The Great Adventure - Day 12 - August 16, 2009

I generally enjoy visiting a new or different church. If the church has a bedrock of similarity with what I’m used to -- that is, if it is at least in the same theological ballpark as my home church, the familiarity of the essentials is disarming and reassuring, and the novelty of the differences intriguing and engaging. I’m always happy to be at my home church, but there’s something fun about being abroad and seeing Christendom from a different perspective. Sunday was our day to pack up and head back to Pennsylvania. Our plans called for being in Harrisburg, PA around dinner time. Saturday night Stacy and I had gone back and forth on whether we’d have enough time to go to church with Kurt and Susie, but eventually decided that we really wanted to and would simply make it work.

Kurt Richardson (Evidently our agreement with the witness relocation program precludes us from photographing him from the front.)

Kurt was up when we got up and had waffles ready for some eager customers. At some point in the meal N managed to get a hold of the butter and proceeded to paste every waffle hole like spackling before I caught him. I pretended to lecture him and then scooped all his butter out onto my waffle and acted like I only was doing it because it would go to waste otherwise.

Like I need more butter.

Around this time L escaped from the table and found Mommy’s camera. She thinks she’s being sneaky and that she’ll get away with using something she’s been repeatedly told to leave alone. She never seems to remember that she leaves a rather direct trail of evidence implicating her in her crimes.

WANTED: Suspect is white female, ~5 years old.
Should be considered dangerous.

Susie being stalked by the Perkins paparazzi.

In post-arrest questioning the alleged camera thief admitted to taking so many identical pictures of identical subjects because she wanted to be able to give them out to her friends. Once again, a child was cursorily admonished, but only half-heartedly, because in this case L managed to take the only pictures we got of Kurt and Susie the whole time we were there. Why we never scheduled any Kodak moments, I have no idea, so L’s blurry indiscretion proved to be rather useful after all.

The Richardsons attend an inner-city mission church sponsored by the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) in downtown Boston right where we had been the day before. (We were a block or two away from the Boston Common.) A largely Asian congregation, probably because Boston’s Chinatown is just a few blocks south, the fellowship meets in a hotel conference room. The minister who preached that Sunday was South African; it took some time to lock on to his accent – not English, not Australian, not Scots – unique, but akin to them all. I’d known a number of South Africans when I lived in Switzerland and I’d always enjoyed listening to them speak. We enjoyed the service and the kids managed to keep their heads on. N actually crawled up into Susie’s lap and cuddled with her though most of it. After the service I hit their book table and was impressed with what they had on hand. I picked up a copy of The Structure of Biblical Authority by Dr. Meredith Kline I found on the shelves.

Out at the car we said our goodbyes to the Richardsons. We were very happy to have had the chance to spend some time with them. I hope we can continue to keep in touch and see each other from time to time on whatever coast is convenient.



Back on the road, we set our sights for Harrisburg. One of my very best friends, Jeff van Bastelaar, who was my best man in our wedding, and his wife Liz live there with their three kids. Their son J is a year older then L. Their first daughter G is a little older than N, and their youngest girl, K, if not a newborn, is certainly a newbie. (Stacy could tell you K’s age with just about as much precision as Liz herself, but from my handicapped male perspective, infants all look about the same until they get your attention by walking up to you and kicking you in the shins – at which point they’re probably around one.)

Jeff is a lawyer, so he likes to analyze and talk through things. We have a long history of late nights over glasses of wine and maybe some other things my kids might have enjoyed in 17th century Boston, all the while discussing art, literature, theology or culture. Ingmar Bergman movies perplexed both of us, but we still carried on as if we understood and loved them. We could, however, wholeheartedly and honestly profess our admiration for Ella Fitzgerald, the Yosemite National Park back-country, and Beethoven’s 6th Symphony.

I am of German extraction and “vB” ( a.k.a. “Veebs”) is most enthusiastically Dutch. A Christmas tradition we held for a number of years when we both lived in California was the exchanging of “adult beverages” in honor of the Fatherlands – something from Germany and something from the Netherlands. Over the years the objective evidence has compelled Veebs to admit that apart from a couple of half-way decent beers, the Dutch really can’t make a liqueur to save their low-altitude lives. The Dutch should have welcomed their frequent German invasions, if only for the chance to improve their spirit distilling skills.

Our drive to Harrisburg was fraught with traffic. We weren’t an hour outside of Boston when the interstate stopped cold. We crawled two miles in an hour and a half. We never saw what the hold-up was because those two miles brought us (finally!) to an exit where we jumped ship and hit the surface streets. Our usual life’s metronome, the hunger pangs of our kids, took us off the road for lunch far sooner (distance-wise) than I had hoped, but the Greek pizza place we stopped in (Zorba's Pizzeria Tavern in Sturbridge, MA) took a lot of the complaint out. I had a really good marinated pork pita sandwich-thing. Stacy got some sort of a BLT made with Canadian bacon, which tasted fine and all, but she kicked herself afterwards for her lack of world vision and for not getting something a little more Greekish. Back on the road, we simply trucked it the rest of the day. Another traffic snag in eastern PA around Wilkes-Barre (construction - our stimulus dollars at work) tacked on another 45 minutes to an hour onto our schedule.

It was pretty late when we finally pulled up in front of the vB’s in Harrisburg, but regular phone statusing ensured that the pizza pulled in right behind us and our travel-logged kids managed to tap into all new stores of kinetic wildness when J and G descended upon them with all their own pent-up anticipation. After an hour or two’s loud pizza consumption and vivacious stomping through the house, Stacy decided she needed to tranquilize our overextended youngsters, and Liz wanted to do the same for hers. Stacy took our car and the kids and headed to our nearby hotel. (The van Bastelaars have a cat – a generally sweet and innocent little thing – but Stacy’s bronchial passages seem to be annoyingly dead-set against such things. We figured anaphylactic shock and a night at the ER might put a bit of a damper on the trip, so we reluctantly stayed at a hotel while in Harrisburg.) Liz similarly depressurized her J, G and K, and then went to bed herself. Jeff and I, however, hung back in their living room over a glass of whiskey and a hefty serving of catching up. A couple hours later, when it was well past midnight and my eyelids were clearly losing their war with gravity, Jeff drove me back to the hotel. As I slipped in the door and listened to the three airy breathings in the room, I remember thinking how blessed I was in family and friends.