still life and stirring

I have an unexpected hour-and-a-half of solitude in my lap this morning, and I find myself wandering the streets and beaches of this tiny seaside town, alone with my thoughts and the little sounds of life carrying on its business all around me.

I'm sitting on a rough-hewn, weather-worn bench out on a wharf, the air alive with nature's industry. Below me, a seagull sits on a platform, going at a cockle with every bit of strength in his beak, in an earnest pursuit of his breakfast. Out in the cove, the water is at low tide and as still as memory; several birds of varying descriptions are bathing themselves noisily, and I peek over the wharf's old wooden railing to see a snow-white seagull whishing his face back and forth in the water over and over. I wonder if it feels delicious. Wings are flapping in the air around me as the gulls and cormorants and pigeons and an occasional heron all wing their way around the docks, picking off the the smorgasbord of fresh seafood exposed by the ebbing of the tide.

The scene down in the tide flats is a cacophony of life, all jumbled together, growing off of one another, tangled and inextricable, except by the sharp and persistent beaks of the water birds. Clusters of mussels congregate in the hundreds of thousands on the barnacle-studded rocks, and thousands of tiny crabs, no bigger than a nickel, scuttle around surreptitiously as they scavenge for tiny bits of food. The spiky green cushions of sea urchins are poking up everywhere, and a welcome sight this year is the celebrated return of the sea stars, all plump and glumpy, easing back into existence and making a comeback after a mass die-off in the past couple of summers.

I remember with a faint twinge of pity at the day 4 years ago when I had a big dream of living here, and it looked like the light was going right out of it for good. What abject misery I felt--what disillusionment and grief and sorrow and distrust. I'm reminded today that all journeys see dark days, and that great and beautiful things can lie beyond them.

--Teri.

my undiscovered country

I'm 39.5 years old, staring down the barrel of my 40th birthday and making some decisions about how I want to be rounding that corner when it comes. Gravity has always been strong, and it pulls at me with the whisperings of this-is-as-good-as-it-gets and it's-all-downhill-from-here. They say deep calls to deep, and for me, it's the deep-dark spiral of human frailty calling out to the bone-deep fatigue that finds it origins in the broken butterfly at my throat. Give into the gravity. Go gracefully into the night. Succumb.

But I don't wanna.

And it's because I've begun to find my undiscovered country. I'm learning a new and unfamiliar language and unlearning some of the old words that no longer describe the terrain. After all these years, words like "slow" and "can't" and "stretched-out" are being supplanted by a new vocabulary--weird words like "glycogen" and "endurance" and "will". The landscape is beginning to shift and change in ways I never thought possible, and the view keeps getting more and more interesting and surprising to me. Kicking against the goads of gravity for the past several months has begun to shape my legs, and where there was once the pudginess of post-childbirth mid-life motherhood, I'm noticing sinew and muscle and a strength I've never before had. These legs have carried me now across a significant finish line, and they want to do it again. And again. They want to move faster and keep shaping and sculpting the new landscape of my middle age, until I pull across the finish line of my 39th year, an entirely new person in an entirely new world, breathing a new atmosphere where gravity is weaker than me.

a tale of two attitudes

There are two stories. And I will tell them both.

Story the First:
It's 1:30 in the morning and there's no such thing as comfort. My neck is cricked in ways I never knew possible, and to score a tenably adequate position for one part of the body means to sacrifice it on the unholy altar of ache for another. I'm catching snatches of sleep here and there in between mandatory position changes (I want to make sure my body pains are fairly equally distributed come morning), hoping maybe it'll add up to enough to keep me on my split and sore feet for our first day in Atlanta tomorrow. I look around at the kids and find they are playing the same strategy game in their various seats.

The prediction for the attitudinal weather system moving in tomorrow looks bleak.

I spent a few hours earlier listening to the charming life story of a man who--as he stated at least 17 times (3 times in one sentence, and to at least 3 different people) spent the last 3 days drinking a half gallon of Royal Crown. A half gallon of Royal Crown. A half gallon of Royal Crown! A half gallon of Royal Crown....he's finally fallen asleep, but the guy ahead of us is texting the night away WITH THE SOUND ALL THE WAY UP. He sounds like an old typewriter up there, which I suppose does add a certain je ne sais quoi to the atmosphere in the train, but nevertheless makes me want to do an act of midnight violence on the man.

 It's a long night on the southbound train to Atlanta.

Story the Second:
After spending a good hour settling in and playing conductors and pilots and what-does-this-lever-do in their seats, the two youngest kiddos settled into quiet conversation in their little enclave, weaving their shared experience tight into the future. Brotherhood, right there. Pure excitement and adventure is running through their little veins, and I am suddenly aware that they will remember this. Always. And I am grateful for the opportunity to gift them with that ember in their hearts.

I twist and turn and wonder if sleep will come, and it does, unevenly. I wake at 1 in the morning to the awareness that the train rocking along the tracks has managed the impossible lullaby. It's a contented, exhilarating feeling, to come awake and feel my body racing forward through the night, knowing I'm passing through several states in my sleep. A peek at the map says we're nearing Charlotte, and I'm astonished to find we've come so deep into the south; only 3 days ago we passed the Mason-Dixon line casually on our drive back from Gettysburg.

As the train barrels on through the night, I'm suddenly reminded of all those scenes in all the old movies where the big map comes on screen and the plane or train is superimposed over it, making tracks all over on the way to some great adventure or mission, while a dotted line plots the course and an X marks every stop along the route: Shanghai, Bangkok, Hong Kong, Casablanca. For us, the map says Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia; but the feeling is the same. We are making tracks, and fast, as we click along the rails and struggle for sleep and wonder at the adventure that is right here and now.

--teri.

clarity of fog

I'm meandering along the shoreline, picking my way through the perfect imperfection of broken shells and bits of seaweed, taking a sweet moment to be drowned in the quirky silence of the sea, and the fog is thick. The tide is low, the waters still, and I know that the surface would be like quietly undulating glass, if I could see it. To my ear, there is no sound but my feet crunching, chewing slowly on the ground beneath me. Even the sea birds and the waves are observing a moment of silence.

I look out where the water should be, and see nothing but a wall of cotton as thick as sea--nothing penetrating the flawless white. This is perfection. The dense fog mutes the whole world, brings it in close, lets it seep into my heart, and feeds me in a deep way that I have somehow recognized since I was a child. In keeping me from seeing far, it forces me to see up close. And up close is usually where I need most to train my eyes, especially on the days when there is no clarity to be found in far-reaching. I'm lost inside the blessed soundlessness of seeing. Somewhere, from deep within the veil, bellows the sonorous call of a fog horn, long and ebony, and its echo ripples and resounds for a full 5 seconds over the beach and beyond, off across the sound. I count it out, one-one-thousand, two-one-thousand, three-one-thousand, four-one-thousand, five-one-thousand as it finally dissipates out of earshot. Somehow it doesn't shatter the perfect stillness, but merely greets it and genuflects on its way over the water.

My eyes are down now, searching the beach for the pretty European oyster shells that riddle the shore this time of year; I fill my pockets with these mothers-of-pearls, but I am finding them less frequently now. Something is changing, I think to myself. It feels subtle, but then I begin to notice little cast-off crab shells, fragmented into carapace and claw, littering the places where the tide has gone out and left evidence of what's happening under the water just off the shore, and I know now that the Dungeness and other crabs are beginning to return from their winter hiding places in the deeper waters of the sound, coming back to the shallows and the shores again, to grow and to molt and to continue the great cycle of life for another season.

The fog is lifting now, the waters begin lapping in the ferry wake, the quiet now retreating and bringing the little noises of life and industry into sharper detail; the sea birds resume their hunting and crying--for them, it is a new season, and I sense that for me too, maybe it is time to begin again.

--teri.

the giving tree

Elementally, maybe I am Shel Silverstein's Giving Tree. I am a tree of life, sheltering and nourishing all my little ones, being both their source and their every resource. As they grow bigger, as they grow more and more into themselves, I begin to feel them reaching towards my choicer branches, towards the harder-to-reach fruit, towards the very heart of me, and I feel them asking for more and more of me--never sated, never slaked, always hungering for more of me. There are days that I feel that they'll never be satisfied until they have used up my every branch and eaten my every hard-grown apple, and finally cut me down and hauled my heart right out of me for their own purposes. They don't know it yet, what a toll has been taken, and they may never fully know it. They don't see the sap I bleed at the end of every exhausted day, when I've lost another small piece of myself that may never regrow, when I'm certain that the end game of all this great giving is for me to give until there's nothing left and I am but a stump, having lived out my life, giving and giving, and giving, and gone.

Or maybe I identify more closely with William Butler Yeats' The Two Trees. There are days when I can gaze within my own heart and see the joy and the holy branches and the merry light; and then there are days when this verse from the poem resonates so strongly in me:

Gaze no more in the bitter glass The demons, with their subtle guile, Lift up before us when they pass, Or only gaze a little while; For there a fatal image grows That the stormy night receives, Roots half hidden under snows, Broken boughs and blackened leaves. For all things turn to barrenness In the dim glass the demons hold, The glass of outer weariness, Made when God slept in times of old. There, through the broken branches, go The ravens of unresting thought; Flying, crying, to and fro, Cruel claw and hungry throat, Or else they stand and sniff the wind, And shake their ragged wings; alas! Thy tender eyes grow all unkind: Gaze no more in the bitter glass.

The ravens of unresting thought have certainly been flying to and fro in my life of late, and the glass of outer weariness is all I can raise my eyes to see. I'm trying to await the spring with patience, when I can maybe shake my leafy head again and feel the surety of my hidden root, and perhaps dower the stars again with a little merry light.

--Teri.

how can god still dance?

I saw a broken rabbit on the road, and I wondered, how can God still dance?

Wending my way down the green of a forest-canopied road this morning, breathing in the beautiful gray silence and singing hard into the quiet, I drove past this little rabbit, its perfection desecrated on the chill fog of the morning highway. It caught my breath and sent warmed tears streaming, and I was moved unexpectedly by the thought of that one tiny life brought to such a violent and graceless end. It was the first faint rumble of an earthquake of staggering realization that struck right on its heels:

If God pieced together the universe with His starry breathing, if He caught the grandest vision in all of eternity and set it into motion, if He is the deepest and highest and farthest reaches of Love itself, then somewhere in the clockless face of existence, He must have cried over this little rabbit, and the millions of little rabbits that perished before it, and the sparrows, and the cattle on a thousand hills, and the deaths of a thousand stars, and your heart, and mine.

How, then, can God still dance?

I assume God is a fabulous dancer; how else could He have painted the great spectacle of the heavens and the rush of unbelievable blue in the oceans and the incomprehensible green of the fern? How else could He have put the tiny sparkle in your eyes, or the beauty in your upturned hand, or the curve of your lower lip? Only a dancing God could have given arch to our feet, and movement like flight when we swim, and grace like swans when we die. He must dance at every birth, at every epiphany, at every slap of a whale's tail on the water, at every work of art, at every pebble on the beach, smoothed and shaped and shining. He must.

The universe, in all its entropy, in all its dying glory, in all its rebirth and failure and rebirth again, is rife with dancing and mourning, and even dancing while in mourning. Maybe only a great God of the universe, limitless in mind and fathomless in heart, could really understand how it is possible--or even necessary--to keep up the fantastic dance, even when the heart breaks, and the sorrows of a hurting world are crying out.

Maybe God can dance when we can't. Maybe God can dance because we can't. Maybe God can dance for us until He teaches us all to dance again. And maybe we'll all learn someday to dance even while we cry.

--Teri.

the whispered giggle of tomorrow

Sometimes, the future happens so fast, you don't have time to believe it; it's been that kind of future for me lately.

Three months ago I lamented the great gaping silence that was issuing forth from the heavens and rending my soul, sure that any hope for the soon-to-come I was imagining was dead and gone, dried up and blown away on the bitter winds of Divine indifference. Then I thought I caught the faint sound of God giggling at me, and I just assumed that it was the derisive laugh of an angry Parent laughing at His little fist-shaking child.

I think now that this only made Him giggle harder. And He's been giggling ever since. What I was actually hearing was the sound of the Great Surpriser of the Universe hiding behind the door to my future with a bouquet of balloons and a chocolate cake, giggling like a schoolboy at the wollop-daddy of a surprise life He's had planned all this time. That door swung open on its hinges at the end of July, and I don't think I've been able to wipe the shocked grin off my face since.

It seems like I'm always drawn back to musical metaphors to neatly describe the messy business of my soul, and what's occurring to me at the moment is that the past few months have been like a really intense piece of modern serious music: a lot of dissonance-- an aching, uncomfortable sitting with a very long moment of no resolution. How any of those clashing chords could work themselves out in my life felt mind-rippingly impossible. I wasn't so good at seeing the possibilities, and I definitely wasn't appreciating the music like a good student should.

But then suddenly, that moment came, when the dissonance broke and just melted into a pure, sigh-heaving, eye-closing sort of sweet music that I couldn't even have imagined before. It was the music of Heaven, of the way being opened to me, of the crooked path suddenly becoming straight. It was a bouquet of balloons and chocolate cake and the grandmother of surprise parties. It was Glorious.

There aren't a whole lot of moments in life when we can really say that we've had a solid, immovable knowledge that we are just exactly where we're supposed to be, doing just exactly the thing we're supposed to be doing. Our purpose and direction are not, for some Divine reason, often made that plain to us. And I'm thinking that the reason for this is to help us develop a little blind faith that the chuckles we hear from Heaven aren't borne of derision, but of adoration; that the crisis we're in at any given moment can inexplicably dissolve into big beautiful; that there is a miracle tucked away inside of each and every moment of longing, just waiting for the door to swing open.

--Teri.

a quiet reckoning with the ashes

I've come to think of Colorado Springs as my hometown for a lot of reasons.  Most of my friends live here; it was my first home after Christopher and I were married; 4/6 of my children were born here; it was where I first fell in love with living in a city. 

When we lived within the city proper, I used to wake one of our children at random at about 4 in the morning during the summer, and we would set off, bleary-eyed into the urban wild with our walking sticks and a flashlight, to discover our neighborhoods before the sun came up. We covered miles of territory, my kids and I, and talked through anything and everything. We felt safe inside the quiet bustling of a city about to awaken and so charged with energy. It was almost magical, and it was everything I ever wanted out of living in a city.

A little over a week ago, my precious city became ravaged at the edges by the worst wildfire in our state's history.  We all watched helplessly as the fire seemed to tumble down the mountainside like a hideous lava flow, toward the homes of friends, and strangers, and the very heart of our community. With sick tears draining fast from terrified hearts, we snapped hundreds of pictures--the paparazzi of the damned, unable to turn away. Thousands of us drove aimlessly but furiously around town, driving ourselves deep into the choking smoke, desperate for any scrap of information or a better vantage point. The air was a thick stew of charred forest, until an altogether different smell began to swirl ominously through town: the acrimonious bitter stench of burning home. Someone on the radio said you'd never forget the smell of a burning house, and I wondered what he meant until Tuesday evening, when that inescapable, thick-as-tar smell permeated everything for miles and shrouded the sun. Despite the awful burning and the thickness we all felt in our chests, we stayed and stayed and stayed, watching from our perches all over town as house after house surrendered to the killing flame and was no more. It was our own little apocolypse right on the edge of town, more fascinating and frightening than anything many of us had ever seen or known.

The rapidly passing days have carried the fire away from our doorsteps, and the valiant efforts of scores upon scores of courageous firefighters is only now truly coming to light, as images surface of thousands of homes spared from the encroaching inferno. We drove over to the scarred area of town last evening, and we clearly were not the only ones who couldn't keep themselves away from a closer knowledge of the terror that was. There was an eerie juxtaposition of residents, trying to pull their lives back together and act normal again, coupled with the almost reverential caravan of people on a nearly holy pilgrimage to the heart of the disaster. We drove down a few streets where the homes were untouched, and then turned down a side street where every house looked just fine until the third one on the right, nestled between two unscathed houses, and razed to the ground. The feeling that overcame me was not unlike seeing my dead grandfather in his casket at the funeral home when I was nine years old; I had known it was coming, but the shock, sadness, and abject awkwardness were unavoidable and overwhelming. Tears welled up again from that place in the heart that holds shame, and fear, and sorrow, and I couldn't resist the  grief for these distant neighbors of mine, now bereft of so much. 

As we drove on, we'd catch a view here and there of blackened hillsides, fences, grass, and the occasional house, and it was staggering to think that there were literally hundreds of destroyed homes up in the hills that we couldn't see, that we'd been breathing in for days whenever we walked outside. The smell lingered heavy, even as the cooling rains began to calm the air. There was an odd peace, I suppose--a deferential quiet on that whole side of town, like the ground itself was in mourning and was swallowing up all the sound. It felt wrong and unholy to even be there in the middle of what was happening, but we felt so drawn to pay our respects to the dead grass and the departed trees and the bodies of the homes scattered like fallen soldiers on the hills. There weren't any words we could have offered, even if we could have found them, and so we just stared, or didn't stare, whichever seemed more to honor the fallen world over on that side of town. 

After our solemn procession through partly-ravaged streets, we drove back to our own untouched neighborhood in the forest, grateful for the cooler, cleaner, sweeter-smelling air of night, but left with an indelible sense of the scale of the tragedy that none of us ever truly thought could happen. We felt so sharply the conviction that we would rebuild our community, we would begin to repair the tattered threads of the indomitable spirit that defines us, but that was tested and torn during the past unbelievable week. Mostly, we left with a deep sense that the fire did something amazing: it burned into the very soul of our city, and left  a communal solidarity etched into us forever.    --Teri.

"please tell me things get better soon"

Dear Friend,

You've been through a helluvalot lately. Your step-dad died last month. You thought you were selling a house. Your baby didn't make it. Your business isn't doing well. Your autoimmune disease flared up with a vengeance. Your kids have been sick. You are having family problems. You hate yourself lately.

You have no idea what your future holds, and that hurts.

Even if you aren't in one of these situations (every one of them is a real story that some of my closest friends have been dealing with; you're likely one of them), you can relate, at least to some degree.

A friend of mine and I discovered today that, although our paths haven't crossed physically in years, our lives are looking eerily similar lately. She's in the big middle of the same sort of disappointment and heartbreak that I was plunged into a couple of weeks ago, and while I'm sortakinda emerging on the other side of the dregs of depression and dispair, she's right in the big middle. So she read all about my story and realized that we have much in common lately. She said, "Please tell me things get better soon." I thought about that. I'd love nothing more than to give a hug and a promise that every-little-thing's-gonna-be-alright, but we all know that's a five-dollar answer to a million-dollar question, as an old pastor used to say. But I thought about it, and some tentative advice came pouring out of me, and I thought, heck. Maybe we could all stand to hear this.

And here's what I have; I'd love it if you'd comment below and offer your own suggestions about how you've dealt with the grief and the anger and the pain in your own life:

1) Pour your heart out to God about it. And then pour your heart out to your best girlfriends. I literally requested that my friends kidnap me and take me out for an evening. I'm not a party girl, but to be surrounded by wise women who loved me was very comforting. Good food and a glass of wine didn't hurt, either.

2) Keep a thankfulness journal. My best friend turned me on to a book called One Thousand Gifts. It is phenomenal, and because of it I have adopted the habit of keeping this journal. I just list any and everything I'm thankful for. During the most craptastic days (and there have been many), I force myself to sit and list things I'm grateful for: Chocolate. Sunshine. A job. No one puking at the moment. Whatever. It's not flowery or poetic, but it is real, and it re-aligns my heart a little.

3) Try to imagine the worst case scenario that your situation will cause. Homelessness? Bankruptcy? What's the worst that could happen? I know that sounds morbid, but it helped me to think, "Okay, what if all hell breaks loose? We'd be bankrupt. So what? No one will starve to death or die from lack of medical care. It would be embarrassing, yes, but nothing sacred would be lost in our family. So if I can handle the absolute mother of worst case scenarios, I can handle much less than that, which is what is most likely going to happen. And that means that I can handle today. And tomorrow. And the next day. (Now, I realize that for some of you, your worst case scenario is a nightmare compared to mine. I'm not making light of your pain at all, and for you, you are living your worst case scenario right now. For you I say wrap yourself in the love of whomever you can, and be as present as you can for today. And then tomorrow when it comes.)

(4) Don't be afraid to grieve the loss. It might seem silly when you think about all the people out there with "real" problems (death, disease, financial ruin...), but your pain is real, and it's legit. You're not whining. And your kids aren't, either. My kids have seen me crying a lot lately, and as weird as that feels, it's given me so many great opportunities to draw them out by being honest about it. When I'm sitting at the dinner table and start bawling because the smell of lavender tea reminds me of how I can't take my kids to the lavender farm on the island I was supposed to move to, I'm just honest about that. And then the kids are, too. And that's a good thing.

I think maybe the greatest thing about pain is that we're never really alone with it. I believe God designed our shoulders just a little wider than normal, so they could help carry the burdens of a life that just sometimes gets too heavy to carry alone. Another friend and I were talking about burden-carrying the other night, sitting in her car, the both of us just about as tapped out as we could be. I reminded her that she needed to reach out for help, especially from me. She reminded me that I, too, am carrying a big load right now. But this friend has made more time for me in her life than I can tally, even when she was underwater with burden herself. The big secret, I think, is that our staggering loads get somehow lighter when we take on someone else's, too. We're just designed that way, and it's magical. >p? And in its own way, when we share and open and grieve aloud, it does get better.

--Teri.

old crappy poetry of the soul, or, i'm still the same old nerd i was in high school

On a dare, I promised a couple of my girlfriends to brazenly post some poetry from my high school and post-high school days, when I was brooding with nowhere to go. This was primarily done to prove to them just how bad that poetry was, even by the standards of my more recent writing. And so you've been warned. I give you...Old Crappy Poetry of the Soul. By Teri Messec.

Birthday

(written for my friend Rachel Espinoza on...what else...her birthday.)

1997

One more year

Tucked somewhere

Under the belt of your life--

Telling without words

All that your eyes have seen,

That your heart has known.

Joyful days that have danced

Their way through your life

Sing now upon their exit,

Granting you mirth

On this bright day.

(Note to self: Eliminate the words "upon" and "mirth" from vocabulary for eternity.)

Chaos

(written on some random day a few months before I met my husband, when I was feeling really, well, chaotic in my life.)

1997

Swallowed whole;

Seasons of disjustice

Force me

From timeless dreamings

And larger hope.

In that blackness

I swim,

Straining towards Reason

But caught in the deluge

of Chaos.

Insomniac

(written after one of my many sleepless nights in 1996, when I thought, because I was too tired not to, that I was really, terribly clever.)

1996

Sleep came not for me last night---

Sleep and me, we had a fight;

Oh, t'was a struggle sleeping tight,

For sleep came not for me last night.

(har har har, snort, har har...)

Pantothenic Rage

(Written in '96, when I was 19, with 2-foot-hair, trying to grow my bangs out like a hippie.)

1996

I have these episodes,

This pantothenic rage

Flares within.

My mind,

In utter anger,

Screams--

A single thought;

I HATE MY HAIR!

To Self

(Written in 1995, just a few days before I graduated high school. This is one of those "Dear Me-of-the-Future" poems. Eerily salient, even 17 years later.)

1995

I've lived with you all these years,

Through your hours of sorrow,

your days of ineptness.

I've seen you gazing, tearful, at your angry mirrors,

While you silently cried at your self.

I've seen your agony

At being shunned by the world--by your self.

I've seen you mock yourself, scoff at your self,

Hurl hurt at your self.

And I've seen you look sadly back at your self,

Wanting so

Just to love yourself.

Empathy

(Written in the big middle of my lustyangst for Ireland, when I was sure I'd die if I wasn't borne straightaway to the Emerald Isle. I'm still trying to get there and this poem is just as sillily true as it was the day I wrote it. I had met Christopher by this point, and was flirting with the idea of marrying this dude. This explains why this poem isn't as horridly black as the ones from 3 months prior.)

1997

I see through my mind's eye

A picture tainted

With the sweet poison of empathy

And yet I am taken

By that utopic scene

And puzzled

At my indescretion.

Sing with Me at Daybreak

(Written for my little brother Matthew, who was probably 11 at the time, on one of those rare days when I actually woke up before 10:30 and discovered that the morning was amazing--so amazing that it was killing me to let the little rascal sleep instead of hanging out with me on the front porch watching me shiver and write bad poetry to the sunrise. Poor kid.)

1997

Sing with me at daybreak,

Quiet sleeping one--

You who paint the dreams

Inside your slumbering head,

Wake with me and feel

The quiet of morning,

The glory of dawn.

Slip the bonds of hallowed sleep

And find the sunrise

Creeping over the night--

Magic is deeper at daybreak,

Oh slumbering child.

Sleep no more--

Wake to the miracle

And sing with me at daybreak.

(note to self: abolish the words "oh", "slumbering", and "sing" from not only your own vocabulary for eternity, but also see about having them legally banned from the English language, as well.)

So that's a taste. Gagging yet? I'm pretty sure I win the bet.

--Teri.