We Interrupt This Life To Bring you...

I am hearing a voice broadcasting through the room: "We interrupt this life to bring you the following important bulletin: We are putting your life on hold for a while. You have food, shelter, clothing and water right now. Apply for jobs all you like, but it's a week before Christmas, and no one is going to want to schedule job interviews until January. Look at apartments all you like, but you won't have the money to start rent payments.

"Feel free to move about the reality, but there is ice on the roads that is not your standard Seattle slush-for-a-day-then-leave stuff. Your usual cost-free method of getting about, bicycling, isn't going to help you much on ice. This is not a time for starting new adventures; it is a time for being thankful for what you have. You are a reasonably talented person, but this is as far as you're getting right now. This is not a time for thinking about where your talents ought to be taking you. Making plans based on your hopes being fulfilled is going to make you unhappy. That only works if you're Barack Obama. The mess that you are in right now was caused by everybody feeling entitled to success, causing reality to be overpriced.

"Please be assured that the space-time continuum is functioning as it should. Your movement through time plus your movement through space will always equal the speed of light. If you don't seem to be going anywhere in space, you're going all sorts of places in time that people in spaceships don't get to have. Enjoy this time while you have it. We will inform you when we restart your life."

Your government loves you

I got back from an airplane trip to find the contents of my suitcase was rearranged. At first I was afraid something had been stolen, but then I found a note from the Transportation Safety Administration assuring me that my underwear was safe to put on.

I'm proud to live in a country where the government cares that much about its citizens.

Las Vegas: It Makes Everybody Want To Do Something Bad

One rule about Las Vegas is that regardless of what your moral orientation or strength is, you'll suffer from strong, destructive temptations. If you suffer from alcoholism or a gambling addiction, your problems are obvious. The same goes for those who love lots of food -- the buffets will drain your wallet and stretch your belt. If you're a sex addict, the pornographic playing-card-sized handouts from scraggly men on Las Vegas Boulevard will connect you to whatever kind of stimulation you need to implode your soul.

If, however, you don't suffer from any of these temptations, you'll still discover that your rather conservative mindset has a volatile nature when challenged. After a short while, you'll be tempted by some vulgar behaviors of your own, flipping off or cussing out the hustlers on the street, taking a megaphone with you as you walk, screaming "Move faster you fat ------- tourists!" An assault of images of what appear to be nude acrobats in positions that you would call vulnerable if they were humanly possible on a big screen TV the size of a tennis court advertising a show called "Zumanity" by Cirque du Soliel will make you consider taking advantage of Nevada's lax gun control laws to shoot holes in the bright body blaster above the boulevard. Or worse, upon being asked by a cocktail waitress in a top that reminds you of a balcony with no railings what you'd like to drink, you demand to see the manager just so that you can punch him in the nose for making her wear such a trashy outfit to support her kids.

My wife interviewed at Seigfried & Roy's Secret Garden to be a tiger trainer. I went along for the visit, and I can think of more than a few people I'd like to feed to those noble, toothy creatures.

Las Vegas, maybe?

Hi all,

Miri has been asked to fly down to Las Vegas to interview with Seigfried and Roy for a tiger-trainer job. We're going on Sunday.

I had a job interview today for an executive director job. They brought out the whole board of directors to grill me for an hour. I think I did all right, but I'm not sure I want to be a fundraiser (which seems to be what they're really looking for).

So Miri and I are both in transition right now, feeling a little stuck there. This classic Sesame Street song summarizes how we feel right now:

A 30 to 40 percent chance of scattered employment

In meteorological parlance, there are these two words about rain that pop up a lot: scattered and isolated. When you have isolated showers (or thunderstorms) moving through an area, that means that a storm will do something, somewhere, but for any given observer, he only has a 10 to 20 percent chance of getting rained on. Scattered means that more rain is coming and a particular spot has a 30 to 40 percent chance of getting rained on. Growing up in Puget Sound, most of my life has been lived on days expecting scattered showers.

And now, I am getting into a situation of scattered life. I have looked at seven apartments, called 10 others, applied for 20 jobs and had one job interview (although the rejection letter just came for that one). In viewing the apartments or applying for these jobs, only about 30 percent of them seem remotely interesting -- but I feel obligated to make the queries anyway because we need to live somewhere and be able to pay the rent.

The apartments have mostly been all right, although a few have been ghetto or rent-controlled. The reviews of these complexes on the Internet, however, have been atrocious. I've been trying to determine if this anti-landlord invective has any merit, or if only cranky people go on these sites to wish fire, brimstone, locusts and frogs upon distant descendants of their former apartment managers because they took too long to fix a washing machine.

Some of you may be wondering how we ended up back in Puget Sound with a life like the weather. I guess this is where the cheery part of this blog entry starts. Miri got a JOB!

Yes, an actual paying job as a zookeeper taking care of exotic animals. She works part time at the Point Defiance Zoo and Aquarium in Tacoma in the Asia exhibit. This is a very good thing as Point Defiance is one of the best zoos in the world. She gets to work with Asian river otters who sound like squeaky toys when they're vocal, tapirs, anoas, porcupines, Sumatran tigers, gibbons and siamangs. She feeds them and cleans their areas. (But don't worry, it's a protected contact facility, meaning the humans and animals never get to play.) Having a part-time job at Point Defiance is a resume builder job, meaning that they employ you for a year or two and then you have to go work somewhere else. (They rarely promote their own people into career positions.) We are hopeful that one of the other two zoos (Northwest Trek or Woodland Park) will hire her later.

I am searching for a job, and we're really hopeful that after I get employed, we can rent someplace to live that's halfway between the two jobs. If you happen to have a friend trying to rent a duplex, let us know.

We have gotten to do some fun stuff recently. On our anniversary, we went to a bed and breakfast south of Spokane and got to drive around in the Palouse country. Here's a picture of Miri at Kamiak Butte:


Click on the photo if you want to see more from that trip.

Miri's parents came to visit us in Spokane, and we went to Lake Coeur D'Alene to go canoeing. Robin and Grant happened to be coming through on their way to Missoula that day.

The other really cool thing we've gotten to do was a hike up at the Sunrise area of Mt. Rainier National Park. Here's a picture of Miri pointing at a black bear:


I got some pictures of Mr. Bear, but if you want to see them, you've got to click on the picture to get through to the album. That's kind of a cheap ploy, isn't it, but you want to see the album now, admit it!

So that's the news from Ruthfordville. Write back, say hi, tell us how you're doing. Jisa the dog wags her tail for you.

How to say goodbye at the airport

In my family, there are two ways of saying goodbye at the airport. There's the Ruthford way, the way of my father's family. They give you a hug and tell you how great it was to see you, and they leave you at the curb. And there's the Fussell way, the way of my mother's family, when they check in to short-term parking and stay with you through check-in, baggage check, and then they go and wait with you at the gate until your flight actually leaves and through all of the flight delays, too (thank God Homeland Security no longer allows non-passengers past security). I much prefer the Ruthford way of airport departures because as you're doing it, your mind is on where you are going, not where you've been. My aunt Alice, who grew up a Fussell, refers to the Fussell goodbye as the albatross-around-the-neck goodbye.

I think Spokane is giving us a Fussell-style goodbye. Miri and I have been here for a year, and it's been a wonderful experience, but it really is time to move on. The zoo has been making Miri work 14-15 hours a day, unpaid, and I think it's been two weeks since she's had a day when she didn't visit the zoo at all.

I feel like I'm sitting in a chair at the airport, waiting for my boarding call to somewhere else, and my dear friend Spokane is sitting next to me, and it has one more story to tell. Miri and I left church early today just to avoid the possibility of people asking us what we do just because the answer wouldn't be civil. We're getting a little anti-social just because we know that we're not going to be around much longer so being chatty and making friends doesn't have much point.

So, Spokane, I love you, but let me read my book quietly while I wait for my flight! And no, I don't want to talk about what's coming next for me because right now the answer is, "Sitting still in a space the size of a refrigerator and eating pretzels." It's a touchy subject. Okay, rant over.

Never tell a tiger to buzz off

Dear Friends,

A good gauge of your general mental attitude is how you respond to something that happens regularly. When you drive your car, are you happy to see the flowers alongside the road, or are you mad because traffic makes your car go so slow that there's little to do but look at flowers?

In my case, it hasn't been driving (I take the bus) but another experience that's had me saying, "I've had enough!" Specifically, it's been people informing me that I'm tall. (As any tall person will tell you, this is about as helpful as being told your head is attached to your neck.)

If I have a good attitude, my response is to answer their questions about height and try turning it into a more meaningful conversation about family and hobbies. If I'm in a bad mood, I mutter, "I'm 6 foot 9," and I wander off.

Recently, though, I've had a couple of obnoxious inquirers who felt it necessary to use three or four swear words when talking about me and my feet. My response has been a sudden, "Watch your language!" in my best how'd-you-like-to-go-to-the-office tone. It's been fun, watching their faces go from "smart aleck" to "survival instinct is kicking in." It's been something of a sadistic pleasure, making these guys know that something bigger than they is ticked at them, but it's really how I've felt. I've had enough.

This story is meant to illustrate a wider feeling of time-to-move-on-edness, which I think is a literary device known as a metaphorical anecdote. Or would that be allegorical?

I think that Miri, too, has had close to enough of the zoo where she's working, as she's on schedule to be working there four days a week but still manages to clock 60 hours there every week. (The internship advertisements said that students worked 32 hours a week, which would give them time to do things like study.) On the bright side, though, when Miri does get in to a 40-hour job, it'll be like a second honeymoon. (I'll have my wife back!)

This isn't to say that I'm annoyed about everything -- by no means -- it's simply that there are a number of things in my life that I used to endure with fake cheerfulness and now I'm just telling people to knock it off.

I have discovered, however, there is one fellow at the zoo who lets it be known he finds my height interesting, and getting snippy is not the best policy with him. It's also difficult to casually ignore him. His name is Zeus, and he's a 500-pound white Bengal tiger. Every time I walk past his exhibit, he holds still and looks at me intently. As soon as I turn my back to walk away, that's when the fun starts. He walks toward me, keeping his body low and sleek, speeding up until... he gets to the fence. Oh, darn, the fence! Then he paces quickly to the left and right, keeping up speed just in case the fence suddenly dematerializes and then he can chase me. From that moment forward, Zeus continues following me, finding the best point in his exhibit to keep an eye on me. Sometimes he rears up non his hind legs so he can get taller.

On Thursday, when we had this interaction, there were twelve other humans around his exhibit, and he was uninterested in them, staring at the wall until I came by. Then he came out, pacing and stalking me.

I know that it's my height because when Jeffrey and Patrick, my two tall brothers, came to visit a few months ago, the zookeepers noticed Zeus stalking them, too, through the whole zoo, and his exhibit does have a line-of-sight view of the entire zoo. This makes his exhibit an odd one -- for a human viewing most exhibits in museums or zoos, it is a transitory experience to see it, like listening to a portion of a song. You observe it for a little while, and then it's gone. This particular exhibit, however, continues observing you.

I've been trying to understand this behavior, and I don't think it's aggressive because Zeus makes this sound known as chuffling while he does it. Chuffling is sort of halfway between a sneeze and a purr, and it's a social behavior. If you want to know how it sounds, say chuffle" five times quickly while poofing out your cheeks like Louis Armstrong. Zeus' brother, Apollo, on the other hand, makes it very clear he does not like me by putting his ears back, growling and getting ready to pounce.

So, what other explanations are there? It could be that I look like a small elephant (food) or that he wants to come out and play, like he did in this video with the zoo director.



This leads me to believe that Zeus is not really that aggressive of a cat. Rather, I think maybe he just enjoys seeing a small person's face go from "happy-go-lucky" to "survival instinct." Sigh. Comeuppances are such a difficult justice to accept.

I will miss this tiger, and I think Miri will miss all of the cats when she leaves Cat Tales, although we both know it is time to leave. When we came to Spokane, we thought that if one of us landed a really good job, either Miri at the zoo as an instructor, or me at a company here, we would stay a while longer. She might get offered a job as a manager at Cat Tales, but we know that the pay is $100 a day with no benefits, long hours and no comp time or overtime, sort of like being a substitute teacher. Now, Miri is going to graduate on Sept. 21, and we are going to blow town like fugitives fleeing outstanding warrants.

We have a minor problem, though, and it is that we don't have a destination picked out yet. Miri has job applications out to zoos and aquaria in the following cities:

• Tacoma
• Seattle
• Las Vegas
• West Yellowstone, Mont.
• Colorado Springs, Colo.
• Pueblo, Colo.
• Garden City, Kan.
• Chicago
• Boston
• Norristown, Pa.
• Baltimore, Md.
• Washington, DC
  

The Point Defiance Zoo and Aquarium in Tacoma would be by far our favorite both in terms of the work Miri could do and in being close to people we know. And, the head of the carnivore department of the Point Defiance Zoo is coming to Cat Tales tomorrow, and we're hopeful Miri can chat with him a little bit. We have also found out that Miri's been shortlisted at the Mirage in Las Vegas, where Seigfried and Roy run a small zoo and are said to be planning one show in 2009.

I'm still trying to decide what my great vocation should be in these fair cities. I took an aptitude test recently, and the testing agency suggested I think about urban planning, which would be kind of cool. One of my happiest memories from being 4 was building a system of irrigation ditches in the backyard of our house in Virginia with my sister. It was the only game we ever played with water that did not involve ambushes and soakings (usually me being the victim). . . maybe it means something.

I have, however, been able to find some other work than just working for the quirky non-profit. I wrote an article about huckleberries, and the local weekly paper published it. Click here:

http://www.inlander.com/localnews/305513576761415.php

Researching this article made me happy because I learned about how huckleberries might be possible to be grown commercially in a few years. Invest in mountain property with trees!

I got to ride my bike through quite a bit of huckleberry country recently, which was a great deal of fun. I went on the 2008 Ride Around Washington, a Cascade Bike Club event. It started in Packwood, and did a six day loop around the east side of Mt. St. Helens, down to the Columbia River Gorge, up to Trout Lake (which, by the way, I highly recommend as a getaway location), then to Goldendale, Naches (where we saw a cantaloupe cannon) and finally back over White Pass to Packwood. Five Ruthfords made the trip, and I took some pictures you can look at here:

http://www.pbase.com/allears/volcanoes_bike_ride_2008

The ride was a lot of fun, except for the fact that my poor wife had to work all the time I was gone and didn't get to do anything fun. But our dog made her go out and play a few times.

Anyway, that's the news from Spokane. We'd love to hear from you!

In Christ,
Thomas Eric Ruthford

Job hunting and such

Hi all,

These days Miri and I are diligently looking for jobs that we can get in the same city. We know that this city won't be Spokane because the management of the zoo there is good at taking care of cats, but they're not so good at taking care of their humans. (And, there are a couple of 500-pound cats who seem to think I am a giraffe. I get the heebie-jeebies sometimes.)

Miri's internship at the zoo is winding down. She graduates in September, so, we're looking at jobs all over the country in places such as Las Vegas, Boston, Baltimore, West Yellowstone, Mont., and Garden City, Kan. Yes, there really is a zoo in Garden City. I don't know if Las Vegas has a zoo, but they do have Seigfried and Roy (and the tiger that tried to eat Roy Horn is still happily living there but we won't go in to that). Cool thing about working for Seigfried and Roy is if you're employed by them, you're employed by the Mirage, a big resort that actually pays benefits and stuff.

I am working in my job at the non-profit that is too quirky to be described. I am also teaching classes at our summer journalism institute for teenagers, giving talks on ethics and writing. Yesterday, we talked about adjectives, and how you have to be careful with your judgmental adjectives, such as "horrifying" or "every mother's worst nightmare." I made them listen to Alice's Restaurant and asked them why there was so much useless detail in the song, such as "implements of destruction" and "twenty-seven eight by ten color glossy photographs with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back..." (Because there's so much useless detail in the draft.)

I am getting ready to do the Ride Around Washington at the beginning of August. This will be a fun spin around the volcanoes of southwest Washington. These rides are always 6 days long and take up around 80 miles. I have composed a limerick about the people who do the daily ride announcements:

Never make a promise that's impossible to fulfill
The war will be short, you can cure anything with this pill
The harm from the worst promise of all never mends
Rather, you'll lose 200 friends
It is to say, "Today's route is mostly downhill."

Usually when I make updates about what's going on in my life, I have some quirky, humorous story to tell like 6-year-old children lecturing me on the importance of paying attention. But alas, I don't this time. (Life is a little dull.) I have, however, been reading an assortment of library books that I can tell you about:

• Surprised by Hope, by N.T. Wright. I found out about this book by watching an episode of the Colbert Report that also featured Cookie Monster. Bishop Wright, an Anglican Bishop, was there, too. This book takes a look at popular religion seen through funeral sermons and tries to connect that way of thinking back to the real teachings about the Resurrection. I've only gotten to chapter 3, but I am enjoying it so far.
• Bottomfeeder, by Taras Grescoe. This book tries to take on the whole ocean at once as an ecosystem which can provide us with excellent protein. He talks about oysters in Chesapeake Bay, the monkfish, the bluefin tuna and salmon. His argument is that we should try eating from the middle of the ocean's food chain, with fish like sardines and anchovies, because they're not endangered. The section on shrimp farms was really gross.

Okay, that's only two books, but the other ones I've been reading are mostly cookbooks, or I just tossed them aside after the first chapter. But, there was this one article called "No," in the Kenyon Review about writers receiving rejection letters. Here's a link to it. It made me laugh, especially as I keep getting rejected, too. My wife tells me I ought to be a famous writer like J.K. Rowling, that way we can live someplace like West Yellowstone and I won't have to find a job driving a tour bus. But, I don't get discouraged -- persistence does pay off, as lots of asking did get Miri to marry me. Oh yeah, if you want to read some humor articles about Christians getting married, you can go to this blog, Orthromance, that I started.

Anyway, that's the news from Spokane. I'd love to hear from you!

Thomas / Eric / Thomic

p.s. A hysterical political video came out today on jibjab.com It's done to the tune of "The times they are a changing" The Obama section had me on the floor.

A new Onion Dome Article!

Hi Readers,

Okay, time to brag again. I got into the Onion Dome again! Whoo hoo! Fame and fortune here I come! My article is about an Old Calendar parish resolving to observe the Fourth of July on the Old Calendar so that they can actually have meat. Click here to read it.

And, I have a new article here, about Christian romance, too, if it's not clear from the Table of Contents. It's called Early Babies and Other Hazards of Passion.

In Christ,
Thomas

The Best Rejection Letter Ever

I hope I can get a rejection letter of this quality some day...

We have read your manuscript with boundless delight, and if we were to publish your paper, it would be impossible for us to publish any work of a lower standard. And, as it is unthinkable that in the next thousand years we shall see its equal, we are, to our regret, compelled to return your divine composition and beg you a thousand times to overlook our short sight and timidity.

--A Chinese publication rejecting a writer, as quoted in the Kenyon Review

I just saw "Horton Hears a Who..."

And the Mayor of Whoville reminds me of the Prophet Isaiah.

So here's what's up...

Hi All,

We've put up some new photographs that you can look at. Miri has posted some pictures of the tiger cubs at Cat Tales:

http://www.pbase.com/allears/cat_tales

And I've put some pictures of Miri up here:

http://www.pbase.com/allears/pictures_of_cute_wife

We don't have a whole lot of news to report. The weather is very nice here in Spokane. Now that we have a warming trend after our absurdly heavy winter, we now have flood watches in effect everywhere. Our dog still likes chasing after her ball.

Miri has about four months left in her program, and we are likely to move this fall, although we still don't know where. If you hear of a new zoo opening up, please let us know.

Also, I've been entertaining myself and about four readers by writing a blog about the struggles of the single Orthodox Christian called Orthromance. Here's the link:

http://orthromance.blogspot.com

Some of the humor will be a bit on the obscure side, but I hope you'll find some of the jokes funny. Our newest feature is a little box where you can enter your e-mail address if you want to get the new posts as they come out.

And then, as always, here's my personal blog, where I just post random things that happen:

http://thomasericruthford.blogspot.com

We hope you're well!

Love,
Eric

I make the big time!

Hello dear readers,

I got published in the Onion Dome! I'm famous now! Whoo hoo!

Here are the links to the two articles:

New Confession Guide Bans Retelling of Liturgical Gaffes

Top Nine Rejected Onion Dome Headlines

Now, a warning about the first article and the comments that follow on The Onion Dome: It will get inappropriate jokes stuck in your head forever. The subject of the article is those eternal jokes.

Anyway, thanks for reading, and thanks for all of your kind comments. I am going to post some more Orthromance blog postings soon. I have an idea of what I want to say about "Match-Making and Other Bad Advice," my challenge is to make it actually funny. I also have written what I want to say about "Early Babies and Other Hazards of Passion" but I think I'll hang on to that until the end, since the blog has been, up until this point, mostly about the trials of loneliness, and that's about the next stage in your life, after you've found someone you're really enthusiastic about.

When I do think of something to write, I'll put it up.

In Christ,
Thomas Eric Ruthford

Benefits of anti-gravity

I hope that anti-gravity is discovered during my lifetime because I would like to bake a spherical loaf of bread. It'll stay fresher much longer.

Ooh, I got paid to write again!

Hi everybody,

Here's a link to a story I wrote for the Inlander, Spokane's weekly paper:

http://www.inlander.com/localnews/311943940048840.php

It's about parks in the Peaceful Valley. I think I'll get a whole $70 for it. Yow! I might make enough this year to qualify for a 1099!

Guilt and gifts

I am convinced that plants and books are the most guilt-ridden gifts, but for opposite reasons. With a plant, you have to write the thank-you letter quickly, before the plant dies (as it will quickly, if you are like me) so that you can describe in the letter how lovely it is while you can still remember it. Otherwise, you feel guilty both for the death of the plant and for your vague, schmaltzy description of it.

The book is the inverse. With a book, you have to delay your answer until you have read it. The thing sits upon the shelf, making you aware both of your clodish insensitivity in not thanking its sender and in your incapability to write a meaningful letter including details from the book. Months pass and your cheery little note whithers like a dying plant until it has been almost a full year since whatever occasion prompted the book, and you open your mailbox with dread, looking for a sarcastic note inquiring whether your postman is still living and perhaps his widow might appreciate this year's gift more than you.

Lent + Romance = Grapefruit + Milk

It’s Lent 2006, and I’m sitting in my bedroom, looking at a little paper sign. It says “The Old Cathedral would be a great place to get married, but it doesn’t #$*!ing matter.” The stars and symbols are really there because I didn’t want to put something that rude on the wall. Above that despairing phrase is the title, “Forbidden Thoughts 2006.”

I put that thought up there because I’d been having it entirely too much. The idea is that if I recognize that this kind of thinking will get me nowhere, I will stop hurting myself with it. (I think a shrink would call this “cognitive therapy.”) It’s like a gardener breaking up the soil with a pick. If he finds a rock that’s too big to be moved, he can keep whacking at it all day under the principle that he has the right to plant tomatoes wherever he wants, or he can leave a stake in the ground to mark the rock, and just go around it. My little paper sign is there to remind me to leave this rock in my head alone.

Why, you might ask, have I got a rock in my head? Well, I’m a bachelor, and I’m 26. I’m not too happy about it, and thinking about how you’d like to get married when you have no girlfriend is going to get you nowhere. The reason that the cathedral is in my head is that I just discovered this wonderful old church in San Francisco, the Old Cathedral of the Holy Virgin. This church was built in the 1880s by Anglicans. It’s a wooden church with Gothic architecture. The priest there tells me that it was built like a sailing ship, with no nails in it.

In the 1920s, large numbers of Russian refugees of the Bolshevik Revolution came across the Pacific Ocean to San Francisco. They bought this Anglican church and turned it into their own cathedral, filling it with beautiful icons. They named it after an icon of the Mother of God entitled “Joy Of All Who Sorrow.” (The short way of dealing with this is to call it “Holy Virgin Cathedral.”) In the 1960s, they built another cathedral in San Francisco, an even bigger one, with five gold onion domes that can be seen from the Golden Gate Bridge. That cathedral looks like it was brought by helicopter from Kiev. It’s also named after the “Joy of All Who Sorrow” icon, so there are two cathedrals with the same name in San Francisco (I don’t get this) but one is the Old Cathedral and the other is the New Cathedral.

The New Cathedral is famous enough to get into tourist guidebooks for San Francisco. Most people who walk into the place for the first time are a little overwhelmed by its towering ceilings, walls covered with frescoes, and not a word of English on any of the icons. There’s also the relics of St. John of San Francisco resting in a glass coffin in the cathedral. Yes, a dead person with his dark green hands and feet visible.

The New Cathedral is a popular place for Orthodox to get married, but if you’re going to invite a large number of friends who haven’t been to an Orthodox church, the grandiose, foreign design of the cathedral, and the dead body in the corner can kind of freak them out.

After having lived in San Francisco for a year, I’ve found the Old Cathedral. It’s a church with a few dozen members led by a priest, who, like me, did not grow up in the Orthodox Church. The services are half-and-half in English and Old Church Slavonic (a liturgical language which hasn’t been commonly spoken in 1,200 years). The cathedral looks more American and familiar, the services are long and contemplative, and the parishioners are a friendly multi-ethnic bunch of Russians, Ukrainians, Eritreans and converts. The cathedral is a large building that could hold 300-400 people easily, but we only get 40 or so people now (most of the founding families are going to the New Cathedral). The children of the cathedral take advantage of this fact because they can hide and play in the narthex of the church without disturbing the service going on up at the altar.

Up the street is Alamo Square Park, with its famous row of Victorian Houses, the second-most photographed structure in San Francisco after the Golden Gate Bridge.

So that’s the explanation for the little paper sign on my wall. The Old Cathedral would be a wonderful place to get married, but it doesn’t matter. Getting married is an abstract topic since I’m not seeing anyone, and it’s Lent. Yes, Lent.

Lent is a funny time for romance. Lent and romance are each appropriate in their own way, but together they’re like grapefruit and milk. You can have them together if you really want them, but it usually turns out weird.

Great Lent is the time in which the Church – meaning we humans – enter in to the spiritual condition of the Old Testament, in the words of theologian Alexander Schmemann. We are outside Paradise, outside of the gates of heaven, and no effort of our own will get us back in. But, the Old Testament tells of the coming of Christ, who can transcend that barrier. Our worship in Lent is a re-enactment of the Old Testament – thank God it’s only six weeks long rather than centuries of preparation! The services of Holy Week, which follow, put us in the shoes of the Apostles, who are seeing the most amazing and frightening events of their lives, who are then delighted in the Resurrection of their Master and God.

Father Schmemann calls the mood of Great Lent “Bright Sadness.” We are sad because of our sins but we are happy because we know what’s coming.

Great Lent is a time of prayer and fasting, of giving up non-essential activities such as television and going to concerts or bars, not because these activities are bad (they can be very helpful) but because you’re focusing your soul on the crucified and risen Christ. It’s the spiritual equivalent of boot camp. It takes a lot of focus, and we don’t try a lot of new things. Having a new girlfriend or boyfriend during Lent is like a professional baseball player painting an oil mural during spring training. It can be done, but do you really want to?

I became Orthodox in 2001, and my first Lent was in 2002. It was also my first year of serving in the Peace Corps in Ukraine. It was a wonderful time of spiritual discovery, with each service bringing me a little closer to the Resurrection. Also, I had discovered how Ukrainian dark bread is really good even without margarine. I ate it all through Lent and lost 40 pounds. It was great. When Pascha came around, it was like graduating from high school again or something – we made it!

Lent 2003 was a little harder to take because the Iraq War started in the second week of Lent, and it seemed like every Ukrainian I knew wanted to tell me what an idiot president that we had.

Lent 2004 is when things started getting complicated. I had just gotten back to the United States, and I was suffering badly from culture shock. (The culture shock of coming home is worse than going there.) And, there was this American Orthodox girl who wanted to spend time with me. She’d studied Slavonic language in university. She was beautiful, brilliant and tall, but she’d been a pretty shy person through high school and college and as a result had learned about men through reading Jane Austen novels.

We started seeing each other a couple of weeks before Lent. I enjoyed talking to her, but I wasn’t too sure about it becoming “a thing” with her. And, I wasn’t too sure about starting a new relationship during Lent in principle. She, on the other hand, was very enthusiastic. Sitting next to her, I thought I could hear the violins playing in her head, a crescendo moving to a climax of energy that could be let loose if we had our first kiss.

I thought we could just talk during Lent and maybe get romantic after Pascha. (And, stupidly, I thought that if I didn’t kiss her, we’d stay friends.) Anyway, it all fell apart a few weeks into Lent and I rarely hear from her now.

During Lent 2005, I met a tall girl at a church conference, and we got to talking about favorite books. She said she was reading Sense and Sensibility, by Jane Austen. After the conference, we kept writing each other, and she invited me to travel to her town 200 miles away to meet her parents. I was really excited, and I went to the library and checked out Sense and Sensibility to read on the bus. I got through half of this piece of chick lit (the main character was wondering why her suitor had left unexpectedly and was mad that he hadn’t written or called). I met the parents, who really seemed to like me, and then the girl told me her true ambition was to be a nun.

When I got back home, I walked directly from the Greyhound bus station to the library and hurled Sense and Sensibility through the return slot with finality.

Now we come to 2006. It’s Lent again, and, smarting from the embarrassments of the past two years, I swore off talking to eligible women. And, I started attending Old Cathedral, a beautiful place to get married, which brings me back to my original scene of this essay – sitting in my bedroom, I’m looking at that paper sign which bans the use of that dreadfully negative thought.

Let me let the clock run forward some from Lent 2006 now, and I’m going to tell you how my resolutions turn out.

I almost succeed in my efforts not to talk to women during Lent, until I’m at another San Francisco Orthodox church. It’s the evening of Holy Thursday, and I’m in line to go up and kiss the large crucifix that we put in the middle of the church in remembrance of the death of Christ. There, I meet a tall, beautiful young woman with long brown hair who has just moved to San Francisco. We become friends, and I spend most of the next several days with her. She’s very stylish. She says that she likes San Francisco because you can find more unique cocktail dresses in the boutiques and you rarely have to endure the frustration of finding another girl at a party who is wearing the same dress as you.

We go to the Paschal night service together, and then at the feast afterwards, I’m so entranced with the girl that I forget to eat.

That story doesn’t get much further than that, though. Pretty soon, I discover why. I met her on Holy Thursday, but on Holy Wednesday, she went to a dance club called Ruby Skye and met a young man passing through San Francisco. A few months later, she moves to Canada to be with him.

I keep going to church at the Old Cathedral, which, unlike the other church I attend sometimes in San Francisco, has no girls. (I wouldn’t have any problem identifying the other church if it didn’t lead to the identity of the girl I’m talking about.) This is at once a relief and a frustration. It’s a relief not to have to think of the right thing to say.

I go to an Orthodox conference for young adults. There I meet a tall, beautiful young woman from Canada. I tell her a little about my Peace Corps service, and about how I lost weight in Ukraine because the diet is better.

“Now you’re slim,” she said.

“Not quite,” I said. “My ideal weight would be 230.” (I’m six feet nine inches tall.)

“What?” she said incredulously. “That’s how much I weigh. Are you calling me fat?”

That didn’t get any further.

I keep going to the Old Cathedral. One Saturday in July, I’m attending a vigil service, which is an evening preparation service before the next day’s liturgy. During vigil, we have two services combined into one. There’s Vespers, which contains an assortment of readings, mostly from the Old Testament. Then, we move into Matins, which contains the Canon, an assortment of readings about the New Testaments saints that are commemorated that day. It also contains a Gospel reading about the Resurrection. Like Lent, it’s a movement from the Old to the New, from darkness to light.

This particular Saturday, we have some visitors helping out with the service. Rather than the usual one reader to do the responses to the priest’s prayers, we’ve got a real choir director visiting from Boise with her daughter. And, the choir director’s husband is a priest, serving, so we’ve got two priests working together at the service. I hear the lovely singing and reading emanating from the choir’s corner at the front of the church.

The vigil service takes about two and a half hours. At the end, I walk over to the choir’s corner to say hi to the visiting choir director and her daughter. They’re both quite happy to see me. Later on, I ask the daughter out on a date, and rather than the usual “prove you’re worth it” routine that a girl will give you, she says yes.

And, the Old Cathedral turns out to be a great place to get married, and it does matter.

Getting paid for writing and other life in Spokane

Dear Friends and Family,

Recently, I’ve experienced a rare honor in a writer’s life: having an article get published for which one is paid:

http://www.inlander.com/inlandway/74737699488100.php

They pay $.10 a word, and it’s for the local artsy weekly paper. It’s actual work. I think it’s the first time I’ve earned actual money for writing something in about six years. This story is about the zookeeper-training program that my wife participates in. All of the people I interviewed are classmates of Miri’s.

The zoo is kind of a cool place. They’ve got 45 tigers and two bears up there, and Miri’s been learning quite a bit about their care. Also, she’s been shoveling an awful lot of snow (we’ve had more than 70 inches this year), giving her muscle tone that’s better than mine, which is a little embarrassing. I have gone up to the zoo a few times to help with the shoveling, on Sunday afternoons. One of the things that makes the shoveling so difficult is that it can’t just be tossed to the side; it has to be put into wheelbarrows and taken to a pile. They now have three snow mountains that are each about eight feet tall.

I got to drive a wheelbarrow around the park last Sunday, and I shoveled snow in front of the exhibit of a lion named Jambo, who doesn’t like me very much. He gives me a death stare and crouches like he’s ready to jump every time I come by.

Jambo is a Barbary Lion, a species extinct in the wild, and he’s about 500 pounds in size. He looks kind of like Scar from “The Lion King.” It’s a little disconcerting having only a chain-link fence (even though it’s 12 feet high) between him and me. The other zookeepers tell me that there’s nothing to worry about; he just doesn’t like tall people.

To get from Jambo’s exhibit to the snow pile, I go past Kalki’s exhibit. Kalki is a leopard, he weighs about 100 pounds, and every time I go past, he makes it very clear that I really ought to be in the three pieces rather than one. He shows his teeth (and he’s got a lot) and he lunges at the fence. No amount of cheerful talking gets him to be nice.

As this article also mentions, the zoo has four Siberian tiger cubs, and they behave like a litter of kittens, except for the fact that they’re 25 pounds each. Miri supervises them on Sundays. They’re very cute, and they are a thundering herd when they’re playing. They’ve batted at my hands and tried to hold them with their large feet. They get cardboard toys to play with and Miri has shot several videos of them demolishing the toys.

I’m hoping to expand my work as a freelance writer to include other stories such as the efforts of a University of Idaho researcher to domesticate the mountain huckleberry. The deal with working for the Inlander is that I’m responsible for coming up with my own ideas, which isn’t easy when you’re new to the area. I’ve been writing to PR people at assorted universities and other agencies asking them for ideas and to put me on their press release list, which, I’m sure is going to get me a whole lot of e-mails telling me what a huge deal it is that they’ve raised $200,000 to build a new center to recognize rich donors. But, it’s a start.


WHERE WE LIVE

Miri and I are living in an apartment on the north side of Spokane, Wash. It’s a spacious two-bedroom apartment, and the rent is very reasonable. In San Francisco, we could have rented a doghouse for this amount, which might’ve made the dog happy; we’ve never had a doghouse. We live next door to our apartment complex’s landlady, and she’s very helpful.

We’d love to have guests. The guest room is cozy and well insulated. It’s also been really fun having our own kitchen, especially with all the cool cookware we got as wedding gifts. I’ve been learning all about cooking pot roast recently, although there’s always leftovers when only two people eat it.

MARRIED LIFE

Being married is neat. Miri is wonderful. I don’t know how to describe it beyond that except to say that I’ve relaxed quite a bit since being a bachelor. I actually go to the library and check out books now! That’s something I never did in San Francisco just because I never felt like I could relax enough to read a book. I’ve been buying the New York Times Book Review on Sundays, and the library has had most of the new books I’ve been interested in:

Some of the books I’ve enjoyed include:

The True Meaning of Smekday, by Adam Rex. This is one of the funniest books that I’ve read in the past five years. Several times, Miri came close to throwing me out of bed for laughing too much while she was trying to sleep. It’s a book about an 11-year-old girl and her cat saving the world from invading space aliens. It’s an obvious jab at America’s Indian policies, and a more subtle jab at our Iraq policies. And, it contains a lot of Huckleberry Finn in it as the 11-year-old girl becomes friends with one of the aliens.

A Mirror Garden, by Monir Sharoudy Farmanfarmaian. This is the memoir of an Iranian artist who created a new art with lots of mirrors. As she wanders through this tale of development of her own artistry, she also conveys a great deal of cultural and historical knowledge about Iran. It’s a charming, engaging story, although it is kind of annoying how she mostly exempts herself from public affairs in her home country (that is, until she gets kicked out in the 1979 revolution). The dust cover says that it’s a grace-under-pressure kind of story, and that the author is sort of a Persian Audrey Hepburn. I guess that makes sense, but the only thing I know about Audrey Hepburn is that she makes middle-aged women think about pretty dresses.

The Abstinence Teacher, by Tom Perotta. This is the story of a New England suburb where a fundamentalist church opens up and starts protesting the sex-ed curriculum in the public schools. The two main characters are the sex-ed teacher and a soccer coach who is a member of this church, and who happens to have the sex-ed teacher’s daughter on his soccer team. I didn’t enjoy the plot because of its moral ambiguity, but the characters are wonderfully written, and are very believable, real people.

God’s Politics: Why the Right is Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It, by Jim Wallis. This book is 400 pages of political warmth, if there is such a thing, intended to prove that it is possible to be a Christian and vote for a non-Republican. I liked it, but there was a certain hippie-Jesus element in his religion that unsettled me.

There were several other books that seemed promising, but I never made it past page 50:

Sons and Other Flammable Objects, by Porochista Khakpour. The main characters were just too darn mean.

Arthur and George, by Julian Barnes, a fictional account of the youth of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes. Well-written, but too proper and British to keep my attention.

Arguing the Just War in Islam, by John Kelsay. I just didn’t care.

FUTURE PLANS

Miri and I are looking for zoos where she can work, which is almost certain to be somewhere other than Spokane (there’s only one here, and we know the payscale). Places we’d like to go in Washington state include the Point Defiance Zoo, the Woodland Park Zoo, and Northwest Trek. We’ve also thought about zoos in Oregon, Colorado and a few other places. This means that we’re likely to move again before 2008 is over, which I am looking forward to. Hopefully we’ll land someplace with a more interesting job market.

OTHER STUFF

I joined a bowling league, and I actually scored 147 in a game last week.

I went caucusing last Saturday. It was fun meeting some neighbors. A whole 28 people showed up from our precinct, which was impressive.

I’m working on a book intended to make the Orthodox Church seem less weird to outsiders. Maybe the title should be, “Don’t Overlook Us Just Because Our Hymns Don’t Rhyme.” The book is intended to apply the principles of marketing to our efforts to communicate with multiple audiences (right now I think we only communicate to people like ourselves).

I finished all of the thank-you cards for the gifts from the groom’s guests at the wedding. At least I think I did. If you didn’t get yours and are wondering why this clod doesn’t write you, please let me know. Miri is still working on the thank-you cards for the bride’s guests and is threatening divorce over my being too smug about it.

So, what’s been up with you? Any of it worth a story in the newspaper, you think?

Please keep in touch.

In Christ,
Thomas Eric Ruthford