How’d we get to the end of July?  Another summer month has flown, but as Leah has started to recount on her blog, it was an eventful month for her.  She spent two weeks in Tanzania for work, which meant I was alone, by myself, with no one else, in the house, at all, except me.

Which was fine.

I saw friends, including Aaron, Anna and baby Em visiting from New Zealand.  I spent time with my family.  I went to the dentist.  I worked on the house, worked on the cars, and worked on adding another 10 lbs through ice cream consumption.  I raced my bike twice and even qualified for the national championships (fourth year in a row).  I even took a little personal time to relax.

Here are a few things that didn’t happen:

-Starvation
-Running out of clean clothing
-Unsanitary conditions in the house
-Unsanitary conditions on the Alan

Which is exactly what I’d expect.  After all, I’ve lived on my own FOR YEARS and didn’t develop scurvy or smell like a compost bin.  However, other people, especially the ladies at church were worried.  I was asked more times than I can convey here if I was okay, and not okay in the “do you miss her?” sense (yes), but in the “are you going to survive?” vein.

Please.

I realize that as a white, Christian man in America I’m on the favorable side of just about every double-standard on the block so I have very little to complain about.  But, if as a society we’re going to try and move past gender roles and move to a less constrained personal existence where both spouses are capable of taking on myriad responsibilities, expect me to be competent and leave me alone.  I’ll be fine.

I still have my mom to cook for me.

‘Men are not angered by mere misfortune but by misfortune conceived as injury. And the sense of injury depends on the feeling that a legitimate claim has been denied. The more claims on life, therefore, that your patient can be induced to make, the more often he will feel injured and, as a result, ill-tempered. Now you will have noticed that nothing throws him into a passion so easily as to find a tract of time which he reckoned on having at his own disposal unexpectedly taken from him. It is the unexpected visitor (when he looked forward to a quiet evening), or the friend’s talkative wife (turning up when he looked forward to a tête-à-tête with the friend), that throw him out of gear. Now he is not yet so uncharitable or slothful that these small demands on his courtesy are in themselves too much for it. They anger him because he regards his time as his own and feels that it is being stolen. You must therefore zealously guard in his mind the curious assumption “My time is my own”. Let him have the feeling that he starts each day as the lawful possessor of twenty-four hours. Let him feel as a grievous tax that portion of this property which he has to make over to his employers, and as a generous donation that further portion which he allows to religious duties. But what he must never be permitted to doubt is that the total from which these deductions have been made was, in some mysterious sense, his own personal birthright.’ - Screwtape to Wormwood as told by C.S. Lewis in The Screwtape Letters

I have little to add, other than my resonance.  Nothing seems to be going quite right theses days, and I feel aggrieved that I have to take time out of MY day to work on broken car windows, or deal with non rebuildable transmissions, or schedule an appointment with the dentist to fix a cracked tooth, or rebuild a bicycle wheel that keeps breaking spokes, or deal with a distributor in regards to a tubular that had no glue holding the basetape on, or working with the bank to replace all our credit cards after attempted fraud.  Then I feel petty and shallow for my aggravation.  It’s not all about me.  It’s not my time to begin with.

PS. be very careful typing the word “screwtape” into google

My two favorite girls. If only Katie was pictured, we’d have a klugfecta. (Thanks for the photos Joanie!)

After several hours walking around Portland’s Pearl District, I heard a faint, yet familiar noise.  At a distance it was unplaceable, but its staccato beat sounded like a 1/4″ ratchet handle in the hands of a quick worker. As a bicycle drew near, I knew it could only be one thing.  But no!  They were extinct!  Could it be, perish the thought, a freewheel, caught in the wild?

Yes.

In a sea of cyclists, a lone soul had protected his right to coast, and in doing so, had torn a hole in the soft underbelly of Portland hipster aesthetics.  I was shocked.  Furthermore, he was unkempt, and not unkempt in a I-spent-three-hours-trying-to-look-like-a-chic-vagrant sense.

He must have been a recent emigre to Portland from the decidedly less hip outside world.

In Seattle I can walk down Broadway, or through Belltown (avoiding drug deals and muggings) without feeling terribly square.  Of course, I’m not exactly a trendsetter, but I’m not exactly awed by people’s abilities to combine thrift store ensembles with neon, oversized sunglasses.  In Portland though, I’m intimidated by a bunch of people whose skinny jeaned asses I could assuredly kick.  I make Leah order my coffee at Stumptown, afraid I’ll say something stupid.  I’m not even well versed enough in the hipster lexicon to feel comfortable in a Portland bike shop.  At Powell’s, the world’s coolest bookstore, I find the technical books building and keep to myself with the other proper nerds, in hiding.

It’s not that I don’t like Portland.  I do.  It’s beautiful and interesting, and well laid out.  It has better infrastructure for its size than Seattle.  There are good restaurants and attractions.  However, it’s just so overrun by underemployed 20-somethings, including the clutch of pan-handlers on every corner who want you to finance their perpetual wanderings.  It’s painfully cultural in an exclusive, current and trendy sense.  It’s also whiter than the Annual Meeting of the Evangelical Covenant Church, a denomination with outposts of Swedish pride.

More about that.

The whole Klug clan ventured to Portland, not to gawk, but to celebrate with mom on her commissioning and Leah with her ordination.  It’s a big accomplishment for both.  The closest parallel we’ve arrived at yet is achieving tenure at a university.  It demarcates, in some senses, between a job and a career life calling.  I’m super proud.  We were excited to be surrounded by the support of friends and family, and we took full advantage of the opportunity to celebrate in style, by making dad pay for everything.

In the end, it was a nice break from the realities of a hard month, and an opportunity to get away from home.  It was more than a trip; it was significant and fun, and eye-opening.  Quality time was had.  For Leah, ordination will likely open up new opportunities, and we’re excited to see where that leads us, all in good time.  For mom, it’s just as much a form of recognition of the years and years of quality service she’s given to the church.

I will close with this:  As a husband and son, nothing makes me more happy than when people show my wife and mother honor, respect and admiration.  It’s humbling to get to share life with great people.