It was a lovely evening; the kind I don't often get! I thought it so ironic that here I got such a nice reception in Houston and was treated like a queen while certain Anglican churches in the DC area - regarding my newest book - won't even return my calls! Which is why a speech I gave today on Capitol Hill at Mt. Moriah Baptist Church was so nice. For Lent, about 70 people ordered copies of my book and studied it. Imagine! Like a college text.
It is so lovely in DC right now as all the cherry blossoms are out. Everywhere you drive, there are cherry trees. Which is why I don't like to leave the area at the end of March. It's the nicest time to be here.

Trip to Houston, part 1

So much happened this past week that I'll split it into two parts. There was some mixed reaction to my presence at Church of the Redeemer as not everyone there was wild about "Days of Fire and Glory" but no one had any qualms about the most popular member of our entourage: Miss Veeka. I showed up at Redeemer my second night in town to explain how my book came about. I'd say 80-100 showed up, which is a fabulous crowd for a Friday night event there and a few folks even drove in from Austin. Sending out all those personalized invites brought results! A few people from Redeemer's long-ago past, such as Charles Meisgeier, the University of Houston scholar who researched the place years ago, put in an appearance as did people I had not seen in two decades.
Fortunately some of the folks who were unhappy about the book when it came out finally read the thing and changed their minds 180 degrees after they saw the complexity of the story and appreciated the massive amount of work it took to put the book together over a four-year period. For two full summers and a 3-month stint in 1994, I worked on the book full-time, which didn't do much for my bank account. Those were the days before the Internet and before no-cost long distance calls, so you can imagine how expensive and time-consuming it was to do fact-checking.
Redeemer, as it turns out, is barely making it financially and its staff had to all take pay cuts recently but all the same, the folks there are really hoping the book can bring some needed healing to the place. I got lots of help from former members Eric and Stevie Sawyer who drove in to handle the book table, which was a godsend as I was embroiled in conversations the whole evening after my speech. But the person who was the star of the show was Miss Veeka, shown here with a banner as she joined the dancers in the aisle.
I returned Sunday morning just to be there and soak up the memories and talk with as many people as possible. Another photo shows Veeka seated in the arms of the rector, Nan Doerr.
I met with other friends around Houston and reintroduced myself to the wonderful local Mexican food. Monday, Veeka and I trapised up to Brenham, about 70 miles northwest of us, to try to find some bluebonnets and Indian paintbrush. Unfortunately, because of a cold winter, the flowers were late by several weeks, so the photo here of Veeka standing in a field of blue were the ONLY bluebonnets I could find up there. We had a great time visiting a museum on the Brazos River that told the history of Texas as an independent country between 1836-1846 including many factoids I'd never known before. Sort of wish I had gone there many years ago when I first moved to Houston.
The one part of the trip that did not work out was getting any kind of media attention from the trip. I contacted TV and radio places to no avail. Either I got ignored or was told by one anchor that if my work was not related to that of the Osteens (the ruling family over Houston's largest church), she was not interested. The local media are fixated on this church: Lakewood. Finally near the end of my trip, one network affiliate expressed some interest, so I am hopeful. The Houston Chronicle ignored me; some bitternesses run deep, apparently.
Houston had changed a lot since I'd been there 12 years ago for a short visit. One way were all the new freeways and tollways west of town, which confused me quite a bit. Houston is the LA of the south in terms of all the road concrete out there. I was also amazed at the super-low housing prices. I could afford a lake-front mansion down there.

Coming to Houston

Well...here we are, a mere three days from lift off when we jump on friendly Continental Airlines for our direct flight to Houston so I can make two book appearances and see lots of friends. It's been 12 years since I've been there, so I am mapquesting directions on how to get everywhere as I have quite forgotten how to get about the city.
For those of you who've not gotten my Facebook invites, I am appearing at Church of the Redeemer at 7:30 p.m. this Friday to talk about the book and then at 6:45 p.m. Wednesday the 17th at St. John the Divine Episcopal. The former is in the East End and the latter is in the far more ritzy River Oaks area. I'm hoping to touch base with lots of friends and of course show off Veeka who is pictured here in yet another of her ballet classes.
I also hope to get lots of face time with Texas botany such as its redbud trees and Indian paintbrush and bluebonnets. That's the main reason I'm showing up in March - to see all that - although I've been told Texas had a cold winter so everything is running late. Well...I didn't want to miss all the flowering trees up here in Maryland at the end of March, so I chose the second week of the month to head south to the Bayou City.
Things up here are doing fine although one of our associate publishers just quit the paper which put quite a chill into the newsroom which is still half-empty. I just came back from New York 10 days ago where I was doing research on a series I'm working on. Wouldn't you know it but I arrived just in time for a foot of snow. Then I drove to Virginia Beach last week to speak at Regent University and got MORE snow down there - even though they didn't see any of it in DC. That white stuff just follows me around.