“With $5 I could buy an entire meal for you, Claire. That’s ridiculous.”

This was my response to her only request at the Mizzou game last weekend. We ate the obligatory hot dog and drank Diet Coke from a huge black and gold souvenir cup, but otherwise I was determined to be thrifty and frugal on this outing. Spun sugar at $5 a bag, no matter how pretty it looked, did not fit that resolution.

She didn’t argue with me. She went back to cheering and shaking her pom-pom and watching all the people around us.

Once in awhile she would say, “Yum. I love this lip gloss Pam gave me,” smacking her lips, “It smells like Cotton Candy!”

“Sorry, no Cotton Candy. It’s really messy, Claire.”

But then as we were walking back from the restroom we happened to be following the lady with the brightly colored bags of cotton candy on her tall wooden stick. A $5 bill in my pocket was jumping out and screaming at me, “I’m NOTHING, but this little girl has only asked for ONE THING today . . . on her BIRTHDAY . . . and it doesn’t matter how messy or nutritionally worthless it is, Claire will never forget it if you let her buy that bag right now!”

“Excuse me, we’ll take some Cotton Candy!”

Many childhood experiences could fit into this Cotton Candy category: no nutritional value, messy, sticky, and over-priced. I’d include sleep-overs, amusement parks, Happy Meals, and birthday parties in this list. But sometimes these are the right choices to make anyway.

Sure, it might mean we’re cleaning up or taking extra naps or temporarily emptying our wallets, but these are investments in memories.

Will Claire remember that pink and blue Cotton Candy of which she barely ate a third? Maybe not. But when she looks back on her childhood, I think Cotton Candy will pop up in there somewhere and she’ll feel warm and happy inside.

That’s worth a few extra wipes and $5 bills today.

If there is one thing I have learned in my 36 years on this earth it is that life is about managing the tensions between truths. Very few things are as simple as they seem. Jesus pointed this out often. He was Lion and Lamb. He told us the first would be last. He promised life if we died. Tension between truths.

This week college football took a hit. And rightly so. As I heard Kirk Herbstreit say on ESPN, “We need to remember there are bigger things in life than college football.”

So there’s that, which sort of makes me hesitant to write this. Until I remember the tension.

Because just about 9 years ago, college football did everything right. At least for me.

Most of you know that 9 years ago I was pregnant with Claire and Ellery and things didn’t go well. During the three or so weeks before they were born, I was in and out of University hospital in Columbia, Missouri, because of the complications. The first of those stays was especially difficult. I was on something called mag sulfate that made me feel hot and weird and sick. My room was kept quiet and dark so that I wasn’t overly stressed or excited, but the effect was more depressing than soothing.

Finally one Saturday afternoon we opened the windows – I’m not sure why.

L.G. Patterson/AP Photo

The Missouri game was on the tv. The volume was low, of course, but it was nice to watch the images of strong healthy people on the screen. Then, as if orchestrated, a Tiger (maybe Brad Smith – in my memoir, it will definitely be Brad Smith because you can do that in memoirs) ran in long for a touchdown. I saw it on the screen but not before I heard it through the window.

Thunderous cheering and shouting from the stadium just blocks away. Thousands of people forgetting their cares and worries and cheering for the conqueror, taking part in a celebration bigger than themselves. On the screen, a quiet and tiny image of what could be. Through the widows, the noisy proof of its truth.

For me it was a tension-filled reminder of life: how we sometimes find ourselves grieving and celebrating in almost the same moments. How life is triumphing even while death is threatening. Those sounds and the way they affected me are all that’s right about college football.

Saturday we celebrate Claire’s 9th birthday. And quietly in our hearts we’ll also remember Ellery’s passing. It’s a tension every year. A good friend is taking Claire and Jesse and I to the Mizzou game that day. And we will cheer. And we will be reminded of good and health and life. Maybe our cheers will be someone else’s reminder that day. We all need them now and then because we live in a world of tensions. Both of us living truth. Both of us needing the reminders of each other.

This Saturday we will throw open the windows to the sounds of celebration! I hope you’ll hear us from wherever you are.

I showed you a beautiful image of The Beginning. With more photos, I wrote about The Middle. But what can I say about The End?

Because no one knows their own end.

I’d like it to be something like The Notebook. We’d be holding hands in our sleep and just drift away to Jesus together. I’ve recently read two different news stories about the real-life versions of that movie, two couples married for years who were able to escape the sorrow of living without one another because they met death within the same 24-hour period. That would be ideal, wouldn’t it? But that doesn’t happen for many. Most of us have to deal with something less than perfect.

No one knows their own end. Mostly.

One thing we do know. A Facebook friend alerted me to a new ABC series called Once Upon A Time. It is mesmerizing (but not for children even though the title might imply as much). The fight between good and evil, so clearly depicted in fairy tales, is the basis of the show along with a bit of The Matrix twist about living in one reality and forgetting the truth. Fascinating. My favorite line so far came from Snow White when she realized her newborn child had escaped the evil Queen’s curse and would someday return to rescue them all. Full of fire and hope even in the midst of her deepest sorrow, suffering, and loss, Snow White locked eyes with Evil and said, “You are going to lose.”

That much we know. No matter when death takes us now, it will not win in the end. It will lose.

So I cannot tell you how The End will look in words, but at the same wedding that gave us beautiful images of beginnings and middles, my brother-in-law caught this one that makes me think the end will be something like this: Us looking back over our lives – over all that we’ve known, loved, made, and cared for – and knowing it’s been good:

And by then we’ll also know it isn’t really The End. It’s the beginning. The beginning of Forever. And I don’t have a blog post for that yet.

I love the beginning, but living in the middle is pretty sweet too. Fluffy filling. Smooth caramel. Chewy dough. The good stuff is in the middle. We loved celebrating Drew and Kate’s beginning at their marriage ceremony this weekend, but I was never so happy to be in the middle either.

Dan and I would catch each other between runs to the tux shop and walk-throughs at windy rehearsals and we’d smile, “So glad to be on this side of that!” So glad our beginning was beautiful, too, but mostly glad to be past it and to now be in the middle.

The middle of this bounty:

The middle of playing wedding . . . or orphanage, or mommy, or rock star, or all of them together:

The middle of dreaming into mirrored glass and smiling at the hazy images:

The middle of barn dances and laughter and twinkle lights:

This is basically the middle of life together, and it is sweet. Sure, there are moments we don’t necessarily want captured in digital ink, but I’m thankful for these shots that provide markers along the way. These photos, I know, will eventually fill a photo book that we’ll turn the pages of again and again.

“Look how small you were!”

“Oh, I loved that barn! And I loved our dresses!”

“Did I always smile like that?”

“What was I pouting about?!”

And none of us will remember because all we’ll see is how good it was in the middle.

As I prepped a class this week, I pulled out my copy of Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird. I love looking back through books that have changed and challenged me and seeing what I may have marked or underlined. In this one, I found a paragraph I had drawn three blue lines around – above it, below it, and down the left-hand margin – to block it off as important to me. What did I see in this paragraph, among the many paragraphs in this classic book for writers? What life did it speak to me?

Read it yourself first.

Sometimes people turn out to be not all that funny or articulate, but they can still be great friends or narrators if they possess a certain clarity of vision — especially if they have survived or are in the process of surviving a gret deal. This is inherently interesting material, since this is the task before all of us: sometimes we have to have one hand on this rock here, one hand on that one, and each big toe seeking out firm if temporary footing, and while we’re scaling that rock face, there’s no time for bubbles, champagne, and a witty aside. You don’t mind that people in this situation are not being charming. You are glad to see them doing something you will need to do down the line, and with dignity. The challenge and the dignity make it interesting enough.

What do you think?

I think I must have been losing hope by this point in the book. Lamott is an amazing writer – so funny and natural. I wonder if by this point I was frustrated with my own lack of style. Maybe you never do this, but sometimes when I read something great I think, Well, with amazing stuff like this out there why would anyone want to read my too-long, too-boring pieces?

(You never do that, right, because you are full of confidence. I know. But just in case, take a peek at this quotation from Ira Glass; it should boost your self-esteem a little.)

This paragraph by Lamott gave me permission to write my story even if I wasn’t funny. Even if I wasn’t brilliant. I knew I had survived. I knew I had survived with dignity. And so have you. You’ve survived something. Lamott’s words promise that survival could be enough to keep someone reading who needs to see your win, even if it wasn’t pretty.

So we write. Or tell. Or sing. Or paint. Or dance. But the stories are told. The footings in the rocks of trial and tragedy are pointed out and found. This is how we help each other through.

I’ve missed you. I’ve missed this.

You’ll remember that I took a blogging break in September. I’m generally pleased with the preliminary results of that break. I felt very good about my performance on the GRE, even after the four hours I spent taking it in a cell-like computer testing room. I won’t have actual results for awhile, and I’m way to prideful humble to share my score even when I do, but I’d say my effort was rewarded.

And football? Yeah, that is going very well. I’m ridiculously proud of Jesse. On Saturday he scored two touchdowns. Granted, this was only after the other team finally put in their smaller boys in the 4th quarter when we were already down 50-0, but it was still thrilling. I’ve been especially proud of how he’s handled trying out for different positions (there aren’t hundreds of other players or anything, but he wanted to be the kicker and he is the kicker) and learning to not emotionally melt at the first sign of conflict (no one would ever describe Jesse as having thick skin). He’s enjoyed his “man practice,” as my mom described it, and it’s been my joy to observe.

But as important and as wonderful as all of that has been, I’ve missed this. When STORY was over, I was gently pressured by my friend Brad to blog about my experience, so I broke my September silence with a September Interlude. I can’t thank Brad enough for the nudge, because the second I hit “Publish” on that post I felt better. Honestly, I almost felt physically better.

This afternoon I sat down at the kitchen table and wrote a letter to our World Vision child. I told him about how much we like American football. I told him we sing and pray almost every night, and now he is added to those prayers. I told him I hoped he was happy and well. (I didn’t tell him that I wished I could see the headmen and chiefs his mother mentioned and decide for myself if they were really taking good care of his village. Learning what NOT to communicate is important, too.) I sealed the envelope with the same accomplished feeling I have after clicking to publish this blog. I guess it’s just how I’m made.

And It’s so good to let you know!