7 Quick Takes Friday #25

This has been an odd week. Other than in that way I do not know how to describe the week, but perhaps the quick takes, a meme hosted by Jennifer Futwiler at Conversion Diary, will bring the right adjective to mind.

1. Friday was an odd day. At least, the afternoon was odd. My boss gathered together about a dozen people from various levels of responsibilities in various directorates, sending us a cryptic message about the time and place and stating that the agenda would be shared with us upon arrival. Shades of spy novels! I could make no sense of the listing. Most were rank and file from other directorates. From my directorate were two rank and file and I, the head of the directorate. No other directorate heads were invited. It turned out that we are the people that my boss considers the "visionaries" of our organization. He wants to make some radical changes and especially to build strong junior leadership and thinks that we can provide the insights he needs into doing that. I was pleased that there was no concern on his part that having their "big boss" present would silence my employees. It did not. They are used to speaking up, whether I am present or not. It is an interesting assignment. However, having a few chosen ones may backfire in that the larger group may not accept the work of the smaller group. My most useful recommendation, in my opinion, was to spread the wealth and pull in others in small working groups that are topically based. That seed seems to have fallen on fertile soil. Time will tell.

3. Saturday's world was a considerable distance from Friday's. Family fun with son Shane, his wife Lemony, her father Joaquin, and our grandchildren 8-year-old Nathaniel and 1-year-old Nikolina! We all attended a baseball game in which Nathaniel was playing. Poor Nathaniel! He is destined to be a scientist, not a ball player! He whacked away at a t-ball that was set up to help him and finally bunted the ball straight down from the stand onto the ground. "Run, Nathaniel, run!" everyone cried.

He turned around, confused, and asked the catcher (from the other team), "Should I run?" The umpire urged him to go, and he scampered off to first base, arriving just before the ball, heaved by the catcher, dropped into the mitt of the first baseman. Safe! Ultimately, he managed to trot from base to base, home, and then into the bunker. When he emerged from the bunker, there was no longer a tiny little Nathaniel; there was only a walking pile of catcher's gear.

Nathaniel wandered along the fence, caught sight of Shane, and walked over. "Where do I go now, Dad?" he asked. Shane pointed out the catcher's mound, and Nathaniel walked over to it, looking just as confused as he looked when he came up to bat. The pitcher threw out the ball, the batter let it past, and it plopped onto the ground at Nathaniel's feet. Nathaniel just looked at the ball.

"Throw the ball back to the pitcher, Nathaniel," the umpire/referee/coach guided him. Nathaniel bent down and tossed the ball. It plopped back on the ground not far from where he was standing and rolled slowly a short distance toward first base.

Yep, that kid is going to be a scientist, not a ball player. Meanwhile, aren't parents and coaches who are out there to help kids learn and not pressure them to win games great?!

3. After the baseball game, Donnie and I headed out for lunch at Subway while we had our car detailed next door. What a pleasant hour! Once in a blue moon (that hardly ever seen second full moon in a month), Donnie and I get to do one of the ordinary things of life. In this case, the ordinary thing was cleaning our car and going to lunch. Here I must confess to how dirty my car can and does become. After lunch, it was easy to find our car because of its customized back bumper (a huge dent created when I backed into a tree, a story not necessary to repeat here), which I have not fixed because I have had little time, unwilling to spend much money on a vehicle's looks, and, most important, like being able to find my car in a large parking lot of look-alike cars.

4. Sunday was another play day, this time not with family but with a friend from Washington, DC. B-H is a very famous interpreter, having interpreted for the negotiations of most of the international treaties with the Soviet Union and former Soviet Union. B-H walked all over San Ignatio with me and fell in love with our charming town. We concluded the day with a BBQ on our deck, with Donnie behind the grill tongues. Donnie sears a wicked salmon! Add corn on the cob, baked on the grill, and giant russet potatoes, nestled in the corner of the grill, being infused with heat, top it off with mixed, fresh, local berries, and you have a meal fit for a king,or at least for two hungry San Ignatians and their guest.

5. On Wednesday, I spent lunch with an employee who used to work for me directly but was not promoted in step with me and so is now several levels below me. At his occasional prompting, we have lunch together for old time's sake. Slava suggested an Indian restaurant on the peninsula, about a 30-minute drive, and I drove us there. The Indian buffet was great, and I ate too much naan bread, that's for sure. I had a way to wear off the extra calories, however, because it started to rain during the mail. After the meal, as we were leaving the restaurant, the rain turned into a downpour. We waited enough time for the raindrops to achieve definition, and, considering that we would have only a few minutes before they all started running together again, we dashed between the raindrops the three blocks to my car. Whether the absurdity of returning to work dripping wet -- neither of us had brought an umbrella -- or the adrenaline from running, Slava, a close-mouthed, frequently taciturn, introvert, broke into a 20-minute soliloquy about his wife's last days five years ago, a topic about which he never speaks. Moreover, he told me details of the plans about his own burial in upstate New York. I suppose he occasionally thinks in those terms, given that he is in remission from lung cancer. I realized as I let him out that I am likely now the only person who knows these plans and his preferences. With no Californian relatives, he needs to have someone who knows what those plans are. Now he does. Beyond the pragmatic aspects, I felt touched that he would confide in me. What wonders running among raindrops can produce!

6. This Thursday night, as every other Thursday night, I co-taught catechism to the first-year confirmation teenagers at Old Mission Church. Having found out that our young "atheist" was not truly an atheist but simply angry at God for the murder of his aunt and unwilling to listen to direct discussion, I held a competition. Each teenager was given ten minutes to write down as many reasons as they could think of as to why God might let bad things happen to good people. I motivated them by bringing patches of the NASA-RKA (Russian Space Agency), with the 5 teenagers who wrote the most reasons getting a patch. (All the others got a book mark that said: I am one of a kind; I am God's design. Then we all shared our reasons. It was an attempt to get them indirectly to think about things that they did not want to think about directly, and it seemed to work. Of course, my major concern was with our little atheist, who, I was pleased to note, actually wrote down one reason. Hey, one is a start! After that, I talked about how God's time works differently from ours, giving examples of good coming from bad after 15-25 years, using the story of Shura, Noelle, the son of the INS director, and the blind Russian orphan, about whom I have blogged before -- all of which are interlinked, but the links, all told, took about 35 years to be put together. For the first time all year, the noisy teens turned silent, as silent as a muted movie scene. All of them, including the self-pronounced atheist who always has caustic and challenging comments, simply listened, without uttering one word in response. Yet the silence spoke loudly: these kids wanted someone to answer this question for them. I pulled out some additional reasons from Early's book, 21 Reasons Bad Things Happen to Good People, and they leaned forward, clearly eager to catch every one of those reasons. Many of them left in a clearly reflective states. My co-leaders and I are convinced that this lesson was deeply taken by many, if not most, of the teens. Our atheist, as usual, left his study papers behind, along with the bookmark. Sighing, I picked it up to put it back in the package for someone in the future who might appreciate it when I caught sight of the fact that we have to put it in his homework folder instead so that we can return it to him: he had written his name on the back of it. Hah! Caught in the act of showing a little belief!

7. Thursday night, RO stopped by. She is visiting from Alabama. Her office sent her to look at what my organization is doing. While she was not conferring with me, having been sent primarily to work with another directorate, she did spend some time today with one of my middle managers. Last night, though, was my time, our time, together. Donnie made a tasty (delicioso, as they say around here) spaghetti dinner. I don't know what was more pleasurable, the meal or the company. Oh, of course, I do: the company. However, the dinner was good, too!

Wishing you a week of comidas (meals) that are deliciosas!