Wierd Things

One of this week’s pictures is of a rainwater tank. A lot of homes have them to collect rainwater for household use. When you live in a rainforest, that’s apparently normally a dependable water supply. Of course, it’s properly filtered and all that. One of the pictures is of a wooden lizard carved apparently out of the log it’s sitting on. It’s in a park we walked through this morning. The other picture is of a real lizard that we also saw on this morning’s walk. It was one of at least a half-dozen we saw, in fact. The woods are full of several varieties of giant, 2-foot-long lizards. To make matters worse, they have surprisingly long legs which they rise up on to run, and they run very fast. Frankly, when they’re running they remind me for all the world of those veloceraptors that chase the good guys around the kitchen near the end of Jurassic Park. I got as close as I dared, in hopes that he’d run across the picture so I could get a profile shot of him running, but I didn’t really get very close, just on the off chance that he’d run toward me instead of away from me. I don’t think he could have done anything to me if he’d caught me, but I’m pretty sure he’d have caught me.

I’m discovering that in learning the language here, you can’t just discern a general principle and then just guess from there; you have to memorize each individual pronunciation. There are differences where neither the U.S. nor the Australian position could be defended; they’re both just completely arbitrary. We pronounce “tourniquet” “turn-a-kett”. They pronounce it “torn-a-kay”. That’s probably closer to the proper French way to say that originally French word. On the other hand, they pronounce “fillet” “fill-ett” whereas we pronounce it “fill-ay”, so in that case we’re probably closer to the original French.

My one big pet peeve here is with grocery carts. I know I’m weird but I’ve always loved grocery shopping. Until now. Grocery carts in the U.S. aren’t the easiest things to steer and I wouldn’t have thought you could make them worse, but Australian grocers have turned them into an insidious instrument of torture. Each of the four wheels turns independently, 360 degrees, freely. You go through a store and you see men and women alike throwing their whole body into trying to keep their cart from wandering off sideways. No wonder they call a cart a buggy. The only wonder is how they’ve managed not to produce an entire nation of frustrated, irritable, angst-ridden, borderline psychotic grocery shoppers. Of course they have a slower, more relaxed pace of life! They have to, to make up for the emotional and physical devastation of grocery shopping.

I just got back from the store, by the way.

Boyhood Adventures and More Food

Last Saturday the kids rode horses to a swimming hole. The dads took the non-riders to join them. Roland introduced them to the joys of taking a horse into deep enough water that it’s actually swimming rather than wading. I introduced them to the joys of a rope swing. There were moments when we were pretty sure we were egging them on to levels of adventure that would have concerned their mothers, but they had a great time.

Roland and Emmy and Karen and I sit out on the patio or at a Starbucks with a cup of hot tea and enjoy the cool evenings and congratulate ourselves on actually getting to enjoy this time together to which we all so looked forward for so long. It’s good.

I’m still this weird little poverty-stricken Arkansas kid thrilled and fascinated by grocery stores stocked with exotic foods. Today I went grocery shopping with the women. On the one hand, they apparently have a fairly extensive Greek population in Australia, so the shelves were loaded with varieties of olives and feta cheese and yogurt. Also, crustaceans are apparently quite plentiful in Brisbane Bay, so the seafood section has a wide variety of prawns (shrimp) and other shellfish, and even more than one variety of oyster.

On the other hand, after extensive searching, I must sadly announce that there is not a pinto bean to be found anywhere in this modern, thriving metropolis. I’ve found something that looks close, called a Bortillo bean, but according to Wikipedia, it’s not a pinto. They have almost no dry beans at all, and the canned beans are either navy beans or kidney beans, and not much even of that. Where I come from, that’s like a city where no one sells bread or milk. And outside an oriental market, nothing here is spicy. Salsas and other foods that here declare themselves to be fiery hot will contain half of one percent jalepeno. Nothing reaches beyond what a Texan would call medium.

Still, it’s hard to complain when we haven’t had the same main course twice in the past seven weeks, except for two Saturday nights that we had hot dogs and maybe three Saturday nights that we had pizza. Think of that – 50 days and 47 main courses.

We visited a new mall today, or rather, one that has just opened a new section that makes it 3 times its former size. It includes three supermarkets as well as smaller stores selling only breads or meats or fruits and vegetables. Every food place was giving away free samples, so at 5pm with no meal served since breakfast, I’m still full. Somehow, magically, I still only weigh 158 pounds, which is about 73 kilograms, I think.

What can I say? God is good.

Flora, Food and Folks

The first picture this week is of me at the Vegemite section of a local grocery store. Vegemite comes in at least four sizes, including the large jar I’m holding, and a convenient squeeze tube. The top shelf on the right side of the picture is of competing brands. One is just a straight Vegemite clone called MightyMite. One is called Promite, which is kind of Training Vegemite for beginners. It’s a little less salty and has just a hint of sweetness added. The fourth variation is called Marmite. It’s a British product and is twice as salty as Vegemite. For any stray reader who has never heard of it, Vegemite was invented in Australia, is manufactured here, and mostly consumed here. It’s a thick, dark brown, very salty, yeasty tasting spread that is eaten on bread by practically all Australians.

The other two pictures are of my daughter Charlotte with Roland's daughter Kaylah, and a cool-looking Australian tree that Karen saw on her daily walk one day this week.

It’s very cool living in a place where any drive takes you in and out and back and forth between a typical, if very hilly, modern city, and tropical rainforest featuring signs warning motorists not to run over the kangaroos and koalas. One sees such things here in those stray, undeveloped patches of a growing city where flat, cultivated fields would be seen around Dallas.

To paraphrase George Bernard Shaw, Texas and Queensland are two states divided by a common language. Here, a cookie is called a biscuit, which is shortened to bikky as breakfast is shortened to brekky and afternoon is shortened to arvo. They do the same with people’s names, so Brett is Bretty and Dean is Deano. I’m learning on my job to talk to builders on the phone, but it’s a challenge between the facts that I don’t have a construction background and that they are very reliant on Australian slang. Jake says the kids at school are fascinated by his accent and by the fact that their accent sounds as funny to him as his does to them. Like most kids their age anywhere, they’ve never lived in another country and it has never occurred to them that we all have accents, including them. Jake said their two dominant images of Texas are the movie “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” and of a gun in every household. Jake told them it’s actually 8 guns in every household but his home only has two guns because his dad doesn’t believe in them.

I love that boy.

Another Week in Paradise

This week’s pictures are of Karen and Emmy relaxing together on the veranda (as we apparently call patios and porches in Australia), Roland watching his home team, the Brisbane Broncos, win the Grand Final in Rugby League, and a picture of Roland and me with a dear old friend of Roland’s named Brendan Kelly. Brendan was a private school principal who attended the church Roland pastored at the time in Maryborough, Australia. They used to share a daily early morning prayer and jogging time. He counts Brendan as one of his closest friends, and one who most enthusiastically shared Roland’s understanding of grace and vision for the church. By a remarkable and possibly miraculous chain of events, Brendan has suddenly become the senior pastor of a church in Toowumba, a couple of hours from here, that has a Sunday morning attendance of 1,200 people. Roland and I visited Brendan’s church this past Sunday and had a great visit with him and his wife over lunch afterwards.

Life is good. Karen takes long walks in the park every day, surrounded by parrots, giant lizards and exotic flowers. Jake starts work today at a store that sells what he’s convinced are the clothes the cool kids wear. Charlotte’s working, enjoying the Hearn kids and keeping up with her U.S. friends on her laptop PC.

I wake up rested at 6:15, enjoy a cup of tea on the veranda and go to work at an office surrounded by raucous kookaburras making it sound like a Tarzan movie. At 10:00 or 10:30, we take a 30-minute break for morning tea and a light snack. We get home from work at about 5:30 and the house is filled with the laughter of Mercer and Hearn kids, aged 11-18, thoroughly enjoying each other’s company. August was the best month ever for my employer, Trade Alliance Group, and I expect the same will be true of September when the numbers are in. I’m starting to learn the job, so I’m feeling a little more secure on that front. It would be nice to be rich. It would be nice to be a part of a big church that we started. It would be nice to be 30 instead of 50 years old. But I’m preaching tomorrow so I’ve been thinking a lot this week about finding the love and joy and peace of God in the middle of the ordinary frustrations, limitations, grief, hope, failure and successes of ordinary daily life. And I am finding them.

Life is good.