Give President Bush the Credit He Deserves

This picture was taken at the RV park in Washington, DC, where we camped.

Jacob (Julie's son, age 6) and Owen posed in front of a cardboard cutout of George W. Bush.

Clearly, one of these boys is being raised to love his country and all it stands for. He has also been taught to give George W. Bush the respect he has earned as leader of our country over the past seven years.

And the other...has been raised to love his country and all it stands for, and--yes--to give President Bush the respect he deserves.

RV Riding

One of the most unique features about this summer's road trip was that we went in a 31-foot RV.

I had never camped in an RV or driven one, so I didn't know what to expect until I met Julie in Raleigh, NC, and clilmbed aboard. It was sweet. There was a room in the back with a queen-sized bed. A shower and a bathroom. The middle section extended out about three feet when we camped so we had room for a kitchen (including microwave, oven and stove) and seating for about seven. In the "fo'c'sle" above the drive there was another queen-sized bed.

Within minutes, the boys were running all around the back. Julie and I weren't sure of the safety rules to follow. We did feel pangs of guilt when we heard Owen (7), Jonah (4), Jacob (6) and Joshie (3) jumping on the bed in the back room. Soon there was a crash and we had the boys in seatbelts for the rest of the trip (I fixed the bedroom mirror at our first stop).

Traveling with kids in an RV is great. Someone needs to use the bathroom? Go then. We're not stopping. Thirsty? The refrigerator was stocked with Sprite, Diet Coke and juice boxes throughout the trip. The only stops were for gas.

Sure, this wasn't a very smart time to be driving a gas guzzling RV around the country. On the drive back from New York to Raleigh, NC, I know we spent $440, stopping four times to fill up. (Many pumps have a $75 or $100 maximum fill-up, so I wasn't able to calculate gas mileage very well.) Still, it was worth it because Julie's business, MyDietSolutions was picking up the gas tab.

To pay her back, we plastered decals on the walls of the RV. We wore brightly colored shirts everywhere we went that read: "I'm learning about BLUBBER!" and gave the web address. Whenever we went into the city, I stuffed my pockets with promotional pens and post cards, which we left everywhere we could think of: subway trains, restaurants, kiosks.

My favorite technique was sliding cards behind the posters that advertized on the subwasy in NYC and Boston. We must have given out more than 300 pens!

Driving the RV was quite another task. Since Julie was paying, I was happy to let her drive--and she did for 80 percent of our trip together. The further north we got, the more difficult that became. (Ellie and Owen modeled our shirts at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, right.)

We decided to stop in Atlantic City to check out the action on the boardwalk there. It was fun driving into Atlantic City. Somewhere I learned that the streets in the game, Monopoly, are named after streets there, and I sure was right! We cruised down Atlantic Avenue and crossed Ventnor, Kentucky, and Park Place. Julie and Ellie wanted to check out the Trump casino, so we aimed for Pennsylvania, which went past the Trump Taj Mahal.

Unfortunately we got to the end of the street and couldn't find a place to park. I got out to scout things out. Poor Julie had to turn the thing around. Later, in Plymouth, we would see the Goodyear Blimp at the airport where Julie's husband, Don, parked his plane. I joked, "We should have a competition between the RV and the blimp to see who can make the sharpest turn!"

While Julie stopped and started, back and forth, from one side of Pennsylvania Avenue to the other, I slipped into the Resorts Casino across the street. I was blinded by the casino lights. (It really does mess with my brain. It was hard to concentrate on my mission--and I am not yet addicted to gambling.) Finally I found a parking guy who was so nice. He showed us the way to one of the outside lots, and he let us park for free.

This is how Julie got me back. When we got back from the boardwalk--and a buffet dinner at Resorts--she said, "I have a lot of work to do. Why don't you drive this leg?" So I hopped in for my first experience driving an RV and cruised up the Garden State Parkway towards the Big Apple.

Two hours later, I was squeezing my way onto the Verrazano Narrows Bridge from Staten Island to Long Island. The lanes were n-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-r-r-r-r-o-w! My knuckles were white already, and I hadn't yet begun to navigate the interstate canyonlands of Brooklyn and Queens.

It was terrifying. I would be scared driving my tiny Saturn through that area, but driving an RV was horrible. I knew that the only thing worse than driving the Long-Island Queens Expressway would be the streets of Brooklyn. I kept going.

Julie made a game of it. "Let's see how many times you get honked at," she said, after one driver laid on his horn big time. I was scared of changing lanes. I was more scared in getting stuck in an exit only lane or getting onto an expressway that led back to the city. Both hands were frozen to the wheel.

And then the sun went down and we were finally out of the city on our way to Orient Point, Long Island. We stopped for gas, and Julie returned to the driver's seat. I wouldn't drive again until the drive home.

All in all, driving an RV is terrible. Adventure makes it worthwhile, I guess, but I still have flashbacks to the Long Island Expressway. This small town boy really got more than he bargained for there!

Worth the Wait?

Has it been three weeks already since I posted to my blog? Ouch!

There has been a lot happening--mainly our road trip up the Atlantic Coast, and I can't wait to blog about it.

To be honest, I was blogging, but I was being paid to do it by my sister's web site, MyDietSolutions, which sponsored our trip. I also wrote a blog about the trip, which (frankly) wasn't very detail-rich, and I had to include a lot of facts about blubber and weight loss. But there are some good pictures and highlights from the trip there.

If you are a friend, you are welcome to check it out, but in this blog, I'll get deeper into some of the things I experienced, so reserve your comments for here.

Also, I read a great book the weekend before the trip, and I have almost figured out post modernism and its applications to spirituality, but that is for later!

On with the show!

Baseball Summer

I'm indulging in my favorite sport, baseball, this summer more than I have in years.

My fantasy baseball team, the Arizona Run Devils, is #1 in my league of fellow high school teachers. I'm over 200 points ahead of the 2nd-place team thanks to awesome seasons from real-life baseball players Chase Utley and Justin Morneau. For those of you who don't know, in fantasy baseball, team members draft real players and get points for the statistics they earn in real baseball games.

Finally, I found this statistic in a recent column by Gennaro Filice:

The Cubs swept the Dodgers this week, evening the all-time series at 1,010-1,010.

The National League, in which the Cubs & Dodgers play, was founded in 1876.

I love this game.

Clues to the Tree of Life

I'm expanding my Podcast reach.

Recently I went through the offerings at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, and I listened to a podcast about the Assyrian collection. I want to tell the rest of what I learned in story form below:

In the halls of the Met's Near-Eastern Galleries, you can see the seeds of the Bible parading across the walls. Lovely, powerful beings march across the walls. Each one has four wings, and their power is symbolized in the enormous leg and arm muscles so carefully wrought by an artist long ago.

It's funny. When I think of an angel, usually I think of a tall, male figure. Now that I think if of it, he has blond hair and white garments. His figure isn't particularly striking--effeminate, perhaps. In my imagination, the power comes from his wings.

That's not how the writers of Genesis and Judges pictured angels when these books were written long ago.

They saw men very much like the one at right. They have long, braided beards, dark hair, and brightly painted, fringed clothes. They look like they could have stepped out of an advertisement for Gold's Gym. These men were known as Genii, from which we get the magical term of "Genie."

(The term, Genie, comes from the Arabic term, Jinn, which also refers to angelic beings, albeit beings with a different set of powers that those of our Western angels.)

I hadn't really thought about the cultural implications to what I believed an Angel to be. Yet it is clear from the relief that I'm seeing things quite differently from the way they were at the time the Bible was written.

Genesis 3 closes with an extraordinary image: an angel holding a flaming sword, guarding the entrance to the Garden of Eden and barring Adam and Eve from the Tree of Life.

Of course Revelation ends with the same image of a Tree of Life. But this is one where the angel is not barring the way, but instead it is showing John the way into heaven--quite a twist, and what I would describe as quite the happy ending.

In Revelation 22, the Tree of Life is more of a species of tree than a single tree, since apparently these trees line the River of the Water of Life (verses 1-2). What kind of tree could it be?

It "bears twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month. And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations" (2). Those are some good hints. Fruit falls every month. Its leaves provide healing. When I think of fruit, I think of apples or peaches--but they fall once a year, they can't possible produce in every season (at least not during winter). Have cherry leaves been used as a medicine?

Later rabbinic traditions held that the tree of life was so tall that it took 500 years to climb to the top.

Let's review the clues: the Tree of Life is tall, it never goes out of season, it produces fruit, its leaves are for the healing of the nations.

The ultimate visual clue--if one connects the origins of the Biblical tree of life with Abraham's cultural origins in Mesopotamia--can be found on another relief. This pictures another Genii--this one with the head of a hawk rather than a prince. His wings are behind him. He has the powerful arms and legs from the original picture. Like the original, he carries a bag full of incense.

Look at his right hand. In it is the seed of the Tree of Life.

It is too long to be an apple, too narrow to be a pear, too large to be a grape or a cherry.

It is...

...a pinecone.

That's right, the people of the ancient Near East saw the pine as a tree of life. It is evergreen, almost magical. It certainly isn't what I would have expected from previous readings of Genesis or Revelation.

Is it what you expected?

After I post this blog, I'm going to walk up my driveway to get the mail. As many of you know, it is lined with pine trees that my grandpa planted over 50 years ago.

Today, as I'm walking, I think I might better imagine what John saw in Revelation 22: "Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, clear as crystal, flowing...down the middle of the great street of the city. On each side of the river stood the tree of life."

Walking through those pines today, I'll feel closer to heaven--closer to Eternity which has been promised me.

A Fitting George W. Bush Memorial

Some folks out at the University of California at Davis have come up with a great way to honor George W. Bush when he leaves office in a few months. The propose renaming San Francisco's Oceanside Water Pollution Control Plant, the place where the fecal matter of San Franciscans is treated before being dumped into the Pacific Ocean, the George W. Bush Sewage Plant. (The seal is presented here.)

As I understand it, it would take a whole lot of fecal matter to make that place stink as bad as Bush's presidency!

A Wee Bit o' Bracknell

We have refinanced the house, and we're in the middle of some pretty big changes at the Ole Dittes Manse. We have all new windows now, and the family room will soon have four fewer doors and one new floor.

This is in advance of Jenny and me finally moving into my grandparents' bedroom and giving the big bedroom to Owen and Jo-Jo (who are currently crammed into the study at night).

I'll post pictures once the family room is finished--this should be within the next three weeks. We still need paint, and floors, and some electrical, and siding...do you understand how crazy things seem right now?

Meanwhile, I'm still doing the transplanting work outside that I detailed in an earlier blog. I found three pine seedlings (barely two inches tall), which I dug up and moved into some gaps in the row of pines at the end of the orchard. I also found two apple seedlings under the old apple tree, and I hope to transplant those this weekend.

Better yet, some of the planting I did last fall has come up! Last May, my mom got Jenny and me 20 bluebell bulbs for our anniversary. The Newboldians who read this blog have fond memories of the Bluebell Forest that grew near the college. It was a 12-acre wood, and in late May and early June it was carpeted with thousands of bluebells.

Now the Bracknell Wood had a 100-year head start, but we're catching up. Last fall, Jo-Jo and I planted the bulbs in the woods next to our wedding site. This year about 12 flowers have come up.

(Admittedly the photo looks awkward, but if you look carefully, you can see the platform of our wedding chapel in the background of the pictured bluebell.)

In many ways this restoration will cost us well over $30,000. Yet in many more ways, it will be priceless. This place is a timeless place for Ditteses (and now Georges, too). Every tree I plant, every bulb I push into the ground is something I know that I will see in ten years and more--something that will probably outlive me and pass on as a gift to generations to come.

We cleaned out the attic (ahead of adding a new layer of insulation), and I found an old steamer trunk. It was empty of any artifacts, save for a bag full of very, very old women's shoes.

At first I was disappointed. Then I looked at the bottom. A torn sticker there had the words "G. Dittes." The sticker bears the name, not of my Grandpa, but of my great grandfather, Gotthold Dittes. Images appeared in my mind of his flight from Germany at age 18, the long trip across the Atlantic from Hamburg to New York; a photo of him at Niagara Falls, where he stopped on his way to see family in Minnesota (eventually he returned to New York to work and raise a family).

Did this steamer trunk make the trip? It's probably impossible to figure that out. All I know is that it won't be going back into the attic. Once the bedroom is finished (and I have restored the trunk), it will be my night stand: a great reminder of grandfathers, my love for travel and adventure, and the timelessness that makes me love this place so very, very much.